How was life in Soviet Russia for my Mom? Life in Soviet Russia was not easy but they didn’t know how to live any other way. Everybody lived very simply; there was not much food to go around, clothing was all the same, nobody had excess clothing, and they lived in small apartments. After the fall of the Soviet Union, ... Read More »
Both of my parents come from the same city in Poland, so I assumed their experiences would be fairly similar based on the little information I had. Although, for this interview, I decided to sit down with my mother and hear her side of her experience, since we had never once discussed it throughout my life. Ania, my mother, was ... Read More »
I was thirteen years old when we moved to the United States. It was my first trip on the airplane, and I remember feeling excited and scared at the same time. Scared because I have never flown on an airplane before, and excited because I wanted to see my city from a bird’s eye ... Read More »
Jumping through a train window, scared that it was going to leave without his brother making it through, Arthur Abezgauz was a teenage immigrant fleeing Russia in the 1980’s with his family due to religious persecution. Their plan to make it to New York wasn’t so simple. He explained, my grandmother had met ... Read More »
The Isaacson Family hails from the Province of Piltene, part of a region of western Latvia historically known as Courland. “You have totake the train to Riga,” a descendent later recalled. “Take it at night, you’d get there the next morning.” Courland was Latvia’s oldest Jewish community. It’s believed that the first Jews arrived in Piltene around 1571–probably merchants from ... Read More »
The ensuing stories will follow the trajectories of two different families who immigrated to New York from Eastern Europe at different point in history. They are ultimately connected by marriage, and their legacies live on. The Weill Family Teddy Roosevelt’s doppelgänger, Nathan Glickman (née approx. 1866; Moscow, Russia) and the ever ... Read More »
Darya Novik (name changed) was raised in Belarus when it was a former Soviet Union state. When asked, she said she had a “pretty ordinary childhood.” She lived in the 2nd largest city in Belarus, went to regular school and music school and grew up playing piano. “Just like everyone else.” Once she ... Read More »
David Weber immigrated from the Pale of Settlement, Russia (now an area in Ukraine) in the late 1800s, at around 20 years old. The Pale of Settlement was an area in the Eastern section of Russia where Jews were required to live by the Russian Czars at that time. Living in the area limited opportunities and freedoms for Jews that ... Read More »
Rissa Rasnovsky was born in the late 1800s in Borzna, Russia (now Ukraine) in the Pale of Settlement. The Pale was an eastern section of Russia where the Russian Czars and government ordered Jewish people to live in. Places other than the Pale of Settlement were mostly forbidden for Jewish people to reside in, limiting the opportunities and freedom Jews ... Read More »
My grandmother, Fruma Dushnitzer, did not intend to become a US immigrant when she came to visit in July of 1939. She and her 3 year old daughter Fagie, came on a ship, “The New Amsterdam”, to visit her parents in Chicago, as they had never met their granddaughter. They had emigrated from Lithuania to Chicago in the late 1920’s. ... Read More »