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!”