back from the FSU

I am back from my family-history jaunt through the FSU (Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Lithuania) in one piece, excited capitivated and in one piece, despite getting bizarelly mugged in Kaunus, Lithuania, while on a guided tour with Tanya of some of the old buildings associated with my great-great-great grandfather, Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Spektor, the Gaon of Kovno (1817-1896). Sadly, my attacker managed to snatch my camera with my photos of the whole trip and while the guy was quickly caught and delivered to the police by some local youths who heard my cry for help and corraled the guy, in the process the memory chip in my camera was lost, and with it, all oif my photos of the trip. I was lucky though, because after the police frisked the attacker, it turned out he was carrying a loaded pistol. Such a thing had never before happened in Lithuania to a western visitor on a roots trip, and there was semi-serious speculation that the attacker may have been some kind of dybbuk summoned by Rabbi Spektor who might have been upset I intended to visit his grave and snap photos there--but that he showed mercy on me by sparing my life. The story of the attack on me ran on Page 5 of the main Lithianian daily paper, Lietuvos Rytas, and I was interviewed also on the main interview program on Lithuanian Radio. Honestly, I've had a hard time writing about my trip since returning because didnt want the mugging incident to overwhelm everything else, but its hard not to start with it. Here are other impressions and results. Our first heritage stop was Rostov-na-Donu, where one side of my father's family, the Tulbowitz's lived back in the 1870's and 1880's. We didnt' find what we had hoped to find; records of the home and or tavern owned by Shalom-Aharon and Sophie Tulbowitz, or of their daughter Rose and her husband Abram Bloch, who emigrated from the city for America in 1890 together with Sophie, (the rest of the family left several years later), partly because the best census of Rostov residents, including Jews, was done in 1895-96 and my family had already left for the Goldine Medina, but we did find Jewish community documents from 1878 and 1879 announcing the birth and corcumcision of their son Gabriel and death of three year old Isai, neither of whom we had, until now, on our family tree. Even more exciting, the documents identified them as "meshanin" (townspeople) from Rechica, a small town in south-eastern Belaurs. So now we know where the Tulbowitzes came from before Rostov, though we dont know yet when they left Rechicha (an archivist in Minsk will shortly check Rechica archives for clues).

Rostov itself, which had been rundown and shoddy the last time I was there in 1999, was now flush with money with the once empty left bank of the Don filled with restaurants, discos, and resorts. They are doing a good job thankfully, of preserving the integrity of the old city's 19th Century architectural core even as sleek new buildings rise in adjoining districts. Indeed, Rostov looked every bit as prosperous as Kiev where we had just been and no comparison with other parts of Ukraine, that are still terribly rundown and depressing. I knew from reports that Moscow had become incredibly rich, but I hadnt expected to see such a transformation in Rostov. We did then spend a day in Moscow, which was ludicrously expensive and choked with traffic, but we were taken to one of the best restaurants in the city by two old friends who have done very well (she is the co-owner of a winery using Bordeaux grapes in Anapa near Russia's Black Sea coast) and treated to a bottle of their best white, so left town on the train to Minsk feeling no pain...We only had a day in Belarus, but it was something of a surprise in that people we spoke to--including members of the Jewish community seemed genuinely appreciative of the social policies followed by their dictator Lukashenka, who of course has a very very bad image in the West. In short, they say, he has avoided the worst aspects of the move to free-market economics that beset Russia and Ukraine---the closing of factories and collective farms and mass unemployment and the plunging of 80 percent of the population into poverty, drunkedness and despair, by cushioning the blow, keeping alive a form of collective agriculture, keeping prices reasonable, etc, etc. Of course, he managed to do that thanks to dirt cheap energy supplies from his longtime ally Putin, but once Lukashenka made clear he did not want the much-anticipated merger with Russia unless he himself would become the supreme leader instead of merely a governor, Russia has begun charging Belarus much higher energy prices, so who knows how much longer Luka can keep it up. But at this point the population looks pretty content, well-fed and grateful to have avoided the shock therapy their neighbors endured.

Tanya and I were driven by a guide from the Jewish community to Ross', Izabelin and Volkovisk, small towns near the Polish border which were frespectively the birthplace and the first two rabbincal postings of the illustrious Rabbi Spektor, who then moved to Kovno in 1864. On the way, we saw storks in the field, lots of goats, chicken and sheep and felt to be floating through Chagall-land. We were warmly recieved by thye mayors of all three places, who had no prevjious idea that their towns were associated with Rabbi Spektor, who during hios heyday was the most influential rabbi in the Russian Empire. There are no Jews left there--all those communities were slaughtered by the Nazis and the Jewish cemeteries almost completely overgrown to the point where only a few headstones can be seen...Melancholy and haunting.

We spent our last four days in a lovely hotel in Vilnous with a magical panorama of that exquisite city, once the Jerusalem of the Litvak Jews. The beauty of the city makes the story of the annihilation of its Jews from 1941-44, which was recounted to us in detail by our superb guide Regina Kopeleivch, all the more emotionally devastating. We did have the opportunity to meet and talk to a wonderful 85-year-old survivor who we had seen in posters, suddenly come to life, and also to witness a performance of Yiddish songs performed for a group of students from around the world (including German Christians) who come to Vilna every summer to study Yiddish.

In Kaunus, besides getting mugged, we visited the ruined home and ohel of Rabbi Spektor and his second son, Tzvi Hirsch Rabinovich (Unfortunately, all traces of his first son--my great-great grandfather, Chaim Rabinovich, have vanished). I did however have one more 'Eureka' geneological moment in Lithuania. Just after we arrived in Vilnius, Regina Kopelevich introduced to another western visitor, Eli Wohlgemuth of Montreal, who said he wanted to meet me because his great-great grandfather, Rabbi Yishai Wohlgemuth of Memel (then the eaternmost city in Germany, now the Lithuanian city of Kleipeda) was a close friend of my great-great-great grandfather, Rabbi Spektor. That was amazing enough, but I was also blown away by his last name, Wohlgemuth, because my mother's mother Elli Ringel, was born Elli Wohlgemuth in East Prussia in 1900). Elli was a wonderfful lady,who escaped Hotler with my then teenage mother and came to America, but she had a snobbish disapproving attitude toward Russian Jews, who she considered uncouth and uncivilized, even though, or maybe because, East Prussia was right on the border with Russia.

In any case it seems almost certain that my Wolgemuths, who lived in Konigsburg, the capital of East Prussia until 1920, when they moved to Berlin to find Elli and her sister Hilda, suitable well-to-do Jewish husbands, were almost certainly related to Eli Wohlgemuth's family, which was based in Memel just a short way up the Baltic Coast. So in one stroke, Eli Wohlgemuth provided me with links to both my mother's family and my father's, which had always seemed so far apart, German-Jewish and Russian-Jewish, oil and water, in my mind. And the kicker was this, according to Eli, the East Prussia Wohlgemuth clan had all emigrated there from Belarus in the early 19th Century--so those who despised Ostjuden had themselves been Ostjuden a couple of generations before!!! Who would have think it??? I mean, come down off superiority shtick, German Jews, yekkes, and lighten up, already...

Nu, thats it for now...For further accounts of my roots trip, there will soon be an article in the Jewish Week and eventually a book still forming in my mind along the lines of "Encounters with a Tzaddik; Secular, liberal, decadent Walter Ruby has a hell of a dialectic across space and time with his ancestor, the illustrious Kovno Gaon and gets mugged by a dybuk in the Process"...coming in the not so distant future to a Barnes and Nobles and artsy-fartsy cinema near you...