Max Hurwicz (1862-1927) was Adek‘s father and thus Leo’s grandfather. He died on March 7, 1927, when Leo was nine years old. (Source: Kotzin Genealogy Research Report, page 10.)

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“He knew me,” said Leo, “but I didn’t know him, I was under one and a half years old. After that, he was in Moscow and I was in Warsaw. When we were both in Moscow, when I was one year old, he was perhaps 51 years old. According to the story I was told, he looked at me and said ‘a chochem’ (a wise man).

“So,” Leo joked, “I consider him a good judge of character. But I have no memory of him, except indirect.

“When Max was approaching college age,” Leo continued, “in the nineteenth century, he was hoping to go to college, the first person in the family. The tsar at that time I think was named Alexander, of the Romanov dynasty.”

[Note: Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_II_of_Russia.]
 
“It must have been possible for a Jew to enter the University. But this Alexander, if I am right about the name, was assassinated by an anarchist. This resulted in a big move to the right politically, and one of the ‘reforms’ so-called was that Jews could not attend the university. But all six of Max’s children were university graduates; but that was already under the Communist regime.”

Leo told me in 2006 that he thought Max’s full name might be Maximillian. He said Max was the first in the family to have the name “Hurwicz”, that Max was in fact one of two sons of the Kotzin family (Kocyn in Polish), but was registered as a Hurwicz to avoid the draft, as a family with only one son would not have that son drafted. (The tsar’s army was a terrible place for Jews.)

A point that puzzled me for a long time: The family tree says that Max Hurwicz was born in 1862, his brother Moses “Moritz” Kotzin in 1869. You might think that it would be the second-born son that would get the draft-dodging surname; after all, when the first son was born, no one could know that there would be a second son seven years later! My guess now is that both Max and Moses were registered with the civil authorities only after 1869. Why would that be? Well, the family tree says that Moritz was born in Lithuania. The familysearch.com site says that the “family lists” that were used for conscription in Lithuania were created “randomly on a local basis.” It also says of these lists: “They are not completely reliable because of efforts to evade taxation or conscription by avoiding correct enumeration.” My guess is that both sons were officially registered only after 1869 in one of these family lists. It’s also possible that they weren’t registered until January 28, 1897, when the Russian government conducted the first and only nineteenth century general census of the Russian Empire. However, this census is considered reliable in comparison with the family lists, so I think the family list hypothesis is more likely correct.

Max and Moritz, two brothers, married two Friedland sisters (Frydland in the Polish spelling). Max married Sara Lea Friedland, and they had four daughters, among them Helenka.

There were four Friedland sisters in all. Some relatives now living in Canada (including Guela Solow, living in Toronto) are descended from Helen Kotzin (née Friedland), the sister who married Moritz.

Leo said that, around the time of World War I, Moritz borrowed money from Max to emigrate to Canada but had to return to Poland because he was unsuccessful in establishing himself in Canada. Later Max would not lend him money to try again. Moritz was angry about that, and this was the start of a rift between the Kotzin and Hurwicz branches.

But the sisters secretly kept in touch, which turned out to be lucky for relatives like my father, uncle and grandparents, after World War II, when the Kotzins were highly instrumental in bringing them over from Europe and helping them get established in the U.S. (some of the Kotzins at least having by now moved to Chicago). Thus, World War II healed the Kotzin/Hurwicz rift when those in Europe needed the help of those in the U.S. or Canada.