Category: history

Family History: Finding A Missing Relative

Like everyone, I knew about the Ellis Island archives, but I never thought I would need to search there, because I do not have any “ancestors” who arrived in America many years ago – it’s me, who came here! But here I was the other day, trying to find whether and when my great-grandmother’s brother came to America. I was pretty sure he did, because my second cousin told me that the family “was in touch” with him and then “lost touch”, shortly after the revolution, I would assume.

Given how many Jews were escaping Russia during the 1900s pogroms, and not knowing the year when my great-grand-uncle came to America, and not even being sure about the name, I didn’t have high expectations about success in the Ellis Island archives. Still, to my surprise, I got a result in five minutes, just typing a couple of possible name spelling variations. Funny that the guide to the search for your ancestors suggested you shouldn’t type the name that they adopted in the US. It states that all of this “using the name of the village as the last name” or “translating Italian names into English” are not more than legends, that the newcomers adopted their new names after arrival. So I first tried his legal name, and that’s when my first several tries didn’t yield any results. But the moment I typed the name, my cousin said my great-grand-uncle has adopted, I found him! Again, I was surprised that only one person checked all the boxes!

I have to figure out what “Dranden” is because no geographical location is identified by this name, so the officers were not that knowledgeable. Also, I ordered the print of the ship manifest page, because I can’t see all of the details in the frame they showed me on the website. The manifest mentions he came from Lithuania, and it is quite possible that he was on his way, but I still can’t figure out what place name was mutilated like this!

And one more discovery. I vaguely remembered that my uncle, who immigrated to the US independently from me, mentioned our relatives “who were here before us.” I contacted his widow, who told me that she knew about these relatives and even used to be in contact with them, but those were yet other relatives! The relatives from my father’s father’s side, and all the connections are well known, so I will try to get in touch with them as well!

I will tell more about them when I get to the other part of my family history!

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.

Early History: My Paternal Grandmother

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.

The Earliest I Know: My Paternal Grandmother’s Family

I started to record everything I remember about my family history in 2008, but all these notes are in Russian. When I started this blog, I had an ambitious goal to write down everything I remember about my family history, including my own. Back then, I decided to start with the latter because I thought it was important to start with the non-recorded parts. Now, six years later, I am still far from done with that endeavor, but I realized that translating from Russian is also not a small undertaking, and I’d better start :).

That being said, Hettie’s Timeline is now going to grow its head 😀

***

My paternal grandmother’s family represents the purest Jewish part of my ancestry. Most of the things I know about the great-great-grandparents are apocryphal, meaning I cannot tell how far or close they are from the truth. My grandaunt told me most of what’s written in this post, and I have zero supporting documentation.

Both the Levitin and Sandalov families lived in Priluki in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire, in the Pale of Settlement. Both families were Levites, who preserved their purity and married within their cast until my second aunt married a tailor’s son.

My great-great-grandfather Mark (Morduh) Sandalov was from a rabbi’s family, but unlike his brothers, he was an atheist, and thus was, if not excommunicated, at least denied any financial assistance. His bride was only fourteen when they got married, and according to the family legend, her first eight babies were either stillborn or died in infancy, and out of the eight more children she had later, only four lived to become adults. My great-aunt told me that my great-great-grandmother was very smart, and she taught herself several languages, and even math, but she wouldn’t have had any chance to receive any formal education even if she hadn’t gotten married that early.

As for her children, I thought that I only knew about two of them, but my second cousin filled in the gaps. The oldest of the surviving children was Rachel, the second was my great-grandmother Gitly, and they also had a younger sister, Golda (Aglae), who died relatively young from cancer. Also, they had a son (and I hope my cousin will be able to recover his name). My cousin said that this son went to America, where he changed his last name from Sandalov to Sandler, and the family eventually lost contact with him.

“Antie Rachel” passed away before I was born, and I thought that she never married, but as I found out, she was married to a cousin of her brother-in-law, but he died young. She had one daughter, Maria, whom I vaguely remember. According to a family legend, Ant Rachel was quite a “businesswoman,” which was extremely unusual in our family. She stepped up to run a dry goods store instead of her father, Mark, who was exceptionally impractical and not a businessman at all. She turned his store and a warehouse into a well-run and profitable business, which she voluntarily handed to the Soviets after the October Revolution, not because she was afraid of her business being taken by force, but because the whole family embraced the change.

When I say that I am a product of three generations of revolutionaries, I mean not only the Dombrowski side of the family but also my Jewish ancestors. Gitly Sandalov married Isroel-Dovid Levitin. He was definitely a member of one of the revolutionary parties, but I am not 100% sure he was a Bolshevik. It might be another family legend as well. My great-aunt told me that he was “under official police surveillance” (glasnyi nadrzor politsii) in contrast to “unofficial” (neflasnyi nadzor), and thus the police were “conducting surveillance” in their house from time to time. She used to tell me the story about the “party papers,” which were hidden inside the grand piano, and how policemen ordered her to play, and knowing where the papers were, she was trying not to hit these keys.

***

The family got their share of pogroms, both before the October Revolution and during the Civil War. As it was usually happening, their Ukrainian friends would hide them during pogroms. As my great-aunt used to say: “Each of the pogromshik had a friend, regarding whom they would say: yea, Juds are Juds, there is no question about it, but this Jud is special, not like others.”

And in case my readers didn’t connect the dots yet, the grave I found last year in Estonia is the grave of Isroel-Dovid (David) Levitin, the husband of Gitly (Gustava) Sandalova and my great-grandfather. So that I won’t look for their dates of birth anymore, he was born on January 25, 1883, and died on June 6, 1955. I will add the exact dates for Gitly when I verify them, but she was born in 1886 and died in April 1970.

They had three children. Grunia (Henrietta), my grandmother, was born on August 27, 1903; Feiga-Sora (Faina) was born on September 7, 1904; and Moishe (Michail) was born on March 9, 1912.

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.

Languages

I want to record this as a separate post because my mom suddenly remembered that something like that happened at some point and started to tell everyone. I do not remember the episode itself because the conversation happened without me :), but I remember who my mom described it to me many years ago. What she told me back then makes sense, while what she is saying now does not make any sense at all.

I should start with mentioning that my paternal grandmother’s side of the family were polyglots. Living in the pale of settlement, they had to speak four languages to get around, plus Hebrew, just because you should know, plus foreign languages taught in the gymnasium, plus some Greek and Latin. So it was only natural that when I started to talk (which, as I already mentioned, was very early – I recited first nursery rhymes at the age of 14 months), my great-grandmother started to introduce some Yiddish, her first language. She started casually saying to me, “And in Yiddish, this is called so and so.” When my mom overheard that, she said: “Gustava Markovna (my great grandma’s Russified name), let her learn how to speak Russian first!” For which my great grandma replied: “I never expected you to be such an antisemit!” For which my mom got very upset and ran out of the room, and my great ant Fania followed her and tried to console her saying that “nobody meant anything.” My great grandmother never apologized because she was not a type of a person who ever apologies, but the question of Yiddish was never raised again. (And it has nothing to do with my mom teaching me English later)

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.

The Eighth Grade and Specialized Schools

Although we didn’t have a formal distinction between grade, middle, and high school (as I mentioned earlier, in most cases, it was one establishment, and all grades were located in one building), finishing the eighth grade had some special meaning. We had formal exams after the eighth grade (Composition, Russian Grammar, Algebra, and Geometry), and we were given a diploma for “Graduating from the Eighth grade.”

Those who had poor grades (what exactly “poor” meant was relative) could not continue with the “upper grades” and were sent to “professional schools” (i.e., vocational schools) to complete their educations. They had to study for three years instead of two and, theoretically, would receive the same instructions in all subjects plus learn some vocation, and then theoretically, they could either go to work in the field they were trained or could try to apply to college. In addition, there was a very limited number of specialized schools, which were much more like High Schools in the US: they had only the 9th and 10th grades and were focused on in-depth learning of some subjects.

The trick was, however, that the school I attended was already “specialized” because we were taught English starting from the second grade, and by the eighth grade, we had English lessons every day of the week. Education was free, but we had “to pay it off.”

Everyone who had good grades in English was required to attend the tour guide courses in the “House of Friendship.” The course was designed for three years, and by the time of high school graduation, the students were certified tour guides for the city tours (year one), several major museum tours (year two), and the tours of the summer tzar palaces (year three).

I didn’t want to attend these courses. At the beginning of the eighth grade, I already attended the Youth Math School twice a week and a stage reading studio (I forgot once or twice a week), and I started to entertain the idea of going to a specialized math school after the eighth grade. Fortunately, there was one more option: instead of the House of Friendship, I could attend the tour guide courses at the Hermitage Museum, a one-year program. This program was still done through the school, and even now, I am unsure to what extent it was another “spy school.” However, that was a very fun time, and I am exceptionally glad I had this opportunity.

We met once a week (and I had a special free pass to the Hermitage Museum). We spent two hours with an extraordinary museum curator, Ludmila Voronikhina (who was, indeed, related to a famous architect, Voronikhin). Each time, she took us for a tour (in English) to cover one of the museum collections. We learned a great deal about art and artists and about the history of the Hermitage, and we learned all artistic terms in English. I was an art lover even before that, but these lectures gave me a world of knowledge and even deeper arts appreciation.

We were not required to have a formal exam at the end of this course. Instead, Ludmila Voronikhina asked each of us to choose the topic we would like to cover. During the last several meetings of the school year, the two hours were divided between our mini-tours, and she kept teaching us about Matisse and Picasso.

Since I was in ultimate and unconditional love with Leonardo da Vinci, I chose the tour of two Leonardo’s Madonnas, and I still can talk about each of them for at least twenty minutes!

However, as much as I enjoyed this course, my heart was increasingly with math. The most important change that happened when I was in the eighth grade was that the Youth Math School classes were moved from the University to three specialized schools (they were still taught by University students). That’s how I found myself entering the building of School Number 30 for the first time.

To be continued

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.

Russian Lies #1

A friend shared with me a series of Ukrainian documentaries uncovering the tools Russian propaganda uses to mislead both the world and its own people about Russian and Ukrainian history, culture, and their respective roles in the world and how the Russian-Ukrainian war is the logical continuation of all of the above. I want to present these documentaries one by one and write (hopefully) detailed comments about each of them, mostly targeting my American friends.

The first documentary is about the history of Russia. Most of my friends likely remember only some episodes of Russian history that, for this reason or that reason, were mentioned in popular culture or were taught in school in relation to US history. The bottom line is that I do not expect anybody to have extensive knowledge of Russian history, so here is some explanation.

The first part of this documentary talks about the Medieval state Kyivan Rus (or Ancient Rus), with Kyiev being its capital and the language being the predecessor for three languages: Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian (and if you ask me, I’d say that nowadays Ukrainian is the closest of three to this old language). After the disintegration of the Kyivan Rus (the stage all the Medieval states went through) and after the Mongol invasion, the Moscow Principality gradually rose to power and eventually conquered most of the original Kyivan Rus land, but the rest of the world referred to it as Moscovia, not Rus. As this documentary states correctly, “Russia” as a name of the state appeared way later.

The most striking fact is that nobody ever made a secret of it! I was very much into history when I was in school, and by the time we started to study Russian history in the fourth grade, I already knew “all of it.” Nevertheless, I remember our textbook as clear as if I read it yesterday, and all of the above facts were mentioned there!

There were many facts I didn’t know about the newer parts of history; for example, I knew nothing about the joined annexation of Poland and the Soviet-Nazi parade in Brest, but everything related to Ancient history was well-known and was always in plain sight. I can’t explain why I never questioned the moral grounds of “conquering Siberia” and other colonial acquisitions. Let me repeat it again: while 20th-century history was heavily censored and presented as the “liberation” and the “fight for justice,” there were never any attempts for a similar cover-up of the earlier history. We all knew it, and we all thought it was OK.

How Math Became My Favorite Subject, But Not Right Away

I was a good student from the very beginning of school: my mom, Aunt Kima, and Baba Fania would never allow me to be less than that. However, I didn’t have a favorite subject for a while. I loved books and reciting poetry, so I was always the kid who opened the shows, but other than that, I didn’t have any special talents.

We didn’t have science or social studies lessons until the fifth grade, although I read many popular science books. We started to study Russian history in the fourth grade and botany and geography in the fifth. I immediately fell in love with biology, especially because by then, I had read many books about the wonders of nature, the mysteries of cells, endangered species, and so on.

In the fifth grade, I started to attend academic competitions, which were called olympiads. We had school olympiads, and the winners attended district olympiads, and the winners of district olympiads were sent to the city-wide competitions. All of them took place on the weekends, and having that we had school on Saturdays meant no weekends at all.

My first competitions were in biology, and I easily made it to the city-wide olympiad and easily got a second-degree diploma, finishing the fifth person in my grade level. I remember that I did great in microbiology and almost failed zoology (we didn’t have zoology at school yet, and I didn’t read enough by myself). I could not tell the difference between the black grouse and the wood grouse, could not identify the birds by skeletons, and so on. In the end, the examiner asked me what I wanted to talk about, and I told them what I knew about birds’ migration, and somehow got a passing grade in biology. The last subject was ecology and wildlife protection, and I spoke my heart out and got a top grade. I remember that I was very nervous about not remembering the names of the national parks and the dates they were founded, but my examiner said: please, spare me from the dates and name; tell me what you think about protecting endangered species. And I rocked!

My mom became very nervous about my fascination with biology because all of the craziness with genetics and Lysenko was fairly recent, and she didn’t want me to be in trouble. She started to steer me towards math. I liked math, but not even close to how much I loved biology. Besides, there was a new thread on the horizon – I started to be very interested in history.

How we were taught history in school will be a topic for a separate post, and in any case, we didn’t have any history olympiads – I guess it was dangerous to know too much about history. However, we had olympiads in math, physics, chemistry, and literature, and I participated in all of them.

My mom wanted me to focus on math because it was the only safe subject from her perspective. I was not against math, but I didn’t feel strongly about it. In the sixth grade, I started attending a Youth Math School, an after-school activity hosted at the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics of Leningrad State University. Back then, the Department had yet to move to the out-of-the-city campus, and the classes took place in the old building on the 10th linia of Vasilevsky Island, about 15 15-minute tram ride from my home. Most times, I was the only girl in the class, and I always felt stupid. Our teachers were first- or second-year university students, and they rarely had enough pedagogical skills. The boys pretended they understood all that was said, and sometimes, they could solve complicated problems, and I was barely able to keep up with them. Still, I thought it was cool to come to the University once or twice a week, so I kept coming. In the sixth grade, I participated in the district math olympiad but didn’t make it to the city-wide.

I kept attending the Youth Math School in the seventh grade and still didn’t get any diploma at the olympiad, but I quite unexpectedly made it to the city-wide essay competition, got a second-degree diploma, and was interviewed for a radio show. I suspect that made my mom even more alarmed :), especially because my award-winning essay was about Euguene Schwarts’ plays. It’s not like Schwarts was a forbidden writer, but he never praised the Soviet State and the Communist Party, many of his friends and peers were imprisoned, and the officials silently ignored him.

Fortunately for my mom, things changed when I started the eighth grade.
To be continued.

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.

My First River Cruise

One thing I am very thankful to my mom for is that since I was ten, she took me on long tourist trips, which would last for three weeks or even more. I tried to start writing about these tours several times, and each time I thought that I needed to find the photos form these trips, otherwise it doesn’t make much sense to write about them.

But realistically thinking, I won’t have time to search for these pictures for a while, let alone to scan them, so I finally decided to start writing about the trips and add the photos later, whenever I have time to find and process them (most likely, after I retire, but who knows!)

Before I start, I want to say a couple of words about vacation-taking in the Soviet Union.

I know that it was different in the beginning of the Soviet state, but by my time, most people had at least one month of vacation (and some had even more!) Vacation time was strictly about “calendar days,” not “workdays,” so if some public holidays were in the middle of your vacation, they were “lost.”

Since vacations were so long and were taken strictly once a year (in most cases, you couldn’t split it into parts), everyone tried to take them in summer. The parents needed this summer vacation to take their kids “to dacha” (as I already mentioned a couple of times), and others just wanted to have time off work. Since it was not sustainable for everyone in a company to take a month’s vacation in summer, there was a perennial nightmare of scheduling vacations in the beginning of the year and hard limits on how often each person could take a vacation in summer.

What would people do with their vacation month? In most cases, they wanted to get away from the city, and it could be just going to the countryside to visit their relatives or going to a dacha. In many cases, people could use a “trade-union voucher” to go on a tour or to some resort. A local trade union bureau would approve the distribution of the vouchers, selecting “the best workers” and/or “those who needed it most,” and the lucky ones would end up paying 10-20% of the full price.

Unlike most people, my mom usually bought the tours without trade union vouchers, paying the full price because most tours she wanted to go to were not available through the trade union vouchers. She would save money during the whole year to go to new places. For seven summers, from 1973 to 1979, we went on these tours together.

The first one was in the summer of 1973, and it was a relatively short one. We were going to take a “Volgobalt course,” departing from Leningrad and then getting to the Volga River through the system of locks, visiting Yaroslavl – an old city on the Volga River, and then returning back to Leningrad. There were several complications with this trip. First, it started on May 20, which meant my mom had to ask for permission to take me out of school on my summer break ten days earlier (that was not a problem; I was a good student). Second, I was only ten, and and a child had to be eleven to be admitted to the cruise (do not ask, I have no idea why), so my mom had to get permission from the captain of the ship. And the last problem was a force of nature: it was very early in the navigation season, and Lake Ladoga was still covered with ice, so the ship couldn’t get to Leningrad. A couple of days before the departure date, all passengers were given railway tickets to Cheboksary, where our ship was waiting for us.

As far as I remember, there were no organized tours at the stops. We had a full day in Yaroslavl. We disembarked, and my mom and I went to the city and tried to visit as many museums and churches as time permitted. We loved a fairy tale -looking city, and only wished we could stay longer.

I know that I have pictures from this cruise somewhere, and I hope to eventually scan them.

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.

Watermelons

That’s a historical post about something you can easily forget. I remembered it when I was thinking about the day Igor was born and the days before that.

In the Soviet Union, at least in the northern part of it, the beginning of September meant not only the start of school but also the start of the watermelon season. My granddaughters might not believe it, but watermelons were not sold in the stores. It was a seasonal fruit that would arrive at the end of August/beginning of September. Watermelons were sold at the temporary locations (same as New Year trees). The trucks unloaded watermelons in the cages, and then the shoppers were allowed to walk around and select a watermelon. There was no guarantee that a watermelon would be ripe; nobody checked whether they were ready for harvesting if the timing was right. There was always a risk of getting a watermelon, which was almost white inside.

And there were lines! Watermelon lines of shoppers waiting for their turn to enter the point of sale and start hunting for a perfect watermelon. In September 1985, Igor’s dad spent a lot of time in these watermelon lines. I remember that he even wrote a poem about “waiting in a watermelon line forever.”

I have no logical (or any other) explanation for why watermelons were “deficit.” They were not imported; they were grown in the southern parts of Russia and Ukraine. But still, when I think about the time Igor was born, it comes to mind: “I am standing in the watermelon line. Forever.”

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.

Filmmakers For Prosecution

I finally finished watching both movies: Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today and Filmmakers for the Prosecution. The first one is a 2009 digital restoration of the film produced in 1948 by brothers Budd and Stuart Schulberg. In this film, they collected the evidence that would be used to convict the Nazy criminals at the Nuremberg Trail. The footage they collected was only partially included in the impressive documentary, and the second film included some footage that had never been seen before. However, a more disturbing fact is that even the original movie (without these extras) was intentionally hidden from the public by the US government.

Jean-Christophe Klotz, who directed the second movie, interviewed many of the creators of the original “Nuremberg” film or their surviving relatives and friends. He also talks about the Russian documentary by Roman Carmen and about the race between the filmmakers on which country will be the first one to tell the world about Nazi atrocities. Apparently, the main reason for the “Nuremberg” movie to disappear from the public view was that Russians were portrayed as US allies (actually, the film does not include the secret pact and Russian annexation of parts of Poland). That being said, by 1948, the US government didn’t want any mention of being allies with the Soviet Union during WWII, which shelved the movie for seventy-five years.

But that was not it. In addition, it was presumed that the wide release of a film indicting Germany on war crimes might impede political and public acceptance of the plan to rebuild Germany’s economy, a vital plank in the Marshall Plan’s approach to European recovery. So apparently, the film was viewed as anti-German, at least to the same degree as anti-Nazi.

More valuable information is available on the project website, which also reveals the search for evidence in the propaganda films made by the Nazis themselves. If any of my readers are interested, I encourage them to explore this website.