Holy Week and Bialystock-Grodno

As if Holy Week were not intense enough, a new ingredient is shaping my thoughts today. Truth be told it’s not new but, rather, has gained more of a “fine point” in recent days.

In short, I’ve located the exact birth city of my maternal grandmother, a woman I came to know only in my mid-twenties towards the end of her life.

It’s complicated, as most family stories are. Suffice it to say that I do not joke when I proclaim myself a Jewish Hillbilly. My father’s family (the hillbilly side) emigrated to West Virginia from England generations ago. They were the kind of folks an ethnomusicologist seeking authentic forms of English Renaissance ballads might have approached in 1905, trudging through the hollows, a gramophone hooked on his back. He easily could have set up such an  apparatus on the front porch of the Bailey Family homestead in Sand Lick, West Virginia, while my great aunts sang treasure after treasure into the horn, still shelling peas.

But the other side of my family came to America from Poland at the turn of the 20th century, exactly like the refugees in Alfred Stieglitz’s iconic photo Steerage.

Itke (Ida), my maternal grandmother, sailed to Ellis Island in 1911, likely for an arranged marriage to my grandfather Abraham, himself an arrival at Ellis Island in 1907 from Vilnius.

Yesterday, I saw a postcard on eBay of the SS Rotterdam on which Itke sailed. It was a handsome card, written by a person of far higher class than Itke. Itke did not read or write according to a 1920 census. She was 16 when she crossed alone on that ship. What would such a girl have written if she had possessed the skill? Did she feel mournful and frightened, leaving behind, presumably forever, her mother, brothers, and homeland? Or was she so excited that fear was not an element in her crossing?

Either way, we all know this story. It is our “American” story. Her ship did not sink. She did get here and was met by an “Uncle Mordecai” who lived in Brooklyn. Events were put into place, and she quickly was married. Life was hard, she bore four children, her husband did not rise to his obligations, departed often, and ultimately left the family. Itke had to work her fingers to the bone as a seamstress in the garment district to feed the family, taking on additional piecework at night, as did tens of thousands of immigrants.

As for my mother Minna, born in 1918, she was the smartest child of the family. Nevertheless, as a female in an impoverished Orthodox family, she was barely allowed to finish high school. Her dreams exceeded her place in life: the kitchen stove plus a menial day job at Woolworth. You can see where this is going, right?

About 1937, towards the end of the Depression, she met my drop-dead gorgeous, fun, clever, guitar-playing dad, whose own family had fled its coal-mining roots to seek work in New York City when their lives disintegrated financially after 1929. An unsanctioned alliance between two young people arose. It wasn’t quite Romeo and Juliet, but some elements were the same.

My mother (wisely? foolishly?) threw off her life, jumped on a train, and eloped to Roanoke, Virginia where that good-looking Lewis had just started a photo-finishing business. They were immediately married by a Salvation Army Captain and, boom, Minna found herself on a new planet, fully cut off from her family in New York. She expected this, but it cannot have been easy.

Along the way (a life of nearly sixty years together), my parents did what was needed to make a strong home for me and my brother. Stability mattered back then, and it particularly mattered to them.

The part I had not realized (the fact burning on my mind right now) is that Itke came from Bialystock-Grodno, a Polish city with close to 90 thousand people around 1900. About 60% of them were Jewish—a remarkable percentage for a Jewish community, even for Poland. This concentration of Jewish population helps explain Bialystock’s well-organized commercial, social, artistic (especially theater), medical, and educational life.

I found a 9-minute archival film on Bialystock-Grodno that attests to these things, presented by Steven Spielberg (who has done a lion’s share of work on preserving Eastern-European Jewish history). As I watched the blurry footage showing vibrant daily life (particularly schools, factories, and shops), I pondered whether my own great-uncles and aunts could have wandered past those same cameras, headed to the market or the bakery. Or the synagogue.

Except it all came crashing down with Nazi occupation. Alas, one of the famous things about Bialystock-Grodno happens to be the torching of its Great Synagogue with 2000+ people massacred inside of it. That was but one atrocity. Bialystock Jews were executed en masse in other ways. Those Jews who weren’t killed there were rounded up and sent to Treblinka or other death camps.

Again, this past is not news to me—outlines of the story had trickled down to me, despite the fact that I grew up fully in my father’s Appalachian-rooted, Protestant culture. Within this culture, my tireless, never-give-up, never-let-up mother passed as a mysterious shade. She seemed different from everyone else, although I knew not why. Only in the summer of 1972 did I put the pieces together and figured it out. That, however, is a different story for another time.

I don’t know when I’ll get back to Poland—hopefully this fall, working a marvelous Smithsonian Journey’s route called Old World Europe. (I highly recommend this tour which begins in Poland (Warsaw, Krakow) and travels to Budapest, Vienna, and Prague.) Assuming all goes well, I’ll arrive in Warsaw ahead of the group and take a train to Bialystock-Grodno. I doubt there is much I can do, other than walk the streets, find a café, a bakery, and a pension to stay overnight. It will be enough just to breathe the air and experience the same sunrise and sunset my grandmother would have known.

For now, I am going to try and bake a batch of the famous Bialystok pretzels known as bialy. Occasionally I heard my mother refer to these saucer-sized puffy pastries, with their onion and poppy-seed topping, since they also made the journey to the New World, establishing themselves in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Apparently, bialy are tasty for just six hours, so it’s best to live near the bakery that makes them.

Everyone undergoes a spiritual journey at Easter time. For Christians, Holy Week, the most important season of the liturgical year, is woven around Passover, the defining feast celebrated by Jesus and his disciples in an Upper Room so gloriously imagined by Leonardo da Vinci. At that Passover meal, the still young Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth spoke the words that gave birth to the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist: Communion, Bread and Wine, or the Lord’s Supper.

But in Maundy Thursday service this year, I may be thinking more about how Itke celebrated her last Passover in Bialystok-Grodno in the Spring of 1911. Did she realize she would never again see her mother braid the traditional Challah or light the Passover candles?

One more thing. Bialystock means “clear river.” The river with that name, now a mere spring, once coursed through the town. Water frames the spiritual life in  many religious traditions, starting for Christians with the sacrament of Baptism. Even as the history of a place like Bialystock-Grodno is muddied by tragedy, the message of a river’s clear water cannot be forever suppressed.

There is nothing new or theologically deep in what I have written here. I wanted only to share my news about Bialystock-Grodno—the seedbed of my life. May you find a moment to reflect on the long-ago people and places that framed your heritage as we step into the last days of our Lord’s Passion.