UNCOVERING THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF CHUDNOV

My cousin Alexey sent me a picture from his grandmother’s stash of memorabilia. He noted that on the flip side is revealed, "Chudnov before the war." This historical picture of a forgotten world, a Jewish shtetl of my ancestors in Ukraine, surfaced in 2021.

Straining my eyes, I looked for any signs of life while simultaneously envisioning my ancestors toiling. The fields and trees captured in black and white transformed quickly in my mind to many shades of green, with looming clouds appearing to hover over the shabby landscape.

Now married, the father of two young sons and living in Germany, Alexey, who grew up in Kharkiv* and is fluent in Russian, Ukrainian, English, and German, said the picture was from before Germany invaded the USSR in 1941. The scene is from 30 years after my father was born in Chudnov, but it tells a story. That saga of the Jews of Chudnov lines a portion of my book, Kitchen Talk: Sharing Family Tales.

In 1897, Chudnov had a population of 5,580; 4,491 were Jews. Between 1906 and 1914, many Jews from Chudnov immigrated to the United States. They included my father’s nuclear family. Most of the remaining Jews, including dozens of my relatives, were viciously killed by the Nazis in 1941. Why? Because they were Jewish.

According to my cousin Alexey, there is no Jewish population left in Chudnov, no synagogue and no mention of any previous Jewish life anywhere. “The town was over two-thirds Jewish,” he exclaimed, “and has now been wiped off the map of Jewish history.” That is why my account, with excerpts from friends and relatives who were born and lived in the thriving Jewish shtetl of Chudnov, is of personal and historical importance. My book shows how my family and extended mishpocheh navigated through these periods in history.

Mikhail Fishman, a cousin, born in Chudnov in 1935 and one of the last Jewish survivors there, cared for the Jewish cemetery for years before his death in 2011. Through the advent of social media, messaging Tanya, Mikhail’s granddaughter, a young widow who still lives in Chudnov with her daughter, Aleksandra, born there in 2013, is immediately gratifying. Cousin Tanya, a nurse, and her daughter could be the only two living in Chudnov today who have any Jewish blood.

Expounded upon in Kitchen Talk: Sharing Family Tales is the story of my American-born cousin Erika. She is the great-granddaughter of my paternal grandfather’s brother Louis. Upon her return from visiting Mikhail and his family in Chudnov in 1997, Erika sent a short diary of her experience. She included pictures showing Chudnov's late 20th-century countryside. Also, she captured a photo of a memorial to the residents who perished in Chudnov during WWII, which glaringly makes no mention of ethnicity.

It’s never too late to learn more about your ancestry and, having a visual picture somehow makes it easier to appreciate. Born in Chudnov in 1911, my father came to America as an infant in 1912 with his mother. His father settled in Newark, New Jersey, a year earlier. How different my life would have been if my father had not come to America, and I had been born in Chudnov.

Leaving their families behind must have been so difficult for my grandparents. Once in America, to help them get a start, they had family nearby and friends from the old country, ** but who were their family members they left behind? Fortunately, my aunt saved letters from those ancestors. There were 125 letters safely concealed. I have spent the better part of 25 years since her passing, with the help of those gossip-filled envelopes found in a cookie tin, and my cousin Harry Langsam’s masterful translations, resurrecting our family tree.

Accomplishing a connection to my relatives all around the world was through patient perseverance. Our daughter, not only visiting, but lodging with cousins born in Ukraine who made aliyah and live in Israel, reported that the only word she could understand some of them speaking was “Sharon, Sharon, Sharon.” While we don’t all speak the same language, our love for one another and a mutual desire to keep our ancestry alive are palpable.

Now that I have this personal family snapshot of the countryside of my father’s birth and not a pictorial from an encyclopedia or someone else’s memories, I regret that I have no similar pictures of the shtetls from the youths of our children’s other ancestors. My search will never end; this is my lifelong commitment to my descendants. All our extended family members are the added beneficiaries.

More and more archives are cataloging and releasing records. Alexey can read the original language and is selflessly willing to translate the documents, as he did with the letters I sent to his grandmother in his youth. His paternal grandmother, my father’s cousin, was born on October 9, 1913, in the Village Volosivka, near Chudnov, Ukraine. To escape pogroms, her family later moved to Chudnov about 1914, where her younger siblings were born.

Raya, Alexey’s beloved grandmother, whom I was privileged to meet on her few trips to the United States to visit her sister in Los Angeles, died at age 90, on May 1, 2004, in Kharkiv. What I vividly recall from her stopover visits with us in New Jersey goes beyond the softness of her face and her lovable personality. Forbidden from telling anyone of her trips to the United States for fear of losing her communist party membership essential for her well-being, Cousin Raya confided that she told her neighbors that she was going to Moscow for vacation.

Who would ever have dreamed then that Alexey and I would someday communicate in English on WhatsApp? He even met my husband, daughter and younger son on a video chat, and I met his six-year-old and, also, his infant son. We look forward to the day we will all meet in person.

While this blog post has focused on my paternal side and the ancestral shtetl of my father’s birth, Chudnov, Ukraine, I am equally working on the family trees of my mother’s family and my in-law’s. One cousin on my mother’s Friedman side is having a go at my manuscript. Quid pro quo, I helped edit his autobiography, Just Call Me “Mr. Lucky,” by Chuck Friedman. He called to say that for fun, he counted the number of inserts in Kitchen Talk: Sharing Family Tales and recorded a whopping 279 pictures, documents, pieces of memorabilia, recipes, and other tell-tale artifacts.

Kitchen Talk: Sharing Family Tales not only gives the characters a legacy, but the details bring them to life. If you have connections in the publishing world, please keep me in mind. I am on a mission. To borrow a line from Dr. Michael Kesler, in the article, which I wrote, Holocaust Survivor’s Legacy is Much More than a ‘Remnant,' *** “I had an epiphany: The Jews had been born to inform.”

*Kharkiv (Ukrainian), or Kharkov (Russian), also [Charkiv and Charkow], Ukraine

**Communication is Key: https://njjewishnews.timesofisrael.com/communication-is-key/#.WkRFudWnHrc

Also, Who Remembers Mae Schnoll Federbusch? https://jewishlink.news/features/43110-who-remembers-mae-schnoll-federbusch

***Holocaust Survivor's Legacy is Much More Than a 'Remnant' https://jewishlink.news/features/45193-holocaust-survivor-s-legacy-is-much-more-than-a-remnant?fbclid=IwAR1uwyflB1p_lWCsvqz2uFgP5nCDFmTPV3D4bYjno1xHV7FeIg_tzMU85Mo,
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More detailed information from my communication with Alexey and specific information about our ancestry is below. Genealogists, or our relatives who can help in our plight to gather records, see the information posted below.

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Alexey and I are closely related since his paternal grandparents were each first cousins to my father before they married. My paternal grandparents were first cousins. Alexey’s grandmother was my grandfather’s niece, and his grandfather was my grandmother’s nephew.

We worked tirelessly, albeit virtually together, to figure out the names of the shtetls our ancestors inhabited and their original family names. According to Alexey, the main “problem” is that the name was changed in USSR ca. 1938 and later.

Murovany => Muravin

Murovana => Muravina

Alexey asked me to check my grandfather Nathan’s documents because, as far as he understood, he NEVER changed his name to Muravin. He was Murovany. I was able to take pictures of his passport easily with my cell phone to show to Alexey, across the world, instantaneously. What would our ancestors have thought of that?

Cautioning me not to think too much “about the difference between man’s and women’s form of the name,” Alexey considers “more important the actual spelling because it means that in old birth records we should look NOT for the name Muravin/Muravina BUT for the name Murovany/Murovana.” He added, “Two N or one N in the name Murovany/Murovana – depends in Russian or in the Ukrainian language is the document written.” To add to that, I remembered that one of my cousins from the line of my grandfather’s brother Louis said that her family spelled the name Marovannick, which was how I found their branch of the family recorded on the ship manifest. In America, both her grandfather Louis and my grandfather Nathan adopted the family name, Mark.

As far as the place of birth/marriage/death, one account by a relative shows that my father’s maternal grandfather, from Chudnov, left the shtetl but years later returned. We devour each and every clue to enable us to piece together any and all details of our ancestry.

Cousin Raya at her husband’s gravesite (Alexey’s paternal grandparents) with her sister Anna visiting from California - All three were my father’s first cousins

Over “kitchen talk” it was noted that they went to the cemetery, which was the only place they felt safe to speak in Yiddish without their conversations being secretly intercepted

1939

Alexey’s father Leonid Portnoy (April 16, 1939-October 9, 2005) on his grandmother’s lap. Leonid’s grandmother, Fruma, Alexey’s great-grandmother, was my grandfather Nathan’s sister, my grandaunt.

WE REMEMBER Fruma Muravina, born 1886, married her cousin Zelig Muravin, born October 3, 1884, in 1909, Each born and then married in Village Volosivka near Chudnov, Ukraine - both mercilessly killed in 1941 in Chudnov, Ukraine

Needlepoint by Raya

I was able to show it to Alexey’s six-year-old son David on Whatsapp - crafted by his great-grandmother

Alexey describes name changes after 1938

Memorial Stone in Chudnov - photo credit Erika Seligsohn Byrd 1997

Ancestral Chudnov countryside in color - photo credit 1997 Erika Seligsohn Byrd