Dr. Metablog

More on Starokonstantinov

The (website) "My Shtetl -- Jewish Towns of Ukraine" gathers information about Starokonstantinov -- "Old Constantine" -- the town from which, in 1895, my courageous grandparents emigrated to America. The site is in Russian but it can be mechanical translated into awkward but intelligible English.

Some of my friends of European extraction have been able to return to the old country villages where their families originated, but that option is not available to me. Trust me, there's no pilgrimage to Starokonstantinov  in my future -- even if the town happens to survive the Russian invasion and the rockets. My grandparents did not bring to Ellis Island happy memories and nostalgia or pique my curiosity with warm furry memories of their earlier years. Nevertheless, Starokonstantinov provokes my curiosity. For how many decades did my ancestors live in this so-obscure-to-me town?  How did they manage to survive?

One of the compilers of the My Shtetl website, Yevgenii Schneider, has unearthed a report on Starokonstantinov written in 1884 by a certain N. I. Zuts, a lieutenant in the 45th Azov Infantry Regiment. Why or for whom these paragraphs were written I have no idea, but some of it largely duplicates information that I have previously posted. According to Lieutenant Zuts, Starokonstantinov was founded in 1505 as the village of Kolyshchentsy in a grant from the king of Poland to one Ivan Labunsky. On January 5, 1561, Labunsky's descendants sold Kolyshchentsy to Prince Konstantin Ostrozhsky. Three months later, Ostrozhsky was permitted by the king to found a city first called  Konstatinov, then Novokonstantinov, and finally in 1632 renamed Starokostiantyniv. A castle was constructed in 1571. In 1620, the city passed into the possession of the princes Zaslavsky, and in 1682, to the princes Lubomirsky. Starokonstinov became part of Russia in 1793.

(It seems to be the case that Ukraine was a largely unpopulated or underpopulated frontier until a few hundred years ago. When and why did my people decide to try their luck on this vast plain?) 

Zuts expresses frustration that it hard to count Jews because of "the special conditions of their life, which is generally distinguished by great mobility and inconstancy with respect to place of residence: in the city there are many Jews who live permanently or for a very long time due to their trade and other affairs and are not included in the city population. Jewish houses, not being the property of one person, and sometimes constituting the property of several families, cannot serve as data by which, even desirably, with a small error, it would be possible to determine the number of their inhabitants. When concluding marriages among themselves, many, even the majority of Jewish families, accepting a son-in-law for a year, two, three or even five years, depending on the marriage conditions and the son-in-law's property status, subsequently move to other localities."

 

The good lieutenant seems genuinely mystified by the communal customs of the Jewish population. Zuts admires one aspect of Jewish life: "the charity of the Jewish residents is expressed primarily in the fact that poor Jews receive help from the wealthier ones. Independently of this, there is a Jewish Hospital in the city, located in a house built with public funds and maintained with money donated by two wealthy Jews, Israel Epstein and Abraham Krasnoselsky."

 

And Zuts adds this very interesting detail of Jewish life.  "All Jewish houses are built almost according to the same plan and the same model, having the character of a guest house, i.e.: on both sides of the corridor there is a row of rooms; each room has a door into the common corridor and is also connected to the neighboring rooms by doors, mostly double-leaf. Consequently, each room has 3 doors and only the corner rooms have 2 doors." Zuts describes what is familiar to me as a "shotgun house" -- a style not at all rare in the new world but apparently exotic to the lieutenant.

The website also contains a few pictures of houses typical of Jewish inhabitants. As far as I can tell, these are recent photographs of older homes in various states of repair.

The website does not make it clear who, if anyone, is living in these houses today.

In addition, Evgeniy Schneider appends a brief history of the Jewish community of Starokonstantinov. I've transcribed it.

"Jews have lived in Starokostiantyniv since the end of the 16th century. In 1629, there were 130 Jewish families (about 25% of the total population), and the community was the second largest in Volyn. During the Khmelnytsky period, the Jews of the city and the surrounding area took refuge in the fortress. On the Ninth of Av, the Cossacks broke in and killed everyone. Starokostiantyniv was also destroyed several times by the Haidamaks in the early 18th century. But Jews continued to settle there, and in 1765, 1,801 Jews were registered in the city and its surrounding area. In 1802, the number of Jews was 2,053. In 1827, when Tsar Nicholas I issued an order to mobilize Jews into the Russian army, serious unrest broke out in Starokostiantyniv. In 1847, there were 6,611 Jews in the community, and in 1897, 9,212 (60.7% of the total population). Most of the local Jews were Hasidim, followers of the tzaddikim of the Chernobyl and Sadagora dynasties. In 1911, the city's population was about 20,000, including 11,800 Jews. With the establishment of Soviet power in Volyn in 1920, the Jewish community was disbanded. By 1926, there were 6,934 Jews in the city (41.3% of the population). There was a secondary school with instruction in Yiddish.
At the end of 1931, there were 4,837 Jews in the city (about 33% of the population), of whom more than a quarter were deprived of the right to vote ("disenfranchised").  The Germans occupied Starokostiantyniv on July 8, 1941. In late August 1941, the Jews were confined to a ghetto. The Jewish population of Starokostiantyniv and its environs was exterminated in a series of actions from August 1941 to November 1942.  Today, the town has a small Jewish community, "Shalom." In 2012, it had 80 members."  A tragic story.

 

The website posts another picture that intrigues me. It's an old photograph, probably from the the turn of the last century, of Jewish workers in what is called a "cigarette factory." I know that when Isaiah came to America, in 1895, he made his living rolling cigars. I just wonder if he followed a trade that he had begun in Starokonstantinov. Would he, perhaps, have recognized any of these people?

 

 

 

My Aunt Mollie

This post is written for my children, grandchildren, and any potential future descendants. Aunt Mollie was an important person to my in earlier years. She should be remembered.

Mollie was my father's older sister. She was born in 1900, the third of the four children of Isaiah and Eta. She was an extremely private person and never revealed the least personal information about herself. I know nothing of her childhood and I am not even certain that she attended high school. I know that she was for many years employed in the surgical instrument field, where she advanced to a responsible management position and earned a reasonable salary (for those days). She retired early, perhaps in her fifties. She never married nor introduced me or anyone else in our family to a boyfriend, lover, or suitor, though in later life I learned that it had been her constant habit to visit a "Mr Isgin" every Wednesday. Who was Henry Isgin? I believe that he was a fellow worker at her place of employment and I know that when he died he willed Mollie his Long Island City house. That's all I know; I hope that her relationship with him was satisfying.

Mollie's curly black hair never grayed. Her eyes were so dark that there was no visible distinction between iris and pupil. My daughter, who knew her only in her last years, remembers her as small, squarish, and big-bosomed.

Mollie never "moved out"; during my childhood, she lived with her parents and later with Eta only in a small ground-floor apartment at 334 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights. When Eta died in 1963, she moved across the river to a her own place at last, a modest apartment in Greenwich Village, where she lived until her death in 1985. She enjoyed the concerts and the theater and her independence. She was a solid New Yorker; like my father, she never learned to drive an automobile. Unlike my father, who was uncomfortable outside his familiar sphere and was averse to travel, Aunt Mollie was an adventurous sort. She traveled the world, usually solo. She was constantly on the move. I heard tell, for example, that she was a passenger on one of the first commercial flights to China (in the 1930s).

In 1952, she offered to take me on a trip to Washington DC. I jumped at the chance. It was my first time out of Brooklyn and quite the revelation: gosh, there were other cities, other neighborhoods in the universe! We stayed at the Mayflower Hotel (gosh, there were hotels!), ate in "restaurants" -- another novelty -- visited the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, and even took a boat ride up the river to Mt. Vernon. We heard Harry Truman deliver a Fourth of July address from the base of the Washington Monument. It was exhilarating and inspiring -- a first toe-in-the-water alternative to my very marked provinciality and to the exaggerated caution of my parents. I am sure that I would never "gone away" to college, or relocated to the Rocky Mountain west, or traveled to other continents if it hadn't been that Aunt Mollie introduced me to a bit of the world outside the P S 217 schoolyard world in my thirteenth year.

Mollie also helped me financially. She wasn't rich but as a single woman with a good income she accumulated enough cash to intervene, generously, at critical moments. In a sense, she was the family banker. She gave me a couple of thousand dollars for part of the down payment on the Hackett Hill property and later held, on favorable terms, the mortgage on my house on 10th Street. When she died, she bequeathed me the remainder of the principal.  Although these were not great sums, they were nevertheless very crucial to me and to my family's financial well-being.

Even more important: Mollie admired and, I believe, loved my wife -- which was a very good thing because my own mother was not so positive.

I can't say that I ever had a real conversation with Mollie. She asked little and told less. She was not thoughtful, not well-education -- nor even a reader. She was always a little crude and could be critical and blunt (though not to me). To my brother, when he was going through a tough period in his financial life, she said, "Why don't you just get a real job." To a niece, she offered, "Why don't you just lose weight."  A true Victorian at heart, she regarded all illnesses as mental and moral weakness.

Mollie was proud of her extraordinary vigor and health. She once told me that she went 40 years without seeing a doctor. She was robust and middle-aged at 84, dead at 85 -- every one of her organs having failed. Loss of mental acuity was the first sign of decay. In 1984, she called my father on the telephone and said, out of the blue, "Pop is here."  Dad said, "What do you mean Pop is here. Pop died in 1946." Mollie answered, "Yes, I know that. So why is he here."  After that shocking moment, the end came quickly.

I' have never visited my parents' graves, but I'm told that Mollie is buried on my father's right and that my mother is buried on my father's left. So Dad lies forever between the two women to whom he was closest in life. 

Words of My Life: Bottom

"Bottom" is another of the many words that came into my life through the medium of baseball. As soon as I was able to walk and talk, I learned that an inning has both a "top" and a "bottom." "Bottom of the ninth" was an optimistic phrase because there was always the Ebbets Field hope that the Dodgers might come through with a game-winning rally. Later, when I discovered that there was more to human existence than baseball, the various and colorful meanings of "bottom" began to reveal themselves. For example, the posterior part of the human body, which I knew as the ass or the behind or the tuchas, was, I learned, called the "bottom" by people of sophistication. A euphemism?  A Britishism? 

Even later on, I discovered that bottom, signifying buttocks or butt was not the root meaning of the word but a metaphorical extension of its original sense. Old English botm, cognate with Latin fundus, meant land or farm or soil. This meaning of "bottom" is well-preserved in the phrase "bottom land" -- the level and fertile acres along the banks of a watercourse. Many English family names are consequently topographical surnames of ancient inhabitants of various river fronts -- such as Bottoms, Robottom, Higginbottom, Ramsbottom, Longbottom, Winterbottom, and Bottomley. Names that have nothing to with either innings or asses.

The oddity that "bottom" can refer both to farmland and to the human butt can sometimes yield unconscious comedy. For example, in 1977, I was a guest at a wedding in the infelicitously named Kent village of Pett Bottom. I must hope that Pett is a variant of Pitt, a "hollow," rather than "pet" with a supernumerary "t".

These days, "bottom" is more likely to mean something like "the essence" -- as in such phrases "to get to the bottom of the matter"; or "the bottom of one's heart."

And then there's egregious Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, who does not disdain the mandatory pun: "This is to make an ass of me."

Shakespeare likes the word "bottom." Here's Malcolm's most memorable characterization of Macbeth.  

 

                          I grant him bloody,
Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful,
Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin
That has a name: but there's no bottom, none,
In my voluptuousness: your wives, your daughters,
Your matrons and your maids, could not fill up
The cistern of my lust, and my desire
All continent impediments would o'erbear
That did oppose my will:

 

This "bottom" is not farmland or butt; it's the low point in a downward trajectory. This "bottom" is associated with "cistern" -- a receptacle for holding water.  Curiously, Shakespeare regularly uses the word in its relation to the water of oceans, most specifically the sea-bottom:  

 

            the slimy bottom of the deep.    (Richard III)

 

O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love! But it cannot be sounded; my affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal.  (As You Like It)

 

By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap,
To pluck bright honor from the pale-faced moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the deep,
Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,
And pluck up drowned honor by the locks.  (I Henry IV)

 

As is the ooze and bottom of the sea. (Henry V)

 

Who ever yet could sound thy bottom? find
The ooze, to show what coast thy sluggish crare
Might easiliest harbour in?                                   (Cymbeline)

 

 

I suspect that Shakespeare would have savored the modern phrase, "bottom feeder."  But I doubt he would have understood, any more than I do, the names of the fifth and sixth quarks, which are top and bottom (exactly like an inning).

 

Other words of my life:  slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage. spatchcock, umpire, stopper.

My Onion Heart

Last night I woke from a dream with this peculiar phrase repeating itself in my half-conscious brain: "it fills my onion heart with fear and trembling."  

I have a couple of questions to ask of my capricious dreamatorium, which although capable of creating passable iambic pentameter is rarely self-explanatory.  

a) What is "it?"  What is the nameless dread that precipitated this piece of blank verse, and b) what in the living heck is an "onion heart."  And why am I accused of having one?  Is an "onion heart" pungent and tasty, when eaten either raw or sauteed?  Or is it layered with a succession of scales and therefore mysterious and perhaps unknowable.  

Frankly, I don't have a good theory, except to say that I don't feel that to be described as having an "onion heart" is complimentary. If my dreamatorium wanted to say something nice about my heart, it had such relevant and easily available alternatives as "lionheart" or "braveheart." Or even "sweetheart," for goodness sake.