Part One – There (Eastern Hemisphere)
CHAPTER TWO – ARCHIVES (CONTINUATION)
MOTHER’S FAMILY
The most unfortunate thing is that mom did not save old photographs of her parents! Alas, she was the only child in the family, and there is no one else to look for duplicates. There were just a few of old photographs, but during the stormy emigration they remained with relatives who were… robbed. The thieves took our precious pictures, stored in my yellow leather university briefcase. The valuable-looking briefcase stuffed with papers (“Banknotes!”) tempted the thieves. Wow, how they later probably tore and crumbled photographs with Jewish muzzles, which swindled them as always!
And now, in the absence of photographs, I have to rely only on my own memory.
1
Let me start with the family of my maternal grandfather. He, along with his brothers and sisters, as well as 75% of the families of my ancestors, moved to the Caucasus. I think that these facts and high percentages speak of some general reason, such as “It’s warm there, and a lot of fruits grow on trees”, or rather, clearly less anti-Semitism in the South.
Another reason was urbanization, that is, the growth of cities due to the migration in them people from rural areas. And the Caucasus belonged to the Pale of Settlement, and Jews could move within it by their own free will, without asking anyone for permission and without inventing special Jewish tricks, like a “yellow ticket”.
Something tells me that I saw, if not my great-grandmother, then her large photograph in someone’s apartment. The same inner voice keeps repeating to me: “At the eldest, Aunt Anya’ apartment,” but the next day the prompt changes: “At the youngest, Aunt Beba’s!” If I was inclined towards mysticism, I would think that this is my mother’s work from heaven. The words “Aunt Anya” and “Aunt Beba” indicate someone from the older generation – first of all, my Mom, who pronounces them. However, I am sure that if these are my mother’s clues, then from the inside, from my own memory.
Grandma Sofa called Grandpa Grisha by the name Gilyara. Only in America did I learn that Gilyara is Hillel, the name belonged to a famous Jewish thinker who lived at the turn of two eras. The grandfather’s family lived in Gomel, but moved to the south. I don’t know who the first started relocation, but my grandmother and grandfather made their way there through a country, tormented by revolution and civil war, I guess they knew the direction.
They all settled in the city of Baku, just as we, immigrants of the nineties of the twentieth century, forty-four relatives from different cities of the Soviet Union, gathered in one New York courtyard. Apparently, nevertheless, there are some “forces of attraction” connecting relatives, acquaintances, fellow countrymen, fellow believers and so on into larger formations.
All I know about my great-grandfather is that he was a mahogany furniture maker and died early from a heart disease. Great-grandmother lived with her youngest daughter Beba, the poorest but most generous of all. She, short and plump, was married to the same round little man named Nyoma. Mom said that they were distinguished by accuracy and hospitality, although they lived very modestly. Once in my childhood, when I was five or six, we visited them in Baku with my Mom. I immediately noticed a small table in the kitchen, covered with a white starched tablecloth.
“Do you have a restaurant here?” I asked, anticipating the treat like Winnie the Pooh.
“And this little nosher (food lover) is not a fool to eat!” Nyoma laughed.
It was absolute true. I still consider myself a gourmet.
I have no other memories of their family, but their eldest daughter Lina, beautiful and fat, married in Tbilisi, a war front-line officer and a communist who worked with my father. Families communicated, I played with second cousins, and our mothers competed in gastronomy and cooking.
Grandpa’s older sister raised a son. In my childhood, I once met him when he visited to see my mother – his cousin. I noticed that he looked much older than my mother and seemed to me like Mom’s uncle.
Another grandfather’s brother, the only one of all siblings, had an education, and became a professor of geology. I remember their gloomy apartment with massive mahogany furniture made by my great-grandfather, leather sofas to match the color of the furniture and floor lamps illuminating separate parts of the apartment. Two children grew up there – Mom’s cousins George and Ella. George was athletic and, while visiting us, did exercises, lifting a well-fed nephew instead of weights. But in their breed there was not only a gene for beauty, but also a gene for heart failure. George fell dead, dancing to the popular Armenian song “Ara vai, vai!” on his own jubilee – fiftieth birthday. It happened in a restaurant, in the circle of relatives, friends, among the festive abundance. Here you go… “Ara vai, vai!”
Ella was a charming girl, and her fate was successful. One day, an “underground businessman” (as private business in USSR considered illegal) met his acquaintance – my paternal grandfather David, who was a well-known rate-setter. He calculated the cost of products and the wages of manufacturers – the lessons to the young Prince Vorontsov were not in vain. They talked about this and that, and the businessman said to my grandfather, “I want to marry my son to a beautiful girl, and your daughter-in-law is a beauty. Does she have suitable relatives? Be my agent, I owe you a new raincoat, mackintosh!” and he laughed happily.
The Grandfather ignited to find a fiancée – the businessman knew how to increase activity of performers with financial interest. Mom invited her cousin to visit, the young people met, liked each other, and things began to spin. So another Mom’s relative became the third Baku woman who moved to our city. She lived a happy life with her husband, raised two children who are now raising their children in Israel, but my grandfather never received the promised mac.
“I didn’t suspect that you don’t understand jokes,” the businessman told him. “Is such a piece of gold worth some kind of mackintosh? If we had a serious agreement, I would be in your debt for life, but no one is responsible for jokes.”
And he left happy with the fate of his son… and the mac.
And with Ella and her family, we were friends all our lives. Maybe I’ll mention stories about them in the appropriate places.
I never saw another grandfather’s brother, a female’s hairdresser. He passed away when I was one year old. His leg was cut off by a tram… However, in old photographs he is dressed in a leather coat with three “sleepers” in his buttonholes, without indicating the type of troops. That means – a captain of the Cheka. So the end of his Chekist career in a hairdressing salon, and not in the GULAG, is a good finale. He had two daughters, also beautiful, like all their breed.
We meet the children of the older sister in different countries, but the son of the younger sister died suddenly and young. That’s right – from heart disease. I have a fleeting but pleasant memory of him. A boy of about twelve sharpens with a file an aluminum dagger for me, a six-year-old. I see this as a symbol of fraternal help in the fight against pirates.
The youngest sister of my grandfather, was not familiar to me. Her husband George held an important post in the Odessa Shipping Company, and the children subsequently lived in Moscow. Their daughter was another beauty in the family, and her older brother, named George (an amazing variety of names in the family) did not give his photographs, due to a secret work in state security.
Perhaps now I’ll move on to the family of my mother’s mother.
2
Until quite recently, I kept putting off describing a subject that was completely unfamiliar to me. Grandma was the dearest and beloved of all, and her family… the most distant and unknown. Once they all (and how many are “they all”?) lived in Lodz, from where my grandmother flew away from wealthy parents to her beloved but poor Gilyara in Russia, and they went to live together in the southern city of Baku, after which the connection with her family was lost forever.
This short story is full of hidden drama. I don’t know where the young people met, how their relationship arose, how the parents fought against the daughter’s course not to the west, but to the east. But it was clear to me that my great-grandfather, who had either a shop or a ready-made dress studio in Lodz, could not be happy with the choice of his eldest daughter – a poor, shtetl-size-town guy with not a penny to bless oneself with.
“So what that he has golden hands? But never in his life had they held a needle! Then what’s the use of him in the tailoring business? So what if he’s handsome and tall? In his Caucasian hat, he looks more like a Yesaul. He will manufacture children to Sofi, and I’ll had to feed them all!” I imagined my great-grandfather’s monologues.
Perhaps the words were different, but it seems to me that I reflect the overall picture correctly.
Grandpa Grisha came from a large and poor family. He left early for work. I have repeatedly admired this handsome young man in a huge mutton hat in a brown-and-white photograph, toned with sepia. But not it alone. There were two or three black-and-white daguerreotypes, where grandfather looked like a count – he was already older, in a tuxedo, a pleated shirt, a top hat, with a cane and a cloak thrown over his arm. The fact that the outfit is not fake, but at least rented, is proved by amber cufflinks that I broke in my student years, a ring that I sometimes wear and keep for my son, as well as a gold Breguet on a chain, now not working and only having a collection value. And this is for a simple worker, or even an apprentice? Hmm, we really have a bad idea of that life!
Grandmother mentioned some balls in Lodz or Gomel, where grandmother went with her beloved younger sister Zelda to visit relatives. And then the young people got married. But they did not stay in the western city, but went south.
I think that in addition to great-grandfather’s dissatisfaction with the marriage, there were other reasons why young people chose to leave. I believe that the main reason was the move of the entire Grisha’s family to Baku – away from the places of pogroms, to the rapidly developing oil center of the country, located in the Pale of Settlement (Jews could settle there without restrictions). This process led to a significant increase in the Jewish population of the city (from approximately 2 thousand at the beginning of the 20th century to 40 thousand in the 70s).
I can’t say exactly how the family moved, but the newlyweds’ trip was not calm. Although the country was tormented by turmoil, pogroms, revolution, war with Poland, but the dowry – Kuznetsov dishes and downy featherbed – was managed to be delivered.
Once the Grandma remembered that the Petliurists were inspecting the train, and she, knowing about the pogroms perpetrated by them, hid her husband under a fluffy ball skirt and began to resent in polish the inconveniences of the road. Petliura was an ally of Pilsudski, so the Ukrainian cornet saluted, apologized to the lady that life had become so piggish and, clicking his heels, left the compartment.
Grandfather’s sisters, simple shtetl girls, did not like this proud wayward “refugee pretending to be a panni.” Of course, these were class differences. Or, if you prefer, differences in class. What could Sofa, torned from her home and her usual way of life, object to these “chazerim”? She herself chose a life where they cursed in Russian, which my Grandma did not know and in which, even in her old age, she made mistakes. But after all, the saying teaches that the paradise with a sweetheart is even in a hut. And where this hut is… not specified. What if… in hell? Of course, these are just my thoughts. In fact, those from the Grandma’s family who did not flee from Poland ended up in “hell”. The SS men buried them alive. Somehow the Grandma knew this…
My research began by accident: my sister asked me to recognize difficult words for her non-Russian-speaking employee in an old birth record. I noticed that despite the Russian text, there is a seal of the Polish archive, and the town was not far from the place where my Grandma’s father came from. So I briefly mentioned: “We should take a look.”
The sister, who was raised since childhood by our Grandma Sofa, took my note more seriously than usually and “took a look”. And as the Jews say: “Oh, wei!” – data poured down. I received documentary evidence for my great-grandfather, great-grandmother, their parents and parents’ parents. My sister and I tracked our grandmother’s middle brother to America until we found our grandmother’s younger sister moving to Canada and until we found the older brother on various lists. Alas, great-grandmother Masha died in the ghetto in 1940. Looks better than being buried alive… All that remains is to bequeath to the children to look through all the new archival lists. Oddly enough, but over time information pops up.
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