The Vanishing Bridge

An email from my cousin in Australia left me devastated. Writing from Brisbane, Dianne, my mother’s second cousin, shared the news that her brother Peter suffered a massive stroke. Her words made it clear that he wouldn’t last long. Peter and I had just exchanged several emails about our family history. I didn’t know they would be our last.

I didn’t know about Peter, nor about a large branch of my family in Australia, until Dianne and I were genetically matched via Ancestry.com in 2017. Dianne’s messages, at first, wouldn’t get through to me, so she Googled my name and, chancing upon my daughter’s bat mitzvah announcement, contacted the rabbi of our shul in Long Beach, California. We soon established our common origin – Ukraine – and included her brother Peter, who had made aliyah in the early 1970s, in a deep dive into our family’s past.

Our connection wasn’t just genetic. Meeting Peter for the first time in Israel in 2019, not only did his resemblance to my grandmother tell me we were family, but also our childhood memories, shared across three continents. We were both raised in the shadow of the shtetl. We knew where we came from.

Peter grew up with his grandmother Tobl Zitserman, born in Bershad, a Jewish town in southwestern Ukraine, close to the border with Moldova. In 1909, the newly wed Tobl and Moshe Hoffman sailed from Odessa for Palestine, but finding few prospects there for themselves, followed the link to Moshe’s brother on the west coast of Australia. They arrived in Perth in 1910 and settled there.

I grew up with her niece, my grandmother Maryam-Zisl Zitserman, in Moscow. Yakov Zitserman, Maryam’s father and Tobl’s brother, left Bershad to marry Rohel, a young woman from the nearby shtetl of Chechelnyk. During WWI, Yakov was drafted into the Russian army and killed, leaving behind Rohel and two small kids: Maryam and her older brother Aron. 

Rohel soon remarried, and Maryam and Aron grew up with their stepfamily, losing the connection with Yakov’s family. The Zitsermans in Ukraine and Australia wouldn’t know what happened to him, nor would we know about his siblings and parents. 

Cataclysmic political changes probably had something to do with the family rapture as well. The Russian Civil War, which broke out after the October Revolution of 1917, would wreak havoc upon the Jewish population of the lawless Ukraine. The number of Jewish deaths is estimated by the United Nations’ Whitaker Report on Genocide to be in the 100,000-250,000 range.

The nascent Soviet state emancipated the Jews, removing the confines of the Pale and the barriers to education and professional careers. In 1928, Maryam left Chechelnyk to study at a new chemical college 400 miles away in Kharkiv, an audacious move for a 15-year-old raised in a traditional family. In her class photo from 1930, Maryam sits in the front row – a modestly dressed woman, her head wrapped in a scarf. She would return to the shtetl every summer to visit her family and meet there Yosif, an engineering student, whom she would marry and follow to St. Petersburg and later to Moscow.

My grandmother was a very reserved, stern woman. My father’s family would call her ironically “The Iron Lady,” but this modest, unassuming strength was a prized quality of the eshet chayil of the Pale. 

Maryam’s strength would also serve her well during WWII. Evacuated to the Russian hinterland, she would work as the staff chemist at a grain distillery producing liquor for the troops, a war-time necessity second only to weapons, while nursing Yosif — wounded in the war — raising their son Yakov, and gathering around her the few relatives who had escaped the Holocaust in Ukraine. 

After the war’s end, Maryam joined the Russian Grain Institute in Moscow as a lab scientist, while also steadily, diligently completing her Ph.D. in chemistry. She would work there until, and even after, her retirement. It was also during her retirement that in the aftermath of my parents’ divorce, she and Yosif, now in their late 60s and 70s, would take me in and raise me for the next 15 years. 

Maryam and Yosif were the first generation to leave the shtetl, but the shtetl never left them, its values extending naturally into their home. Striving for high education, career achievement, and a good diet was expected, while being a schnorrer (“beggar”), schiker (“drunk”), schlump (“lazy bum”), ‘mot‘ (“spendthrift”), or oyzgeputzt (“flashily dressed”) was always abhorred.

“Feh!” my grandmother would smirk, commenting to Grandpa on such behavior. “They do that, we don’t.”

Tradition also evidenced itself in small things. My grandfather never left the flat without a close shave and a fedora. Similarly, Grandma never stepped outside without her luxurious dark hair braided and upswept, a pair of simple pearl earrings, and a touch of lipstick. It mattered greatly to Maryam and Yosif how people saw them, what they would say. 

By the same token, you had to be selective about what the others should know. Some subjects were not discussed in public, my mother’s divorce being one example. 

Another unspeakable subject was the pogrom which swept through their shtetl in 1920 when they were 7 and 11. I had no idea the pogrom even happened until I read about it years after my grandparents’ passing. I also found that in Tobl’s hometown of Bershad nearby, “150 Jews were massacred by Ukrainian gangs and soldiers of Denikin’s army” (Encyclopedia Judaica). Peter, growing up in Perth, heard some oblique talk about the troubles from his grandmother, but I never got to ask my grandparents what they saw.

Returning to visit Peter in 2022, I got to see family heirlooms – a gold-rimmed pink-and-white cup and a saucer that traveled with Tobl from Bershad to Palestine and all the way to Australia. Later they retraced some of the journey back to Peter’s condo in Rehovot. My heart skipped a beat realizing that my great-grandfather Yakov would see the cup and the saucer growing up. And here I was holding them in my hand.

“Do you want to see the tallit Grandma made for my bar mitzvah?” asked Peter.

In Bershad, many Jewish girls were taught how to make tallitot. Encyclopedia Judaica notes that Bershad was “celebrated for its tallit weaving industry … Of the town’s 175 artisans, 163 were Jewish.” In Perth, Tobl made tallitot for her family members, as well as for the bar mitzvah boys at Peter’s grandfather’s shul.

I snapped a few photos of Peter beaming broadly – a transplanted Jewish Australian physician, wearing the Ukrainian-style tallit, striped in blue and fringed in white, over a T-shirt and shorts. 

Peter is gone now, and with him, his connection to Tobl’s past. His children and grandchildren, all born in Israel, have some understanding of Peter’s Australian background, but his Ukrainian roots are as distant to them as the images of Tevye in the famous musical. 

Not so to me. The reminiscences of growing up in the Pale, the joys and suffering of the post-revolutionary decades and WWII weren’t just entertainment choices, they were my grandparents’ lived experiences woven into the fabric of my childhood, kept alive in their home.

I spent my entire adult life in California, and raising my own kids I tried to pass the values I’d learned from my grandparents. But what about those vivid echoes of life in the Pale, when I’m gone, what will happen to them?

All I can do is to fix these memories on the page, preserve their images in words and sentences. Otherwise, there will really be nothing left.

Lane Igoudin, Ph.D., is the author of the memoir “A Family, Maybe” (2024) and professor of ESL and linguistics at Los Angeles City College. Find him @laneigoudin or at laneigoudin.com.