It was actually February 2010 that I began removing things from the Box and studying them seriously.  I grew determined to conquer the Yiddish that sealed a world behind its walls.   I acquired The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Learning Yiddish. Moved on to the highly rated Colloquial Yiddish, the Complete Course for Beginners.  Finally plowed through the online Mango Languages.  All 108 lessons.  Twice.   And ultimately accepted that I was defeated. The  handwriting — those swirls and curls, faded by time and the creases of up to a century — was indecipherable to me.  Plus Yiddish was never a totally codified language.  Even when I could make out individual letters, the spelling and – often —  the vocabulary did not conform to any dictionary I could find.

Still, I attempted to create my own OCR program from the few words I was sure of; but each script was different, each letter had come from a different sender (one was in Cyrillic!)  and I didn’t know who any of them were.   I did have Beryl’s photograph, however, identified in my mother’s tidy handwriting.  Even I could make out the word Shemeseve on the back.  And the date 1920 which I assumed meant that the photograph had been sent to Lena by a surviving family member.  I submitted it to the generous volunteer translators at JewishGen.  And the past reached out and grabbed my heart.

Per Ite Doktorski, the back of Beryl’s photograph was inscribed as follows:

 1: For long remembrance
” 2: for my dear
” 3: brother-in-law, sister,
” 4: and nephew (masculine, singular)
” 5: from Berel Melnik
” 6: Shemezeve
” 7: Minsk Guberniya
” 8: April 10, 1920.

The words on the photograph had been written by Beryl himself.

January 9, 2012: I find I am walking around the kitchen crying;  and I am not exactly sure for whom.  For long-lost Beryl inhaling death beneath the dark Russian  water?  For my grandmother, so far from home and those she loved… handling the tiny photo over and over until the paper and the ink were faded into each other, blurred with longing, blurred with fear.  Or for my mother growing up in a house with so much absence:  no maternal grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins.  What that said to her about the place of women in the world.  Or for myself:   all these unknown people gone and forgotten, waiting for me to find them every moment, every day.

I turn to sweets, eating the cookies I had baked last night to send to Cody in Mexico.  At least—finally– I can do that.  For four years in China I could send him nothing at all…. except two pairs of enormous shoes in the suitcase of a friend bound there for shopping.  Another generation of my family scattered to the world. 

Desperate to know more (and ignoring the fact that in April 1920 Lena had one surviving daughter but no son yet), I found Naomi Elbinger, a translator-for-hire in Israel, and sent her a postcard covered in dense tiny script.  To my dismay and confusion – though the vast amusement of my cousins – the letter was not from any of the Melnicks.  It had been written by Peish’s father Yitzhak to David Blistein, the eldest of the four Blistein boys.

The postcard’s text and its translation appear on the page B for Blistein. Of relevance here is that its translator assured me its hectoring disappointment was virtually a given in letters from the Old Country.  In fact, she was preparing an article on that very subject for The Forward and asked permission to reproduce in it Yitzhak’s words.  As a result, I was prepared when the same crankiness appeared in the Melnik letters.  But actually reading them would still be years away.

In the notebooks I keep, I can find records of all my red herrings:  Lena’s cousin Leon Braicinesky hunted through hundreds and hundreds of Manifests. Attempts to obtain Lena’s death certificate on the application for which I had supplied the only parents’ names I knew:  a mother named Clara and a father named Samuel.  Samuel was easy. It was listed on the Ellis Island manifest.  I believe  the name Clara was provided by my mother at some point;  but again I am not entirely sure.

Simultaneously, I was wrestling with the information Maksim Matveev had sent me.  His first letter said: My great-great-grandfather David-Solomon Melnik was born in 1865 in m. of Semezhive of the Minsk province.His wife Hasja  Melnik  was born in 1867. My great-great-grandfather worked on a mill. He has 6 children, 4 sons and 2 daughters. Sons: Peisach was born 1890, Lejba was born 1896, Boris was born 29.12.1901, Isaak was born 1903 and the daughter Sofia of 1898 and the Lipa of 1886 which 1907 has emigrated to the USA. My great-grandfather Boris has left 1922 to Leningrad, and behind that in has moved to Moscow in 1941. At Boris and his wife Sofia Melnikovoj (Nоzik) has 2 sons and 1 daughter. David 1926, Sirafima 1930 and Evgenie 1933. Serafima Makarova (Melnikovoj) my grandmother.

So Lena and her cousin Peisach were exactly the same age.  Was it a coincidence she had married a man with the same name?  Yet no matter how many ways I searched the Ellis Island manifests, I could find no sign of that Lipa Melnick who had emigrated from Shemezeve in 1907.  I found a Lina Melnick who had come from someplace called Wilezky in 1903 as a 20 year old.  There was also a Ludwika Melnik and a Lempiada Melnik who had arrived as young women in 1907 from similarly unpronouncable  towns.  And of course, there was also the possibility Lipa hadn’t even landed in New York.  I had wasted several months looking for the New England manifests only to discover that many had been destroyed in fires.

Maksim did his own research and concurred.

12-31-11

Dear Ronni

 I saw information of yours grandmother on the site http://www.ellisisland.org/,but I wasn’t  found information of  my great-grandaunt Lipi Melnik ,quite possible she had   another  last name when  arrived U.S.A. Semezhevo is very small township, and very few people live in U.S.A which arrived from  Semezhevo. My great grandfather Boris was  uncle  which lived in U.S.A too, but I wasn’t know him name.  I have  one photo  with him uncles.

I suppose Maksim could have laid claim to Leibe Melnik who clearly came from Shemezeve and may well have left there in 1907 before making her arduous way to her ship in Rotterdam.  Except Leibe Melnik had clearly come to Providence, RI to see her cousin. Leibe Melnik was mine.

Among the four letters in the Box, the one in Cyrillic was dated  August 8/18, 1916 (the two dates reflect the ongoing transition from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar)

I sent it to Maksim.  The translation he produced was surreal, though I don’t know whether this was due to the old Russian or his new English.  This is what he sent:

• «Dear,  sister and brother-in-law.
• First of all, I want  to tell you, God be thanked, that we are alive and healthy. And that I want  to wish you.
• We often get letters from brothers  and always thank God that they are alive.
• There are  a lot of news in Semezhevo .The troops still stand but  it have  not  much men, about 300 men.
• I want to go to America now , but  I have not opportunity to do it.
• I want to look at your children and kiss them…
• But   it  is too far now. Grandmother is very angry at the uncle .Already almost two years there wasn’t letter, and in the winter he has written the letter and wrote that has sent it 65 roubles; But to live on money and to write it is more , and that it means I do not know, and the main thing allocate Feifily 38 and to it of 30 roubles, and mum even bow hasn’t written.
• That to us this war will be is remembered to death.  For needs it is necessary to send every month on 15 roubles, to earnings anybody isn’t present a mill doesn’t work. In a word we are as in nippers, Feifil  has become the millionaire and never at all won’t ask as we live.
• Odd rabbit it!
• We be healthy ,We remain all your parents loving you and brothers and the sister.
• Give my best regards to Lizenke and Dore.
• It seems to me while this letter will reach will be already Rosh Hashanah and thus and so congratulate now and wish a lot of good luck and health and family love in yours further life.
• Write often letters.»

(I want to emphasize that Maksim did far better in English than I would ever have done Russian.  I have kept the wording as he sent it because it probably preserves the language of his country better than any tidier version I could produce.)  By process of elimination, this letter was most likely written by Lena’s sister Sofia, who reports having heard from the brothers but signs off “we remain  all your parents loving you and brothers and the sister.” She would have been 18, the same age as Lena when she emigrated, but the family is obviously worse off than it was 8 years earlier.  “I want to go to America but have not opportunity to do it.”  And who the heck was Feifil the Millionaire?  Maksim and I agreed that this had to be hyperbole.  People in nippers can say the darndest things.

Embedded in one of the Yiddish letters was an address in Cyrillic. I sent this on to my ever-accomodating relative.  In the inverted manner of Russian addresses, it came out thus:

City of Slutsk   Soviet Socialist Republic Belarus (S.S.R.B)

Proletarskay Street the house № 172

Neumarkt (Naimark , Naymark , Neimark , Neumarkt)

For Melnik Pejsah

Okay,  Lena apparently had a brother named Pejsah too.  It was a common name.  JewishGen’s Given Name Database informed me it was derived from Passover.  Apparently Lena’s Pejsah had moved to Slutsk and was living on Proletariat Street with someone named Neumarkt.  The letter, however, was not dated.  He had left Shemesevo but I didn’t know when.

I shuffled through the others and found one on similar paper whose top line I now grasped read Slutsk, 1930 November 10. 

The handwriting in this letter was tantalizingly clear. I could make out the phrase:  “beloved and devoted daughter”.

It was repeated frequently.  I became convinced this letter was from Lena’s revered father Shmuel.  And then… and then…

2-14-12: Another shock when my brain finally registers I am looking at the name “Beryl”;   and that the laboriously deciphered sentence goes on to say: “is in Leningrad.  He has a quite good life, a pretty wife and two children.”  This is 1930 and my image of Beryl found floating in a canal as a young man is suddenly shattered.  He had to be approaching 40 by that time.  And I also know from Maksim that his Boris Melnik went to Leningrad.  What the heck is going on?   

The mystery novelist Tana French deflects the blindness of her detectives to the obvious by having them, in retrospect, ruefully acknowledge their blindness.  My only excuse is that pursuing one’s family history tends to be an erratic affair.   Bouts of obsession are interspersed with wide swathes of life moving onward.  I wrote two novels, built two websites, planted forty fruit trees, trapped three wild bee swarms, while simultaneously dealing with an aging Dad and a dying dog.  Finally travelled to China to see Cody.  Floated on a junk through Halong Bay north of Hanoi on his 29^th birthday.  Continued to study Yiddish.  Got in a little Russian and Vietnamese as well.

Which is not to say that I didn’t occasionally dip into the random data the Internet kept spewing.   In 2014 I found the naturalization petition for Hyman Kern, my father’s grandfather.  In 2015, I found the petition for Philip Blistein as well.  Although the infamous postcard had been translated four years earlier, I still had had no idea where Yitzhak Blistein was living at the time.

The ensuing hunt for Peish’s farflung family may be explored in Chapter 6:  B is for Blistein.   But in Lenaland, four years just basically drifted by.  Off and on,  I continued to poke at various sites on the internet: Ellis Island changed its format.  Jewishgen and Ancestry and FamilySearch all seemed to merge.   New sites popped up, like Geni and the related MyHeritage which I never risked entering beyond the free pages,  because of their nasty reputations around credit cards.  Grateful for the occasional nugget I found there, though, I did post some of the information I had

Occasionally  I found the odd clue to my father’s family and to my husband’s maternal and paternal families.  On the web, like in the restless sea off Rhode Island, new fragments of lost lives were churned up every day.  It was an enormous time sink.  It was better than online solitaire.   I indulged sometimes out of bordeom.   Sometimes to avoid a more daunting task.  In general, I found nothing.  The search engines were erratic, often unable to find the very information I had located days earlier.  Keeping track became important.  When FamilySearch abandoned its Personal Ancestor software, I switched to the compatible and also-free Legacy8 but my use of it was as lackadaisacal is the rest of my genealogical work.

And then one day in October 2016, I plugged Lena – as was my wont — into Ancestry.com expecting nothing. I knew too well that women of that generation didn’t leave much of a paper trail. Suddenly, however, I was handed her 1963 application for a Social Security Number. She never received the number, but somehow her application had lingered in the internet ether;  and on it she had written her parents’ names:  David S. Melnick and Ida Kavitsky. I had never heard those names before. What happened to Samuel and Clara?  Okay, I thought, maybe David Samuel Melnick…. until I turned back to Maxim Matveev’s page on Jew Age and discovered that his great-great-grandparents were David Solomon and Hasya Melnik. Uh… Clara, was probably Chaya as said with an accent by Lena and misheard by either Lil or, more likely, my mother. Ida is the U.S. form of Chaya. Chaya is not that far from Hasya as pronounced on the other side of the pond

For the entire time I was communicating with Maksim back in 2012, I was laboring under the misapprehension that his David S. Melnik and my Samuel Melnik were brothers. Now I realize they were the same person. Spookier, although I now knew there was no way Beryl had been murdered as a young man,  Maksim did have a murdered doctor in his family. From his email:  My great grandfather Boris had brother Isaak, He was a doctor. He be killed in 1928 (at the age of 24 or 25) . He also isn’t Beryl.I have his foto and Berli’s foto and it is different  men too.”

So Lena’s brother was murdered, only twenty years after she came to America; and his name was Isaak not Beryl .  And again, Boris is the European form of Beryl, who — yes — had gone to Leningrad. Whew.

Despite Maksim’s conviction that my Beryl and his Boris were different people, I now looked at the two photos with my Tana-French-blinders off.  Ears, mouth, eyes…  Of course, they were the same person,  at two different ages.  It was time to find out what the Yiddish letters said.

Chapter 3: The Letters