Dr. Metablog

Dear grandchildren:

I once asked my father, your great-grandfather Emanuel Pearlman, where in the Ukraine we originated. He said that he was told that it was a village called (and here he used a very deep guttural initial consonant) Xhosantin-gebernya  – an answer that left me not much enlightened. If he knew more — and I don't think he did — he didn't say. Our family did not cultivate nostalgia for the old country. Nor much curiosity either. We had no reason to yearn.

But new information about our past has recently come to me. According to a correspondence between my late cousin Marion and a distant Israeli relative, it is now clear that our family hails from the the town of StaryConstantine — also called Starokostiantiyniv in Ukrainian and Alt Konstantine in Yiddish. It was a small city of perhaps 30,000 people at its height, founded, as far as wikipedia and I can figure, in the sixteenth century by a noble or wealthy person named Konstanty Ostrogski who built himself a castle sometime during the 1560s. Castles are built for protection in lawless places, but then, most places were lawless in late medieval Europe. Old Constantine is in northern Ukraine at the junction of the Ikopot and Sluch rivers. Here's a picture of the Old Constantine castle across from the Sluch:   

But when, you ask, did your and my ancestors settle in Old Constantine?  I remember it mentioned when I was a child that our family came to the Ukraine from "the west", which I assumed to be Germany because my grandmother Eta's maiden name was Hessel (though in fact Hessel is more commonly Danish rather than German). The Jewish community in Old Constantine dates to the sixteenth century, it is reported. "The town’s Jews suffered Cossack onslaughts during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the end of the nineteenth century, more than half of the town’s population was Jewish." That's all we know.

However, in the nineteenth century, there lived in Old Constantine a husband and wife named Yaakov and Menucha Sheindl Perelman. They dwelt in a house on the corner of Ragnedinshkaya and Bolshaya Vasikovshaya streets (a house which was destroyed during the second world war). Yaakov Mikolshtein Perelman was born about 1830, lived a long life, and died in about 1920. According to the story, he resided in the one house his entire life. His wife, Menucha Sheindl came from Radomyshyl, a village not far from Old Constantine that was historically a center of Jewish settlement. (In 1797 a total of 1,424 people or 80% of the total population were Jewish). Menucha Sheindl Perelman was the daughter of a sugar and wool merchant named Solomon Rabinovich, who was so rich that "they changed houses for Passover" — which is a custom heretofore unknown to me. Menucha died in 1908 at age 75 or thereabouts. The family, once wealthy, lost everything in the 1917 revolution and the disorder and purges that followed.  

And how are Yaakov and Menucha related to you, my grandchildren?  Well, they're your great-great-great grandparents. According to the newly discovered information, they had eighteen children "mostly twins," of whom only nine survived to adulthood. Seven daughters were born before your great-great grandfather Isaiah (also called Buzya or Buzzy) saw the light. Isaiah it is reported, was born "the year the serfs were freed," which is 1861, but I know that he was 83 when he died in 1946, so I calculate that he was born in 1863. But perhaps Isaiah didn't know his own age which wouldn't have been unusual in an era of bad record keeping. When he was thirty-five, Isaiah emigrated to America, arriving in 1896 or thereabouts.

Why did he set out for the New World?  Certainly the troubled conditions in Old Constantine were reason enough. But there's also something of a story. Isaiah married (I don't know whom) but after one night of marriage he asked for a divorce. I don't know if the divorce was granted, but I do know that very soon afterward he left town with Eta (or Yetta) Hessel, also from Old Constantine. She was 23 or 24, a decade or a dozen years younger than he. 

Why the one-day marriage?  No one knows what happened that night, but it couldn't have been good. A sexual impediment?  An arranged marriage gone bad?  Prior misdeeds come to light?  The discovery of pregnancy?  We're free to speculate, but never to know. 

However, we do know that Isaiah and his father did not see the world with the same eyes. Yaakov was religious; his son Isaiah was an atheist. We don't know Yaakov's politics, but we know that Isaiah was some sort of leftist or communist. Something of a free-thinker, after the style of Moses Mendelssohn. And perhaps Karl Marx. And we can also guess that it might have been impossible to remain in Old Constantine after the marriage contretemps. 

In New York City, Isaiah and Yetta had four children: Max, born around 1896, Solomon, born about 1898; Mollie, born in 1900; and my father Emanuel, the youngest, born on December 22, 1904.

My grandfather Isaiah also had two younger brothers. There was Chaim, who followed him to America some years later and from whose daughter Rose spring the Goldberg and Chodosh lines. And also Isaiah's youngest brother, who was named Meshulam Zusi Perelman. He did not follow his older brothers, and I don't know his history, but his family left the Ukraine and it's his Israeli granddaughter Nechama Sheindl Brukman (born Perlman) through whom these facts were recovered. Nechama Brukman died in 2008 at age 86.

It is most melancholy to read that in 1939 there were 6,743 Jews living in Old Constantine, accounting for 31 percent of the total population, and that the entire Jewish community, some no doubt our cousins, were murdered during the first years of the war.