I remember my grandmother baking her famous butter cookies, but no one in the family ever learned how to make them. There was no recipe. I knew where she came from but not what it was like to live there. A photograph showing the life-worn faces of my great-grandparents aroused no interest in me when I was growing up.
The questions I didn’t ask my mother reflect the questions she in turn never asked her mother – and so it goes.
My belated response has been to write the story that I can write now, exploring the space between genealogy, memory and recorded history.
My knowledge of my mother’s family goes back only as far as my great-grandparents Uri and Hudel Schwartz who lived in a town called Rohatyn. Nearly everything about them fades out behind a curtain of silence. One knows only that by 1942 Rohatyn (now Rogatin) was, like much of Eastern Europe, judenrein.
Rohatyn was a town in Galicia, then a province in the eastern region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From this fact and the half-in-Yiddish anecdotes from Grandma Yetta, I began to piece together a narrative that began in the early days of the 20th century. Fortunately for me, another distant cousin had already laid the groundwork by discovering a Google group devoted to Rohatyn research. So my knowledge has come primarily from secondary sources. I read published memoirs translated and posted on Jewishgen.com and learned about centuries of history in a book called Galician Portraits: In Search of Jewish Roots.
A picture began to emerge that was very different from what I had imagined. For one thing, the town was not a poor shtetl before the First World War but a relatively prosperous market town with many Jewish artisans and business owners.
My great-grandfather Uri (Ireh in the Polish dialect) was a skilled cobbler, and his two brothers were musicians. Through Alex Feller, leader of the Rohatyn research group, I learned about the Faust Family Band, a klezmer group well known in the region. I learned that my great-uncle Wolf Schwartz, known also as Wolf Zimbler, was a member of this band.
It was the war that changed everything and brought poverty and hunger to Rohatyn. Most of the Jewish residents fled to refugee centers when the Russian army invaded the town in 1914. The Russians ransacked and burnt most of the town. Worse still, they exiled all the Jewish males to Russia as the Austrian counter-offensive advanced eastward a year later.
I knew that Grandma Yetta had tramped through the fields of Poland carrying baby Carl on her back. I matched such scraps of first-person memories with recorded history in order to re-imagine the events of a hundred years ago. Where official archives were incomplete or contradicted the account handed down within my family, I went with the family version. The story continues to evolve as additional pieces of the puzzle come together, sometimes randomly.
For anyone lucky enough to have ample documentation, the process of working without a living narrator is much easier.
