The labyrinthine inter-entanglements of Lena’s and Peish’s families first became evident when I was still hunting for the elusive Leon Braicinesky.  Although 11 Inez Court is now buried beneath a part of Interstate 95 built while I was in high school (Marshall Goldberg and I used to illegally speed down the not-yet-opened bits in his cute but terrifying MG), I did manage to locate it in the 1907 Providence City Directory.

I was disappointed, of course, not to find a single Braicinesky.  I did, however, notice a name at #10 that rang a bell:  Joseph Helford.   I knew that in 1904, Peish’s brother Morris had married a Jennie Helford; and a quick check showed that in the 1900 census, she was listed as Joseph’s eldest daughter.  Back then the family was living at, yes, 11 Inez Court.

I even found the 1891 immigration manifest showing her arrival with her stepmother and three siblings (though back then her name was Zippe).

Before singles bars or J-date, it was easy to imagine Peish hanging out with his brother’s new in-laws and meeting an attractive young woman who may (or may not) have been staying in the very same house.

Except, of course, it was easier than that.  Not only did I establish that the Isaac Levin living at #11 Inez Court was, in fact,  the father of the cousin referred to on Lena’s manifest;  and that therefore #11 Inez Court was definitely where she first stayed;  but on his manifest, Isaac had claimed that Joseph Helfond/Helford was also his relative.  They were brothers-in-law as well as good friends.  From two different sources, Morris’ grandson Michael Morgan and Joseph’s great-great-great-nephew Harlan Karp, I obtained the same photograph of the two men together in their old age.   Michael’s mother Barbara refers to Isaac as Old Man Levin.  But how they had become related I didn’t have a clue.

Technically one man would have had to marry the other man’s sister.  If only it had been as simple as that.  Joseph Helford had at least two two wives and it looked like Isaac Levin had had two wives also.  Plus of course his name (and therefore his sister’s) wasn’t even Levin.  And I was starting to get suspicious about Helford/Helfand as well.

You can follow my descent into this quagmire in What’s in a Name:  Kulikovsky, Helfand, Gelfand, Helford or Elman? but for now, suffice it to say I still haven’t figured it out.  As was becoming my habit, faced with a brick wall, I returned to my letters and photographs.  There were real people at the end of all these mysteries.  I had their faces.  I had their words.

Specifically, I returned to the photographs sent to me in 2011 by Maksim Matveev.   In the first,  Lena’s father David-Solomon Melnik is sitting beside Beryl’s wife Sonia Nozik Melnik.  I assume they are posed on the steps of the Melnik home;  or perhaps its mill.

In the second, David-Solomon and Sonia (in the white dress) appear again, surrounded — presumably — by other family members.

In the third is the woman Maksim identified as his great-great-grandmother Chaya Melnik.

Even back then, I realized I had seen her face before.  She was seated stage-right  of the little girl from Lena’s box, the girl who had haunted me.

But now  I knew  this was Lena’s mother Clara/Ida Kavitsky Melnik.  The man standing behind her had to be one of her Slutsk-based sons.  So the little girl was the daughter of either Peysakh or Leibe.  She was my mother’s first cousin.  Lena’s niece.

I desperately wanted to know her name. I sent off my last untranslated letter to Lena’s Watson.  I knew it was probably from Peysakh since I could see his address in its text.  She confirmed it was from him with an extended addendum from his wife Merka.  Unfortunately, I did not learn any new names beyond Merka’s from it.  I did learn, however, how astonishingly generous my grandmother had been.

<< Dear sister and brother-in-law with your dear children, [may you] live happily!

I received your letter, but it gave me no joy to read that you’d sent the money.  I know very well that you can give away your last possession when someone makes a sour face.  If I could sent it back I would.  My situation has improved – I landed a job and get 50 roubles a month, in dollars it’s $25, but my position is in Starobin.  My job is to supply stock to a cooperative.  Since I’m in Slutsk all week, I’ve also brought Merka and the kids over to Slutsk, but poor Mother is left all alone in Shemezeve.  She isn’t doing anything now.  Leybke is in Kapulye [now Kapyl, Belarus] with his wife.  He has already got a son.  His job is the same as mine, so he also has enough to live on.  There’s no news, everything is in order.  I have 3 children, may they live long, and I make a living.  Itse or Beril are coming home this week so we’ll decide something and will also take Mother to Slutsk or [find] another solution because it’s no good for her to be all alone in Shemezeve.  Please write letters more frequently to the address I’ll give you.  Mother writes me frequently.  She writes she’ll be coming to stay for a little bit and we’ll write a letter together, but don’t wait [for it] and write. 

[p. 2] Remain well and live happily.  I thank you wholeheartedly for the money.  If only I could pay you back in kind.  I greet you and our children, may they be well and happy, as your brother, brother-in-law and uncle wishes you. 

My wife and children greet you very warmly and wish you the best of luck.  From me, Peysakh Melnik

Mother received the 50 dollars.

My address:

Peysakh Melnik

c/o M. Naimark

172, Proletarskaya St,

Slutsk, Belorussian SSR

[Merka:] Dear sister-in-law and brother-in-law, I thank you very much for the dollars, but you can’t imagine how many tears I shed reading your letter.  May G-d grant that we may be able to pay you back in kind.  We’re now living in Slutsk and we miss Shemezeve.  Life was quieter there, while here I’m stuck indoors with the young children, may they have long years, as in prison, and poor Peyshe is never at home and is always on the road.  But what can be done about it?  It was even worse without a job.  We thank G-d for this too.  He’s also very overworked, he’s taken on more than he can manage, but man must live in hope.  Perhaps we too will live to see a better life one day.  But our poor Mother is worse off than anyone else – to be left all alone in her old age.  I’ve already sent her many letters [asking her] to come to us.  Perhaps she will one of these days. 

There’s nothing else to write.  I greet you, your husband and your sweet children, may they have long years.  Remain well and live happily as is the wish of your forever well-wishing sister-in-law and aunt, Merka Melnik, who’s looking forward to a reply soon. 

Both my translator Lena Watson and I were astounded at the sum of money my grandmother had sent to her family.  If she sent $50 to her mother, I assume she sent a commensurate amount to her brother.  Both he and his wife wept tears of gratitude but expected they could never repay the gift.  Lena Watson confirmed that usually the amounts sent home were in the $5-$10 range.  And while the rate of exchange changed radically between Sofia’s letter in 1916 and this letter (presumably sent both after David-Solomon’s death in 1923 and Lenin’s death in January, 1924 when the ruble hit its historic low of 2.4 million per USD and then was re-denominated to 2.22) Yitkhok-Leib had only sent 65 rubles (then worth roughly $8) to be split among his relatives while my grandmother was sending 110 roubles to each.

Beyond that, the letter made identifying the people in the Semezhevo photos a crapshoot.  Since Peysakh Melnik’s letter stated that Leibe’s first-born child was a son, by process of elimination, my mystery girl was Peysahk’s first (or perhaps his only) daughter.  Frustratingly, he specified he had three children (he would have four by the time of his mother’s letter 7 years later) but didn’t give their genders or their names.   In the line-up in Semezhevo, the child being held is clearly female;  but squinting until I was cross-eyed couldn’t quite convince me that these  hale and hearty folk were the same pinched-face souls captured by Yochin, the famous Slutsk photographer.  And yet Merka did report how much she missed the open spaces and tranquility of Shemezeve.  In Slutsk, she said, the children had to be kept indoors, like prisoners.   Maybe that explains the Slutsk photograph’s tense vibe.  But then, the subjects of formal pictures in those days always seemed to be suffering:  the result of remaining motionless for an indoor camera’s slow shutter speed.

And what about the cheerful young man on the far left of the Semezhevo line-up?  Were both he and Slutsk’s bearded pater-familia  Peysakh himself?  And what about the child he seems to be holding, whose small ear can be just made out at the very edge of the photo?  If one posits logically that both the Semezhevo pictures were taken on the same day (presumably by an itinerant photographer since no one in those days had iPhones) then the girl in white, the still-childless Sonia Nozik Melnik, is holding her niece in the large family photo and her nephew in the smaller one.  And presumably Peysakh was now holding the self-same boy.  But who was he?  His identity was a tantalizing mystery, since had already seen him in Lena’s brown box:

On the back, this was written

translated by the kind Ite Doktorski as:

line 1: Dear
2: uncle and dear aunt, I am writing
3: to you to say that I am in good health
4: and preparing to travel to visit
5: to you. Write to me about
6: Leah and Itze and I send them my greetings.
7: From me your nephew …ni Witzig Shmeze(“v” or “m”)e

and by the equally kind  Emma Karabelnik as: “Beloved uncle and dear aunt. I write to you to tell you that I am in good health and am preparing to travel for a visit to you. Write to me.. (I can’t understand the end of the sentence) regards from your nephew Yaki (not sure about that) Weitzig Shemezewe”

For Lena to be his aunt, this boy had to be the son of one of Lena’ siblings.  Based on the first photo,  I would have assumed that he was Beryl and Sonia Nozik’s son.   Except that I learned from Maksim two important things: 1.  that David-Solomon Melnik died in 1923 and 2. that Beryl’s first child wasn’t born until 1926 and was also named David — presumably in honor of his late grandfather.  So this boy couldn’t be little David Melnik at all.

Then who was he?  The name on the back had stubbornly resisted my Jewishgen translators.  They were gingerly settling on some version of …ni Weitzig or Witzig, when Logan Kleinwaks — a fellow Jewishgen researcher — jumped in.  He had a great-great-grandmother from Shemezeve whose maiden name was Wiczyk.  Could my little boy be related to her?

It seemed to me that the last letter in the name was a “gimel”;  but sure enough, if I plugged Witzig into the Ellis Island Passenger Search, what it spit out were mostly versions of Wiczyk.   And when I plugged the same name into the Yad Vashem indexes, I was handed Vichik (or Вичих).

In any case, it wasn’t Melnik.  Which meant the boy had to be the son of Lena’s only sister Sofia.  I knew she had died in 1922, so he couldn’t have been born after that.  He looks about 2 in the photograph with his grandfather  and unless she is one of the smiling girls up on the porch, his mother doesn’t seem to be in evidence.  My best guess was that …ni Witzig/Wicyzk/Vichik had been born about 1921.

But I could find no trace of him either on Russian genealogy sites or in the vast collective memory of Jewishgen databases. Plus my grandmother only had this single photo of him.  I was positive he had never made it to the States.  Reluctantly, I checked the Yad Vashem Database for Victims of the Shoah.  Among its two million names were only 58 Witzig/Wicyzk/Vichiks, but sadly, five of the murdered were from Semezhevo;   seven more from nearby Timkovitch.  And then my eye fell in Sinei Vichik, born in 1922.

I looked again at the name on the photograph.

I – and my superiors – had read the first letter as an ayin.  It just as easily, however, could have been a samech: Not …ni but Sinei.  His patronymic was Morduch.  He was student in Minsk when he was evacuated east. Evacuated!  Not murdered.    But all by himself.  I have no idea what happened to his father.  Unlike many entire families tallied by the Soviets in 1942 in Veshkamya, Sinei was living and working in this city of refugees alone.

And then what?   Did he survive the war?  Did he ever return to Minsk or elsewhere?  Perhaps someone someday will see his face here and tell me his end.  But for now — understanding that on most levels this is pure speculation — for now, at least, I will call him Sinei Vitzig.  At least in my mind he did not lose everything:  his home, his life, and his name.

Unlike Peysakh’s dark-eyed daughter or his other three children.  Unlike Leibe’s wife and children as well.  All of them gone.  Probably lined up in front of a trench and shot in the neck and buried.  Elsewhere,  the Nazis erected their elaborate killing machines,  their numberings and records, their facades of labor and industry.    In Belarus — called by historians the “deadliest place on earth between 1941 and 1944” — , the Jews were  just gunned down, like cattle, where they stood.

As illustrated by the fate of Faivel Kievitsky,  my grandmother’s uncle, her mother’s brother.   Immortalized in Sofia’s letter as “Faivel the Millionaire”, he was born in 1878 in sleepy Semezhevo; but quickly moved on and out and up.    In the  1907 Duma List, he is described as living in Romanovo and having a worth of 250 rubles.   Not exactly a millionaire.  Not even the richest Kievitsky in the area;  but simply to be eligible to vote was a  coup for a Jew.  And then…

In the Yad Vashem site I found his six children, born in Chaychitsy and Tiraspol, places so small they can barely be found on a map.  Less than a mile from each other.  Less than three miles from Semezhevo.  Faivel was 63 when Operation Barbarossa sent the Nazi Einsatzgruppen death squads pouring across the Polish border.  His older children had married and moved to Slutsk and had families of their own.  His younger children were in the Red Army or still lived in Tiraspol with him.  Fifteen members of his family died, many on the same day, June  12, 1942,  in Romanovo:  children, daughters and sons-in-law, grandchildren as young as 3.

Only a single daughter, Anne, survived to testify about the slaughter.  Romanovo was six and half miles from where Faivel had been born.¹

Chapter Six:  B is for Blistein

¹ Holocaust by bullets in figures: In July 1941, all the Jews from Romanovo and the surrounding villages were confined in a ghetto, composed of a street, guarded by local police, surrounded by barbed wire on one side, and a river on the other side. According to witnesses interviewed by Yahad, Jews were concentrated and forced to live in 3 houses. Jews had to perform forced labor like cleaning the streets. On June 12, 1942, the Jews were shot by the Germans, assisted by local police, in a pit near the orthodox cemetery.