My uncle, Abe Max, אברהם בנ מרדכי, was the eldest child of Rachel and Alter (Mordechai) Max.
Born in Russia in 1905, he came to England with his mother in 1908 to meet his father who had arrived in Liverpool earlier after going to but then leaving America. He had four younger brothers and three sisters, though the rest of the family is a story all on its own. I was told that Abe had to leave school in his young teens to start work and he wasn't ever able to take full advantage of his not insignificant intellectual and scholastic talents. Being the eldest son appeared to entitle him to a Shabbos barmitzvah in either Crown Street or Islington shuls. From a conversation I had with my aunt, Ena Max, who died aged 101 last year, her brother-in-law Joe, who was Abe's next younger brother never forgot that he had to make do with a Thursday morning barmitzvah while his elder brother had a shabbos barmitzvah with a proper kiddush. On such trivia are fraternal jealousies perpetuated. My first recollections of Uncle Abe are mostly with his wife, Bertha, in a bungalow on Mentmore Road, close to Brodie Avenue in Liverpool where I played with another boy,Yossi Capek, and then later his visits on a Monday or Tuesday evening to my parent's house, 2 Barmouth Road in Wallasey, where he gave me 'extra tuition' in maths which was never one of my strongest subjects in school when I was about 11 or 12. A severe looking man in a three piece suit, i didn't look forward to his visits. He sat across the table from me in our 'morning room' as we called our living room, under a clothes maid suspended by a pulley from the ceiling above and opposite the metal range that we had until my parents replaced it with a more modern fireplace and hearth. I was fascinated by his leather-gloved false hand that substituted for his own hand that had been cut off by, I think, an electric saw in an accident in a carpentry shop he had been working in. Fascinating too was that he would put a special fork and knife combination tool that he had with him so that he could cut up and eat his food. By the time that I started being tutored by him I think that he used to teach in a further education college somewhere on Merseyside and through his connections by marriage with the Blankstone family, he used to give my father Jake, ז’’ל, stockmarket tips. He also had an office of some kind in Liverpool - to do what there I don't know - and would sometimes appear with this or that piece of antique something with him. I do remember him bringing a strange display case to Wallasey one day. It was a glazed wooden case that had cross sections of pieces of cable in it. These were pieces that had been cut from different telegraph cables that had been laid under the Atlantic during the 19th Century.