To the editor:
Some time before World War I, when my father was still a small boy, his family emigrated from Kyiv to Lowell. Later, my father’s uncle emigrated to Lowell. This granduncle of mine worked hard as a junk peddler and saved until he was able to bring his wife (my father’s maternal aunt) and children (two boys and a girl) to reunite with him in America. The story I am about to tell was told to me by my granduncle’s daughter, Nichamah. It happened during the period when her father was away in America and she and her two brothers were very young children in Russia (Ukraine was then still part of Russia) with only their mother to look after them. Here’s the story as Cousin Nichamah told it to me:
“The Russians were terrible antisemites. They would come in mobs and shout, (here, my cousin said some Russian words)… That means, ‘kill the Jews! Save Russia!’
I remember one early morning in Russia when my mother was trying to wake us up to escape a pogrom. My mother had a hard time trying to wake me up. I was a very little girl then. What did I know about anything? I didn’t want to get up. I wanted to stay in bed and sleep. My mother took a needle and kept sticking me with it until I woke up and got out of bed. She took me and my brothers and we fled the house for our lives. We were running for some time looking for a place to hide.
My mother came upon a Christian woman and asked if she could hide us. The goyah (gentile woman) showed our mother a necklace with a cross and told her to wear it so that she and we kids would appear to be Christians. The woman said she could make it look like we were relatives or friends who came to visit. Of course, my mother absolutely refused to put on the cross (here, for added emphasis, Cousin Nichamah defiantly stuck out her lower lip, shook her head and waved her arm across and back.)
This goyah had a lot of crosses. She could open a store. She took a handful of crosses and said to, at least, let the children wear crosses and that she would say that they were her own. She told Mammeh (Mom) that her children were so young that wearing a cross shouldn’t make a difference. But even though we were pitzeleh-kindehr (tiny-children) we knew not to wear a cross (again my cousin made the face and waved the arm.) We kids cried and screamed. We would not put on a tzelem (cross – technically, it’s the biblical word for image – including, in some cases, idolatrous images.)
The place had a huge oven that was used for baking bread. We kids were hidden inside the oven. When the pogromenkers (pogrom rioters) came to the goyah looking for Jews, she told them that she didn’t see any. Our mother stuck her head in the oven so that it looked like she was busy with the oven baking or something. That was so the mob wouldn’t recognize her or talk to her.
Well, the muhmzayrim (plural of the biblical term for someone born out of a prohibited union) didn’t find us or we wouldn’t be here today to tell you the story. She was a brave woman, that goyah. If the anti-Semites found out that she lied to them, they could have attacked her as well as us. Maybe the goyah took pity on us because she was a mother herself and felt for us when she saw a mother trying to save her children.”
All the people identified in the story of my cousin’s narration of her pogrom experience have passed on. Otherwise I would have shown one of them the story before sending it for print. I do not have a photographic memory and I did not take notes on the story when my cousin told it to me. Although the narrative appears to quote my cousin, it is not verbatim. In my retelling, I made modifications for the narrative’s flow. But with regard to the basic physical events that happened, I tried to keep the contents substantially the same as they were told to me.
Hersh Goldman
Swampscott
