The Hollywood sign from Beachwood Drive. (Photo: Anthea Gerrie)[Missing Credit]
It was time for a mother-and-child reunion-plus-roots trip. I wanted to learn more about my mother’s mother, Annie Tempelow, born in Lodz, married in New York and deceased in Manchester, where my grandfather moved the family to be closer to his brothers, after giving up on Manhattan.
I knew Annie’s well-documented landmark moments from the family tree compiled by my genealogist cousin Saul, but although he’d checked shipping manifests and found my grandfather – possibly the only Litvak immigrant to scrape a passage to New York then pay to return to Europe eight years later to be dirt poor for the rest of his life – there’s no record of Annie ever arriving in the USA.
Ellis Island arrivals hall in the 1900s[Missing Credit]
This year the National Immigration Museum on Ellis Island, the gateway for millions of Jews fleeing the pogroms, opened a new and improved hall of records. So it seemed to offer my best chance of tracing Annie. Did she arrive alone or with a previous husband? As Grandpa Lazarus lied about his marriage to Annie being his first, perhaps so did she. Nearly 30 when they married, she was old for a new bride, but he had been widowed a year earlier and was desperate for a mother for the small children he was left with. Perhaps he met Annie, a poultry dealer who lived opposite the shul where they married, when he was buying chickens for Shabbos dinner?
Shiny new computers, helpful research assistants and millions of newly uploaded records did not find Annie, but the immigration museum offered fascinating, huge photographs of how my grandparents’ generation lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where most Jews settled on arrival, making the neighbourhood the most densely populated on Earth in the early 20th century.
Anthea at Ellis Island arrivals hall in 2026 (photo: Anthea Gerrie)[Missing Credit]
The Eldridge Street Synagogue where they married has been given a glorious $20 million (£14 million) renovation, and houses The Museum at Eldridge Street. As Annie gave her address as 5 Eldridge Street on her marriage certificate, I was able to hop across the road and take a picture of the building where she lived.
Eldridge Street Synagogue, New York. (Photo: Anthea Gerrie)[Missing Credit]
At New York’s Tenement Museum, you can explore apartments once lived in by real immigrant families, furnished as they once were. The museum has expanded to offer walking tours of the Lower East Side as well as guided tours of a cramped two-room flat round the corner. This was the sort of place where my mother spent her babyhood, no doubt with her father pounding away on a sewing-machine in the front room like his Essex Street neighbours, perhaps assisted by her older brother and sister.
Grandmother's pre-wedding home at 5 Eldridge Street. (Photo: Anthea Gerrie)[Missing Credit]
You don’t need American connections to enjoy these New York attractions. But they can be a schlep to reach from midtown Manhattan, where most visitors stay, so it’s a blessing the Lower East Side has spawned its own decent hotels since gentrifying. The Moxy makes a lively, affordable base with an excellent Japanese restaurant in the basement and is less than a ten-minute stroll from Russ & Daughters, a great family-run deli virtually opposite the Tenement Museum, already up and running when my mother was born more than a century ago.
Statue City Cruises, whose boats leave from beautifully refurbished Battery Park on the tip of Manhattan, include a stop at the Statue of Liberty en route to Ellis Island.
My love affair with America was born the day I ran up those stairs on the Queen Elizabeth, though it would be another five years before I was old enough to discover it on my own. It was California that claimed so much of my heart that part of it has never left. Although eight years later, just as my grandfather had done in New York, I discovered I had deeper British roots than I expected.
After searching for Annie, I flew cross-country to channel my younger self who partied in West Hollywood, enjoying live music at the Whisky A Go Go, Roxy and other venues still there, like the Troubadour at the end of my street, though Sneaky Pete’s piano bar on Sunset Strip is long gone.
LA's Sunset Strip (Photo: Anthea Gerrie)[Missing Credit]
The Strip, with its bright lights and vast billboards, is a must-see for tourists as well as nostalgic former residents, so it was lucky for me that my oldest friend, Elaine, left Edgware for LA even before me. Now our sons are grown, she has converted the upstairs bedrooms of her home off Sunset into a haimishe, family-style B&B with bagels for breakfast, so I got to stay in my old neighbourhood. The fairy lights are now strung along Santa Monica Boulevard rather than the apartment buildings on either side, but my cousins’ low-rise complex on Sweetzer Avenue, which was my first LA home, is still standing, an example of the fine mid-century architecture which distinguishes the neighbourhood.
Mexican food at El Coyote[Missing Credit]
Some special-occasion restaurants of our time have gone but Dan Tana, the celebrity favourite which was well beyond our pockets during our West Hollywood years, remains, as do our budget haunts including El Coyote, home to the best margaritas, guacamole and hand-made tortilla chips in town, and Fatburger (not for the observant). Also still open is the too-pricey-at-the-time Formosa Café, where movie greats once hung out for cocktails against a rich red faux-Chinese backdrop.
One can still marry with a view of the Hollywood sign from a few hotels, though our own chupah stood on a rickety residential deck on Woody Trail, high in the hills. Visitors can get even closer to the sign on an easy stroll around its base, with or without a guide. And there’s a great view of it from below on Beachwood Drive, especially if you go up as high as the Beachwood Café, a local hangout where queues form for weekend brunch.
But even the verdant Hollywood hills pale beside the coastal mountains lining California Route 1, newly reopened after a two-year closure by landslides (another reason for the timing of my sentimental journey).
Gerrie family reunion beneath the Hollywood sign[Missing Credit]
It takes a good (and brave) driver to get to the fine hostelries of Big Sur, our honeymoon destination – and deep pockets to stay in them, although Deetjen’s, the bohemian budget alternative we opted for, is still standing.
And it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to eat at Nepenthe, which wins my vote for America’s most beautiful restaurant. Textile designer Kaffe Fassett was born into the family which opened it in 1947, and I have never understood how he could bear to leave his California clifftop eyrie for a new life in London.
Road trips are really the only way to discover the sheer size of America and the natural majesty of the mountains, plains and deserts that punctuate its cities, and it takes less time on Route 1 to drive between two of the greatest, Los Angeles and San Francisco than it does to cross the nation on Route 66.
But we took the latter route at the start of our eight years, delivering a car from New York to California – a great budget alternative to car hire for those prepared to fly into New York and home from the west coast.
Beware of losing part of your own heart to that even more seductive America of the open road, as you discover sights from mesas and canyons to diners and drive-ins, sounds – including the sound of silence that only comes with miles of undisturbed space in every direction – and unforgettable experiences along the way. t
America As You Like It (americaasyoulikeit.com) offers eight nights from £1,660 per person, including flights London-New York, New York-Los Angeles and Los Angeles-London, plus four nights room only at the Moxy Lower East Side and four nights B&B at Elaine’s Hollywood Bed and Breakfast. For more information, see statueofliberty.org, eldridgestreet.org, tenement.org, visitcalifornia.com and visittheusa.com
Anthea's first LA apartment[Missing Credit]