Had dinner the other night with my father’s first cousin once removed, Gene, who grew up, from the age of five, in 1933, in the same Bronx apartment building on Eastburn Avenue where my mother lived with her parents.   Gene’s wife Sally grew up on the other side of the Concourse, just a few blocks away.   Sekhnet and I ate with them in a Chinese restaurant in Teaneck, where they have lived for many years.

I learned that Gene and Sally, like my parents, had little real information about their parents’ lives before they came to America, or about the families left behind. Gene’s father Morris had been one of eighteen children in a Polish town near the German border. Nine of the eighteen lived, including his father’s twin sister.  

Of these children only young Morris made it to America, having been sent for in 1909 or so by an uncle in New York.   He arrived after a two-week Atlantic crossing; was greeted by his uncle, who, three days later, died. Thirteen year-old Morris had to make his way alone in New York, learned the needle trade, became a union shop steward and a Communist.

“Stamper was a Communist,” my mother always said, without any judgment attached.  Although, it turned out, according to Gene, that after von Ribbentrop signed that pact with Stalin’s underling Molotov in 1939, the fatal non-agression deal between mass-murdering Josef Stalin and soon to be mass-murdering Adolf Hitler, Morris Stamper resigned from the party.

My grandmother Chava, Irv’s mother, had come across the Atlantic, with Gene’s mother (Morris’s future wife), on one of the last ships to leave the port at what was then probably called Danzig, now Gdansk, before the outbreak of World War I.     This was in the summer of 1914.

I was mostly listening, and filing details away, but I got the impression, from Gene’s description of his mother Dinsche as a brave, beautiful “leader” and Chava, two years younger, as a complaining, far less intrepid type, that it was due to the spirit of Dinsche that the two were able to cross the Atlantic in steerage during the summer of 1914.  

Dinsche had regarded the crossing as something of an adventure, charming the crew and getting special privileges for the two of them.  Chava, apparently, complained about the food, though the food they got was better than the food most people in steerage received, thanks to the socially adept Dinsche.   After their German-registered ship discharged its passengers in New York it was quarantined in the U.S. for the duration of The Great War.

As for the muddy hamlet the two of them came from, Truvovich, a place no longer found on any world map, it had been one of three such tiny Jewish hamlets located across the river from Pinsk, in a swampy area, as far as I can tell.  The other two doomed hamlets were Vuvich and Misitich.   Pinsk at the time was a town of about 70,000 people, about 30,000 of them Jews (of whom 37 are known to have survived the Nazi occupation).  

It was a short ferry ride from Truvovich across the Pina River (though Gene called it by a different name). It must have been after a ferry ride to that metropolis, in the earliest decade of the twentieth century, that Leah and Azriel were immortalized in a photo studio in the two large portraits Chava dragged with her to the New World in 1914.

The most amazing bit of history Gene imparted, along with descriptions of his childhood train trips up the Hudson River to visit Chava and her kids in Peekskill, was about my father’s uncle Aren’s Marco Polo-like voyage across Asia, the Pacific, the entire American continent just after the turn of the twentieth century.   If I’d heard this amazing and unlikely tale, I’d forgotten it.  

Aren had three children, Eli, by his first wife, who died of complications from Eli’s birth, and Nehama and Dave by his second wife. Aren sent for his little sister Chava in Truvovich after he remarried. Eli, I did the math just now, was about six when he went with his father to greet his beautiful, red-haired aunt in NYC and the two fell immediately into lifelong love.

Aren’s story I heard mostly from his son Eli. I spent many days, often until late at night, talking with Eli in the final years of his life.   Much of the talk was family history, the entanglements and devilish details of it.   Aren had arrived in New York City in around 1905, I had understood, where he learned to vulcanize rubber. Getting in on the ground floor of the brand new automobile industry, he would work with cars for the rest of his life.

I knew Aren had escaped from conscription in the Czar’s army around the time of the Russo-Japanese war, which history books tell us was in 1904-05. In those days a Jew drafted into the Russian army served for thirty years, absent early release via death or dismemberment in battle (partially untrue, actually, see note*).

Aren and two friends, Fischl Bobrow and Fleishman, decided not to be among the 40,000-70,000 dead Russian soldiers in that war.  They escaped the Imperial Russian Army together and arrived in the United States.  It’s possible Fleishman opted for Canada instead, which is where I think he settled.  I believe Fischl was the eventual connection to the Widems, Irv’s father’s family, from outside of Hartford, Connecticut.

According to Gene, their flight took them across Siberia, the Pacific (or perhaps the Bering Straits) and eventually to San Francisco.   San Francisco in 1904 or 1905, before the Great Fire of April 1906.  I picture Aren now, arriving in California, having crossed the massive Pacific Ocean somehow, a trip of about 6,000 miles.  Then he heads east, presumably on the transcontinental railroad, for another three thousand miles.  Next we hear from him, Aren’s in Manhattan learning to vulcanize rubber.     A few years later he sends for his little sister, who becomes my father’s mother, and the rest, as they say, is history.

* Apparently Jews, who were not allowed to serve in the Russian army until 1827, had been drafted for a twenty-five year hitch prior to the reforms of Alexander II.  Therefore Aren and his friends were likely only in for a five year military stint at the time of the Russo-Japanese War.  They were not alone in disobeying the Czar’s military orders.   From the summer of 1905 to the fall of 1906 there were apparently 400 mutinies in the Imperial Russian Army.

Things were made worse for the Jews at this time by circulation of the infamous forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published in Russian 1903,  confirming the worst about The Chosen People, in the minds of many, and unleashing a renewed flood of pogroms.