Mary Antin, born in the Lithuanian (now Belarussian) town of Polotsk in 1881, recorded her memoirs of the Old Country and of coming to America in The Promised Land, a book first published in 1911. The Promised Land is a valuable first-person account of the myriad concerns and experiences surrounding the journey from the squalid…
Tag: genealogy
From a Ruined Garden: a marvelous distillation of memory
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Where might you expect to hear a tale of an enchanted Passover seder where all participants fall asleep at the table before even the first glass of wine is consumed? Or of a blind cantor who, during a brief visit to town, sings so sweetly in synagogue that the whole community is mesmerized for weeks?…
Journey to a 19th-century shtetl
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Back about a century and a half ago, the town of Kamenets was a typical Russian-Polish shtetl consisting “of 250 old houses, black and small with shingled roofs,” and with some 450 Jews listed in the Revizski Skazki, the official government registry. However, most of the town’s Jews did not appear in the registry. Fearful…
The miracle called Ancestry.com
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The internet-based genealogical company Ancestry.com has added a major series of Jewish collections to its website, including many data bases that may be searched free of charge for users who open a free account. Ancestry’s recently-added Jewish Family History Collection include the 19th-century Jewish records related to many places in Eastern Europe. There are specifically…
Bad Arolsen & the International Tracing Service
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Funded solely by Germany and managed by the Red Cross, the International Tracing Service (ITS) of Bad Arolsen, Germany, has built up a vast Central Names Index of more than 50 million reference cards pertaining to some 17.5 million people, mostly victims of the Holocaust and family members who made inquiries about missing relatives after…
Roskies’ Yiddishlands is evocative memoir
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Soon after her arrival in Canada in 1940, Masha Roskies sat down to a meal at her sister-in-law’s house in Montreal and, seeing that only “Canadian bread” (the white, fluffy stuff called Wonder Bread) was on the table, asked for a piece of real bread instead. When her aunt curtly replied that “this was what…
Beider on Polish-Jewish surnames
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What’s in a name — or, more precisely, a Jewish surname? No one, it seems, has ever been able to answer that question with as much scientific methodology and linguistic and historical background as Alexander Beider, a 32-year-old Moscow-born statistician who emigrated about 1990 to Paris, where he lives and works as a computer programmer.…
Beider on Russian-Jewish Surnames
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Alexander Beider, who is arguably the world’s foremost expert on Jewish names, has revised and updated his 1993 Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire, a four-year task that he undertook knowing it would probably not generate adequate renumeration for him. If that proves to be the case, he may yet take comfort in…
On Jewish Memoirs and Autobiography
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On the several occasions when I’ve enrolled in creative-writing or memoir-writing workshops, usually with the aim of finishing a particular story that I’ve written, I’ve always been struck by the wealth of literary talent seated around the table. This has generally come as a pleasant surprise, since I’ve also observed that few people possess the…
A Trove of Yiddish Letters
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North York resident Debbie Rose, who has been fervently researching her family tree for the past several years, has found a large trove of old Yiddish letters of historic significance that she hopes to get translated into English. The letters, some dating back to the end of the 19th century, belong to a relative in…
