Tears Over Russia: A Search for Family and the Legacy of Ukraine's Pogroms
The impact of the pogroms has been muted to some extent by the even more powerful trauma of the Holocaust — and by the overwhelming desire of many survivors to move on and embrace their new American lives...Brahin, a Jewish genealogist and researcher, confronts that silence in her family history, Tears Over Russia...Starting with her grandmother’s recollections, she has produced a remarkably vivid account of life in the Old Country that reads at times like a novel — or a series of Sholem Aleichem stories — with matchmakers racking up both triumphs and disasters and marauding thugs imperiling Jewish villagers...The parallels are deliberate...Aspects of Tears Over Russia have a mythic quality, with larger-than-life characters surmounting impossible circumstances...At the core of the narrative is a series of interviews Brahin conducted with Channa (Americanized to 'Anne'), who lived from 1912 to 2003...Brahin delves deep into family history, recounting her great-grandparents’ tumultuous on-and-off romance...Mostly, though, her American story is a happy one...She wins beauty contests, becomes a table tennis champion, and enjoys a 66-year marriage that produces a daughter, Marcy...And a granddaughter, Lisa Brahin, who makes sense — whatever sense is possible — of a life marked by terrifying trials and ultimate survival.
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With curiosity spurred by her grandmother’s stories, genealogist Brahin spent years reconstructing an overlooked historical period that pre-dates the Holocaust but is in many ways a taste of the bitter sorrows to come...The sweeping reconstruction of this family story focuses primarily on Stavyshche, a poor Ukrainian village outside Kyiv, exposing nascent Eastern European antisemitism amidst the chaotic geo-political changes in early 20th century Russia and Ukraine which resulted in nearly 200,000 Jewish dead and massive emigration to America...The bibliography alone makes this a valuable resource...This family history of Kyiv is especially potent in this season of Russian-Ukrainian strife, ironically with a Ukrainian Jew now at the helm...Timely and essential reading.
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Genealogist Brahin debuts with an evocative and distressing account of her grandmother’s experiences during the wave of anti-Jewish pogroms that swept across Russia and Ukraine in the early 20th century...Estimating that as many as 250,000 Jews were killed between 1917 and 1921, Brahin details horrific crimes committed by gangs of 'vicious peasants' and soldiers of the Russian White Army and Ukrainian nationalist forces opposed to the Bolsheviks...Her grandmother Channa, who was born in 1912, was forced to flee her home in Stavishche, a village near Kyiv, and hide with her family in the forest and in the dark crawl spaces of friends’ homes...Brahin adds context to Channa’s story with reports from Yiddish newspapers and diligent archival and genealogical research and paints vivid scenes of anguish and resilience...This is a vital personal record of Ukraine’s turbulent past.
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