BlogIf there was only one family selected to illustrate the numerous internal conflicts within the Jewish community of Lithuania at the beginning of the 20th century, it would be the family of Sasha’s grandmother, Leeba.
From our story The Rosenblatts you may remember that Leeba’s father, Rabbi Abraham Rosenblatt, married Khisya Goltzman soon after his graduation from Rabbinical School.
As it happened in those days, their marriage was arranged by the elders. Khisya was telling her daughters that it was only a few days before the wedding when Abraham and Khisya met each other for the first time.
Khisya was a couple years older than Abraham and not of great health, but she was from a family well-connected within Vilna’s Jewish community. She was the oldest among the Goltzman sisters, but the last to be married.
Soon after the marriage, the Rosenblatts moved to Panevezys, a small town 70 miles away from Vilna, where Rabbi Abraham was assigned to one of the new and quickly growing Jewish communities.
Khisia preferred an intense life of musical, literature and artistic secular circles. Together with her daughters she often stayed in Vilna at her parents’ house. Leeba remembered being in Vilna most of the time. She attended her schools there as well as her older sisters before her.
Khisya’s younger and only brother, Nathan, a lifelong bachelor, lived in the same house. A musician and occasional poet and writer, Uncle Nathan had a wide spectrum of friends in Vilna and beyond. His students and friends, ranging from teens to young (and not so young) adults, were always in his apartment in the Goltzman’s house. The crowd in the apartment became even bigger when, in addition to the music lessons and literature readings, Nathan decided to start a theater studio. The group called themselves – Nathan’s Circle. Later Uncle Nathan would play a major role in Leeba’s life, but that will be another story.
Leeba remembered noisy and heated discussions about everything in Nathan’s Circle – Vilna at that time was the major center of cultural and political activity for the Jewish community: One of the first Hovevei Zion organizations in Russia was established in Vilna; The Jewish butchers in Vilna organized themselves to oppose pogroms and other forms of anti-Jewish attacks and even being (sort of) acknowledged by the Vilna police; “The General Jewish Labor Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia” – widely known as Bund (“Union” in Yiddish) – was also formed there at the end of the 19th century and eventually played a major role in Russian Revolutions.
From a secular and socialist perspective, both Bund and Zion opposed to what they viewed as the obsolete nature of traditional Jewish life and for that had a lot of supporters. But what would be an alternative way? There were as many heated arguments and answers as numerous fractions and political perspectives in the growing Jewish social movements in Russia and Eastern Europe. The educated elite in the Jewish community – like “raznochintsy” intelligentsia in Russian society, who did not hold high ranks and did not fully belong to the ruling group – were the most active ones.
Some Jews dreamed about their future in Russia as an accepted ethnic culture with their own Yiddish language and history – Leeba’s father, Rabbi Abraham Rosenblatt, was one of the many active supporters of those perspectives. There were reasons to think that way, especially in Lithuania at the beginning of the 20th century, where a Jewish Renaissance was rising. In addition to the number of new synagogues, yeshivas and rabbinical schools, there were numerous secular Jewish libraries, schools, theaters, museums, medical facilities, scientific institutions, and publishing houses. In Vilna alone there were several daily newspapers in both Yiddish and Hebrew.
Many, however, questioned even the possibility to achieve their social goals in Lithuania, much less in Russia. Even those who did not directly suffer economic hardship and over-population – Khisya Goltzman’s family, for example – felt political pressure and repeated waves of antisemitism. Pogroms were hard to forget and forgive.
Even Yiddish, although being the common language across all Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, was viewed by some, especially in German oriented communities, as a ghetto jargon. Even in Nathan’s Circle, where Yiddish literature was one of the main subjects and Yiddish writers like Mendele Mocher Sforim or Sholem Aleichem were highly respected, there was no total agreement that their language would be allowed to survive.
That is what those “noisy and heated discussions” were all about. And, as anywhere in Vilna, each and every of those frequent topics resulted in two major questions: “Should we go?” and “Where?” Déjà vu for those Jews who migrated from Russia to the West two generations later.
“Where?” – was a relatively easy question in Lithuania. For decades around the turn of the century, South Africa was considered among Litvaks – Lithuanian Jews – as the most attractive place to go.
Diamond discoveries in Kimberley and the gold rush in Barberton was not missed by those who had (or thought they have) the spirit of adventure. The Boers Wars with the British were not a problem – those wars were short and far away, and although Jews were fighting on the both sides, most fought with the Brits.
But the gold rush alone was not the reason for Litvaks’ mass migration to South Africa – there were many other considered places around the world to make a fortune. The success stories about Samuel Marks, the early Jewish immigrant from the little Lithuanian town of Neustadt, who became one of the biggest business magnates, one of the advisers of President Kruger, and the generous sponsor of Jewish communities across South Africa, were well-known across Lithuania. Those stories were the proof that anything was possible there.
No less important was that the British government, which always supported the Jewish immigration to South Africa, granted Jews in South Africa equal citizens’ rights after the Boer War.
South Africa was wildly “advertised” in Lithuania. One such report was published in the Hebrew newspaper Ha-Melitz:
“The traveler who comes from our land, tired and weary of the oppressor and of the vicissitudes of life that overcome him at every step, forgets here (in South Africa) his poverty, his squalor, his degradation and his humiliation. He breathes a new life, a life of freedom and liberty, a life of wealth and honor, because there is no discrimination between a Hebrew and a Christian. Every man attends to his labors diligently and finds a reward for his toil.” [From THE JEWS IN SOUTH AFRICA by Gustav Saron and Louis Hotz.]
Talking about Nathan’s Circle – what else would you need to hear, if you were young, excited, and just looking for justification of the decision you already desperately wanted to make?
Leeba, the youngest among the Rosenblatts, did not truly understand or wasn’t really interested in those discussions, unlike Miriam and Dana, her older sisters.
After the First Russian Revolution and the mess that followed, a large group from Nathan’s Circle finally decided to travel to South Africa. Miriam, 19 at that time and in love with a medical student from Nathan’s Circle, was eager to join that group. Leeba and Dana, of course, wanted to go with Miriam.
Rabbi Abraham, their father, absolutely and categorically objected.
Khisya intervened and was able to turn those categorical objections to conditional ones – the student should first become a doctor, Miriam and he must be married, and Leeba and Dana would stay at home. Well, mother knows best…
After Yom Kippur of 1907, 111 years ago, everything was ready for the long journey. They traveled though Poland and Germany to Holland to board the ship that was sailing to one of the eastern ports of England. Then they would cross England to another, western, port with a short stay at the house of one of the Khisya’s cousins, in Northern London.
The group that Miriam and her husband joined to go to South Africa dissolved soon after. It was not an easy journey and only a few of them had enough dedication to make it all the way through – Miriam and her husband did. They established themselves in Cape Town and were active in Zion movement. They left for Palestine in the mid-1930s.
There is an interesting book, The Reb and the Rebel – the autobiographical stories of the members of another Lithuania family, Schrire, who left for South Africa around the same time as Miriam. The book is not only about the struggles on the way to Cape Town – it is more about establishing the new lives, decisions they had to make, as well as the adjustments to the new culture: the communities of the German and British Jews were very different from Litvaks in most parts of their everyday live.
Leeba and Miriam continued exchanging news about their lives throughout the following 30 years. In her dreams, Leeba joined Miriam in the far away land, but Leeba’s real life took a different path.
But that will be another story.
P.S. The title painting – “Vilnuis’, by Sigita Jakutyte
