SOL
SCHECTER
Bubby
Rose Lerner’s nephew and cousin of the Lerner Boys, recalls...
Back in the 16th century,
Poland was a feudal country and a source of trouble to many people. The Cossacks populated Russia, from the
Nesta River all along the Black Sea.
Originally these Cossacks were under the rule of the Tartars, the
remnants of the Huns who had come here.
Peter the Great had driven them out with the help of Poland. But when Poland went "from bad to worse," it
was divided up between Russia, little Germany, and the Austrian Empire (the
mountainous parts including the Carpathian Mountains, Transylvania, and part of
Romania.) The first breakup of Poland
happened at the end of the 16th century. At that time Poland extended down to about twelve miles north of
the Black Sea. At the end of the 17th
century, the Austrian Empire got into trouble and Romania became an independent
country. Towards the end of the 18th
century, Turkey conquered part of Greece, part of Bulgaria, and part of
Romania.
Our
parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, even great-great-grandparents
(yours and mine) never lived in Poland.
We originally came from the Austrian Empire. They controlled the territory that is now practically half of
Germany, way down to the Balkans and some of the Balkan countries outside of
Greece and Transylvania. Eventually
Queen Marie Teresa of the Austrian Empire, at the end of the 18th
century, got into a mess and made an enemy of Germany, Russia, and
Britain. Most of all, she made an enemy
of the Jewish people. Three times
during her lifetime, she ordered the Jewish people out of her dominion. Then she let them buy the privilege back by
taxing them way over their heads. At
that time everybody had to take a name to register for identification. It went back and forth like that until the
breakup of Poland.
There
are several ways that we know that our family was in the Austrian Empire. Mainly we know by our names and our
coloring, and also our language and our accent. For example, we had very few "Mediterranean heads" in our
family. We had blue eyes and
"towheads". With high cheekbones and
long faces, we could be sure that we were mixed with some of that stock that
was closer to the ice.
Another
way that I have of knowing where we come from is that none of our names or our
ancestors’ names end in "ski". We took
the names of our professions, that’s the way they did it. So if a man was a student, they called him Lerner,
and if he was a sochet (Kosher meat slaughterer), they called him Schecter
(my name). In Russia when they were
ordered to take names, they took Russian names; in Poland, they took Polish
names. In the Austrian empire we took
the names of our professions and trades. It’s been Lerner as far back as they
had to take names - between 1735 and 1755.
One
other observation of mine about our origins is that my father spoke the same
Yiddish as my Bubby (Nessa) did, and she was not a Litvashka. If she’d had a Polish accent, we’d have
heard her use it.
We
should realize that there was no such thing as racial purity for Jews in
Europe. While Jews in Poland lived in
peace from the 7th century until the division of Poland, the rest of
the Jews in Europe had been raped and murdered and beaten a thousand
times. Four times in the history of
Europe (from the time of the Visacots), the rabbis had to allow the children
(whose fathers were not known) to come into the Jewish community or we would
have been decimated. From then on the
precedent was set that genealogy could only be established for certain through
the mother’s side. It was a rabbinical
decree. When the Jews were in Babylon,
where the Talmud was written, the Roman armies drove Jewish women to be
prostitutes for their soldiers who were abroad, just like Hitler did. Since those times, the rabbi has had the
authority to decree that if a mother knows it is her child that guarantees that
it is a Jewish child.
Getting
back to our geographical origins. When
the Austrian Empire broke up and Russia became big and powerful and the Turks
came down, our ancestors moved into that part of Transylvania that was
originally Austria and became Romania. My father, Morris (Moshe) Schecter, had
second cousins on his father’s side that came from Pasaravia, which was
ultimately a province of Russia and a province of Romania, moving with the tide
of battle between the two countries.
The Turks had part of Romania.
The decision to do away with Transylvania came when Turkey was in a
position to take away the Crimea and large territory from Russia. It was the time of the Crimean War
(1853-85). Either Russia was going to
grab up the Dardanelles or Turkey was going to take away the Crimea and have
full control of the Black Sea. That is
why the European nations (including Britain and France) came in and put a stop
to the thing. The Treaty of Paris
(1856) let Turkey keep a large part of Europe that they had taken and gave
Romania the area of Transylvania.
Many
Jews, very late in the 18th century and before the Crimean War,
moved out of this Romanian part of the country because there was a lot of
Turkish influence there. Our relatives
got out and went from Transylvania, which was under Austria, and came to Russia
early in the 18th century.
They couldn’t go far into Russia because there was a Pale of
Settlement. The Pale designated those
regions in Russia in which Jews were allowed in live. The Jewish Pale established in 1792, was made up of the areas
annexed from Poland. Even within the
Pale, Jewish population was subjected to many restrictions, which were in force
until the Russian Revolution of 1917.
So
when we got out of Romania, we settled in the Province called Odolia, which
became Kamanisk (district of) Podolia, when Russia took over. I was born in Tulchin, in the Ukraine, about
nine hours train ride from Odessa.
Kamanisk Podol’sk is about fifteen miles from Tulchin, not far from the
Romanian border. Muldow was the part of Romania where we came from. In fact, Bubby Nessa’s maiden name was
Muldover. She had a brother Leib
(Muldover) whose sons went to Argentina. I remember having a map with Balta on
it, which was where my uncle, your Zadeh, Chaim Lerner came from. He came from Balta when he came to marry our
Bubby, my Aunt Rose.
Rose
lived with us before she got married.
When she got married, she went to live with her husband, Chaim
Lerner. Their first baby, a boy died.
Joe was born in 1900, and then Deborah, the baby girl that died in infancy
after your Zadeh left Russia. The
reason he left Russia for America is an interesting one. He used to go to Denmark and buy herring
(Jews were herring eaters). The man he
worked for used to make him open up the crates of herring and put in more salt
and it used to kill him to be cheating the public. He used to say, "Some day"....
He was on the liberal side, in favor of the underdog. In fact, he was the first Jewish baker in
Montreal to join the Union.
One
time he went to Denmark, on the Baltic Sea for Machess herring (the good
herring). Only that time when he went
to buy the herring he continued on to Hamburg, Germany, took a boat and came to
Montreal. He went to Montreal because
he had a lantzman there. There were
three or four from Tulchin that he knew very well. He went to work for a baker and learned the baking trade, saved
money, went into hock for a steamship ticket and sent for his wife who came to
Montreal with the two children, Joe and Moe.
(There is some discrepancy about the year, but it was probably
1905. Sol’s father came out later in
1905-06 and Sol came to Montreal in 1906.)
Rose
was six or seven months pregnant when Chaim left. She had a difficult pregnancy with Moe. Not only that, she was heartbroken. Her husband didn’t tell her that he was going away to
America. And one child died when he was
gone. When it came time to give birth,
she didn’t want to take a chance so she went to her sister’s (our house) to
live with us.
Years
later, in Montreal, she told me what a difficult time it was in Odessa. The houses in Odessa are built
European-style. There’s a court with an
entrance and all the house are inside, tenement-style, with a watchman there. But Jews weren’t privileged and had to live
in a certain section. So at night when
she started her labor, my father called for a cab to go to the hospital. But
there was a curfew for the Jews after a certain hour. And this watchman didn’t want to let them out. My father said,
"Can’t you see she’s going to have a baby?" "Yes, but I can’t let any Jews
out." He was a little guy and my father
was quite tall, and my father yelled at him, "If you don’t let her out, I’ll
break your neck!" My father was meek
man but this time he cursed the watchman out.
So he let them out, the droshke was waiting outside and they went to the
hospital where she had her baby.
My
mother, my father, and my Aunt Rose were all in Odessa together. The rest of our family was at our home in
Tulchin. In order to get to Odessa from
Tulchin, you had to take a drushka from Tulchin to Venetza then go by train to
Odessa. My father’s father and
grandfather were shochet (people who killed meat for kosher). In Europe in those days, a man couldn’t come
into town and set up shop. These were
small, poor communities where there were only enough people for a certain
number of shochet to make a living, maybe two or four. So the privilege of being able to live in
that community was that profession was passed onto our children - "hazukah" - a
privilege or birthright. But my father
was left-handed and a left-handed person was not allowed to be a shochet. They
tried hard to break him of that but they couldn’t. So he really had no profession. "He lived off the air" was the saying. When he got married he had to do something, and through a person
who knew somebody there, he became a clerk in a commodity-buying house. He was the dealer for people who came to
Odessa to buy wheat. At the time, they
used to import lots of wheat from Odessa.
My father would go out in the countryside and show the different kinds
of wheat stored in elevators. He used
to come home to Tulchin for Rosh Hashonah and Pesach. The rest of the time he was out making a living, traveling around
showing the wheat for export. My mother
was able to live [there] because of the "hazukah". My father sold his birthright to be a shochet to outsiders and
bought a house so my mother had a place to live in. That was in Tulchin, where my mother was near her family - her
sister Rose (Bubby Lerner), and brothers David and Sol Chaim and her mother,
our Bubby Nessa who had given birth to thirteen children, but only these four
had lived. So my father sent money from
his job in Odessa to my mother in Tulchin.
You
must understand the condition Jews liven in there. People worked very hard all week, they lived within a settlement
and didn’t go out. Business was done on
a very different scale. No rip-off, no
horse thieves. They didn’t take anybody
to court. A man was as good as his
word. If there was a difference of
opinion, they went to a dyan, a learned Jewish judge based in the community.
This was only if they couldn’t settle the difference of opinion between
themselves was all just between Jew to Jew.
A
wealthy man used to come every week to see if my mother got the letters from
her husband with the weekly check. You
see, there was no post office delivery - in fact there were no street numbers,
not even necessarily street names - just "over there". So my mother had to go to the post office
for her mail. This man would check to
see if she received the money and if not, he told her to be sure to come any time
to borrow a couple of rubles - not to be without food over Shabbos. Talk about
food, a chicken had to go for a family of six over Shabbos. They used everything - the feet, the neck -
they had to make it last and it was difficult.
Bread you could eat all you like.
Sometimes even with a little sugar on it, or schmaltz (melted chicken
fat).
I
remember the day Aunt Rose and the children came to live with us. I remember in the cold weather were we slept
on top of the stove. You climbed up
over the oven (it was a king of oven like in bakery) and there was large area
like a heath that we could sleep on top of.
Our house had four rooms - a kitchen, bedroom, living room, and "olke",
which was like a den. I remember when
my father used to come home (I was a kid), and Willie and I would sleep in the
den so that my folks could have the bedroom, the others the hearth.
Aunt
Rose was married the first time when she was about eighteen years old. It was an arranged marriage, but he was "not
good" and not a good husband. So she
had a "ghet", a Jewish divorce.
There were no children. She used
to tell me she carried me to "chedar" (Hebrew school) when I was three years
old. I don’t remember.
Bubby
Nessa Muldover married a schoolteacher, a "malamed", by the name of
Mayer Soloman Sirota. In Europe there
were two kinds of teachers, those that start kids on their studies - that teach
them "chumash", and those that teach them Talmud. Zadeh Mayer Soloman was a full "malamed",
a great Talmudist, a very learned man.