Tracing My Great-Grandfather, Emil Singer: An Orthopedist in Vienna In the first half of the 20th century
When I first began searching for information about my great-grandfather, Emil Singer, who lived about a century ago in Vienna, Austria, I ran into a challenge. Another man with the exact same name lived and worked in Vienna during those very years. That Emil Singer became a famous printmaker and etcher , until he was tragically murdered by the Nazis during World War II. (Image: Vienna: The "Graben" street. Etching by Emil Singer, early 20th century. Courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) . Narrowing down the search for “ my Emil Singer”—the father of my grandmother, Esther Sygmand—finally proved successful when I began searching Austrian archives by his birth year, combined with a variety of documents I discovered in my grandmother's estate. Esther Singer (Sygmand), the eldest daughter of Emil and Amalia (Esther’s mother, who passed away in 1921, after which Emil married Johanna), was born in 1912 in Vienna, which was then the capital of the Austro-Hungarian...
