Song about Jews history in Kiev
Nair Reg Mizrahy
Allan Harris
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Bernardo Sorj
BESSARABIA:
MEMORY OF A PLACE OR A PLACE IN MEMORY?
Bernardo Sorj
The Bessarabia of my childhood
One of the first words I heard in my childhood was my father saying in Yiddish "Boruch, you are a Bessaraber". Bessaraber, from Bessarabia, the land where my father come from.
Mom was born in Argentina, into a family that had just arrived from the city of Bialystok, in Poland. But she didn`t had memories from that place. After all, she was Argentinean, and my father lived until he was 18 years old in Bessarabia, more precisely in Khotyn.
Possibly more important than the geographical data was the fact that my grandfather was a rabbi, as were several of my uncles and great- and great-great-grandparents. An aura of almost mystical respect hung over him. Veneration that merged with the extermination of my father's family, including my grandparents, uncles, aunts and nephews, in the Holocaust. About my mother's family there was apparently nothing special to tell. On the contrary, my maternal grandfather left negative memories in his daughters.
Throughout my childhood, I listened to the stories my father told about life in the "shtetl", the small town where he lived. First of all, that he was born in Kelmenitz, but soon the family moved to Khotyn, where his father, besides being a rabbi, had certain delegated functions as a judge, conferred by the Russian power.
He related that life in the shtetl, including my grandfather's house, was very poor and the cold winter was very hard to bear. One aunt, to help the family, would cross the Dniester River to smuggle cigarettes, at the risk of being killed. One of the rich families would occasionally send a few kilos of cornmeal to make polenta. Mameligue, polenta, was so present in the lives of the besarabers that they called each other "mameligues".
Dad, the only one of the brothers without a vocation for studies (he liked to run down the street with his only toy, a wire wheel that he handled with a stick and, as a teenager, flirting with girls), wanting to help, went to work picking walnuts. He came home with his pay for the day and his hands blackened from work. My grandfather, who never hit him or yelled at him, was very upset. That was not a worthy job for a rabbi's son! He was sent to be a watchmaker's apprentice, a more dignified job. After disassembling several clocks and not being able to put the pieces back in place, he gave up trying.
Another way for the children to earn money was to wait for the Cossacks who came to shop and drink vodka, tying and tending horses. He did this several times, but quit when a drunken Cossack, in lieu of a tip, ripped off a friend's ear for being a "filthy Jew."
My father's world was totally introverted. So much so that when he arrived in Uruguay the only language he spoke, wrote and read was Yiddish. The "outside" world, made up of the goyim (gentiles) was hostile and one had to keep one's distance. This was not always possible, especially on the eve of Holy Week, when a mob, with the priest at the head carrying a cross, would go through the Jewish streets throwing stones, robbing and setting fire to the houses of the supposed murderers of Christ. In one of these pogroms, my father's cousin was burned to death.
Memories of my grandmother are few. Traditional, promising young rabbis married the daughters of wealthier families, who gave them a dowry. The resources allowed the rabbi to devote himself to his studies while his wife took care of the children and the business. This was the fate of my grandmother Frida, who managed the business purchased with the dowry. Ill at a young age and taking care of the family, the business ended in bankruptcy. Despite the hardships, Dadused to tell me that life in the shtetl made more sense than in today's world, but it was difficult for women, "who were not properly recognized."
Dad's memories centered on the father figure. His life was devoted to study, spending every day rereading the Talmud. He arbitrated in conflict situations, often in commercial matters between rich and poor. My grandfather did not submit to the demands of the powerful, because he believed that his role was to protect those in need. I remembered the respect people had for my grandfather: everyone in the synagogue stood up when he entered. My father, in the synagogue in Uruguay, when he went up to the pulpit to give the blessing of the Torah (pentateuch) was called "Bentzion son of Rabbi Boruch", his main source of pride.
I used to repeat to my father that "we came into the world to do good", that "prayers are worthless if the person is not good". I always reminded him that love is to protect the loved ones, and that is why love has a high price, that of suffering when the loved ones suffer. Before traveling to Uruguay he reminded her that "tzu zain a yd is tzu zain a mentsh" (to be Jewish is to be a righteous person).
At that time, Hasidic rabbis, from lineages generally passed down from father to son, went from town to town with their courts, receiving the local population to distribute blessings that would have miraculous powers. In return, they received the most diverse gifts from people who had little to give. My grandfather was silent, but conveyed his displeasure to my father.
The portraits of my grandparents and my uncles were on the sideboard and my mother always tried to put them in a sideways position, so that my father's eyes would not cross them and the tears would flow without him being able to hold them back.
I was named after my grandfather, Boruch. It was an enormous burden that my parents, but also my relatives, in the most varied ways, made me feel.
My father arrived in Uruguay having as only address one of the sons of the Sancovski family, the same one that sent corn flour to my grandparents' house. Although the Jews who arrived in Montevideo organized themselves in Farbands (associations) with their own synagogues, they soon began around their neighborhood, since on Saturday it is not possible to use a means of transportation, thus bringing together people from the most diverse origins. In the synagogue the lingua franca was Yiddish, and the different origins took a back seat, although my uncle spoke Hungarian with a compatriot, and some were called by their place of origin, such as "litvish" (the Lithuanian).
The Bessarabia of Israel
In 1955 a man came to the synagogue who performed a traditional fund-raising function for the Yeshivot (study centers) of Israel. After the prayers, the tradition was for the visitor to make a commentary on a religious topic. At the end of the presentation he explained that he had passed through the city of Cali, in Colombia, and asked if there was anyone from Khotyn, as the Movermans knew they had a relative in Uruguay and asked to be contacted.
The Movermans were Dad's cousins on his mother's side. Dadgot in touch and was told that a son of his brother had survived the Holocaust and was living in Israel. He had been saved because his mother, my uncle Moishe's wife, when they marched all the Jews out of town in the middle of the winter night and shot them, managed to throw herself into a ditch and carried her two sons to the Soviet-controlled side.
When I arrived in Israel, I found my cousin David and asked him to tell me more about his family. David had repressed the past, which he never told his daughters about. He only talked about it with his wife after fifteen years of marriage, when the Eichmann trial in 1961 brought out the repressed emotions.[1] They never spoke of it again. Israel, for them, represented a rebirth and the nightmare was to be left behind.
The few things I was able to get out of David completed a little more of the picture of my father family's story up to their extermination. Moishe, David's father and my dad's older brother, following tradition, married the daughter of a wealthy family and moved to another village, Secureni (present day Sokyryany) almost 100 kilometers from Khotyn. David recounted that his father went to his parents' house every week to bring them supplies and make sure they were well. That when the war came, Moishe brought his parents to live with them, and that, on the death march, when my grandfather could no longer walk, he was carried by Moishe and finally they both fell, being shot in front of their children. That one of the aunts, my father's sister, was a teacher and read world literature. That the other brother, the youngest, Shimsha (Sanson) was a mathematical genius and went to study in a big city. My father, knowing that Shimsha was not in the village at the time of the killing, held out hope that he was still alive. David told me that at the end of the war he returned with his mother (his older brother had been drafted into the Red Army) and searched for his relatives. They learned that Shimsha, when the war broke out, had tried to return home to her parents, but died of cold and starvation on the way.
David left the family names at the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem. The only photo he kept, lost somewhere, was of my grandfather in an older age.
For me, the most important thing I wanted to tell my father as soon as I found him again was that his family was doing well financially. That the guilt he carried for not being able to save his parents by bringing them to Uruguay was not justified. That his parents had the resources to leave, but were rooted in Bessarabia. When I told him this, my father looked at me and said, "My parents and siblings would possibly be dead by now, but the children..." Once again, my dad expressed a greatness that was all his own. For him, the Holocaust, above all, was not about personal pain, but about the destruction of other lives, particularly children, that should have been lived.
The sociologist's Bessarabia
Over the past decades, in a scattered way, I tried to get more "objective" information about Bessarabia. All I knew was that dad was born in Tsarist Russia, but emigrated when the territory fell into Romanian hands after the First World War.
Khotyn 's story sums up the vicissitudes of that part of the world. During the 13th to 18th centuries it was part of the Principality of Moldavia, but at certain periods it was under the tutelage of the Polish-Lithuanian Community. In turn, the Principality of Moldavia was a vassal of the Ottoman Empire, which for a century (1711-1812) directly ruled Khotyn. From 1812 to 1917, it was part of the Russian Empire, and in 1918, was annexed by Romania. After World War II, until the present day, it became part of Ukraine.
What constituted Bessarabia is largely in the Republic of Moldova, and a smaller part in Ukraine. My father's identity was neither Romanian nor Ukrainian. Although most of the inhabitants of Bessarabia who left Romania were born in Tsarist Russia, the Jews of Bessarabia did not consider themselves Romanians, on the contrary, Romanian Jews constituted a group with a different identity. They were bessarabians.
I found a book in Hebrew about Khotyn and a chapter in other book.[2] I learned that the total population in 1930 (Dadleft in 1928) was 5,781, of which 37.7% were Jews.[3] With just over 2. 000 people, the community had a hospital, a nursing home, two elementary schools for boys and girls, a school for religious instruction, a library with one of the best collections in Bessarabia in Hebrew and Yiddish, a Savings and Loan Saving bank, which charged no interest, a cemetery under the care of the community, a place to receive the needy, and an organization, Maot Hittim, through which the community supported 500 needy families, a good number of whom received assistance in secret, so that they would not feel humiliated. Of the funds raised by the community, one third of the total was dedicated to cultural and educational activities. It had also a fund that ensured the pension of the employees of the institutions, formed by the equal contribution of the employees and the community.
Alongside the formal institutions, in the last decades before the war, emerged all kinds of cultural groups, besides organizations linked to the Zionist movement that my grandfather supported, which was unusual among the rabbis of the time.
The winds of modernity were coming to Bessarabia, but with a delay compared to other parts of Eastern Europe, because the vast majority lived in small villages, culturally far from the large urban centers. It is not by chance that Baron Hirsch sought candidates in Besarabia for the project of creating agricultural colonies in Brazil, , since the influence of socialism had not yet reached there, unlike most other Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. The consequence is that today Brazil has a large concentration of Bessarabian descendants.
Finding Khotyn on maps was easy, although many cities changed their pronunciation and spelling according to the ruler of the day. Kelmentiz, however, did not appear on the maps, but after some wandering around on Google I discovered that the name of the town was Kelmentsy, and that in Yiddish it was pronounced Kelmenitz.
More difficult was finding references to family members' names. To give two examples: my name and my grandfather's name, in Yiddish is spelled Boruch (in modern Hebrew Baruch). But in spoken Yiddish it was pronounced differently, I imagine because of Slavic influence and especially because in Hebrew there are no vowels, so the same letters can give rise to the most diverse combinations. Thus, Boruch became Burech or Burke, as my grandfather was called and as it appears in the book about Khotyn.[4]
And the last name? My father's name in Yiddish was Shorch. When he arrived in Uruguay it became Sorj (because there is no Sh in Spanish). My cousin hebraized it into Sorek, and the names of the dead relatives he inscribed in Iad Vashem, appear as Szorch, while another witness, related to my uncle Mordechai, wrote Shorkh.[5]
Memory of place or place in memory?
When I read, decades ago, Gabriel Garcia Marques "One Hundred Years of Solitude" a sentence about the city of Macondo struck me without knowing very well why, but I remember it to this day: "... for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be blown away by the wind and banished from the memory of men...". Bessarabia, I know today, is not for me a physical place, but what cannot be banished, the memory I have of my father. I could go on a pilgrimage through the lands he trod, but it will have no connection with the world of his footsteps.
We try to hold on to material vestiges and give them a transcendental meaning. Today I no longer have the desire, which I cherished for a long time, to visit Khotyn, although I understand that people make pilgrimages to the places where their ancestors lived, in search of traces that relate them to the passage of time, beyond the one we live in.
Dad, someone who when I asked him if he believed in the coming of the Messiah, he replied that the Messiah had arrived, which was the State of Israel, did not agree that the Wailing Wall should be an obstacle to peace. "They are stones, he said, they have no life." It is life that must be protected.
What is Bessarabia to me? It is my father's memories, with a legacy of wisdom that he tried to practice in a collectivity that felt it had lost its sense of community, of respect for study and, above all, of the obligation to protect each other.
Martin Kundera wrote that "The only reason we want to master the future is to change the past." This is true, not only for most emigrants, Jewish or not, but, perhaps even more so, for all of us living in the present times. We struggle against the most diverse memories of suffering, traumas or insecurities that marked us in childhood and youth to affirm a present in which the past has been overcome. Dad's exceptionality is that for him the past was not just a memory or a nostalgic feeling, but his greatest asset. Bessarabia was the world that was annihilated for him, and to preserve it he guided his conduct by the values he had received, the only possible way for him to perpetuate the memory of his loved ones.
Zichronam lebracha. May their memory be blessed.
[1] They were watching on television a witness who had a similar experience to David's wife, who was saved from the Holocaust because her parents put her on the road, at the age of ten, wearing a necklace with a crucifix, and she was found by a peasant woman who needed help around the house.
[2] Sefer Ḳehilat Ḥotịn - Besarabyah - (Hebrew). Publisher Shlomo Shitnovitzer Electronic reproduction. The New York Public Library - National Yiddish Book Center Yizkor Book Project, https://ia902907.us.archive.org/15/items/nybc313810/nybc313810.pdf . "Khotin", Encyclopedia of Jewish, Communities in Romania, Volume 2, (Khotyn, Ukraine), Translation of "Khotin" chapter from Pinkas Hakehillot Romaniam Published by Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 1980. https://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/pinkas_romania/rom2_00353.html
[3] The number would have almost doubled in 1941, but these are approximate numbers.
[4] More so because the letter Haf can be read as k or ch , as can the letter Taf, which can be read as t or as s. Thus, for example, the word Shabbat in Yiddish is pronounced Shaves or Shuves.
[5] The list of dead relatives that David left at Yad Vashem is incomplete, as the names of his cousins and one of dad's sisters are missing. Part of his difficulty in dealing with the past? https://yvng.yadvashem.org/index.html?language=en&s_id=&s_lastName=shorkh%20&s_firstName=&s_place=secureni&s_dateOfBirth=&cluster=true