Authored By Shirlyn Bold Nash:
Of my mother’s siblings, Aunt Rose was the closest in age. In fact, Aunt Rose told me, they used to share the same plate at mealtime. They both attended Lucy Flower High School, a technical school for girls, in Chicago, travelling quite a distance daily by street car. Aunt Rose always told me her mother believed in girls being educated (not a popular sentiment in those early years.) Aunt Rose specialized in cooking…she wanted to be a dietician; my mother, in handwork, sewing,
needlework, etc.
When Aunt Rose graduated high school, just after World War I, she was offered a job as Office Manager for Ben Bay Cigar Co, which was owned by her mother’s brother, Nathan Elson. Aunt Rose took the job so she could send her older brother, Ben, to dental school, her younger brother, Manny, to law school, and her youngest sister, Gwen, also to law school. She told me that because of Aunt Gwen’s hip deformity, and because Aunt Gwen was so smart, she needed a profession where she would meet men who would admire her for her brains and not be concerned by her hip deformity. (Incidentally, in my early years, I was often told how Uncle Ben would sit by her side and comfort his youngest sister, Gwen, who suffered mercilessly from two surgeries to correct the hip deformity.)
In any case, Aunt Rose decided to send Uncle Ben to dental school (which her husband-to-be, Sam Ruttenberg, was attending.). And so it happened. When Sam, her fiance and brother finished dental school, they went into private practice in an office adjoining the El in downtown Chicago on Madison and Wells…
At that time, relatives in Hamilton, Ohio began to advertise in all the large USA city newspapers for relatives. These were my grandfather, Selig Ostrovsky’s cousins. I didn’t find out the whole story until I met Ben Strauss at one of the Cincinnati functions. It seems that Strauss was shortened from Ostrovsky and (also Ross cousins, as well). Rose Leshner was one of the Strauss cousins who was married at the time to Eli? Leshner, who became quite wealthy, altho’ originally a peddler. After the Strauss cousins made contact with the Chicago relations, Uncle Ben (Ostrom) travelled to Hamilton, Ohio to meet them.
This next part I heard from Aunt Ruth (Friedman),,, Aunt Ruth was invited by the Leshners, as a blind date to meet the Chicago relative, Ben Ostrom. Apparently, that did it!! Love at first sight! And can you blame them? A raving beauty and an up and coming dentist!! How soon after I don’t know, but Ben gave up his Chicago practice, and moved to Cincinnati to marry the love of his life, Ruth Friedman. I remember the wedding, and riding up and down in the hotel elevator with Sid and Kenneth. I also remember swimming in the Leshner’s pool, although Aunt Ruth said that was a different visit–to announce their engagement.
(This is to accompany my memories of the Elson family DVD; there are
lots more to be completed at another time)Another Story by Shirlyn Bold Nash: The Cigar Store under the El
Aunt Rae and Uncle Nate (my mother’s oldest sister and husband,) were the parents of twins, Fred and Milton, our oldest first cousins. The twins, the oldest grandchildren in my mother’s family, were both brilliant and funny; students at the University of Illinois; both played instruments in the band, Fred, the trombone and Milton, the flute. Milton, was a student of architecture.
Aunt Rae and Uncle Nate owned a cigar store, during the thirties, under the el tracks in Chicago, on Thorndale near Winthrop. Later, after Prohibition, the cigar store became a tavern, (with betting in the back room.) The “store,” originally bore the sign: “Ben Bay Cigars.” And, I do believe, a sign when cigars sold for a nickel each. The back room also housed Jocko, a monkey, that Fred brought back from his trip to Africa when he graduated college. The whole family worked there, serving different shifts. Uncle Abe not only served drinks, but also served as the bouncer. Grandpa usually opened in the morning and was alone serving drinks, until the rest of the family came on later shifts.
Aunt Rose used to write stories of Grandpa’s use of the lang’vitch — one which concerned a customer who ordered a whiskey sour, and after searching through all the liquor bottles, Grandpa told the customer that he didn’t have any “sour whiskey.
After my mother died in 1932, we, my father, brother, Sid (third oldest grandchild) and I went to live with Aunt Rae and Uncle Nathan, Freddy, when home from school, Grandpa, who had a room in the basement, Aunt Gwen, while in law school, and others who worked at the “store,” from time-to-time…Uncle Abe, and Uncle Manny. There was also Raffles, the dog, large, rust-colored wire-haired terrior. I shared a bedroom with Aunt Gwen, Sid slept on a sleeping couch in the dining room with Fred, and I can’t remember where my father slept, unless it was another couch.
The house was a bungalows at 5711 N . Campbell Ave.
It had been a bad winter for the family; my mother had died in February from pnuemonia, and Milton, the year before, cause unknown. It was the height of the Depression!! Banks closed and jobs were scarce. But the family, as usual, took over and kept everyone going!! I don’t know where my father managed to scrape up $5.00 a week, but he hired help, a farm girl named Pauline, who my father took with us when we moved, which was often. She lived there also…maybe another room in the basement.
I also need to mention my next oldest cousin, Ken, whose father died young, also from an unknown cause. Ken was two at the time. I write about all this because it is my earliest memory of Sally when she visited us, while we were living in that house. I was thrilled to have a girl cousin at long last!
The following was authored by Carol Carol Logan and published in The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle on March 30, 2001 and April 6, 2001
Nowadays, almost everyone has heard about “the Vanishing American Jew” that Alan M.Dershowitz wrote about in the book of the same name. But recently, I have begun to reclaim the Judaism that my family rejected. Her his the first part of my Odessa. The tale of my parents’ abandonment of this Jewishness began somewhere in Kovno Guberniya in Lithuania, and in the Village of Main, near Kiev.
Many ancestors of America’s Jews came from these same places. What sets different is that most of my relatives is that most of them came to America with few positive feelings about being Jewish.
My Mother’s Mother-blond, blue-eyed Sarah Schaefer-arrived at Ellis Island alone at the age of 16, near the end of the 19th century, to except he programs in Lithuania. Her only relative in the U.S. was an uncle who found her a job as a lace maker in a Lower East Side (N.Y.) sweatshop. Throughout her life, Grandma Sarah remaineddeveotly Orthodox, ravening at home and walking to Schul every day. However, her observant Jewish lifestyle was exactly what turned my mother into a passionate feminist before anyone ever heard go Betty Friedan.
My Mother and her her three sisters wanted no aorta’s in a life in which the wife did all of the housework, cooking and childcare while her husband came home from work at night read the paper, listen to the radio or watch television.
They had no desire to believe in a religion in which men thank God every day they weren’t born a woman. They didn’t want have three sets of dishes or speak Yiddish, or to live in an American “shtetl”, constantly terrified that the “goyim” might come and beat them up or throw them out of the indie as the Cossaks had done with Grandma Sarah.
Although she lived in American for 65 years, Grandam Sarah never overcame her fear of “the goyim,” or learned to read English well, or to speak without an accent. But she always urged her grandchildren to get as much education as possible.
After the war, my parents moved to a new development in Arlington, Va. We were the only Jewish family in the area. Because my mother didn’t keep kosher, Grandma Sarah would never eat on our house.
DIM MEMORIES
The few dim memories I have of anything Jewish I have are connected to Grandma Sarah. I remember Uncle Al wearing a yarmulke and reading. the Haggadah at the Passover cedar at her house and cousin Arne asking the Four Questions.
The rest of Passover is pretty much a blur, except for us playing under the sedar table, and the grownups saying the blessing over the wine. I remember hearing the words, but didn’t know what hey meant.
I clearly remember the menorah, but we never lit it. My grandmother gave me a quarter or a dollar, for Chanukah gelt and I think I played with a dreidel. But no one taught me anything about the holidays but no one ever went to synagogue.
We also always had Christmas Tree, so I could be like the other kids in the neighborhood. Maybe that’s because my mother’s own parents had moved to rural Minnesota before she was born and were the only Jews in town. She knew what it was like to grow up being different from everyone else.
During my six years in elementary school, I knew only two there Jewish students besides me. In junior high school, I knew one Jewish boy. In high school there were only four Jewish students besides me. I never had a Jewish teacher.
Given these circumstances in my family and education, there was nothing about being Jewish for me to like or with which to identify.
But despite her rejection of organized religion, my mother spent her whole life questioning and searching. She was a voracious reader of philosophy and poetry, and she took me to the Ethical Culture Society on Sundays. My mother’s only life long belief was there are atheists in the foxholes.
Although she died an excruciatingly painful death from lung cancer, to her final breath, she never said a single prayer, or turned to “God” for strength or help. Of this she was proud.
As for my father, I only learned during the past year that most of his family had been secular Jews, even back in Russia and that neither he nor his brother had a bar mitzvah. In Malin, his mother’s parents and grandparents were prosperous manufacturers, spoke Russian and even had children who went to the university in Moscow. The only reason they emigrated here in the 1890’s was to save their sons from being conscripted into 25 years of military service in the Tsar’s army.
When they got to Chicago they worked in a cigar factory, a comedown from being the owners of a juice factory and an inn and being the wealthiest people in town. My father’s associations with growing up Jewish on the north side of Chicago were that he was chased home from high school, had stops thrown at him and was a called a “dirty kike.”
Everyone in the large extended family resented the fact that my Great-Grandpa Selig didn’t have a job, but stayed home all day, studying the Bible. He had come to this devotion late in life. He always wore a suit, even on the hottest days of summer, and pushed the children for misbehavior at the table. He was viewed as a mean tyrant, not as a role model. Uncle Dave, a rabbi, also wasn’t respected; he was pitied for choosing such a foolish career.
I still can’t erase from my mind’s ear my father’s voice saying “Anyone who believes in God is a fool, and any Jew who denies he is a Jew is a traitor.
He never got over the horror of the Holocaust, although he was born in Chicago and never was in Germany. Out of solidarity with the murdered six million, he thought Jews should always proudly say they were Jewish. He personally rejected the religion and culture and ignored holidays, but he was a great teller of Sam Lepidus stories and Jewish jokes.
Anything I learned about my Jewish heritage from my parents, who ultimately divorced, was by osmosis. They were both passionate fighters for the underdog, for liberal causes, for education, for excellence, for justice and honesty. It was only last summer when I was studying in an Orthodox women’s yeshiva in Israel that I learned about Tikun Olam and the comandment to study. I knew that many Jews were excellent students, and often were involved in liberal politics, but I never knew that this values came to us from the Torah.
Even though I wen to Oberlin College and the University of Chicago graduate school, which were both heavily Jewish, I never heard of Campus Hillel or knew any students more observant than I was. In four yeas of college, I only dated one Jewish guy. In graduate school, I seriously dated one man whose family was “very Jewish” but I felt complete out of place with them.
Then as my father had done following his divorce from my mother, I married a Methodist, a minister’s son who had also strayed from his childhood upbringing. My open-minded father-in- law performed our wedding ceremony, reading selections from “The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran and Shakespeare. never mentioning any kind of supreme being.
Somehow my husband and I never really discussed religion. It wasn’t until our sons, David and Jonathan, were about six and four that my husband began remembering the fun he had in his Sunday school, Methodist Youth Fellowship and Vacation Bible school. And I began to feel sad that I had nothing to teach my children about my Jewish “roots.”
I wanted them to attend the religious school at the only synagogue in town, but we had to join the synagogue for them to do that. It wasn’t a question of money, because I offered to pay any amount they wanted. But I wasn’t ready to join the synagogue. “Home schooling” in Judaism wasn’t an option since I had not yet started down the path of Jewish learning.
Because of the members only policy at the synagogue my sons attended the liberal Congregational Church Sunday school, where no membership was required. I was disturbed about the dilemma at the time that I consulted a Jewish psychiatrist. His advice was to “bring them up in their father’s faith” since their mother had less faith than their father did. He said “When they grow up, some day they will become interested in their mother’s heritage and will start searching on their own.”
My personal tale of the “vanishing American Jew” will soon come to its logical conclusion.
David is going to marry a lovely. smart, kind Irish-Catholic woman who doesn’t practice her religion either.
Thus, the “official” Jewishness of any children may have come to an end.
Given my own choices, what right do I have to complain or feel anything but happiness for them?
Almost everyone here is descendant of immigrants, but it is rare to find the place one’s ancestors lived before they left the “Old Country” to make a new life in America.
Beginning in 1987 and during the next seven years, I made 14 business trips to the former Soviet Union. Then, one fateful Saturday in late December 1994, I found my paternal grandparents’ juice factory and five room wooden house where my father’s mother, Rae Ostrovsky, was born over 100 years ago in Malin, Ukraine.
That discovery was the first of several turning points in my search for my Jewish roots. It made vividly real for me all the stories I used to hear in Chicago from my Great-Aunt Gwen, my Grandma Rae’s youngest sister, about how their mother, Sarah, had left her parents’ home in Radomyshi, near Kiev, to marry Selig Ostrovsky and move to Malin, a few miles away.
Until I found that house in Malin, I had spent most of my life avoiding everything Jewish, with a few isolated exceptions. For example, one of my favorite classes in college was a survey course in comparative religion, and during the 1960’s I bought a beautifully illustrated book of Jewish prayers, called the “Language of Faith.” But I never actually read it.
In the summer of 1964, after spending my junior year in Paris, I decided to visit Israel, even though I didn’t know anyone there. Although I was completely non-observant, I was moved to tears when I stepped off the Greek ship that had brought me from Athens to Haifa. Visiting places like Jerusalem, Beersheba, Masada, the Dead Sea, Nazareth and Akko was tremendously exciting.
Interestingly, in 1990, the first time I visited Kharkov, Ukraine, someone asked me what kind of American I was. I replied that in the United States we are all just plain Americans. But he persisted, wanting to know if I was of French, or Italian or Spanish descent (based on my hairstyle and appearance, those were his guesses).
“I come from that group of people that Ukrainians have always hated,” I replied. He was rather taken aback by my answer, and said something to the effect that some of his best friends were Jews. Since I had not experienced anti-Semitism during my trips to the Soviet Union, I cannily surmise that my answer to him was the result of my grandmother’s stories of oppression told during my childhood.
I was often surprised during my travels through the USSR that many people whom I met by chance, who had no way of knowing I was Jewish would turn out be Jewish themselves. Frequently they would tell me of discrimination in admission to universities or in their places of work (During the Tsarist and Soviet periods, citizens had internal passports that indicated a person’s “nationality.” Being Jewish was considered to be a nationality.)
I also still vividly remember a good friend’s comment in a letter resent in the mid-1960s after attending a professional astronomical conference in Tashkent. “The Jews are everywhere triumphant,” he wrote in referent to the disproportionate number of Jewish astronomers at the meeting.
Yet it never occurred to me to look for the Jewish sections of Paris, Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkiv, Kiev or Canterbury, where I lived during my many overseas travels.
And so, after the shock of seeing the dismal current conditions in the village where my ancestors had lived so Welk during the 19th century, I became overwhelming grateful to be an American. I felt a solidarity with my Jewishness that I had never before experienced.
LIFE CHANGING EVENTS
When I returned to Wisconsin after that discovery in December 1994, I joined the very synagogue that I had been unwilling join back in the 197-s when my children were small. Even though everything about the synagogue experience was strange and uncomfortable, I gradually began to take part in more activities, such as attending Friday night services, Saturday Torah discussions, the Hadassah book discussion group and fundraisers. I become a life member of Hadassah.
Then, a second major life-changing experience occurred in the mid- to-late 1990s. I started spending time with my second cousins, who have become baalei yeshiva (those who turn to faith, or what I call”born-again Jews”). I attended may Shabbat meals anther home, first in Berkeley and then in Baltimore, and I also omit he director of the women’s Orthodox yeshiva in Har Nof, Jerusalem, where my cousin spent a year learning. Torah. I became obsessed with trying to understand why these two highly educated intelligent doctors would chose to follow the Hasidic lifestyle.
The third major turning point came in February last year when some friends in Green Bay, who are members of a Milwaukee reform synagogue, invited me to attend the first community wide “Day of Discovery.”
I cannot describe the feelings I experienced that day. I had never been in such a totally Jewish environment in my life. And I also learned for the first time about Shir Hadash, the Reconstructionist synagogue in Mequon, which I started attending, and at which I always felt welcome. Around that sam time, I mettle new Rabbi at the synagogue in Appleton, started studying Hebrew and Judaism with him, and joined his congregation. Then, last July, I spent a month studying “A Taste of Torah”, a course for non-observant Jewish women, at my cousin’s former Yeshiva in Jerusalem. The intensity of that experience convinced me that I wanted to live in a more Jewish environment and decided to move to Milwaukee. Many people, both here and in Israel, have used the Yiddish word “bashert” to describe the many coincidences that have occurred in my life during the past year. One “chance” meeting has led to another, and another, making my time in Milwaukee one of the most interesting periods of my life.
Besides joining Shir Hadash and participating in its numerous activities, I have been attending many visiting scholar programs, luncheons, teas, dinners, concerts and services at three Reform congregations, and many other events at at Conservative and Orthodox synagogues. It is quite striking to compare how I feel when I visit different synagogues, and to observe how differently members relate to a stranger their services and events.
At some of these synagogues, the congregants and Rabbis have been friendly and warm, but at others, no one paid any attention to me or introduced themselves to me, even after I attended several services and events at the same synagogue. These differences do not correlate with the size of the building, size of congregation or denomination. I can only assume thatchy reflect the personalities of the individual synagogues.
To fill the lifelong gaps in my Jewish knowledge, I have been taking the Florence Melton Adult Education course offered by the JCC, and the basic Judaism, Jewish prayer and Jewish drama classes at the “Academy of Adult Jewish Studies, sponsored by the five-synagogue congregation consortium. Because of my professional interest in foreign languages, and my personal interest in getting more out of my Jewish learning, I am exchanging Hewbrew lessons for Russian lessons with a Milwaukee rebbitizin. I also volunteer in the Jewish Family Services “Yediddim” program and am attending the Coalition for Jewish Learning’s training courser religious school teachers.
It is amazing how many people have told me that they would love do what I am doing-to sample the various synagogues in the Milwaukee area- but who say they can’t because their families have always belonged ti such-and-such a congregation. Many people here have also told me that they do not attend services on a regular basis or have time to get involved in a significant way in Jewish education programs.
Although I do not have any idea where this quest for my Jewish roots will take me, although I am still not a “believer,” I sometimes feel as though I have “died and gone to Heaven” since moving to Milwaukee because of the abundance of Jewish opportunities and the warmth of many people I have met.
In his play, “No Exit,”, Jean Paul Sartre wrote “Hell is other people.” If he was right, then the opposite must also be true. “Heaven is other people.”
Carol Logan has a master’s degree in Slavic Languages and Literature from the University of Chicago and is a specialist on the former Soviet Union. She has taught Russian at St. Norbert College in De Pere and worked as a consultant at its Bemis Center for International Education, where she devoted and implemented numerous bilateral projects with Russia and Ukraine. Among her other experiences, she served as a program specialist at the U.S. Information Agency in Washington.
Our Family-Our History 