Recently, at an Orange County, California book group, our host, Anna, suggested that we publish our own family tree alongside those of Vera and Alla. It was a timely topic since my husband has been compulsively researching our family trees over these last two months. I knew a lot more about Vera and Alla’s family histories than my own. I admit I was a skeptic about genealogy since it seemed pointless to know a name, place, date of birth and death without understanding the story of the person.
My husband, Harry, has attended his share of talks on our book, Jewish Luck. He resonated with one of our many themes, the centrality of the immigrant, the one who chose to leave his or her home country. Trained as a systems analyst, he likes a project. When he was asked to become part of a new Jewish Genealogical Society in Minneapolis/St. Paul, he had the opportunity to retry his hand at drawing our own family tree after a decade of neglect on the topic. A lot has changed in a decade. Using Records.ancestry.com. Jewishgen.org, Geni.com, Familysearch.org, and Libertyellisfoundation.org, he soon discovered a treasure trove of documents. I felt like he was working on a jigsaw puzzle discovering new pieces each day. Slowly, Harry excavated the facts about our ancestors. But he treated them as photographic negatives and with his curious and analytic bent, he exposed these pictures to just the right light to reveal the stories. Miraculously, the individual leaves on the tree transformed from empty outlines to having unique color.
Researching family trees is not for the faint-hearted. Harry would shoot me an email at work, which would haunt me for days until I banned him from my work email. The first was the death certificate of my grandfather’s sister, a six-year-old girl, Esther Katz, who died when she was struck by an automobile. My first thought was “How many automobiles were on the road in 1927?” Of course, that question can be answered in seconds. Then I thought about the family’s grief and wondered about the potential blame and the effect that had on the 12-year-old brother who was supposedly assigned to supervise her that day. I wondered about her personality and how much she was missed. I won’t even talk about how I obsessed about my great grandmother who died in her early 40’s from botched up surgery – a new immigrant from Russia shipped to a man twice her age in Ohio to raise his eight children and another six. What went through her mind on that train ride to her new marriage?
Once Harry had identified names, his next step was to research their hometowns and include their stories. My grandmother had come from Dnepropetrovsk, known as Yekaterinoslav before the Revolution. The remnants of an old tale Grandma told were verified when Harry found out that the Jewish men of the town took any implement that could serve as a weapon to arm themselves against the Cossacks who entered the town in 1905 intending to stage a pogrom. These Jews successfully defended themselves.
On Harry’s side, we learned the unlucky story of a Polish town named Lutsk, meaning “luck.” His great-great-grandmother Ada (Bark) Adler came to Baltimore in the 1880’s and managed to rescue some of the remaining family from Lutsk during the famine of 1921. Twenty years later, the town was devastated by Nazis with almost every Jew killed within a few hours.
Sometimes our relatives led us to bigger and better stories like that of the Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, founder of the Lubavich movement in the US, a person whom I never thought I would write about until I realized he is the Jewish Forest Gump. He was literally everywhere in the Jewish world of the the early Twentieth Century. I think he and the punk group, Pussy Riot, share a great deal of hutzpah.
Harry’s distant cousin, Max Rhoade, was the lawyer who rescued Rebbe Menachem Schneerson’s father-in-law, Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson (whom I will refer to respectfully as Rebbe YY). During tsarist times, Rebbe YY protested for the rights of Jews and was effective enough to be arrested four times. In 1906, he was in Western Europe to persuade Dutch and German bankers to stop pogroms. Stay Rebbe in Amsterday, stay! He apparently didn’t want to miss the Revolution and returned to Russia. In that literally godforsaken country he actively encouraged the illegal establishment of Jewish schools. He had responsibility for maintaining a clandestine Habad yeshiva system and was under surveillance by the NKVD (secret police). Finally in 1927 the secret police caught up with him and he was sentenced to death for counter-revolutionalry activities. But Rebbe YY survived. Pressure from Western Governments led to the commuting of his sentence. In 1929, he went to Israel, then traveled to the USA for a tete-a-tete with President Hoover. Stay Rebbe YY, stay! Pick one – Israel or the USA. But no, Rebbe YY went to Warsaw and refused to leave even after Nazi Germany attacked in 1939. With US help and probably kicking and screaming, Rebbe YY finally was cleared to go to the USA. So Harry’s cousin’s greatest accomplishment was probably to see the Rebbe land safely. Supposedly, the day after Rebbe YY was given advice not to start up the Lubavitch movement in America, he founded the first Lubavitch yeshiva in the US. The rest is history. I admire him -- though not his timing -- and don’t know why there isn’t a blockbuster film about him.
The more Harry delved into the history, the luckier we felt to have our relatives leave when they did. We would not have had the same opportunities; and, odds are the family tree might have been cut off at that point had they stayed. In doing work akin to a private detective, Harry found out-laws, he found in-laws. He found explanations for family eccentricities. This was the best gift he could give our parents, to know their families would live in perpetuity with our children and their children.
Currently, I am reading David Laskin’s book, The Family. What strikes me most is his description of the three branches of his family all originating from a small town in Poland. There were the ones who came early to the U.S. including his grandmother, a founder of Maidenform Bra Company, early Zionists who made aliyah to build Palestine, and those who perished in Poland. I realized how intertwined and universal these stories are since so many of us originated from Eastern Europe and at the turn of the twentieth century our families dispersed to two or three other continents.
On this 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, I am amazed by those who were trapped in the worst place on earth, and not only survived, but maintained their spirit and ensured that their stories, our stories, would continue to be told. In the end, we are one people with one fate, and not all of us, like Yosef Yitzhak Schneerson, have nine lives.