Arthur Hartmann: A Biographical Sketch

Summary

When I was a boy, my Uncle Arthur Hartmann was a famous violinist. He wore to his concerts a long velvet suit with half a dozen medals, and a yellow sash tied round his middle. He had his hair cut to look like the great Ysaÿe. After every concert he ate nothing but hothouse grapes—at least that was what I was told. We all worshiped and revered the great Uncle Arthur. Whenever he had a photograph taken, it was always in a soulful attitude with his index finger poking a hole in his cheek, and in his right hand a violin which my family insisted was one of the earliest and best Stradivariuses.

So Alfred Bendiner (1899–1964) wryly portrayed his once famous uncle at the beginning of his book of caricatures Music to My Eyes. Bendiner's affection for his uncle is also evident in his Translated from the Hungarian, a nostalgic account of how his parents and their families established themselves in America after the long trip from Hungary. In this memoir, Bendiner traces his family history by recounting amusing anecdotes but forgoes the accurate documentation of the daily details of births, marriages, divorces, and deaths. It is, however, one of the few sources of information about Arthur Hartmann's parents and childhood.

Family and Childhood

Arthur Hartmann's father, Sigmund Hartman, was born in the Hungarian town of Máté Szalka in 1843 and married Pepi Schweiger (also born in 1843) from the nearby town of Sátoraljaújhely in 1865. They became shopkeepers and produced nine daughters (three of whom, including one set of twins, died in infancy). In 1879, Sigmund's sister Rose in Philadelphia, the wife of Wilhelm Stern, sent the money to bring Sigmund and Pepi Hartman and their six daughters, Jennie, Gizella, Katie, Rachel, Bertha, and Rose, to America. Upon their arrival on 2 December 1879, Rose Stern put them up in the hotel and restaurant that she and her husband ran on tiny Duponceau Street (renamed Darien Street around the turn of the century) in the heart of Philadelphia. Here Arthur Hartmann was born in the early morning of 23 July 1881.