F

amily Tree Syndrome

 

February - December, 2002








About two years ago, I arrived in England on a visit to my family there and learned to my surprise that my nephew Michael had become interested in Genealogy and had traced my father’s family back to the mid 1800’s.  Having never really considered the possibility I was pleased both that he found the family history of interest and more especially that he had done something about it.  I asked to look at his research and found it quite fascinating.  

Fast forward a year and we are in Israel, celebrating my husband Gerry’s 60th birthday.  It was our second joint visit, his third and my fourth visit so obviously it is a place we know well.  On Gerry’s first visit to Israel he had seen a second cousin, Dvorah, that he had met as a young adult back in California, but by the time we returned together in 1985 he had lost touch with her and attempts to find her through the phone book (the only way in those pre-internet days) had failed. This time we had two months at our disposal and, more crucially, internet contact with members of his extended family.  After trying the phone book again and failing — neither of us can read Hebrew and so we had to work through friends ¾ Gerry in desperation sent email to a cousin in San Francisco.  Bob didn’t have the necessary information, but recommended the husband of another cousin with whom, as it happens, we had long been in email contact.  His response to our inquiry was also negative, but after a couple of days he was back in touch with an old address he had found among his wife’s papers.

Gerry’s reaction to the email was electric.  “Ruth!  Of course, that’s it! Ah, now I see why we couldn‘t find it.”  He recognized the address from his original visit.  I should perhaps add here that Gerry has the world’s worst memory for names and faces but an almost encyclopedic memory for places.  He will often retain the map of a city in his head for decades and be able to discuss it intelligently with an inhabitant long after a visit. The other part of his exclamation was that we had been asking friends to look for our cousin in Tel Aviv when in fact they lived in a suburb of Tel Aviv called Ramat Gan.  Coincidentally the very same suburb where my closest friend lives.  The phone company keeps separate directories for each suburb rather than combining them like we do in the U.S.

The email triggered a chain of events that has had us immersed in Gerry’s family history ever since.  First, of course, we had to find out whether the old address was still good.  Happily it proved to be the case as our landlord in Jerusalem announced to us after we had asked him to look up Dvorah in the Ramat Gan phone book. [He had already tried and failed to find the family in the Tel Aviv phone book.] Two phone calls later and Gerry and Dvorah were laughing and crying over the long years of absence and arranging to get together in Ramat Gan. 

On that visit we heard the story of their family’s escape from the Soviet Union after the second world war to Israel. Dvorah and her siblings are the children of Gerry’s mother’s first cousin, Eda. Gerry’s mother Bettie and four of her five siblings had come to the U.S. with their mother Etta Stotland Kazer in 1913 when Bettie was only three years old. Etta’s sister Feiga Stotland Stotland had stayed behind in their native village of Narodichi along with her husband Shmuel (also a Stotland and also Feiga’s uncle) and their ?? children, including Eda. After Eda married, she and her husband moved east to Tashkent to escape from the advancing Germans, a move that undoubtedly saved their lives.  It was from Tashkent, that the family traveled through the Soviet Union to the Polish border and got false papers allowing them to cross into Poland saying that they were returning Polish citizens.  From Poland they made their way to Vienna and ultimately from there to the newly established state of Israel.

But there was one question that Gerry was burning to ask that he felt sure Dvorah and her brother and sister must know.  Where was his mother’s family, the Stotlands,  from?  He had heard his mother talk about some place called Naroditch, but he had also heard her say that it was just a Russian word for village and not a place name.  Not so, responded Dvorah.  Not only was it a place name, but a place name that could be found on almost any map of Ukraine. That very day, Gerry determined to go to Narodichi (as it is called in Ukrainian) and to see the place where his mother, his grandmother and his aunts and uncles were born.  Perhaps we would even find relatives there.

But there was one more story to hear before that, the astonishing story of Dvorah’s uncle  who had stayed behind in the Soviet Union and was now in the New York.  Eda’s younger brother, Iosif, had stayed behind in the Soviet Union, survived the war years by working in a critical war industry, married and raised a family. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, he re-established contact with his sister in Israel after long years without writing to her for fear of attracting unwelcome attention from the Soviet authorities. That contact was followed by a reunion in Israel in 1994. Sure that he wanted to leave the Soviet Union, Iosif was not sure he wanted to jump out of the frying pan of a collapsing Soviet Union into the fire of an Israel beset by terrorsim.  And then, serendipitously, his step-daughter’s family emigrated to the United States and two years later sponsored Iosif and his second wife Anna.  They settled in Brighton Beach, the Russian-speaking part of Brooklyn, New York, and in turn sponsored Iosif’s children and their families and Iosif’s one remaining sister Golda and her family.

But I am getting ahead of myself.  On leaving Israel, we spent two delightful months touring the Mediterranean and Aegean coasts of Turkey  before making our way overland through Bulgaria and Romania to the southern border of Ukraine. And yes, we visited the native village of Gerry’s mother and the other Stotland relatives.  We did find some Stotlands there, but have not been able to find any link beyond the name and the fact that they are Jewish.  But we walked the streets that his mother’s family must have walked and although the Jewish heart of the village, where the market was and all the Jews congregated, has disappeared, razed by the Soviet authorities to build a park, an administrative building, and a cultural center, much of what is there must be just as they knew it.  Hundred-year-old and more log homes painted blue and white.  Every home with a pleasant garden lining beaten earth streets and the community surrounded by farm fields, collectivized after the 1917 revolution, but otherwise probably largely unchanged like the river xx that runs through the village on its way to the Dnieper and from there to the Black Sea.

And finally, we arrived in New York and hesitantly searched on the web for a man called Iosif Stotland in Brooklyn.  There he was!  Just a phone call away.  We knew he was in his eighties and doubted that he spoke much English, so I got out my Russian dictionary and composed a short paragraph explaining who I was, who we thought he was, and how we were related and picked up the phone.  An answering machine picked up and as half-expected, the voice, female, spoke Russian.  I waited for the beep and then said my little piece.  Unfortunately at that time we didn’t have any phone number to give them, so I promised to call back the next day at the same time.  I wondered, nervously, if they would understand my rusty Russian.  The next day as promised, I called back and was greeted by what to my ears was a torrent of Russian sound.  At first I understood very little and we were both so excited that it took quite a time to arrange a time for us to visit them and to communicate such things as address and directions.  

The fact that I studied Russian was merely a happy accident.  After two years in high school and four years in college, I should have been well-equipped to speak and understand the language.  In fact, however, I had not excelled in my Russian studies and after 30 years of almost complete neglect, the situation had not improved. Fortunately, our month in mostly Russian-speaking Ukraine had mitigated some of the neglect, two days spent in and around Narodichi trying to serve as Gerry’s interpreter, and my dogged efforts to read Russian magazines I had picked up had knocked off some of the rusty corners.  But in truth my skills were not really up to the task.

Our visit with Iosif and Anna was one of the most heartwarming afternoons I have ever spent. Even though these people were of no blood relation, I felt as though I had found my own long lost family, so much had I absorbed of the family history.  And rather than being frustrated like I was with my dreadful Russian, they were just so delighted to find an American relative that finding one that also spoke Russian was like manna from heaven.  Iosif asked me again and again, “Surely you have Russian relatives, you must have somewhere in your family?”  And I would say no, that I was born in England and that to my knowledge I had no Russian-speakers in my family tree.

And so we come to the crux of the story. The family tree.  We have been working on it on and off now for about three months.  We were very lucky not to have to do anything from scratch, but rather have built on the efforts of two of Gerry’s cousins, Esther Stotland Kazer Rosenstein Grossberg and Eleanor Stotland Miller, ably assisted by Reva Stotland Kazer Stone Gomberg and the Stotland-Goldsmith brothers, Bob and Harold.  It is of abiding interest.  We have been to the National Archives and pored over census records.  But mostly we have profited from data collected by the rest of the family.  So far the Stotland family tree goes back to Gerry’s great great grandfather and who knows perhaps on a future visit to the Ukraine we might manage to take it back even farther.  We certainly hope so.
 



Stotland Roots | Israel | Ukraine

November 16, 2002