Tag: russian empire

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 “ั‹” (“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 ๐Ÿ˜€

***

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.