The Herz Family

If any figure embodies in herself what the name Herz could mean in the twentieth century, it is Alice Herz-Sommer, whose Hebrew name read עליזה הרץ-זומר [Corpus Zakhor — verified record]. Born in Prague in 1903 in the vanished world of German-speaking Jewish bourgeoisie in Bohemia, she died in London in 2014, aged one hundred and ten [Corpus Zakhor — verified record]. Her life thus spanned the entire century, from the last glimmers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the dawn of our own, and her Memory became, even during her lifetime, a patrimony.

Prague, at her birth, was a city of interwoven languages — Czech, German, Yiddish — and her family belonged to that cultivated elite where one read Goethe and where music served as domestic religion. Trained at the piano from childhood, Alice Sommer became an accomplished concertist and a recognized pedagogue before Nazi occupation closed the vise of persecution upon the Jews of Bohemia-Moravia. Deported with her son and her husband, she was interned in the camp-ghetto of Theresienstadt (Terezín), that antechamber which the Nazi regime disguised as a "model city" to deceive the Red Cross, and where a portion of the intellectual and artistic elite of Central European Jewry was concentrated.

There music ceased to be an ornament and became a means of survival and an act of inner resistance. Alice Herz-Sommer gave, according to the testimonies she transmitted in her long old age, some one hundred concerts there, interpreting notably the Études of Chopin, offering the detainees a few hours wrested from horror. In this obstinacy to play is read one of the virtues that the Jewish tradition had most lengthily cultivated: the sanctification of life, the refusal to let the oppressor have the last word upon the spirit. Where barbarism sought to reduce man to his nakedness, art affirmed that an indelible dignity remained. Her husband perished in the camps; she and her son Rafael — who would become the cellist Raphael Sommer — survived.

After the war, Alice Herz-Sommer chose emigration to Israel, where she lived and taught piano for several decades, participating in her measure in the musical life of the young nation, before joining London in advanced age [Corpus Zakhor — verified record]. Become one of the oldest survivors of the Shoah, she was, in her final years, the subject of portraits and films that made of her a symbol of resilience — a living pedagogy of hope, transmitted without bitterness. Her journey from Prague to Jerusalem inscribes her personal Memory in the larger History of those Central European Jews whom catastrophe cast toward the Jewish national home, and whose musical, philosophical and literary knowledge fecundated the nascent Israeli culture [Khazzoom, 2008].

Another Alice bears the name Herz, and her destiny forms with that of the pianist a striking counterpoint. Alice Herz was born in 1882 in Wilhelmine Germany and died in 1965 in the United States, where she had taken refuge [Zakhor Corpus — verified record]. The lineage file connects her to the space of the Weimar Republic, that fragile democratic interval between the collapse of the Empire and the advent of Nazism, where a generation of German Jewish women engaged in pacifism, feminism, and social action.

A German activist, as the verified documentation soberly designates her [Zakhor Corpus — verified record], Alice Herz belongs to that tradition of moral commitment which ran through emancipated German Judaism: the conviction that faith and culture obligate, that they impose taking a stand for justice and against the violence of States. Driven out by Nazism, she found refuge in the United States, like so many exiles who carried across the Atlantic the memory of lost freedoms and an unyielding ethical imperative.

Her ultimate gesture, in 1965, made her a figure in the history of American pacifism. Aged over eighty, she protested against the war waged by her country of refuge in the most radical manner possible, pushing to the extreme the testimony of her conscience. This sacrifice, which one cannot comment upon without gravity nor without the respect due to the shadows that surround it, belongs to the long and painful Jewish meditation on the relationship to war and violence — this tension between the commandment to preserve life and the duty to cry out the truth in the face of injustice. Born in Weimar Germany, dead to speak her refusal of war, Alice Herz embodies in her tragic way a virtue that the tradition of Israel has honored above all others: the voice of the prophet who, alone against power, refuses to be silent. That two women of the same name, almost contemporaries, one having played Chopin in a camp to say that life deserves to be lived, the other having offered her life to say that a war ought not to be, gives this chapter of the lineage a moral density that no bond of blood was necessary to weave.

With Dalia Hertz — דליה הרץ in its Hebrew spelling — the name enters squarely into Israeli culture and its renewed language. Born in 1942, poet and playwright, she belongs to the modernist generation that transformed Hebrew poetry at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s [Zakhor Corpus — verified note].

This generation, sometimes called the "generation of the State" or associated with the Likrat circle, broke with the collective and heroic rhetoric that had dominated Zionist poetry of the pioneers. Where the elders sang of the national "we," the labor of the land and the epic of construction, the modernists reintroduced the "I," the intimate, irony, attention to ordinary things, and a language closer to everyday speech. Writing poetry in Hebrew, in the Israel of the first decades, was to participate in an act of civilization of singular reach: giving a millennial language, long confined to liturgy and study, a contemporary flesh capable of speaking love, doubt and the modern city. In this way, the work of Dalia Hertz is part of one of the most remarkable achievements of twentieth-century Jewish life — the resurrection of Hebrew as a living and literary language.

Her presence in this avant-garde, alongside a new female voice in a field long dominated by men, testifies to a renewal of forms and sensibilities. The poetry she helped bring into being dialogued with European modernity while taking root in the new soil of Israel, and her turn to dramatic writing further broadened this contribution to the stage and to language. Through her, the name Herz ceases to be only that of the exiled and the survivors to become that of a creator rooted in recovered cultural sovereignty. She thus embodies a cardinal value of tradition: the love of just speech and the service of language, that ancient conviction that the world is sustained by the words one speaks and writes [Kimmerling, 2001].

The fourth face of the lineage transports us from Israel and Europe to the New World, and from art to business. John Daniel Hertz — ג'ון ד. הרץ — lived from 1879 to 1961 in the United States, where the verified file first identifies him as an American football player [Corpus Zakhor — verified file]. His trajectory illustrates another facet of modern Jewish experience: that of the immigrant who, starting from nothing, rises through energy and ingenuity to the top of host society.

The name Hertz remains attached, in American Memory, to the adventure of urban transport and the automobile — taxis first, then vehicle rental that would carry his surname around the world. This success in economic action, far from being a mere tale of fortune, also belongs to the heritage of virtues that Jewish tradition has valued when accompanied by responsibility: the spirit of initiative, the capacity to grasp the technical novelty of one's time, and — among many of these builders — the conversion of wealth into generosity, through support for charitable works, education and communal life, according to the old principle of tsedaka. His passion for sport and the world of racing made him a public figure of America's early twentieth century.

The existence of John D. Hertz reminds us that the Jewish diaspora was not merely a history of persecutions and survival, but also a history of boldness and contribution to the development of the societies that welcomed it. He represents, in our constellation, the pole of action and matter, when Alice Herz-Sommer embodies the spirit, Alice Herz embodies conscience, and Dalia Hertz embodies the word. Together, these four polarities draw a faithful image of Western Jewish modernity, divided between Europe, America and Israel.

It is only after meeting the women and men who bore it that one can question the name itself, for among the Herz the name does not open history: it closes it and illuminates it. The patronym belongs to the great family of Jewish names of Germanic origin, and its study falls within the scope of reference works on Jewish onomastics [Dictionaries of East European and Judeo-German Surnames].

Herz literally means "heart" in German, and this semantic value is not inconsequential: many German-speaking Jewish names became fixed based on given names, affectionate nicknames, or words bearing moral significance. But scholarly usage recalls above all the close kinship between Herz, Hertz and Hirsch — the latter meaning "stag." This proximity is explained by a tradition of pairing Hebrew and vernacular names: the Hebrew given name Naftali, associated in Jacob's blessing with the doe and the stag, is traditionally paired with the surname Hirsch, itself often contracted, softened or Germanicized into Herz or Hertz. The name thus carries, in its German form, a biblical echo — the tribe of Naftali, its lightness, its freedom.

The variants recorded for the lineage — Hertz, Hirsch, as well as the Cyrillic transcriptions Герц and Херц — sketch out the area of dispersal of the name: German-speaking Germany and Austria, Bohemia, but also the space of Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire, where the patronym was adapted to the local alphabet [Dictionaries of East European and Judeo-German Surnames]. The hereditary fixing of such names accompanied, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the great campaigns of civil registration imposed on Jews by modern states — Josephine Austria, Prussia, Russian Empire — a decisive moment when a population heretofore identified by descent ("so-and-so son of so-and-so") entered the civil status of nations. The name Herz, in its metamorphoses, thus preserves the trace of the borders crossed and the languages traversed by those who bore it.

What should we do, then, with this dispersal? The documentation is clear and the work must state it plainly: the precise genealogical links between the Herz figures brought together here remain to be established [Corpus Zakhor — notice of the lineage]. No archival item currently connects the pianist from Prague, the activist from Hamburg, the poetess from Tel-Aviv and the American businessman. What we hold is not a tree but a bundle — a set of lives gathered by a name and by a common belonging to the German-speaking Jewish world and its descendants.

Yet this bundle, precisely, expresses a truth of contemporary Jewish history that no neatly combed family tree could convey. Central European Judaism in the first half of the twentieth century was broken, scattered, forced into endless new beginnings. The same forces that separated the branches of a single family — exile, deportation, emigration to America or Mandatory Palestine — explain why we find the same surname in Prague, Detroit, Chicago and Tel-Aviv. The convergence of several Herz toward Israel, in both the pianist and the poetess, is not fortuitous: it follows the broader movement of a people for whom the land of Israel became, emerging from catastrophe, a place of refuge and refoundation [Hacohen, 2003] [Goldscheider, 1996].

The intersection here is between Memory and archive: tradition might dream of a single root, history does not yet offer proof of it, but it offers something perhaps better — a truthful image of the modern Jewish condition, where the name survives the dispersal of bodies. The Israeli society to which the Herz of Europe arrived was itself a crucible of tensions between communities from opposite horizons, between the German-speaking Ashkenazi elite and Jews from Islamic lands [Chetrit, 2010] [Shohat, 2017] [Smooha, 1978]. In this great gathering of exiles, each name brought its own memory; that of the Herz brought the culture of Weimar and Prague, music and poetry.

Alice Herz-Sommer [עליזה הרץ-זומר] (1903–2014) — Born in Prague into the German-speaking Jewish bourgeoisie of Bohemia, this pianist and music teacher was interned at the Theresienstadt ghetto-camp, where she gave numerous concerts that made art a refuge and a form of resistance against barbarism. Having survived with her son, she emigrated to Israel where she taught for decades, before ending her life in London. Becoming one of the oldest survivors of the Shoah, she left behind a legacy of resilience and a joy of living transmitted without bitterness [Zakhor Corpus — verified record].

Alice Herz (1882–1965) — Born in Wilhelmine Germany and formed within the space of the Weimar Republic, this activist was forced into exile in the United States by Nazism. She belongs to the tradition of pacifism and German Jewish moral engagement. In 1965, in her eighties, she brought to its most radical conclusion her protest against war, becoming a painful figure in the history of American pacifism and a tragic embodiment of the voice that refuses to be silenced [Zakhor Corpus — verified record].

Dalia Hertz [דליה הרץ] (born 1942) — Israeli poet and playwright of the modernist generation, she participated in the renewal of Hebrew poetry which, at the turn of the 1950s-1960s, broke with the collective rhetoric of the pioneers to reintroduce the intimate, irony, and everyday language. Her work inscribes the name Hertz in the major achievement that is the resurrection of Hebrew as a living literary language and in the cultural sovereignty of modern Israel [Zakhor Corpus — verified record].

John Daniel Hertz [ג'ון ד. הרץ] (1879–1961) — Established in the United States, first noted as an American football player, he embodies the trajectory of the Jewish immigrant lifted by his energy to the forefront of early twentieth-century American society. His name remains attached to the history of urban transportation and the automobile, illustrating the virtue of bold economic action and the spirit of enterprise of the diaspora in the New World [Zakhor Corpus — verified record].

Joseph Hermann Hertz (1872–1946) — Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and the British Empire, he was the author of an annotated edition of the Pentateuch, the famous "Hertz Chumash," long widespread in synagogues of the English-speaking world. Although his connections with the other bearers of the name gathered here are not established, his stature as a spiritual guide and commentator illustrates the contribution of the name Hertz to talmudic knowledge and to the conception of Jewish Law in the twentieth century [Zakhor Corpus — documented figure].

At the end of this journey, the Herz lineage appears for what it honestly is: not a dynasty with certified ramifications, but a constellation of destinies that the name gathers and that the history of German-speaking Judaism illuminates. From Prague to Tel-Aviv, from Weimar to Detroit, from Chicago to London, these lives tell the same great ordeal — exile, catastrophe, reconstruction — and each responded to it according to its own genius: the pianist through art, the activist through sacrifice, the poetess through words, the businessman through action.

If one had to name what this lineage will have expressed, among all the virtues of Israel, better than any other, it would be the sanctification of life and spirit in the face of the violence of history. This is the thread that runs, secretly, from Alice Herz-Sommer playing Chopin in the antechamber of death to Dalia Hertz breathing flesh back into the language of the Bible; from Alice Herz refusing war at the cost of her life to John D. Hertz devoting his energy to the service of the world. Each in their own way held upright what barbarism sought to tear down: the dignity of the person, the power of culture, the voice of conscience. In this, these scattered bearers of the same name participate in a vaster collective memory — that of a people who, through the centuries and continents, has made of survival not mere persistence, but an obstinate affirmation of meaning. Whether the archives one day tighten or not the bonds between these branches, the name Herz will already have said the essential: that the heart — for such is its meaning — still beats.