Tag Archives: Rabinovich
From Kiev 1902 to Odessa 1905
Posted on September 3, 2017 by plumtree05
Why did my grandfather only save a Guild Certificate from Odessa, a place never mentioned by my family, and no documents from anywhere else? As my mother had once said on a tape she made about her family before she died, that she thought her father might have had a shoe factory in Kiev, I decided to turn my search to Kiev in 1902. Could my grandfather have begun working towards his Guild Certificate in Kiev and then continued in Odessa? My grandparents had originally come from Baranovichi, west of Minsk, where their first two children, Aron and Sara, were born. That the family stayed there until they went to Odessa would have been another possibility, but I have never found any online records for Baranovichi. One possibility is that the next two children, the ones who may have mysteriously died in the Odessa pogrom, were born very close together before the family arrived in Odessa in late 1902. If my grandfather had wanted to end up in Odessa, why might he have started out in Kiev? Was it easier for some reason to start a machine shoe factory in Kiev than in Odessa? Did he have relations in Kiev who could help him? I needed some evidence of where my grandparents were living in order to find the birth records and names of the two missing children which might then lead me to their death certificates if they died naturally.
I wondered again about the photograph I have of the two eldest children possibly taken in 1902 when the daughter was about 18 months and the son nearly 4. I assume this was taken around the time the next child was born. Could it have been taken in Baranovichi or Kiev? The stone wall prop in the photograph looks like many photographs of children taken in Odessa at that time, but I have never found one with exactly the same background. Possibly it was from Kiev although there are far fewer studio portraits from turn-of-the-century Kiev online to compare.
Aron and Sara 1902?
Kiev portrait 1898
Then I looked back at the Odessa Craft Guild Certificate at the few words of handwriting written in the blanks on the half of the document which still exists. On the line above where it says 'the year 1902' and 'No.205', it says in print 'the document issued to him from' and then there followed a word I couldn't decipher until now, when I realised, by checking some of the letters with a couple of words above, that it said 'Gorodische', the town where my grandfather and two more generations of my grandparents' families were from. The next word is illegible as it is on the torn edge. Could it be that my grandfather originally received a craft certificate in 1902 in Gorodische (near Baranovichi) as it was his birthplace, the place he originally became a shoemaker or their home in 1902? Was the certificate then transferred to Kiev or Odessa?
1905 Odessa Craft Guild Certificate of Yankel-Khaim Leib Rabinovich (Jacob Leon Rabinovich)
I had looked for information about Kiev before I realised that the Guild Certificate was from Odessa and I had downloaded a few Kiev directories from 1905, 1906 and 1912. I had not seen my grandfather in them and had not given them any thought since then. I had found a jeweller on the main street, Kreschatik 25, named Yakhnovich, my grandmother's maiden name, which was very uncommon, and wondered if this was a relative and my grandparents' link with Kiev. My grandmother also had had two older sisters who had lived and studied in Kiev as teenagers in the 1880s before emigrating to America. Now I realised I needed some earlier years of the directory, particularly 1902-1904. I returned to the website where I had found the directories. They had the years I wanted but the download did not seem to be working. Nothing could have been more frustrating, and after struggling with it for a couple of days, I found another website where the directories from 1899-1914, minus 1904, could be seen online but not downloaded. (search Цифрова бібліотека – НБУВ)
http://irbis-nbuv.gov.ua/cgi-bin/irbis_ir/cgiirbis_64.exe?S21CNR=20&S21REF=10&S21STN=1&C21COM=S&I21DBN=ELIB&P21DBN=ELIB&S21All=(%3C.%3EPS=%D0%9A%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%94%D0%B7%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%B2%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%BE%3C.%3E)&S21FMT=preitem&S21SRW=dz&S21SRD=UP
I scrolled through the years I wanted and found that there was a Shmuel Meer Rabinovich and Shaya Shevelevich Rabinovich who had leather shops or businesses in Kiev. One was on the same street as Sholem Aleichem's house, Bolshaya Vasilkovskaya, number 2, at the top of the main street Kreschatik. The other was on Aleksandrovskaya Square, at the beginning of Konstantinskaya Street, a main business and shopping street which lay between the lower town and the steep hills rising above it. Also, only in the years 1902 and 1903, there was a Rabinovich, the only Rabinovich with no initials, who had a shoe shop. He was also in another list called 'bootmakers' which in later years became a list of master shoemakers. I looked at the two addresses for these businesses, Konstantinskaya 2 and Dmitrievskaya 14, and with much searching on several very comprehensive websites of old photographs of Kiev, before the city was redeveloped in the 1990s, discovered that the address of the bootmaker, probably a workshop address, was a building with several leather businesses. This address was probably very close to the leather business of Shaya Rabinovich.
2 Konstantinskaya
Konstantinskaya
Konstantinskaya 1980
http://toursdekiev.com.ua/ru/map
Kiev directory 1902 shoe shop ad
The address with the shoe shop, Dmitriskaya 14, was a long street higher up in the city which began with rows of mostly two-storey buildings with shops but further on became more residential. Some of the buildings in the first stretch of the street had several shops but 14 had only one.
Dmitriskaya at its beginnings, where number 14 would have been, at the corner of Bulvarno-Kudryadskoi
Could this Rabinovich be my grandfather? Normally I would not give any thought to a Rabinovich with no first initials as there were so many Rabinoviches. But this was a Rabinovich shoemaker. There were no other Rabinovich shoemakers in Kiev at that time and I had not come across any in Odessa. I had come across two wealthy Jacob Leon Rabinoviches, the exact name of my grandfather, in Odessa, so I could conclude possibly that names were less important than trade or business. It was a very long shot but somehow to find a Rabinovich who had both a shoe shop and workshop in the exact years I was looking for seemed like something that should not just be instantly ignored. If both these Rabinoviches without initials are the same shoemaker, and it seems highly unlikely there were suddenly two for the same few years, it seems very ambitious of my grandfather to start out in a new city with two businesses at some distance from each other. If he had got this far, there must have been some calamity that forced him to give up his life in Russia in 1906.
15 and 17 Dmitriskaya (across from the shoe shop)
Checking the directories in the years after my possible grandfather left Kiev, I found that Shmuel and Shaya Rabinovich had their leather businesses in 1905 but only Shmuel is there in 1906. He also began to have a shoe business in a large permanent market at the lower end of the town, the Jewish area of Podol which he kept from 1906-1908. Shmuel no longer had either business after 1908 but in 1910 his son, Meer Shmuelevich Rabinovich has his previous tile stove business and is running his father's leather business.
Did my grandfather have a relation or relations in Kiev, one or both of the Rabinoviches with leather businesses, who advised him, possibly helped him, possibly sold his shoes afterwards in the market? Was the jeweller Yakhnovich also a relation? Was that why my grandfather began creating his business in Kiev rather than Odessa? There was another particularly strange coincidence in the Kiev directories, although this time the years did not match my grandparents last few years in Russia. Beginning in the 1906 directory, there was a woman feldsher, a medical assistant or midwife, Rebekka Moishe Rabinovich, the exact name of my grandmother, who worked with another feldsher at the house of a feldsher who later became a doctor, Andrevsky Descent 38, one of the steep slopes rising from the lower part of Kiev. Andrevsky Descent 38 is the last house at the top of the hill in the shadow of the Andrevsky Church which dominates the skyline.
Andrevsky Descent
Rebekka is in the directory one more year, 1907, so if it was my grandmother there would have had to have been a mistake. Unfortunately there is no directory for 1904 and the pages for medical professionals are missing from the 1905 directory, so it is difficult to tell when this Rebekka Rabinovich began working. Previous to 1904 there do not appear to be any women feldshers listed, so it might be that women were not listed until after 1903. Later the category of feldsher included the masculine and feminine forms of the word. There has never been any mention that my grandmother had any medical training, but one of her older sisters, Anna, had studied nursing in Vienna, and a couple of her cousins were very successful pharmacists. She also very much wanted her youngest son to be a pharmacist and supposedly encouraged my mother to study medicine. The younger son had been interested in languages but studied pharmacy for a couple of years, probably dropping out at the end, and worked for a few years in a shoe shop before drowning at the age of 23. My mother studied English and German, possibly fulfilling her brother's wish.
In Natan M Meir's Kiev, Jewish Metropolis: A History, 1859-1914 (2010), he describes an example from the records of a family moving from Odessa to Kiev in 1901 and their problems with residence permits and craft certificates, which puts my grandparents' situation in context.
Rukhlia (Rokhel) Aronovna Roitman moved to Kiev with her husband Aron and child in 1901 from Odessa; the couple was originally from Zhitomir. According to a petition that Roitman submitted to the Kiev provincial governor in 1904, Aron, a typesetter by trade, found work at a printing shop and applied for a residence permit, but soon fell ill and travelled to stay with relatives so that he could convalesce. Since the relatives could not be expected to support their entire family – they now had three children – Roitman decided to stay in Kiev to work as a seamstress; she had received a certificate attesting to her mastery of the craft from the Zhitomir Artisan Board in 1894. Since her details are sketchy, we do not know if Roitman practised her craft while her husband was working or why the couple decided to move to Kiev. However, it seems likely that they had left Odessa for Kiev in the hopes that Aron would find employment there; perhaps the downturn in the Odessa economy had put him out of work. As for Roitman, it may be that she had obtained her artisan certificate while an unmarried adolescent or young woman and had worked as a seamstress until she married Aron or perhaps until they had their first child; the wording of her petition suggests that she had not been working while Aron was employed. (113-114)
As neither of my grandparents' younger children were born in Odessa, it may be that they did not move there until 1905 and were able to get the Guild Certificate quite quickly on the basis of the workshop and shop in Kiev. I want to fantasise so far as to think that my grandmother was a feldsher, possibly working part-time while a nanny watched the children, like Sholem Aleichem's wife who worked as a dentist, but it makes more sense that she might have been minding the shop while my grandfather ran the workshop. And then, I will imagine them, with their four children, moving everything to Odessa to set up another shop and workshop by the sea, where they could grow fruit trees and grapes. And the hunt for how and where the four children became two children continues.
Posted in families, photographs, places, silence	| Tagged Guild Certificate, Kiev, Kiev directories, Rabinovich	| 1 Reply
Peresyp and police surveillance
Posted on March 1, 2016 by plumtree05
Peresyp (Пересып) was one of the later areas of the city to be attacked in the pogrom as it is separated from the rest of the city by a ravine, and was not on the route of the marchers. It is a predominantly working class area and only 20% of the population was Jewish, compared with 50% in some other areas. Even though it runs along the coast, it was a mostly industrial area which does not feature much in Odessa history, as it does not compare with either the wealthy centre or colourful Moldavanka. Its own stories must lie hidden in the walls of the old buildings still lining the main streets and small lanes. The Jews in Peresyp were shopkeepers as well as skilled artisans, factory workers and casual labourers on the nearby docks. Several factories related to the grain trade, such as flour mills , as grain was brought from the interior to the port at Odessa to be shipped all over the world. As much of the grain throughout the 19th century was brought to the docks by oxen dragging heavy wooden carts over the unmade roads, there were also tanneries, slaughter houses and factories for meat preservation and tallow making, as it was not worth the cost and effort to take all the oxen and carts back.
Oxen, carts and sacks of wheat, 19th c
Many Jews took on the laborious business of visiting farms throughout the Ukraine and coordinating the delivery of grain to Odessa, a process that lasted from May to September. Eventually the transport was taken over by rail.
Moscovskaya St, Peresyp
Peresyp 1890
Probably quite a few of the pogrom hooligans were the casual dockworkers who lived around Peresyp and did not want to rampage in their own area, leaving it to others to finally march down the streets causing destruction. None of the Russian reports focuses on or even mentions the streets attacked or the numbers of people killed in Peresyp.
Peresyp on google streetview
However, on the website Museum of Family History (http://www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/ce/odessa/pogrom-unionmembers-A-G.htm) there is a letter written by Jacob Tenenholz to the Committee of the Jewish Colonization Association in Paris from a group of about 100 Jewish Peresyp union-members and heads of households asking for help to leave Russia after the pogrom. The letter is written from the address 17 Bozhakina St. Peresyp is long and narrow, running along the coast, and originally had four main parallel streets, one of them the coast road, and the third one being Bozhakina.
Peresyp
Now the coast road is broken up and two of the parallel roads make up the carriageways of the M14. Many road names have changed. If the second carriageway was the old Bozhakina St, then this would have been the house where Jacob Tenenholz lived and possibly one of the streets affected by the pogrom.
17 Bozhakina St, Peresyp
Nine families on the list also had the same names as people in the pogrom death records, although several were fairly common Jewish names. The list of nine families was as follows:
D. Dorin, age 38, "charrotier"wife, age 36, sons: ages 15, factory worker; ages 11, 6 and 1, daughter, age 4
Muny Dorin, age 46, "s'occupe de charriage?" wife, age 44, son, age 14
G. Gelman, age 32, buttonier wife, age 30, sons: ages 12, 5 and 2, sister, age 20, milliner
A. Sch. Goichman, age 50 wife, age 45, sons: 23, 10 and 5, daughters: 21, 14 and 7
S. Kritschevsky, age 38, worker in a mill wife, age 35, sons: ages 14, 12 and 11, daughter, age 3
Ichel Mankovsky, age 33, labourer wife, age 26, sons: ages 7 and 6, daughter, age 4
R. Nemirorovsky, age 40, "currently colonist" wife: age 38, shopkeeper, son, age 17, daughters: ages 11 and 8
W. Poleikov, age 38, "bottenier," labourer wife, age 36, sons: ages 12, 8 and 3, daughters: ages 10 and 6
W. Rabinovitsch, age 46, labourer wife, age 38, sons: ages 17 and 16
The people in the pogrom death records with these surnames, 4 adults, 4 in their teens, and 2 small children, are:
1841 Dorin Berel Motev 31
1815 Goikhman Shlema Gershov 45
1816 Gelman Shaya Shlemov 25
1915 Gelman Efoim-Menash Zusev 2 years 5 months
2018 Gelman Isruel Zusev 5
1570 Gelman Fradya Meerova 38
1871 Krichevski Gersh Khaikelev 19
1888 Mankovski Moishe Idelev 19
1902 Nemirovski Yankel Moishev 15
1946 Polyakov Lazar Leibov 18
1564 Rabinovich Freida 70
1963 Rabinovich Avrum Nukhimov 60
2033 Rabinovich Solomon about 30 visitor from Riga
1841 Дорин Берел Мотьев 31
1815 Гойхман Шлема Гершков 45 Кодым
1816 Гельман Шая Шлемов 25
1915 Гельман Эфоим-Менаш Зусьев 2г 5м
2018 Гельман Исруэль Зусьев 5
1570 Гельман Фрадя Меерова 38
1871 Кричевский Герш Хайкелев 19
1888 Маньковский Мойше Иделев 19
1902 Немировский Янкел Мойшев 15
1946 Поляков Лазар Лейбов 18
1564 Рабинович Фрейда 70
1963 Рабинович Аврум Нухимов 60
2033 Рабинович Соломон около 30
Two other family names were in the pogrom records and in the 1904-5 directory owning property in Peresyp, Goliak and Fefer, (Голяк и Фефер) although they owned property in several areas. Duvid Faivelev-Leibov was a second guild grain merchant who owned property in the centre and in Peresyp, one at 160 Bozhakina St, but the 22-year-old who died in the pogrom, Abram-Lazar Leibov may not have been related. G. Goliak owned property on the outskirts of Peresyp, at Slobodka Baltovka on Baltskaya, but the pogrom victim was 36-year-old Luzer Duvidovich, and there was a D Goliak who owned a house in Moldavanka at 39 Vinogradnaya and was possibly the father of Luzer, as mentioned earlier (The pogrom at Moldavanka).
Peresyp Slobodka Baltovka (Слободка Балтовка)
Google streetview does not cover Slobodka Baltovka or Baltskaya, which lie across the railroad line from the main running along the coast. While trying to position the marker to see if it was possible to get a view across the railway, I accidentally found myself on a little lane going down to the sea, nearby but in the other direction from Baltskaya. It seemed a typical little Peresyp lane.
Peresyp lane to the coast
Of the surnames on the list of families in Peresyp desperately trying to leave Russia, it stood out that several appear on lists of people, including whole families, wanted by the police in Odessa for their socialist activities. There is one list online entitled Jews under police surveillance 1905 (http://www.eilatgordinlevitan.com/rokiskis/rok_pages/jews_under_police_surveillance_1905_parts1and2.html), which has several surnames that are in the pogrom death records. The people under surveillance were:
Goikhman, David Iankel
Groisman, Levi Itsek Moshko
Kaplun, Mordko Meier
Rabinovich, Viktor Khaim-Iankel
Shapiro, Maria Semen
Another list of people wanted by the Okhrana in Odessa is in an online excerpt from an article in Avotaynu Winter,1995 by George Bolotenko with references to material from the Russian archives – Odessa Okhrana Detachment March 1905-1906:
These were members who met on January 29, 1905 at the home of the son of
Zhakar Movsheve MIKHELOVSKII at 29 Malia Arnautskaia Street. The police took ten people into custody.
This list also includes people from the Peresyp list, Gelman and Goikhman, the Goikhmans being brothers. Although the police surveillance list includes family members, the family of David Iankel Goikhman does not include Mordko Iankel Goikhman who is on the second list. Most of the Odessa people on the surveillance list were not originally from Odessa, but had been involved in a revolutionary group in Odessa and were now missing. There is also an online Okhrana 1905 document from Paris which includes several interceptions from Odessa, again with names, Kofman and Leschinsky, which are also in the pogrom death records (cdn.calisphere.org/data/…/Okhrana_XIIIc_Incoming%20Dispatches.pdf ):
Iosa D Leshhinskiy from Odessa received permission to go abroad
Interc. letter from 'Nilka' in Geneva to Osip Kofman in Odessa, for Faya: asks for assistance in distributing the manifesto of the Anarcho-Communists
None of the actual people under police surveillance were in the pogrom death records, either because they were in hiding or had left Odessa by then, but maybe some of the victims were related in some way to those who were wanted by the police. Because they were not given full rights as citizens, there were many anti-czarist Jews active in politics who might have been targeted by the police and by the more traditional conservative workers.
There was one Rabinovich on the surveillance list, Viktor Kaim Yankel, age 23, about whom is written: registered in Ukmerge JC; born in Shklov; finished Odessa Realschule; exiled to Siberia for surveillance for 4 years; armed resistance to the authorities in Iakutsk; was arested and sentenced to hard labor ("katorga"); escaped from Aleksandrovsk prison in 1905.
His wife Tauba Iosel Rabinovich (nee Slutsky) was also on police surveillance in Yakutia. His parents and four sisters were on surveillance in Odessa. Victor Rabinovich appears in another online record, Fond 364 (154) in the Odessa archives Прокурор Одесского окружного суда 1870-1920 (The prosecutor of the Odessa District Court 1870-1920)
http://archive.odessa.gov.ua/el_arh/doradjanski/f_601-700/
The first entry on the left reads: Inquiry into the charge against V Kh Ia Rabinovich, S M Levin and others for producing hectograph proclamations for the RSDWP (Russian Socialist Democratic Workers Party) 11 Oct 1904-19 Jan 1905.
Fond 634 Odessa archives
The word 'hectograph' left me puzzled. I knew about the printing presses and illegal literature of the revolutionaries. I had a Russian Socialist journalist great-uncle who was barred from entry into Russia in the 1880s, but was constantly entering with false passports and spent six months in Wormwood Scrubs in 1913 for travelling with a false passport. He was finally deported to Russia after being interned in Germany from 1914 to 1916, having travelled with a false British passport. It didn't matter that he had a wife and six British-born children in Britain. I knew that bookbinders were drawn to the revolutionary movement because they were very independent and often itinerant, going from town to town mending and rebinding books. They had the perfect opportunity to carry literature from place to place. But I had never heard of the hectograph. According to the online Early Office Museum (http://www.officemuseum.com/copy_machines.htm):
'In the hektograph (also spelled "hectograph") process, which was introduced in 1876 or shortly before, a master was written or typed with a special aniline ink. The master was then placed face down on a tray containing gelatin and pressed gently for a minute or two, with the result that most of the ink transferred to the surface of the gelatin. Gelatin was used because its moisture kept the ink from drying. Copies were made by using a roller to press blank papers onto the gelatin. Each time a copy was made, some ink was removed from the gelatin, and consequently successive copies were progressively lighter. In practice, up to fifty copies could be made from one master.'
1876 ad for J. R. Holcomb & Co.'s Transfer Tablet hectograph
Hectographs were occasionally used by artists, especially the Russian futurists and German Expressionists, who experimented with printing methods and making books. The result was a beautiful, faded mimeograph or carbon copy.
Kruchonykh's Myatezh I (Mutiny I) 1920
While looking for information on hectography, I came upon this interesting quotation from Trotsky about organising eight or nine chapters of the South Russian Workers' Union in Odessa, which led to 28 members of the union being arrested in 1898:
If it had been possible for anyone to look at this with a sober eye, at this group of young people scurrying about in the half-darkness around a miserable hectograph, what a sorry, fantastic thing it would have seemed to imagine that they could, in this way, overthrow a mighty state that was centuries old. And yet this sorry fantasy became a reality within a single generation; and only eight years separated those nights from 1905, and not quite 20 from 1917.
(http://socialistworker.org/2010/09/02/legacy-of-leon-trotsky)
I hadn't realised that Trotsky (the name apparently came from one of his prison guards in Odessa, which he used on a forged passport) had been brought up on a farm in Ukraine (in a nonreligious Jewish family) and had been sent to live with relations in Odessa when he was nine and then attended a German technical school (realschule), possibly the school attended by Viktor Rabinovich, which had a more practical curriculum than the gymnasium, including science and modern languages. It may have been that the more cosmopolitan atmosphere, integration of different ethnic groups and classes, and increased opportunity for Jewish children to learn Russian even in Jewish schools, helped the growth of radical politics in Odessa. The cousin that Trotsky lived with was a writer and publisher and sparked his love of print and printing presses. (https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/trotsky/leon/my_life/contents.html)
After the diversion with the hectograph, I began to delve into the family names that were on the Peresyp letter and the police surveillance list.
Posted in archives, families, maps, photographs, pogrom death list	| Tagged hectograph, Peresyp, police surveillance, Rabinovich, Trotsky	| Leave a reply
Rabinovich families: part two – birth records and the pogrom
When I began this research, I did not know whether my uncle Michel was born before or after the pogrom, as his date of birth is not on his death record or anywhere else. But there was one more clue which helped me to put the pieces of this story together. One of my cousins told me a story about the oldest son, Aron, who was seven when they left Russia, and who had nightmares all his life from having seen 'Cossacks spearing Jewish babies'. He never spoke of the past or his childhood, but did explain about his nightmares to his wife, saying that when there were raids in his village, their Ukrainian maid, who had a Cossack boyfriend, would warn them, and the children would be hidden. What did he mean by village? Where might they have lived? How many raids might they have experienced? Where were they hidden?
Malyi Fontan
In his memoir, Mosaic of Life, Kataev also uses the word 'village' when his family moved just a few streets from their home on Kanatnaya to Otrada, a group of four short streets which had originally been a fishing village on the edge of the steep lanes down to the coast. I began to think about my grandparents living on one of the small lanes running down towards the sea or at one of the fishing villages used as local resorts, the Malyi, Srednyi, or Bolshoi Fontan, and I wandered along Google Streetview, looking at the old houses that remained.
Gospitalnyi Lane (lane off French Blvd towards the sea)
Gospitalnyi (Госпиталный) below first Rabinovich (Рабиновиичa) dacha
If Michel was not born until after the pogrom, the two nameless boys would have been the youngest, possibly under 1 and 2 years old in 1905, and it would not have been possible to hide them away with the older children. They would have been in their mother's arms, easily grabbed away by soldiers. If Michel had been born before the pogrom, this story falls to pieces. But recently I asked a researcher in the Ukraine to look up three Odessa birth records for me: the two Mikhails born in 1905 (there were no Mikhels), both born after the pogrom, to see if any were my uncle Michel, and one Nakhman born in 1904, as that was a family name, and might have been one of the other boys. I found that Michel was not born in Odessa, unless it was during or immediately after the pogrom and the family did not have a chance to register the birth. The real children of the Odessa birth records I received were one Mikhail, son of an Odessan businessman Abram-Ide Khaskelecich, Nezhinskaya St 14, born 18 November 1905, another Mikhail, born 30 November 1905, son of Hersh Leibovich and Ester from Satanov, and Nakhman, son of Abram Shimonov and Zislia from Kherson, born 14 December 1904.
13 Literaturna St
Literaturnaya (Литературная) running down to park by sea
Literaturnaya, Srednyi Fontan 1894 – track running north from main road to sea
The stories about my uncle Aron also say the nightmares were the result of witnessing a baby being tossed into the air and stabbed with a sabre. A slightly different version of this story was that he had seen Cossacks riding into their village, taking small babies out of their mother's arms, tossing them into the air and spearing them on their swords. This made me wonder where Aron and his sister had been hidden that he could see this scene. At first I had imagined he was looking out an attic window at some distant scene down a street, but of course it is more likely he could only see in front of his own house. Later, I began to think that they might have been in a shed looking into their own yard, or a cupboard in their house looking through a keyhole. Both stories mention babies, as do many others newspaper stories about the pogrom, but there are no babies in the pogrom death records and only 3 children under three years old.
If the two brothers had not died in the pogrom, why would my grandparents have gone to so much trouble to hide any evidence of them, to hide the birthdate of their youngest son, and everything else about their lives in Odessa? It was a very elaborate lie to keep going for the rest of their lives. The 1910 US Census has a question about the number of children a woman has had and whether they are alive or dead. In 1910, four years after they arrived in New York, my grandmother had had her first child born in the US, and she said she had had four children, and four were alive, the three that had come from Russia and the new baby. Why had she not said she had had six children, as she did on my mother's birth certificate? I wondered if the census was done orally with the whole family around, and my grandparents did not want to mention the two missing children in front of the others. Michel was then 5, old enough to understand everything, and may not have known about the missing brothers, or anything about the circumstances of his birth and why the family left Russia. This might have been a lesson for the children that the past was not to be spoken about. And a problem for them later.
I went back to Michael Ignatieff's Russian Album to help me think about how my grandparents might have felt after leaving Russia without their two young boys. His grandmother also lost a two-year-old son in Russia and he writes:
There was typhoid at the resort, in the water supply, in the water ices the children ate on the terrace overlooking the sea, in the milk for the littlest one's formula. In two frightful hours, Natasha watched Vladimir come down with the disease, and she saw the life of her youngest – Paul – ebb away before her eyes. In time she managed to speak of all her losses, all her dispossessions, but never this one, never the snuffing out of baby Paul's little life. How many times, in her most secret hours, must she have stalked that accursed ground in her memory wondering what else she might have done, how she might have deflected the falling sword. She never returned to the Crimea again, to those blessed estates of her childhood with the beautiful names – Koreis, Gaspra – but her memory must have marched back again and again to that hotel bedroom in Eupatoria, to that empty cot. When the time finally came at the end of her life to put down what happened that summer of 1909, she did not write about it at all…Through all the waystations of the life to come, she kept just one little picture in a round silver frame on her night table: the smiling image of her dead child. (p85)
I have a photo of the two eldest children, Aron and Sara, when they were nearly 2 and 4, as Aron was born in December 1898 and little boys began to wear trousers by 4. It might have been taken shortly before the third child was born in Odessa, or before they left Baranovichi.
Odessa 1902?
Studio portraits of children leaning on props such as walls were very common in Odessa at that time. It looks as if someone has made a copy of this photograph cutting out the name of the photographer and town at the bottom.
Odessan boy 1900s?
When I was 6 or 7, I remember finding an old children's book, Tige, among my parents' books. I assumed it had belonged to my mother when she was little, although it was never mentioned and I never thought to ask. It is the story of a dog who moves from the country to live with a little boy and his family in New York City until the family finally moves out of town to a house with a garden, much to the dog' s delight. In one of the first pictures, the little boy is dressed in a dress, as my uncle was in the photograph. It was not until recently that I thought to look at when the book was published – the date inside is 1905, and I realised that the book must have been for Aron, who was seven when the family arrived in 1906. The story mirrors my grandparents' lives at that time, as they settled first in Manhattan and then moved out to New Rochelle. Had he been given it for his first birthday in America around Christmas 1906?
Tige by Richard F. Outault 1905
I am quite sure that my grandparents would not have bought a book in English, a language they never learned to read or write properly. They would not have known that this story was a spin-off from a popular cartoon called Buster Brown. Was it bought by one of my grandmother's brothers, the successful one who had had several businesses and was always helping out other family members? I doubt that there were many other books or other things in the house at first, so this is a rare reminder of their first months in the US.
This is the only photograph of my grandparents' children in Russia. When I read Ignatieff's description of the death of little Paul, it makes me wonder how my grandparents might have felt losing two little boys, possibly from an illness like typhoid, but possibly brutally during the pogrom. That these two boys remained nameless and no photographs were kept probably says more than any number of words. The first family photograph taken in the US was of my grandmother and the three children about two years later, when the baby, Michel, was about 3, wearing a dress as had his brother before him. The children are not as smartly turned out as six years earlier, or as most children are in studio portraits. Their clothes are rumpled and not tucked in. The little touches of a mother wanting her children to look their best are not there, although everyone, except the youngest who looks up quizzically at the photographer, is smiling.
From the little I have heard about my grandmother, I felt that something had been broken in her by the time she reached America. I gathered that she rarely went out anywhere, whether to the shops, into New York City, on a holiday, or to visit relations. My grandfather mainly worked from home or very early in the morning so that he could be at home for lunch with my grandmother, and once settled, she did not want to move or change their life in any way. And even though my grandfather was often around, when my mother, the youngest child, went to college in New York City, she felt she had to come home for lunch as often as possible because her mother was now alone. My cousin also mentioned that, in the summers, my mother would come from work to her mother's for lunch, and then take her and my cousins to the beach, where my grandmother would sit by herself rather than talk to the other old women gossiping together.
My grandparents always lived on the same two adjoining streets in New Rochelle but none of the houses they lived in remain. Many of the houses around there do not look that different from Russian houses with their gable ends to the road, picket fences and tree lined streets.
Acorn Terrace, New Rochelle
New Rochelle street
Vershynna St, Bolshoi Fontan
Nedjelina St, Srednyi Fontan
There was one more clue to where all the children were born. In the US 1920 census, the Russian districts where people were born were recorded. My grandparents and the two elder children were said to have been born in the Minsk district, and for Michel it said Kiev. My grandfather also wrote on his naturalisation form that his last residence in Russia was Kiev. It is possible that they had left Odessa and stayed initially in Kiev to have the baby and wait until he was old enough to travel on to Minsk and then America. But it is also possible that, not wanting to speak of why they had left Odessa, they invented the story that they had lived in Kiev. When my eldest uncle applied for his first US passport around 1960 he wrote that he was born in Kiev. Was he not born in the Minsk district or had he simply decided to repeat the Kiev story?
I was still not sure where Michel had been born, and no closer to finding the other two uncles. Eventually, as more records come online, possibly even added to this blog from people who have retrieved records from the Odessa archive, this list will be wheedled down to a point where it might be feasible to find my uncles. Below is a list of the Odessa Rabinovich births for 1902-1904, among which are possibly the two missing boys.
44 RABINOVICH Beila
108 RABINOVICH Rivka
293 RABINOVICH Ester
299 RABINOVICH Dina
5?? RABINOVICH Gersh
503 RABINOVICH Gersh
606 RABINOVICH Leib
535 RABINOVICH Elasha
557 RABINOVICH Pesya
576 RABINOVICH Alisa
858 RABINOVICH Esya
892 RABINOVICH Mal?
1177 RABINOVICH Aaron
1438 RABINOVICH Shmil
1743 RABINOVICH Khaim Mendel
1883 RABINOVICH Gersh
1942 RABINOVICH Ilya
1749 RABINOVICH Mesiya
2089 RABINOVICH Evce
1835 RABINOVICH Vitali
2232 RABINOVICH Rudolif
1991 RABINOVICH Braina
2327 RABINOVICH Iosif
2071 RABINOVICH Etel
2591 RABINOVICH Ruvin
2601 RABINOVICH Moise
2367 RABINOVICH Tsipora
2373 RABINOVICH Feiga
2415 RABINOVICH Khana
11 RABINOVICH Gersh
122 RABINOVICH Breita-Riva
240 RABINOVICH Khvelya
620 RABINOVICH Borukh
799 RABINOVICH Manus
1079 RABINOVICH Isidor
1200 RABINOVICH Moisei
1059 RABINOVICH Beila
1253 RABINOVICH Ber
1255 RABINOVICH Yakov
1585 RABINOVICH Iosel
1891 RABINOVICH Sergei
2301 RABINOVICH Menasha
2341 RABINOVICH Shimon
2225 RABINOVICH Evgeniya
2430 RABINOVICH Pesya
58 RABINOVICH Leya
110 RABINOVICH Aron
220 RABINOVICH Beilya
413 RABINOVICH Ekhatsniesh
538 RABINOVICH Usher- Ruvin
549 RABINOVICH Boris
841 RABINOVICH Avram
695 RABINOVICH Mirel
702 RABINOVICH Beila
1365 RABINOVICH Mariem
1634 RABINOVICH Falin
1672 RABINOVICH Sarra
2082 RABINOVICH Mordel
1885 RABINOVICH Etya
1985 RABINOVICH Leya Reidya
2011 RABINOVICH Ester
2012 RABINOVICH Etya twins
2441 RABINOVICH Mikheal
2509 RABINOVICH Nakhman
2666 RABINOVICH Iegoshia
2682 RABINOVICH Gersh Volf
Posted in archives, families, literature, maps, places, silence	| Tagged birth records, Bolshoi Fontan, census, family secrets, Ignatieff, Kataev, Otrada, Rabinovich, Srednyi Fontan	| 1 Reply
Rabinovich families: part one
Although there is still one more area of Odessa where there was major pogrom destruction, Peresyp, near the docks, first I would like to return to the city in general and focus on one family name, Rabinovich, one of the commonest Jewish names, a Jewish Everyman. Rabinovich families were probably spread across Odessa from the very richest guild merchants to the poorest of the working class and casual labourers. The extremely well-off first guild merchant and tea importer, Leon Jacob Rabinovich, had two sons and, in the directories, much of their property is in the name of Rabinovich brothers.
Teapot Leon Rabinovich tea importer
A dacha with large grounds at 27 French Boulevard, which was used as a landmark in the Odessa directories, was in the name of the elder son, Jacob Leon. Most of the dachas on Frantsuzky Blvd became public buildings after the revolution. The Rabinovich dacha is now an afterthought in the grounds of the Dynamo football stadium and unfortunately there are no old photographs.
Dacha Rabinovich 27 French Blvd
On this 1917 map, there are two Rabinovich (Рабинович) properties on the French Boulevard. The property on the left, number 11, in the name of A Rabinovich, possibly the second son of Leon, appeared to have been a group of dachas down by the coast, but around 1912 a luxurious art deco apartment building with up-to-date facilities was built on the road, and number 27 is the property on the right.
http://www.citymap.odessa.ua/?30
French Blvd and Rabinovich dachas
11 French Blvd
To see how common the name Rabinovich was in Odessa at that time, I compared the entries in the 1902-3 directories for Rabinovich (Рабинович) and Kogan (Коган, Cohen), and found that Rabinovich was the more common.
The 1904-5 directory does not have an index like that the 1902-3 directory, but using a search the names and addresses are similar to those of 1902-3, although various house numbers have changed. In the street section of the directory there are approximately 32 Rabinovich properties, although quite a few landlords own several houses, including dachas. There are also about 15 Rabinoviches in the professional sections, several of whom were first and second guild members, and four were doctors. One of the doctors, Simon Rabinovich ran a hydrotherapy practice with a partner with a large establishment at 27 Kanatnaya St, now a modern neurology clinic. An old photograph online lists the building as 19 Kanatnaya St.
1904-5 directory S S Rabinovich and A A Yasinovsky hydrotherapy treatment
Ул. Канатная, 19, водолечебница врачей С.С. Рабиновича и А.А. Ясиновского
http://viknaodessa.od.ua/old-photo/?ulitsa_kanatnaya
Across the road at 28 Kanatnaya, a beautiful ornate building, lived Sholem Aleichem, another Odessan Rabinovich (Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich), who wrote the stories on which 'Fiddler on the roof' is based.
28 Kanatnaya
On the Jewish small business list there are 19 Rabinoviches, and on the 'All Russia' Odessa business directory (searchable on the Jewishgen website) there are 12 names for 1903 with their types of business.
RABINOVICH Iosif Abram lawyer's assistant
Mendel Samuil lawyer's assistant
Moisei Iakov bank office Nadezhdinskaya
Lazar printing and lithography Troitskaya 52
Srul Volf leather goods Baltovskaya rd 1
Leon colonial goods Evreiskaya private residence Pushkinskaia 31
Nukhim Iosif broker/middleman agency Evreiskaya 8
Khopel-Iankel Borukh fabrics and drapery Stepovaya
Iakov Abram machines for grain mills M Arnautskaya 109
Srul Leiba-David broker stock exchange Lanzheronovskaia 12
Aleksandr Mikhail wine (grapes) Evreiskaya 11
Samuil Berko sacks and bags Evreiskaya 43
In the pogrom death records, there was one visitor to Odessa, Solomon Rabinovich, about 30, from Riga, and a couple, Avrum Nukhimov, 60, from Uman, and his wife, Freida. On the Jewish small business list there are 2 Nukhims:
Рабинович Нухим ул.Тираспольская 12 1893 (Rabinovich Nukhim Tiraspolskaya 12)
Рабинович Нухим Иосифович ул.Кондратьевская 13 1912 (Rabinovich Nukhim Iosifovich Kondratevskaya 13)
The second name is also in the Odessa business directory for 1903, but the first one, without a patronymic, is not mentioned. It is strange that he is the only one on this list without a patronymic and could be the son of Avrum. There is also no listing of what his business was, but his home or business was in Moldavanka on the street where Isaac Babel lived for a year as a teenager, Tiraspolskaya.
12 Tiraspolskaya
In the Semenov 1921 report of the pogrom, two wounded men at the Jewish hospital, X and F Rabinovich, are mentioned as being asked to sign a statement saying that the police were not to blame for the pogrom. Others at the hospital had been intimidated into signing statements. This came after a paragraph in which it said that the figures for the dead and wounded only included those taken to public hospitals, not those in private clinics or at home. F Rabinovich is in the 1904-5 directory at 12 Kartamishevskaya Street, in the heart of Moldavanka.
12 Kartamishevskaya
During the pogrom, 29 Jews had been killed at 7 Kartamishevskyi Lane and 35 at 5 Kartamishevskaya Street. 7 Kartamishevskaya Street had also been attacked. Golda Feld had been living with her father, Avrum Stitelman, at 10 Kartamishevskyi Street. Number 12 Kartamishevskaya Street is on the left in the photo.
Among the property owners in the directories were two Rabinoviches with exactly the same name as my grandfather, Jacob (Yakov, Yankel) Leon (Leib). One was the son of the tea importer, and the family lived at Pushkinskaya 31 and had the dacha on French Boulevard.
31 Pushkinskaya
There was another Jacob Leon at Preobrazhenskaya 3, who, with his wife, was involved with a Jewish orphanage. At first, on seeing the same initials, I thought for a moment that one of them might have been my grandfather. When I saw their houses, I wondered if they were divided into flats and my family might lived in one of them. The house on Preobrazhenskaya was a beautiful, ornate, long, narrow pink building, covered in balconies. Odessa is a city of balconies but this Rabinovich house took the idea of balconies and architraves to wonderful extremes.
3 Preobrazhenskaya
I then found the full names in the business sections of the directory, and saw that the businesses were different. I realised that these were wealthy business and property owners, whereas most people in Odessa probably rented. I had had my small moment of dreaming that I had found my grandparents. Then I came down to earth and realised that my family more likely lived in a small house on the edges of the city with a garden, a grape vine and fruit trees, the type of home they tried to recreate outside New York.
The lists of businessman and property owners is far removed from the mass of ordinary Rabinovich families in Odessa in 1905, those who rented property, and who may have had small workshops or jobs working for others. I tried googling 'Rabinovich family Odessa' to see if anyone had written about their Rabinovich family online and discovered an interesting Googlebook of pre-World War I Russian first-hand accounts of the lives of workers, one of which describes a clerical worker's apartment in Odessa.
Some of the rented apartments that I observed were below street level. In order to get to them, you had to descend a slippery wooden staircase that had no railings. One needed the agility of an acrobat to get down the stairs without breaking one's neck. These basement apartments got no light at all. Little oil lamps burned night and day, spreading a thick black soot and stench over everything. Water streamed down the mildewed walls.
One apartment on Meshchanskaia Street (three rooms and a kitchen) was rented by Dain, a hardware store clerk in Odessa. Each room measured 7 feet high, 8 feet wide, and 8 ½ feet long and was heated by one small brazier. Dain and his family occupied one of the rooms and the kitchen. Two sales clerks and their families occupied the remaining rooms: Rabinovich, who worked in a dry goods store, and Tsypin, who worked in a wholesale warehouse. There were eight people in the Dain family, five in the Rabinovich's, and 11 in Tsypin's. In addition, the apartment accommodated a paralytic co-worker who had been fired when he became ill, together with his sister and her family. The sister's husband, a shoemaker, worked at home.
The preceding description of an apartment on Meshchanskaia Street applies also to dwellings on Staroreznichnaia Street and other streets in Odessa, with the difference that on Staroreznichnaia Street the apartments had floors made of clay rather than dirt and some of the basement apartments received a little light through glass doors opening onto the half-dark corridors. In every other respect, however, these apartments were just as damp, mouldy, dark, and rank as the one described above. None of these dwellings had any furniture to speak of and a family of 7 to 12 people would have one table, a few stools and a double bed.
Gudyan AM 'Essays on the history of the movement of sales-clerical workers in Russia'. The Russian Worker: Life and Labor Under the Tsarist Regime Victoria Bonnell (ed) 1983; p204
Meshchanskaia (Мещанская) Street crosses Malaya Arnautskaya (Малая Арнаутская ) at the end towards Moldavanka and Staroreznichnaya runs parallel to it. Although this is the edge of the wealthier central Odessa, it seems to have been quite a poor Jewish area and some of the old houses on the street are still in bad or derelict condition, although gradually new apartment buildings are replacing them.
Staroreznichnaya Street
Wandering along Google Streetview, I had never before noticed cellars below ground level. I don't think it was simply because I was not looking out for them. It seemed to be a peculiarity of this area between Malaya Arnautskaya and Moldavanka, that the pavement ended abruptly a foot or two before buildings, leaving a gap for glimmers of light to filter through to underground windows. The gaps were sometimes surrounded by metal railings or covered with metal sheet. More recently glass verandahs have been built around the openings.
Meshchanskaya cellars
Meshchanskaya cellar with narrow gap
According to an Odessa website which traces the history of the houses on several Odessan streets including Malaya Arnautskaya, in 1902, there were 1752 poor Jewish people living at a density of 16 people per home on Malaya Arnautskaya, and on the much shorter street, Gospitalnaya in Moldavanka, there were over 4000 poor Jews living in 65 houses. Some of these people had not always been poor, but may have been businessman or professionals who had had run into bad luck – illness, injury, unemployment or a failed business. http://obodesse.at.ua/publ/malaja_arnautskaja_ulica/1-1-0-254
I have numbered the relevant streets on the above map, 1. Malaya Arnautskaya 2. Meshchanskaya 3. Staroreznichnaya 4. Gospitalnaya, and for context, 5. Jewish cemetery and 6. Kulikovo Field, beyond which lived Valentin Kataev, who wrote in his memoir, A mosaic of life, about visiting a Jewish seamstress with his mother on Malaya Arnautskaya, which I quoted at more length previously.
There was a street called Malaya Arnautskaya, which seemed to me at the time to be a long way away, but was, in fact, quite close to where we lived. When we went there, we were immediately engulfed in the world of Jewish poverty, with all its confused colours and sour-sweet smells. We entered a wooden, glass-roofed arcade that surrounded the yard. Here, mamma had to keep her head bent the whole time to avoid breaking the eagle's feathers in her hat on some protruding object or other – garments suspended on a close line, or a low cross-beam supporting the arcade's rickety, boarded walls, half-destroyed by death-watch beetles. The arcade possessed innumerable windows and doors. All the windows were dirty and half of them broken. Most of the doors were open and, in the darkness beyond them, nested families of Jewish shopkeepers and craftsmen: tailors, shoemakers, watchmakers, ironmongers, dressmakers.…
I was filled at one and the same time with repulsion and a tormenting pity for that poor race, condemned to live in such crowded and ugly conditions among the two wheeled carts with curved handles and the shops selling evil-smelling kerosene in barrels, small sacks of coal, rust-coloured salted herrings, bottles of olives, glass jars of cucumbers in clouded, milky water, bunches of dill, and halva that looked like blocks of window putty (p386).
I was particularly interested in narrowing down the list of children born to the many ordinary and less ordinary Rabinovich families in the years 1902-1905, in order to find my two nameless uncles. Some of these children may have belonged to the wealthy families of Odessa but many more would have come from working-class families in Moldavanka and other suburbs. There were 30 Jewish Rabinovich children born in 1902, 18 in 1903, 24 in 1904, and 26 in 1905. How many families might this have represented and how many more were families who did not have children or had older children?
When I first began this research on Odessa and the pogrom, knowing that two of my mother's brothers had died before the family left Russia in 1906, I wrote down, for the first time, a list of my mother's siblings with their dates of birth, Aron 1898, Sara 1901, Michel 1905. I had only known how much older my mother's brothers and sisters were than her, not the dates. I then checked with the passport and saw that the ages fit.
1906 passport: Aron 7, Michel 1, Sara 5
As children, we accept the bits of information we are given without questioning or looking at them in different ways. Seeing the list and the dates in front of me made it obvious the two brothers had been born in the space between 1902 and 1904, the years the family were living in Odessa. As the thoughts and ideas are put down on paper, or on screen, sometimes what seemed to be disparate fragments of information come together and take on new meaning. And so I began to look for online Odessa records which included dates of birth or addresses during the years 1902-1905 but my family remained as elusive as ever.
Posted in archives, families, literature, maps, photographs	| Tagged birth records, dachas, French Blvd, Kanatnaya, Kataev, Meshchanskaya, Rabinovich	| Leave a reply