Years ago, when Google was new, I thought it'd be fun to search for my name and see what came up. Most of it was me, a bit of it was Amitai Etzioni, and one intriguing link went to a German-language page for a Hotel Schlair.

Finding another Amitai on the web was no surprise (it's not that unusual a name in Israel, and my parents had told me about Etzioni when I was young). Finding another Schlair was. The spelling of my last name is extremely unusual; the only Schlairs I knew of were relatives.

There's a real German word pronounced the same way — “Schleier” (”veil”) — but my father and uncle grew up in Israel and spelled the name in Hebrew, and their parents grew up in Lipkan, Bessarabia. The land formerly known as Bessarabia is now split over at least Moldova and Ukraine. (Lipkan is now in Moldova.) While many of the people who lived in Bessarabia came there from Germany, the predominant languages appear to have been Russian and Yiddish, and the Jews almost certainly used Yiddish. So while it's likely that my family name is German in origin, and they spoke a language derived from German, it's also likely that it was many generations since any of them had seen German.

It's hard to fault my uncle, then, for taking a wild guess at an English spelling when he emigrated to the US. His Israeli English teacher agreed it was a good guess! And that's how I came to be a Schlair instead of a Schleier.

So when I found this Hotel Schlair online a few years ago, I resolved that someday I'd meet the owners and hear their story. And when I was making plans a few months ago to go to Vienna for a technical conference, I realized this was my chance.

Short version: results inconclusive. The Kremsmünster Schlairs have been there since 1815, and for a long time owned a mill which was highly profitable. Their business did well during WWII because they were in the Nazis' good graces. Interestingly, they have some inklings (though unsubstantiated) about Jewish ancestry. Also interestingly, though perhaps coincidentally, it appears that Bessarabia changed hands a few years before these other Schlairs came to Kremsmünster and bought a mill.

The technical conference was pretty cool too. Oh, and I'd eat Austrian food again any time.