By Anne M. Filiaci, Ph.D.
Early Influences-Family and Childhood
Lillian Wald’s father, Max D. Wald, was born in Germany in 1838. A descendant of rabbis, merchants, and professionals, Max’s first years were plagued by food shortages, cholera epidemics, and political uncertainty. When these crises led to the German uprisings of 1848, the boy joined a flood of immigrants who escaped the chaos of their native country and moved to the United States.
By all accounts, Max Wald grew up to be a gentle, unselfish and dependable man. He married Minnie Schwarz, a pretty and strong-willed woman from a large, close-knit extended family. Lillian was born to Max and Minnie in Cincinnati, Ohio on March 10, 1867. The third of four children, she had an older brother Alfred and an older sister, Julia. Younger brother Gus was the “baby” whom they all pampered.
Lillian’s childhood was happy and financially comfortable. She would later describe herself as “spoiled” and “pampered.” Max was a prosperous optical goods dealer. Minnie loved beautiful things and expressed her exquisite taste in the clothes she wore, the family’s home furnishings, and in her skillful and artistic embroidery. Lillian’s mother was also known for her generous and trusting nature. Minnie Wald had so much faith in the essential goodness of human beings that she was known to hire the family’s servants right off the street, without asking for references. Once, when she needed a laundress, Minnie saw a woman walking by with a basket of clothes and gave her some of the family’s laundry. Lillian and her sister Julia warned their mother, “…those are our best things. You don’t know this woman. You don’t know she’s honest.” Minnie looked at the woman and asked, “My good woman, are you honest?” When the laundress said yes, Minnie proclaimed to her children, “There! Didn’t I tell you?” Sure enough, the trust paid off-the laundress returned Minnie’s (clean) clothes.
Sometimes Minnie’s generosity made its recipients uncomfortable. On one occasion–the wedding day of a household servant named Mary Flanagan–Mrs. Wald insisted that Mary, instead of the children, take the family’s carriage to the church. Mary, who felt uneasy riding in the carriage while the Wald children followed behind, got out and insisted that the Wald children take her place as soon as the vehicle turned the corner. Holding her wedding skirts up with her hand, she walked the rest of the way.
Later, while living with her married daughter Julia, Minnie’s generous handouts made their home a favorite target for the city’s homeless men. The police warned Mrs. Wald that the house had been “marked,” and asked her to stop giving. She resolved the problem by giving the men money if they promised not to come again.
In addition to providing Lillian an early and constant example of the joy of trusting in and giving to others, Minnie Wald instilled a love of reading and a curiosity about the world in her daughter. Plagued by frequent headaches, Minnie often asked Lillian to read aloud to her while she lay on the couch. The requested reading was wide-ranging–from New York City tabloid-type newspapers to Dickens to George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss.
Lillian also loved to read on her own. For a period, when she had trouble with her eyes and was forbidden to do any reading, she hid for hours in a darkened space under the piano in order to pursue her habit undetected.
Lillian’s maternal grandfather, Goodman (Gutman) Schwarz was, like Max, an immigrant. He had been a prosperous merchant, and lived with the Walds for much of Lillian’s childhood. The children called him “Favey” (one of them had a hard time pronouncing the word “Grandfather”). Favey loved German music, literature and folk tales. He was also fond of birds, which he often acquired but invariably set them free because he could not bear to see them imprisoned in cages.
Favey entertained the young Walds with stories, pampered them with toys and gave them money for candy and ice cream. He also bought ponies for them–all yellow with black manes and tails, and all named “Kitty.” He took his grandchildren to operas and to the theater, and built them a bowling alley and a playhouse. The playhouse, built when the family lived in Dayton, Ohio, was life-sized and resembled the houses he had known in Europe when he was a young boy. It had a flower-lined path leading up to it, and real furniture inside it. One day, Lillian was playing with a new doll in the playhouse. It became “sick” and, although Lillian did her best to nurse it, the doll died. The children gave it an elaborate funeral, with Alfred preaching and Lillian leading the procession to the burial site.
Minnie’s brother–Lillian’s Uncle Samuel Schwartz–often came to their house for long visits. Uncle Samuel had earned a medical degree, graduating at the top of his class, but early in his career he took an overdose of a drug that he had prescribed for himself. Insisting that the incident had ruined his health and destroyed his confidence, he stopped practicing medicine and became a semi-invalid. On his many visits to the Wald household he, like Favey, introduced the children to music, literature and plays, and spoiled them with toys.
Young Lillian felt particularly close to her older brother, Alfred, and years later would remember how they used to walk to school together. Alfred started a weekly newspaper in their nursery that they all worked to publish. He also organized a theatrical company. Lillian herself proved no slouch in the drama department, often re-telling Favey’s stories to a group of children on their front porch.
Lillian moved often during the first decade of her life because of her father’s work, and she had few memories of any particular place she lived during that time. Max Wald’s work also forced him to travel, which led to long and frequent absences from home. He did try to take his wife and family on trips with him whenever it was possible to do so, and Lillian remembered that on one trip the family accompanied Max on a Mississippi River steamboat. While at Minnehaha Falls near St. Paul, Minnesota, a careless young Lillian leaned out too far over a precipice in order to better watch logs spilling down the falls into the river. She was pulled back by none other than General Sherman, who not only saved her life but later treated her to a ride in a carriage pulled by army mules.
The Wald family settled in Rochester, New York in 1878, as Lillian approached 
adolescence. There, her uncles Nathan Levi, Morris Schwartz and Henry Schwartz had become successful clothing merchants. Their wives gave time to various philanthropic organizations. One of Lillian’s aunts–Mrs. Nathan Levi–was president of the (Jewish) Ladies Aid Society and on the board of the Jewish Orphan Asylum.
When the Walds came to live in Rochester, roughly two-fifths of its nearly 100,000 residents were, like them, of German descent. The community of German Jews was the city’s fourth largest ethnic group. In Rochester Max Wald had found a place where the family might feel comfortable and welcome. An optical goods salesman, he had also chosen a good place to do business. The city was well on its way to becoming a national–and even world-famous–optics center. In 1850, John Jacob Bausch, a German immigrant like Max, had opened a small shop that sold, among other things, eyeglasses. By the 1860s, Bausch and his partner Lomb had adopted a method that allowed them to make eyeglass frames more inexpensively, and sales soared. By 1874, they opened a factory that employed one hundred skilled workers. Soon, in addition to eyeglasses, they were producing opera glasses and other optical goods. At the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, their microscopes were prominently on display. By the end of the decade Bausch and Lomb had the largest optical factory in the world, and other optical goods enterprises had sprung up in the city to compete with it. Max Wald prospered and rose to success in this environment.
Religion
Lillian grew up in a religious tradition that stressed the similarities, rather than the differences, among all people. The Walds joined Temple B’rith Kodesh, a Reform synagogue founded in 1848. When her family joined the synagogue it was led by Max Landsberg, a reformer and one of the city’s most influential leaders. Rabbi Landsberg believed in the cooperation of all religious groups, and wanted to show that “non-Jewish brethren can come here and hear us pray and be surprised at how little difference there is….” To this end, he installed an organ, and made sure that sermons were delivered in English as well as German.
Rochester’s Jewish community also provided Lillian with numerous examples for giving to those less fortunate. They sponsored a number of charity organizations, including the Dime Society, the Hebrew Benevolent Society, the Hebrew Ladies Benevolent Society, and the Jewish Ladies Aid Hospital Society. Rabbi Landsberg helped to form an umbrella organization called the United Jewish Charities of Rochester, so that all of these charities could work together more effectively. The impulses of Rochester’s religious community reinforced the examples that Lillian’s mother and father provided for her with their many personal acts of charity.
The pre-adolescent Lillian Wald led a sheltered existence in the midst of a loving extended family. In addition to being surrounded by music, art and literature, toys and treats, she was exposed to the latest ideas from the best thinkers of the time. A self-described strong-willed child, Lillian Wald’s tendency to throw caution to the winds–modeled by Minnie Wald’s blind trust in others–was often encouraged by indulgent parents and even bystanders. Whether watching her mother hire a laundress off the street, reading with bad eyes while hidden under a piano, or leaning dangerously over a precipice, Lillian learned that it was possible to take risks and not only survive but flourish. Perhaps most importantly, she learned that life could be immeasurably enriched by acts of service and generosity to others.
Bibliography:
Antczak, Marianne, “The Germans,” in James S. Pula, Ethnic Rochester, Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985.
Bremner, Robert H., “Lillian Wald,” biographical entry in Notable American Women,1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary, edited by Edward T. James et al., Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1971, v. 3, pp. 526-529.
Daniels, Doris Groshen, Always a Sister: The Feminism of Lillian D. Wald, New York, Feminist Press, 1989.
Duffus, R.L., Lillian Wald: Neighbor and Crusader, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1939.
Feld, Marjorie N., Lillian Wald: A Biography, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. See Feld’s notes on Wald’s Rochester relatives, p. 210. Current 1/11/2013
McKelvey, Blake, “The Germans of Rochester; Their Traditions and Contributions,” Rochester History, Vol. XX, No. 1, January, 1958. Available at http://www.libraryweb.org/~rochhist/v20_1958/v20i1.pdf (Current 1/9/2013).
McKelvey, Blake, Rochester, A Brief History, New York, Edwin Mellon Press, 1984.
McKelvey, Blake, Rochester on the Genesee: The Growth of a City, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993
Rosenberg, Stuart E., The Jewish Community in Rochester, 1843-1925, New York: Columbia University Press, 1954.
Illustrations:
Link to Illustration current 07/29/2018
Historic American Buildings Survey, Paul L. and Sally L. Gordon, Photographers October 16, 1966, SOUTH (FRONT) ELEVATION. – George Thompson House, 546 East Avenue, Rochester, Monroe County, NY, built 1876-1877, Link to Illustration current 07/29/2018
LOC Prints & Photographs:
Link to Illustration current 07/29/2018
Historic American Buildings Survey, Hans Padelt, Photographer Winter 1968 (2 1/4′ x 2 3/4′ negative) GENERAL VIEW OF SOUTH FACADE. – Hiram W. Sibley House, 400 East Avenue, Rochester, Monroe County, NY, built 1868, Link to Illustration current 07/29/2018
LOC Prints & Photographs: Link to Illustration current 07/29/2018
Harris-Hollister-Spencer House, 1005 East Avenue, Rochester, Monroe County, NY, built ca. 1865 Link to Illustration (this also has picture of Patrick Barry house) LOC Prints & Photographs: Link to Illustration current 07/29/2018
Silas O. Smith House, 485 East Avenue, Rochester, Monroe County, NY, built 1839-1841, Link to Illustration LOC Prints & Photographs: Link to Illustration current 07/29/2018
Ontario Beach, Charlotte, NY, 1888, LOC Prints & Photographs: Link to Illustration current 07/29/2018
Bausch and Lomb Factory on St. Paul Street, Rochester, ca. 1899; moved there in 1874 and remained until the 1970s. RPL Image Collection Link to Illustration
Copyright Anne M. Filiaci 2014