The Fox Family

Hyman and Rebecca Dickter Fox immigrated to the United States in 1914 from Bessarabia. He stowed away on a lifeboat. She pretended to be the daughter of a family on board. They settled in New York before joining landsleit (compatriots) in Pittsburgh.

Selling brooms door to door, Hyman Fox (1893-1989) was able to save enough money to open a shoe store in the Hill District. The store enabled him to bring his wife’s family — he was the only living member of his — to Pittsburgh and employ them. After the store was destroyed in a fire in 1920, Fox began peddling with a horse and wagon, which he continued to do for 43 years. He rode through the Hill District and later into Oakland, too, leaving home at 5 a.m., and staying out until he had sold everything in his cart and had fed his horse. He worked in any weather condition except prohibitively deep snow.

Hyman and Rebecca (1894-1962) Fox became American citizens in 1952. They belonged to the Bessarabia Society, a local social and beneficial group of immigrants from their homeland. They had four children, Jesse, Joseph, Mollie and Mary. After Rebecca Fox died, Hyman Fox remarried and moved to New York, where he lived until he was 95. He spent the final two years of his life, blind and deaf, at the Jewish Home for the Aged in Pittsburgh.