by Barbara Fischkin
In 1919, after a brutal anti-Semitic pogrom in a small Eastern European shtetl, my grandfather knew that his wife and three young children would be better off as refugees. He prepared them to trek by foot and in horse-drawn carts from Ukraine to the English Channel and eventually to a Scottish port. Finally they sailed in steerage class to the United States. My grandfather was a simple watchmaker—and one of the visionaries of his time. Europe, he told his tearful wife, was not finished with murdering Jews, adding that things were likely to get much worse. And so, my grandmother became a hero, too. She said farewell to her mother and sister, knowing she would never see them again. In Scotland, she descended to the lower level of a ship with her children—my mother, the eldest, was seven years old. My grandmother traveled alone with her children. My grandfather was refused entry to the ship. He had lice in his hair. He arrived in the United States weeks, or possibly months, later.
My grandfather, Ayzie Zygal of Felshtin, Ukraine became Isaac Siegel of Brooklyn, New York, where he lived for the rest of his life. In his later years he spent summers in the Catskill Mountains, always asking to be let out of the family car a mile before reaching Hilltop House, a bungalow colony. My grandfather wanted to walk that last mile along the local creek. It reminded him of the River Felshtin. He never regretted coming to America.
My grandparents died, in Brooklyn in their early sixties. My grandfather had been poisoned by the radium he used on the paint brushes in his shop to make the hours glow. He licked them, with panache, to make them sharper. My grandmother had a heart condition, exacerbated by diabetes. They were both gone before I turned three.
They had lived much longer than they had expected they would in 1919.
I was told my grandfather left Europe to save his family’s life. And because my mother narrowly escaped death. I was told he did not believe there would be any more miracles.
In the eerie quiet after the pogrom my grandfather could not find his eldest daughter, my mother who was then six years old. She had been sent to hide in the cellar of the Council House with her Uncle Moyte, a bachelor. (With three little children to save, my grandparents needed help from another adult). After the massacre ended my grandfather went to search for my mother but the Council House had been burned. All he saw on the road were corpses. Among them was the body of his dead brother Moyte. My grandfather assumed my mother had also been killed. He was carrying bodies to the cemetery when a Gentile farmer, whose watches and clocks my grandfather had fixed, tapped him on the shoulder and whispered in his ear that my mother had survived. The farmer had found her hiding in a haystack near his cottage and had taken her in, risking his own life to save hers. In the Council House my mother had cried so loudly for her own mother, that Uncle Moyte left his hiding place to find my grandmother. Meanwhile the Council House was set on fire but my mother escaped through a small window and ran into the woods.
My grandfather got his family to America because he could. He had other relatives who lived in Brooklyn.
As I read about refugees today, I wonder if there was an additional element to this story. I wonder if my grandfather was also an economic refugee, one whose poverty, ultimately, kept his family alive. He had nothing financial to lose, nothing to leave behind except a small shtetl shop. No land, no big house, no fancy jewels, no expensive art collection. Today our “migrants,” are often reviled for wanting asylum when it is suspected that what they are really seeking is prosperity. I think they want both. I think my grandfather wanted both. Asylum and prosperity.
My grandfather did not become rich in America. He had a bigger shop than he had ever dreamed of having in Felshtin. His small watchmaking business was in the heart of a busy Brooklyn neighborhood. After my mother married my father, my father and grandfather pooled their money—the down payment was said to be under a thousand dollars—and they moved on up from apartments to a house in a pricier section of Brooklyn: Midwood. Their new semi-attached two-story brick home had a driveway, a garage, a garden in the backyard and more. There, at the dining table at 4722 Avenue I, my grandfather ended every Passover seder with a solo rendition of “God Bless America,” delivered with his Yiddish accent.
During World War II any soldier who came into my grandfather’s shop in uniform got his watch fixed for free. My grandfather told those soldiers that his son—my mother’s younger brother—was in Europe fighting against the Germans. Yes, Uncle Sammy, was one of those three children in steerage with my Grandmother, mother and another sister, all pogrom survivors. My grandfather always emphasized that Uncle Sammy was fighting for America.
For me, it is important to retell my family’s story now, as the Israel-Hamas war rages—as brutality evoking inconceivable historic hatred and torture is countered with “bigger and better” brutality that creates new, shameful history. Too many of the otherwise legitimate stories that surround this current horror, do not take into account the voices of Jews who are proud to be Jewish but do not want to be Israelis. This longstanding choice of Jews like my grandfather—and like me—is not about the current war, or politics, or a Palestinian State or whether or not Bibi Netanyahu is a war criminal. Rather, it is about identifying as Jewish by religion, not by nationality. Decades before I began to understand that Palestinians were being punished for what Hitler did, decades before I saw Netanyahu for the despot I believe he is, I identified myself as a person who is Jewish by religion and American by nationality. It is the same identification my grandfather cherished.
I have contributed to Israeli peace and ceasefire movements, as someone who is passionate about human rights, worldwide. I pay dues to my temple so that it can continue celebrating the religion that is my heritage. I do this conscious that at family seders my grandfather did not sing the Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem. I did not learn the words to the Hatikvah until I went to Hebrew School. As a child I heard plenty about anti-Semitism (in the United States and Europe) but it was not until Hebrew school in our Modern Orthodox temple that I heard the word “Zionism,” or the name “Theodore Herzl.” Herzl as the founder of Zionism, was taught as part of a history lesson but only after Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, the destruction of the temples and more. We did not talk much about the Holocaust. Even in the early 1960s the Holocaust was still raw and survivor guilt, which hit my family too, was palpable. Silence was easier. I learned more about the Holocaust in my New York City public school classrooms, where at least one concentration camp survivor came to speak to us, than I ever did in after-hours Hebrew School.
It’s not that my family didn’t honor Israel or praise the Jews who “made the desert bloom.” Growing up, I heard that phrase many times. My parents raised money for Israel bonds. My mother was a lifetime member of Hadassah and made sure I am one too. Every Friday evening of my childhood, before we lit the Shabbos candles, I put coins in a blue and white charity box. The box displayed a map of the State of Israel. “Tzedakah,” was what my mother called those coins I put in, using the Hebrew word, although she spoke Hebrew only when she prayed. Yiddish was the language of her childhood — and America was the main event of her life. She often told me to be grateful that I lived in the United States. When it came to New York City, her chauvinism ran even deeper. She also told me to never forget that I had been born in the greatest city in the world. I was a New Yorker. On subway trips to Manhattan, or even to Abraham & Strauss in downtown Brooklyn, she would point at a tourist and say, audibly: “That woman is not a New Yorker. You can tell by the way she dresses. A New York woman would never wear an awful dress like that! And those shoes! Her hair!” I believe my mother, a kind woman but honest to a fault, ranted about this more than once on a trip she and I took to visit relatives in Omaha, Nebraska—which is why we were never invited back. I was little. It was the summer before I started first grade. Despite my age, I learned a lot from that trip. I saw firsthand that we had Jewish relatives in the Midwest, the heartland. They were Americans. I never heard any of those relatives say they would have preferred living in Israel instead of Omaha. Cousin Sam, (a different Sam than my uncle) showed us around his city with pride. He worked at the Post Office so he knew the territory. He also pointed out Omaha’s faults, including racial segregation and said he hoped that someday this discrimination would be eradicated. Cousin Sam and the others loved Omaha as much as my mother loved New York. Being Jewish—and being loyal American Jews—was what we all had in common.
My mother was also a good listener, passionately loving—and analytical about many things. But looking back I see she had a very basic, glorified and biased view of Israel. She spoke with awe about the Hadassah Hospital there, as if it was the only hospital in the world. She read Exodus and deemed it the best book in the world. She also read a biography of Mickey Marcus, the eminent American Army colonel who became Israel’s first general. His life piqued her interest. She was impressed that he, as she noted: “tried to make friends with the Arabs and even dressed like them.” (Actually he was killed by friendly fire when he ran out one night wearing a bed sheet and was mistaken for an Arab “intruder”). When my mother spoke about Mickey Marcus she typically mentioned that she hated Arabs. Why? Because Arabs hated Jews. I had thought that was the Nazis who hated Jews. At that point, my mother had never actually met an Arab. To be fair, her view softened after she and my father took their first trip to Israel in their sixties. She met Arabs on their group tour and saw evidence of Arab-Israeli cooperation.
As for me, I relate more to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky than I ever have to any Israeli leader, including an obvious choice, Golda Meir. Of course: Zelensky is Jewish and Ukrainian. Yes, my family left Ukraine after those pogroms. Zelensky’s did not. They did not leave after the Holocaust, either. They felt Ukrainian. I don’t but I feel a deep connection to Ukraine and to Ukrainians. If it was not for that Ukrainian farmer who hid my mother I would not exist. When Putin invaded Ukraine, I felt it in my bones. I felt physically ill.
I traveled widely when younger but due to challenges at home most traveling had to stop before I made it to Ukraine or Israel. These are places where I still hope to be able to kiss the ground—but as an American. Kyiv and the town that used to be Felshtin, my mother’s birthplace in the western Ukraine, are higher on my bucket list than Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. I mourn for everyone at war, for the Israelis and the Gazans. I believe any thinking person would. But my mourning—and cheering—for Ukraine is not intellectual and may be even deeper than emotional. I think it goes beyond the Ukrainian farmer. Beyond Zelinsky. It is ancestral. The shtetl where my mother was born, is said to have been a home for Jewish people for 900 years. And although its borders have changed, the majority of its people have been ethnically Ukrainian for a very long time.
There is also this: My relatives who stayed in that shtetl and were there when Nazis occupied it, now rest in a mass grave off a road near what was once their home. I believe my maternal great grandmother and great-aunt are buried there.
What is happening in the Middle East hurts my brain. What is happening in Ukraine hurts my heart. When my heart and mind come together I see the seeds of another World War. I can feel my grandfather’s premonitions. He had someplace else to go with his wife and children. I am afraid my own family may not have that option, that times have changed. I have nightmares that before long there will be no place that opens its doors to refugees, refugees like my grandparents and their three children.