A little more than a decade ago, I invested $4 at a local Mormon Family History Library for a microfilmed reel of Jewish records (1846-1853) from my paternal ancestral town of Konin, Poland. It turned out to be one of the most rewarding investments I ever made. It took a few years but eventually I…
Tag: genealogy
Kerry family comes full circle
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About a century ago, Fritz Kohn, a 29-year-old Czech-born Jew living in Austria, visited a government office in Vienna and officially changed his name to Frederick Kerry, for all intents and purposes abandoning his Jewish heritage at the same time. When Kerry and family arrived at Ellis Island in 1905, they were listed as Germans…
Reconstructing Hungarian-Jewish world
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As Montreal-area author Elaine Kalman Naves was preparing to write the book that eventually became Journey To Vaja: Reconstructing the World of a Hungarian-Jewish Family (McGill-Queen’s University Press), she considered carefully whether to present the story as a non-fiction chronicle or as a novel. The book tells the story of the Weinbergers, a farming family…
Mary Antin’s The Promised Land
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Mary Antin, born in the Lithuanian (now Belarussian) town of Polotsk in 1881, recorded her memoirs of the Old Country and of coming to America in The Promised Land, a book first published in 1911. The Promised Land is a valuable first-person account of the myriad concerns and experiences surrounding the journey from the squalid…
From a Ruined Garden: a marvelous distillation of memory
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Where might you expect to hear a tale of an enchanted Passover seder where all participants fall asleep at the table before even the first glass of wine is consumed? Or of a blind cantor who, during a brief visit to town, sings so sweetly in synagogue that the whole community is mesmerized for weeks?…
Journey to a 19th-century shtetl
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Back about a century and a half ago, the town of Kamenets was a typical Russian-Polish shtetl consisting “of 250 old houses, black and small with shingled roofs,” and with some 450 Jews listed in the Revizski Skazki, the official government registry. However, most of the town’s Jews did not appear in the registry. Fearful…
Journeys of David Toback
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It is sometimes said that heredity is destiny — a phrase with some apparent truth in The Journeys of David Toback, an old (Yiddish) diary edited (in English) by Carole Malkin and published by Schocken Books. For David Toback, who became bar-mitvahed in a dirt-poor Ukrainian village in 1888, the pair of tefillin that his…
The miracle called Ancestry.com
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The internet-based genealogical company Ancestry.com has added a major series of Jewish collections to its website, including many data bases that may be searched free of charge for users who open a free account. Ancestry’s recently-added Jewish Family History Collection include the 19th-century Jewish records related to many places in Eastern Europe. There are specifically…
Bad Arolsen & the International Tracing Service
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Funded solely by Germany and managed by the Red Cross, the International Tracing Service (ITS) of Bad Arolsen, Germany, has built up a vast Central Names Index of more than 50 million reference cards pertaining to some 17.5 million people, mostly victims of the Holocaust and family members who made inquiries about missing relatives after…
Roskies’ Yiddishlands is evocative memoir
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Soon after her arrival in Canada in 1940, Masha Roskies sat down to a meal at her sister-in-law’s house in Montreal and, seeing that only “Canadian bread” (the white, fluffy stuff called Wonder Bread) was on the table, asked for a piece of real bread instead. When her aunt curtly replied that “this was what…
