Where did we come from? - The Jewish Standard

Many of us — most of us — don’t have any idea what life was like for our families when they lived in eastern or central Europe, and then when they made it to America. I know I don’t.

We might know their names. We might have done some genealogical research, come up with birth certificates or ship manifests or census documents. We might have spit into a test tube, sent off the spittle (how often does anyone get to write that?), and then receive announcement after announcement about possible fifth cousins with initials instead of names. All of this is more theoretically than genuinely interesting.

Very soon, YIVO will offer us more. It’s begun a huge project to digitize all the heaps and mountains of documents that it safeguards. It’s deeply exciting, as Dr. Jonathan Brent, YIVO’s CEO, and Shelly Freeman, its chief of staff, told me as we sat together at breakfast earlier this week.

The database will include all sorts of information “relevant to the search for family connections from eastern Europe to the United States,” Jonathan said; they range from photos to yizkor books to landsmannschaft records to material from the National Desertion Bureau, which tried to track the husbands who hadn’t been able to abandon their families in the old country but somehow managed to ditch them once they reached our golden shores.

“One of the important parts of this project is that it situates individual people within a community, with a history,” Jonathan said. If you find your grandmother, you can find where she lived. You can learn about a community.” Everyone’s grandmother came from someplace, whether or not you know that place, or even whether or not you know anything about that grandmother. And soon you’ll be able to learn more.

Astonishingly, the material that YIVO will digitize includes early films. It turns out, Jonathan told me, that the trip from Europe to America wasn’t as entirely one-way as I’d always thought. I always assumed that you’d say goodbye to your parents, your sisters and your cousins and your aunts, and you’d know that you’d never see them again. But that wasn’t necessarily true. Sometimes, we’d known, the first in a family to immigrate to America was able to send for the family. At other times, the rest of the family left at home struck out on their own. Sometimes they’d find the relative who’d gone ahead. Sometimes they wouldn’t. And we’ve always known that there were some people who left the Old World, came here, just didn’t like it or couldn’t make it work, and went back home.

But what even Jonathan hadn’t known until he started to work on this project was that YIVO’s holdings included early home movies.

It turns out that some Jewish immigrants were successful enough in the new world to be able to afford not only tickets on a boat that would take them east again, not to stay but for a visit, but also to afford a newfangled contraption that took moving pictures. “There was a travel agent in New York who encouraged people to go back,” Jonathan said. So it turns out that one person is responsible for a trove of moving images that unexpectedly make a time and place come alive.

About those home movies of the family back in eastern Europe — in some ways they’re tragic. Who knows how many of the children they show survived the Holocaust? Most likely, not many of them.

But in another sense they are miraculous. They show children being normal kids, actual human beings, not just names on (or not on) a ship manifest. It shows that then, as now, there were divisions in the community — some children were religious Jews, as their clothing made clear, and others looked like their contemporaries in New York.

The database will contain documents in English, Yiddish, German, Polish, Russian — whatever language people spoke. They won’t be internally searchable, but people will be able to download material and have it translated. Facilitators will help with the search.

It will be a big step forward in helping people know more about who they are and where they come from. Thanks, YIVO.

—JP

Opinion