ABSTRACT
The name Laqueur is unusual and I have become accustomed to seeing it misspelled more often than not. My father’s mother was called Friedensohn; her family came from another little town in Central Silesia. Just last night I had a call from the percussionist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who proved to me that we are doubly related both by way of the Laqueurs and the Friedensohns. My mother was née Berliner and her mother had been born Cassirer. For all I know, I might be related to the coinventor of the telephone, to the philosopher Cassirer, or to the famous art dealer of that name; Emil Berliner emigrated to the United States in 1870, at the age of nineteen, and, in his late twenties, based in Washington, refined Alexander Bell’s telephone with his invention of an effective microphone and an induction coil. Later he achieved a breakthrough in improving Edison’s phonograph, replacing the cylinder with a shallow-groove, flat disc—the modern record. He went on inventing; in his middle seventies he constructed several helicopters and acted as his own test pilot.
