Pedigree

A wip. last updated 8/18/24

First entry: Hello. This story is going to be written in the first person voice of me, Andy; formally Andrew Akim Litwin. My middle name, Akim is my Great-Grandfather's first name. As the page title indicates, the subject mater will be about lineage and origin. Although the absolute origin of the lineage are not known at this time. The ancestor trail is only know back to my Great-Grandfather (and only back to my Grandfather on my mother's side). The question arises: Who taught my Great-Grandfather diamond cutting, jewelry design and crafting? My sister has the hypothesis that he married into a jewelry artisan family. But we simply do not know. If by chance you happen to know more or have an idea of how one might find out more, please kindly contact me.

As implied, and if you inferred that this is also a business story, you inferred correctly. There is an aspect of the business part of the story that I would like to touch on now. Similar to due process, trustworthiness and honesty are assumed until otherwise. This heart beat (that is an ancient drumbeat) continues and it seems to mystically nullify "otherwise."

 From Litwin Diamond Cutters Catalog [late 1950s]

edit [5/6/24]: To clarify the preceding statement. While there is a mystical aspect, A. Litwin is a member of professional trade groups [three] where their focus- or a significant part of their activities focus on- identifying and helping to prevent its members from becoming-perhaps unwittingly- a part of wrong doing. A. Litwin does a thorough due diligence on those it considers doing business with. To date, A. Litwin has not had / encountered a problem in this regard. Indeed, it has been able to act "old fashioned" [I know of from a first-hand source that agreements in the million dollar and north range that were "sealed" with a handshake.]  in that it has the pleasure of working with those whereby A. Litwin can send a payment check once an agreement is reached. Although, I trust, that in general, these last statements will not be construed that A. Litwin is naive and in fact is just the opposite. Action for [that fortunately, to date, has not been necessary] misdeed would be punished immediately starting with the severance of all relationships with the perpetrator. One of the three before mentioned professional trade groups has, as a specialty, the remedy of "financial indiscretion," all three of these groups have initiatives to help ensure ethical and moral conduct of its members and that its members do [and the vetting of businesses that one may consider doing] business with].

The truth, as I see it, is that ecological and ethical sourcing of materials used in the making of jewelry is quite a significant challenge. The ethical and moral responsibility is that one does their best. One of the trade groups that A. Litwin is a member of, focuses on the ethical sourcing [as a moral / ethical imperative and to help its members act likewise], in conjunction with proactive actions to take for helping to prevent "money laundering" where the "windfall" from this endeavor is often used for activities where the intent is to hurt [sometimes in irreversible ways] or kill others.

Ecological sourcing is very important but much easier said than done. Ecologically comparing one production / sourcing method to another is extremely difficult.

Why? For one, I know from direct experience, that it is extremely difficult to objectively measure a set of parameters of events while conducting an experiment [where a cornerstone of the Scientific Method is that the experimenter controls the environment] is conducted in a laboratory or akin to such [e.g., a clinical trial] setting.

So then one sees the enormity and arduous efforts needed for the much wider spectrum task of evaluating and comparing the ecological effects of different sourcing methods that even reasonably approximates a circumstance where objective measures of key parameters can be obtained. Something to consider [I feel like Carl Sagan at the moment] : What is the source of "this atom of gold" or this "molecule of water" that could be from just about anywhere. 

Second [Bet] entry: Some Joy. Pictured below is my mother who was just blessed with a 91st birthday [may she be blessed with many more] in April 2024. Her father and mother had a General Store where she worked and she claims that she was not very good at sales. I am incredulous about this "claim" because she appears to be good at marketing and the two- sales+marketing- mix well together. The "give away" is -get the glasses in the two images below. One from around 1957 and the other from not to many years ago.

Sara Litwin at Litwin Diamond Cutters around 1957

Sara Litwin at Highland Beach Florida 2017

Third entry [ג]  A beautiful cycle. Is it possible to literally, "within one's imagination imaginations" to have an infinite amount of energy that can be used to do mechanical work? The answer is unequivocally yes. Put another way, to the extent one has concerns, that a given energy source, currently in use, can cause damage to ourselves and the whole of the natural world; can these agents of concern be eliminated? The answer is again, unequivocally yes.[ To further explain at the moment, is, in a manor, tangential to to what I would like to directly address at the moment.  While the two- what I would like to mention now and this matter perhaps seem to not be related, they are actually inextricably linked. The quantitative proof of this goes back to discoveries of the early 1900s.The application of it these 1900s discoveries would, given the will to do so, result in a total a [World Health Organization type definition of] universal health for every person on the planet. The single greatest attributable factor in the rising cost of health care and the struggle to meet unmet healthcare need can be explained by and is derivable from the Newton Mechanics equation of: Work =force X displacement  [movement] 

[An apparent exception like isometric muscle contraction can also be explained in this way to.]

My recollection is that Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi has, I infer, by her actions / keen insight in having been a decades long, staunch supporter of the the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's efforts to make a Fusion Reactor has long understood the forgoing.  A recent Wall Street Journal story under scores this by a "follow the money"  story about the billions of dollars that are being invested into a number of companies, that likewise, are about being able to make a commercially viable Fusion Reactor. Andy to, has had this notion in mind from a health care perspective when he wrote up, first a brief, and then expanded into a book and then a set of slides to help explain the book, in an academic setting, starting on this around 2000- A conceptual model / paradigm that would allow for all unmet health care need to be met.

Well back to the  present [I feel like a character in a Sci-Fi time travel story for the moment.]. Given an ecologically sound, "carbon neutral" or better state [ if you prefer this type of framing, fine] of all aspects of jewelry production and thereby - one would hope- significantly diminishing unethical, immoral and devastatingly harmful sourcing and production processes and instead markedly increase life and joy supporting activities then their still is a hurtle in this to overcome. Namely, are the tangible / material  means of production of the infrastructure needed to ecologically produce jewelry themselves manufactured in an ecological and, ethically / moral way? The answer is unequivocally yes.

Beautiful Gimal - cycle [now for the moment, I am back to feeling like David Bohm.]

Fourth entry: I had mentioned earlier that the ancestor tree on my father's side  thus far cannot be traced back further than my Great-Grandfather but it seems there must have been someone who taught him how to cut diamonds,  design jewelry and craft it. It is pretty clear that his family and him did not travel straight from what today would be in the vicinity of Ukraine to the USA. But rather they spent some time in Vienna and perhaps did some work their. Because the jewelry box top pictured below:

Is a branding image indicating an award that they won or Akim won in Vienna. As will be seen I have stepped forward some, maybe because the records-documents- we have from the ship manifest they traveled on and the cities listed as their places of birth on their immigration papers is curious both in terms of location and time frame.  

Fifth entry: Based on the image below, as a "time stamp" of sorts, let us use 1918 for a Litwin Diamond Cutters establishment on USA soil. An irony is the date 1918. If from within a Marxist-Lenin view you can think of a more bourgeois activity than diamond cutting please let me know. In doing so you would have done your "Mitzvah for the day" by making another person smile.

So while do not "hold your breath", I will try to "round-up" [pun intended] the other four shapes as well, cut during this era, and then image these and post them with commentary on the "Diamonds" page. One matter of fun interest [understood, the, perhaps, particular use of the word "fun" in this context] is to juxtapose how these diamonds were cut [limitations etc.understood] to e.g. Marcel Tolkowsky's Round / Round Brilliant cut [of 1919] and to a "standard" ideal Round Brilliant cut [of 2024].

Somewhere there is a commandment [again, please do not "hold your breath" on this one either] that I will try to find [or if by chance you know where, please kindly write or call to chat, and let me know] that one live life with fun as fun. i.e. not to serous, although life, to live, living is paradoxically serious.[at the moment I feel like a hybrid of Rodney Dangerfield, Jackie Gleason and Tevye the Dairyman [the "Fiddler on the Roof" version- a blessing and "exposure" as I saw Zero Mostel on stage play Tevye and likewise have seen a number of times Chaim Topol as Tevye in the movie]. So actually, this moment's feeling, is of a hybrid of a hybrid.

Sixth entry: Follow-up and calcification of the fourth entry. "Rounding up" a number of rounds, the other four shapes and others shapes as well, cut during the before mentioned time period is not a problem.

However, what is and needs clarification is the "imaging" of them. No two ways about it, jewelry photography is very challenging. But for this project and in general, still images, help, but only get one so far. What is needed are videos and video renderings of the jewelry as it moves and interacts with light.

This fact was underscored for me recently [7/4/24], dinning at a lovely restaurant at Half Moon Bay. The lighting was such that the effect it had interacting with jewelry was quite similar to the lighting conditions one might find good to examine a cut / polished diamond [s]-daylight, somewhat  overcast -overcast- but the restaurant at least "visually" was not lit this way at all. A plausible explanation for this might be that while the visual ambience differed , the light temperature might be similar.

The point being, imaging of jewelry is nuanced, tricky. 

Seventh entry: Below are some immigration related documents.However, ordering them as to time and place is not clear as best as can be discerned at the moment. However, as indicated in the First entry the "start" is unknown "here" but in the spirit of, in the meantime, maybe someone seeing these documents might know or at least know more.

 Akim's wife: Petition for Naturalization Rasia Litwin born in Kiev Russia [Rasia Danuk].

 On this List or Manifest of Alien Passengers for the United States; listed are:

* Rassia
* Sons: Jacob, Max and Boris
* Daughter: Rebeca [Revkah]
and it appears to indicate from Austria [Vienna]

However Akim is not listed as being on this ship the Neckar.