Episode 17: Family Ties
My family history is sparse. We don’t have reliable census records, or church records by which we can trace our heritage, the way Christian families from the West do. And we don’t have synagogue records, the way Western Jewish families might, either. As Soviet Jews, we can trace our lineage back three or four generations, max. Some families might be able to go back farther, if there was great record keeping passed down from generation to generation, but I think this is probably the exception, rather than the rule. Whatever birth, marriage, and death records existed for Russian Jews through their local synagogues, most of these were lost either during the Tzarist pogroms of the 19th and early 20th centuries, or after the Russian revolution, when synagogues were largely burned by the Red army.
What we do have are stories, some true, some exaggerated, some simply made up, of the lives of our ancestors. Piecing these stories together is difficult, and there are conflicting versions of many of these. Here’s what little I know about my family history.
My mother’s parents were living in Babruysk, a city in Belarus, when World War II broke out. At the time, the city had a population of about 85, 000 people, with Jews numbering around 27, 000, about a third of the total population. In June, 1941, the Nazi army captured the city and promptly killed about 20,000 Jews, burying them in mass graves on the outskirts of town. They also build a concentration camp and imprisoned the remaining Jews and other prisoners, eventually killing most. A few people, Jews and Gentiles both, did escape into the surrounding woods and acted as resistance forces, and worked to weaken the enemy’s use of railways in the area.
My mom was an infant of 3 months when her mother and she were placed on an evacuation train from Belarus to Uzbekistan. They were part of a very small group who did leave, and therefore escaped the Nazi invasion. Her father, my grandfather, had been drafted by the Soviet Union and put on a different train. My grandmother and mother were taken to Tashkent, a fairly large city in Uzbekistan. At the time, Uzbekistan was part of the Soviet Union, one of several Central-Asian countries annexed by the U.S.S.R. My grandmother, oddly enough, had an uncle living in Tashkent, who took in her and her infant daughter for the duration of WWII, keeping them out of harm’s way, safe from the Nazis and the Soviets alike.
My maternal grandfather, who had been drafted and placed on a train headed for the front, decided that fighting Nazis or anyone else wasn’t really his cup of tea. The story goes that he jumped off that train and made himself scarce. We have no information about where the train had been headed, nor where he jumped off, but I’ve been told that he walked or hitched rides all the way southeast to Iran, and then made his way back north to Uzbekistan and to, you guessed it, Tashkent.
From Babruysk to Tashkent is about 4,000 kilometers, or approximately 2500 miles. From Tashkent to the border of Iran is about 2200 kilometers, or approximately 1400 miles. Did he actually walk all those miles? If my grandfather jumped off that train shortly after it left Babruysk, he would have traveled more than 5,000 miles to end up in the same city as his wife and daughter. But it gets better from here. He didn’t know they were in Tashkent! He found a family that took him in and let him live with them for three years, hiding him in the cellar. They had a daughter, and they were planning to marry him to her when the war ended and he could make his presence known. In the meantime, my grandmother was living with her uncle. At the time, the population of Tashkent is estimated to have been around 750,000, so it’s not outside the realm of possibilities that neither of them knew the other was “in town,” so to speak. But somehow, when the war did end, my grandparents found each other and set off for Estonia, where my grandfather had family. From Tashkent to Talinn, Estonia, is 4500 kilometers, or approximately 2800 miles. How did they make the trek with the infrastructure of the Soviet Union in shambles after World War II, and with transportation limited, at best, not to mention with my grandfather’s status as a deserter? Not. A. Clue. How much of the story is true and how much is fiction is hard to say. Crazy things happen all the time. There is a record of my grandmother and mother traveling by train from Babruysk to Tashkent. They are both considered Holocaust survivors.
We do know for a fact that my grandparents did arrive in Estonia, and that my grandmother gave birth to my uncle in Talinn in January of 1946.
My father’s parents’ lives during World War II were very different. They had been living in Leningrad when the Nazi army marched to siege the city in 1941, aided by the army of Finland . The resulting Leningrad Blockade lasted for 842 days (2 years and 4 months), with food and fuel routes completely cut off, and the population starved, causing 1.5 million deaths. My father’s father was a cook in the Soviet Navy, stationed on one of the ships in the Gulf of Finland, off Leningrad’s coast. His mother, with my dad, aged 3, and his two younger sisters, were evacuated from Leningrad to a small town in Siberia, but they starved too. My dad has told stories of how his mom would leave the three of them hiding in the apartment they were living in, and go to the Soviet army troop stationed in the city to beg for food. She would be gone most of the day and return in the evening, sometimes with some milk, sometimes with some bread, whatever she could get. How she, a tiny, shy, Jewish woman, managed to talk Soviet soldiers into giving her food is a mystery probably best left unexplored.
Both of my dad’s parents were from Ukraine, and I have no idea how they wound up living in Leningrad. Grandpa’s family were tailors, and my dad at one point traveled to Poltava, Ukraine and found the small shop with a wooden sign reading Gorner Tailors hanging over the door. He didn’t obtain that sign, and for many years he expressed regret over this. I don’t know what my grandmother’s family did for a living. My grandfather is pictured here at the top right, looking both dapper and frail, wearing a newsboy cap and a tie that looks like it’s choking him, with possibly his siblings, though I don’t actually know.
My paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Butovsky. This is her family (mother, father, and grandmother) from sometime during the 1910s. She’s an infant here, and this is honestly the fullest her face ever looked. She was very thin, with a hollow, gaunt face her entire life after this. I know absolutely nothing about her family, other than their last name. In later life, she looked a lot like the grandmother in this picture.
My mother’s maiden name is Simakovsky. My entire life, I had known that my grandfather, Semyon, was one of four brothers, with three living and one who died young. I was named after the youngest, Alter, who died at the beginning of World War II. What I didn’t know my entire life was that their last name was not the same as the family from which their parents had come. The name Simakovsy was actually made up by their father, who decided to quit his original family name because of a conflict with his brother. He left their home and ended up settling in Russia in the town of Sima, on the Simka River, a town about 200 kilometers, or 120 miles, northeast of Moscow. He took Simakovsky, meaning “from Sima” as his last name, and the rest is history, or at least a story. I have no information on where his family of origin lived at the time. I have no information about how long he lived in Sima, when and whom he married, and how his son, my grandfather, ended up in Belarus to meet and marry my grandmother. Equally unknown to me is how his other living sons ended up in Estonia. Here’s my grandfather, probably sometime in the 1950s.
Here’s my grandfather, probably sometime in the 1950s.
My grandmother’s family were from Babruysk, Belarus. She was one of 11 children, and other than the fact that she had extended family in Central Asia, that’s all I really know about her background. She was short, like my other grandmother, but unlike her, she was plump, at least for as long as I knew her. She may or may not have been slim before marriage and her four years in Tashkent (there are no pictures from those years). After making it to Estonia after the end of the war, my grandparents ended up going to Leningrad, where my grandfather worked his way up from a job as a department store warehouse worker to manager of the warehouse and, eventually, manager of the store. Because of his job, he had the ability to “get” things for his family and, eventually, for his grown children’s families. We didn’t have to stand in line for toilet paper or shampoo, and we had clothes and shoes. And my grandmother was always plump, a short, round woman, who wasn’t always kind to her daughter, my mother, but loved her grandchildren completely and fiercely.
My maternal grandparents, as well as my uncle and his family, immigrated to the U.S. only a couple years after we did, settling initially in Louisville, KY, and moving shortly thereafter to Columbus, OH. My paternal grandparents did not. My paternal grandfather passed away, aged 63, from stomach cancer, and my grandmother followed him a year later, succumbing to kidney failure and loneliness.
There are other extended family members in the U.S. and Israel, both on my mother’s and my father’s side. As a child and teen, I’d met some of them, but those meetings never resulted in relationships, and so we remain scattered and mostly disconnected. My father’s sisters and their grown children eventually also immigrated and settled in Columbus, where we live, and while my father was close with them, and my cousins are close among themselves, my brother and I never recovered those close ties with our dad’s family. And unfortunately, the conflicts that tore apart my maternal grandfather’s family didn’t end with his father, but continued through my grandparents to tear apart my mother and her brother. My maternal grandparents died in 1995 and 1996, grandpa first, of leukemia, and grandma the following year. To date, my brother and I have reconnected with one of our cousins on that side after almost 30 years of lost time. Maybe we will be able to restore some family bonds, reconnect with our other cousin and our uncle and aunt. I’m cautiously optimistic. Too many stories have gone untold, generations of ancestors unknown and unremembered.
I don’t know a lot of Russian songs about family relationships and ancestry, and all that, but here’s a song about one man’s experience as a “girl dad.” It’s called Dochenki (darling daughters). I couldn’t find any translations of the lyrics, but essentially, the song starts with the man reminiscing about his younger, unmarried days, when having a family seemed like a major hassle. It progresses to his being married and having daughters, who, to his surprise, “crawled into my heart like kittens crawling into someone’s bed.” It goes on to his daughters growing up and having their own families. And it ends with him thinking about his death and how their lives go on without him. The chorus, which is what the song gets its name changes from verse to verse, keeping track of the reminiscences. It starts always by addressing the “darling daughters” three times, and then mentions “sweet evenings” and “nightingales” as symbols first of the singers carefree youth, then the loss of his carefree life, then as something he wishes for his the girls as they grow up, and finally as things present even at a cemetery, though the singer is now dead and gone. Enjoy!
