Layers of the Onion - A Family History Exploration

A Personal Legacy

2012-02-11T10:15:00.002-06:00

This blog was begun around the theme of family history. This week I have been living a bit of my own family history as we laid my father to rest. I delivered a eulogy at the service hoping I would get through it without triggering tears.   It felt important to me that I speak publicly about a man who was very much a public figure, but whom I knew through the lens of family.

I last visited my father shortly before he died. As I walked into the room I was heartened when he exclaimed "Susela", to which I replied "Dadela", and he smiled. That was our well worn path. I sat with him and told him a little about what I was working on which ironically was a series of cross generational interviews in the Jewish Identity and Legacy project. As I've written in these pages, I am interviewing elders and their children about the elder's legacy and its influence on their adult child. As I told him about it, it dawned on me that perhaps I should answer the same questions I was asking of others.

Sitting there with both my mother and father I began to tell my dad what I thought my legacy was from him. I later wove much of what I told him into a eulogy.   What a wonderful gift to be able to share it with him directly.   A gift for him and a gift for me, nothing unfinished.

Among his many accomplishments, my father, Philip Weinberg, created the public television station that serves central Illinois. He was a rather eclectic man with the ability to leverage technology to serve his love of culture and the arts.   He was a university professor, trained as an electrical engineer, but very much a visionary. If something didn't exist that he felt was important, he didn't hesitate to start it. He started the Electrical Engineering department at Bradley University and was its dean for twenty years. Later in his career he founded and led the College of Communications and Fine Arts. In between he built public radio, public television and numerous buildings and performance spaces.

After his funeral the TV station interviewed me. "Did you think it unusual that he went from being an engineer to communications and fine arts?" they asked. "No", I replied as I thought of my own rather eclectic career spanning nonprofits, finance and the arts, a combination that never seemed unusual to me because of my father who encouraged me in all of my pursuits.   I grew up thinking you started things if they didn't exist, you loved your work and of course you would have diverse interests and explore them with passion. Doesn't everybody? I took that for granted because that's what I witnessed every day. Unlike the external world that saw what he did as extraordinary, I knew him in his everyday life as my Dad. From the vantage point of that front row seat, I learned to view his perspective as the norm. And that is quite a legacy.

Art and Memory

2012-01-17T15:20:00.000-06:00

Lately I’ve been reflecting on memory. With two parents in their 80s struggling with failing memories, it is a subject that often occupies my thoughts. When I stumbled across the book Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, a book that focuses on the topic of memory, I read it with great interest. Foer, a journalist, began his engagement with the topic when he wrote an article about a memory competition that encompassed seemingly impossible feats for us mere mortals.

As I read his book I learned about memory palaces in which one secretes images, the more ludicrous the image the better, as the purpose is to recall memories in a sequential order.    The first memory palace was created after the ceiling fell at a banquet killing the people in the hall. The speaker had momentarily been called out of the room and was then called upon to try to recall everyone in the room to identify the dead. Working his way around the table he found he could recapture the visual information by visualizing spatially. The same concept was subsequently applied to assist in memory. Actual physical spaces are imagined as home to items on a list, each tucked into a different room. Numbers are converted to two letters that can be transformed to words and images as well. Soon Foer is bitten by the bug and begins to train for the American competition which he amazingly wins.

My mother is reading the book as well and taking notes, hoping to find some trick to make her recalcitrant memories stay put. She asked me what stayed with me from the book, even as I realized that my adequate and sometimes good memory often failed to retain the complexity of a book a month after reading it. But this book has meaning for me on a number of levels, both the personal and the artistic, and some key concepts have stayed with me because of their relevance.

Foer writes about the fact that we are using our memories in ways for which they were not originally designed. Memories weren’t designed to remember numbers; they were designed to rely on visual indicators for such practical tasks as determining if something was safe to eat. Thus most of the methods of retaining memory revolve around creating memorable visual imagery.

If you read this blog you know that I combine painting and story. I am often surprised when people come into my studio and tell me they were there a year ago and remember a story I told about a painting. Often they bring someone with them and ask me to tell them a particular story or show them a particular painting. My paintings seem to become memorable to them because of the accompanying stories and similarly the stories remain because of their association with imagery. It seems like a pretty basic concept, but I never fully appreciated the interrelationship between imagery and story until I began to think about it through the lens of memory.

When I take a story and imagine how to evoke it in a painting, I often combine disparate imagery, juxtaposing different times and places. When I give talks about my artwork, I don’t need notes to evoke the accompanying story. The image is a more than adequate prompt even providing sequencing similar to the rooms of a memory palace as I work my way through the directionality inherent in the painting. The act of doing a painting is actually not so different than that of creating a memory palace.

I used to keep a sketchbook when I traveled and when I recall those trips it is from the vantage point from which I did each sketch, fixed in memory by the sheer attentiveness required to do a drawing. I still remember a trip to Sorrento over Easter when there was a religious procession in the evening. It felt as if it would be disrespectful to take a photo so I mentally took a snapshot, noticing the shopkeepers framed in the light of their doorways and the scones casting a glow on the stone walls. When we returned to our hotel I pulled out my pencils and recreated in great detail the image I had just committed to memory. I hadn’t thought myself capable of such a feat and was surprised at the capacity of my memory, one of the lessons of this book. The other lesson… paying attention is a lot of work and the very act of doing so is what contributes to memory. It is not something we tend to do habitually in this time when so much memory is externalized to computers and phones.

An artist friend told me that people often purchase her paintings because they remind them of something in their memory. Whether it is tapping existing memories or creating new ways to join story and imagery in memory, art and memory clearly have a connection. Story provides context, art provides visuals and the two together create a powerful vehicle for learning and retention.

Telling the Story

2012-01-12T14:14:00.003-06:00

This week we are opening a six month exhibition of three bodies of my work that relate to the Holocaust. This exhibition is housed in the Eiger-Zaidenweber Holocaust Resource Center on the second floor of the Barry Family Campus in Minneapolis (4330 Cedar Lake Rd South). The show is very much a collaborative effort with sponsorship by Talmud Torah, the U of M's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest and the Tychman Shapiro Gallery.

The focus of this exhibition and related programming is the question of how we tell the story of the Holocaust, particularly as we have fewer survivors to share their first-hand testimony. Over time, “story” becomes “history” and the immediacy is lost while distortion becomes all too prevalent.

As you enter the gallery you see my series “A Hole in Time” that looks at the pre-war Jewish community of Radom, Poland, the town my grandfather came from.    Drawn from imagery in a 1937 film of the Jews of Radom, these paintings evoke snapshots of a once thriving community. Coupled with this artwork are the pre-war photographs of my friend Dora who grew up in Radom and was 15 years old when the war broke out. Her photos were hidden in the shoes of her brother and her husband during their time in the camps. We had the opportunity to exhibit this work and Dora’s photographs in Radom, Poland in 2011.

That series leads into my work on Lithuania where I looked for the traces of the former Jewish community and how Lithuania deals with the history that transpired on its soil. My discomfort with the reframing of history that has occurred in Lithuania is expressed in several of these paintings. When I toured the Vilnius Genocide Museum in 2009, much to my puzzlement, there was nothing on the Holocaust. Keep in mind that the town was 45% Jewish and 95% of the Jews were murdered, the most significant case of genocide that ever occurred in that region. If the Genocide Museum were your source of information, you would not realize the Holocaust occurred.  It addressed only the Soviet occupation. There is no need to actively deny the Holocaust, reframing and silence do a more than adequate job of that. This series is called “The Silence Speaks Loudly” as I found the silence quite deafening.

My third series is drawn from the Jewish Identity and Legacy project. As part of this project* I interviewed a range of Jewish elders and then developed artwork around their stories. Included in this exhibition are interviews with four local survivors around whose stories I developed both artwork and video.

I must confess that when I was developing this artwork, I didn’t think in terms of the larger story arc. In each case I was following a thread that intrigued me and that was sufficient. In fact, the broader theme emerged only after I grouped these series into one exhibition. I then began to see how they knit together.

All the work is around the common theme of story and in each case I had the opportunity to gather stories first-hand from those who lived them. In Lithuania I heard from our guides, a former partisan and a hidden child. My friend Dora shared her stories of our common Polish ancestral town, both before and during the war. In Minnesota I learned the experiences of Jewish elders who survived the war and built new lives in Minnesota.   In each case I had the opportunity to hear the stories directly. I have deep admiration for these dynamic people in their 80s and 90s who have a commitment to educating others in the hopes of making “never again” a reality. I often find myself thinking that ten years from now they are unlikely to be here, and what then? I already see history being rewritten in Lithuania. How do we keep it alive and immediate? How do we keep it from being distorted to meet the agendas of different groups? And what is my responsibility, and yours, to keep it alive?

My artwork grew out of a need to both process what I was learning and a sense of responsibility to retell the stories. I often feel that my efforts are meager compared to the power of first-hand testimony, but it is my small effort to keep the stories alive and accessible.

*Jewish Identity and Legacy interviews were funded by the State of Minnesota Arts & Cultural Heritage Fund, administered through the Minnesota Historical Society

Artwork: Greetings from Bessie

2011-12-23T10:41:00.009-06:00

In doing my oral history project I had the opportunity to interview a number of survivors. Walter charmed me immediately with his faint accent and gentle manner. A tall courtly gentleman of 90, Walter had a story that was different from many. He was able to get out of Eastern Europe with his immediate family and then joined the army and went back as a Ritchie Boy, a unique unit from Camp Ritchie where German speakers, often Jews who had escaped Eastern Europe, were trained to interrogate prisoners of war. (for more on the story of the Ritchie Boys).

I was going to school on March 15, 1935 on the day Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, I was there. My parents were in Romania. I went to school on that day. They had sentries in front. I walked up the steps of the school. By the entrance were a bunch of hoodlums with swastikas on their sleeve. “Juden raus”. They wouldn’t let any Jews into that school.

I went and packed my bags. The railroads were already run by the German army so I had to get permission to buy a ticket. There happened to be a sympathetic officer so I was able to buy a ticket. I believe that was the last train that left Czechoslovakia for (Romania).

My mother’s history is that at age 5 her family moved to the US so my mother was brought up here. At that time in 1939 the war started already and Czechoslovakia was already occupied and Romania was going to be next. So my parents made frantic efforts to get out. They were on a quota system, so many but not more. Because of her background in America, she went to school here. She had to show evidence to the American consulate that she had been in America. By chance her sister who lived in America was a good friend of her former teacher and she once met her and asked her, ”Is there any evidence that my sister Bessie was your student?” She says she has a class picture. So my mother had to show that picture to the American Consulate and said, “This is me, I was there”. And on that basis she was able to get a visa to get the whole family in.

When my family got out we boarded a ship in Genoa, Italy. That was the last refugee ship that left Italy. On the way to the United States, Italy declared war on France in 1940. And from then on they dropped the refugees off in New York and the ship went back empty back to Italy and there was no more trafficking.

Walter was able to join the Army after Pearl Harbor was bombed. Prior to that non-US citizens were not admitted. He became a "Ritchie Boy", trained in interrogation techniques for German prisoners. After the war he was stationed in Czechoslovakia, ironically the place he was when the war first broke out.

Every time we went by jeep through a town I saw in the middle of town there was a big bulletin board. This was a time when the concentration camps were being liberated and the International Red Cross published the names of the people who were released and they put them on the bulletin board. My mother had a lot of relatives who were sent to the concentration camps and she got hold of one of those lists and she found a name that she knew, that was a second cousin of hers. He had just been released from Theresienstadt and he was coming home. My mother wrote to me, "Would it be possible for me to visit that family?" I was anxious to meet a relative. I found the address and I knocked on the door. The people came to the door slightly opening it. What is a man in uniform doing here? They were suspicious of people in uniform anyway. So they opened the door and I said, “Bessie Schwartz my mother is sending you greetings”.

Walter then told me that the cousin who went to Theresienstadt was Jewish, but his wife was not. He had gotten a divorce in order to save her and they re-married upon his return. Walter became good friends with the family and later in life reconnected with the daughter.

The image of the half-cracked door stayed with me and I decided to include it in the painting. The connection with the family was an important element in Walter's story as well as his experience as a Ritchie boy. I was also struck by the chanciness of his escape, the last boat, the last train and a school picture all figured in the story. There is also a circular motif to reflect the oddity of his story coming full circle back to Czechoslovakia.

Artwork: Fallen Leaves

2011-12-05T13:01:00.003-06:00

When I do an interview I begin with a basic history. One of the questions is when their parents died and at what age, normally a routine question. When I asked Boris, a Russian immigrant and survivor, when his mother died, I got the response "She was shot when she was 39". With that I knew this was not going to be an easy interview. He then elaborated and told me that his mother, father and two sisters were in a concentration camp and building a bunker for Hitler. When they finished, they were executed. Boris was a child at the time.

How this child survived was a tale of chance. Through an interpreter he told me that when the war broke out they were put into a ghetto. They had to survive somehow in the ghetto and the Nazis, the Germans warned them that if they make one step outside of the ghetto they will be instantly executed. His father had many friends among the Ukrainians. They helped them. They brought food to help them survive. From there they were taken to the concentration camp.

We were scheduled to be shot because we were useless. My aunt who was pregnant and the older people, but my parents were driven to the site of construction every day. We were loaded onto open trucks and as we were leaving to be shot one of the officers, a German officer stopped the truck and said the site was not ready for the execution.
She (his aunt) realized that they had to run. Someone pointed her to a man who helped to lead people out of the camp. She had coins, golden coins sewed in and she made arrangements paying with those coins and that man who would take them out. When they got unloaded from the truck because the site wasn't ready this man who was paid with the gold coins took them out of the concentration camp.

Boris was unconscious because he was beaten severely and lost consciousness. The aunt couldn’t carry him so she paid for a woman to help, for him and for herself to be taken out of the concentration camp. They were taken outside of the camp. There was another family. The man gave directions to everyone who he had taken out and they just started walking. It was in the middle of the night. They started walking and they asked some peasants around the area to be hidden for the day or two. It wasn’t far from their town. There were small towns. That’s how they made it to Mogilev Podolsk.

They were subsequently caught and sent back to the camp. By that time the Germans did away with everyone in the concentration camp and the Red army marched in and they were freed.

After the war he searched for a picture of anyone in his family. This painting is based on the one image he located, a sepia colored school picture of his sister set in the shape of a leaf. I decided to echo that form in additional leaves with the names of his family members who perished written in Russian. I wanted the image to be muted as if seen through a glass.

Loss of a Leader

2011-12-01T09:22:00.006-06:00

I recently received word from friends in both Poland and Israel of the death of Haim Kincler, a key figure in the worldwide community of Jews from Radom. Kincler was the head of the Radom Society in Israel and was instrumental in the creation of the cemetery restoration project in Radom, Poland. The original cemetery was destroyed by the Nazis who used the tombstones to pave roads. As I’ve written in prior entries, he facilitated the creation of a Lapidarium in 2010, a curved wall in which 70 previously hidden tombstones from the former Jewish community were embedded. These had been hidden by a Polish tombstone maker during the war. The Polish tombstone maker had hoped to sell them after the war, but was unable to due to Communist constraints on holding something of historic value. They remained hidden for many years. Kincler learned of them and got the children of the tombstone maker to contribute them to the city. Ultimately they were returned to the cemetery as part of the newly constructed monument, a joint effort between Israel and Poland.

Kincler had survived the war in the East. Later he arrived in Palestine on the ship Exodus. He was blinded during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. Despite this handicap, he finished law school and subsequently owned and managed a successful business. Early this year I was in Radom with my friend Dora. Dora was a school girl in Radom when the war broke out. She was deeply touched that on this visit there were so many commemorative efforts around the former Jewish community. Many of those efforts came about through Haim Kincler. He was 93 and had lived a full life, but his loss is a loss to the broader Jewish community with ties to Radom.

An Investment in Zionism

2011-11-19T15:27:00.000-06:00

So often genealogists are faced with dry documents out of which they try to conjure the spirits of their long-gone ancestors. A fortunate few have letters that create a fuller picture. For me, knowledge of what my family valued came from an unexpected source.

I had become aware of a site for The Company for Location and Restitution of Holocaust Victim Assets which seeks to reunite heirs to the assets their ancestors held. Now I had no illusions of any windfall, but I was intrigued when I went into the database and typed in Radom, the Polish town from which one branch came. Up popped twelve pages of names, among them my great-grandfather. In many cases I knew the descendants of many of those listed. Now it didn’t appear any great wealth awaited as most had a listing titled JCT Shares. The JCT stands for Jewish Colonial Trust and represented shares in the Jewish Colonial Fund established by Theodor Herzl in 1899 to serve as the Zionist Movement's financial arm. I recalled reading that many people purchased one share and when you divide that up among descendants it is probably not worth filing from a monetary standpoint.

As a genealogist I had a different interest. I was intrigued with the idea that my great-grandfather was enough of a Zionist to make an investment in the movement. It appeared that he had purchased at least one share so I began the process to confirm that it was in fact him. The data they asked for was easily accessible for a genealogist so I sent the forms back and waited. Some time passed and I received correspondence verifying that this was in fact my great-grandfather. While I doubt I will go the additional step to collect on the assets, I feel as if I have a fuller picture of my ancestors and their views. I had previously learned, from a friend who is a survivor from Radom, that Zionism was an important part of the Radom community. Apparently it was also something on which my great-grandfather placed value.

Artwork: Postcard from New Ulm

2011-11-07T11:13:00.002-06:00

Storytime! Time for another story and another painting in the ongoing Identity and Legacy series. One of my most moving interviews was with Trudy, a survivor from Stuttgart. Trudy reminisced about food and her grandparents and then launched with some hesitation into the story that defined her youth, life in Nazi Germany. She recounted the pre-war period in Germany where she first experienced the new regime through the loss of a friend.

I had a good friend, a girlfriend. She was my age and we went to school together. We were close. She lived just around the corner from where I lived. Sometimes she stayed overnight at my house, sometimes I stayed overnight at her house. She was not Jewish. And it was about ’33, all of a sudden my girlfriend was a little strange towards me. And one day she came and said, “Trudy, I cannot be friends with you anymore.” I said, “Why?’ ‘Because my father worked for the radio station and if they find out that I am having a Jewish friend, then he will lose his job”.

Trudy was fifteen when this occurred and it was the beginning. I was especially touched by this story as it spoke to the experience of a young girl and her friendships, irretrievably altered by a political regime. Soon they couldn't get jobs anymore or go to school and they were evicted from their apartment. Five years later, the morning after Kristallnacht, Trudy's father was taken to a concentration camp and then released on the condition that he leave Germany. This was still early. Some German Jews were offered the option of leaving the country. They desperately began to search for a country that would let them in.

My father had to report to the Gestapo every week about his immigration and he was in danger if he wouldn’t go away they would take him back (to the concentration camp). So we waited a little bit and they came up with a trip to Shanghai. Shanghai opened, and let the Jews come in. I was included too, my passport was not ready. My parents had to leave. My parents left in 1939, beginning September and they said two weeks later goes a second transport to China, Shanghai and I could be on that boat. But in those two weeks the war broke out. That’s how I was stuck in Germany.

Trudy joined her aunt and uncle. Ironically their son had gone to Shanghai with Trudy's parents. Six weeks later everyone over 30 was shot, including her aunt and uncle.

Trudy told me stories about her time during the war and the ten camps in which she was held. Many of the stories emphasized the sheer chanciness of her survival.

After the war the towns in Germany were abandoned as the Germans ran from the Russians.

Every night we stayed overnight in a different house in a different village and ... all the villages were empty, the houses. The Germans did run away from the Russians, they left and left everything behind so we had food.... We went in and chose a house where we could stay and I was sick and a few of our friends were sick. ... Polish soldiers came and asking, they did go through the houses and asking if anybody was sick and I said, “I’m sick” and they had a cart, a wagon with cows in front pulling the wagon and take me to the hospital.

After the war Trudy was reunited with her parents in Minneapolis, a joyous occasion after a nine year separation. Her father lived for six more years.

They (her parents) went on a trip to New Ulm and he passed away in the night. After the funeral of my father I got a postcard in the mail from my father, from New Ulm, and he writes, “We have such a good time, everyone speaks German here, German, born in Germany, raised in Germany and the food is so good, German food”.

There were so many colorful stories that it was challenging to narrow the scope for a painting. There was almost too much - Shanghai, the theme of separation and such visual imagery of abandoned houses and cow drawn carts. What especially stayed with me was the after-death postcard from her father and the fact that it represented his delight in all things German, a familiar home despite the war. This painting, Postcard from New Ulm, incorporates many of the images from Trudy's stories with the postcard as the central image. The monument in the foreground is nicknamed Herman the German, a monument in New Ulm, a Minnesota town with largely German roots. A procession of vehicles includes an image from Shanghai, a boxcar and a cart pulled by cows taking those who were ill to the hospital. Each is representative of a part of the journey undertaken by both Trudy and her parents which for her father ended in New Ulm. The houses are abandoned with doors open and curtains flying in the wind. The words of her father are on the card emphasizing the importance of their German heritage even when Germany had turned on them.

Artwork: Fire, Light and Legacy

2011-11-03T16:42:00.004-05:00

This week I received the good news of a second grant to fund my ongoing oral history project on Jewish Identity and Legacy. Early this year we completed a series of interviews with elders within a Jewish elder facility. Our interviews were with Russian immigrants, Holocaust survivors and those who grew up in immigrant communities in the Twin Cities. This second grant will enable us to focus upon cross-generational interviews and examine the question of how legacy transmits across generations.

I’ve been working on a series of paintings based upon the stories we’ve gathered and in the next few entries will share some of the artwork and the stories with you. Some of the interviewees were truly amazing story tellers. Fannie, who grew up in the Jewish community in the Twin Cities was one of the most prolific storytellers, perhaps because she had progressed to recording her stories in books.

When I begin a painting I reread the transcript for that particular person and think about whether there are some themes that emerge. In the case of Fannie, every story related to fire, light and legacy.

Fannie had begun by telling us about her mother, a central figure in her life. She related that her mother had told her stories when she was a child and urged her to write them down.

My mother was always afraid that we wouldn’t remember anything she said or did ... and she wanted the children to know that she had a life... all of the things that she did and saw and heard and she was afraid that it would all be forgotten. And so she chose me as her spokesperson. She would always grab me in from play and there would be a cup of coffee and milk and a caramel roll and she’d say “Ess”, Eat, listen to what I say and then “Shreibses arupt”, write it down. I said, uh huh,uh huh, and I’d be busy eating my caramel roll and drinking my coffee and she’d keep me for about an hour and when she was all through talking she’d say, “Go out to play”. I didn’t shreibe arupt, I didn’t write it down. And one day I came home, she was staying with us and she was burning all kinds of papers, citizenship papers, a whole bunch of them was on the floor in a bag. And she was destroying them. And I yelled, “What are you doing?” And she says, “Did you shreibe, write it down?” And at first I didn’t know what she was talking about, and I said, “no”. "Well so what do I need all this for? Who’s going to care? No one’s going to care! " And then I said, “Mama, please.” Well she stopped destroying and ...in my old age I discovered I could write, I didn’t know how, but the kids bought me a word processor. I was 77 and I remembered Shreibses arupt, that would be the title.

When I asked her if there was something she grew up with that is still part of her life she replied "Benching licht".

Benching licht, Blessing the candles on Friday night. My grandmother who came to live with us had her set of candles, my mother had her set of candles. And you see my mother, when they were packing her up to send her to America so she could marry her boyfriend, you see the first thing that his mother put in the trunk were a pair of candlesticks. They are over 200 years old.

Fannie also related a story about the candelabras that have been a part of a local synagogue since 1926. The story began with a fire in the shteibel, attached to the synagogue. Her father was quite distressed by this as it was caused by candles and he thought they should have electric lights.

And he thought about it and he thought about it and one day he was walking home from synagogue with his neighbor and he was discussing the situation. Mr Osias Silvers (his neighbor), said he was a smith… a tinsmith and he thinks he could make a reasonable pair of candlesticks. So Pa said, you mean if I get you drawings and patterns you will be able to make an actual thing? Oh sure he said. He does that every day for a living. And so they started.

Mr Silvers went back to work and he asked his boss if he could have some metal strips, scraps that they didn’t want to use anymore, so that he could make something for the synagogue. The guy says sure, so along the floor he picked up some brass strips and some metal… .And he put them in a bag and in a box and he brought them home. And he said, Mr Schwartz, nobody called anyone by their first name. Mr Schwartz, could you make something out of these strips of scraps? And he said, you know, I think we can make some candlesticks. OK so he put them away and Pa went to work and designed a pair of candelabras. They’re over five feet tall and he specified to be electrified for electricity. And he brought them to Mr. Silvers and he said if we had a drawing he could cut it out. He has instruments and things that could cut the metal to just like a pattern on a dress. So Papa set about getting paper long enough and he had someone help him draw the outline of what he wanted and it was made. The patterns were made and he brought them to Mr. Silvers and said, “Could you work from this?” Absolutely he could work from this … and they set about making the patterning for the candelabras.

The candelabras have been in the synagogue since and in fact represent a multi-generational legacy. Fannie restored them prior to her daughter’s wedding at the synagogue.

My raw material is story. Sometimes I have some imagery to work with as well. In this case, I had images of the candelabras, the candlesticks and a photo of Fannie’s mother. With fire as a central image I made the background flame colored. I pulled out the suggestion of the candelabras at an angle and duplicated part of the image to fill in the left side of the canvas. Making use of negative space I darkened the empty space that surrounded the form of the candelabra. I sketched in one of the candlesticks with smoke forming an arc above. The central figure was Fannie’s mother holding two papers just bursting into flame. The figure is in front of the candlestick, but I liked the form of the candlestick and left the figure with some transparency so the candlestick shows through. The white of the papers, the candle and the face draw the focus.

I liked the idea of the candle burning representing the ebbing of time and the urgency to preserve legacy in the light of the flames so rapidly destroying it. The candelabra represented a multi-generational legacy that continues to this day.

In Search of Community

2011-10-10T10:25:00.000-05:00

When I began to explore family history it had some unexpected consequences. I began to develop a Jewish community.   As a non-religious Jew I had often developed friendships with others of Jewish heritage just because we shared a similar energy, but being Jewish was incidental to our friendship. Suddenly my exploration of my own family history connected me with a genealogy community sharing an interest in Jewish heritage. A number of my new friends have done adult Bat Mitzvahs as part of their exploration, moving from a cultural interest towards a religious one, but most importantly seeking out a broader Jewish community.   While I don’t see a Bat Mitzvah in my future, I did decide to explore a new direction during the High Holidays.

A new friend had shared with me her enthusiasm about her Jewish humanist community. I decided to attend their High Holiday services as part of my exploration of Jewish identity. As someone who has not attended a temple or synagogue regularly for many years, it was an interesting experience. To my surprise, I found that I liked the sense of community and the thoughtful commentary by members. I especially liked the involvement of young children. Much of my adult life was lived without family around me and I used to think of religious bodies as focused on families rather than people like me. Now I find I rather like the involvement of children as it speaks to legacy, passing traditions on to a new generation. I also loved the music, singing familiar songs, but frequently with a twist in the words to accommodate a humanist orientation. The cello and violin performances were a joy that alone would have made attending worthwhile.

Now humanist services are not quite what I’m accustomed to from my Reform Jewish upbringing. God isn’t really a part of them. Instead they focus on the human spirit and the recognition of the joys and challenges we face in being human. At the same time, humanism isn’t so different from my early religious exposure.   I remember my rabbi leading a discussion in my confirmation class about whether God existed and if so in what form. I rather liked that. I like when everything is up for debate. One of the reasons I identify with Judaism, at least the Reform variety, is it has no dogma. The mere fact that we could have that debate sold me on the religion which is in large part a religion of debaters. Jews challenge, they test, they question. That may have begun as part of the religious culture, but it is also very much a part of Jewish identity, even without the religious underpinnings.

I believe religion is how we explain the unknown and I'm willing to live with the fact that I don't know.    And even as I say that, I also figure I can anthropomorphize God with the best of them and my version has a sense of humor, is often bemused by me, accepting of my foibles and gives me the benefit of the doubt, something we all could benefit from doing with those around us. Perhaps the humanist version would say that represents me being kind to myself.

I noted that many couples in inter-faith marriages attended the services. Not surprisingly couples who come together around shared values, despite different religious traditions, are likely to seek a community that accommodates those values.

I find it a bit amusing that Jews have a humanistic group that isn’t God-centered. I suppose it’s the Unitarian version with heritage. Long ago in my prior marriage we were exploring different religious options and my then-husband was very interested in the Unitarians. We went to a gathering and I came away thinking, nice community, not at odds with my beliefs and values, and yet I hesitated. In trying to explain that hesitation I recall saying it seemed a bit bland to me. I had a rich heritage that I didn’t want to give up.

I haven’t yet come to a conclusion on whether a humanist gathering is the right one for me. I liked many things about it, but part of me really missed the traditional Kaddish. I’ve recited it at many grave sites in Eastern Europe where a humanist version just wouldn’t have felt right. Part of honoring the ancestors is to do it in a way that would have felt familiar to them.

And yet… Jewish humanism has its place for those of us who value our culture, but are not religiously bound.   Even as a non-religious Jew, Jewish identity is intertwined with the person I am. It relates to my social and political values, to my need to question and find my own path, and to the value I place on intellect, education and achievement.   Those are qualities that I value in myself and in others and any gathering that fosters those qualities is one to be celebrated.

Making Knishes

2011-10-07T11:00:00.000-05:00

It has been a while since I wrote about the artwork I’ve been doing for the Jewish Identity and Legacy Project, but I have been hard at work. Several paintings are in various stages of completion. As you will recall I had been working on a series of paintings based on the oral histories from Sholom Home, a Jewish elder facility. Interviewees represent Russian immigrants, Holocaust survivors who came here after the war and those who grew up in early Jewish immigrant communities.

One of our interviews was with a woman who lived on the Iron Range, an area in Northern Minnesota where small Jewish communities have largely disappeared. She had fond memories of Virginia, Minnesota which today has a population of around 9,000.

I really liked living (there). We had a Hadassah, we had every organization the Jewish people have in the cities on a smaller scale and we made different affairs to raise money. It was wonderful living there.

The synagogue has been turned into a community center as only two Jews remain. Because the Jewish population was small there was much more interaction with their neighbors and she fondly remembers sharing traditions with her non-Jewish neighbors.

I never once met a person that I thought was anti-Semitic. My friends in Virginia were some Gentiles and they had us for Christmas and I had them for Yom Kippur, I did. They learned how to make knishes. I taught them how to make knishes. I used to make bagels. We were the best of friends.

Minneapolis was known as a hotbed of anti-Semitism at that time, but she does not remember encountering it in her small town where the religious communities were well integrated.

I had little in the way of direct imagery from which to work so in this case I had to decide how to portray the intersection of cultures. I decided to build on the idea of making knishes.

To that end I viewed videos of women making knishes and decided to build an image of women’s hands in action, one of those gatherings of women engaged in a common activity that bridges differences. Behind them is a Christmas tree to represent the sharing of cultures. The painting is titled Making Knishes.

A Question of Identity

2011-10-05T11:33:00.000-05:00

Have you ever noticed that when you are tuned into something, you spot it everywhere? Perhaps you had a particular type of dog once upon a time and now you are always on the lookout for that breed. Since the loss of a wire-haired terrier, I’ve been known to follow after people walking white dogs with jaunty tails just to pet the pup. I’ve spotted wire-haired terriers all over the world.

As I’ve become interested in the question of identity it seems to pop up everywhere and there I am following behind. I started this exploration with the oral history project Jewish Identity and Legacy, but am finding that many of the same issues cut across racial identity, gender identity and many other identities. This week I attended a talk by Michelle Norris of NPR who has written a book called the Grace of Silence. Originally this was to be a book focused on the emerging discussion about race after the Obama election. Instead it took her into long buried family secrets and questions of identity and legacy.

I quickly read the book prior to her talk and would highly recommend it.   She talks about her family’s focus on outdoing the neighbors to counter black stereotypes, from keeping the nicest yard to being the first to get the snow shoveled. I loved the impudence of her mother in the stories about neighbors selling their homes after they moved in. When the real estate agent showed up with potential buyers she would send her children out to play, emphasizing the presence of a black family next-door. She then delves into what wasn’t spoken about. Her father’s shooting by a Birmingham police officer, her grandmother’s work as a traveling Aunt Jemima and the unease with burdening the next generation with this history.

At the talk she asked the question, how often do you think about your race? Many non-whites at the event replied, “Every day”. One woman said she didn’t think about it when she lived in New York, but upon moving to Minnesota she was far more conscious of it because there was less diversity.

I turned that question around a bit in my mind and thought, “How often do I think of religious or ethnic identity?”   When I was growing up, I thought about it with every well-meaning teacher who asked me to talk about Hanukkah, a minor Jewish holiday that has the distinction of falling close to Christmas. I thought about it when we sang Christmas carols at school and I would go silent on the words “Christ” or “Jesus”.   As the only Jewish kid in my grade school classes, I felt painfully conscious of differences, but I participated in the culture that surrounded me. I helped my friends decorate their Christmas trees and paint their Easter eggs. I even looked into the sky for Santa on Christmas, a little Jewish kid believing in a myth that wasn’t even mine. And I vividly remember when my parents tried to end the one effort they made to allow us to share in the celebrations around us. When my siblings and I were young our house was the only one on the block that wasn’t lit up on Christmas. No tree graced our living room, but my parents broke down on one small thing. They allowed us a stocking that they filled with stocking stuffers. One day they guiltily decided they had to end this ritual, but how to do so? They finally settled on a myth to counter the myth, a hair of the dog that bit us. They announced that they were going to call Santa and tell him we were Jewish and he didn’t need to stop at our house when he made his rounds. I still recall them on the phone as we screamed, “Noooooooooo! Don’t tell him!!!” So what did I learn from that? If you tell people you are Jewish, you won’t get the goodies.

Growing up Jewish in a Midwestern town reinforced a sense of otherness even as it allowed me to develop a chameleon-like veneer that allowed me to fit in. I still remember when I began to do work in New York. I felt as if I expanded into myself, the kid raised by two Jews from Brooklyn, who had to fight for air time in family discussions came into her own. No more reining myself in to keep from interrupting or finishing people’s sentences lest they take offense. In New York that seemed to be just a conversational style, one I was very familiar with. Discussions were infused with a familiar energy, one that I grew up with in my home, but squelched in public.

When I think of identity, I think of otherness. Being different, being excluded, reining myself in lest I transgress on the norms of those around me. It has less to do with religion, but far more to do with being different. When my friends visited family they went to the family farm, I went to Brooklyn. My experience was different and different not only from my Christian Midwestern neighbors, but different from many Jewish communities. I was a small-town Midwestern Jew and didn’t have the cultural affect that made many East Coast Jews more visible. I wasn’t sure what my community was as it was an amalgamation of many and not clearly any one. Perhaps that is why identity is a topic that interests me.

When I contrast my experience with that of race, I realize it has a different dimension than that of those who wear their otherness on their skin. I don’t wear my ethnicity openly and given my Midwestern roots, I don’t display it in my manner. In some ways that may make it more complex as I can choose when to introduce my different background, or conversely not to do so. My name is a Jewish one and I have always been glad I kept it upon marriage as I’ve come to embrace my otherness. My name is the tip off that my background may be different, not quite the same as many of the people around me.    For other Jews it is the tip off that we share a common heritage and creates an openness that might not exist as quickly otherwise.

Since I’ve been working with material that relates to ethnic heritage I think about it far more often.   My current bodies of work deal with the traces of the Jewish community in Lithuania and in Poland. Some of the Lithuania work has dark stories related to the Holocaust and how it is addressed there today. I find that when one does work related to family history, and one’s history is Jewish, the Holocaust is a topic that is hard to avoid. When people come into my studio or to talks, I discuss the work and the journey. There is a part of me that always feels a bit apologetic when I share the stories with Jewish content when my audience is not Jewish. I hasten to add that I realize this is not a rational part of me. Everyone should know about the Holocaust and my artwork and stories help to make it accessible. It is not just a Jewish story, and yet….there is that irrational hesitance.   I am often surprised that interest in this story is by no means exclusive to those of Jewish ancestry so this hesitance is more about me, me declaring my Jewish ethnicity, me declaring my differences very vocally. Perhaps it is about the chameleon Midwestern me who got used to flying below the radar, who feels some discomfort at being public about my differences.

What I Do and Why I Do It

2011-09-17T08:11:00.000-05:00

My artwork based on the former Jewish communities of Lithuania and Poland is currently in a solo show in St. Paul, Minnesota. I will be giving an artist talk in October and it has me reflecting on why I do what I do and what exactly is it that I do? Artist talks are an interesting exercise because they seek to put words to a process that evolves in part out of the subconscious. Even when I begin with a direction in mind, the painting often takes on a life of its own.

Not only does the individual painting evolve, but the series evolves over time. Often earlier work in a series is more representational and later work is more semi-abstract. It is as if I need to paint through the representational work to get to the other side before I can begin to experiment more with imagery. It is a mining process where I bring what is closer to the surface up more fully formed. The stratum below requires more exploration to take form and often takes me to interesting places because of the exploration required.

There is the individual artwork, the series of artwork and the larger structure within which it resides. For me that structure is story. Over time I’ve begun to realize that my artwork is all about story and artwork represents one medium among many that I may use to tell a story. I always include text and when I speak, I tell stories. More recently I’ve also been working with video. A friend of mine says I do performance art. I find that idea rather amusing as it conjures up images of the more dramatic performance artists, a Karen Finley smearing her body with chocolate. Not exactly me, but there is an element of performance in telling stories, albeit a little more sedate than the Finley variety.

There are different schools of thought about how much explanation an artist should provide. Should we be inscrutable and mystifying? I remember going to the Dali Museum in Figueres, Spain where Dali had no labels on his paintings. He wanted the viewer to make of it what they will. I’m at the other end of that spectrum. Very scrutable. I have a story in mind that I want to convey. You can see what you want to see in my artwork, but I also want to make sure you know what I see. I’m someone who reads everything around me, so text enriches my personal experience and I hope it does the same for my audience.

Five years ago I did an exhibition of work on family history. I learned a great deal from that exhibition that began to define how I work. I remember when I was preparing for an artist talk and expressed concern to my husband about whether anyone else would care about my family stories that were imbedded in the artwork. My husband urged me to tell the stories and I was subsequently surprised to learn how much people resonate with story. One viewer wrote in the exhibition book that she didn’t know much about her family’s history, but knew it was similar to mine so pretended my family was hers as she went around the exhibit and viewed the artwork and read the text. For me that underscored that story is one of the ways we put ourselves in the shoes of another person. Of course, that is the magic of story, it allows for an empathetic response, something very important for the material with which I work. Since that exhibition, everything that I paint is about story. I often feel like a journalist asking “Where’s the story?” as I evaluate if I have enough story to spur my imagination and begin painting.

In addition to story, I also found that I needed to work with a series. While each painting may have an individual story it is by grouping multiple stories that we begin to tell a larger story, much like chapters in a book. Multiple stories can amplify each other or reveal different facets of the larger story.

I stumbled into story in my artwork, but in hindsight I realize it has been a theme in everything that I do. In fact, I often tell people that what I do is solve puzzles and tell stories. That is true of my prior career in finance and my subsequent pursuits in genealogy and artwork. And yes there are stories to be told through financial statements just as there are stories to mine through genealogy research and to tell through artwork. Those two constructs, telling stories, solving puzzles, link together seemingly disparate pursuits. It is not surprising that I’ve learned story is a guiding principle in my artwork.

If one’s focus is on telling stories through a series of paintings it follows that it is important both to focus on solo shows that share a body of work, to welcome opportunities to speak publicly about one’s work and to write about it as well. It also means that artwork is a medium for story telling rather than the end point in itself. It is a means of communication, not just about creating a pleasing image to hang on the wall. And it means that I choose stories that have depth and meaning, that are about topics I care deeply about. And that is what I do and why I do it.

Finding Your Family's Ancestral Towns -Part II

2011-09-08T08:19:00.000-05:00

A few years ago I was doing research for a client in LA. She had family that came to St. Paul, Minnesota in the 1800s and didn’t know where they came from. While I was quite envious of the extensive research she could do in the US, I realized that I had an advantage in having my European origins in the more recent past, relatively speaking. Records after 1906 provide much more extensive information and her relatives had been here for several decades by then. I had traced her family through the census and had searched for immigration records. Immigration records were difficult to find and there was often no way to confirm that it was the correct record. Without those critical two points to draw the line between (relatives in Europe, relatives in the US), we had only supposition. Early naturalization records are also just as sketchy as early immigration records.

I decided to try a new tack, probate records. I was able to find an index listing for my client’s great-grandfather for a will in the Minnesota Historical Society Library. A fabulous place for anyone doing research on Minnesota relatives, this library offers birth and death records, countless newspapers, city directories and more. A friend was able to find his relative’s personnel file in the records of the railroad. I took the index number over to Ramsey County Courthouse where I located the Probate Office. They quickly settled me at a microfilm reader and pulled up the great-grandfather’s will from the 1930s.

The will offered a wealth of information. It identified family members, in one case a sister of whom we hadn’t been aware. It noted causes that he gave to, property he held and lo and behold---the town of birth. The will noted the town of Good Levey, Poland. I went to the Town Finder at Jewishgen and input the name. Up came the town of Garliava, Lithuania. The Russian and Polish name was Godlevo.

But we had another clue in the sister’s name. We began to search that new branch and learned that the sister had sons. We found their immigration records in 1907 which was a challenge as the name had converted from Bartelstein to Burton. In the record it indicated that they were going to their uncle, my client’s great-grandfather in St. Paul and gave their town of origin. This was further validated by another source. As young men her sons had to register for the draft in WWI. Their draft registration also indicated the town from which they came, a town just 35 miles away from Garliava.

Emboldened by my success in the St. Paul court records, I explored the Surrogate Court (same as Probate Court) records in Brooklyn for my own family. While no one had the wealth to justify a will, I did find guardian papers and records that unveiled other mysteries. One relative who lived in Brooklyn, but had died at her son’s in Morristown had a document that listed all of her children with their married names. It was quite simple to go to the court office, check a card file and have them pull up the requested documents.

There is no magic bullet for discovering the town of origin. Immigration records post 1906 are the easiest route. Even if the family came in the 1800s, it is possible that a family member came to them after 1906. If immigration records are not available you will need to continue to explore other avenues. Probate records provided an unexpected source for this information.

I am currently working with another person whose family came over in the 1800s where we are trying to find the ancestral town. We’ve been successful in working our way back through census records. We then found burial records on the Jewish On-Line Worldwide Burial Registry. This program, that I often contribute to when I photograph tombstones in Eastern Europe, also has many photos from the US. In this case the family cemetery was well documented and provided some information that may prove helpful. It gave us both her great-grandfather’s Hebrew names and the names of his father. The great-grandfather’s name in the US was Louis, but his Hebrew name was Nachum Leib. I have found that these names are often used interchangeably so we can now search using one or the other or both. With the names of her great-grandfather and his father we can search in European records, but it is still a broad universe within which to search without the town of origin. The next step would be to find death records for the great-grandfather. Death record information is as good as the knowledge of the person providing it. As his wife was still alive upon his death, she would be familiar with the town he came from. If we are lucky it will give us something more than the ubiquitous “Russia”.

Finding Your Family's Ancestral Towns I

2011-09-05T13:37:00.000-05:00

One of the most perplexing questions people face when they begin genealogy research is identifying where their family came from.   I have been working with a friend to determine the answer to that for her family and am reflecting on how I first learned of the ancestral towns of my family. I’ve known them for so long now that I forget there was a time I didn’t.

In the case of my Kishlansky branch, I had a three page history written by my grandfather that told me of Kamenetz-Podolsk as his town of origin. My mother also told me that she remembered her mother talking of Kamenetz. She thought she was saying Communist and it was not until much later that she realized it was actually the name of the town of origin.

My Belarussian ancestors are all buried in the cemetery section in New York for people from Dunilowitz. Many Eastern European towns had burial societies in the US, especially in places like NY. People from the same shtetl often ended up buried together, recreating their original community beneath the ground. A cousin of my father’s clued me in to this detail which was later confirmed by immigration records.

My other town is Radom, Poland and I believe family was aware of this town of origin. I know that my aunt told me of it when I did an oral history with her 25 years ago. Obviously asking family members is the best place to start with this research.

Having the town made my search for immigration records more focused. Any family name from those towns was a possible relative. Even with this advantage, it still took me several months to find all of the immigration records. Names were spelled a variety of ways and often transcribed incorrectly. Town names also varied significantly. When in doubt I input the town name into stevemorse.org and went through every person who came from that town.

I was fortunate in some respects in that many family members came over after 1906 when the immigration records began to offer greater information. After that time they tell you who the nearest relative was in Europe and who the nearest relative was where they were going. For my more unusual names I built a database of every person who came to the US with that name. Then I started playing the match game looking for relationships between those two data points of European family and American family.

When I build the database, I use filters so I can sort it easily by different details. I have a column by year and I code the family names and towns so I can sort them even if they are recorded by a variety of spellings.   I then sort by immigration date and relationships become much more apparent. Often it is a game of tag. My first intrepid ancestor was my grandmother’s uncle Morris Kishlansky. He went first to the UK with his wife where they had two children. In 1898 he came to the US as Morris Kislianski indicating he had no relative at the other end to greet him. I wonder what that experience was like. He’d had a few years in London with his family to learn the language, but his mission was to establish a solid foundation for his family in a new country.

He must have succeeded as his wife followed a year later with her two children indicating they were going to her husband. The record noted they were from Russia and were coming from London, still no ancestral town was recorded. In 1902 I see a record of a different last name going to the original stalwart immigrant. Srul Baron was going to his brother-in-law Morris Kislynsky and he gives his home as Kamenik, the first mention of the ancestral town in immigration records. I knew from my grandfather’s written history that my grandmother had an aunt Sarah Baron. In 1903 my grandmother’s oldest brother Itzek makes his way to America to none other than Srul Baron, his uncle, followed in 1904 by Srul’s wife and children. Now Itzek is tagged and his brother Benjamin comes to him in 1906. It is late in 1906 that the laws change requiring more information in the manifest. Through this point there is no record of the nearest relative in Eastern Europe, but the town of origin is noted as Kamenetz.    But wait, Benjamin is coming from Chotyn. What’s that about? I map it relative to Kamenetz and learn that it is 30 miles away. There was a time when Jews could not live close to the border of the Pale and were displaced from their homes. Kamenetz Podolsk was close to the border. Perhaps this accounts for the periodic movement I see between Kamenetz and Chotyn.

In 1911 my grandfather comes to his brother-in-law Itzek giving an address that I can look up in the 1910 census. He too notes his town of birth as Kamenetz, but most recently was in Czortkow, Austria, a town not far from Kamenetz, perhaps a way station on his path to Rotterdam.   Interestingly he indicates he has no relative in Europe, despite the fact that his wife was still there. My hunch was that he hoped to start a new unencumbered life. When I painted this gentleman I called him The Enigma as he remains a puzzle.

In 1912 my grandmother’s brother Frank or Frajina makes his way to Itzek, noting both Kamenetz and his nearest relative in Europe, his father Avriam Kislanski. A long period passes before further branches of this family immigrate. There is a war to settle in Europe and a series of pogroms that break out in the region post-war. In 1921 within a week of each other, my grandmother and her brother and sister-in-law, come to the US. My grandmother is going to her husband giving his original name, not the one to which he later assumed. The family is back in Chotyn (Hotin) now where her nearest relative is given as an aunt.   I’m wondering if my great-grandfather is still alive. Yes, I conclude when I find the records of her youngest brother and his wife, also from Chotyn (Hotin). Her brother has indicated Abram, his father, as the nearest relative in Europe and Frank as the nearest relative in the US. I’m curious about this aunt who took the place of the father as nearest relative in my grandmother's manifest. That move to Chotyn, did it come about because of the pograms? All mysteries to which I may never know the answers.

I had an advantage in my research that many others don’t have. If family came to the US in the early 1900s it is both easier to trace due to more information in records and family members are often more likely to know of the original town. What do you do if family came in the 1800s when records seldom indicated the origin? Stay tuned and I’ll clue you in on some approaches.

Trusting the Process

2011-09-03T13:17:00.000-05:00

I am a big believer in process. I am often far more focused on the process than an endpoint, as I find that it leads me to places I never could have imagined. The process requires a willingness to experiment, to risk and to embrace the unknown. Not to mention a little patience and faith that interesting things will happen, but not necessarily on my schedule. All of these are things I’ve had to learn and sometimes relearn.

Lately I have been thinking of process in many realms of my life. When I am in the process of doing a painting I frequently take photographs of its progress. When I run those images through a slideshow I can watch my painting materialize through all of its stages. This exercise never fails to reinforce my appreciation for the creative process. I have learned that there are often very small changes that can make a dramatic change in an image. At times the process can seem glacial. When I first had the flexibility to focus more time on my artwork, I thought I’d be at the studio every day. I soon realized that gestational time was as important as painting time. Sometimes ideas on how to develop a painting occur to me when I’m driving or doing something totally unrelated to painting. The diversion allows my subconscious to kick in. I’ve written in these pages of a time that I painted over a painting in frustration only to discover that the partially hidden image spoke to me in a way that the original didn’t. When I’m not satisfied with an image I have been known to glaze it with a wash of white or gold paint, often improving the image in ways I would not have expected. Sometimes it takes enough dissatisfaction to take the very risks that could ruin the painting, if they don’t save it. I have learned it is all part of the process.

I don’t think this fascination with process is a new thing for me. I still have boxes of old letters I wrote in high school and college. I once knew someone who after he was forty got rid of all his correspondence, not wanting his private life to be too visible to others should something happen to him. Conversely I am enamored with the process of how we become who we are, some characteristics visible from the beginning, others gradually unveiled as we get more comfortable in our own skin. I keep that record of correspondence because it reveals the “me of then” on the way to becoming the “me of now”.

When I speak publicly I often tell stories about my artwork as well as the story of how one series of work has led to the next and opened up new doors along the way. That too is a process. I once took an art class from Minnesota artist David Feinberg. He said something that I’ve always remembered: He told us that our second painting would be similar to the first, the third would be similar to the second, but the tenth would not be at all similar to the first. He was of course speaking to the process by which each step influences the next until we look behind us with amazement at how far we’ve come, often to a very unanticipated place.

Searching at the Holocaust Museum

2011-08-20T10:40:00.000-05:00

The DC genealogy conference ended yesterday so I decided to head over to the Holocaust Museum library to check out the records from the International Tracing Service (ITS). Several years ago I had joined the first group to do research in the Holocaust records of the ITS in Bad Arolsen, Germany. I had gone there with a list of fifty relatives who had died in the Holocaust, all from Radom. I soon discovered that as they went to Treblinka, a killing camp, there were no records of their deaths. Only those who were in work camps such as Auschwitz were tracked. They were viewed as part of the Nazi's inventory of workers, albeit temporary ones.

I had to revise my research strategy to make use of my time there and began to search for those who had given testimony on my family to Yad Vashem. Through that I discovered cousins in Paris and Israel with whom I’ve since connected. The records at Bad Arolsen were unwieldy to maneuver and located in several buildings. Often one would find the original lists of Jews in various locations after the war. I was struck by the wanderings of many across Europe after the war as they sought surviving family or anyone from their prior town. The files at Bad Arolsen also had original correspondence. I read the heart-breaking letters of a survivor who had gone to Sweden and was trying to find her husband. She had heard he survived, but no one knew where he was.

The records from Bad Arolsen have now been shared with a number of organizations around the world including the Holocaust Museum in DC and Yad Vashem. The system at the Holocaust Museum library didn’t seem intuitive to me, but was easy enough to learn and pulled up scanned documents in alphabetical order around the name that was input. While conference attendees were directed to the Holocaust Survivors and Victims Resource Center on the second floor, I found the database was also available in the fifth floor library with some assistance from one of the staff in logging in. I pulled records on several people I had not previously explored and saved the images to my flash drive.

I then shifted my attention to lists of survivors from Radom that were on microfilm. The films which need to be ordered in advance of specific cutoffs can be viewed on scanners and easily saved to a flash drive. I had worked in books on prior visits so this was my first experience in using the scanners.

I was buried in microfilm when the alarms sounded and we were herded to a park across the way. It turned out to be a fire drill, but it reminded me that the museum has to be prepared for a wide variety of threats. The museum has this drill down to a science and a half hour later we were shepherded back by floors. The one good thing about the drill was it allowed me to connect with a woman who I had met in Bad Arolsen who lives in Israel and had come in for the conference. "When are you coming to visit me ?” she asked, and I filed that away as a future trip possibility. With my websites, blog and genealogy trips to Utah, Germany and various conferences, I have had the good fortune to meet many people in genealogy circles who have become good friends.

Conferences are a good opportunity to connect with both new and old friends, to research, to learn new information and to validate how much I already know. And now it’s time to shift gears. I’m off to the National Gallery.

Juxtaposing History and Family: Cause and Effect

2011-08-18T07:54:00.000-05:00

In yesterday’s blog entry I wrote about the Pale of Jewish Settlement and the repressive laws that led to a major mass migration. Today I had an opportunity to access the Jewish Chronicle, a very useful UK publication I dicovered at last year's conference. I decided to drill down and see how the political climate had affected the community in which my grandparents lived.   I took a look at Kamenetz Podolsk in the Ukraine, home of my maternal grandparents as it was a large enough area to be recorded in the publication.

One of the earliest entries I found was in 1898. Here it noted that the director of the Gymnasium (school) had been instructed to expel seven Jewish students from the school. The reason – their parents did not possess the right to live in the town which is less than 50 kilometers from the frontier.   Jews had been expelled from border areas to assure they wouldn't easily escape the Pale. Was my eleven year old grandfather among them? I think about the street I visited on which he had lived at the time of the Russian census just a year earlier. Perhaps these expulsions account for the movement of my family between Kamenetz and the nearby Chotin area, something that had always puzzled me.

The Chronicle goes on to say that Jewish merchants of the first Guild outside the Pale may employ Jewish clerks. The police interpret this to mean that only the clerk, not his family may live outside the Pale and have been known to send his wife and children back to the Pale. The merchants of the first Guild are those merchants who met the requirements to live outside the Pale.

The oppressive laws had their effect. By approximately 1895 my grandmother’s uncle was the first to immigrate to London. There he had two children and then went on to New York in 1898 followed by his family. A procession soon began. His brother-in-law joined him in NY in 1902 naming the uncle as his closest relative in the US. Soon 1903,1904 and 1906 saw the arrival of the uncle’s sister and my grandmother’s brothers. In 1911 my grandfather came to avoid the draft leaving behind his new wife and child.

Continuing through the Jewish Chronicle I found that in 1913 in response to the anti-religious legislation in Russia the Jewish school teachers had decided to keep the schools open on Saturday (the Jewish Sabbath) and close them on Sunday. The laws required businesses to close on Sunday and that in conjunction with closing on Saturday adversely affected their businesses. Presumably it drove other practices such as adjusting school hours.

In 1914 the Austrians entered Kamenetz-Podolsk and imposed heavy “contributions” on the town. They took the mayor and several prominent residents hostage, many of whom were Jewish. As there were insufficient funds, both Jews and Christians brought articles from the churches and synagogues. It then notes that after Austrian atrocities, the return of the Russian Army was “hailed by the Jews with delight”.

By 1920 there were reports on the pogroms that had occurred over a two year period. A prominent Ukrainian Jew noted that these were beyond the pogrom excesses with which Jews were so familiar. He states that “during the last two years the Jewish population of the Ukraine is being systematically, persistently exterminated.” The Kieff (Kiev) Red Cross reported that “the general surrounding circumstances have given to the pogrom wave an unheard of range of cruelty, bloodshed, tragic doom and no escape. This wave has for its objective the entire annihilation of Ukrainian Jewry and in several instances whole communities, men, women and children have been put to death”.   Jews were deprived of all means of locomotion and thus communication with the outside world. It went on to talk of Jewish passengers on trains that went through Kamenetz Podolsk being taken from the train by soldiers and shot.

Family folklore is that my grandmother’s first child died in a pogrom. In any case she was on a boat by 1921 being brought to America by her brothers, presumably to escape the dangers of Eastern Europe.

Understanding the historical events as they are juxtaposed with my family events begins to paint a picture of cause and effect. It allows me to understand the environment that influenced the lives of my family.

Understanding Historical Context

2011-08-17T07:55:00.000-05:00

I began my day at the genealogy conference attending a history lecture on the Pale, the region where many Jews lived in Eastern Europe largely due to restrictions on their mobility. At past conferences an interest in history has been awakened for me now that I have a context through which to frame it. While I knew of the Pale and I knew that borders had changed frequently between countries in this region, Hal Bookbinder’s talk knit together many disparate pieces in my knowledge.

Bookbinder traced the history of the Pale of Jewish Settlement from its creation in 1791 until it was dissolved in 1917. Along the way he discussed the various partitions of Poland and its arrangements with neighboring countries that influenced the movements of Jews through Eastern Europe. He spoke of a deal that was struck between Poland and Lithuania in the 1500s when Lithuania turned over the Ukraine to Poland in exchange for protection. When the Poles took over the area they brought the Polish Jews with them. That is why most of the Ukrainian Jews arrived there after 1569. The earliest synagogues and tombstones date back to that period.

In 1772 there was the first partition of Poland where Russia took what is now eastern Belarus, Austria-Hungary took Galicia and Prussia grabbed the area adjacent to it. Poland continued to exist, but twenty years later there was a second partition when Prussia grabbed Posnan and Russia grabbed the Ukraine and Belarus. Poland continued to exist in some form for two more years until the third partition when they were dismembered in 1795.

Then Napoleon came along and beat Prussia in 1804/05. He defeated the Hapsburgs and added Galicia to his empire and dubbed this region the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. The way most family history researchers see this influence is in the genealogical record keeping. The French used more of a story structure (eg. On such and such a date a male child was born to …) while the Russians used a columnar style.

Now Napoleon met his Waterloo in 1814 and the Russians marched in and took over most of Poland. In Vienna they created Congress Poland and declared a new independent nation of Poland with none other than the Czar of Russia as the King of Poland, independence being a relative term. In the south of Poland, Krakow remained independent from 1815-1847 until Austria-Hungary took it over and it became part of Galicia.

The Poles were a rebellious people and after a few uprisings the Russian czar dissolved Poland in 1871 and reformatted it in the Russian manner into gubernias. This was around the time that Russia began asserting its influence as the Polish records change from the Polish language to Russian in 1868. This movement between Polish and Russian control begins to explain why so many ancestors wrote Russia Poland, Poland or Russia as their place of origin, all during the same period.

With the czar as the new sheriff in town there were a new set of rules for the Jews. Typically there was less freedom of movement except when Russia needed bodies to populate new territories to keep out other countries. In 1791 Jews were restricted from living in the heart of Russia and the official decree creating the Pale came in 1799 from Alexander I.

From 1825-1850 Czar Nicholas was in charge and he instituted the infamous Cantonist laws. Jewish boys of 11 or 12 and sometimes as young as 7 were taken and placed in military schools. When they became 18 they had to serve 25 years as a private in the army. If they converted they got better food and some advancement opportunities. Roman Catholics had a similar, but less onerous conscription rule. In all 70,000 Jewish boys were taken until the law was disbanded in 1856. After that a more normal conscription period of 3 to 4 years was in force, still enough to spur my draft-dodging grandfather to immigrate.

Nicholas restricted Jews from living in Kiev in 1827 and in 1843 expelled them from an area along Prussia and Austria. Interestingly there were petitions from the local people to keep them as they did the commerce in that region.

From 1850-1875 Alexander II was the czar and a more enlightened period began. He ended the Cantonist laws and began to open Russia up to select portions of the population. Jewish merchants who paid taxes were permitted more freedom of movement in 1859. In 1861 this was extended to university grads and physicians. Former military men and certain craftsmen were also granted more freedom.

Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 by anarchists and Jews were blamed. Alexander III was an anti-Semite and encouraged a wave of pograms resulting in many deaths. Jews were forbidden to settle outside the towns. They couldn’t own or lease land. Education quotas went into place. Jews couldn’t farm land or become doctors or lawyers or engineers. In the early 1890s Jews were expelled from Moscow where many had lived. They could take what they could carry. The 1897 census identified 5 million Jews in the Pale all living under these restrictions and persistent dangers.

Pograms intensified in 1903 with thousands robbed, raped or killed. Finally in 1917 with the fall of the Czar the Pale was eliminated.

During the period from 1881-1914 two million Jews left for the west, mine among them. Bookbinder attributed this to the period of enlightenment of 1850-1875 followed by lack of opportunity, oppression and pograms. Train and steamship travel was faster and relatives and friends who had made the journey encouraged them to come.

Understanding the political context creates new meaning for genealogy research explaining movements of people, changes in documentation and shedding light on some of the cultural impacts that are still felt today. I recall when I was interviewing a Ukrainian immigrant and she told me that you had to perform better than everyone else because the deck was so stacked against you. Those very limitations contributed to the Jewish culture we know today with its focus on achievement and education.

New Resources and Improved Access

2011-08-16T08:16:00.000-05:00

I am always on the lookout for genealogy databases that might open a new avenue for my research. At the International Jewish Genealogy Conference, I learned today of an upcoming release at the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). The database offers some unusual sources of information. During WWI the JDC assisted in transmitting funds between Americans and their family in Poland, Romania, Palestine and Russia. Their records indicate the flow of funds and the sender and recipient. I remember my father’s cousin, the one survivor in our family, speaking of my grandfather sending a $10 bill back to Poland and I wonder if he might have sent money back during WWI, a few years after his arrival in the US.

I hadn’t fully appreciated the range of situations that involved the JDC and the records illustrate the variety of their involvement. Some of these situations include aiding Polish Jews imprisoned in Siberia, financial aid to prominent rabbis and Russian Jews trying to contact their American relatives. In addition to funds, the JDC also assisted Jews in Eastern Europe who were requesting other forms of assistance from their American relatives.

During the Nazi period refugees and emigrants were assisted across Europe. The well-known case of the SS St. Louis also became involved with the JDC. This was the ship that carried over 900 passengers seeking escape from the Nazis. They sought to land in Cuba and were denied entry. They ultimately were forced to return to Hamburg as no country would provide safe haven. Ultimately the JDC got the agreement of Holland, Belgium, England and France to accept the refugees and posted a guarantee of their support. Needless to say many did not survive the war.

During the war many Polish Jews escaped temporarily to Vilna, Lithuania where the JDC provided aid. Similarly they aided Jews who escaped to Kobe, Japan and Shanghai. Many Polish Jews survived the war in Russia and are listed by the JDC Location Service when they were sent back to their home country. CARE packages were sent to displaced persons after the war and identify the location of relatives who sent them.

The new release will occur in fall 2011 and will be found at JDC.org.archives.

Some records are already available at www.jdc.org/SharedLegacy. There you will find a Names index that contains individual records associated with WWII and the JDC Emigration Service in Vienna and Munich. I input several names of survivors and found records on their immigration to the US. Also in the database was a list of Polish Jews who immigrated to Vilnius trying to stay ahead of the Nazis.

At another session I heard some welcome news on JRI-Poland. JRI-Poland provides tremendous value for those of us researching family roots in Poland. They have indexed 4.7 million records many of which are searchable on the Internet. It used to be possible to order records with a credit card through JRI due to an agreement between JRI and the Polish archives. Several years ago the then new head of the Polish archives terminated the agreement between the archives and JRI. Suddenly the process of securing Polish records became very challenging requiring translating Polish and wiring money internationally. I have ordered records several times through this rather intimidating process and am quite sure it has proven a barrier for many. A new agreement will soon allow a return to the earlier process of ordering by credit card from JRI as well as the initiation of the indexing that had gone on hold. At this point most available records through 1905 are indexed, but a backlog of newer records will need to be indexed.

Blogging from the Other Side of the Keyboard

2011-08-04T11:12:00.000-05:00

Have you ever wondered when you read a blog what it is like on the other side of the keyboard? I’ve been thinking about that lately as I realized that I have passed the two year anniversary of this blog. I was originally introduced to the idea of blogging by an artist friend who pointed out a variety of arts blogs designed to share one’s latest work with a community of artists. A blog solely on artwork seemed too limiting to me and as I had been painting family and cultural history it soon morphed into a family history blog with an arts component. Over the last several years I have traveled widely in Eastern Europe with trips to my ancestral towns in Belarus, Poland and the Ukraine. Soon I was writing about travel as well. As I am a voracious reader, the occasional book review also finds its way into the blog if related to family and cultural history. It’s a broad swath, but I write about what I care about and hopefully attract readers who share some of the same interests.

So a few observations… I’ve learned that blogging requires deep commitment to sustain the effort. A compulsive personality is an asset when it comes to consistently blogging. I began this blog when I was traveling to Lithuania to study Yiddish at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute. While time is often limited when traveling, material is not. Seeing a new region through fresh eyes offers a wealth of new material. The challenge arises when one isn’t traveling. There have been times when my life was quite full, but not specifically related to genealogy or family history travel or artwork so little blogging occurred.   And then there are times when new material overflows and I seek to capture it as fast as I can.

One of the things that I struggle with is how much personal information to put out there. Juxtaposing being a fairly private person with a web presence is challenging. A private blogger is a bit of an oxymoron. Of course I share family history information, ever hopeful that someone related will stumble across my blog and uncover an entirely unknown new branch. One can always hope. When I was writing about my oral history project on Jewish Identity & Legacy, I debated how much of my own background and thoughts on Jewish identity to include. I’ve since concluded that if it is relevant to the topic, then it is appropriate. My cultural Jewish identity was relevant to my interest in exploring the topic of identity and thus made its way into the blog.

People blog for many reasons. For me it is much the same reason that I create Shtetlinks (now Kehila links), websites for those searching family from a particular town. I’ve learned a lot in the course of my search and I hope that others find it useful. I’ve had many people reach out to assist me as I did my research and this is a way that I give back to that community. And of course, I like to write. I doubt most people write blogs if they don’t. I often find that writing is a way that I organize my thinking. Many times I have started to write about a discovery and in the process of writing I think of an important new direction to explore.

I always appreciate those who send me comments as it gives me some flavor for who is reading the blog. I also make use of the statistics available through Google on the blog. It is reassuring to realize that even if I never wrote another blog entry a significant number of people around the world will continue to find my existing entries. Google provides statistics on the number of hits, which blog entries and from where they were referred. It also tells me geographically the number of people who are reading the blog from around the world.   I must confess to some fascination with these statistics. This week I had readers from the US. the UK and Germany leading the pack, but also hits from Canada, the Czech Republic, Belize, the Ukraine, Chile, Austria and Russia.   Blog entries on Prague and Cracow seem to be most in demand, usually a blip that corresponds to travelers to those regions.

Over the period Google has tracked these results, the US accounted for about two-thirds of the hits with the balance largely composed of Canada, Germany, the UK, Russia and Israel. Of the almost 120 blog entries that I’ve done there are three blog entries that have generated the most interest. Stalking the Shtetl Stork is the all-time leader with a focus on a shtetl visit to Pilvishok. I can only guess that there is a devoted group searching family from that particular shtetl. Tied for second place is Principles for Basic Genealogy Searches and Archive Day. Principles is very appropriately named which may account for its hits. As I was doing research for others, I detailed out my process and the basic principles that guided my search. It is a good primer for anyone beginning genealogy research.   Archive Day describes my time at the Radom archives doing research.

Two years ago I didn’t image that I would still be writing the blog after my Lithuanian travels. It is quite possible that it will morph over time as I’ve completed most of my Eastern European travels and uncovered many of my family history mysteries. So keep reading and together we’ll see how this evolves.

Many Hands Make a Mitzvah

2011-08-01T08:14:00.000-05:00

One of the satisfying things about my work with genealogy is when I am able to help another person make an important family connection. As I have created two Shtetlinks, websites for others searching their family history, I often have the opportunity to do that. It frequently takes many hands to make a mitzvah (a kindness for someone else) and a recent experience illustrates that well.

The first step in the making of a mitzvah was an e-mail that I received last November from the head of the Radom Society in Montreal. He advised me of the discovery of 72 previously unknown Jewish tombstones that had been erected into a monument in the Jewish cemetery in Radom, Poland. As most of the tombstones in the cemetery had been used by the Nazis to pave the roads, the discovery of intact tombstones was a very important event. His uncle Haim Kinczler, head of the Israeli Radom Society, had been instrumental in discovering these tombstones and assuring that they would be available to those visiting Radom, a huge mitzvah in itself. The Israeli prison system and the Polish prison system collaborated with the help of Polish prisoners and a British/Israeli philanthropist to build the structure that houses the tombstones. For more information on this project see my prior post Unusual Collaboration Unveils Lost Tombstones.

When I heard about the tombstones, my first thought was that I needed photos. The tombstones potentially belonged to the families of those researching family from Radom and I had the means to reach them through the Radom Shtetlink. With the information that was provided, I contacted a friend at the Resursa, the Arts and Culture Center in Radom. I had met Jakub on my last visit to Radom when he secured the key to the former cemetery for me so I could visit it. I asked him if he might be able to take photographs of the tombstones for me and he graciously went out to the cemetery in the middle of winter to do just that and sent me a CD with the photos.

I then needed to get them translated so posted a request for help on the JRI-Poland e-mail list. Two volunteers did the translation. One of the translators, an Israeli friend with ties to Radom did an additional step cross-referencing it to the Book of Residents, a kind of ongoing census that records family groupings.

Up until now I was choreographing, arranging for photos and translations. Now my hands-on work began as I had to isolate each picture for a web album, clean up the information into a format for the web and build the appropriate pages and links to publish it on the site. I also submitted the photos and translations to the Jewish On-line Worldwide Burial Registry which will add them to their database that is easily accessible to researchers. Finally I completed the circle by sending an e-mail to JRI-Poland’s email list to announce its availability.

Now I had only to wait to see where it led and it didn’t take long. I already knew that one of my translators had found a family member in the tombstones that he had translated. This week I spoke with a woman who is planning a trip to Radom who had discovered the Radom Shtetlink. She reported that in looking at this database she discovered her grandmother’s tombstone. The links to the Book of Residents further added to the information on her grandmother.

In order to connect a woman in Detroit, the child of a survivor, with her grandmother’s tombstone in Poland, it took many Israelis and Poles to create the structure, someone in Montreal to communicate it, the help of my Polish friend to photograph, two translators, one American and one Israeli and finally me to organize the effort and build it into the website. Many hands make a mitzvah.

Breaking Through Logjams

2011-07-28T09:02:00.000-05:00

Ever hit a point where you are stuck in your research and not really sure where to go next? I’ve learned to trust that new directions will come, but that I have to actively seek out new information and connections for that to happen. An opportunity to do just that will occur next month. Each summer Jewish genealogists gather for the International Jewish Genealogy Conference. This year it is in Washington, DC, although many are already planning ahead for next year’s conference in Paris. I am no exception hoping to meet with a third cousin in Paris who I’ve connected with via e-mail after tracing the family through records from the International Tracing Service. But first we have one more American conference and DC is a good location as it is home to the National Archives and the Holocaust Museum as well as other resources that I look forward to learning more about.

I’ve begun to peruse the schedule to figure out what to attend and like many conferences it forces choices between sessions that are often equally appealing. An excellent film festival accompanies the conference so one could easily attend only films and be quite content.

A resource center offers many databases that are not normally available without fees and many of my breakthroughs have come at the conference through those resources. In Chicago an obituary I found gave me information that allowed me to trace a sibling of my great-great grandfather back to Belarus. At the LA conference the Jewish Chronicle gave me core information on my British and Scottish relatives that subsequently made sense when I gathered one more puzzle piece. This year I noted that there are several British newspaper archives as well as that very useful Jewish Chronicle to continue my UK search.

The conference also piques my interest in a variety of new areas, continually expanding my knowledge base and sending me off in new directions. At the last conference I learned how to create search engines that I incorporated into my Shtetlink websites. I first became interested in learning Russian from a conference workshop a few years ago and later became intrigued with social and political history from a historian’s lecture. At the last conference I attended a workshop on creating family histories through interviews and committed to doing one in the following year. With twelve completed between my Jewish Identity & Legacy project and my Radom project, I knocked that one out of the ballpark. The presenter from last year is now doing a seminar on using visual images as part of family stories, something I know a little about as an artist. He’s asked to include one of my paintings in his talk so I’ll have to attend that one.

The conference is also a good opportunity to meet with genealogy friends, both old and new. As I do two Shtetlinks, I frequently am contacted for information by others researching family from those towns. The conference will allow me to meet several of my correspondents.

For those of us who have had considerable success in our research the challenge is always where to go from here. The conference is a good way to break through those logjams through meeting with others and learning of new approaches. I’m not quite sure where this one will lead, but I’ve learned that if one comes to it eager to learn and curious about new information, the unexpected may just happen. For more information on the conference see 2011 IAJGS Conference.

Destroying and Re-creating

2011-07-13T08:54:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I was in the studio destroying paintings. Well, not exactly destroying, but in the middle of my process it would certainly have appeared that way. I have a show coming up in September where I will be showing my two series of work that were exhibited in London and Poland. There are two paintings with which I have never been completely satisfied. As you may recall, I had repainted my original paintings, which were on board, onto canvas for the London show to facilitate shipping. In doing so I sometimes was able to improve on a painting, but I didn’t always succeed in a second version that I liked as much as the first. Often I would try to change one aspect to improve a painting, only to discover that there were other aspects that I hadn’t re-created successfully that made the painting work. I couldn’t see that clearly until my second attempt provided a contrast. It wasn’t that the painting didn’t work on its own. It just wasn’t the original. Ultimately I had to accept that it was OK for my second versions to stand on their own as unique and separate paintings even if their inspiration came from a prior painting.

But now, I eyed them and contemplated whether I dared to take a paint brush to them. Is a painting ever done? It seemed that my semi-abstract paintings were the most challenging. The originals often had happy accidents that resulted in an effect that I couldn’t seem to re-create. Then in a moment of bravery I began to destroy my paintings.

I find that it is very difficult to destroy in order to create, yet some of my favorite work has arisen from such actions, once totally painting over a painting and turning the subtle image that remained into a new artwork. I admire people who don’t hesitate to start anew, confident that they will land on their feet. I’ve had to learn to take those leaps and there is always a swallow-hard moment that precedes them. Whether it is painting out a painting, or leaving a job to venture out on one’s own, each requires an act of letting go, ending one path to find another. I suspect there is a constellation of traits that define those of us who struggle with such choices. I’m a bit of a packrat, not good at getting rid of things. I keep them for history or because I might want them some day or simply because I don’t know what to do with them. But I admire my friends with streamlined lives and aspire to at least move in that direction. I think it is by letting go that we make room for the new and that is true in life as well as in paintings.

Five years ago I made that leap in my own life, leaving a career in finance to focus on my artwork and family and cultural history. And there were quite a few swallow-hard moments that preceded that. It wasn’t that I didn’t paint or explore family history while I worked, but I did it in a different way, not as intensely, not as focused and not as much in the flow, letting the process unfold. I do consult periodically, but my new life has gradually been expanding to fill the available space. In the period since I left my job I’ve gone in new directions. I did my first solo show, followed by many more and then several international shows. I began to do public speaking about my artwork and family history and discovered that when you enjoy what you do, it is a natural next step to share it. And when you are passionate about what you do, that enthusiasm is contagious. I discovered the power of story and began exploring that further in my artwork and I started painting in series because a stand alone painting wasn’t enough to tell the stories I wanted to tell. Before long I was creating multi-dimensional projects because the stories demanded it. I began to partner with organizations and individuals and I accessed technology, creating web sites, video-editing and yes, blogging. Often I traveled to find the stories I painted. In recent years I’ve spent a total of four months overseas in eleven countries. Had you told me five years ago that was what I would be doing, I might have not had so many swallow-hard moments, but I would have missed out on the joy of discovering each new opportunity on my path.

So I’ve learned that letting go of “good enough” while hard, is a necessary step to get to something that I may find more satisfying, whether in a painting or in my life. And as for those paintings, I left my studio pleased with my newly re-created paintings. We’ll see how they appear when I view them with fresh eyes today.

New Sources of Inspiration

2011-07-07T10:02:00.000-05:00

I recently wrapped up the first phase of an oral history project on Jewish Identity and Legacy. It consisted of a series of interviews with elders in a Jewish continuing care community. I am now working on paintings that reflect many of the stories they shared.

A few months ago I decided to try my hand at video editing and created a DVD with excerpts from many of the interviews. I am picturing it playing in the background when I exhibit this body of work. Turn an artist loose with a new tool and soon I was creating my own title pages, menus and DVD labels, incorporating imagery and searching my own voluminous photo files for reference images that I could use.

One of the stories told to me was about the creation of two candelabras in 1927 by the father of one of our interviewees. The candelabras are in a local synagogue and were enriched by the story behind their creation, an attempt at using electricity rather than candles in response to a fire in the synagogue. I decided to use the candelabras as a central image with each title page containing an aspect of the candelabras even if not identifiable as a whole.

In creating the title pages I discovered some new ways of combining imagery that may lead to a series of additional paintings. The ability to blend images allowed me to experiment on the computer resulting in some of the images here. I like the effect and may try a few paintings based on these efforts. Paintings often have collage like images blended together. I once did a series on reflected images, using them as source material for such effects. The computer affords me yet another tool, albeit a more controlled one, to test the combination of imagery.

Unraveling the Puzzle of my Scottish Relatives

2011-06-15T10:35:00.000-05:00

All genealogists have loose ends that they periodically tug on. I’ve written a bit about my British and Scottish connections and recently revisited that information through the use of ScotlandsPeople . As its name implies this site is focused upon Scotland ancestry and provides vital records.

As I’ve written in the past, I began by tracing a family story from a late cousin of my father. He recalled getting a gift of boxing gloves from relatives in England named Kodish. He recalled the names Jacob and Louis. When this cousin died I was given his old photos and discovered an inscribed picture of Louis Kodish. “From your cousin Louis Kodish” it read. When I first began working with family history I asked others who had been doing this for longer than I, what they did when they finished it. They assured me it is never finished, you just move on to research cousins. I am now at that once distant point in the horizon, tugging on threads that once seemed quite remote.

I’ve since found immigration records for Louis who came to the US in 1929 with his wife and returned to Glasgow in 1934. He came to another family member confirming a family relationship and the Glasgow connection expanded my search still further. It also offered his father Marks/Max as his closest relative in Scotland.

Genealogy is a process of building on each new piece of information to deepen one’s knowledge. At the site Scotlands People, I found the death record for Louis’ father Marks or Max Kodish submitted by his brother Jacob. In that it gave his parents names as Barnett Kodish and Sarah Rothchild Kodish. My Raichels from Dunilovichi who came to America changed their last name to Rothchild. They were in contact with their British relative so this shared name change seems like a legitimate linkage. I now had new names to search and to use to validate relationships.

Some records are immediately available on the site while others need to be ordered from the General Register Office for Scotland. Among the documents that I was able to locate was the 1923 marriage record for Louis and his wife Katherine. I was able to validate the record as it listed the correct parents of Louis, consistent with the birth record I received in his previously ordered visa file. Interestingly the record states that rather than being done in a synagogue it was done by declaration and “warrant of Sheriff”. Upon doing some research I learned that this was termed an “irregular” marriage similar to our civil ceremony.   They went ahead with an irregular marriage by declaration and then paid a fine to the sheriff in order to register it. This practice went away in 1939 when civil marriages were permitted in a Registrar’s office.

A few years ago I had access to the Jewish Chronicle, a publication of the Jewish community in Great Britain. I had copied all entries for Kodishes figuring I’d find the missing link eventually and it would then make sense. Much of genealogy is prospective, getting ready for the big discovery that unlocks earlier data. I now went through the copied documents looking for Barnett. There in December 1916 I found the obituary for Barnett which noted he was of both Glasgow and London. It reported that he was the father of Max and Solomon of Glasgow and Jack of London. A search of the Jewish Online Worldwide Burial Registry turned up a record at the Edmonton Cemetery in London for his burial.

Armed with this information I began to search the Scottish database. I soon found the death record for Solomon that noted his parents, wife, address, cause of death and the submission of the death by his son-in-law. Working backwards with the name of his son-in-law I found the marriage record of Solomon’s daughter Lily which occurred at the Cromwell Road Synagogue as a “regular” marriage. Solomon was a master cabinetmaker, a profession he shared with his brother Max. Similarly my great-grandfather who was their cousin reported his profession as a joiner in his immigration manifest. I now also have a synagogue name that may also have family records.

The brother Jacob (Jack) has a bit of a story. Some time ago I found an immigration record for a Bloome Kodish with her three children Joe, Sid and Anna. They came to the US in 1923. She listed a brother with the last name of Silverman as her nearest relative in Glasgow (even though she had a husband in Glasgow as well, perhaps an early sign of trouble) and was going to another brother in Chicago. I last saw the children listed in the 1930 census. Then in May 1938 Jacob set out for NY to see his wife Bloome noting his brother Solomon as his closest relative in Glasgow. He notes his original birthplace as Vilna, Russia. The gubernia in which Dunilovichi was located was Vilna and is typically given as the place of birth by those from Dunilovichi. His visit was short-lived as he returned in March 1939.   Working back I discovered the original Kodish-Silverman marriage in 1912. A few years after his visit in the late 1930s he is listed as divorced as he enters a second marriage in 1941. This marriage fared better, lasting until death parts them in 1967 as reported in his death record.

I’ve made considerable headway on a mystery that I once had little hopes of resolving. I now know the relationship between our families and have identified many family members. I’ve also learned that the Rothchild name was assumed in both England and the US.

I was unsuccessful in finding the death record for Barnett Kodish even knowing where he is buried. The records office had nothing on file. I decided a photo of Barnett’s tombstone would be worth locating as he likely came from Dunilovichi as well and contacted Gaby Laws of GenPals to get a photo and to see if there were other Kodish tombstones nearby. Three days later I had the photo and confirmation that there were not other Kodish tombstones in the area.

Interestingly Barnett’s Hebrew name translated to Eli Dovid Ber son of Yehuda. With this information I went back to the database from the Dunilovichi cemetery that I had posted on the Shtetlink I had created for this town. While there are few surnames I did find an Abraham Hedesh, son of Yehuda who died in 1936. I have found that names with an H, G or K are often interchangeable so I would suspect that this is a younger sibling.

I’d like to find the death record for Sarah Rothchild Kodish as it would likely tie to the name of my great-great-great grandfather, but I’ve had no success finding a record of her death nor a tombstone near Barnett. As Gaby pointed out, it is quite possible that she didn’t come to London and only the father and the older sons made the journey. In the Dunilovichi cemetery there is a Sarah, daughter of Moshe (same father's name as my great-great grandfather), but no surname to offer assurance that it is the right Sarah. She died in 1914 so may well be the elusive Sarah Raichel/Rothchild Kodish, sister to my great-great grandfather.

If you trace the threads of this journey you will find the following path:

1)   We begin with an anecdote about Louis Kodish
2)   Then discover an inscribed photo from him
3)   Examine Immigration records and find his father’s name
4)   Order a visa file from the US Citizenship and Immigration Service that provides the birth record with both parents’ names
5)   The Jewish Chronicle provides an obituary of Louis’s grandfather with related family members (obtained earlier, but made sense at this point)
6)   The Jewish Online Worldwide Burial Records offers burial information on the grandfather of Louis Kodish
7)   Scotlands’ People provides his father and uncles’ death records and various marriage records including that of Louis
8)   Back to Immigration records to explore his uncle Jacob’s first marriage and possible descendants in the US
9)   And then on to Genpals for a tombstone photo
10)   And back to the Dunilovichi cemetery to see if there are tombstones that are potentially related now that I have more information on earlier descendants.

It is this path of working one’s way through a puzzle, building on each successive discovery which keeps me so enthralled in this search.

Sleeping With the Chickens and Bricks for Bread

2011-05-25T21:58:00.000-05:00

It has been a bit of a whirlwind since returning from Poland. I recently spent a weekend in New York where I met up with my Israeli friend who set much of my Radom project in motion when he sent me the 1937 film of Radom. While there I interviewed two survivors from Radom, one of whom lived next door to my family in Radom. I’m not quite sure what I’ll do with the interviews, but given that most survivors are in their late 80s and early 90s, I felt that I should take advantage of the opportunity while I could. Interviewing an elder population does forestall procrastination.

Upon my return I received my work back from Poland, just one day before a huge open studio event in Minneapolis known as Art-a-Whirl. It is always a good opportunity to interact with people around my work so I was pleased to be able to include the Hole in Time Series on Radom that you’ve seen in this blog. Art-a-Whirl which sports a tornado as its symbol ended up with a real tornado and closed with a rainbow visible from our studio window after a weekend of visiting with art patrons.

Since returning from Poland I’ve been winding up my oral history project on Jewish Identity and Legacy. With most of our interviews done and the end date looming, I’ve been drafting a final grant report and teaching myself video-editing. Many of the interviews generated wonderful stories that I hope to include in a DVD.

I have also begun to develop paintings around the stories that have emerged. In fact, source material was my original impetus for the project although it has proven to be quite fascinating in its own right.

One of our interviews was with a woman who grew up in north Minneapolis, originally the home to much of the Jewish community. She related the following story to us about staying with her grandmother when she was young.

I remember my grandmother had a one bedroom apartment. She had a mattress must have been about that thick (holds hands two to three feet apart), all feathers you know, and a stool to get up. So when it was time to go to bed, I crawled in to get into bed to sleep with her… next to the bed my grandmother had two live chickens in a box and I was deathly afraid of chickens and that’s where I had to sleep that night with the live chickens there.

In the morning she’d go to the shocket (a kosher butcher) and have the chickens killed. She’d carry them to the shocket and come back and flick them. Sit in the back yard and flick ‘em. Every time on a weekend. She’d go like on a Friday morning before Shabbos started and get her chickens and when I’d come to sleep with her she’d have the chickens Friday. And every time I went I had to go sleep there and I had to sleep with those chickens. I’ll never forget that. I was scared to death that night.

That image stayed with me and led to the painting called Sleeping With the Chickens.

Another story that I’ve sought to capture was provided by a subject who was a Holocaust survivor. He told us of being sent from Auschwitz to Warsaw to help dismantle the Warsaw ghetto. After the ghetto was destroyed, buildings were dismantled and bricks sold to the Poles. He told me that he would go down in the basements for bricks and discover bodies that he covered with sand.

Then they (the Nazis) need a transport to go to Warsaw. But they didn’t take any people who speak Polish, but they didn’t know … I could speak Polish. So I got in between the French and the Italians and the Greeks and I got into Warsaw… The Warsaw ghetto was bombed. People were laying on the basements there like flies. So what they did is to blow up the rest of it, the rest of the building and they covered up the other ones. Then I had to do clean up with the bricks...The Polish people came in with a horse and a wagon and they were buying those bricks from the Germans. When they got in they had to pay so much and they had to show me a piece of paper, how many bricks they need to buy. So I gave them the bricks they needed to buy and sometimes I ask them if they have bread or something like that. Pretty soon they got smart, they brought me a bread, they brought me a salami and I gave them those bricks. I gave them instead of 20 bricks, I gave them 25 bricks. See the five bricks they had a hole on the wagon and they put it in the holder so the Germans, because they count the bricks when they went out. They gave them 20 bricks and going out they had to show the paper that they got 20 bricks, so they went up on the wagon and count the bricks, but they didn’t count the other ones.

The painting, Bricks for Bread, shows the Warsaw ghetto in its destruction in the distance. One church remained amongst the rubble. This gentleman survived frequently by his wits and used his skills in bartering later in rebuilding his life and a business.

These early paintings are experiments in capturing the imagery based solely on the words. Usually I have some visual imagery to work with, but in this case I need to create my own. When I travel I frequently take photos for reference so my photos of horse-drawn carts in the Ukraine came in handy.

Hiding in Caves

2011-05-03T11:28:00.000-05:00

Sometimes it seems like there are connections between everything I encounter. On Sunday we went to the Yom HaShoah Holocaust Commemoration in Minneapolis. The speaker at the event was Christos Nicola, co-author with Peter Lane Taylor of the Secret of Priest’s Grotto: A Holocaust Survival Story. Nicola related the story of 38 people who survived the Holocaust hidden in a network of caves in the Borshchiv Raion within western Ukraine. Priest’s Grotto is actually one of the longest caves in the world with 77 miles of passages that have been explored. He put up a map of the region and there was Kamenetz-Podolsk, just 25 miles away. Last month when we drove to Kamenetz, the ancestral town of one set of my grandparents, our guide had pointed out Borshchiv as we passed and mentioned the story.

Nicola, a cave explorer, first discovered the cave and heard stories from local residents about Jews hiding in the caves. After ten years of searching he finally found a member of the family who had survived in the caves now living just blocks from him in New York. Relying on a memoir written by the matriarch of the family in 1960 as well as recollections from family members, he went back to the cave to document the existence of the family within the cave. His efforts were underwritten and reported by National Geographic. Some of the family members, from toddlers to a woman over 70, had resided there for 344 continuous days, the longest instance on record of uninterrupted cave living.

Nicola talked of their survival without any of the equipment and clothing that is commonly used by cavers today. They basically learned how to survive in this new environment. They tunneled to create an escape route which they had to use when they were discovered in the first cave. In the second cave they found a natural lake, learned how to dry the moisture on the walls and adapted to living in darkness.

Several family members who survived were killed by Ukrainians after the war had ended. Most of the family immigrated to the US and Canada.

To learn more you can find an interview on NPR and read the article in National Geographic’s Adventure magazine.

Returning Home

2011-04-13T16:18:00.000-05:00

Today we drove back to Warsaw. Jakub met us at the hotel so we could say our goodbyes. We were very grateful for his assistance at every step of the way and felt a real connection with him.

Before departing Radom we asked Dora if there was anything else she would like to see and she replied the train station. It was from a nearby track that Jews were deported to Treblinka. As Treblinka was our destination, it seemed appropriate to start from the same point. The day was rainy and only got rainier as we drove.

Even with GPS it was difficult to locate Treblinka. We drove through small villages with unpainted cottages and tall stork nests. After some circling of the area we found some signs that led the way to Treblinka. By now the rain was coming down very steadily and the day was gray. Upon arriving we walked down a wide cobblestone path past rows of rectangular blocks, much like railroad tracks. Dora told us they represented the long walk from the train to the execution site. In front of us were large jagged rocks with the names of countries that were represented. Walking past them we faced a large sculptural form surrounded by more jagged rocks that seemed to go indefinitely, each representing a community that was destroyed. We found the Radom rock and actually noted that there were two. We had saved some of the flowers we had been given at the opening to leave at Treblinka and placed them at both stones. Then we pulled out my Kindle on which I have downloaded the Kaddish and recited it together for all our family members who were murdered at Treblinka.

And so our trip comes to an end. For my husband and I it was a two part trip with a week in the Ukraine at my maternal grandparents’ ancestral town, followed by a week in Poland focused on my paternal grandfather’s town. Our Poland trip included many interactions around an art opening and exhibition of artwork, a talk to high school students and dinner with a local Polish family. Traveling with our friends gave me a unique perspective on the town of Radom and a glimpse at how my family may have lived.

In our discussion about this trip Dora said that in her prior four trips to Radom she was a visitor. This trip was different, rather than being a visitor, she returned to her home town. The difference was in large part that we interacted with Poles and were received with great warmth and interest. On prior trips her visit was more insular with no interactions save the usual travel exchanges in restaurants and hotels. On this visit Dora told her story to the next generation and shared her pictures and stories with the residents of Radom. There was a rich interaction that made real connections between people and it is in these connections that real understanding begins.

Presentations, Openings and Polish Friends

2011-04-13T16:07:00.000-05:00

Our last day in Radom was a most eventful one. The weather was sunny and warm, the first such day we had experienced in Poland. We started the day with a stop at the post office. When we did research at the archives the prior day we learned that we could no longer pay them cash for our records as we did the prior year. Instead we were required to go to the post office and give them a slip of paper with the account number of the archives as well as the sum they advised us for payment. That paper was then stamped and we could take it back to the archives to receive our documents. Our friend Jakub accompanied us to the post office down the street from our hotel which proved to be fortunate. Whether we paid by cash or credit card, the post office required a local address in case something went wrong and they didn’t receive payment. Our home address in the US wasn’t acceptable for this purpose. It was illogical even to our Polish companion, especially when paying with cash, but without his address on the slip we were unsure how to get our material. Fortunately he was happy to assist us and we received our stamped paper.

Soon it was time for our presentation to high school students at the Resursa. We arrived at the Resursa which is a grand building with figures atop it and a statue in front of it. Jakub had advised us that it was a Citizens Club long ago and was used as an officers club by the Germans. Now it is an arts and culture center for the city with a variety of programs and exhibitions. They had a large auditorium which slowly filled with students. Dora, Jakub and I were on stage together with our interpreter. As I entered the auditorium and arrived at the front row I saw our young friend Michalina who had been so helpful to us on our prior trip. We hugged warmly and I was then whisked on to the stage. I had just a minute to ask Michalina to translate for Dora’s son as they had decided only to translate from English to Polish. Dora was quite determined to speak in Polish, no small feat after 70 years of not speaking it, but she accomplished it masterfully.

The format of the session was to have Jakub ask us questions to which we would respond, with most of the questions directed at Dora as the focus was on her recollections of her life in Radom. The questions for me related to what drew me to Radom, researching my family history and how I felt about Radom. As Dora replied in Polish, I would recognize a similar word to English and instantly know which story she was referencing. As I sat and listened to the stream of Polish words I counted the students in the auditorium, about 100 filled the room.

Midway through the presentation we learned that there was a class of Israeli students who had come to the presentation. They understood English, but not Polish and as no one was aware that they had joined us they had missed a portion of the presentation. The program then switched to English with a promise to the class to provide them with Dora’s written memories in English that I had provided to Jakub. After the presentation we invited the Israeli students up to the stage to meet Dora. She conversed with the teacher while her son spoke with them in Hebrew. The students surrounded Dora eagerly taking pictures of her. Dora also had an opportunity to speak with the teacher of the nearby school which is memorializing the school, The Friends of Knowledge, that Dora attended and gathering information on its attendees.

After the session we had some time to explore the town. We walked towards the archives where we planned to exchange the slip of paper for our documents. As we walked we noted many abandoned buildings or buildings propped up with wood. We had learned on our last visit that the buildings that were abandoned by Jews upon their deportation often deteriorated as there was no clear title to them. The city would periodically place an ad in the paper so they could begin the process of taking them over.

At the archives we found that some of our documents had been copied, but the identity papers were on a CD. Papers in hand, we took advantage of the nice weather to stroll down Zeromskiego, the main commercial street that is closed to traffic. We stopped for a quick bite to eat and it was soon time to return to the Resursa for the opening.

As we entered the Resursa we were greeted by a very dapper Jakub. He advised us that some press were in the room. We soon saw our friend Michalina. Her parents who had hosted us at their home on our last visit, greeted us warmly. They had invited us to visit after the opening. The room soon filled with people and it was time for comments. Jakub made some brief comments and Dora spoke warmly of her experience in returning to Radom doing her comments in both Polish and English. I spoke about the development of the artwork that was there, my ties to Radom and my collaboration with Dora. They presented us with flowers and we were whisked to yet another room to do a radio interview.

Our beautiful day had now turned rainy and we piled into the car of Michalina’s father. On our last visit, the men had shared a number of shots of vodka so it appeared that they had cleared any barriers to a repeat performance. The plan was for Michalina’s mother to drive us home as the designated driver. Dora sat in front and in no time was chatting with Michalina’s father in Polish. We arrived at their home to a spread of salads, herring and meats. This was followed by a tasty fish dish combined with vegetables and then a coconut dessert. Wine and vodka flowed freely throughout. While I’d like to report on the conversation, much of it was in Polish with Dora and Michalina’s parents engrossed in conversation. Finally our evening came to a close with fond goodbyes as our time in Radom concluded.

Exploring Jewish Radom

2011-04-12T17:13:00.000-05:00

We began today with a visit to the USC, the governmental office which has vital records for the past 100 years. Dora was interested in getting her birth record and that of her brother. People who can prove their parent was born in Poland may be able to obtain a Polish passport enabling them easier access to European Union countries. Dora’s experience was quite smooth because she speaks the language and within an hour we had secured the birth records for both.

Our next stop was the archive which holds records that are over 100 years old. We secured a number of identity papers for family members. When we had been at the Warsaw genealogy office of the Jewish Historical Institute, we had obtained lists of family members who had been in the ghetto and completed identity papers. Many of the papers were accompanied by photographs.

Using JRI-Poland.org I had been able to locate indexes of many records on Dora’s family that included her great-grandmother’s birth record and her grandparents’ marriage record. We found the Book of Residents which included her family. The Book of Residents lists the residents by family along with parents’ names and various events in their lives that required official notation. My ability to decipher Russian Cyrillic came in handy and we were able to leave with the records on my list.

Our tasks accomplished, our touring now began in earnest. Dora’s niece had secured a van to take us to different locations and we began with a chronological history. We started at Dora’s childhood home and concluded with a visit to her home in the ghetto. We visited the area of the former forced labor camp and I asked Dora if she ever received any compensation as the Austrian company that ran the weapons factory still exists. She replied that a few years ago she received a very small sum.

We then stopped at her former school which is now an apartment building. She was pleased to see that a plaque on the history of the school adorned the door. We entered the building and I was struck by the worn stone steps on which so many students had walked.

We stopped by the Resursa to see the artwork and photos being hung for our show. At Dora’s request we planned another visit to the cemetery and Jakub once again secured the key to the cemetery for us. Again we said the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, now with this enlarged group of family and friends. It felt especially important to Dora to have her family with her in this place.

We also did a brief stop at the site of the old synagogue. Throughout the day we had several videographers in our group recording Dora’s stories in the related locations. Hopefully some will turn out to be useable as filming in a vehicle or on the street has its challenges. Dora told some stories that I had heard from her previously, but they took on an added resonance when told on the site in which they occurred.

One more day in Radom, but a jam packed one. Tomorrow we give our talk at the Resursa to high school students, then an opening in the evening and we reconnect with our Polish friends from our prior visit.

The Form and Substance of Story

2011-04-10T17:33:00.000-05:00

Yesterday morning we left Warsaw for Radom, the last part of our trip. In Radom we will prepare for an art opening on Tuesday as well as a talk and interview with high school students earlier in the day. When we left Warsaw we drove to the area around the monument to the Jewish ghetto and did a stop at the Umschlagplatz, the point where Jews were gathered for deportation to Treblinka. The monument lists all the first names that were typically used by the Jewish community. Dora commented that it spoke to the anonymity of those who were murdered. At the front of the monument is an image of broken trees, much like one sees on tombstones when someone dies too early. On the back of that image the surrounding trees are reflected. It is a very powerful monument that inspires contemplation.

We then departed for Radom, about an hour and a half drive from Warsaw. Upon our arrival we contacted Jakub, our contact at the Resursa, the arts and culture center where we are having the exhibition of my artwork and Dora’s photos and story. Jakub met us at our hotel and had an opportunity to meet Dora for the first time. He knew much of her story from the 30 pages of interviews that I’ve completed and transcribed. He has translated portions of that story to Polish for local publication.

We soon got into a very interesting conversation that began with identifying questions that Poles might want to pose. It led to an intense conversation about how some Poles fear that returning Jews might want the return of property and how those issues should be addressed. We also discussed the roots of anti-Semitism, the role of the church and the cross and convent that was once located at Auschwitz, all the sensitive issues! While our focus is on the story of the Jewish community prior to the war and what their lives were like, we are all aware that sensitive issues could also arise and need to be addressed if they do. I have no doubt that Dora can handle such issues very adeptly.

Jakub then contacted the gypsy who has the key to the Jewish cemetery and we drove out there. Dora had never been to the cemetery before. When she lived here she was too young and on her prior four visits to Radom they had not gone there. Without knowing how to access the key it would not have been an easy thing to do. I was interested in the new monument which included 70 tombstones that had been previously hidden. Jakub had taken pictures of it for me and I have been getting them translated. There are very few tombstones that still remain as the Nazis paved the roads with the tombstones. Fragments are mounted on the cemetery wall which surrounds an extremely large area, giving us a sense of the magnitude of the cemetery that once existed.

We went to a small building where the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, is posted on the wall behind a curtain. On the side are plaques for each neighboring town where communities of Jews perished in the Holocaust. Dora, her son and I all recited the Kaddish together. I looked over at Dora and saw her eyes filled with tears and tears quickly came to my eyes as well. To say the Kaddish in that place felt especially meaningful. Four generations of her family members were murdered, her great-grandmother, her grandmother, aunts and uncles and cousins. She knew those family members and friends personally and had individual relationships with each of them. Later she noted that under that soil lay the remains of the Jewish community of Radom, including those of some of her family members.

I read to her the quote on the wall from Psalms (78,6), "That the generation to come, the children to be born, may know and should arise and tell their children". It captured well the commitment Dora has made to sharing her story with successive generations. Dora later commented to me that this experience was the defining moment of the trip. Of course the trip isn’t over yet so there may be more moments yet to come.

The following day we made a trip to Garbatka, the vacation town where she spent her early summers with her family. Dora is especially nostalgic about this time as it represented a happy time before the war destroyed the life that she had. We drove through forests with small white flowers on the forest floor. Dora observed that the trees were newer, not the thick trees of her childhood. We started our visit at the train station where Dora reminisced about how her mother and the children would be there during the summers, but her father would come on weekends. They would greet him at the train station and then he would take them into the woods to find wild strawberries and mushrooms. As I recorded her recollections a train passed behind her and the church bells chimed. We then drove through the town looking for a cottage that resembled her recollection of the ones she stayed in during those summers.

Upon our return to the city we made a stop at the home where Dora had lived for the years prior to being forced into the ghetto. She identified her bedroom window and those of her parents and brother and we walked behind the building while she pointed out the location of each of the rooms of their six room apartment. In the ghetto they were living in two rooms with no indoor plumbing.

We then walked through the park to the main commercial street in Radom, Zeromskiego. Flags were flapping in the bitter cold wind commemorating the anniversary of the plane crash which took the life of the former Polish president a year ago.

Dora pointed out the building from which the German authorities had operated. One day during the time of the ghetto, she had been sent there to repair frayed carpet runners. When the Governor noticed her armband with the Star of David he had sent her away aghast that a Jew was in the building. It was very strange to actually connect a physical location with this story, giving it a form and substance that words alone couldn’t convey.

As we walked down Zeromskiego we ran into family members of Dora’s late brother. When they had heard Dora was coming to Radom they seized the opportunity to learn more about their father’s life. We later joined them for a dinner to celebrate this occasion that brought us all to Radom.

Windy Day in Warsaw

2011-04-10T01:26:00.000-05:00

We arrived in Warsaw last evening to meet our friends Dora and her son Gary. Dora is a survivor and former resident of Radom who now resides in the Twin Cities. She is sharing her pre-war and ghetto photographs in Radom in conjunction with my artwork and of course her stories.

Most of our day was spent in travel getting from Lviv to Warsaw, a one hour flight with lots of delays. Our licensed taxi to the Lviv airport was about a fourth of the cost of the private one we used to get to our hotel. When I gave the driver a tip, he protested that I had paid him too much. Ahh, an honest man! “For you”, I reassured him.

Over dinner we heard about the private taxi that our friends hired at the Warsaw airport. which charged them the equivalent of $60 for what should be an $11 cab ride (45 zlotys). Travel always involves such stories, small change in the whole scheme of things, but irritating nonetheless.

Before we departed Lviv we had a few hours in the morning and did at stop at the National Museum of Ukrainian Art which houses Ukrainian icon paintings from the 14th-17th century as well as special exhibitions of contemporary art. I found the paintings of Judgment rather amusing as little fellows in black with spiky hair and heels tortured unfortunate souls. They looked rather cartoon-like through contemporary eyes. Some life-size and realistically painted wooden cutouts represented groupings of saints and other religious figures creating interesting tableaus. We also especially enjoyed contemporary work by Michael Kimonovsky (my translation from the Ukrainian).
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It has been cold and blustery in Warsaw with periodic rain. Last year we got caught in a torrential downpour here so associate the city with miserable weather. The one bright spot (in addition to our companions) has been our hotel Mamaison Diana which provided us with palatial apartments at a very favorable price. We are staying in a very modern apartment with two bathrooms, a walk-in closet, a large round Jacuzzi and a balcony which runs the length of two rooms. We will be totally spoiled for all time after these accommodations. The restaurant has also been excellent.

We purchased a tram pass for the day so we could easily maneuver the city and set out in the direction of the Jewish Historical Institute. We actually were heading to the Jewish genealogy office associated with the Institute which is staffed by Yale Reisner and Anna Przybyszewska. On our last visit to Warsaw we had spent considerable time there and came away with a wealth of information. I thought Dora would find this to be an interesting resource as well. Several hours later we left with lots of information to follow up on at the Radom archives. We learned that the Jewish school she attended in Radom has been adopted by another school that is in the same area and they are documenting the history of her former school and its attendees. We’ll make sure to try to connect while there. We also identified what identity papers are at the Radom archives from the ghetto listing which included Dora’s family members.

We then walked throgh blustery winds to the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto by which time it had begun to rain in addition to the wind and cold. We headed for warmth at the Arsenal, an excellent restaurant on the tram line that we had eaten at on our last visit; There we holed up for a meal in cozy surroundings. Dora shared many of her stories with us over lunch and we reluctantly departed into the cold after several hours.

We decided that because of the weather we would opt for a warmer alternative, riding the tram lines on a tour of the city. Dora soon began chatting with local residents leading to an alteration in our plans and a visit to the old town area, the Stare Miasto. Everywhere we went everyone was quite helpful and having a Polish speaker in our midst certainly simplified our usual travel. One man escorted us to a bus stop and gave us very precise instructions, another chatted at length with Dora ending the discussion by kissing her hand. Once again we retreated to a café for warm drinks and then made our way back to the hotel where we gathered yet again around food and stories.

Of Castles and Cemeteries

2011-04-06T15:03:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was devoted to castles and yet one more cemetery, one of the most interesting ones to date. We began our day in Khotin, a city about 30 miles away from Kamenetz Podolsk in Bessarabia. My interest in this city is that my grandmother’s family originated there and several family members gave it as their most recent residence prior to immigrating. At that time it was located across the Dinster River in Roumania. Now it is part of the Ukraine.

We began our day with a visit to the fortress/castle that we had admired from Zhavnets on the other side of the river. Not quite as grand as that in Kamenetz, it made up for this by the striking views of its location. Located high above the river, it is surrounded by earthworks and fortifications.

We also drove around Khotin to the area where the Jewish homes and shops had been and identified buildings that would have existed in the late 1800s and early 1900s. A synagogue still stands and is in use although there are not enough Jews to have a minyon. At one point we drove past a home that was abandoned and I viewed the inside which consisted of two rooms with what may have been a heating unit of green enamel. An outhouse stood in back and a wooden storage shed and root cellar adjoined the house.

After touring the town we drove to the cemetery. I had done a search on-line and found the tombstones had been photographed. One was of particular interest to me, Mariam daughter of Avrum was all that was recorded, no surname and no dates. My great-great grandmother was Mariam (Wasserman), daughter of Avrum so I was interested in locating that tombstone to see if it was possible to decipher more. We arrived at the cemetery in front of which stood a house with writing on it that indicated it was the Jewish cemetery. As no one appeared to be home except a small child, we began to explore. Once again we saw striking photo engravings and I quickly found a tombstone for a Wasserman, the maiden name of my great-great grandmother. My first thought was that this appeared to be an orderly cemetery with tombstones in rows. That belief was shattered as I got about three rows back and discovered that small saplings made many of those rows impassable.

First the cemetery manager’s wife appeared and then the manager himself. A burly man with a white beard, he was accompanied by his grandson, a small child who perched on a tombstone as Alex translated for us. The manager told us that he grew up in the cemetery and was the third generation to manage it. He reported that when a group tried to improve it they actually created problems. They cut trees down, but they dropped their seeds creating the saplings. They also tried to burn brush and it destroyed about 500 tombstones.

We asked him about my family names and the one he was able to offer information on was that of Wasserman. While two had been on the on-line site, he showed us several additional ones. He told us that a Wasserman came from Israel each year to visit the grave of a family member. I was interested in a Mariam Wasserman of a more recent generation as family names frequently are repeated within a family. He showed us a tombstone that had a scissors on it and no surname and indicated that it was for a Wasserman as it was one that the Israeli visited as well. He seemed to know all of the tombstones personally as well as their families reporting that one was the mother-in-law of another.

The cemetery has been in existence for 300 years. When I asked about my great-great grandmother he asked when she would have died and led us to the section that would be around 1900.

While I found Miriams and Abrams, I didn’t find them in the same tombstone. Realizing the futility of the search, I began to focus on the decorative details on the stones. The other cemeteries typically had a Star of David, but very little other ornamentation. The tombstones in Khotin were often multi-colored as well as ornamented with fish, birds, lions, griffons and ornate patterning. I inquired about an area that was particularly decorative and was told that it was 200 years old.

Upon returning to Kamenetz we visited the castle there. The prior day it was closed as they were filming a movie there. It is often used for such projects. Our final project was to attempt some videotaping. A test drive by auto quickly reminded me of the bumpiness of the roads and I walked across the bridge filming and down the street where my grandfather lived. Not quite ready for prime time, these videos will allow me to share the imagery with family.

This morning we began our journey back to Lviv. By now the horse drawn carts, storks and elderly women in head scarves looked much more familiar. The day was sunny and we chatted as we drove. By now we felt like old friends with Alex having discussed a wide variety of subjects spanning family, politics, history and literature. When we arrived in Lviv, Alex gave us a brief tour of the Jewish sites including what remains of a 16th century synagogue destroyed by the Nazis, the former Jewish district and ghetto area, traces of Yiddish writing which remain and a Holocaust memorial. We bid a fond good by to Alex. His assistance had allowed us to access sites which would otherwise have been inaccessible to us due to language barriers and a lack of knowledge. Our investment in his time had been well worth it. Tomorrow we fly back to Warsaw and meet up with Dora and her son for the next leg of our trip in Radom.

Communing With the Ancestors

2011-04-05T15:42:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was a very full day as we began our explorations of Kamenetz Podolsk in earnest. Much of the day was spent in cemeteries, three of them to be precise. Cemetery information can be a very important resource when researching family history. Having discovered the tombstone of my great-great grandfather in Belarus, I am always hopeful when visiting the cemetery of an ancestral town. I also know how challenging most Eastern European Jewish cemeteries are to navigate. There is often no person or funds to maintain them and they quickly become overgrown and largely inaccessible. Until I experienced an "overgrown" cemetery, I did not fully appreciate the meaning of the word.

We began our day at the Kamenetz Podolsk cemetery. The keeper of the cemetery had a list of the names of the graves for more recent burials. He provided us with four pages of surnames handwritten in Cyrillic which I photographed and Alex offered to translate. Alex read through the names aloud as I listened for family names. A few were similar to some of my family names so I took photographs, unsure yet if they will connect to anything in my family.

The more recent tombstones were interesting as many of them had photographs, some that appeared to be photo engravings that covered a large portion of the tombstone. Writing was usually in Russian, but sometimes with Hebrew as well. Alex indicated that the older tombstones were to the right of the newer ones. I have found that it is often just as easy to photograph all of the tombstones rather than just look for my own family members. The time it takes to decipher the names in Hebrew can just as easily be spent on photographing each one allowing me to figure them out at my leisure and providing information for other researchers in the bargain.

I thought I’d begin with the tombstones at the back as those would presumably be older, but as I worked my way to the back I noticed a wooded area behind the cemetery and saw a tombstone in the woods. Thinking it was just a stray tombstone, I went to photograph it. I quickly realized that the woods were full of tombstones with small trees filling the spaces between them and many knocked over or unreadable under moss or behind thick saplings. Those which were readable however, were remarkably clear. They appeared to be preserved from the sun by the very woods which made it difficult to move between them. Now a woman on a mission, I began to work my way from one thicket to another tripping over branches and breaking off deadwood that obstructed my view. Not exactly an idyllic wooded setting, the ground was strewn with garbage and appeared to have been the site of numerous drinking parties. A swastika was painted on one of the tombstones which lay on its side.

Originally I had thought it would take just a short time, but as I proceeded I found that the section extended the width of the cemetery. Never one to stop halfway I continued for several hours until I had completed all of the old section and then proceeded to photograph those which were legible up through the war years, about 200 in total. It was often a logistical feat as I held branches back with one hand and photographed with the other. Did I mention that those bushes had thorns? My translation skills are limited to deciphering the name of the deceased and the father’s name. I attempted some translation this evening and oddly the first one I translated was Abram son of Srul (an abbreviation for Israel). My great-grandfather was Abram son of Meir-Srul. I couldn’t yet determine the date which should identify whether this is relevant to my family.

From the cemetery we did a brief stop at the memorial for those who were murdered by the Nazis in an open area in the town and then went to Karvansary, the area where Jews first lived in Kamenetz. Karvansary lies just below the castle wall. We began with a stop at the original cemetery. From the cemetery the view is quite scenic with the castle in the distance and goats grazing on the hill in the middle ground. Nestled in the hills are the houses of Karvansary. The cemetery was small and only about 30 tombstones were at all legible and some barely, but I went ahead and photographed them hoping someone can make more sense of them than I can.

We then drove through the area of Karvansary and Alex identified houses that would have dated to earlier times. On the way back I saw my favorite image of this trip. Up in the hills on a bicycle, a young man was herding the goats. Some ran ahead while some stragglers followed the bicycle.

From Karavansary we headed out to Zhavnets, a town across the Dinster River from Khotin. A researcher had told me that my grandfather’s family originated in Zahvnets. First we drove through the city and identified older homes in the area where the Jews had lived, then we headed for the cemetery. The cemetery is located across the river from the fortress/castle in Khotin so we had very scenic views of the fortress. I was delighted to hear that the cemetery had already been photographed as I could not imagine tackling yet another one. Two cemeteries were buried in the woods, once again tombstones hid behind trees and moss covered many of them, but the setting was rather idyllic with only forest surrounding it. It had a very different feeling than maneuvering around the garbage dump in Kamentz.

Our cemetery search is not yet over. Tomorrow we go to Khotin where my grandmother’s family originated where we will find yet another cemetery, fortunately one which has been documented. Thus ended our day communing with the ancestors.

On a Very Bad Road to Kamenetz-Podolsk

2011-04-04T14:50:00.000-05:00

Yesterday morning we met our guide, Alex Dunai, and began our journey to Kamenetz-Podolsk in the Ukraine. Kamenetz is the ancestral home of my maternal grandparents and the last ancestral town I needed to visit. Previously I’ve traveled to my other towns in Belarus and Poland. I had met Alex at the International Jewish Genealogy Conference and heard him speak, but this was our first opportunity to have an extended interaction. Alex arrived at our hotel with his new vehicle with a “strong engine” which I would come to appreciate as we navigated roads filled with deep potholes by moving rapidly between lanes while avoiding oncoming traffic. I was grateful to have Alex at the wheel as well as serving as our linguistic aide. This was clearly not a journey we would have wanted to attempt ourselves.

Once out of Lviv we came to small towns where houses lined the road behind low fences, much as I had seen in Lithuania and Belarus, but the homes were less homogenous in color and style. Some sported tile work that seemed to mimic Ukrainian needlework. Farm land surrounds the towns and tall trees have spheres high in their boughs which gives it a very ornamental feel. Alex told us the spheres were mistletoe. It was a warm, sunny day and landscape formed interesting silhouettes against the sun. We passed a cemetery of crosses set amongst the trees with their mistletoe ornaments. Across the road, truncated trees mimicked the form of the crosses. Storks nested high above the houses having just returned from Africa. As we drove, people walked along the side of the road, many were older women with babushkas on their heads and canes in hand. Roosters and chickens and the occasional turkey wandered by the roadside.

After a four and a half hour drive we arrived in Kamenetz Podolsk, clearly the most visually striking town of my ancestral heritage.
An enormous castle/fortress stands in the city like something out of Disneyland, but this is the real

deal. I had seen pictures of it, but one soon realizes that a picture does not do justice to this town. Below the castle is the area of Karvasary, where the Jews lived in earlier times.

The Smotrich River surrounds the city on three sides and flows into the Dinster River. Two bridges cross the river. Below are high bluffs and a canyon-like topography which was clearly visible as greenery had not yet filled in the trees. The bare trees were quite beautiful in their starkness. We walked across both bridges taking countless pictures as each vantage point offered a new vista. As we crossed one of the bridges we noticed something we had seen in Lithuania, locks attached to the bridge with names of young couples and a date engraved. In Lithuania it is a tradition to attach the lock and throw away the key upon marriage. Apparently this is also done in the Ukraine.

I had the name of the street on which my grandfather lived with his family at the time of the 1897 census. Alex had determined that the name had changed, but found the location. The street ended at a large park and the area closest to the park was the older section. I walked along the first few blocks and took photos of the older buildings, imagining how the family lived in the homes in this area.

In the course of our day we tried a few Ukrainian foods that were new to us. As my husband is a ‘pescetarian” ( a vegetarian who eats seafood) we had to think about foods that might work in a country of meat eaters. I was introduced to “green borscht” which is made of sorrel leaves with rice and potatoes. At dinner we tried “mamaleyga” which is like polenta with cheese with some meat atop. My pescetarian husband found potato pancakes and mushroom soup to be good meatless alternatives. He'll be eating a lot of that.

Warsaw and Lviv: Finding Our Way

2011-04-03T14:42:00.000-05:00

For those who may be interested in considering travels to Poland or the Ukraine, I thought it might be helpful to speak to some of our travel experiences and discoveries. I am a price conscious traveler who likes affordable quality. When I plan our trips, I do extensive research, read other travelers' reviews and monitor rates across many sources. My one absolute is Internet in order to write my blog and research my surroundings. Because we had such a positive experience in the Mamaison Isabella while in Budapest last year, I decided to try the same chain in Warsaw. Here I found two Mamaison hotels, one an apartment hotel like we used in Budapest and one which provided a lovely hotel room.

Upon our arrival we went to the Mamaison Regina which is the only hotel located in the old part of the city. Now keep in mind that the old part of the city is actually new having been reconstructed after its wartime destruction. At first I was prepared to not take it seriously, but have come to appreciate that the city went to unusual lengths to preserve its past and the reconstruction is truly masterful. Frescos decorate buildings and design work reminded me of the central plaza in Prague. When we looked out of our dormer window at the Regina we overlooked one of the artfully painted buildings. Around the corner were inexpensive, but appealing restaurants and the Vistula River flowed just a few blocks away. Had we more time in Warsaw it would have been an easy walk across the river to Praga, the area of the city that suffered far less destruction than Warsaw and still contains some of the older buildings. The hotel was tasteful and contemporary and with a favorable rate offered an extraordinary value.

On our return we will be staying at Mamaison’s sister hotel, the Diana, which is an apartment hotel. I expect equally high quality from them. In addition to Budapest and Warsaw, Mamaison also has hotels in Prague, Bratslava and Moscow. The hotels offered favorable rates when booking directly and paying in advance.

We had a lovely dinner our first evening and scoped out a restaurant that served breakfast for the following morning. To our dismay very little was open at 9AM on a Saturday including the restaurant of our choice. We found a small coffee shop where we got the hot chocolate that seems to be typical of at least two experiences in Lublin and Warsaw. Very thick and rich, one eats it with a spoon. The chocolate is similar to what one would find in Spain and is almost dessert – like.

We caught a taxi to the airport in the morning. A short flight got us to Lviv where I began by puzzling out the Cyrillic on the airport building only to discover that it spelled Lviv. We were very surprised by the airport entry as it felt more like an ancient train station and looked very Soviet. We later found that a new one is being built. A slow line moved forward into another room. There we found our luggage and had to run it through a screening machine on the way out. The security person asked if we spoke Ukrainian, German or Polish to which we replied “English”. He had been chatting at length with the woman who preceded us, but our conversational prowess just wasn’t up to the task.

When we exited to the central entrance area, we discovered a bank machine which didn’t know what to do with our card. Hmm, how to get money to get a cab was going to prove to be a problem. A Ukrainian came up to us and through gestures asked if we needed a taxi. I was hesitant to take a private cab, but soon saw that there was no taxi line to access. To my question of “How much” the guide replied only, “Dollars, Euros”. I knew the rate was supposed to be between 80 and 100 grivinas which equates to $10-12 and decided to wing it. He pointed out an ATM across the street from the airport and we got enough grivinas for immediate use.

He soon found our hotel and only then asked for 200 Grivnas. I replied 100 and we settled on 150. In Lviv we are staying at the Hotel Chopin which is a lovely hotel in a convenient location. The staff speaks English and it has a reasonably priced restaurant with a fabulous breakfast, omelets made to order, cappuccino and cinnamon filled croissants. Anything we wanted to order off the menu was included with the room fee. One of the appeals of this hotel is that it is around the corner from the Lviv Art Gallery, a collection of largely Polish and Ukrainian art.

We immediately headed over to the more contemporary section of the Lviv Art Gallery covering the 19th and 20th century and largely Polish and Ukrainian artists. The earlier period of the 15th to 18th century is housed in a nearby palace which we will visit on our return. We entered a room with some rather stodgy looking portraits, but half way through it began to get interesting with artwork that seemed more symbolist in origin. Some of the artists’ work reminded us of other artists with whom we were familiar, but most of the names were unfamiliar to us. I was also surprised to see a series of paintings of Jewish imagery, some by Maurycy Gottlieb.

We then wandered over to the Rynek Square to explore the town and enjoyed the variety of architectural styles which were represented. A striking building with winged figures atop beckoned at the end of a central avenue and we learned that it was the Opera House.

It was a Saturday night and many people were out, but the restaurant that had been recommended near our hotel had closed by 9 PM. Back to the Rynek we went to find an open restaurant. At the one we selected the waitress didn’t speak any English and our command of Ukrainian was nil. Helplessly she looked around the restaurant for help. Taking our order soon became a community effort. A woman at the next table understood our question and relayed it back to the waitress in Ukrainian. Yet another woman helped her on the next question. With the aid of the entire restaurant we soon succeeded in placing an order.

Thus ended our initial foray into Lviv. We look forward to more explorations on our return and may draw on our guide, Alex, for suggestions as Lviv is his home.

A Contact, A Book and An Interview: Preparing for Ukrainian Travels

2011-04-01T22:36:00.000-05:00

We’ve begun our journey to Poland, arriving in Warsaw where we delivered the artwork and the photographs for the Radom exhibition later this month. Tomorrow we head off to Lviv from where we begin our journey to Kamenets-Podolsk, the original home of my maternal grandparents.

As I prepared for our trip to the Ukraine and Poland I received an interesting contact. Betty sent me an e-mail telling me she was a survivor and had a connection to Radom. She invited me to contact her to learn more. When I called her in Ohio I learned that she was a survivor of Trochenbrod, a virtually all Jewish agricultural community in western Ukraine that existed prior to WWII. Many people are familiar with it as the setting of Jonathan Safran-Foer’s book Everything is Illuminated. Few Jewish communities were agricultural and I am unaware of others that were almost exclusively Jewish, a set of circumstances that created a community that was quite unique.

While most of the town was murdered in the Holocaust, Betty had hidden in the forest as a young girl with her family and survived, one of 33 survivors out of 5000 Jewish residents. The only Christian in Trochenbrod was the post-mistress whose son now lives in Radom. As his playmates were the Jewish children he spoke Yiddish and learned some Hebrew as well. Almost sixty years after the war Betty connected with this former childhood playmate.   When she heard of my Radom project from the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage in Ohio, she resolved to contact me. She asked that I reach out to her childhood friend in Radom in the course of my visit.

The story of Trochenbrod has recently been told in a book The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod by Avrom Bendavid-Val.    Betty Gold (then Basia-Ruchel Potash) tells her harrowing story in the book as does the son of the post-mistress. As I always try to do topical reading for my travels, this book on the Jews of the Ukraine seemed especially appropriate for my airplane reading and began to give me some context on the relationships between Jews and the nearby Ukrainian villagers. Ukrainians were often used as killers by the Nazis, but this book does underscore the positive relationships which also existed between Jews and their Ukrainian neighbors.

A few days ago as part of my Identity and Legacy oral history project, I had the opportunity to interview a Ukrainian Jewish woman from Kiev. She too spoke of the positive relationships that existed into the 1930s between Jews and Ukrainians.   It began to change in 1932 when a famine was created by the policies of the Soviet Union as they began to move towards agricultural collectivization. Millions of people died and the Jews fared somewhat better than the Ukrainians creating jealousies. When I asked why the Jews fared better she gave examples of Jews using resources more efficiently and being more entrepreneurial in order to survive. This is a theme that also was addressed in the book on Trochenbrod where the Jews took poor farmland and irrigated it to make it usable. I suspect that this creative and entrepreneurial bent grew out of the restrictions that were often placed on Jews historically.

From unusual contacts to newly discovered books to timely interviews, it seems that many forces are converging to educate me as I seek to understand the historic and human dynamics that affected Jewish and Ukrainian interactions.

Jewish Life in the Soviet Union

2011-03-26T16:25:00.000-05:00

Currently I am doing a series of oral histories in a Jewish elder facility focused on the topic of identity and legacy. One of the facilities is home to many Russian immigrants and I have had several interesting interviews in recent weeks. One in particular has stayed with me. The person I interviewed, Boris, told me first of the death of his parents and sisters at the hands of the Nazis. First they had to build a bunker for Hitler and then were executed upon its completion. Boris held out a picture of a beautiful woman, his sister, the only picture he has of family.

He then related a story about his father-in-law who had a Russian passport prior to the revolution. By Russian he meant that it said he was Christian. His father-in-law’s parents had converted and married in a church in order to get the benefits of jobs and education which were frequently barred to Jews. After the church wedding they went home and had a Jewish service. After the revolution his father-in-law went to the authorities and asked for a Jewish passport. He believed that he would now be able to exist as a Jew without discrimination. Unfortunately that hope was not fulfilled.

Boris related how he and his wife had chosen to have their son take his mother’s name which was not a Jewish name as it was derived from a town. They made this choice to protect him from discrimination. After they followed their son to the United States his son took back his father’s Jewish name and lives proudly today as a Jew.

These interviews have heightened my interest in learning about life in the Soviet Union as a Jew and that interest was furthered by a wonderful book titled Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler’s War and Stalin’s Peace by Masha Gessen. The author of this book is a journalist who traces the story of her two grandmothers, close friends before their son and daughter married producing the author. Both Jewish, one was born in Bialystok and went to Russia to study, the other was a Russian Jew by birth. Ester, the Polish Jew, loses her father and fiance to the Nazis, but her mother is deported to Russia saving her and giving Ester a small nucleus of family. The story relates the challenges of being Jewish both in pre-war Poland and in post-war Russia. Many of the pre-war incidents she references echo the stories I’ve gathered from Dora, my friend who came from the Polish town of my grandfather’s birth. I had not fully appreciated the deep Zionist stirrings in the Polish communities nor how much the doors of other countries were slammed in the faces of Jews who sought escape prior to the war. Limited numbers were allowed into Palestine and in the five years prior to Hitler’s rise in 1933 the US issued just 33,000 visas to Europe’s Jews. The post 1924 visa files that I now access in family history research exist only because the US was shutting the door.

Many of the Jews who survived were those who were able to make their way to Russia or were deported to Russia. Yet living in Russia brought compromises and challenges. One grandmother is a censor of international correspondents and is in the unique position of reading the uncensored news even while she must literally toe "the party line". Taking a stand against reporting on others can mean danger not only to oneself, but to one’s family and joining the party is necessary for survival, but not necessarily sufficient. Throughout this the obstacles strewn in one’s path to securing education and employment as a Jew are daunting. The Zionist stirrings are viewed as challenges to the Russian state and Jews were targeted with deadly anti-Semitism. My interview with Boris comes into sharper focus as the outcome of this virulent history. Many of the children immigrated to seek freedom from discrimination and the parents followed in their wake.

Ordering Visa Files

2011-03-18T23:21:00.000-05:00

As of late I've been busy preparing for my travels to Poland. Today I received enlargements of all of Dora's photographs which have an odd power in their grainy quality. There is one of her and her father which was clearly folded four ways to fit in a shoe throughout the war. We'll be bringing these photos and Dora's story to Poland together with my paintings to tell the story of the former Jewish community.

On another topic, a month ago I ordered a visa record from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service for a cousin of some sort who had left Glasgow for the Chicago. My quest is to tie him back to the Belarus shtetl of Dunilowicz and thus solve a long time family mystery of a link to relatives in the UK. Yesterday I received the first step in this process, the case number for which I paid $20. Then I pay another $35 in order to get the visa file which should contain a birth record. It took one month to get through this first step. All ordering is on-line so very simple to execute. I always wonder what the mailman thinks is the story behind this correspondence from the U.S. Citzenship and Immigration Service that comes to my home.

Who Tells the History?

2011-03-08T21:57:00.000-06:00

Last week I attended the conference of the Council of American Jewish Museums in Philadelphia. There I had an opportunity to visit the new National Museum of American Jewish History. There were many topics of interest at the conference and as the focus was on story it tied closely to the type of artwork that I do. Museums are exploring the use of oral histories as a way to tell the story and Holocaust museums are evaluating the question of how to teach about the Holocaust when the survivors are no longer present.

Hovering over all of these discussions is the fundamental question of who tells the history and what is the story? Is it told differently if it is a museum focused upon the Jewish experience, the African – American experience or other museums grounded in the ethnicity that they represent?

I put that question to the test as I toured the Museum of American Jewish History. I was curious as to how they would addressed America’s response to news of concentration camps in WWII. They accurately noted that the State Department had willfully obstructed the flow of information about the plans of the Nazis and prevented actions being taken to rescue Jews. Information was provided to them as early as 1942 which they not only failed to respond to, but buried. Would this show up in a museum with a broader focus? What about quota systems for Jews that prevented them from gaining entrance to schools solely on the basis of their ethnicity? There is history that is uniquely told by those most affected by it and I came away feeling that this new museum did an admirable job of telling it.

Prior Research Solves the Mystery: More Scottish Discoveries

2011-02-20T16:39:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I wrote about my discovery of a branch of my Belarussian family that settled in London and Glasgow. That discovery sent me back to my files to see what I may have gathered previously that might now make sense in light of this new information.

A year ago I had access to the records of the Jewish Chronicle. This UK publication documents many of the important life events within the Jewish community. When I went through it, I recorded any record that noted a Kodish as well as articles on family ancestral towns. Now I had some new names to search, Sarah and Barnet, Max and Jack. My searching proved fruitful as I discovered an obituary for Barnet in 1916 which told me that he had come to the U.K. It named his three children, Max, Solomon and Jack, but didn't mention his wife who presumably predeceased him. Then in 1974 I stumbled across the obituary for Max's second wife that names all their children, spouses and grandchildren.

I find that much of the time I put into genealogy research is prospective. I record all the records for family names in a region or time period where I knew they lived, trusting that at some future point it will all make sense. It is like laying out all the pieces for the center of a puzzle which just look like a jumble until I get the straight edges into place to anchor them.

In reviewing information I had collected on the Kodish family I found one piece of information that looked intriguing. In 1938 Jacob Kodish, presumably the brother of Max, immigrated from Glasgow to the US. He noted he was born in Vilna, the district that branch of the family came from and which was the larger area around Dunilowitz. He was 47 at the time so would have been born in 1891. He was going to his wife Bloome in Chicago and noted that he had been in the US in 1923 and 1925. An immigration record for Bloome shows up in 1923 with their children Joe, Sid and Anna going to her brother in Chicago. So what causes me to think this is the correct record? Three things aside from the Glasgow linkage...He gives his nearest relative in Glasgow as his brother Solomon. At this point his other brother Max has died as has his father so Solomon would have been the only one left. The other detail that causes me to think this is a family member is the way he came over. He worked on the ship as a waiter in exchange for passage, exactly the same way that his nephew Lewis Kodish came over. The fact that he went to Chicago where Lewis also went seems to indicate family members that both may have accessed. As the 1940 census isn't out yet, I can't check to see if they were still in the US at that date, but I do have a plan of attack to secure more information.

In 1938 he would have needed to have obtained a visa to come to the United States. In fact he would have needed one in 1925 also. A visa file can be ordered from the US Citizenship and Immigration Service which will typically include a birth record and other identifying information. As Jacob was born in Eastern Europe it would provide the link I've been seeking to the original ancestral town. It may also provide more information on the original name of his mother who is where the relationship to my family resides.

So one death record opens up the door to 25 new members on a family tree and a likely linkage to the Eastern European community from which they originally came.

A Discovery in Scotland

2011-02-19T21:15:00.000-06:00

This morning when I checked my e-mails, I had an exciting surprise. As I’ve been preparing for our upcoming trip to the Ukraine and Poland, I had placed a message on the Ukraine Special Interest Group of jewishgen.org. In that I had asked if anyone had been to Kamenetz-Podolsk or Chotin and if so if they could share any information. One of my responses was from a name that was familiar to me. Harvey Kaplan, the director of the Scottish Jewish archives, was on my list of people to contact to pursue my British/Scottish roots. An e-mail exchange followed and this morning I was greeted with an e-mail from Harvey with the death record of a relative who links back to my Belarussian shtetl of Dunilowitz.

A little back story follows, but you can also find more detail in the following blog entries: Finding my British Family and Finding my British Family Take2. A cousin of my father remembered family in England and receiving a gift of boxing gloves from them. He remembered their name as Kodish. Upon his death I found in his photos one signed “from your cousin Louis Kodish” and the search ensued. Since then I have found immigration records to and from the U.S. of Louis and his wife Katherine. In 1929 he came to a relative in NY and then moved to Chicago. In 1934 he returned to Glasgow which was the home of his father Marks Kodish. I obtained his visa file as a visa was required for immigration in 1929. Within that was his birth record which gave his mother’s name. I traced him back to Glasgow in 1934 at which point I lost the trail.

I shared this information with Harvey who checked several sources and while not finding Lewis discovered a death record for Marks/Max Kodish, his father. The first thing I do when I receive such a record is try to confirm that it is the correct person. A few things lead me to believe that it is. Listed by his name is the name of both his first wife and his second. The first wife’s name is Kate which corresponds with the birth certificate for Lewis Kodish. The person who submitted the record is Jack Kodish. When I went back to my notes from almost ten years ago, I discovered that my father’s cousin also had remembered a Jack or Jacob Kodish. According to the death record this is the brother of Max. After confirming these details I noted something unusual. The record gave the names of Max Kodish’s parents. They were listed as Barnet Kodish and Sarah Kodish with a maiden surname of Rothschild.

My great-grandfather’s original name was Raichel, but upon coming to the United States he followed the lead of another cousin and changed it to Rothschild. Did this happen in England as well? It is quite possible that Barnet and Sarah did not immigrate, but their names were Anglicized by the person providing information in the death record. My great-great grandfather Pesach Mordechai, who never left Dunilowicz,was listed as Peter and Max in the death records of his children. As there was contact between the family in Great Britain and the US they would have known of the name change to Rothschild and may have updated the maiden name in their family retrospectively.

The record contains additional information which may prove useful in the future. It tells me that Max Kodish was a furniture manufacturer and his father was a “restauratent”. At first I assumed that he ran a restaurant, but in combination with his son’s profession, I wonder if he might have restored furniture. While Max died in Glasgow it lists both his address in Glasgow as well as his usual residence which is an address in London. Given that his son was born in London, he appears to have lived in both Glasgow and London at different times. It also provides the address that he died at in Glasgow which could well be that of his brother Jack. He died at age 58 in 1936 so would have been born in 1878.

So now I turn to the question of how I’m related. To figure that out I had to map out the relationships and group them by age, not always foolproof in a time when families were large and childbearing often an extended period. To counter that I listed ages of siblings when possible to capture the broad range for comparison. By working my way backwards I concluded that Sarah Rothschild Kodish was a sibling to my great-great grandfather, Pesach Mordechai. Max was a cousin to my great-grandfather and Louis a cousin to my grandmother. And so a mystery is solved about that mysterious British connection. Still many puzzles to explore, but the relationships are now explained.

In 1997 my parents went to London for their 50th wedding anniversary and copied down Kodishes from the phone book. Fourteen years later we've identified relationships. Answers unfold over many years.

Puzzles that I will continue to explore are whether Barnet and Sarah immigrated to the UK. With their names identifed, I can now begin to explore that question. I also can explore the history of Max's brother Jack and any family he may have had in the UK. The puzzle of what happened to Louis and Katherine also remains an open question. New answers raise new questions and no dearth of puzzles to explore.

Preparing for Poland and a Question of Identity

2011-02-14T14:02:00.000-06:00

With my return from London, I've quickly plunged into my next two projects. The first is my upcoming show in Radom, Poland, the town of my grandfather's birth. The show will be of artwork based on the former Jewish community and derived from a 1937 film created by a visiting former resident. My artwork will represent one part of the exhibition. The other with which I am also deeply involved is telling the story of my friend Dora, a former Radom resident. Dora, a survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen settled in my community after the war. She has shared her stories with me through many hours of interviews as well as her scrapbooks of photos that capture a time before the war and during the ghetto. My task has been to complete, edit and link our hours of interviews to the photos that best tell her story. I share this in turn with the arts & culture center in Radom to translate the interviews to Polish for their audience for this portion of the exhibit. In between I try to complete the paintings I plan to bring with me to Radom. I’ve been working on a few images of the elder religious Jews. While Dora has spent much of her life working with Holocaust education and done many visits to Radom, this will be the first where she speaks to Poles about her memories and experiences. She said to me that she is going with me because she hopes it will prove to be “meaningful”. That is my hope as well although for me personally it has already proven to be that. Sharing the story in Poland will add yet another layer of meaning.

The second project with which I am working is also oral history within my own community, yet closely linked to the cultural heritage that I have been exploring in Eastern Europe. Together with a partner, I am interviewing residents at a Jewish elder care facility. In recent weeks we have done two interviews, both with women in their 90s and I am energized and delighted with our results. Firstly because they represent a positive model for me of how one can age. Secondly because of the richness of their stories and the way they evoke Jewish cultural history and give me a view into local history. I feel like I’ve been entrusted with something of value and hope that I can do justice to it. The project is called the Jewish Identity and Legacy project and focuses on both how a Jewish identity is formed and how that in turn feeds legacy. I plan to develop a series of artwork around the stories at a later date and am pleased at the rich visual imagery that is emerging.

I think we often focus on topics that address our own questions and the topic of Jewish identity is one I often contemplate. I am convinced that while it may relate to religion, it doesn’t have to. There is more to it than that and I am interested in understanding that question. The women we interviewed grew up in strong Jewish communities with deep ties to both religion and culture, environments that don’t exist in the same form today. We live in a world of greater assimilation that presumably will affect the sense of Jewish identity in the future. And yet…As a non-religious Jew married to a non-Jew, I have a strong Jewish identity that has only deepened through my research into cultural history. So what is that all about? I look forward to examining that question as I delve into this project.

Across the Pond: London Opening

2011-01-29T18:25:00.000-06:00

Earlier this week I gave a talk at an opening of my Lithuanian based artwork at the London gallery of Woolfson and Tay. The opening was coordinated with national Holocaust day. My comments related to the experience I had in Lithuania that underlies this body of work and I thought it would be appropriate to share an excerpt of those comments here.

I was especially pleased to show this artwork at this particular gallery because the context was very appropriate to the nature of this work. The owners of this gallery also run a nonprofit called Living Imprint through which they produced a film titled Surviving History. The film is composed of interviews with survivors of the Vilnius area and is truly poignant as it examines the experience of these survivors in the latter stage of their life. Two of the survivors were our guides in Lithuania.

I wanted to share with you the back story of what brought me to London. A few years ago I decided I wanted to learn Yiddish. Now the reason I wanted to learn Yiddish was to include it in my artwork. Several years ago I did a series of artwork on family history. In the series I frequently used language and especially liked the use of non-Latin languages such as Russian, Yiddish or Hebrew because one first experiences them on a graphic level. If one knows a bit of the language you might then decipher the literal level. Since my work was focused on family and cultural history, I decided to learn Yiddish to better incorporate it into my artwork. As there are few opportunities to learn Yiddish in my community I signed up to attend the Vilnius Yiddish Institute in Vilnius, Lithuania.

There I participated in an intense language program of several hours of class a day and several hours of homework each evening. In addition to the language program, I also participated in a cultural program led largely by two guides who were both survivors. They took us through the former Jewish areas of Vilnius and the ghetto. Fania, a former partisan, took us to Ponar, the forest where most of the Jews of Vilnius were murdered. They talked of their experiences during those times and the community as it once was. When we were in the forest of Ponar, one of our group asked Fania how she could come and tell the story of what occurred when her family lied buried in the pits. She replied, “I speak for them because they cannot stand up and speak for themselves”.

When I returned home I developed this body of work, my attempt to tell the stories that we learned from our guides and from living in Vilnius. I wondered how I could create the sense of intensity that we experienced because of these amazing women in their 80s who were our guides and I remembered the film Surviving History that I saw while in Vilnius. I contacted Living Imprint to see if I could get a copy to show in conjunction with my artwork and included a link to my artwork. They liked what they saw and here I am.

I call this series The Silence Speaks Loudly because I was very aware of silence in Lithuania about the former Jewish community and the Holocaust. There were few traces of the former Jewish community and frequently silence about what had occurred. For me the silence only made me more conscious of the missing communities. I often use the metaphor of negative space to describe it. When I say “negative space”, I mean in the artistic sense. You have probably seen the image of two faces in profile facing each other. When you focus on the space between the faces, the negative space, you see the form of a goblet created by the outlines of their profiles. For me the Jewish communities existed in that negative space and were formed out of the silence and the edges of the community that remained.

The silence, the negative space, is manifest in a number of ways. There is a lack of physical traces of the former Jewish community. In Vilnius, a community which was 45% Jewish ,there are few buildings with Yiddish writing on them that remain. In a city that once had over 100 synagogues only one remains in active use supporting the small Jewish community that is left. The traces of other former synagogues were not evident. So physical traces are largely absent.

The memory is also often silent. While we were in Vilnius there was a young woman in the Vilnius Yiddish Institute program who grew up in Kaunas. She told us that she didn’t know that Jews had made up 45% of her city until she was in college and accidentally ran across a book by a Lithuanian Jew. Now that in itself is an oxymoron in that one is either considered to be Lithuanian or Jewish, but not both. In any case until she was 13 the Soviets were in control and they did not talk of Jews dying in the Holocaust, only Soviet citizens or people. So the exposure didn’t occur then, but even after that it was only by accident that she learned this. Now she was interested in learning more and sought information, but that is far more the exception than the rule.

There is a silence that is perpetuated today through such institutions as the Genocide Museum. The term genocide was coined by a Polish Jew after the Holocaust. It literally means “race killing”. In a city where 45% of the population was murdered there is no mention of the Holocaust in the Genocide Museum, a building that was once Gestapo headquarters. The story that is told is that of the Soviet occupation. The only allusion to the Holocaust was in reference to the Lithuanian partisans where it says “some violence against the civilian population occurs as happens in any war”.

So where does this silence come from? During the war, Lithuania was very complicit with the Nazis. Now that is not to say that there were not some Lithuanians who reached out to their Jewish neighbors, but for the most part Lithuania cooperated with the Nazis and performed many of the murders. Many of the people who fought with the Nazis and actively murdered Jews during the war subsequently became partisans fighting the Soviets. They are viewed as national heroes. It is hard to have a dialogue about the Holocaust when it implicates your national heroes.

I also think the division between being Lithuanian or Jewish creates a sense of otherness, allowing a distancing from the Holocaust and a separation of histories, the Holocaust as the history of the Jews, the Soviet Occupation as that of Lithuanians.

I found these issues very disturbing and my artwork was my response to them. I felt that in my small way I needed to share my observations and my artwork is the vehicle by which I do that.

I then shared a number of paintings with their accompanying stories. You can find the stories at Studio 409 Art. Two of them are included below:

The painting Gedenken is really the signature piece of this series. It is of the forest of Ponar where the Jews of Vilnius were murdered. I started sketching it on the plane returning home. When one stands in a forest that was a killing site, it is natural to look up at the trees and think about them witnessing what occurred. Or conversely to look at them and think they were the last vision of those who perished. I wanted a painting that was tall and this one is six feet high. The one I did for London is actually a second iteration on two hinged canvases so I could more easily ship it. Below the trees I wanted to represent the pits in which people were murdered, but not get too macabre. I decided to use Yiddish letters turned on their side as figurative elements. In many ways the language also faced near extinction along with its speakers. Upright bands of the word "Gedenken" run between the random letters getting larger at the bottom as if they were being viewed from that vantage point. "Gedenken" means "remember".

The companion piece to this painting is one called Buried Truths which is based on a true story. During WWII a Polish journalist lived in the forest near Ponar. He witnessed the murders of Jews by Lithuanians. He saw them brought to the forest, their clothing confiscated as the murderers learned that clothing with bullet holes didn’t sell as well on the secondary market. From the Lithuanians he heard the stories of escapees and attempts to hide children in piles of clothing. Each day he wrote about what he witnessed and buried what he wrote in jars in the forest. After the war what he had written began to surface in archives. A woman named Rachel Margolis pieced it together and published the book the Ponary Diary. Needless to say, it was quite controversial as it named names. I liked the idea of bottles buried underground, representing truths that were too dangerous to reveal at that time. I wanted some sprouting pages like leaves as truth will eventually emerge.

The show will run through February 20th in London at Woolfson and Tay.

The Chessplayers of Radom

2011-01-07T20:01:00.000-06:00

I've been working on a painting in my Radom series of a group of chessplayers on the streets of Radom. It has been one of the paintings I've struggled with, but have found pleasing in those rare moments when it works. It has gone through many iterations, but below is a detail from what I have thus far. The painting has quite a bit of texture from the medium which builds up the figures.

I asked Dora whether she recalled chessplayers in Radom and she advised me that chess, like playing the violin, was a cultural occupation of the Jewish community. All the men played chess and taught their sons and grandsons.

"It's a thinking game", she added. You have to be able to outthink and predict what your opponent's movements will be."

I found myself wondering about that skill set and whether in fact it was fostered by an environment of potential danger where one had to be able to outthink and predict an opponent's movements in the real world.

Show in Radom, Poland

2011-01-04T16:54:00.000-06:00

Having shipped my Lithuanian based artwork to London, I've refocused my energies on preparing for my show in Poland in April. I plan to bring 9 or 10 small paintings on wood panels that capture the former Jewish community of Radom, the town from which my grandfather came.

If all goes well, my friend Dora will be accompanying us on this trip. Dora is a Holocaust survivor who grew up in Radom. She was 15 years old when the war broke out. A remarkable woman, she has been kind enough to share her recollections with me as well as commenting on the imagery that I am capturing from the 1937 film of Radom. She has many photos and documents from before the war and during the time of the ghetto. When her brother and mother left to be deported, her brother grabbed random photographs. He kept them in his shoes throughout the war. Even in Dachau his shoes were never taken from him so the photographs survived.

While my paintings seek to capture the community that once existed, Dora brings a unique perspective to this effort. In addition to showing my artwork we hope to put together imagery that tells her story and puts a real face on the former Jewish community that seems to be a subject of fascination in Poland.

It is interesting to me that the reaction of the Poles today is so different than that of the Lithuanians, my other series of Eastern European artwork. In Lithuania there is often silence and a rewriting of history. In Poland there is considerable interest in the former Jewish community. A virtual Jewish community has developed without Jews, although one aspect of this is that some Poles are discovering they have long hidden Jewish ancestry. The Nazis followed by the Soviets was certainly enough to make any surviving Jew obscure their religious heritage.

Dora reminded me that the Poles as a government never collaborated with the Nazis as occurred in other countries. Still the story is not always a pretty one. I accessed a new website recently called the Historical Jewish Press. I typed in Radom and up popped an article from September 1945 that related the murder of returning Jews to Radom. Having survived the death camps, many didn't survive their return home. These outbreaks were attributed to the Polish Fascist Underground and were sufficient for most returning Jews to abandon Poland. A generation later, perhaps enough time has passed to feel comfortable learning about the community that lived in their midst.

And so I continue to work on my series of paintings and scan Dora's documents and photos. Our effort will be to build bridges and understanding with the community that exists today.

The Pathways of One's Life

2010-12-26T16:35:00.000-06:00

Have you ever thought about how each action lays the groundwork for the next? Any genealogist soon learns how each document provides information that leads to the next piece of information. A census record helps you to hone in on an immigration record, a death or marriage record gives you the names of the prior generation. Step by step we construct a family tree by leveraging off prior discoveries. It is only when we look behind us that we realize how far we’ve come.

Lately I’ve been thinking of the process of genealogy as a metaphor for understanding the pathways of one's own life, not just the lives of our ancestors. Just as with genealogy, we begin to understand and manage our path through life when we understand the way each step opens the door for new paths and how multiple paths can begin to weave together into a more powerful direction than any one path in isolation. The often innocuous discovery can lead to opportunity. Sometimes the opportunity is right in front of us, but we don’t recognize it until we are ready.

I am an “ incrementalist” by nature, realizing that the big stuff grows out of many little steps. And perhaps I am more focused on this than most, going so far as to keep a spreadsheet of steps taken and what they lead to.

Let me give you an example…Recently I was invited to show my artwork on Radom, Poland at the arts and culture center in the city of Radom. I’ve had many people ask how that came about and I realize there is no simple answer, multiple threads connected to create that opportunity. Just as I often retrace my steps in genealogy to understand how I solved the puzzle, I began to retrace my steps in life.

In actuality it started over five years ago when I tracked down a second cousin in Israel. His daughter who spoke English became my point of connection. When she was going to a conference in Montreal, I flew up to Montreal to meet her. There I also met her cousin who is head of the Radom Society, the organization for survivors and children of survivors of Radom who live in Montreal.

And another thread…Early this year I developed the Shtetlink for Radom, Poland. The Shtetlink is a website for Jewishgen.org that is created to help others researching family from that town. In developing the site, I connected with people all over the world sending out 400 e-mails to fellow researchers. One Israeli friend provided me with a homemade film of the Jewish community of Radom that dated to 1937, five years before that community was annihilated. In taking stills from the film for the website, I realized its potential as source material for artwork. That same friend connected me with the arts and culture center when I was planning a trip to Radom. They very kindly assisted me in getting the key to the cemetery as well as providing photos for the website.

I’ve been working on a series of artwork on Radom, but feeling the need for story to breathe life into it. My work typically is a vehicle to tell a story and while the Radom work captures a picture of the former Jewish community, it needed more. I do quite a bit of public speaking and it was through an arts connection who heard me speak that I was introduced to a woman in my community who is a survivor from Radom. She has graciously agreed to let me interview her and incorporate her memories with my artwork.

So we have the website, source material feeding into a body of artwork, a survivor’s story, a connection in Radom and a connection in Montreal. Now we have only to set it in motion. I have a mental image of a pinball machine shooting the ball forward. A month ago I received an e-mail from the head of the Montreal Radom Society telling me about a new development in Radom. I’ve written about it in this blog at An Unusual Collaboration , but essentially it was the discovery of 70 previously unknown Jewish tombstones that had been hidden away and are now incorporated into a monument, that had recently been dedicated.

Now to appreciate this fully you must realize that the Nazis used many of the Radom tombstones to pave the roads, not only destroying the synagogue and the people, but also destroying the history of past Jewish families as reflected in the cemetery. I promptly decided I needed to get pictures of the tombstones for the Shtetlink, but how to do so? An e-mail to my contact at the arts and culture center soon secured their agreement to send me photos. Of course, I also shared with them the link to my artwork on Radom and the story of my interviewing the survivor. They quickly responded with a request that I consider showing my work in April when they do a focus on the former Jewish community of Radom.

And that is how things happen.

The Budapest Brain Drain

2010-12-03T13:43:00.000-06:00

My travels and research are often accompanied by a reading program on related topics. In recent years I’ve been particularly intrigued by the cities of Eastern Europe and especially the Jewish experience. While the Holocaust was a defining historical event, I am also interested in the Jewish experience pre-war as well as post-war. What was life like? When did they begin to sense danger in their environment, a danger that exceeded the “conventional’ anti-Semitism of that time and place? After the war, many Jews continued to live under Communism. Others immigrated and attempted to rebuild their lives as survivors. Obviously the Holocaust would have marked their experience and responses to their environment, but in what way?

My family history research has awakened an interest in history as it provides a context for understanding it on a personal level. The books that I find most enlightening are those that present history through the lens of those living it. I only wish that I had been able to learn history in this manner originally as it would have captivated me much sooner. Earlier this year I had the opportunity to visit Budapest and learn more about the history of that region. When I stumbled across a book by Kati Marton, I was intrigued by its focus on Budapest and its mention of familiar places that we had visited. As the daughter of Hungarian journalists with Jewish roots, she has a unique connection to the city. Her parents were journalists in Budapest during the Communist regime, arrested, imprisoned and finally released, ultimately immigrating to the US. Years later she goes back to Budapest and reads the files of the secret police, realizing the constant surveillance that her parents had been under in both Budapest and the US. Her book Enemies of the People paints a vivid picture of life under the Communist regime.

While Marton’s maternal grandparents had perished at Auschwitz and her father’s career options were restricted by his Jewish heritage, the family raised their children as Catholics. It was not until Marton was an adult that she stumbled across her Jewish roots.

Marton’s book, The Great Escape also focuses upon Hungary, in this case the stories of nine Hungarian Jews who left their country as Hitler came to power. Settling in the US and England, these nine Jews became major figures in physics, photography, film and literature. While Marton’s memoir Enemies of the People, tells one story in which she is herself a character, The Great Escape captures a broader experience by virtue of the multiple and often intersecting histories it presents. The Great Escape looks at the story of four scientists: Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner and John von Neumann. These scientists were key figures in the creation of the atomic bomb. In addition von Neumann, a renowned mathematician, was known for inventing Game Theory and pioneering the computer.

The book relates a fascinating journey by Szilard and Wigner to visit Einstein in Long Island. There they discussed the experiments in Germany which suggested a nuclear chain reaction could be created by bombarding uranium with neutrons. They then added a piece of information that Einstein had not yet contemplated, that this in turn could create atomic bombs. Much of their impetus for their involvement in the creation of the atomic bomb was the fear that the Nazis would get there first, a fear colored by their realization of the danger presented by the Nazis long before the US shared that understanding. Several of them had studied physics in Berlin and knew the advances in science that could make this possible. Einstein was alarmed enough to sign a letter to President Roosevelt to alert him to this threat which ultimately led to the Manhattan Project. After Hitler’s death, the creators of the atomic bomb assumed opposite sides of the issue. Szilard opposed the use of the atomic bomb convinced that the mere threat of it would have been sufficient.

Marton also tells the story of Robert Capa and Andre Kertesz, major figures in modern photojournalism. Michael Curtiz, the producer of the movie Casablanca and Alexander Korda, a major producer/director are also chronicled. Marton rounds out the nine with the political writer Arthur Koestler. While all are interesting lives, the preponderance of the scientists who were so central to key world events causes these segments to dominate the book.

Marton hypothesizes that the position of these men as outsiders contributed to the remarkable roles they ultimately played. They were outsiders on many levels, as Jews and as Hungarians. Marton makes the point that Hungary was isolated by way of being landlocked and “language” locked, the language having no relationship to other languages and thus limited to a small segment of population. In fact, many of those of whom she writes had extensive language skills that eased their transition between cultures. She also notes that they were all nonobservant Jews, a product of the secular world of Budapest and its café society. Many of these men came of age in a period of rich cultural ferment prior to WWI. Many went on to study in Berlin. They were worldly and well-educated and highly sensitized to changes in the political environment. Enough so that they saw the impending dangers, departed and re-established their lives and careers.

I found the consideration of “outsider” status of particular interest as I believe the outsider role frees one up to challenge the conventional wisdom, to “think outside of the box”. I think it is likely that the considerable success of many Jews is partially attributable to that factor. When one doesn’t have access to the traditional rewards of the system, one is strangely freed up to do the unexpected, to create one’s own path.

Creating a Cohesive Whole

2010-11-24T18:11:00.000-06:00

I’ve been working on the series on Radom and am beginning to think about how to create a cohesive whole as well as sections that can stand as a group. I’ve been using a limited palette of black, white, red iron oxide and phthalo blue although more brown tones are beginning to emerge as a mix of these colors . Red iron oxide and phthalo blue are my favorite colors and form the backbone of virtually all of my paintings.

In this series the colors will unify the imagery, but I realized I also need to keep the size of the images relatively consistent as well. That means that images like the bicyclist which are of a smaller scale will be eliminated and new images like the market will be added in their stead. I also am thinking in thematic series within the broader series. While colors may vary slightly between the images, the thematic series should be more unified by color. The water carrier and the market are a pair as are the two of the women in the cemetery. I’ve begun to group these on my art website so I can begin to picture the larger piece. In my newly completed market scene you will notice that the water carrier who has his own painting appears in the background as well.

I am drawing imagery from a 1937 film that offers very poor quality images. This is both challenging and beneficial as it forces me to interpret and reinvent imagery into something recognizable. Some images are truly compelling in their original form. Others require consolidating multiple images to form a painting. Many of the images are of people looking at the camera and while this may not be the normal everyday scene, I like the idea of the townspeople engaging with the viewer. I anticipate breaking it up a bit by including some imagery of buildings, but don't have nearly as much fun doing paintings of buildings so they may come at the end.

London Bound

2010-11-24T17:49:00.000-06:00

Late in December I will be shipping off my Lithuania based artwork to the Woolfson and Tay gallery in London. There it will be in an exhibition that will kick off with an opening event around Holocaust Day. As I will be speaking at the opening, I’ve begun to put words to my work. Artwork often begins in a less verbal place and words are a way not only to explain it to others, but to make sense of it to myself after the fact.

I have come to realize that my work is very much about testimony. When I was in Lithuania our guides were those who experienced the Holocaust first-hand. In telling others of what occurred they offered their testimony as evidence, proof of what they experienced and witnessed. In telling their experience they verify the events that occurred in a country where denial and minimization of those events is all too frequent. Those determined women who told us of their experiences are in their 80s. When they are gone, the testimony that they so fervently offer will be gone also. History will be rewritten to a more palatable version. It is already occurring.

So what is my role, a mere observer 70 years later? Perhaps I should say, “What is my responsibility?” because I feel that I have one. At minimum it is to take what I’ve learned and observed and communicate it more broadly. We all use the tools at our disposal and so my artwork becomes a kind of testimony, reflecting my response to information I’ve learned and observed. My experience has been that imagery allows one to tell a story that stays with the viewer. By linking it with an image there is a visual hook and thus artwork is a natural vehicle to preserve testimony.

An Unusual Collaboration Unveils Lost Radom Tombstones

2010-11-20T11:08:00.000-06:00

When I visited my ancestral town of Radom, Poland, we had an opportunity to visit the Jewish cemetery. Just a few tombstones remained intact with broken portions embedded in the wall that surrounds the cemetery. The Germans had used many of the tombstones to build a runway and to pave a road to the airport.

I recently learned an interesting story about the Radom cemetery and efforts throughout Poland to restore Jewish cemeteries. Prisoners from 50 Polish jails have volunteered to participate in a project to restore Jewish cemeteries. When the Israeli Prison Service learned of these efforts they began a collaboration with their counterparts in Poland. Brian Anderson, a former Brit who retired to Israel, became aware of these efforts and raised the funds for this project to continue.

Haim Kincler, head of the Israeli Radom Society, made a fascinating discovery on one of his visits to Radom. A Polish tombstone maker had moved 70 of the most elaborate tombstones to safety hoping to sell them at a later time. This plan was thwarted by the Communist regime which prohibited citizens from holding anything of historical value. Many years later the sons of the tombstone maker returned the tombstones to the city with the understanding that they would be showcased. With the support of the Polish cemetery project, a monument was recently unveiled which incorporates the 70 tombstones. Thus an important piece of history has been preserved. I am making some inquiries to see if I can secure photos of these tombstones for use on the Radom Shtetlink as they may well represent family members of those who are researching family from Radom. You can read more about this at Vos is Neias? (What’s News) along with pictures of the monument.

Of Bicyclists and Water Carriers

2010-10-29T23:11:00.000-05:00

I am continuing to develop the series on the Jewish community of Radom, the town in Poland from which my grandfather came. I am using a 1937 homemade film of the Jewish community as source material and am painting in a size of 12 inches by 12 inches. There is something satisfying about working in this size. It is a study, a snapshot of a moment in time. Something I should be able to capture quickly, although that is not always the case.

I’ve learned that size has little to do with the amount of work a painting may demand. Someone recently asked me how long a painting takes me. Some paintings almost paint themselves. Others start with an idea that evolves. Sometimes there are happy accidents and sometimes it is a struggle and I paint over it several times before arriving at something with which I am satisfied. When I paint something that is representational it is easier in the sense that I know where I am going with it although I may struggle to capture it. When I am trying to capture a quality evoked through texture or layering, I may work it extensively. And there are those paintings that lean against the wall indefinitely waiting in vain to be announced as finished.

I am posting two that are still in progress. The one on the left is of a bicyclist on a crowded street. As I look at a cross-section of seven paintings I find that there are qualities I like in some better than others. In some paintings I’ve used medium to build up the surface and then carved into it giving it a three dimensional quality. I plan to go back to the other paintings to try to create that same quality so they look more unified.

Since I began this series I’ve had a serendipitous development. I’ve been doing quite a bit of public speaking on genealogy and artwork and someone who heard me speak remembered that a woman she met is a survivor from Radom. I called her up and discovered a wonderful connection quite apart from our Radom link. We’ve been getting together regularly and I’ve invited her to collaborate with me in this project by sharing her recollections around some of these images. My new friend is now in her 80s, but was 15 at the time of the war so her recollections of Radom are of school mates, summer camp and visits to the country. Her world was one in which they didn’t want to speak Yiddish because they considered themselves Polish. Youth groups were focused on Zionism. The streets were filled with people who appeared very modern next to the older religious Jews in their long black coats, very much the imagery that the film captures. We talked about the stereotypes that were fostered by Roman Vishniac’s photographs and how little they represented the reality of a city like Radom. And yet there are the anachronisms that existed side by side those more cosmopolitan citizens. In the imagery from the film there is one image of a water carrier. It seemed like a very unusual image to me and I asked her about it. Who did he carry water for? “Oh there were people who didn’t have indoor plumbing who bought water from him.” She urged me to paint him as he was truly an image from the past.

The Great Migration

2010-10-24T21:35:00.000-05:00

Immigration records are often the starting point in a family history search. The records of my ancestors who came over in the early 1900s frequently reveal their nearest relatives in Europe and who they were going to in the United States. From these records we can observe how each new immigrant helped the next. Each new immigrant goes to a brother, uncle or cousin who has already braved the journey. Parents are often the nearest relative in Europe and frequently remained behind as each child departed.

Stories that have been handed down often indicate difficulties in leaving the country with my grandmother actually taking a bullet in order to leave the Ukraine. What drove them to such lengths to leave a familiar place for such a long and unknown journey? Often it was the threat of a stint in the Russian Army or threats to their life presented by Cossacks and pogroms.

I recently read a fascinating book that focused on a different kind of immigration that echoed the experience of my Jewish ancestors. The book is The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson. It addresses the migration of Southern blacks to the North and views them through the lens of immigration theory. From WWI through 1970, six million black southerners migrated from the South to the North. Although it took place within the confines of one country, it meets many of the characteristics of immigration. The South under Jim Crow laws was unquestionably a dangerous, dehumanizing and limiting environment in which to live. Lynchings and the inability to defend oneself were not unlike the pogroms that arose periodically in Eastern Europe leaving as many as 300 dead in their wake, the tally in my grandmother’s shtetl a year before she departed for the United States. The North, while by no means prejudice free, did not have prejudice embedded in the very fabric of its laws like the South. It presented a land of opportunity to blacks in terms of quality education, the opportunity to move freely and freedom from threats to their life.

As I read of their lives under Jim Crow laws I was surprised to learn how the restrictions arose after Reconstruction. The North withdrew in the mid-1870s and Southerners began to take away the opportunities that had accrued to freed slaves in the intervening decades. Freedoms were stripped away one by one, gradually dehumanizing them and constricting their world. The restrictions that were imposed were eerily similar to many that were placed upon the Jews by the Nazis.

Leaving was not an easy thing to do because Southerners didn’t want to lose their cheap labor force and often blocked their departure. They had to plan their exit carefully often leaving from another town quietly to assure a safe exit. Not unlike my family members who had to swim a river and were shot at crossing the border.

In the North the Southern blacks faced many of the challenges of other immigrants, compounded by the fact that race was a far more defining characteristic than ethnicity. Wilkerson writes that immigrants who traveled the furthest against the most difficult challenges typically found a greater level of success. Southern blacks were no exception to this rule spawning such well known names as Toni Morrison, Aretha Franklin, Jesse Owens, Oprah Winfrey, August Wilson and Michelle Obama.

I found this book enlightening on many levels and thoroughly engaging. Wilkerson follows the stories of three unrelated people from their experience in the South, their departure and their subsequent life in the North. Her premise of “The Great Migration” as an immigration story creates a logical context through which to view the evolution of today’s black communities. For me it created a level of empathy as I saw their experience echoed in my own family’s immigration story.

Solving the Puzzle

2010-10-18T00:20:00.000-05:00

For the past few days I’ve been holed up in front of a microfilm reader at the Family History Library in Utah. This is my annual trip to do genealogy research in the candy store for genealogists. The library has many of the records that you would have to travel all over the US to locate. In one place you can find a wide variety of records: birth, death and marriage records, immigration and naturalization records and countless other documents. Not only does the library have US records, but they have European vital records.

As I’ve been at this for many years, the discoveries are less frequent, but I had one exciting discovery on my first day. For many years I’ve searched for my grandparents’ marriage certificate from the early 1900s. I’m back to the 1700s in Poland, but I was quite frustrated by the fact that I couldn’t find a record that was slightly less than 100 years old in the US. I’ve researched records at the Family History Library in Utah and in NY and never had been able to find it. There are sites that have developed finding aids, among them the Italian Genealogical Society which has an on-line index for brides and grooms in NY. When you do research on the Internet, it is important to revisit paths you may have already explored. As I was researching for a client, I decided on a whim to plug in my grandparents’ names despite the fact that I’d searched there unsuccessfully. To my surprise, the record came up. Presumably it had been added since my last search.

When I arrived at the library, I made a bee-line to that microfilm. There was the certificate with my grandmother’s brother-in-law and brother as witnesses. My grandfather was the only one in his family who came to the US so had no family of his own represented. Interestingly he indicated he was born in Warsaw even though I have his birth record from Radom, about 60 miles south of Warsaw. My grandmother indicated that her birthplace was Vilna although she actually was born in a shtetl 75 miles away from Vilna, but in the Vilna gubernia.

When I interviewed her daughter years ago she told me, “My father was from Warsaw, Radom. Radom was a province of Warsaw. My mother was from Vilna which was also a larger development. They were proud to be from large cities that represented more the intelligentsia. People that came from small towns, they related to them as people coming from a "dorf". A dorf is a forest, a wilderness, nothing. In those years it was further to go to a school or to a development. When my mother would relate (her past) she came from a shetl, a small town.”

In addition to my own records, I’ve been doing considerable searching for several clients and met with some success taking one family back to the client’s great-great grandparents. It is often satisfying doing someone else’s research where there is still much to be discovered. I am always fascinated by the process of unraveling the story. In this case I did a lot of research on-line before I came to Utah. I was able to find immigration and census records that built out the family tree to her great-grandfather and identified three of his siblings. From the immigration record we identified the town the family came from. In Utah I found the death certificate for her great-grandfather that gave his parents’ names giving us a solid base to begin to explore European records and a branch that immigrated to South America.

The trio of records that I like to begin with includes immigration, census and death records. Immigration records tell you who the nearest relative was in Europe, who they were going to in the US and the town they were from. Once I determine the town, I map out all of the family names from that town and then start identifying relationships, frequently finding cousins and siblings. Census records reveal immigration and naturalization dates and often verify family members with whom they were residing, With some data points of ages, immigration dates and family members, I can verify death records which take us back one more generation. My original search years ago was far more random as I had yet to learn the interconnections between the various records.

I often speak with fellow genealogists about what draws us to genealogy. Solving puzzles is often the entry point. In my work, I have always been intrigued with understanding the system, how one part interrelates with another and often leverages it. Systems are a form of puzzle. Just as a Suduko puzzle or Scrabble board is built on specific interrelationships, genealogy solutions also are derived from interrelationships. When you understand them you can use them as tools to solve the puzzle.

Principles for Basic Genealogy Searches

2010-09-20T21:42:00.000-05:00

Recently I’ve been immersed in genealogy, preparing for my Utah research trip and doing genealogy consulting and lectures. It is always interesting for me to work on someone else’s family history with the benefit of the insights I’ve learned from my own. As I’ve been preparing a talk, a recent consulting job was a helpful exercise in articulating basic research principles.

I always recommend that people first start with interviewing everyone in their family who might know something about their history. In this case, the client didn’t have the benefit of family members who could offer that information so we were reliant on what she knew and remembered. She knew her grandmother’s married name and thought she knew her maiden name. She also knew the names of some of the siblings of her grandmother, the birth year of her grandmother and the year of immigration.

With that as our starting point we began by following principle #1: Work with what you know towards what you don’t know. We searched ancestry.com for her grandmother’s married name and quickly found the 1930 census. The census confirmed the year of birth, but the year of immigration was six years later than what we had believed it to be. Principle #2 What you believe to be true, isn’t always accurate. Don't let it blind you to other possibilities. We had done some unsuccessful searches for immigration records using the year we believed she came over. This new information told me we needed to widen our net and search a broader number of years. Principle #3 Start broad, then narrow as necessary.

With our broader net we quickly found the 1920 census record for my client’s grandmother and family. This record indicated yet another immigration date, but one that was close to that of the 1930 census. The 1920 census record was an important one for several reasons. It provided the name of the client’s great-grandfather who brought all of his children to the US. It told us he had filed initial papers to become naturalized so we could look for a naturalization record. It also told us that different siblings immigrated at different times. The record confirmed several of the siblings’ names and provided a few new ones of whom we hadn’t been aware. Most immigration records just indicate the place of birth as the country, but in this case, it actually specified Vilna, Russia. I knew from my own family experience that Vilna could mean the gubernia rather than the city, kind of like a county or province. My grandmother used to say she was from Vilna. In fact I found that she was from a small shtetl 75 miles away from Vilna which is now in Belarus, but at one time was in the Vilna gubernia.

Our next step was to search for immigration records as we hoped to find the town from which they had immigrated. Several siblings had come in 1914 as had my client’s grandmother Lillian. I had done some searches with the name “Lillian” with little success and wasn’t sure what that name might have been prior to being Americanized. Instead I decided to search on her brother Hyman whose pre-Americanized name I assumed was Chaim. Principle #4 Search for the non-Americanized name and Principle #5 If unsure, search for related names. Searching with just his non-Americanized name, birth year and year of immigration I quickly found the record which also contained his father Schaje and sister Lillian whose name appeared to be nothing like Lillian. Ellis Island had transcribed it as Kate. The year of birth corresponded with both censuses and what we knew it to be originally. One of the things I would be interested in seeing is a tombstone for Lillian as it might indicate in Hebrew what her original name was.

Within the record it indicated the last permanent residence as Wischnowo Wilna. We now needed to convert the town name to what it is called today. We had a clue in that we knew Wilna was Vilna and we knew they were supposed to have lived close to Vilna. Substituting Vs for Ws the name now read “Vischnovo”. I then went to the jewishgen.org communities database and input the name along with a request to tell me how close it was to Vilna. Up popped Vishnevo, Belarus within 53 miles of Vilna. All the other options were much farther away. We soon found a shtetlink for Vishnevo which talked about a match factory that my client recalled as a family business.

The key pieces of information on the immigration record are who remained in Europe and who were they going to. In this case they were going to Schaje's son Ichk, no doubt Isador in the 1920 census who had been the first family member to arrive in 1904. The nearest relative remaining in Eastern Europe was Schaje's brother Abram.

Now that I had the town on which to search I decided to make use of the advanced searching techniques possible on the stevemorse.org site. I input the surname and the town and soon pulled up ten records. Among them were Kate (Lillian), Chaim and Schage (Schaje) whose record we had found in 1914. The variance in Schaje's name points out yet another principle #6 Transcription errors are prevalent due to transcriber unfamiliarity with Jewish names. Go to the original document to confirm.

I realized that I might not be picking up all of the towns of Wischnewo due to transcription errors so instead decided to search for the surname with a given name that started with an “I” for Ichk and a town that started with a “W”. Stevemorse.org allows this flexibility. Now I picked up another transcription of the town, “Wiscknewo” which didn’t show up earlier and it was for Itrko. Interestingly when I went into the record it showed Itzek, then 12 coming with his brother Selik and his sister Mine, accompanied by his father Schaje who must have then returned to Wischewo only to come back ten years later with his youngest children. Selik was a new sibling of whom we hadn’t been aware as he had not shown up in census records with the rest of the family, probably living independently from the family in 1920. A 1912 immigration record of brother Benjamin notes that he was going to his brother Selig. The birth year for the father Schaje in this earlier record read 1852 instead of the 1862 as we saw in the 1914 immigration record. Principle #7 They didn’t pay much attention to birthdays or dates in general, don’t expect them to tie out across all documents. My great-grandmother had a different birth year for herself in every birth record for each of her children.

And one more principle from this exercise…Principle # 8 Search related lines. Since I knew that Schaje had a brother Abram, I took a look at the unidentified records of the same surname. Several of them had a father in Wischnewo named Abram, thus making them cousins and an additional thread to follow.

Searching is a laborious process, but you can shave some time from your efforts if you keep these principles in mind.

1: Work with what you know towards what you don’t know.

2 What we believe to be true, isn’t always accurate. Don't let it blind you to possibilities.

3 Start broad, then narrow.

4.Search for the non-Americanized name in immigration records.

5. If you can’t find a specific name, search for related names.

6 Don’t forget that names can be transcribed in error. If names seem close, confirm the actual name in the original document.

7. Don’t expect birth dates or immigration dates to match exactly across all documents.

8. Search related lines for cousins.

Story Gathering

2010-09-11T14:19:00.000-05:00

Several years ago I began a series of artwork on family history. That series has been the source of many offshoots in artwork about family, community and cultural history. Earlier this year I contacted Sholom Home, a Jewish elder facility about showing my family history artwork there. As we spoke it occurred to me that my artwork often elicits others’ family stories and what better place to do so than an elder facility. My initial phone call quickly morphed into a project in which I am now engaged. My partner in this project is a local storyteller, Carla Vogel, who in addition to storytelling also does legacy work at a local hospice. We had spoken for several years about possibly partnering and she seemed like the perfect partner for this project.

Together we are interviewing residents of Sholom Home and recording their stories. We are especially interested in legacy elements and how individual stories within the same community can begin to tell the story of a community. I will then develop artwork around the stories, similar to what I’ve done on my own family history.

Along the way we’ve connected with the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest who frequently does oral history projects. I’ve done genealogy and collage workshops for them in the past. They are providing guidance in how to approach oral histories and will be a repository for the stories when we are finished. The artwork will reside at Sholom Home when it is not being exhibited elsewhere.

We’ve done one interview and I’ve begun the first painting. The woman we interviewed is in her

Detail of Painting

mid-90s. Against the backdrop of nursing home chatter and frequent beeps from residents, she told us of her life and her experience teaching young children. Behind her is an image of her as a young woman reading a book that had special significance in her history. During our first interview she sang her favorite Yiddish song for us, also one of mine. Oyfn Pripetchik (At the Fireplace) is a song about a teacher, a rabbi, who is teaching young children the Yiddish alphabet. You can find the song at this link. Teaching children the alphabet seemed especially applicable given our interviewee’s history. She attends a regular Yiddish class and spoke of how much she likes the power and fire of the language, offering her latest words to stump her teacher. In the painting I wanted to include Yiddish, especially some words from the song that related to children learning the Aleph Bes (alphabet). I’m not sure if I’ve finished this yet as I am still experimenting with how I want to represent these stories, but this is what I have thus far.

I am also continuing with my Radom Hole in Time series. One of the things that I loved in the 1937 film of Radom was the way people walked almost into the camera creating a sense of immediacy in the viewer. I wanted to do an image that would capture that sense. The image on the right is the result of that effort.

A Hole in Time

2010-08-22T10:55:00.000-05:00

I've added one additional painting (see bottom) to my series on Radom and reworked the top painting. In setting them on top of each other I've also noticed that the top two paintings seem to have lines that connect quite unintentionally. I may keep that in mind as I develop other paintings and perhaps have them assume a more precise rather than random assemblage.

The new image that I've added appealed to me because it seemed so classic. There are always some young men who want to get into the picture and these two, particularly the one bending into the camera, seemed to fit that profile. I've got similar pictures that I've taken in foreign countries where a group of young men vied for the camera's attention.

I've been working with medium and carving into it to pull out the profiles and details of a face. The wood paneling behind these two makes use of the grain of the wood itself.

As you may recall I am trying to use the motif of a pinhole camera in my imagery with the edges slightly darkened. My working title had been "A Point in Time", but I am now thinking of it as "A Hole in Time". It seems to fit with the theme I've been reading as of late on time travel. Recently I cleared out some books from my bookshelves to make room for my genealogy materials that have taken up residence on my floor. In doing so I stumbled across a copy of From Time to Time by Jack Finney. In the 1970 novel, the protagonist goes back in time to the late 1800s. Finney's focus on the details of another time spoke to the researcher in me that seeks to go beyond dry facts to truly imagine another time. I also loved Finney's short stories in About Time: 12 Short Stories and his sequel Time and Again.

It seemed to me that these glimpses of the once vibrant community of Radom truly provided a hole in time, allowing me to step into and imagine a world that is no more.

Artist Under the Influence

2010-08-15T13:11:00.000-05:00

I used to wonder what I was going to paint next, but I’ve learned to relax and ideas just come. It often seems rather magical to me the way they arise, but I’ve learned that other interests often serve as an engine.

I am working on a new series on Radom, the town my grandfather came from. I’ve begun two so far so I believe that meets the definition of a series. I plan to do many more. I’ve written about the 1937 film of the Jewish community of Radom that I received from a fellow researcher. It captures a happy time and a cross-section of the Jewish community just five years before the Holocaust destroyed it.I’ve pulled many stills from it for the Shtetlink site that I created. In doing so I found some images that really spoke to me. When I put the page out on the Shtetlink I had three columns of images and I liked the juxtaposition of disparate images. That was my impetus to create a series of small images that worked as a whole.

My second influence… I went to an open studio last week and stopped in a studio where the artist was painting on wood. Now I often paint on masonite, but she was using wood panels and I really liked her work and particularly the surface. I liked the ability to use the grain or sand it so decided to try it as a material. Unlike masonite the panels have sides so don’t need to be framed. For someone who likes instant gratification, being able to hang a work immediately has a lot of appeal.

My third influence…My next decision was what size to paint. As I wanted to create a larger image out of many smaller images I opted for 12” x 12”. Earlier this year I had done several paintings in that size for the Foot in the Door Show that the Minneapolis Institute of Arts does every ten years. They only accept paintings of those dimensions. Normally I don’t work that small, but I found that I really liked the work that I did for that show so decided to explore those dimensions further.

And my final influence…Last weekend I went on a long bike trip with my husband and between pedaling managed to make use of the camera that I bought for our Eastern Europe trip. I discovered quite by accident, as I tend not to read manuals, that it had a pinhole camera setting. Now this worked beautifully for landscape shots. Colors are slightly muted and a grayish edge surrounds the

center image. I soon was wondering if I could get that effect in my painting series. My working title is A Point in Time and a pinhole image seemed to fit well within that.

So four influences drove my topic, material, size and style. Amazing where a camera on the wrong setting can lead. This is how art happens.

If you're interested in the camera with the pinhole setting here's the link. It also has a 12X zoom in a very compact camera, a high quality Leica lens and the wonderful additional feature of GPS. It picks up where you are and links it to the picture.

Finding My British Family - Take 2

2010-08-07T11:38:00.000-05:00

Today I received another thread in my continuing search for my relatives in the United Kingdom. As you may recall (see entry: Finding My British Family 11/28/2009) I have been following the history of Louis Kodish and Annie Singer. Louis Kodish was born in London around 1900, immigrated to the US in 1929 with his wife Katherine and returned to Glasgow in 1934. He came to his cousin Abraham Singer who was also my grandmother’s cousin and returned with his wife Katherine to his father Marks Kodish in Glasgow. This much I had learned from immigration records to and from the US.

As his relationship was to my relatives from Dunilovichi, I am operating under the assumption that his father was also from Dunilovichi and have hopes of linking yet another family to mine. I know that there were Hedeshes from Dunilovichi in the Dunilovichi cemetery and names spelled Khodis or Khodos in the 1834 and 1850 Revision Lists for the town. No linkages yet, but I remain hopeful that a puzzle piece will click into sharper focus.

In February of this year I sent for the visa records of both Louis and Annie from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Two months later I received Annie’s record and today, six months later I received the record for Louis. This is relatively fast compared to the year or more it used to take before they started charging for their services.

The file for Louis was interesting, but didn’t provide anything new for me to pursue. Included in the visa file was a photo that was clearly the same person who sent a photo to one of my father’s cousins signed “your cousin, Louis Kodish”. The application provides his address and that of his father. His mother was deceased by 1929 when he was submitting this record. His father’s name was given as Marks. Most of this I already knew from immigration records. The one new piece of data came from a copy of his birth certificate which gave his mother’s name as Kate Epstein. The last name of Kodish was spelled Cordis. Back to the cemetery where I found no Epsteins. Quite possibly his mother was not from Dunilovichi..

Annie’s file also showed a photograph of a young woman in her 20s. She was born in London in 1907 and lived in Jerusalem from 1923 to 1928 when the visa was issued. I did the math and found that she went there at age 16. Her mother Sarah was indicated as deceased and her father Meyer was no longer in London, but back in Diniavolitshe, Poland, presumably Dunilovichi. Perhaps he returned after his wife’s death and his daughter decided to venture into Palestine rather than return home with dad. Now in 1929, tiny Annie, at 5’1 ½ “ was leaving Palestine to go to Brooklyn to stay with her uncle Abraham Singer, my grandmother’s cousin. I am struck with the sheer adventurousness of her journey.

Her birth record indicated that her mother Sarah Singer was also formerly a Singer. Communities were small and marriages to cousins were common. In addition to the birth record there was a certificate showing that she was free of trachoma and a Certificate of Character from the Department of Police and Prisons.

So from the visa files, I now have a little piece of additional information for both Louis and Annie on their mother’s names. I can continue to search for Louis and his father Marks in Glasgow. Annie’s trail in London seems to have grown cold with her departure and her father’s return to Dunilovichi. I may see if I can find a record of her original immigration to Palestine and some further trace of her father in Dunilovichi. She appears to have vanished in America, no doubt marrying and changing her name, the curse of genealogists.

And while on the subject of my Dunilovichi relatives, I did have one ah-ha moment recently concerning the timing of my great-grandfather’s immigration. I knew that my great-grandfather came to the US in 1904. What else happened in that year? It dawned on me that my great-great grandfather died in 1904 in Dunilovichi, a fact I learned upon my visit. No doubt there was a relationship between those dates. To test that theory I checked the month in which my great-great grandfather died against the month in which my great-grandfather immigrated. Sure enough, my great-grandfather waited until his father’s death to immigrate leaving just a month or two after his death. Somehow that is a humanizing detail. Now I picture a son waiting for his father to die before he felt free to leave, perhaps waiting out an illness to be at his father’s deathbed. It is in these dribbles and drabs of information that we begin to piece together a story, a narrative about our ancestors’ lives that reminds us that they really lived with all the human emotions and drama that can accompany our own journey.

Paintings Redux: Version Two

2010-08-04T19:26:00.000-05:00

Between genealogy research and conferences I’ve been finding some time to work on paintings for my London show. As you’ll recall, I’ve taken several paintings that I’ve done on board and repainted them on canvas for easier shipping. It has been an interesting experience to take a painting that I considered done and begin anew. I’ve always thought that I didn’t have the patience for repeated versions of the same image. I can't read the same book twice or see the same movie. While Monet’s multiple waterlilies, haystacks and cathedral windows are inspiring, I thought I needed something new to sustain my energies. Now with a reason to do that exploration, I’ve had a few discoveries worth learning. I've found that there are many levels within an image to explore.

It is very difficult to take a serviceable painting and paint out portions to rework them. There is always the fear of destroying what already exists and yet it is the paintings I destroy that give birth to my favorite paintings.. Still a blank canvas is a second chance to take what I liked and emphasize it while eliminating what I was less satisfied with. Sometimes I found it impossible to recreate some effects. Instead I could let go of what I had done and do something new and unique. Often that second effort has qualities lacking in the first.

The challenge that hung over my head was to take my painting “Gedenken” which is24” X 72” and recreate it in two paintings of 24” X36”. I further added to the challenge by deciding I wanted the paintings to be able to stand on their own as well as combine into one image.There were two changes I wanted to make from my original “Gedenken”. I wanted to create a larger base of darker color at the bottom to balance it and I wanted to put bands of sideways letters between each band that spelled “gedenken”. Here’s what I arrived at, both separately and together.

The other painting that I’ve been working on is “What is Left”. This was a very simple painting of the doors of the Torah ark that remained from the synagogue from 1438. The synagogue was damaged in the war and destroyed by the Soviets after the war. As I studied the image of the doors more thoroughly, I discovered some details that I omitted in the original. The lock to the doors is inserted into a star of David, now captured in version two. What looks simple is deceptively difficult. The doors are of hammered metal and create dappled areas of light and shadow. The hammered forms and the variations of light presented some challenges to capture.This is definitely an image that needs to be viewed at a distance to see the elements come together.

You can find the original paintings on my art website under Lithuanian Artwork on the right.

How They Lived

2010-08-03T23:21:00.000-05:00

Working on the Shtetlinks (websites on ancestral town) has the added advantage of putting me in the middle of the information that swirls around the towns I am researching. As I do both research and artwork around family and cultural history, new information often feeds one of those engines.

I’ve written of the 1937 film I obtained of the town of Radom, Poland. I recently put about 80 stills from the film on the Radom Shtetlink, a rather laborious process. As stills the images spoke to me in a way that they didn’t when watching the film. Many are striking imagery, always good source material

for an artist and they will resurface in a different form in these pages. What I took particular note of was the diversity of the Jewish community. While the stereotypic religious elder can certainly be found in the film, many within the Jewish community looked no different than my grandparents and parents would have at that time in New York. The stereotype of the shtetl Jew told through the stories of Sholom Aleichem and the camera of Roman Vishniac fails to tell the story of many in the Jewish community of Eastern Europe. That was particularly true of a fairly large city like Radom where one could find merchants, teachers, doctors and lawyers.

Recently I was connected by a fellow Radom researcher to an author whose work is quite evocative of life in those times. Bernard Gotfryd is a former Radom resident and a survivor. He worked for Newsweek as a photographer for 30 years and brought his photographer’s eye to his stories.

Gotfryd sent me a copy of his most recent book “I Can See Them in My Dreams”, published in Poland. Stories in Polish and English introduced me to personalities in Radom and told their stories. One of the things that I seek to learn in my research is what the lives of my family members were like. With the Holocaust as the end point of their lives, it is easy to focus on their deaths rather than their lives. Between the film imagery and Gotfryd’s words, I have begun to get a sense of what their world was like.

Intrigued by his recent book, I tracked down a copy of his earlier book “Anton the Dove Fancier” which similarly paints vignettes of Radom and subsequent events during the Holocaust. The book won the PEN/Martha Albrand Special Citation for Nonfiction as well as several additional awards. Gotfryd captures the complexity of human interactions. It is not a black and white world, but one populated with people thrust into impossible situations, trying to find their way through them while preserving their sense of humanity.

New Tools from the Conference - Creating Your Own One-Step Searches

2010-07-31T14:56:00.000-05:00

Since returning from the International Jewish Genealogy conference, I have been hard at work applying what I learned. I always try to attend a mix of topics that spans history, language, new tools and resources as well as technical skills.

Some of those technical skills and tools have already proven helpful in the Shtetlink sites I provide on Radom and Dunilovichi. If you’ve explored those sites you know I am a fan of spreadsheets, often organizing research in spreadsheets and providing them for download. During my time at the conference I attended Dr. Stephen Morse’s workshop on using his “One-Step” tools to create one's own search tools. Basically he has written the HTML code to create a do-it-yourself Soundex search engine to search a database. Steve is a talented computer engineer and entertaining presenter and his tools have become a critical resource for most genealogists. For those of you who did not have the benefit of his session, you can find instructions on how to create a search engine at stevemorse.org under Creating Your Own Search Application. Click on Frequently Asked Questions for a basic tutorial.

You can find some of the ones that I’ve built on the home page of the Radom Shtetlink (see link at side). There you will find one that I built for the 1823 Patronymic Database that I found on my recent trip to Radom. If you click on the Names tab and then the 1823 Patronymic link you will see the original data as I found it in the archives. There are two columns, one listing patronymics (father’s name plus an ending such as Herszkowicz) that Jews went by prior to being required to take last names in 1823. The second column is the last name that they took. In the database I built, I've added a separate column for given name followed by patronymic and surname.

While it was exciting to read my great-great-great grandfather’s entry, trying to do research on a hard copy handwritten listing is not an easy task. Previously I input that information into a spreadsheet that I made available to download and search via filters. Now I provide another way to search via the “One-Step” method.

My 3rd great-grandfather was Berek Herszkowicz prior to taking the last name of Rubinsztajn. That means that his father was Herszk. If he had brothers they should also be listed as Herszkowicz. But Herszkowicz can be spelled a number of different ways. By entering Herszkowicz into the patronymic field and clicking sounds like, it will pull up the various spellings and the last names that those individuals took. It is quite possible at this point in time that adult siblings took different last names. Seven names come up with a father named Herszk, all possible siblings with different names that I may wish to remain aware of in my Radom research.

And a few tips for those who wish to build a search tool...

As a novice, I have found javascript (js-2) to be the easiest starting point to build search tools. You will also want to make use of Notepad to save files in order to remove code that may be input from various programs such as Excel. And finally make sure the names match between the search engine name that you input into the tool and the name you ultimately save the file under. Same goes for the database. Use the "test-drive" button as you build the search to see how it appears to the user. Good luck!