The theme for Week 7 of the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge is Outcast. My husband, who is ethnically a Jew, said I should write about his family since Jews have historically been scapegoated and outcast. When I told him I didn’t know how to write about the Jewish experience, not being one, he joked, “Write about our space lasers!” He laughs about things like this (the space laser thing is pretty stupid and a running joke in our household) but in truth he left his country of birth due to prejudice. Experiencing antisemitism was a normal part of being a Jew in the USSR. There were colleges they couldn’t attend, jobs they couldn’t get, and promotions they were passed over for. They were citizens of the USSR, but were not considered Russians – they were Jews. It was written in all of their documentation. As Alex likes to say, “I had to immigrate to America to become Russian. Over there, I was a Jew.” When his family left thirty years ago, there was a marked uptick in anti-Semitic rhetoric. When people started giving public speeches about how the Jews were to blame for all the problems in society… well, it felt a little too reminiscent of pre-WWII Germany.
Jews in Eastern Europe have always faced adversity. Between 1791 and 1917, Jews were only permitted to live in what was known as the Pale Settlement, which included modern-day Belarus, Lithuania, most of Ukraine and east-central Poland, and small parts of Latvia. Life in the Pale was difficult. Much of the land was too poor for farming, so Jews adapted and became merchants, tailors, or raised livestock. Social welfare programs were a part of most shtetls, as charity was a key component of their religion. The ”haves” shared with the “have-nots” and the communities got by, however, the possibility they could be driven out of their homes at any time was always a fear that loomed over their heads.
During and after the Russian Civil War, Jews, especially those in Ukraine where the largest concentration of Jews in Russia lived, endured brutal pogroms. Fiddler on the Roof illustrates a heavily watered-down example of pogroms. On Tzeitel’s wedding day, a group of Russians come through and vandalize their home. At the end of the play, all the Jews are expelled from Anatevka. While our hearts bleed for Tevye and his family, what the fictional characters in Fiddler experienced is minor in comparison to what Jews living in the Pale endured. Pogroms are a form of ethnic cleansing, and they're brutal. Organized military groups, unorganized military groups, and even random gangs of bored thugs tortured, murdered, and raped Jews, often looting their homes and businesses before burning them to the ground. It’s estimated that during the pogroms of 1918-1921 alone, half a million Ukrainian Jews were left homeless, and between 30,000 and 70,000 were massacred.
Though avoiding the pogroms or outsmarting the Russians wasn’t easy, some families managed to do just that. Alex’s great-grandparents, Abram and Feiga Gorodetsky, moved from the village of Reymentarovka in the Chernihiv province to the country village of Sosnitsa during the Russian Civil War to keep their young family safe from the pogroms. Sosnitsa was calmer and quieter than Reymentarovka. The Gorodetsky family lived in a cottage close to the entrance of the village. Roaming gangs of thugs occasionally came through at night, looking for trouble. The authorities wouldn’t bother them if they robbed and harassed Jews. These gangs could reap all the rewards of causing trouble with zero consequences. They knocked on the windows of the first few homes in Sosnitsa and asked, “Do you have Jews in this village?” Feiga was a quick thinker. She sent her children through the back door and ordered them to hide in the neighbor’s pigsty. No one would think to look for them there, and any small noises they made would be covered up by the sound of the pigs. While she ushered them out the back door, Feiga wrapped her head in a handkerchief, and then dealt with the bandits. In perfect Ukrainian she said, “No, there are no Jews here!” and sent them on their way.
As the eldest of two grandchildren, Alex had a close relationship with his grandfather, Mendel, who was one of the little children sent out the back door to hide amongst the pigs. As close as they were, he never heard this story from his grandfather, and learned of it only a couple years ago. Mendel shared it with his nephew, who was curious about the family history. This nephew had the foresight to write down every story that was shared with him, and eventually turned it into a document that he graciously shared with the extended family. He wrote of Mendel’s experience, “Even many years later, in his story you felt both the fear they were experiencing then and the humiliation they had to hide in a pigsty (for a Jew, among pigs!).” Try, for a moment, to imagine the fear that the parents and children were feeling. You’re a small child, awoken in the dead of night, sent through the back door to hide in a dirty, foul-smelling pen of grunting pigs. You may not understand exactly what could happen, but you know the literal boogeyman is banging at your door as you flee into the darkness. You’re a mother, trying to protect your children and your home. Your first priority is getting your babies as far away from the danger as possible. You don’t want them hurt or killed, and if you’re about to be raped, you don’t want them to witness it. When you tell the thugs in a bold and irritated voice that there are no Jews in your village, you’re quaking inside. You pray they move on and don’t decide to rob you anyway. You pray none of your neighbors will give you up. You pray especially hard that your children will obey you and stay hidden.
We don’t know if they ever did make it inside. Hopefully they didn’t, but it’s possible. Mendel was born in 1911, so he was a young boy when these night raids occurred, and he told the story as he remembered it, from a child's perspective. If they ever did get inside, Feiga never shared it with him, and none of the bandits ever went looking for the children in the pigpen. She kept her babies safe.
Feiga’s husband, Abram, isn’t mentioned in this story, which makes me wonder if he was there, or if he was forced to serve during the Russian Civil War, even though he sustained such a serious injury to his leg during the Russo-Japanese War that he walked with a stick for the rest of his life. Whether Abram was there, whispering hurried instructions to the children while Feiga handled the gangs, we’ll never know, but the story as it’s written makes it sound as though she was on her own. She was a brave and quick-witted woman to know what to do on the spur of the moment, send her children to hide in a place no one would ever think to look, and tell a convincing lie to the gangs.
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