Getting old Yiddish translated isn’t cheap. The tiny postcard in miniscule script, which probably ruined Naomi Elbinger’s eyesight forever – she has since retired from the business — , cost $80 to get rendered into contemporary English. I decided my first priority was to send my new translator (the fortuitously named Lena Watson) the letter I believed was from Grandma Lena’s father. The one that started “Dear Daughter… and included “Beryl is in Leningrad.” Assuming Maksim’s family tree was correct, in 1930, Lena still had three living siblings and I wanted to know their names and where they were. On the other hand, Maksim had David-Solomon dying in 1923 and this letter was written 7 years later. So clearly something was wrong.
This is the letter in Yiddish:
And this is Lena Watson’s translation. Of course, what was wrong was that it wasn’t from Lena’s father at all. It was from her mother. The affectionate salutation had blinded me to the complaints that followed. I was reminded I’d been told Lena had never gotten on with her mom.
“10 November, 1930, Slutsk
Beloved and devoted children Lipa and Poysha, may you live in delight and joy together with your precious children!
I’m calling you from afar, my beloved and devoted daughter! My heart is still not altogether at ease and sure that you’re still among the living and I have whom to turn to and call you my beloved and devoted daughter! I don’t remember the time, two or perhaps even three full years, that I’ve been grieving over my misfortune. You know already about the terrible blow that befell me, and in addition to the young tree that has been cut off, my heart was always heavy and grief-stricken that in such a time there was no letter from you. I wrote you from Shemeshzovo and then from Starobin, and you still didn’t reply. Last winter, when I had already moved here to Slutsk, I stopped writing as I assumed I no longer had whom to write to, G-d forbid. Last summer, I tried writing to Uncle Yitzhok-Leib, and he even replied quickly and reassured me that you were alive. [p. 2] But he didn’t soothe me at all with his letter, I didn’t believe him; it wasn’t until I received your letter that I began to believe that I still have a daughter. Now, my beloved daughter, I implore you to start writing me frequent letters. It will be my only consolation in the terrible blow that befell me. We’re now in Slutsk. Last autumn I sold the house in Shemeshzovo. I was struggling to keep up the house with all the payments, and there were no lodgers. So I sold the house and bought one here in Slutsk, not a big one, and rented it out, while we moved to Starobin. My husband had a big house in Starobin. We lived in Starobin for almost a year, then the house was taken away and we moved here to Slutsk and have been living here for 8 months. Previously, we wouldn’t be badly off here: my husband has children in America and here he has a son who’s a doctor, they send us [aid] very often; also my son Berl often sends me [aid] little by little, but the dearth and dearness are terrible here now: milk costs 80 kopecks a quart, butter is 6 roubles a pound, meat is keeping at 2 roubles a pound, so no matter how much they send, it’s still little, and we’re living from hand to mouth with no enjoyment. Poyshe is in Rogatshov [Rohachow, Belarus], a manager in a state-run shop. He has [p. 3] four children, may they live [long], and isn’t too badly off. Loybke is here in Slutsk, also in the government’s employ. He also has 2 children and isn’t badly off either. Berl is in Leningrad, he’s an engineer. He is quite well off. He also has two children already, may they live [long]. His second child has just been born; before Sabbath I received a telegram from him saying he’s had a baby girl. I forwarded your letter with your address to Poyshe and asked him to write you a letter. I also asked him to send your letter on to Berl in Leningrad because we all didn’t count at all on having anyone to write to. I have nothing else to write. Remain well, my beloved daughter, and may G-d raise your fortune so that you may start living a better life and we may have no more sorrow in our lives, G-d forbid, and that we may hear good news from each other. Your mother, Rashe.
I wholeheartedly greet Yitzhok-Leib with his children. I await his letter every day. I don’t believe he won’t reply to me to my two letters I sent him.
Beloved daughter, I ask you for one more thing. When you get my letter, please send me a family photograph, by which I mean a photograph of you and your children.”
First off: Lena Watson translated the mother’s name as Rashe but in fact an inspection of the Yiddish makes it clear it could just as easily be Chashye, a nickname — per the Jewishgen Given Names Database — for the Chaya/Hasya/Clara/Ida I already had.
Beyond that, it seemed that Maksim’s family tree was entirely accurate. Lena’s surviving siblings were Poyshe/Peishe, Leibe and Beryl. David-Solomon was long-dead since Chashye had remarried and moved from Shemezeve to Starobin and then to Slutsk over the intervening years. The terrible blow Chashye had been mourning for “two or perhaps even three full years”, the “young tree … cut off” is presumably the murder of her youngest child Isaak two years earlier. The letter also confirms that Uncle Yitzhok-Leib (with his children) was living close enough to Lena to reassure his sister about her continued existence. So Uncle Yitzhok-Leib was the “cousin” Lena (Lipa!) had come to see!1
10-16-16: Today I spent hours trawling Ancestry, looking for Yizhok-Leib, aka Leon Braicinesky. I got side-tracked into the little round woman I always knew as Cousin Annie Rich, in the (admittedly bizarre) conviction that Rich and Braicinesky might be related. I only abandoned that pursuit when I discovered that the specific Annie and Myer Rich I had been tracking (the wrong ones as it turned out) had never lived in Rhode Island at all. Of course, I only realized they were the wrong Riches when I found the real (Providence) Myer Rich’s naturalization petition. He hadn’t arrived in the US until 1910, two years after Lena did. So Rich couldn’t have been the name Lena was trying to say at Ellis Island. What on earth could it have been?
10-17-16: Sometimes it feels like there is no emotion left in all these dusty facts and figures; and then other times, it feels there is too much to be supported. Having discovered in yesterday’s meanderings that Romanova was yet another of Slutsk’s south-western “suburbs”, this morning I tried to figure out which Melnik/Nozik/Rich had dredged that name from the depths. For some reason, Foxfire couldn’t extract a relevant string of bytes from my History, so I plugged Annie Rich into Ancestry as I had before. I had the vague notion that maybe it was her husband Myer who had been from that shtetl. Today, though, when Ancestry spewed out results, there was a new one in the Rhode Island index to Naturalizations.
My first reaction was to curse and my second was to weep. Only twenty five Jewish families in Shemezeve and now I knew the names of three of them: Melnik, Khashdan and now Rich. I turned to the next card
and there was Myer from Romanova. So Rich wasn’t a Shemezeve name.
Armed with Annie’s exact birth date, I turned again to the Social Security Application index. And found:
Annie’s father had been Isaac Levin. Levin was the third Shemezeve name.
But then a whole second day of falling off branches that end up growing from the wrong tree. I find the family in the 1910 Providence census: Isaac Levin (still an alien), his wife Bessie, his daughter Annie, and five other children. But I cannot find either the father’s entry to the US, nor the mother’s surely more noticeable one with 6 children in tow. I am about to give up and wearily plug Isaac Levin once again into Ancestry – this time narrowing the field to the Immigration records… and pop, get the Naturalization petition Isaac Levin hadn’t yet filed in 1910. 
It says he was born in Shemezeve and I suddenly see my confused Lena trying to explain who she was coming to see in America. Not Leon Bracinisky… But Levin, Isaac. I couldn’t be sure whether he was Lena’s cousin or Bessie was, since I could find no Naturalization record for Annie’s mother… but still but still but still.
Even with the specific immigration details Isaac provided on his naturalization petition, however, I can’t find a manifest for him anywhere. Frustrated, I decide the letters are a more logical arena of exploration and turn for the first time to the all-but-illegible letter that I can see started “Dear Sister-in-Law and Brother-in-Law…”
This meant it had to be written by one of Lena’s siblings’ spouses, and since all her brothers except for Isaac were still alive and presumably writing their own letters, I began to wonder if it had been written by Sofiya’s husband, perhaps to announce her untimely death at the age of 24. I couldn’t figure out why else a letter from an in-law would be one of the chosen half-dozen kept across the decades… until I suddenly realized it was signed “with love from your father David Shlomo!”
Huh?
I sent it off to Lena Watson whose translation did not shed a lot of light on the mystery.
“First day [of the week], weekly Torah portion Shlach.
Dear brother-in-law and sister-in-law, live happily. First, I’m writing to you that we all are, thanks be to G-d, in the best of health, [may we] hear of no worse from you.
We received your letter with great joy because to get a letter from you one has to have great [word partially obliterated due to fold], but it’s possible that you have no time to write letters. My beloved brother-in-law, [as to] what you write that there’s no need to set up house, it’s a big mistake. I swear to you that I don’t begrudge her the food and thank G-d, there’s food to eat for the time being, but she won’t be able to stay anywhere – I don’t have to write you this. She doesn’t want to go anywhere. Isroel-Chaim has also written to her that she should come to him, but she doesn’t want to go anywhere because she won’t be as [comfortable] as she is [living] with me because she has a daughter there. [As to] what you ask from whose house [2] the fire started, I’ve already written to you that the fire started from Sherhay’s stable, and suddenly our stable also caught fire. Mother still had time to go outside, but Leybke had to be rescued through the window. The rescuers injured him, poor thing. A new suit burned up. It [the house?] couldn’t be salvaged because of the wind. My beloved brother-in-law, [as to] what you write that you’ll send her a rouble every week, may G-d extend her years, and to you, may G-d grant that you’re able to send at least 5 roubles a week, but it’s a difficult thing. My advice is to set her up in a house because she won’t live with anyone. She isn’t small[?], and G-d forbid that one should live with a child. No, may we be spared this. I’m giving you 50 roubles, so you know that I don’t need the house. When I’m at the mill, I have a home, and when [3] I have to move out of the mill what shall I do in the house, it’s only for her sake. As to what you ask where Mashe’s Hertzil is, his wife is here; whether he writes or not, I don’t know. Forgive me for not sending this to your address. You’d given me an address, but Mother took it and it burned up. I have nothing else to write. Mother with Khasha and the children greets you all. From me, your brother-in-law and uncle, who wishes you health and happiness, Dovid Shloyme Melnik.
My dear children, live healthily and happily. We are, thank G-d, in the best of health, [may we] hear of no worse from you. I’d like to write you something, but I have nothing to write. This week I’ve sent you 3 letters, so I have nothing to write. From me, your father and mother. Dovid Shlyome”
As they would say in the Old Country, oy. This letter opened up more mysteries than it solved Per Lena’s Social Security application, David Solomon Melnik, or David Shlomo Melnik, was her father. But based on this, she also had a brother-in-law or uncle with the same name? Given Jewish naming traditions, I could get my mind around a brother-in-law, but I couldn’t figure out Uncle. Unless he was only using the word in the metaphoric sense. But if a brother-in-law, why would he append his wife’s family name Melnik to his signature? Unless — just as Peish’s sister Elkie Blistein married her first cousin Archic Blistein — Melniks had married Melniks, too.
The writer’s reference to “because she has a daughter t/here” again made me believe this was Lena’s sister’s husband writing; so in fact her brother in law. But then his reference to ‘Mother with Khasha and the children greets you all” was bewildering, because I thought Khasha (aka Chasya — the writer of the previous letter translated — was Lena’s mother.
I began to wonder if this letter was even written to my grandmother. Having figured out that the “cousin” on Lena’s manifest was actually “Uncle Yitzhok-Leib” Americanized to Isaac Levin, if I posited that David-Shlomo Melnik was writing to his brother-in-law, i.e his wife’s brother and Lena’s Uncle Isaac, about a fire at Isaac’s (and Chasya’s) mother’s home, the whole thing began to make a lot more sense. The daughter that his Mother-in-Law doesn’t want to leave is Chasya. “Mother with Khasha and the children” refers to specifically to Isaac’s mother. And if she were a widow, it would also explain why only a mother (and not Lena’s father) had to get out of the house on fire. Since this may have been the last piece of writing from her father, it would not be unreasonable to expect Lena to keep it, even if it wasn’t intended for her. Plus the writer apologizes for not sending it to Isaac’s so apparently it did go to Lena’s address. In that context, the appended message to his “children” and the second signature (David-Solomon without Melnik) is logical. When Lena died, I found the hectoring postcard in her Box that was specifically written to her husband’s brother, so I know she did save things that weren’t actually or exclusively hers.
Of course, now the mystery is why my grandmother put down Ida Kavitsky as her mother’s name if her maiden name was in fact Levin. Was Kavitsky was the name Ida/Chaya/Chasya took when she remarried after David Solomon’s death?
10-21-16: And today, another OMG moment. I was looking for a street map of Old Providence, trying to confirm that it was her Shemezeve neighbor/cousin Isaac Levin that Lena had been planning to visit. I found the Campbell Court the Levins had been living at for the 1910 census, but their house number was reported as being #2 and the 1907 Providence house directory only showed the houses as beginning with #4. I wasn’t too dismayed, since house numbers tended to expand and contract with the number of families stuffed into one dwelling. Nonetheless, I idly plugged Levin into the Directory search box, again expecting little. Pdfs of old documents were not generally searchable. To my surprise, I began getting hits. The fourth was for an “Isaac Levin, teacher”. Recalling that although he was listed as a janitor in the 1910 census, in later years he would describe himself as a teacher, I scrolled up to look at the street address linked to him. It was 11 Inez Court! 
The very address Lena had provided at Ellis Island. The street that had been so impossible to find. My interpretation of Leon Braicinesky as a mishearing of Levin, Yitzhak seemed to have been right on the money. Strangely, there was no mention of Bessie and their six children. Isaac was officially sharing the flat only with four other men. 13 Inez Court held a single woman. Number 14 had two women who were apparently sisters-in-law. But most of the units with men had at least four crammed into them. I thought of the immigrants in East Los Angeles or Monterey Park, now also jammed into rooms not designed for their number. I hoped Isaac had found the Campbell Place apartment soon.
1Incidentally, I was struck by the fact that Chashye had named her youngest after her brother, when by tradition children were never named after anyone still alive. It only occurred to me much later that Isaac was born in 1903 and Yitzhok-Leib left for America in 1902. Given the drama of her letter, it is not unlikely that Chashye considered her emigrated brother as good as dead.