The topic for week 10 of the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge is Translation, and there is a mountain of pictures, documents, and letters to translate from my husband’s side of the family. We’re fortunate that so many papers and pictures were passed down to his father, who brought them all with him when the family came to the US in the 1990s. I’m also incredibly thankful for the kind volunteers in the many genealogy groups I belong to on Facebook who take time out of their busy days to translate our treasures. Alex can translate the Russian, but we rely on these groups to translate anything in Polish or Yiddish. Yiddish is especially tricky because though it uses the Hebrew alphabet, it’s a different language altogether. It’s a mixture of German, Hebrew, Aramaic, and various Slavic and Romance languages. If this is new information for you, you’re not alone. I had no idea whether Yiddish and Hebrew were interchangeable terms and had to look it up!
We were curious about this lovely, old postcard, written in Yiddish. It depicts a lonely soldier writing to the family he misses back home. The tender, heartfelt words written on the back of this carefully chosen postcard mirror what the sender was feeling.
The translation reads:
May God grant us to share very soon all our pains and joys. Do not worry and do not be troubled, my beloved wife, a good life awaits us still.
May God give us happiness and health, so that we may all participate in the marriage of our daughter.
Your everlasting husband,
Shaya Refish
We are so incredibly fortunate that this postcard was signed with both a first and last name! Most of the postcards and pictures we have from Alex’s family say something vague like “a remembrance from me” and might be signed with a first name if we’re lucky. Finding identifiable information is like hitting the jackpot. There was just one tiny problem initially.
Who the heck was Shaya Refish?
We didn’t have a Shaya Refish in our tree. Alex’s great-grandfather was Abram Rajfisz – not Shaya. Yet again, I owe a debt of gratitude to my father-in-law for keeping everything. If he hadn't, Shaya's identity would still be a mystery. While translating a typewritten document about Abram’s father, Mendel, we found our answer. He was listed in the document as “Abram Szyja Rajfisz.” Shaya/Szyja was likely his Yiddish name, while Abram was his official name in documents.
Once we knew who the author was, we were able to date the postcard and put it in context. Abram Szyja Rajfisz was writing to his wife, Sura, in Warsaw, Poland. The couple had five children, but as only one daughter was mentioned, it had to be their first child, Regina, who was born in 1912. That means the postcard was written between 1912 and 1915 when their second child, Efim, was born. All able-bodied men in the Russian Empire were conscripted into military service, so Abram Szyja, like other men his age, was separated from his wife and infant daughter for a time. He certainly identified with that lonely, letter-writing man on the postcard!
This picture of him and some of the men he served with was taken in 1916. There’s so much more to say about Abram Szyja’s intriguing military service and about the Rajfisz/Reifish family, but those stories will be the subject of future posts.
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