adminSeveral children at the John D. Runkle Elementary School in Brookline, Massachusetts in the 1950s used to make fun of our classmate Claire. Her eyes pointed to the ground when she walked, she’d cringe inside herself if anyone came close, and her skin looked like it never saw the light of day. We’d snipe at her to take this drug advertised on TV, Miles Nervine, thinking it treated “nerves.” Now I know it is an antihistamine used for allergies and colds. Maybe it helped with the effects of our ridicule, tears and a runny nose.
When I met Claire’s mother, I am sure I would have looked up and into her eyes, but all I recall is her naked forearm. I had no idea what the blue numbers meant, only a sense that something bad happened to her. There were no Holocaust education programs then. Survivors were shunned by the Jewish community. Anyone who came out alive had to have collaborated with the Nazis.
Family history was of no interest to me when I was growing up but slowly, over many decades, it came to matter. I learned that Louis, my maternal grandfather, and two of his twelve siblings fled Eastern Europe decades before the Nazis came to their “shtetl,”[1] which was then part of Russia. An aunt made it to Israel but the rest of the family and the Jewish ghetto would be erased.
Coming to Care
In the mid 1980s, not long after my grandfather Louis’s death, I went to see Rose, a friend of his who lived in the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center in Roslindale, Massachusetts. When I asked her questions about my grandfather, she became impatient and then angry with me, loudly repeating the word “Berestechko”[2] and finally yelling, “Haven’t you even heard of Hitler!” I certainly had heard of Hitler but not this town she named. Rose told me that was where my grandfather was born but I did not know how to spell it. Despite the passion for literary research that would later bring me through a doctoral program in English, it did not occur to me to educate myself about his birthplace. That encounter with Rose was definitive and worked on me like a slow-release capsule. It explains the interests that would mysteriously emerge in the next decade.
In 1992 I chose to write my masters’ paper on Geoffrey Chaucer’s lesser known “Prioress’s Tale” from the pilgrimage described in his The Canterbury Tales. Elizabeth Mark, the psychologist with whom I was working, thought my interpretation showed that I was a “self-hating” Jew.
The tale’s narrator, the Prioress or nun, describes how a seemingly innocent child walks through the Jewish ghetto singing a hymn to Jesus twice a day, a provocation to the community. The Jews hire an assassin to slit his throat and throw him in a cesspool. The Prioress invokes a widely believed fable of the alleged Jewish ritual murder of a child, Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln,[3] to expand the culpability of one child to all Jews. In my “post-colonial” reading of the tale, instead of citing the scholarship to show that Chaucer’s Prioress was perpetuating a stereotypical lie about Jews, I argued that the fictional Jews needed to resort to terrorism because they had no political standing in the larger community.
I published this essay in the academic journal Diversity in 1995. It included a photo of the plaque at Lincoln Cathedral near Hugh of Lincoln’s remains.[4]
Trumped up stories of “ritual murders” of Christian boys by Jewish communities were common throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and even much later. These fictions cost many innocent Jews their lives. Lincoln had its own legend and the alleged victim was buried in the Cathedral in the year 1255. Such stories do not redound to the credit of Christendom and so we pray: Remember not, Lord our offenses, nor the offences of our forefathers. (emphasis added)
Thirty years after writing that essay, the last lines in the plaque still enrage me. Instead of a request for forgiveness or offering an amend to the slaughtered Jews, the writers pray that G-d will forget their crime.
My intellectual interest in anti-semitism persisted. A few years later in a doctoral program at Northeastern University, I chose as one of my concentrations the first-person Holocaust narrative. I read hundreds of them. Eight years afterwards as an English professor at Rhode Island College, I designed a course on Holocaust literature which I taught four times at this largely Catholic school, ratcheting up the intensity of the narratives each time until one student told me his psychiatrist said he had to stop doing the reading for my course. While I might have told students that my grandfather escaped from Eastern Europe before the Holocaust, I did not feel any strong personal connection to these narratives. I was disconnected from my Jewishness; the narrators and the subjects of the narratives were Other to me.
Yet the emotional glacier, blasted by Rose in the nursing home decades before, was slowly melting. As my first marriage was unravelling, I joined a small informal group of Jews, a chavurah. I felt a connection to its lesbian rabbi as I was coming out of denial about my sexual preference at the time. This group was my first experience of finding peace and even bliss in Jewish practice as we chanted from Rabbi Shefa Gold’s melodic versions of the psalms. About ten years after the meeting with Rose in the rehabilitation center, I found something positive about Judaism.
Later on, while teaching the first course in Holocaust literature, I began attending a Yiddish schmooze group at the local Jewish Community Center (JCC) and hired a private tutor to study the language. Looking back, I am surprised by this about face as I had been ashamed when my grandparents spoke Yiddish to my mother. The desire to connect to my culture was overpowering the practice of assimilation.
During this time, someone at the JCC invited me to join a group travelling to a few death camps in Poland on the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. I readily agreed and then was surprised by my father’s interest. He asked me to send pictures from Minsk. Not seeing this as an opening to his past, I did not even ask him why. He died a few weeks before the trip and never saw the photo I took of a headstone with MINSK engraved on it.
The trip to Poland was visceral, both because I was foggy with grief over the loss of my father and because I was walking into the actual sites of the Holocaust narratives. In the crematoria I touched canisters of Zyclon B, which once contained the cyanide that gassed millions of Jews to their deaths. Then I recalled the energy of the ’60s anti-war movement when we walked through the Warsaw Ghetto, site of a long and surprisingly ferocious attack on the Nazis by a group of half-starved male and female resistance fighters.
Getting Closer
After my father passed, the task of cleaning out the family home fell on me. I found a box marked “Mary Chase” in the basement. Mary was my great aunt, one of Louis’s sisters. I remembered her as a short plump woman, just about my size when I was pre-teen, always dressed in black. Aunt Mary would approach me with a loving voice and say the Yiddish phrase shaineh punim, or “beautiful face,” while lightly pinching my cheeks. When I asked my mother why Aunt Mary dressed in black, I learned that her husband died of tuberculosis not long after they were married and she grieved him the rest of her life.
The box is full of a variety of documents that provide glimpses of who she was and what she cared about. There are unlabeled sepia-colored staged photos most likely of family members that date back to 1889. Multiple artifacts from the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union indicate that she, like my grandfather, worked in the garment industry. The scrapbook is the most telling with many newspaper clippings of two doctors, one famous for group therapy treatment of tuberculosis patients and the other for bone surgery. There are many old letters and thick brown postcards written in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Cyrillic. After my first pass through the box in 2006, I fixed on two of the letters, and asked someone to translate them from Yiddish. I read the translations and promptly put them in my unlocked safe. I would wait 16 years to study them.
One letter, dated June 8, 1939, was written by Mary’s brother-in-law Alkune Hersfeld, the husband of her sister, Rechla; this letter came from their home town Berestechko. The translator read it as a solicitation for money. “We are already six months engaged and Rechla doesn’t even have sheets for herself.” There was no prescience of far more dire deprivations to come.
The other letter bears a postmark from Israel dated in July of 1966 and, I now know, was written by Mary’s mother’s sister, her Aunt Gitel.
July 11, 1966
Dear Miril (aka Mary),
I already wrote you two letters and you are not answering me.
I don’t know why you are angry at us. You should come and visit this land and you will see that in my house, it will be just like your home.
Gitel Kleinshtein
Rosh Pina, Israel
I pulled this translated letter out of its worn manila folder 56 years to the day after it was written. I feel the longing, the hurt. There is no further epistolary evidence of the first writer and the second made it to Israel.
When I first read these the letters, I was slowly awakening from denial about being a Jew. I had not taken a Christian name like “Mary,” but for decades I had been passing as a gentile, or non-Jew, by never telling people I was Jewish. I kept my hair long enough to cover what I thought of as large “Jewish ears.”
Religious “Education”
When I think back on my religious upbringing, it is no wonder that the journey to identifying as a Jew was so protracted. Growing up, what came through to me from my mother was that being Jewish meant looking down upon non-Jews. That bothered me. I was assigned to the neighborhood Heath School with Catholics but my mother put a stop to that and had me switched to the Jewish Runkle School, the place where I tormented the child of a Holocaust survivor.[5]
I did not like being driven to the more distant Runkle school. Nor did I like going to Hebrew school every Sunday. I was supposed to bring 25 cents each week to help plant a tree in Israel but no one ever explained why they needed trees there. (Over 65 years later I found out. Leon Uris explains it in his historical novel Exodus; trees prevent the soil from eroding.) I didn’t last long in Sunday school as my father, a non-observant Jew, used the time to take me to a bowling alley or to the Norumbega Amusement Park in Auburndale, Massachusetts. Returning home, I was the one who answered my mother’s inquiry about Hebrew school with a lie. Contributing to my alienation from Judaism was a sense of being pulled into an alliance with my father against my mother. Family therapists call this triangulation and it was uncomfortable. I liked the time spent with my father and the new activities but I did not like hiding the truth. As I grew older my mother would push me to pretend to be something I was not, a practicing Jew.
When I was a tween in the late 1950s, she put an unattractive green and purple plaid dress on me (to be fair all dresses were unattractive to me) and sent me off alone to services on the High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. After walking up a steep hill (we lived at the very bottom) and then taking the streetcar to Coolidge Corner, I passed the popular Jack & Marion’s delicatessen which served moist meaty corned beef sandwiches on poppy seeded bulkie rolls, and arrived at Temple Kehilath Israel. I know I did this many times but I have no memory of what transpired inside. There was a sense of being used by my mother to prove that the insecure Surmans were “good Jews.” Since I played hooky from Hebrew school, I did not know Hebrew. At the services I would have been alone among family groups. The circumstances blocked any soothing I might have experienced from the singing or the practices. After services I jay-walked to Irving’s Candy Store and used all the money I had above the streetcar fare to buy red Twizzlers or “twists.” Every one of those sweet syrupy sticks oozing joy would be gone long before I returned home. This combination of turning away from the challenges of Hebrew school to do fun things with my father and then lying about it to a mother who would have me make believe that we were believers, contributed to my feeling disinterested and disconnected from Judaism for decades.
Going to Israel
Time passed. I moved to the mid-Atlantic and joined a Reconstructionist synagogue in 2017. I became part of the Haiti Project and travelled there in December of 2019 to help add a second story to a school previous congregants had built. Then my interest in Judaism went dormant again until the summer of 2022 when I received another surge from Rose’s slow-release capsule. My son Derek was planning a family trip to Israel and, although I claimed my seat, I was lukewarm about it. Then a text came from my grandson Ethan, the great great grandson of Louis and the great great nephew of Mary/Mirel, when he was travelling in Israel with the Jewish camp, Havaya. The kids met with a Holocaust survivor who had just spoken with President Biden the week before. Ethan texted his father, “Are there any Holocaust survivors in the family?” I snapped to. My grandson cared, I cared, and I answered.
I consider myself a 3rd generation Holocaust survivor. My maternal grandfather Louis Yunick and 2 of his siblings fled Berestechko when it was part of Russia. His aunt Gitel Kleinshtein also escaped to Rosh Pina in Israel. The rest of their family was murdered.
Up until then my lukewarm preparation for the planned trip to Israel in 2023 had consisted of studying the guidebook Israel and the Palestinian Territories published by Lonely Planet as well as reading the unflinchingly pro-Israel book Start-Up Nation. After the text from Ethan, I went into a genealogical mania. I found a translator and turned over to her the rest of Mary’s correspondence as well as other documents in the box. I wanted to find out how my Great Great Aunt Gitel got out of Berestechko and made it to Israel so I might contact one of her descendants on our trip, establishing the reconnection Gitel had wanted from Mary. “You are not answering my letters. Why are you angry with me?”
One of the databases from the Israeli Genealogy Research Association (IRGA) shows that Gitel married Aharon Shtilerman in Rehovot, Palestine in 1939, just a few years before the murder of the Jews in Berestechko. With Rose from the nursing home no doubt cheering me on, I became preoccupied with Berestechko and the emigration of Gitel Kleinshtein. My son Derek found a copy of Shmuel Spector’s out of print 1990 book, The Holocaust of the Volhynian Jews 1941-1944 from the library at the University of Maryland. I imagined finding clues about my own family. Unfortunately, the book contains no Berestechko specific story, only statistical references. The ghetto in Berestechko was established in October of 1942 and liquidated 11 months later on September 7-9 (366). There were only 30 Jewish survivors (358) but they are not named in the book. Those my grandfather and his siblings left behind were killed by Nazis assisted by local Ukrainians.
Then I turned to the Memorial Book of Beresteczko, Boremel and Vicinity published in 1961 still hoping to find traces of my ancestors. My translator Paula Parsky was the first to turn it into English. In a letter to his sister in America, “The Destruction of Berestetchko from an Eyewitness,” Melekh Goldenberg acknowledges his circumstances were better than most of the Jews. As a craftsman he was not walled into the ghetto.[6] Because he fixed their bicycles and did other chores for policemen, they helped him escape the day of the pogrom. He fled from town to town, each time finding himself in the midst of another pogrom. Goldenberg handed his letter off to a non-Jewish friend who saw that it reached a relative in America. We do not know if Goldenberg ultimately succeeded in escaping the Nazis. No other Jews were named in the Memorial Book.
I knew that my great grandmother’s sister, Gitel, made it to Israel but had not been able to find out if she was one of the 30 survivors of the mass murder in Berestechko or if, like my Grandfather Louis (or Leybush as Gitel calls him in a letter) and his siblings Morris and Mirel/Mary, she left the country early in the twentieth century decades before Hitler came to power. When I lost Gitel’s tracks and I could not access historical records, I came back to the woman I did know.
Aunt Mary Goes Live
Aunt Mary became a person to me when I culled through the remnants of her life for the third time. How grateful I am now to my mother for saving this history when she cleaned her parents’ home. The small box expands each time I rifle through it as I am able to take in more of the past.
Miss Mary Yunick and Mr. Samuel Chase were married on June 2, 1924. Their assimilation is revealed in the name changes; Mirel Unik became Mary Yunick and Shmuel (also known as Simkhe) became Samuel.[7]
I know how much Mirel/Mary loved her husband as she grieved him until her own death over four decades later. She donated a silver Torah ornament in his memory according to the President and Board of her synagogue.
We, the undersigned, officials of Congregation Shaarei Tefilah, indicate with our signs that in the month of Sivan 9 (in 1928), the woman Mirel, bought and donated to our synagogue a Keser Torah made of pure silver in memory of her husband Simkhe and we assert that the congregation of Shaarei Tefila has no right to sell this Keser Torah, but it must remain an eternal memory for the deceased, Simkhe Chase. (emphasis added)
I can picture my roundish aunt no bigger than five feet tall with her gray hair pulled tightly back in a bun fiercely wrestling an “eternal” commitment from the temple officials.
I knew that Simkhe died of tuberculosis but discovered he may have been among the first such patients to be treated in group psychotherapy. Newspaper clippings related to Dr. Joseph H. Pratt fill five of the 10 pages of Mary’s scrapbook. She was a follower.
Pratt began treating pulmonary tuberculosis patients in group therapy in 1905. Eventually he saw “psychoneurosis” as a factor in many illnesses, that there are emotional and spiritual contributors to disease. His medical peers claimed that “Joe Pratt has as much success treating tuberculosis patients on the roofs of Boston slum dwellings as other men did at Saranac.”[8]
Was Simkhe one of the slum rooftop participants in group therapy? Did it help improve his state of mind and relationship with his wife prior to his death just four years into their marriage? It would explain how closely Mary followed Pratt’s career for decades.
The scrapbook also reveals that Simkhe was not the only source of her grief. There is a newspaper notice of people looking for missing relatives when the Nazis were in power. Mary’s call is among them.
I am looking for my sisters and brothers, Schloyme Yunik and his family, born in Berestechko… Etl Gitelman, Rayzl, Yanek, all born and lived in Berestechko. They are Schmuel the melamed’s[9] children.
Mary Chase 3 Mascot Street Dorchester, Mass
I also found two lists of those with whom she had lost contact.
LAST WORD RECEIVED 1938
This page has three sections. The first is written in Cyrillic. The second names family members and friends: Una Unik, Shifra Unik, and Mordovski Rubin. The last one reads:
“Zachary & Ethel Gitelman Berestechko. They had 2 children.”
LAST WORD RECEIVED 1940
The second list is referred to as: “the holy ones who were killed for the sanctification of G-d.” The names of eight other siblings are listed. It ends with the names of their parents, my great grandparents.
Shmuel ben [son of] Avrohom Moshe; Leah bas [daughter of] Dovid
Mirel/Mary had many reasons for dressing in black, but what did she mean that her relatives were killed for the sanctification of G-d? Why use “sanctification” which means making something holy? How could their deaths have made anything holy? Were they made holy in dying? According to Rabbi Sid Schwartz, “It has become common to refer to all victims of the Shoah [Holocaust] in that way.”[10]
How did my ancestors and the other Jews in Berestechko die? Survivor Melekh Goldenberg tells us that the Ukrainians “stepped up and greatly helped the Germans” who had promised them an independent Ukraine after the war. The Germans gave the Ukrainians “freedom over the Jews.”
The gestapo with the help of the Ukrainian police, under the pretense that they were going to work, together drove some 300 men from the ages of 14-60 years old into the palace and there they dug a great grave, and all of them were shot and buried.
Goldenberg is describing the first of the massacres in the shtetl. When I first encountered this narrative, I realized I already knew that my relatives in Berestechko had been ordered to dig a pit and then stand facing forward as they were shot from behind, the power of the bullet propelling each one down to their death. Rose had told me about it in the nursing home decades before but it had been too horrifying for me to retain.
Historian Shmuel Spector takes up the question of why the Jews in this region were not driven to extermination camps such as Sobibor and Belzec which were not that far away.
It seems that the planners of the “Final Solution” believed that in the Ukraine, whose population remained indifferent or hostile to the Jews and collaborated with the occupier, the slaughter could be carried out locally without any reactions or troubles. (173)
The first slaughter of the 300 men and boys described by Goldenberg brought no great “reaction or troubles;” thus the Germans were convinced that “liquidation on the spot fitted the local conditions” (Spector 173).
Gitel Kleinshtein, Mary’s aunt, assumed Mary’s lack of correspondence was the result of her anger. I do not think so. Gitel’s niece was not well. Among the documents in the box is a letter from the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (AFL-CIO). “Our records indicate that you failed to return your 1965 earnings card.” There is a bill for her hospitalization at the clinic named after Dr. Pratt at the New England Medical Center from August 5-August 12, 1966, one month after Gitel’s letter. The most recent artifact from Mary’s life is a statement of dividends earned ($14.48) from New York Life Insurance Company dated June 13, 1967. Mary was not corresponding with her aunt in Israel because she was dying.
The most recent document was one I procured from the Boston Public Library.
CHASE – Departed April 20 [1968]. Mary (Yunik) of 1200 Centre St., Roslindale, devoted sister of Louis Yunick of Dorchester and the late Morris Yunik…Memorial week will be private. Expressions of sympathy may be donated to her memory to Congregation Agudath Israel Hebrew School, Woodrow av. Dorchester. (sic)
The obituary startled me. 1200 Centre St. is the address of the Hebrew Rehabilitation Centre where I met Rose in 1985 and where Mary’s brother, my grandfather Louis, had passed. They all died in the same place.
Aunt Mary died when I was an undergraduate at the University of Rochester, participating in the student strike against the war in Vietnam. No one told me she died. but even if they had it would not have mattered then. The anti-war struggle was all I cared about. Yet even though I had no idea what my ancestors endured in the shtetl, I now think something did come to me from that past: just enough courage to champion a cause and raise my voice with others, “U.S. Out of Vietnam Now!”
What kind of a Jew am I today? I do not hide my religion and I cannot imagine ridiculing children of Holocaust survivors. Some years ago, I tried to contact Claire, the girl we tormented in elementary school. I reached her mother who did not want to give me her contact information but promised to deliver a message. Despite the shame I felt, I managed to blurt out my role in what happened and apologized. Claire’s mother was remarkably forgiving, repeating, “It’s okay. She will be happy to hear this.”
Forty Years After Meeting Rose
Today I dream like a Jew: we have been discovered and “they” are coming for us. What should I pack? How do I protect the kids? I yell at the others, “You are not moving fast enough.”
I am a “secular” Jew. If I attend services or events at my Reconstructionist synagogue, Adat Shalom, it is to engage with other left liberals rather than to practice rituals. I am glad I was in services October 27, 2018 the morning a terrorist killed eleven worshippers and wounded six at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.
There are no Jews that I know of in my neighborhood or workplace, but when the opportunity arises, I let people know I am Jewish, even stating the reason in the optional comment section of the Time Off Request Form as “a Jewish holiday.” I formally reversed assimilation with a simple haircut. I told the stylist, “This time you can cut it shorter.” There is no need to hide “Jewish ears.”
[1] A shtetl is a town mainly populated by Jews in Eastern Europe.
[2] Only recently did I learn that the town kept changing hands. The name was spelled many ways: Berestechko (German and Ukrainian), Brestiski (Hungarian), Berestetchka (Polish), Beresteczko (Russian), and Brestitski (Hebrew). From 1795 to 1917 Berestechko was part of the Volhynian Governate of the Russian Empire. Since Louis lived there during this time, I thought I was Russian.
[3] In 1255 a Christian boy was found dead in a well next to the home of a Jew and Jews were charged with his death. The story is an example of the “blood libel” where Jews were falsely accused of extracting the blood of Christian children for ritual practices. In Lincoln eighteen Jews accused of murdering Hugh were hung without trial after demanding a mixed jury of Jews and Christians (Panitz, Polly. The Alien in their Midst: Images of Jews in English Literature. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1981. 37.)
[4] The photo was courtesy of psychologist Elizabeth Mark.
[5] It is ironic that I married a man named Heath in 1968.
[6] The Nazis forced Jews into ghettos surrounded by barbed wire fences and armed guards. This consolidation made it easier to round them up later for “liquidation,” i.e. extermination.
[7] It is possible that Mirel and Schmuel were assigned these American names when they came through customs in the United States.
[8] Until the discovery of antibiotics in the 1950s, many afflicted with tuberculosis went to the town of Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks for a cure.
[9] My great grandfather taught the Hebrew language and traditions.
[10] Email communication.
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Once an English professor, Karen Paley is now a Financial Advisor and a student in the MFA program in Nonfiction at Goucher College.
Recent or forthcoming work appears in riverSedge, Stirring Nonfiction, and the Avalon Literary Review. You can find older work in Women and Language, Kerem, Na’amat Woman, Writing on the Edge, The Yale Journal of the Humanities in Medicine; and Traditions of Eloquence (Fordham UP).