Re: [Cz-L] New member info- David Brener

Dear David,
My name is Charles Rosner. Iím French, but I was born
in August 1941 in Czernowitz, at the time it was
called Cernauti.
Iím retired now, but your interest for the name
Wolkenstein rings a bell. I spent about 30 years
working for the banking group CrÈdit Lyonnais, half of
that time in the international division: Alexis
Wolkenstein was the group deputy general manager, in
charge of international.
Although I wonít count myself among his close friends,
I believe we were quite close in the ten last years of
his career, till he retired in 1995. In particular, in
the nineties, I was part of the very small team that
worked with him to clean up CLís mess in the
entertainment industry.
  <Wolk>, as we used to call him affectionately among
us, was born in Paris in the thirties. He was not
Jewish by religion: his father or grandfather had
converted. Wolk was married and had two sons, one of
whom is a physician. In 1990, he was awarded the
French LÈgion díHonneur and I was present at the
ceremony.
Iím telling you about this award, because when I got
it (December 2000) I had to chose another
<LÈgionnaire> to perform the ceremony in my honour: I
chose Wolk, of course. In his speech, and with his
usual humour, he started saying that he tried for a
few days to find on a map and in different
encyclopaedias the place I was born; finally, he
<looked into a pre-war AtlasÖ and there it was, about
a 100 km from the place (his) grandfather came from>
The ceremony took place in Monaco in June 2001: Wolk
and his wife came from Paris, but this was his last
trip; he died in December 2001 from bone cancer. His
wife told me that this trip, and the fact that I
called upon him, were his last happy events in life.
Now, here is another information: in 2004, I was
allowed to go personally through a few registers at
Chernivtsiís archives. In one register listing the
people who got the Romanian nationality around 1922
(till 1918 Czernowitz was Austrian; it became
Romanian, under the name of Cernauti, after the
Versailles Agreements), I found the name Wolkenstein.
I took note of the inscriptionÖ but all my papers
(including Wolkís last address in Paris) are already
on storage. If you read some of my recent mails, you
know that Iím going to leave in a few days on a
temporary <exile> in Brittany, till June 2007. Sorry,
I canít do better.
One last thing: I believe that Wolk told me once that
part of his family came from Byelorussia. Also, you
should know that there is a small village in Tyrol,
Austria, called Wolkenstein.
I hope the above helped you a bit.
Regards,
Charles

--- BRENERDA_at_aol.com wrote:

> My interest is in the WOLKENSTEIN family who came
> from Czernowitz.
>
  - snip -
Received on 2006-07-28 08:20:18