The stories here were told to me on Shabbos afternoons by my Bobi Bayla, or at other times by my father and my Aunt Esther. My Aunt Sarah spoke less often of the Old Country, but she did recall it with fondness. Bobi Bayla's family came from Bar in the Ukraine, near the Rumanian border. The Ostrachs had lived in Meidan since 1850. How my grandfather and grandmother came to be married, I don't know. It probably was a marriage arranged by a shadchan, a matchmaker. My grandfather's home town was in Meiden, 15 kilometers away from Bar. That is about ten miles, too far for them to have met causally, but not too far for a matchmaker to travel. Most marriages were arranged, and they often were between couples from different villages. In any event, my grandfather moved into my grandmother's home and there she bore three children: Esther Fage in 1906. Sura in 1908, and Zvi, called Hersch in 1910. Then my grandfather left for America.
He went home to Meidan at least once, when Esther was born, to tell his widowed mother, Chantza Fage about the baby. She became furious with him. How could he give the baby the name Fage? She was still alive, and you're only supposed to name a child after someone dead. Esther reported to me that he, probably for the only time in his adult life, apologized profusely, "I'm sorry, Mamma. I didn't realize." Esther seems not to have ever met her paternal grandmother.
Bar was not a shtetl, a village of Jews. It had a large population of Jews, however, about 50% of the town. As you will see from these stories, Christians, both for good and for evil, played a role in their lives.
Bayla and the Cossacks
When the Russian Revolution was raging in Ukraine, the Cossacks liked a little side action of killing Jews, who made up a large percentage of the population there. Once, when my Bobi Bayla was walking, a soldier rode up to her and asked, "Where are the Jews?" Bayla looked over her shoulder and spat. "There are no Jews here!" Since, unlike her mother, she did not shave her head when she got married, she looked like any Ukrainian Christian girl. The soldier just left.
Another time, when my father was about two, he became very ill with some sort of bronchial infection. It lingered. My grandmother finally decided that what he needed was to go to a forest with Balsam trees. Apparently, they believed that the smell of Balsam cleared the chest and cured the illness. The problem was that, in order to go to the forest, she would have to take him on a train, and Jews were not allowed on trains. To make matters worse, this was during WWI, before the Russians withdrew from that futile endeavor. Not daunted by the matter of trains of Russian troops, nor by the prohibition against Jews, she packed a tin with foods like hard boiled eggs, pickles, cheese, and <i>vorscht</i>, the Yiddish word for </>wurst</i>, meaning 'sausage' In this instance, the vorscht would have been a very spicy garlicky sausage, called "kosher salami" nowadays. This was a lifelong passion of my father's. She boarded the train, dressed like any Ukrainian peasant, paid the few kopeks it cost and sat down, surrounded by soldiers. She was petrified. My father was sleeping, if not in a comatose state. She was afraid that if he woke up, he'd speak to her in Yiddish and her ruse would be discovered. Fortunately, he didn't wake up and she got to the forest. After trekking into it, she sat with her back against a Balsam tree, cuddling my father. For two days, he slept. On the third, he suddenly woke up and said plaintively, 'Mama, ich will a bissel vorscht." She knew he was cured, got back on the train and got home with no incident. When she told me this story, she acted out her trembling fear, and larded it with "Oy, Gottenu" and the prayers she kept repeating. Again, she braved the Cossacks--and the Russian troops--and won. Fortunately, she didn't look Jewish.
At other times during those terrible years, when Cossacks rode through the town, her Christian neighbors took her and her three children into their homes and just pretended that they were relatives living in their houses. With the help of these neighbors, she and her children, Esther, Sarah, and Harry, survived without injury.
Bayla's life was not all about confrontation with hostile Gentiles. She was a skilled seamstress and and handworker, who could crochet, tat (make lace), and knit, as well as, of course, sew. She was so gifted that all she had to do was look at a complex pattern, and then she could recreate it exactly. She also made up her own designs. Her work was so well known in this town of 15,000 souls, that she was often asked to make the trousseaus for the wealthy families' daughters. What money she came by undoubtedly was from her handiwork.
One other story of note: Bayla to the rescue. When my Great-uncle Sam, Sonny and Allen Seidman's father, was born, he was blue and didn't cry. So my grandmother wrapped him up and opened the oven door and, holding him in her arms, kept putting him in the oven for a few seconds and then taking him out, repeating this until he began to cry. As she told me this story, she reenacted her movements, holding her arms as if she were cradling a baby, and bending forward and back.
When I had my first baby, my son Eric, Bobi swaddled him for me. Her hands moved so fast, I could hardly see them moving, but she wrapped him so tight, he stopped crying and fell asleep instantly. She loved babies and children and was gifted with them.
After an especially vicious attack on Jews in 1919, she packed her tin with vorschts and apples and some other necessaries, took her 3 children, then 13, 11, and 9, and bribed a boatman to row them across the river separating Bar from Romania. Interestingly, my father's Hebrew chanting was in Romanian form, and so was the family's Yiddish pronunciation. (There were seven major dialects of Yiddish in Eastern Europe, but the "correct" one, which neither side of my family spoke was Vilna's.) In any event, when the boatman got them to the other shore, he demanded more money. My grandmother had very little. As I noted, she didn't come from an area with much of a cash economy and she knew they'd have to walk until they found a community of Jews to help them. So, she refused. The boatman threatened to kill her, but she wouldn't give in. He kept them hostage until dark, when he finally gave up and rowed back. Where they slept for the next two years and how they ate, I don't really know, but I would guess they would go to shtetls along the way, villages with a large percentage of Jews. There they could find Kosher food and receive hospitality. Since first publishing this website, other have contacted me and told me their forebears also took the route through Romania after escaping Russia. Romanian Jews must have extended hospitality to the escapees. There was no public transportation, restaurants, or motels. Her bravery in escaping is amazing to me. I don't know if I would dare to come from a town I'd lived in all my life and then go into the unknown as she did. Both my father and my Aunt Sarah spoke of her courage and determination. She was truly an amazing woman.
In Bar, my Bobi did work at harvest time, picking tobacco, and as they were walking through farming country, she and the children could have done farm work. Somehow, they made it to Bucharest, Romania two years after they set out. There, she was able to get in touch with HIAS (Hebrew Immigration Aid), and they located my grandfather who had to sponsor her and pay the fares for the four of them, or else she couldn't have entered the country. HIAS booked her on a ship called The Adriatic Boss out of Southampton, England. My father remembers eating his first ice cream from a street vendor in England, and gulping it down so fast that he got a headache from the cold. The passenger record from Ellis Island lists my grandmother and her children's origin as Jassy, Romania. My grandmother arrived at Ellis Island with her three children in 1921 and took the train to Providence.
Her first day in America, the four immigrants were enthralled by electric lights. When my grandfather came home, finding all the lights blazing, he yelled, "Where do you think the electricity comes from?" My Bobi answered, "The cellar." Life in America had begun.
Once, my uncle Si came home for a visit and he remarked to his mother, "Mama, you haven't spoken Yiddish all day. How come?" She answered thoughtfully, "Vell, I guess I've become a real Yenkee Dudel Dendy."
When Si was in high school, he loved to have cupcakes and milk when he came home from school. My grandmother bought him his favorite cupcakes from Korb's Bakery (which is, alas, no more.) and she would never let me have one. How I coveted those cupcakes! But, she did give me other goodies. My mother forbade me to have any candy, but often when I tripped down the stairs from our 3d floor flat, my Bobi would be waiting for me dressed as usual in a hand-knot cardigan and an apron over it. As I approached her door, she'd stick her hand in the pocket and withdraw a big gumdrop, putting her hand to her lips and saying, "Sha!" and, as she handed it to me, "Na." She also baked piroshkes, an apple tart, and platzeleh, big sugar cookies good for dunking into glasses of hot tea. My favorite was when she made blueberry vereneki, a half-moon shaped crescent of dough filled with fresh blueberries and then boiled. They were something like ravioli, but with a thinner dough. We ate them with sour cream and sugar on them.
One vestige of my grandmother's country upbringing remained. She would never buy a chicken unless it still had its intestines in it. She had to inspect its insides for herself to make sure it wasn't diseased in any way. She used the cleaned out intestines to make kishka, a wonderful bread sausage. As I noted, she was very gifted in making things, but in America nobody wanted handmade lace. So, she confined herself to fancy knitting. We all had cable-stitched sweaters, hats, and I had hand knitted kneesocks. If she saw a knitted or crocheted piece she liked, she just looked at it, and then recreated it without a pattern or set of directions. She was truly gifted.
My Father Harry's Earliest Memories
When my father was about three, two little boys were playing in the street when two drunken peasants happened by. The boys, wearing yarmulkes and tsitsis (ritual fringes under their shirts) were easily identified as Jewish. The peasants took out their swords and hacked the boys to death. My grandmother was one of the Jewish women in town who helped wash the dead and prepare them for burial. She took my father with her. He recalls holding on to her leg while she was working, and looking upward, he saw one of the boy's legs hanging over the table he was laid out on. The leg had a deep gash in the sole of the foot at the instep. "I never could forget that image," he told me. "Or the sound of the women sobbing as they prepared the bodies."
Another vivid memory, one he repeated many times, was the time Cossacks rode into town, as usual targeting Jews. One came to the house of a poor woman who had but one possession of any value: her Shabbas candelabra. The Cossacks took it. The woman, standing in the doorway of her hut, pleaded with him to let her have it back. His response was to run her through with his sword. Then he commanded the onlookers, and everyone else in town not to touch the body. It was summer, and in the heat, the woman's body bloated until it filled the doorway. My father couldn't erase that picture from his mind either.
Another time, my father was playing with a neighbor's pig. He was pretending to be a Cossack. He had a kitchen knife in his hand, and, in his play, lunged with it towards the pig. Unfortunately, he cut so deeply, the pig died. "My mother was petrified," he told me. "She was afraid of what the neighbor would do to them." Because they were Jewish, the neighbor could have assaulted or even killed them. Their best hope was if he was willing to take money for the pig. But that was no easy matter in those days, as this wasn't a cash economy. People grew their own food, made their own clothes, and prepared all their food on their own. Very little was ever bought. Fortunately, the neighbor was kindly, and accepted whatever kopeks my grandmother managed to scrounge up.
The house my father and the whole family lived in was attached to another house in which a Russian Orthodox priest lived. He never mentioned the priest, except for the fact of his residence, so I presume relations were cordial. Also, during WWI, Russian soldiers were billeted in my father's house. It must have been unbelievably crowded with my grandmother and her three children, her parents, her two sisters, and whichever of her numerous brothers were at home. Her oldest brother, Laban, was in the Russian army and was killed during the war. Terry Ostrach tells me that two of the boys were twins, but I never heard my father or grandfather speak of that.
Not only did my father describe the house, but he told me that all the houses were built around a plot of land that acted as a backyard would for us. When it came time for the Goyim (Gentiles) to slaughter their pigs, they had a big party in which the men got shikka (at least mildly drunk), ad had a piig catching contest. The pigs sensed death and tried to run away. When they were all caught amidst all this festivity, they were hung up, and the women gutted them out as the men danced, trying to outdo each other in athletic moves like splits, leaps, and so forth. If the women danced, they would dance in a staid circle around the men, who were in the center. The climax of the party was roasting the pigs' tails, and they always gave my father one. He recalls walking around eating this great delicacy. I asked him if they did it to subvert his being kosher, and he said, "No, it was a big treat, and they loved his grandfather,so they naturally gave him this treat as a favor." I remember that, in later years in America, my father unkoshered our house in a hurry by bringing home a ham along with directions for my mother on how to cook it.
My father adored his grandfather. He and his mother and sisters lived with the grandparents and all the unmarried children in the family. My great-grandfather, Abraham Seidman, was a blacksmith, and apparently an uncommonly skilled one. Blacksmiths not only made all the farming implements, like plows, but also items like cooking pots and stoves. He was so respected that the townspeople called him "Panye Abramke," which means "honored Abraham." This form of address was virtually never used to Jews. It was a mark of utmost respect, in a culture which usually just called Jews "Zhid" in a contemptuous tone. Not only did they speak to him so reverently, but, at Easter, they would bring "ostenske", which were presents, usually of geese, to him. When my father told me this story , he was 75 and had but a few months to live, although I don't know if he realized that. In any event, what was noteworthy, was when he told me this story, his eyes filled with tears at the memory of his Zadi being called "Pan."
My father also told me that his mother and his aunts, Rifka, and Odessa, the youngest one, each had her special household duties. Rifka baked the bread every week. She placed the loaves on a shelf above the stove, whether to the side or on the top, he didn't say. When I asked if they didn't get stale, he said he didn't remember. My grandmother was in charge of all pickling, and, even in the USA, until she was very old, she made magnificent pickles. Unfortunately, nobody thought to ask her how she made them, so the secrets of the world's best pickles of all time went to the grave with her. The youngest sister, who my father said was Fageh, (which means 'bird' in Yiddish), was in charge of the floor, which was packed dirt. She would take crushed colored rocks and create designs as borders on the dirt floor on Shabbos (modern Shabat) and holy days. I doubt, however, that this sister was named Fageh for two reasons. One is that Esther's middle name was Fageh, and my grandmother wouldn't knowingly have used the name of a living relative to name her child. The second is that we know there was a sister named Odessa, so this youngest sister must have been that Odessa.
. My Zadi Zisse (Samuel) Ostrach
My grandfather Zisse's two sisters were Rifka and Leah. He also had several brothers. We can find no evidence that any member of the Ostrach (Ostrakh, Oistrakh, Estrak) famiy emigrated to America, except for my grandfather, but Terry had an Ostrach from France contact her on her ancestry.com website
My Zadi Ostrach died when I was only 3, so I don't really remember him. My father told me that he loved my brother Herbie and me, and used to take us for walks all the time. He called my brother "Kelly the Copper" both because of his blond hair and snub nose, and because, when asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, my brother, then 3 or 4 answered, "A policeman." He was stuck with that nickame for a long time after my grandfather's death.
My grandfather came to America in January 1911, when my father, Hersch (Harry), named for his paternal grandfather Gersch, was only 3 months old. In the Old Country, he was known both for his brilliance in the interpretations of the Bible and his mathematical skills. These he utilized in doing the calculating of the cost of wagonloads of produce grown in the farming community of Meidan, his birthplace.
Samuel was known both for his deep erudition of Jewish studies and his sharp tongue. He also was a chazan in shul (a soloist who is not an ordained cantor in a little synagogue.) He trained all three of his sons to sing the religious liturgy, including the Passover Seder, and my uncles Morris and Simon, who were born in this country, sang in the choir of our shul. Si, a world famous scientist, told me he has sung the Koyen's prayer at Orthodox synagogues all over Europe. Although the family name is not Cohen, the males of the family are Koyen's (members of the ancient priestly caste.) I remember my father presiding over a Pidyan Ha Ben for a Seidman baby, probably Sonny's oldest son, since it is only an oldest son who needs to be "redeemed" from becoming a priest.
My Uncle Si, one of the two sons born after my grandmother got here in 1921, remembers another Schechtman cousin, Jack, dropping indressed in riding breeches and riding boots, and his father shouted at him in Yiddish, "Yonkel, you bum, you ride ferdlachs!" (Ferdlach were "little horses" or ponies. The use of the lach diminutive was an insult, implying he could only ride inferior horses.). As Si said, "There often were major arguments and insults, but everyone returned the next week."
So far as I know, none of my grandfather's brothers or any other Ostrachs came to America, although he came from a large family in Meidan. David Oistrakh, the famous violinist, was the grandson of my grandfather's brother David. Both my grandfather and David were grandsons of Moshko Ostrakh and sons of Gersh. Simon has a fax from the Oistrakh family showing the relationship. The Ostrach name is variably spelled Oistrakh, Ostrakh, and Ostrak in the records. My Aunt Esther believed there was a variant Estrak, as some people pronounced it that way. There are probably other spelling variants. Terry found the first one in Meiden, Sruel who was born around 1798. A large plot of land was made available for Jews to farm on, and he and his two sons bought one farm. The family was firmly entrenched there until the 20th century at least. I don't know if any Ostrachs still live there now.
Schechtmans and Shatkins
All the relatives we saw were either the Schechtman cousins, an occasional Shatkin, and, of course, her Seidman brothers who settled in Revere, Mass., and their wives and children. The Shechtman connection is that my grandmother's Aunt Brina Shatkin(Die Mema Brina) was married to a Schechtman. My grandmother's mother was a Shatkin, married to a Seidman. Die Mema Brina lived one street over from where we did, so there was a lot of interaction between the families. Davie Schechtman was our soda man. Izzy was the rich one, noted in Providence at one time for being the largest slumlord in the city. He actually had a crew of contractors working for him to keep his houses standing. Izzy also was a bootlegger during Prohibition, and my father recalls a Bar Mitzvah celebration at his house when the Feds arrived and broke up the party. Jack Schechtman loved to scare me when I was a child. He would come to the house, and if I was outside alone, he would lunge at me roaring. I would run as fast as I could, and he would just roar with laughter. Once, it wasn't so funny. While running, I tripped over a small boulder that propped the back door open and fell and cut my forehead which began bleeding profusely and needed stitiching. One Passover, while my father, Harry, was singing the Seder, when it was time to open the door for Elijah, we opened it, and Jack, draped in a sheet, came roaring in. Usually, when we opened the door for Elijah, our dog Flippy walked in. What was odd about that is that we never, ever came in through the front door. We came in the back. So how did Flippy know on this one night to wait at the front door?
The other memory I have is my grandmother's brothers Benny and Sam coming to visit on a Sunday. She would get out her electric broiler because they always brought their own steaks to broil. Was that an Old Country custom? Sam was always quiet, but friendly, but Benny was louder and more outgoing, but not as outrageous as Jack Schechtman. Jack eventually moved to Los Angeles with his wife and two sons, Stanley and Sidney. We never heard from them again.
63 Carrington Avenue, Providence
I grew up in the third floor flat of my grandmother's home, which was on the first floor. My parents, Harry and Rose, slept in the bedroom off the kitchen and my brother Herbie (Chaim Froim) and I shared a room off the dining room. Both my grandmother's kitchen and ours had a "settle" (a couch) in the kitchen by the wall between the back door and a window overlooking the yard. That was the gathering place for the family. On hot summer nights, my father would sit in our kitchen with no shirt on, playing the harmonica and singing. In my grandmother's flat, there were often several people sitting on the settle or at the kitchen table talking effusively about all sorts of things. Passionate discussions were the norm and visitors always came in by the kitchen door and joined in no matter what the topic was. Nobody sat in silence. Only on the holidays did we sit in the parlor of my grandmother's flat. The kitchen was large and had a massive kerosene stove warming in, often with a pot of soup or pratkes (stuffed cabbage) simmering away. In the little pantry off the kitchen was a small gas stove and, of course, a sink and all the cabinets. Both the third and first floors had identical layouts furrnished very much alike.
My childhood was sufffused with singing. My Aunt Esther had a beautiful soprano, my father had a pleasant baritone, and he loved to sing. Singing was a regular family event. Our car had no radio, so when we traveled to Boston, we sang, often in harmony, all the way there and back. We also sang together on summer evenings, my father accompanying us with his harmonica. Not only did my father and his brothers sing the entire long Orthodox Seder, but we all sang the hymns at the end of the service. Perhaps because my husband and his family never sang, I never could get my own kids to sing very much, although we did dance. At Freylachs (happy events), my family danced the Czartskaa, a dance I haven't seen in over half a century.
My uncles Morris (Moishe Laban) and Simon (Sholom) were also gifted musically in another way. They both learned to play instruments in school and somewhere there are pictures of them dressed up in Hope High School band uniforms. Morris played the clarinet and saxophone and Si played the trumpet and trombone. When Morris was an undergraduate, he formed a band, Morris Ostrach and the Melodiers. They played Swing, of course. They often practiced in Bobi Bayla's living room. Our dog Flippy used to be banished to the backyard to rehearsals because he howled along with the music.
Both Morris and Simon truly fulfilled the American dream. They were born within two years of Bayla's arrival in this country. Both did brilliantly in school and beyond. Morris, an oral surgeon, was so expert in reconstructing jaws that when he was in the National Health Service, he received a medal for his work. He had always wanted to become an MD, but he applied late to medical school and was turned down because the Jewish quotas had been filled. He couldn't wait another year to attend Medical school because of WWII, so he accepted a place in Tufts Dental School. When a place opened up in the medical school the next year, Morris was already enamored of dentistry. I can see why. He was also manually gifted, and dentistry offered an outlet for his love of building things. Si became a world renowned mathematician and engineer who received his doctorate in Applied Mathematics/Engineering at Brown University. He has been instrumental in the American Space program virtually since its inception and was awarded the NASA Distinguished Service Medal, the highest award given to a non-NASA employee.
Morris had three children: Steven, Michael, and Laurel. Simon had five: Stefan, Louis, David, Naomi and Judith.
Aunty Esther
Esther, my father's oldest sister, added some more insights into life in the Old Country. She told me that there were only three rooms in the house in which they lived. One was for my grandmother and her three children. One was for her parents, Avrum and Shayndel, and a common room. When it came time to sleep, the boys, her uncles, scrambled up to the hayloft which, apparently was over the living rooms, and slept in the hay. There was no concept of pajamas or separate beds for anyone. Esther remembers to awakening to her grandfather's saying the morning prayers. As he put on the tfillin, wrapping them around his head and arms, he chanted, all the time pacing the floor back and forth. Between that and keeping kosher and always saying grace before and after meals, religion was suffused throughout their days.
Esther also told me they kept a cow in the hallway though which one entered the house, but, one day, the cow was in a bad mood, and, when she tried to go out, it butted her. She finally had to go into the house, calling that the cow wouldn't let her pass.
Another memory, one that Sarah briefly mentioned to me also, was that it was the children's job in the summertime to go fetch the family's animals from the commons, a meadow where everyone in town brought their animals to graze all day. They never mentioned who drove the animals to the commons, whether adults or children. In any event, what Esther especially remembered was that when the children got there, the animals recognized it was time to go home, and they all started to their respective homes, with the pigs, squealing as they ran, leading the way well before the goats, sheep, cows, or, even, horses. I imagine that few horses were pastured as they were needed for farm work and for general transportation.
Esther also told me how mischievous they were as children. When the "honeydippers" (men who cleaned the outhouses) did their rounds, she and her siblings sat on branches of trees overhead, shouting at the men, "You smell like apothecaries." Apparently, this was a great insult. I can't imagine what an apothecary smelled like, but, having used outhouses while roughing it in Maine in my youth, I certainly know what they smelled like.
