Seeking Our Roots in the Ukraine
(May/June
2006)
We had very few expectations-none at all, really. We certainly had very little reason to hope to find very much. My father had left the Ukraine with his family in 1914, when he was only 12, and all effort was then directed towards beginning anew. The family's time and energy were not spent on nostalgia-not surprising in light of their motives for emigration. In any event, beyond picnics on the shores of the Dnieper, my father had very little recollection of his home town, Khortitsa. Moreover, we also discovered in our pre-trip research that it wasn't even clear which Khortitsa he remembered, since we found several, as well as an island with that name. More to the point, we were seeking ancestral roots 90 years later, through a history of revolution, civil war, Nazi occupation and 70 years of Soviet rule, not to mention the ordinary passage of time with its normal growth and change. We knew for starters that all the Khortitsas were now part of greater Zaporozhye (formerly Ekaterinaslav), and we suspected that at best we would find nothing more than a modern neighborhood with an old name.
The idea of the trip was perhaps 40 years in the making, starting when my wife AC and I were posted to the Canadian Embassy in Moscow in the 60s, at a time when the Eastern Ukraine was closed to foreigners. (We only learned recently that it was the centre of Soviet military production, notably the Sputnik satellite.) Khortitsa was always in the family lore, but it remained an unlikely project until our son Josh found himself planning a Klezmer workshop in Paris, and we realized that frequent flyer points would get us to Dniepropetrovsk, just 100 kilometres from Zaporozhye. That was the first step in our voyage of discovery.
My Dad had mentioned Mennonite neighbours, but it was still a surprise to find that the father of an old colleague in the Department of External Affairs had come from the same small town. That had led me to Mennonite sources, including a personal introduction to their Historical Society from the Manitoba Jewish Historical Society I had consulted on a trip back to Winnipeg. The research revealed the great extent of Mennonite attachment to the region, to which they had trekked at the invitation of Catherine the Great in the 17th century. My other internet source of information was the Federation of Jewish Communities of the Former Soviet Union, the Chabad program of renewal that sends Rabbis all over Russia and the Ukraine in order to identify and rebuild Jewish life wherever any remnants might be found.
The Web made trip planning very easy. In addition to the flights, arrangements for hotels and a car rental from the Dnieperpetrovsk airport took a bit of surfing but worked out without a hitch. Our postcards arrived in Canada promptly, and ATMs were abundant. We only encountered two problems. We arrived in Dniepropetrovsk on Friday afternoon and took a cab into town, where we spent the night, returning to the airport by taxi the next day to pick up the rental car which we then drove to Zaporozhye. The cab driver quoted what seemed to be a reasonable price for a ride into town, but we found out later that it was three times the going rate. Also, on our departure from the Ukraine, a zealous customs official purported to be concerned about a half bottle of schnapps we had received as a gift in Vienna (en route to the Ukraine), suggesting it was illegally home-brewed Ukrainian vodka - he finally lost interest when it became obvious we weren't taking the hint and offering some kind of "facilitation fee" to avoid prosecution.
Rabbi Ehrentreu, an Israeli who arrived in Zaporozhye seven years ago without a word of Russian or Ukrainian and is now fluent in Russian, was extremely helpful. (His Montreal sister-in-law suggested that a special treat for the family would be kosher salami, which took up four well-wrapped pounds in our carry-on luggage). The Rabbi lent us his very obliging assistant, Yelena, for the duration of our stay. She in turn arranged for a guide and driver from Intourist, the major (and formerly only) tourist agency in town. She also took the initiative to ask the city Archivist if he had any record of our family name.
What followed was completely unexpected. Despite all odds, the Archivist had synagogue records from the turn of the century, which included the entry of my father's birth, handwritten in Russian and Yiddish. The records also revealed that his parents had come from Belarus only 15 years earlier (a fact previously unknown to anyone in the family), and confirmed a short residency in Khortitsa and listed their street address in Zaporozhye. We were able to stroll both neighborhoods, which still contained houses built at the time. In Khortitsa they consisted of streets of little brick houses with yards and gardens, verdant with fruit trees and bushes (apples, pears and currants at this season). From family accounts, it would seem that there probably hasn't been a lot of change over the century, at least at eye level, beyond the addition of paved roads and overhead natural gas pipes. In Zaporozhye, the houses were larger and more established, although theirs, at #5 Illicha Street, had been replaced by a parking lot of a medical centre. It also turned out that for all these years we've been spelling our name incorrectly. (The full name in the archives would be transliterated as Dolganover, or Dolgan for short. I have no idea why the "a" turned into an "i"-probably just a quick and casual decision on the part of my grandfather or the immigration official in Halifax.)
The Jewish community was undergoing a renaissance, thanks to Rabbi Ehrentreu, who had secured the return of the central synagogue from the government, introduced support services and meals for indigent seniors, persuaded the city authorities to erect a monument to the twenty thousand Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and established a day school. This was the city's first private school authorized by the Education Ministry, and may very well be the best school in the city. Not all of the several hundred students are Jewish, but free secular education is provided to the Jewish kids who cannot afford the tuition.
Our visit to the memorial became a particularly emotional experience when a neighborhood woman appeared with a small bouquet of flowers for AC in a gesture of sympathy and solidarity. The other respectful visitor that day was a young man from the neighborhood-a recent music graduate, as it turned out. He invited us back to the apartment he shared with his mother where, without a common word between them, he and Josh wove a spontaneous musical bond that was positively mystical.
Even the crassly touristy sights surprised and delighted: one of the other Khortitsas, an island in the (now) middle of Zaporozhe, boasts as its major attraction a Cossack model settlement and show, a presentation of the skills and exploits of the legendary, still locally revered, Cossacks. The fully costumed performers stood on galloping horses, skewered hats at full tilt, and demonstrated awesome skills with whips, all of which might have been just good tacky fun, worthy of Buffalo Bill, had the images not evoked thoughts, to a skeptical Jewish mind, of just who was being whipped, speared, manhandled and carried off in the glory days being celebrated by the demonstration. After the show, snacks and drinks (of course) were offered in the small gallery beside the corral, in which a strolling Cossack minstrel serenaded the indifferent crowd. We got to talking with him and discovered that a) the "Cossacks" were all actors and skilful riders simply doing a gig, and b) the big, burly, senior mouthy Cossack with shaved head and pony tail anchoring the corral show was his brother, and c) they were Jewish.
From our research into the Mennonite materials, we had come
across a report of an abandoned Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of Khortitsa.
Although it was unknown to the Rabbi and our guides, the driver was able
to find its likely location, and we set out across abandoned fields in
the probable direction. We suddenly found ourselves walking among scattered
headstones lying dissolutely about the field, virtually none upright,
many half buried in collapsed graves. The inscriptions, in Russian, Yiddish
and/or Hebrew, were largely effaced by time and wind, but seemed to start
in the latter half of the 19th century, running to the late 1920s when
the community moved on to a larger, now similarly neglected, site in Zaporozhye,
before they were overtaken and decimated by Nazi occupation in 1941.
The reaction of our son through these events was particularly moving as
he found a connection to his own roots and distant past that we had not
expected of a third-generation young Canadian musician so thoroughly plugged
into contemporary social and electronic culture. My best photo of the
trip is a hastily taken shot of his spontaneous placing of a stone on
one of the graves. He made easy contact with the kids at the Chabad school
and fit in immediately with the klezmer musicians the Rabbi had arranged
for a boat trip on the Dnieper River for us and his family. Josh wandered
thoughtfully among the neighborhood houses of Zaporozhye and was particularly
anxious to return to Khortitsa one last time, for a final stroll through
its little streets and lanes. It was, then, no real surprise when he suggested
that we explore the possibility of creating a full-scale cruise down the
river that would combined the exploration of heritage, culture and place
with klezmer entertainment. Like their itinerant predecessors, our klezmorim
could also present concerts in and with the communities along the way.
So we had a project idea that was not only uniquely attractive in itself,
but seemed to offer the promise of a multigenerational experience of a
lifetime for others as well.
Recalling the cruise my Mennonite friend had taken to Khortitsa in the mid 90s, we contacted the cruise organizers, who turned out to be extraordinarily enthused by the scheme and gladly offered to help us with the travel arrangements in Canada, through their association with a major travel agent, and the leasing arrangements in the Ukraine. With the energy and naiveté of amateurs, the next steps were similarly straightforward: Josh recruited some of the best klezmorim he had performed with-Michael Alpert, Susan Watts, Eric Stein and Alex Kontorovich-while we mined our KlezKanada contacts for the cultural side of the voyage-Michael Wex (author of Born to Kvetch) and Professor Eugene Orenstein of McGill's Jewish Studies Department. Nobody turned us down-all were unabashedly enthusiastic.
The program just about designed itself. Starting with the music and lectures on board, together with tours of the major cities, it was a simple step to add local concerts in association with local community members and musicians. Adding personal excursions to accessible villages and shtetlach came next. Back on board, musically inclined passengers would be encouraged to bring their own instruments along for jam sessions, or join a choral group. Dance workshops would enable and embolden those without instruments or voice. A festival of particularly relevant films (think Everything is Illuminated and Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin ) would absorb any available free time when the passing scenery had been adequately studied and digested.
When AC and I were on posting to the Soviet Union, my father showed no particular interest in revisiting the country his family had so gratefully fled. On our return, our son could not have been more engaged. It gives the notion of "life cycle" a whole new dimension, doesn't it?