Kharkov, 1909.

The Mondrus branch of our family – the family of Sasha’s grandfather – had originated in the small town of Glukhov in the northern part of what is currently Ukraine, just next to the Russian border.

Although the history of Glukhov goes back for at least a thousand years, today there are very few people who remember Glukhov’s glorious times, when its fortifications provided a serious challenge for the Polish-Lithuanian armies, or the time when Peter the Great declared that place as the capital of the Cossacks Hetmanate on the Left-bank of the Dnieper River, or in later times when Glukhov played an important role as a key grain exchange and transportation hub between Moscow and Kiev, or became the center of the “Sugar Empire” of the Tereschenco merchants dynasty, which was considered as the one of the richest families in the Russian Empire.

In the second half of the 19th century Glukhov was a growing, relatively quiet town of about ten thousand people with the usual (for that region) mixed population of Ukrainians, Russians and Jews in almost equal proportion; the town that somehow managed to keep very tolerant relationships within society.

On Glukhov’s panorama from those years, just behind the symbolic Moscow Gates, there was the Trinity Cathedral, the Synagogue, and a few more churches all next to another.

The name of the town – Glukhov – associated in the Russian language with something slow, dull and provincial (or located in a very remote area). As we know from Glukhov’s history, this was mostly not true. Glukhov, perhaps, got its name from another meaning of that word – plug, or pipe end cup – for its abilities to stay firm in the way of the enemies.

Quiet life in Glukhov came to an end at the beginning of the 20th century. Since the Revolution of 1905, the tensions within the community grew. The First World War brought hardships for all, and hardships soon turned into food riots and unrest toward the Jewish population. Pogroms became more common, when gangs of retreating or deserting soldiers flew through Glukhov.

We used to be taught that pogroms were originated by ultra-right and nationalists groups, and, in general, this was true. But one of the most deadly and cruel pogroms in Ukraine happened to be in Glukhov with active participation by Red Army soldiers and guerilla groups of all colors.

On March 15, 1918, “Renaissance” newspaper wrote:

GLUKHOV. Peasants from the nearby villages together with gangs of Red soldiers brought “Massacre of St. Bartholomew Day” to Glukhov. Up to 500 of the local intelligentsia were killed, mostly Jews. Property were looted, many houses on the main streets were bombed. Murders were committed with unusual cruelty; children were killed in the eyes of the parents. No one family is without victims… 

We, probably, would not be able to write this article, if the Mondrus family had not left Glukhov before that massacre.

The family of Sasha’s great-great-grandfather was the only Mondrus family that appears in the 1888 list of Jewish families of Glukhov.

It was a traditional, large Jewish family that “… lived in Glukhov seemingly forever, before moving to the real city”, as always emphasizes Sasha’s grandmother Leeba, who came to Kharkov from the opened-mind society of Vilna in Lithuania. It seems that she underestimated the desire of her father-in-law, Chayim, to move his kids not just to a bigger city, but to a bigger life.

The main trade in the Jewish community of Glukhov was clothes business and handcraft, and Chayim, Sasha’s great-grandfather, understood well that for his six sons and two daughters in that town there soon will be neither enough social space nor any chance to get a good education.

YIVO (Yiddish Scientific Institute) The Encyclopedia described traditional Heder in the Eastern Europe towns this way: “Heder teachers are consistently portrayed as men of little knowledge and severely limited pedagogic and didactic abilities. Exceptions were rare. Not only this, but melameds were usually part of the lowest socioeconomic stratum in Jewish society. The skilled and talented among the community’s members found employment in other areas.”

Chayim hired teachers from the local Gymnasium, which Jewish kids were not allowed to attend, and organized something like home schooling for his children as well as the children of his brother, Isaya (name comes later as Evsey).

After three years of intense preparation, in 1909, Chayim traveled to Kharkov with his oldest son, Moshe. Kharkov was considered at that time as the future of the Jewish community. Moshe passed his exam and was accepted in the Real School – Kharkov was one of the few cities in Russian Empire that allowed Jewish kids in such schools. Chayim knew that his way was right.

In Kharkov, in the alley next to Military Street, he found a private closed courtyard surrounded by several small cottages – enough space for the whole family and it potential development in time, and moved his family into that place. Aaron Mondrus, Sasha’s grandfather, was 15 at that time and the next year he was enrolled in the same Real School as well.

Chaim’s choice of place for his new home was proved to be right too – most members of the Mondrus family had lived in the same houses around the courtyard for the next fifty years – before and after WWII. It was the place where in the 1920s Aaron brought his wife, Leeba Rosenblatt, the place where Lisa, Sasha’s mother, was born in 1921, the place where Lyonya, Sasha’s father, came to from WWII, the place where Sasha was born.

It was the place where all doors in the houses around the courtyard led to the rooms of Sasha’s aunts or uncles or cousins or great-aunts and great-uncles, until the time when Lyonya, Lisa and Sasha moved to Novosibirsk.

But that will be another story.