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March 4, 2011
A rekindling of a vibrant culture
The search for her Czernowitz family history leads the author in unexpected directions.
SHULA KLINGER
This is the story of how I went online to find information about my family and didn’t get the results for which I was looking. Instead, I found something vastly more complex – and more rewarding.
My grandmother came from Czernowitz, a city in the former Austro-Hungarian province of Bukowina. Residents grew up speaking numerous languages, including German, Yiddish and Romanian. It was a city with a rich cultural life, populated with musical, literary and theatrical figures. The Jewish population of more than 50,000 had thrived for generations and felt very much at home in well-established schools, synagogues and businesses.
But all that changed. During the First World War, so many armies invaded and retreated that its national identity changed six times. The Second World War brought a government that supported the Nazis’ Holocaust. A ghetto was created, families were deported and many perished through executions, forced labor, hunger and illness. Less than a third of the city’s population survived Second World War. To escape the horrors, many families – including my own – fled to other parts of the world. However, while they may have escaped and raised new families in new countries, the survivors are still haunted by their losses.
Nowadays, Czernowitz is in Ukraine and is known as Chernivtsi. The community my grandmother knew, that home has gone. It has not evolved with the rest of the world; it has vanished.
For myself, as a writer, I cannot bear a story with an unsatisfactory ending. I have grown up with the feeling that my relatives were conjured out of thin air. Asking family members for more information drew forth a smattering of anecdotes and a shrug. Family photos contained people no one could identify. Even siblings from the same family had different information about our origins and relatives’ names. Answers to questions about my family origins were always qualified with, “I think.” It was too much. I had to understand who we were and from where we came.
When I started looking, I was dealing with a family that was fractured; siblings on different continents, speaking different languages. Parents lost touch with their children and, in our generation, we have grown up isolated. I never knew my grandmother, and the first cousins only have a hazy knowledge of each other’s names and birth order. So here’s what I did to bridge that gap.
First, I searched for my grandmother’s family in online databases using all of the spellings I could imagine for her surname, and all of the possible permutations of Czernowitz. In this part of the world, it’s not uncommon to find nine different spellings of a single town name.
Knowing little of the geography and politics of the area, I read widely, trying to figure out where else they might have lived before fleeing to Vienna and, thence, to the Middle East.
Then I came across Czernowitz-L, a listserv hosted at Cornell University. I subscribed to the list and sent out an e-mail introducing myself. I was full of hope. I wanted to find someone who knew my grandmother’s family and would be able to tell me something about them – who they were, what they were like, what mattered to them.
I drew a blank, but didn’t unsubscribe. I didn’t think I’d find anything that was personally relevant, but was too curious to leave the group. I was too gripped by the stories I was reading of survival; of both tragic and happy, nostalgic memories; of eateries, recipes, theatres, clothing stores, schools, teachers; friends lost and found ... there’s nothing quite like reading a message in which a person reveals that they can identify a lost family member or confirm that they are, indeed, the school friend last seen 60 years earlier. I have enjoyed corresponding privately with list members in France, Iraq and Canada, learning more about their experiences and sharing my own perspective as a third-generation Czernowitzer who still cares about their greatly altered – nay, vanished – home town.
As I started to feel more comfortable with the group, I started posing questions of my own. I figured that, even if I couldn’t find information about my own family, I could at least learn about the environment that raised Regina Picker, and the values that informed my own, idiosyncratic English, Jewish, Egyptian, eastern European upbringing.
And this is how I learned about pastries in Bukowina, and started making them. It’s how l learned about what was expected of young women, their education and social mores. I found out what entertained them and made them laugh, where they learned and what they read and sang. I saw photographs that told me what they liked to wear and how they looked when they were out in public. I read discussions about social etiquette and views about work, education, marriage and family, all themes that loomed large in my own household as a child. It was – and continues to be – a marvelous education in things that, in a sense, I already knew, but had never known that I knew.
Things that seemed instinctive (however at odds with my own English context) suddenly had origins and reasons. Ideas or lessons that had been troubling and anachronistic had a place in a context I could now understand. I could fit them into a schema in my head, rather than be jarred and irritated by them. For example, the insistence on dress codes, the observance of very particular elements of social etiquette, the sacred value of education and high performance at school, an almost punishing work ethic, approaches to dating that called for chaperones and phone calls to parents. But, as well, there was the celebration of music bursting with frenetic energy, or that was haunting and melancholic; the enormous respect for books and learning; the great importance of bearing witness and preserving cultural memory; the passion for bettering oneself, of being adaptable no matter what life throws at you; the need to build, create, travel and, above all, learn other languages; the over-abundance of food from the Middle East and Europe; and the zany, self-deprecating sense of humor.
What started as the simple search for information has become an eye-opening experience of a richly rekindled culture; it may have been on hold for many decades, but it glows no less brightly in the recollections of its residents. The passion felt by former Czernowitzers for their city is palpable. I feel privileged to be able to witness the telling of stories and the sharing of this passion. It provides a context for my own family story, which has always been frustratingly full of holes. As well, I have learned to recognize those elements of our past that have, thankfully, wonderfully, joyfully, been carried through to the present day in spite of others’ efforts to prevent their meandering journey of survival.
And why does all this matter? It matters because when children grow up knowing very little about their origins, they are not just disconnected from the past. Their parents can try to educate them in ways that are congruent with their values but nobody knows why these things matter, because they don’t know where these values originated; children are unreceptive to their parents’ lessons, finding their approaches and beliefs to be old-fashioned, their attempts to educate them in traditional ways are felt to be intrusive. We have no access to the elders of a community, the wisdom and influence that would once have played such a huge part in shaping our education and upbringing. There is a cultural chasm between generations of the same family.
For me, the Czernowitz listserv is a great deal more than a database of information and it is more than a place to learn about your roots. It is a conversation and a chorus of voices; it’s an archive of memories, a record of a once-vibrant community. It has provided answers to decades-old questions, as well as comfort to those who have suffered immeasurable tragedy. It is a legacy that permits the preservation of a unique and valuable spirit for future generations, a rich experience for younger members and a homecoming for the elders. In short, it has allowed for the creation of a new extended family.
I started writing this piece in the third person, about the list members and their passions, values and preoccupations but, on completing it, I found that I must write “our elders” and “our younger members.” I may regard myself as a rookie, a relative newcomer in the e-mail exchanges with octogenarian Holocaust survivors, but I have read my way into my family’s past, into our shared roots. These people have indirectly answered many nagging questions and provided a sense that our past is more real, can be named and even described in detail. I have become one of the group. These stories are part of my past, and I am now one of them. I, too, am from Czernowitz.
Shula Klinger is an author-illustrator in North Vancouver, B.C. Her young adult novel, The Kingdom of Strange, was published in 2008 by Marshall Cavendish.
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