Sepia Distaff Muddle

Today's Sepia Saturday starts with a group portrait and then briefly examines the cast of characters - those onstage and those mysteriously offstage.


Here is the Zalk family, circa 1900: Max (b. 1859 in Poland), his wife Gittel (aka Gertrude), and their children Sarah, Louis, and baby Eva. The person I'm especially interested in is Gittel, nee Lass.

The story I have heard is that she did not want to come to America; Max came over and had to convince her. She finally emigrated in 1888 with Sarah and Louis (age 3).

According to the 1910 census, Gittel was born Nov 1851 -- or in 1852, according to the 1930 MN census. Her daughter Eva’s birth certificate states that Gittel was born in 1860. Hmm. In addition to these discrepancies, I have spent considerable time winnowing conflicting stories and data in order to determine whether Gittel was the half-sister or the step-sister of my great-grandmother Lena Laser Blumenfeld. Step-sister is most probable.

One version of the relationship is that Lena Laser's father, Moses Laser, died; her mother, Leba Laser (nee Loss) (who was also sometimes referred to as Libshe or Lipse Loss!) , then married a widower with the last name of Lass -- one of whose children, Gittel, was much older than Lena (born in 1865).

But there are other theories as well. For one thing, the similar surnames (let alone the musical-chair given names) are enough to drive one batty. Lass, at least, appears to be solid, as there were other relatives in Minneapolis by that name.

Here is what purports to be a later photo of Gittel. Do you think, as I do, that she bears little resemblance to her earlier self?  She seems a good deal paler, for one thing.

Here is my forebear, her step-sister Lena Laser Blumenfeld, at a similar age, probably in the 1930s.

Compare this photo of Lena as a teenager in Kovno (now Kaunas) Lithuania. Not much resemblance there either, but at least her complexion is the same! (Victoria Carte refers to the format of the photo. If your browser can translate Lithuanian, there is some semi-intelligible information on this Kaunas University Library page.)

For the record, the following is the only known photo of Lena's mother Leba Libshe Lipse Loss Laser Lass...or whatever... taken sometime before her death at at 87 in Minneapolis in 1923. (She emigrated in 1912 to join her children in the States.)

Babushkas one and all! Eventually, at least.

Sepia Saturday: Minsk to Minnesota

Welcome to another Sepia Saturday!

For decades, my family knew little about my mother’s paternal grandfather Isaac Singer (1857-1924). Her father Art, Isaac's only son to stay alive out of a dozen or so children, told us his father had been a furrier when he’d immigrated to the States in the 1880s, expertly matching mink pelts for color. My mother thought he been born in Odessa, Russia, and on some census forms he claims he was from Minsk. Art was hazy at 79, but thought his dad's surname had been "something like Yarminelsky" until the Ellis Island folks changed it willy-nilly, as they did so many other Jews with multisyllabic names, to Singer.

Fast-forward to the present. I was bopping around on Ancestry.com, as is my wont, this time looking up family trees for people descended from Arthur’s sisters, such as Nettie Singer. And bingo, there she was.

And her mother’s name was there too -- listed as (wait for it) “Nettie Jermelensky.” The Nettie part is wrong (it was Mollie), but AT LAST there was not only a reference to the pre-Singer surname, but it was a clear variant on the one we’d assumed was a wild guess up till now!

I attempted to get in touch with the person [I’ll call him Biff Y] who created the family tree, but received no response. Sleuthing a bit further I contacted some of the later names on the family tree -- and it panned out!

After introducing myself, the question I posed was whether "Jermelensky" was apocryphal, or was it perhaps written somewhere – say, in a family photo album? The reply was that there was no written confirmation of the original name “but I have always heard it as Yarmolinsky; perhaps different vowels?”

I visited JewishGen.org, and sure enough, the Ukraine (home to both Odessa and Minsk) is festooned with similar surnames:

YARMALINSKI
YARMOLINSKAYA
YARMOLINSKE
YARMOLINSKII
YARMOLINSKIY
YARMOLINSKY
YARMOLYNTSKI
(There was NADA for “YarmaNELski” or similar.)

I later went to the well-stocked King County library and looked up the name in a massive book of Russian genealogy, which told me that the family name of Yarmolinski "probably came from the village of Yarmolyntsi." It turns out, however, that there are three of those, relatively close to each other, between the general area of Minsk in the north and the general area of Odessa in the south.
Yarmolyntsi, Sums'ka
Yarmolyntsi, Vinnyts’ka
Yarmolyntsi, Khmel’hyts’ka

There are records of a couple of Isaac Singers (not an uncommon name -– perhaps all victims of unimaginative immigration officials) arriving in the States in 1886; they claim to be Austrian or German. Strangely, Isaac on occasion put down his nationality as German. His death certificate correctly says Russian.

Similar to his as-yet unknown in-law counterpart Ben-Zion Blumenfeld (their children would marry twenty years later), Isaac Yarmolinski seems to have come over the year preceding his family; at that time it consisted of his wife Molly (b.1860), and three daughters whose Americanized names were Sophie (b. 1876), Nettie (b.1878), and Annie (b. 1886).

I guessed that after Isaac’s name was changed in New York, when he sent for the family, he advised them to use Singer at the outset. I subsequently found this passenger list online, arriving in the U.S. 30 September, 1887. They steamed on the German Empire via Hamburg to West Hartlepool, to Liverpool, to New York.

Taube Singer (F) Born abt 1859
Scheine Singer (F) abt 1879
Chane Singer (F) abt 1880
Tulke Singer (F) abt 1886

An attached document showed them having last lived in Bobruisk, Ukraine.

Minsk is only about 80 miles from Bobruisk. My guess then is that these respectively are Molly, Sophie, Nettie, and Annie, before they changed their first names to go along with the new American surname. The birth years are pretty dang accurate, and it’s the right number of passengers.

Eventually I was contacted by a direct descendant of Nettie Singer, who said “I am quite sure that you are correct about the group who came together to the USA... I remember Grandma [Nettie] telling me that she was about 8 years old when she came, but she did not tell about her life in Russia and, unfortunately, we kids didn't ask. Back then, the future was important and the past more or less forgotten.”

In the foreground, Arthur's sisters Annie, in the striped dress, and Sophie in the black dress, with his wife, my grandmother Helen. Riva, a daughter of Annie, is standing with Arthur. Late 1940s.

Looking Backward

Snap


From white the world fades
in, vision begins, of pleating
water, sand defined by sandaled
feet, by footsteps.
     Toward the camera
     a wind fixed.
In this dream's a ghost
far shore of ghost hotels
and trees tall tokens
of horizon.
     Foreground, Mort and Beth
     posed shortly to ride
     on Mama's back, unsure
     of what? Helen,
     mother, propped herself
     up on her stomach.
     Paul wore a woolly jumper
     like a little muskrat.
Grandma fading into
sky arrests his arm
as he hops.

     august 1925 sunset
     all day it's been in the seventies
     hazy with small-boned breezes
     arthur under the oaks drinks limeade
     three poles spike the lake down
     to the farthest ones the kids wade
     they hang on kicking
     pretending to swim

Grandma, hair pulled back,
wore a knit dress
that passed for bathing suit.
     She looks from the camera,
     blends with background.
Who is this picture of? Helen smiled
for the camera but is almost buried
by her children
     staring straight at me
     as into a window.

     In Helen's house I look at the photo,
     her mother long dead, and now Arthur;
     children moved away and married.
     The picture is so sharp I could be there,
     even the distortions are believable,
     monochrome and overexposed lake.
     Depth. I might be Mort,
     wild ears, buck teeth, the asking
     look. The eyes are sharp linchpins.

I could hear the waves,
Paul singing, Oldsmobile horns
from across the lake.
I can't say
     what I'm trying to say. Maybe
     it is that in thirty years
     that girl, Beth, will have a child,
     and in twenty-five unimaginable more
     he will see a photograph
     about which he will try to write.