February 24, 2013 

Meet and celebrate our newly found family members...

January 15, 2013

It is exciting to know that my daughter's Peopling the Nation Project, which she did for Mr. Slansky's 8th grade social studies class in 2005, has led us to Michael's cousins, immigrants who survived and were displaced by WWII, and have helped people our nation. Originally our Zheleznyak family members were from Odessa. Some escaped to Russia, then immigrated to Moldova, then to the USA. Just for clarification, we have two new Thomas'.  Senior Thomas spells his name Tomas.

Meet our recently found family:

Michael's cousin Golda Zheleznyak.  Golda is 98 years old. She is the daughter of Michael's aunt Sheyva and uncle Meer who perished in Odessa sometime during 1941-1944.  We do not yet know the story of her life and escape from Odessa into Russia.  We hope to learn more when we meet her and other family members in February.

The baby Michael wondered about for so many years is Golda's nephew and Michael's 2nd cousin, Tomas Zheleznyak. Tomas' father, Yusef, was Golda's brother. He was also able to immigrate to the USA. Pictured is Tomas with his mother, Alexandra (deceased), and his grandson, Thomas (another baby!)

Mother, son, grandson. Alexandra, Thomas, and Tomas Zheleznyak.

Maya, Anatoley, Thomas.

Anatoley is Tomas' son. He is Michael's 3rd cousin. He immigrated to the USA around 1992.  Maya is his wife from Georgia. His son Thomas is pictured here coming out of his performance in the Nutcracker.





Our other cousin who lives in Moscow is also named Michael. He is the son of Michael's cousin Paya (deceased).  Also pictured is Rebecca, Anatoley's daughter who is now 8 years old.

January 12, 2013

JewishGen.org recently posted a somewhat abbreviated story of our trip to their Bessarabia Special Interest Group web page. You can link to the article here. We plan on posting a somewhat longer version of the story, with more photos, soon.

The end of the story on the Bessarabia SIG is a bit of a cliffhanger, so the following should assuage those who don’t like to be left in suspense. 

Those who have been following this blog and the Bercovici Ancestry site may already know that I have some postcards written in Yiddish by my grandfather, which my father saved. There are a couple of letters from my grandfather written in Hebrew. I also have several photographs, many with captions on the back, mostly in Russian. I had all the postcards, letters, and photo captions translated last year in preparation for our trip. One of the photos is of a baby. On the back, in Russian, is written the baby's name, the date of the photograph, and his age, 8 months. He would've been born in 1937. For much of my life I wondered what had happened to this baby. I'm sure my father presumed that his sister, her children, and her grandchild were all killed in Odessa during the war. Nonetheless, if I had any living relatives on my father’s side of the family it would be this baby and his relatives.

Toward the end of December I listened to a radio interview of Charles King, a historian and author of Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams. He said that during WWII many Odessan Jews fled east into the USSR to escape the Romanian fascists. (We had learned this during our visit to Moldova.) When they returned to Odessa they found their homes occupied by others. Many came to America. The Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York is called “Little Odessa” because of the large number of immigrants who settled there.

After I heard this I started searching for the Zheleznyak family on Google. I found a Tomas Zheleznyak in one of those online white page websites. It said he was born in 1937, and it gave a phone number. It took me a week to get around to calling the number for various reasons including more than a little trepidation. The man who answered had a heavy Russian accent. I explained the purpose of my call. He was willing to answer some questions. He said his name was originally Tomik but he went by Tomas or Thomas, and he was from Odessa. He had lived in Kishinev from 1973 to 1992 and then immigrated to the United States. I asked if he knew of anyone with the last name of Bercovici in his family. He told me his grandmother's maiden name was Sheyva Bercovici, and she was married to  Meer Zheleznyak. I told him, “You're my cousin!”

We talked for a long time. He told me that his grandparents were killed in Odessa during the war. His parents escaped. They took him east into the Soviet Union. I did not understand where they found refuge during the war. I think he did not return to Odessa later but grew up somewhere in Russia.

Soon after we hung up I got a call from his son, Anatoley. We also had a long talk. Anatoley told me more of the family's history. One of the daughters of my father's sister is still alive. She is 98 years old and in a nursing home. Anatoley said that if I want to see her I should not procrastinate.

A day or two later I spoke to Jane (Zhenya), Tomas's younger sister who was born after the war. She came to the US with her father, Yusuf, in 1980. She said Yusuf tried to find my father but thought he lived in New York. As there was no Internet at that time his search was limited to telephone books. (My father had lived in New York City but moved to California in the 1930s.)

Since contacting this family we have been exchanging photographs by e-mail. Jane sent me a photo of her grandparents, Sheyva and Meer. It is the same photo I have of them. It is about 100 years old. We have both been carrying around the same photo for decades. I sent them a photo of my father standing in the backyard of our home in San Mateo, California sometime in the 1960s. Anatoley said he looks like Yusuf and also Tomas.

Andrea and I will be traveling to the East Coast in about three weeks to visit the Zheleznyaks. I keep thinking, “I found the baby! I found the baby!”

December 18, 2012

New photo album posted today: Turkey - Part 1.

December 10, 2012 
New Photo Albums

I have posted two photo albums from our trip. Most of the photos are captioned. Here are the links:

Europe Trip-Part 1

Europe Trip-Part 2

I have also posted a complete set of photos of the Jewish cemetery ruins in Baimaclia, but these photos are not captioned.

I plan to post more photos from the trip including those taken in Odessa and Turkey. Andrea and I are working on a narrative account of our journey for JewishGen.org which we will also post here soon.

Home, but not home.

October 26, 2012

We've arrived home, safe and sound, back to rainy Oregon with many autumn colors, our family & friends, pets, all of whom we love and adore.  Our hearts are overflowing with more than we could have imagined from our short adventure and family research project.  Thank you for staying in contact through our blog. You have read a few tidbits, gazed at a few pictures, but know that we have thousands more stories and pictures from the many unexpected joys, surprises and sorrows of our discovery. And we are not done. In many ways we have just begun because we did not finish our ancestry work in Istanbul and now have many new connections and promises we've made to new friends to return to.  We saw the sun rise as the plane left Istanbul and gained altitude over the Black Sea. The sun set over the U.S. midwest about 21 hours later, during the final leg of our trip home. We gained 10 hours, in addition to the daylight advantage of flying due west. That makes for a very long day. There was ample time to reflect on the past month's adventures, but it will take many weeks or more to digest our experiences. We have follow-up letters and emails to write to the many friends we made. Our family research continues, and we have new projects to work on, too, like helping Pavel and Nikolay in Odessa with their holocaust museum and helping to improve the little school in the poor Moldovan village of Baimaclia. Furthermore, I left part of my heart in Konya, Turkey. We will have to return to many of these places, perhaps making Vienna a home base for shorter trips to these relatively nearby destinations. In the meantime Andrea and I are returning to our respective occupations. I know I will be integrating my new insights with the purpose of my work here. We look forward to writing the sequel to this blog in the foreseeable future. Our lives are forever changed. 

The green Bosporus will forever be calling us back. 

Home in time for golden leaves and the red stalks of pineapple sage. 

Cappadocia Magical Stone Formations

October 21, 2012

Uchisar, near Pigeon Valley.

Underground city (Derinkuyu) tunnel.

Stone gnomes carved by natural cycles of weather and earth tremors.