(Note: this page has been edited to reflect the brilliant research of Harlan Karp and Michael Morgan, not to mention the amazing memory of Barbara Morgan)
If you have come here directly, bypassing the Lenaland intro, there are a couple of things you need to know. Philip Blistein and Lena Melnick married on September 21, 1909 in Bristol, RI. Lena told me she came from a town that my young ears heard as Shemmasaville; and that I discovered, almost forty years after her death, was actually Semezhevo in Minsk Guberniya, Belarus. Peish told me had visited a big city called Vilna when he was young. That was the extent of what they told me about their beginnings. They were 63 and 57 respectively when I was born. I never knew them young.
After Lena and Peish’s deaths, and then the deaths of their children: Elmer, Lil and my mother Sybil, I inherited the brown box that contained my grandmother’s papers. I began trying to figure out whatever I could.
In 2011 I had a postcard covered with infinitestimal Yiddish script translated. This is the postcard. (Note: all images can be enlarged by clicking on them)
And this is the translation produced by Naomi Elbinger of Jerusalem:
<Wizna? – top of date cut off]
Beloved Dovid, we have received your letter. [When] we saw your letter, we were all very glad. We were surprised that you forgot about us. What you write that you’ve sent us many letters is a lie because a letter doesn’t go missing. I simply hate to have to listen to all these lies. If a letter is posted, it arrives. Two weeks ago I sent you a letter, but to the address that you sent at the beginning, to Katarinowshik, [but] now you’re writing to Priabrazinshik. You should see when my letter arrives and you should reply to me straightaway, and write everything in detail what you’re up to, whether you’ll become a craftsman any time soon or whether you’ll remain a good-for-nothing. You should write how you feel, whether you feel not bad, whether you’ve sewed yourself anything. [Unclear segment] and write everything as soon as you get my letter. Next, I have little to write to you because it won’t give you much enjoyment since, one can say, it’s the entire winter that I’ve been in bed. I don’t leave the house, I feel poorly, may God have mercy. I’ve owed a lot of money [for] many years[?]. I do know I owe a lot. I don’t know any more what we’ll come to[?]. I have nothing else to write to you. Write to me if you’ve had a letter from Riva. From me, your father Itshak Blumshtein[?]. If I knew that Leah would get a good place in Lodz[?], I’d send her [there] because she won’t get anywhere sitting here with me since I’m only getting worse. We’ve had letters from Yeshke, [ed: I believe this is Mishkin for Morris who was in Gomel] he is doing not badly.
[different handwriting:] Beloved Dovid, we have already complained to you several times, and father says that you are God knows what, and tell me, Dovid, how did you keep yourself from becoming something in such a time? You [two] have different characters. Leah says rightly, other people have brothers who work hard and send [home] presents. Perhaps you will also send a present for Leah. She asks you very much, she can’t write to you herself as there’s no space below. When you send [us] another letter, we’ll write to you a long [reply]. For God’s sake, don’t be lazy and write letters. This is our only joy. Your mother [aunt?] Dvoyra
[along right margin:] All the children greet you.>>
This translation obviously caused much merriment in the family; but it did not answer the basic question: where did the Blisteins come from, where did they go, and how did they live?
Earlier, I had found Peish’s Ellis Island manifest.
He had arrived with his older brother David in March, 1903. They were going to join the middle brother Morris who had preceded them to America and then to Providence.1 They gave his address as Andersides 5. This was pretty darn close to the 5 Ambrose Street where he actually lived. But they had put down Minsk as their Old World residence, and it was if you were talking about the Guberniya or province. But I was pretty sure they didn’t come from a big city like that.
I continued to search for answers. It wasn’t easy. The early immigrants did not leave much of a paper trail; but over the years, more and more data, hidden in the nooks and crannies of various bureaucracies, slowly began to appear — without warning — on the web.
In 2015, I discovered the Naturalization Petition for Philip Blistein.
Now I saw that he claimed he had been born in the Wizna or Visna his father had written from. (Yes, Peish had more than one petition. His brother David’s solitary petition said Viggnia. I liked to envision some Irish clerk’s stab at that name pronounced in heavy Yiddish accents). Plugging Vizna into the Jewishgen Community Database yielded 42 towns it could have been. The best known of these was Wyżna in Poland, 87 miles northeast of Warsaw. But Minsk, Russia was over 700 miles from there. And while there was also a Minsk in Poland, the postcard was addressed in Cyrillic. And then I spotted Chyrvonaya Slabada (it does trip off the tongue, doesn’t it?), in the district of Slutsk, in the province of Minsk.
Before 1917, it had been called Vyzna in Russian, Vizna in Yiddish. Peish had left it in 1903. I was not sure if the picture I had of him with an enormous duffle was taken there but I suspect it was. A last picture of home, before the 19-year old set off into the world.
Vizna was on the rail line to Vilna… the big city Peish told me he had once visited. Not quite halfway between them was Lida, perhaps the town translated as Lodz where Itzhak Blistein had hoped his young daughter Leah could find work.2 Chyrvonaya Slabada was starting to seem like a very good candidate. I clicked through to its Jewish Locality page and found myself staring at a small map of the region. In the center Chyrvonaya Slabada or Чырвоная Слабада. And right above it, Семежево, or Semezhevo. Oh. Yes.
(I have never been able to figure out how to copy Google maps successfully. But this old German map — drawn ahead of its WW1 invasion of Russia –, shows the two towns’ proximity albeit interestingly spelled)
With the wisdom of hindsight, I returned to the New York Public Library’s index of Yizkor books. Plugging in Vizna produced a link to the the exact same Slutsk book that contained the essay on Shemezeve. And with my newly resurrected Hebrew reading skills (thank you, Temple Beth El) I could easily see that the sixth town listed on the cover page was Vizna while Shemezeve was dead last.
So even though Paish used to refer to Lena as “my little Litvak”, it seemed that they were both from Slutsk Uyezd in Minsk Guberniya. Which makes some sense in that Landsmen did tend to gravitate to each other in the New Country. And until the 19th century, both towns had been part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. So perhaps the “Little Litvak” came from that.
But where was David when his father (and stepmother) wrote him the postcard? I had struggled for a long time with the name and address in Cyrillic cursive on it. (I had not thought to have Maksim take a look at it).
I had finally been able to make out Dovid Blishtein written on the bottom line.
This is Довиду Блиштеину though there are actually two different ways of writing the lower case “д” in cyrillic cursive Unfortunately the only font available always renders it in the lower-case-g fashion. Yitzhak had written it in the lower-case-d fashion instead.
But no matter how many times I poked and prodded at the rest of the words above that, I could not figure out a street or a town. Frustrated, I turned to the excellent Railway Postmarks of Imperial Russia. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a duplicate of any of the card’s postmarks; though I did learn enough to know that the clearest one said, first of all, that it had been sent on November 14, 1896 and that along the bottom was printed почто… which had something to do with postal. I was struggling to make out the common почтовый вагон or Postal Wagon — which apparently appeared in almost every postmark. Instead, I found myself staring at this:
It read Odessa Post Office. And now I could decipher the first line of the address Yitzhak had written: В Городе Одессе. To the City of Odessa. David had gone over 1000 kilometers to find work.3
But why so far? The answer: because it was near all his sisters. Martha’s Ellis Island manifest says she arrived from Rybnitiza. Elke — with her two children, her husband Archic and his mother Feige — all listed Rybnitsa as the last place they’d lived. Reva‘s says Ribnica, while Reva’s husband Zelig ‘s has Rebentsoo. And where the heck was this popular place? Well, now it’s in Moldova “under the administration of the breakaway government of Transnistria,” says Wikipedia, Transnistria being a self-proclaimed republic on a strip of land between the River Dniester and the border with Ukraine. But at the time of Yitzhak’s postcard, Moldova was called Bessarabia. It was a center for Yiddish and Hebrew literature. Its Jewish population – – almost a quarter-million — made up an eighth of the total population. More importantly for David, it was right across the river from Archic’s birthplace of Birzula. And it was a quick train ride from there down to Odessa, with its famous Potemkin steps
In the mid-1800s, Odessa had become the major commercial, administrative, cultural and educational center of the New Russia. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 plus the expansion of railroads within Russia, made it the major port for imported goods as well. Factory production exploded, jumping 250% in the last two decades of the 19th century. It was the perfect place for ambitious young men and became home to an extremely diverse population of Albanians, Armenians, Azeris, Bulgarians, Crimean Tatars, Frenchmen, Germans, Greeks, Italians, Poles, Romanians, Russians, Turks, Ukrainians and, of course, Jews By the time of David’s arrival, 37% of its population was Jewish. Unfortunately where Jews collected, pogroms soon ensued. Per Robert Weinberg in “The Pogrom of 1905 in Odessa: A Case Study”, no other city in the Russian Empire experienced a pogrom comparable in its destruction to the one unleashed against the Jews there. And the Anti-semites in Moldova were no slouches either. The deadly 1903 Pogrom in Kishnev, 60 miles from Rybnitsa, sparked international furor when it was described by the New York Times: “The anti-Jewish riots in Kishinev, Bessarabia, are worse than the censor will permit to publish. There was a well laid-out plan for the general massacre of Jews on the day following the Russian Easter. The mob was led by priests, and the general cry, “Kill the Jews,” was taken- up all over the city. The Jews were taken wholly unaware and were slaughtered like sheep. The dead number 120 and the injured about 500. The scenes of horror attending this massacre are beyond description. Babes were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob. The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset the streets were piled with corpses and wounded. Those who could make their escape fled in terror, and the city is now practically deserted of Jews.”
But by then David was gone, back to Vizna and then, with his brother Peiser, to America. The girls and their husbands followed as soon as they could.
1 It was only in March of 2017 that Harlan Karp located what he suspected was Morris Blistein’s elusive immigration manifest.
The hunt had been seriously compromised because the date of immigration provided by Morris on his Naturalization Petition (and sworn to by two witnesses) proved to be a stunning 5 years earlier than he’d actually arrived.
After a flurry of emails whose frequency would put to shame your average teen-age texter, we all agreed that this had to be our Morris Blistein, at which point Michael Morgan unearthed a New York Times page 2 article about Morris’ memorable trip. There must have been a lot of coffee aboard the Trier. Barbara Morgan recalls that to the end of his life, the smell of it made her father seasick.
2For a long time I believed it was Peish’s sister Elkie who was being referred to here. Only much later did Barbara Morgan mention that the Blistein boys had in fact had a younger sister Leah who had died very young in the Old Country. It was in honor of her that three of her siblings named a daughter Lillian.
3 I will leave it for better eyes to decipher the postmarks that indicate from whence the postcard was mailed to David. I can make out Minsk, but given its position to the right of the date, it clearly followed something else.
Chapter 7: What’s in a Name: Kulikovsky, Helfand, Gelfand, Helford or Elman?