The Long Way Home
An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War
David Laskin

Preserving a bit of (family) history

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

I know I know, I’ve been remiss about blogging. Months have gone by and not a peep out of me. But how was I supposed to know that the care and feeding of a blog would be quite so demanding? During these long fallow months, my blog has kind of merged with all those chores and projects I keep MEANING to get to like filing bank statements and cleaning/rejiggering the garage. Strangely, nothing dire happens when I put these chores off aside from a few more ounces piled on the scales of the guilty conscience. But – shazam! – here I am again. Garage is still a disaster but I’m back in the blogging biz.
It has indeed been so long that I’ve put The Long Way Home behind me and embarked on an entirely new project – a history of the three branches of my mother’s family – that has become all-consuming as new projects tend to do. So consuming in fact that an incident connected with its research has inspired this post.
A bit of background. In the first decades of the last century, my mother’s family, called HaKohen in Yiddish and Kaganovich in Russian, divided into three branches – one branch that came here to the U.S., one that went to what was then Palestine and is now Israel, and the third branch that remained in two villages, Rakov and Volozhin, in what was then Russia and is now Belarus. The U.S. and the Israel branches flourished. All who remained behind perished in the Holocaust.
These three intertwined stories are the subject of my new book.
This past May, my daughter Emily and I met four of our Israeli relatives in Belarus to visit the places where our family members lived and died. It was essentially a pilgrimage to mass graves – pits into which Nazi soldiers forced Jewish men, women and children and machine-gunned them to death or empty lots which were once the sites of synagogues in which whole communities had been locked and incinerated together. This was the other Holocaust, the Holocaust of bullets and fire, not gas chambers.
In Rakov, where my grandfather and the Israelis’ mother grew up, we made a remarkable discovery. The Jewish cemetery where our common ancestor lies buried miraculously survived the war. Jewish headstones, including that of our family patriarch Shimon Dov, still stand in a grove of pine and birch trees at the edge of town. The ground is spongy with pine needles. Tall grass but no flowers grow between the graves. It is, to anyone with least bit of imagination, a haunted place.

Thanks to the persistence and foresight of my Israeli cousins, we found the grave of Shimon Dov after a brief search. Those Israel travel prepared! They had brought along steel wool, candles, Israeli flags, and copies of the mourners’ kaddish. They scrubbed the headstone, translated the Hebrew words for me, lit the candles, and together we recited the beautiful ancient prayer. We said the kaddish many times in the course of our trip – but only this once did we say it for a relative who had died a natural death.

A few weeks ago, the head of the tiny Belarussian Jewish community emailed me a request for money to use in the repair of the Rakov cemetery fence. My eyes widened when I saw the sum that was needed. But I composed an email to other family members descended from Shimon Dov telling the story I have told in this blog post and asking them to chip in. And lo and behold, enough of my relatives rallied round that we were able to raise our share of the fence repair for about the cost of a nice dinner out each.
Yes, it’s a small gesture – a footnote to a long, fascinating, often painful family story and the tumultuous, tragic period of history it belongs to. But I think it’s a gesture worth recounting. This was our own little bit of the grass roots collectivism/activism that, in my humble opinion, is the only way we’ll turn this troubled planet around (cf. how the Arab spring has morphed into Occupy Wall Street). For the price of a meal, we have helped preserve a fragment of the past that escaped the calamities of the last century. I’ve already forgotten what I ordered at that funky downtown bistro – but I’ll never forget the hands and the Hebrew letters carved on the headstone that marks my great-great-grandfather’s grave.

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