I started this post immediately after I finished the previous “historical” post. However, when I looked closer at the documents, I was about to show, I discovered some discrepancies and emailed my only living relative who could theoretically know more. The information I received in response created even more discrepancies, so now we are both trying to sort it out. Based on what he told me, I am going to make changes to that post, so if you are interested, check back in an hour or two.
And now, I will finish this post I started two weeks ago, even though there will be more questions than answers.
Presumably, I am named after my father’s mother, whose legal name was Henrietta Levitina. However, unlike her younger sister’s, her real name is questionable. I am unsure about the situation in other parts of the world, but as for Imperial Russia, Jews didn’t have last names until the second half of the nineteenth century. At that time, the last names were assigned pretty randomly. Also, patronymics were entirely a Russian thing; still, all residents of Russia were required to have a patronymic. Many Jewish names were Russified by the officials, who didn’t bother themselves with exact pronunciation, and routinely substituted them with the names from the Old Testament in Russian transliteration. If that’s not enough, at the turn of the century, it was fashionable to give children “foreign” names, not for the assimilation and not in hopes of advancing the future children’s careers, but for pure “prettyness”. So, similar to Nancies, Lauras, and Isoldas in the 1970s Soviet Union, there were Bertas, Roses, and Henriettas in the Pale of Settlement in the early 1900s. The main heroine of Sholem Aleichem’s novel “The Wondering Stars” started to call herself Henrietta Swalb when she became a famous singer, while her real name was Yentl.
When my grandma was born, she was not called Henrietta, but neither was she Yentl. I have “a copy of the copy” of her birth certificate, which reads:
Achieval Copy
I hereby certify that on August 13, 1903, Novgorod-Seversky burgeois Israel-David Zalmanov Levitin and his lawful wife Gily Morduchova, in the shtetl Sherotyn, had a daughter whom they named Gruny.
My Russian-speaking friends migh wonder why the parents names sound like two last names instead of a partonimic and a surname. This form of a patronimic was required in legal papers. “In real life”, Israel-David Zalmanov Levitin would be “David Solomonovich Levitin.” He would be Isroel-Dovid in a synagogh, and most likely Dodik to his friends and neighbors.
The most mysterious part is that nobody ever mentioned anything about Sherotyn. Both my grandmother and her sister always listed their place of birth as Priluki, a city in the Poltavska gubernia, also in the Pale of Settlement, but a good hundred miles away from Sherotyn, a shtetl in Mogilevska gubernia.
I know that this “copy of the copy” is true to the “just copy” because I saw this “original copy” in my father’s house many years ago. It was hand (actually, quill) – written, and the last character of my grandmother’s name was corrected to be an explicit “ы” (“y”). I have no idea why I never questioned the place of birth. Perhaps, I was more intrigued by the fact that neither the date nor the year of her birth matched what I thought to be true.
I know (and nobody denied it) that her younger sister’s birth certificate was forged (and I will explain why in one of the future posts). However, I can’t think of any reason for forging this one.
So, let’s say it here for the sake of future generations:
Her name was Gruny (Ok, maybe Grunia), not Henrietta, and she was born in Sherstyn, not in Priluki, and her date of birth is August 26 (13 by Julian calendar), 1903, not May 9, 1904.
Everybody else in the family had proper Jewish names, even though I didn’t know the real names until I was an adult.
My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.
Hettie's Reflections 