Branches Book

BRANCHES

Julian Ruble

RAYZE ( רייַזע ) : THE VOYAGES OF MY GREAT GRANDPARENTS

Alie Yanofsky → Louis Young 1889-1977

September 29th, 1900, Kiev, Russian Empire Today was bad. I went to play with some friends on my way home from the new Podil Synagogue. There were some Cossack guards on horseback, a rural nomadic people the Russians used as police, who stopped us and asked for identification in the alley behind the synagogue. I responded in my broken Russian that we had none. They got off their horses and asked us again for identification. They called us terrible names, gryaznyy yevrey, dirty Jew! They beat us with their sticks. It hurt so much, I could barely walk home and had to lean on my friend Jacob. My parents tell me that things like this happened a lot in Kiev before I was born. In those days, angry mobs would come to our neighborhood and take Jews away. Papa said they were never seen again. Nowadays, at school, my parents tell me to not say that I am Jewish to my classmates. My friends who have said they are Jewish have been called ‘German traitors’, because we speak Yiddish to each other instead of Russian. We don’t speak Yiddish at school anymore. My father went a few days ago to get travel documents from the city center, and had to bribe an official to actually get them. Where we live on the south side of Kiev is good because it’s close to the river, but it’s also close to a lot of the militant Orthodox- Christian neighborhoods. They often come onto our street with signs that say “Burn the Bolshevik Jews”, protesting the Jewish communists. My father and mother have been considering leaving for England for a while. Mama and papa say I need to start packing my suitcase. We’re going to take a train to a port in Bremen, Germany. From there, my parents say we might move to London, a big city in England, but they aren’t sure. I don’t want to have to learn English, I don’t want to leave my friends Jacob and Benyamin. October 3rd, 1900, Lublin, Duchy of Poland, Russian Empire We’ve been on this train so long, and I’m so tired. We got on in Lublin in Poland, and we won’t stop until Berlin. Then it is a much shorter ride to Bremen from there. It’s fun running around the train though. Sometimes I run into the dining car with my brother Barnette, and we get in trouble with the conductor’s crewmen. Luckily we didn’t have to suffer the train food for

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