5. BURN THE BOATS, Part 1

Reason for Being in the World

For my father, for me, the past really was a foreign country, and it really wasn't dead or even past. He had a view of it I couldn’t make out from where I stood, but I tried to populate a village in my imagination.

Some people memorialize time’s remnant. They revere it. Most simply forget it, in general obliviousness. They disregard it. They think they live free of it. When they think of it at all, they call it childhood and memory, nostalgia, bad things that happened once and nag at you as life gets lived. It’s personal.

At some point, Mom shared with me information I no longer recall, with reasoning now lost with the information, that was her basis for believing my father was really born in 1909, not 1910. I was persuaded.

"Do you really think he was born on Christmas Day?" she had added. "Nobody knows when he was born. Goldie was two."

I suppose Aikah knew. No one thought to ask her, cared to. Oblivious. I think I met her only once, at some cousin’s house, to whom I also paid no mind, small and slight, a smooth cap of gray hair swept along the sides of her head, so far from the broad, stout set of her sister Minnie. If only I'd understood. If I'd known what was breaking up before me, dissipating, shards of pottery in the soil, smoke trails in the air, I would have talked with her.

No one thought to connect us. No one thought to say to her, tell him. Let him carry your memory. For after. My great aunt.

Besides, Aikah didn’t speak English. It would have taken some concerted effort to make the connection between us, the kind of mission no one around me seemed to engage: the concerted effort. People worked hard, went to the beach, ate family dinners. They lived, like the people in the places being forgotten. Life disappears as you live it.

Besides again, who was I to her, anyway? A young amerikanets who doesn’t speak Russian, doesn’t speak Yiddish, looks he doesn’t want to be here – yes, Meyer’s son, all these many years later, but lost in his own head, of another place and another world. I’m an old woman now, the things I saw. Let him live his life, I have my own children.

And I, too, thinking otherwise, lived as if free of the past, even as it hammered stakes in me in the dark, built brick houses of mud, manure, and straw when no one was looking.

So let's say Mac was born in 1910. Doesn’t matter. Then Goldie was born in 1908. In that world, at that time, Yoina and Minnie married no earlier than 1907. Mac shared no memories of them. It was his grandparents he recalled, and he didn’t remember his grandmother's name, so she had died, as Yoina and Minnie had left for America, before memory took hold.

Why had Minnie and Yoina left?

That's what Jews were doing in those days from within the Russian Pale of Settlement: getting out.

Between 1880 and 1924, 3 million Eastern European Jews emigrated to the United States, 2 million from among the 5 million who inhabited the Russian Pale.

What led to such a mass migration?

The earliest reference to Jews in Galicia, the Austrian border region just west of Podolia, in which medieval Kamianets-Podilskyi is found, and where Orynin arose in miniature ten miles west, is from 1030. Its Jewish population likely emigrated in an expanding diaspora east from the Byzantine Empire, the eastern extension and remnant of the fallen Roman Empire 500 years before that. The history of that region, like the history of the world, presents emerging and contending peoples struggling and warring with each other for territory, nationhood, power, and self-determination, including through peasant revolts – then and there, among Russians, Poles, Cossacks, Tatars, Mongols, Ottomans, Romanians, Magyars.

Kamianets-Podilskyi

Always among them, Jews were a minority sometimes tolerated, often used and abused, generally oppressed, and periodically persecuted. Ever changing in the details, Jews were restricted in where they could live and in the occupations they could pursue.

Between 1648 and 1657, during the Khmelnytsky Uprising, Cossacks against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Cossacks and their Tatar allies ransacked and devastated over 300 Jewish communities; by more conservative modern estimates, they murdered upwards of 20 thousand Jews. In the two millennia history of Jewish persecution, this slaughter is one of the many milestone markers.

A century and quarter later, in 1791, Catherine the Great established what became known as the Pale of Settlement for Jews, including all or part of modern-day Belarus and Moldova, Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland, Latvia and western Russian. Jews were now even more restricted than before, in in their movements and where they could live, including being barred from many major cities, like Kyiv. They were barred from engaging in agriculture, so opportunity for that self-sustaining prosperity was precluded. Poverty among the Pale’s Jews was widespread.

In 1881 came the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by a ten-person cell of Narodnaya Volyain, a socialist-anarchist group dedicated to revolutionary terror against the Tsarist regime. Because two of the ten co-conspirators had tenuous or actually no Jewish connection, the rumor spread, as it regularly did over the history of Christian Europe, that “the Jews” were responsible for the Tsar’s death. Thus commenced the pogroms that swept the Pale over the next two years. In 1886, Jews were subject to an edict of expulsion from Kyiv. In 1891, Russian authorities expelled 20,000 of the more educated and professional Muscovian Jews who had been permitted residency there. But it was the pogroms of 1881-83 that boosted both a fledgling Zionist movement and active emigration to the U.S.

In the three-year period before Minnie and Yoina would have married, 1903-06, amid the widespread unrest of the “first Russian Revolution” of 1905, associated pogroms against Jews swept across more than 700 towns of the Pale, killing over 2000, with thousands more injured amid widespread rape and bodily mutilation. For neither the first time nor the last, the expanding Jewish socialist and Zionist movements organized defense forces. But they were always destined to have limited utility without government support. Over the next decade, then, amid increasing emigration of hundreds of thousands more to the U.S. and elsewhere, came the second aliyah (the second modern wave of Jewish emigration to Palestine, or historic Israel) of about 35,000 people.

Why did my grandparents marry in the wake of such continuing violence and threat, and then, soon enough, flee Ukraine? I’ll never know. People fall in love and start families in the direst of circumstances — but though the custom of arranged marriage among Jews of the Pale was beginning to fade with the Twentieth Century, Yoina was not from Orynin, Dad told me, so likely some sadchen, a male matchmaker who arranged unions of couples not local to each other, had been employed. Why was there no local match for Minnie? Among more affluent merchants or educated townspeople, the Meltzers, my family, were poor peasants, Zakiah a balugala — a wagon driver. Minnie had no dowry to bring and apparently no willing available match in Orynin. Yoina Adler, from I don’t know where, worked as a tailor in the United States. What was he then that his parents would accept the match to Minnie? I can’t know.

Whatever the reasons, the two families did accept the match, but it didn’t last long, and while divorce was actually far from uncommon in the Pale, in a small shtetl like Orynin, so quickly failed a union, with the separating parents both leaving their children behind, was surely a scandal. And before 1920, about the time the children Mac and Goldie were themselves leaving Orynin, Yoina and Minnie were already producing more children with new spouses in the United States.

The two would almost surely have left before the outbreak of World War I – which means by 1914, when Mac was only four years old. During the next six years of his childhood in Orynin, Mac and Goldie would live through the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War, the first Ukrainian-Russian War for independence, a Ukrainian war with Lithuania, famine, and the deadliest wave of pogroms yet to come. Mac would speak to his family of none of it — as he never spoke of returning to the Soviet Union during the Great Depression — but for a memory or two to me of pogroms.

Yet all around Mac and Goldie – Meyer and Golda – these events were raging through Orynin.

The town lay a mere ten miles from the Austrian border – Kamianets-Podilskyi, another ten miles, a major target for capture and occupation, as it would be again during the Second World War. Both became a front line in the conflict, the Austrian military bombarding Kamianets as early as August 5, 1914 — and what touched that provincial capital soon laid hands on Orynin.

The Russian forces headquartered locally in K-P., but to Orynin, to extend their reach and extract provisions, they assigned their Cossack allies. Rumors had spread from the start that Jews had been spied consorting with Austrian officers atop a nearby hill. The first pogrom, then, occurred August 9, 2014. Of the varying Cossack tribes to occupy the town, the Don Cossacks were most brutal, housing themselves in the locals’ homes, terrorizing the population, robbing merchants, beating men, raping women, murdering. Wives and daughters were hidden away in darkened, closed-off rooms. One day, two young Jewish men were beaten and each tied behind a horse, then dragged the length of the main Post Road into the nearby woods and shot to death.¹

As Russia’s pre-revolution effort in the war began to fail, however, and then when the new Bolshevik government withdrew the newly-founded Communist nation from the war, control over Orynin would change multiple times. More than once, forewarned, the Jewish population fled to escape the advance of hostile forces, which, all depending, might be any forces. By the time of the civil war, after the October revolution, Reds against the Tsarist Whites, the Bolsheviks were contending also with a Ukrainian rebellion for independence led by Symon Petliura, whose forces, in ultimate retreat, would ally with the Poles, warring themselves — in still another conflict during those same years — through 1919-20 with the Bolsheviks.

Everybody was fighting everybody.

Petilura’s forces retreated to Podolia, home oblast (province) of Orynin and wreaked havoc there.

When the Bolsheviks occupied Kamianets in November of 1920, the majority of Kadima, the Zionist student organization, escaped to Palestine. During the Civil War and the simultaneous Ukrainian war of independence, both the Ukrainians and the White Russians conducted pogroms against the Jews. Between 1918-21, it is estimated that 100,000 Ukrainian Jews died in pogroms, the greatest mass murder of Jews in history prior to the Holocaust, which devastated the same “bloodlands” only twenty years later and overwhelmed that earlier holocaust in memory. All of these events assaulted Mac’s and Goldie’s childhood years, the commotion of conflict and terrified flight a constant of their first decade of life.

Mac could not tell me how Zakiah died – the event that likely precipitated the two children’s departure from Orynin in 1920. There were many possibilities.

And all this stood a blank wall of silence to Mac’s family — a darkness, in which resided some unreachable, almost mythical, unreal place out of which Mac had emerged to be our father in bright, happy America. Emerged in all his capacious love and rageful hurt. And with all the immaterial legacy of his life and love, he had left for me just scattered, seemingly random crumbs of his childhood to meditate on, among them that at one point he and Goldie had spent four years surviving on their own in Poland. That they been sent to stay with their uncle in Lviv and that the uncle’s Romanian wife had not wanted them. That the day they left Orynin, they were rowed across the Zbruch River in the darkness of night.

These things I was told at different times, casually, years apart, yet extracted like gold nuggets dug from a vein in that resistant wall. No connection was ever drawn for me among them. Until, in the context of all these events, and with research, I figured it out.

AJA

Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.

ajayadler.com

1. The historical facts of this account are drawn from multiple public sources; details of Orynin life and history derive mostly from the privately published Orynin, My Shtetl, by Beryl Segal, housed in the archives of the Rhode Island Jewish Historical Association. I will have more to say about Segal and his invaluable memoir in a later chapter.