Rudolf and Victoria Pordes Collection

Victoria (Zetlin) Russman Pordes was the third of five children of Selig Selikov Zetlin, orginally from Vitebsk, Byelorussia, and Esther Geselevna Zetlin. The Zetlins, probably married in the 1890s, lived in Kursk, Russia. Selig Zetlin was a self-taught chemist who had taught himself German in order to read chemistry books. At the turn of the century he worked for the Russian railway and supported the growing family in style, with a house, coach, and servants. But in 1905, after Japan defeated Russia, there was a pogrom in Kursk, as elsewhere, and as a result Esther Zetlin, pregnant with their fifth child, took the four children and a teenaged niece to Vienna, Austria. Selig Zetlin kept his post, supporting the family, though ever less adequately, from a distance and visiting very occasionally. He gradually went blind, however, and by the 1920s or earlier was unable to work. He probably died in the fall of 1938. Esther Zetlin, also blind, remained in Vienna, was deported to Theresienstadt in September 1942 and died shortly afterward.

Victoria, born 7 April 1903, wanted to be a librarian but could not afford the training and so became a bookkeeper. In Vienna she worked mainly for Jacob Engel, who had a wholesale drygoods business. He had two daughters, Renee (married to Fritz Koerner) and Jeanne (married to N. Goldberg). Victoria Zetlin's marriage to Emil Russmann (she generally dropped the second n) in November 1937 was for citizenship purposes only; they were divorced in May 1938. She was the first to immigrate, in the fall of 1938. At first she packed medicines in jars and bottles at Purepac but she soon began a series of jobs as bookkeeper in advertising agencies. In August 1949 she married Rudolf Pordes, a furrier. They lived first on West 108th Street, then on College Avenue in the Bronx, and finally in Port Jefferson Station, Long Island, where Rudolf Pordes died of heart failure in July 1980. Victoria Pordes soon moved to Isabella House in Washington Heights, where she died of a heart attack in June 1986.

Biographical abstracts about Victoria’s siblings may be found in the manuscript "Victoria (Zetlin) Russman Pordes," MS 852.

Rudolf Pordes was born in Lemberg (today Lviv, Ukraine) on 29 September 1906, one of two children of Jakob (a cantor, born 1884) and Rosa (Heinish) Pordes. According to family lore, Jakob Pordes left the family, moved to Vienna, and lived with a younger mistress. Rosa Heinisch Pordes died when Rudolf Pordes was a boy, his father and sister died in the 1930s. By late 1918 he was in Vienna. He was apprenticed as a furrier in 1921, became journeyman in 1925 and master in 1931, and established his own business in 1929. He also early on showed an interest in photography and art. After the Anschluss he fled to Brussels (July 1938), where he found work as a furrier, and in May 1940, when the Germans invaded Belgium, to France. There he was interned in several camps, and in the last one served as camp photographer. With the help of relatives and his fiancée (and later first wife), Golde Senzer, in New York, he was able to immigrate early in 1942.

In New York he immediately tried to reestablish himself as a furrier. With Victoria Pordes he also tried to start an export business, focusing mainly on ceramics.

As the market for fur garments declined, Rudolf Pordes turned first to photography anmd then to art. Many of his paintings (some reminiscent of Jacksdon Pollock's), and his sculptures and collages, in which he used driftwood, coffee grounds, chicken bones, and other "found objects," were inspired by the atom bomb and Rudolf Poerdes' sense of the disintegration or destruction of the world. He had a one-man show in New York in 1958, and was part of group shows on Cape Cod and on Long Island, where he became an avid gardener and landscaped their yard with sculptures and waterworks. Rudolf and Victoria Pordes had earlier bought a small house in Shirley, Long Island, which in later years they rented out. For the last quarter century or so of his life Rudolf Pordes depended on his wife's salary; she continued to commute to New York into the 1970s. Rudolf died in 1980, Victoria in 1986.