Finding Zadie: A Jewish Genealogy Story

One hundred years ago to the week of this writing, my great-grandfather Abraham Ber Tabachnick, still a teenager, was detained on Ellis Island outside of New York City, held as a ‘likely public charge.’ Immigration officials were unsure that he could provide for himself if he entered the country. Perhaps he seemed to them too young and desperate, traveling alone and penniless, and speaking only Russian. He was served breakfast, lunch and dinner as he awaited the decision of the officials. I close my eyes and imagine those days of uncertainty. I can feel his heartsickness, the ache of separation from family left behind, along with a wild mix of determination and doubt at the monumental decision he had made at such a young age to immigrate to America. Would he be denied the dream of a new life? After two days the officials became convinced of his fitness for admission, and on January 25th, 1921 at 11:02 AM, he was released and entered a brand new world.

To walk the streets of New York a free man, how deeply stirring and thrilling! A young man of ideals, intellect and ambition, headstrong and spirited, the world was completely open to him with limitless possibility. Released from the great burden of oppression he had left behind, he was free to pick up the pieces of his broken dreams and build them anew. I can feel the lightness of his step, his excitement and determination to imprint the world with his energy, spirit and heart.

I began the journey of rediscovering my heritage several months before my great-grandfather’s Ellis Island centennial. My mother had suffered a fall and broke her foot so I came to look after her as she recovered. Used to days of activity, I now found myself in a small apartment during the Covid-19 pandemic with nothing to do. I watched hours of internet videos until it seemed like I’d watched everything. I needed a hobby! I started going on long walks in a nearby woodland. Inspired by old-time fiddle music, I tried re-learning the violin after a couple decade break. Finally, on a whim I tried out a two-week free trial of a genealogy website. I started building my family tree, entering the little I knew about my family history and searching the database for records. To my surprise, I found there was so much more at my fingertips than I had imagined. A seemingly endless line of ancestors, all connected through documents, photographs, oral histories and more.

It satisfied my interest in history in a completely new way, and I immediately became fully engrossed. Soon I was spending most of my waking hours on the site, exploring the bifurcating branches of my ancestral tree. It took on an almost compulsive quality, and for a stretch I could hardly look away from my computer, even to eat. My mood had completely shifted, and I’d found purpose and enjoyment in a difficult circumstance. I quickly became a total genealogy nerd! I must say it’s a hobby that suits me perfectly and has provided me more than enough diversion in this unusual time.

And I found a wide community of people online who shared my interest. Redditors who could decipher a misspelled place name or translate script in an unknown language on the back of a photo. Also friends in Facebook genealogy groups, who could comment on my findings and point me in directions I could never find on my own. And other users on the genealogy site, distant cousins who had been researching the same ancestors, some of whom showed up as DNA matches after I sent in a test. I even met one woman on reddit, an expert genealogist who very generously offered to help with any challenges I had building my tree.

I have found that learning about one’s ancestry offers a unique lens on history and makes it tangible in a new way. Through genealogy you can feel into the past and get a palpable sense of what life was like in times that are otherwise studied abstractly and generally. Not only have I gained insight into the past but into my present life as well. I can see how my ancestors not only contributed to my birth but also to my character, making me who I am. And there is an undeniable aspect of gaming to genealogy. Instead of beating a level or completing a challenge as in a video game, you are searching for the next document, or a small correlating detail which confirms that your tree represents an authentic ancestral lineage. You’re like a private detective, putting together a puzzle of people, places, events and stories.

Abraham Ber Tabachnick

I held an outsized curiosity about Abraham, whom my mother called Zadie, Yiddish for grandpa. Though born eighteen years after his death, I was raised in the presence of my great-grandfather. I don’t recall the first time I was made aware of him, rather he was simply with us, firmly present in my life through my mother and her memories of her Zadie. I learned about him from her. He was a writer, a newspaperman, a poet and critic, a socialist, and a Yiddishist. Steeped in Jewish culture, spiritual yet non-religious, he was a man of great heart and conviction. 

As I started researching Abraham online, my first discovery was his naturalization documents through which he formalized his US citizenship. Trying on an American name that he later dropped, he signed the documents ‘Andrew Abraham Tabachnick’ and divulged many illuminating details, including the date of his arrival to Ellis Island and the name of the ship that carried him across the Atlantic. However, when I attempted to search for records documenting his journey, I came up empty-handed.

Luckily there were knowledgeable friends on Facebook who could help. When I presented my findings and question, a fellow genealogy group member informed me of the proper method to find my great-grandfather’s Ellis Island arrival record. His advice was to find the full-length ship manifest and undertake a page-by-page investigation. I was directed to a website with a vast catalog of searchable records, where I soon found what I was seeking: a scan of the original microfilm, 232 pages all told, containing the name of every passenger who departed Antwerp on Jan 6th, 1921 on the steamship Zeeland, the very journey that my great-grandfather referenced on his immigration documents. As instructed, I carefully made my way through page after page, finding no sign of him amongst the Eastern European passengers. After some time I reached the last section of the manifest, containing the 'Record of Aliens Held for Special Inquiry.’ I read six more pages when suddenly, a line of faded text made my heart stop. There he is! His name was spelled in a way that it never would be again, 'Abram Tabatschnik,' yet it was undeniably him. I had found my mother’s Zadie! Given the unusual spelling it would have been impossible for me to find him any other way.

The SS Zeeland, which carried Abraham to New York

1921 SS Zeeland Manifest 

I was certainly the first person to attach this anonymous record from a century ago to a living, breathing man. Out of roughly twelve million immigrants who passed through this port from 1892 to 1924, I had found one who held very special significance for my family. Just a simple typewritten name with a few noted details, yet representing a monumental juncture in a human life. A confluence of all of the aspects which drew me to genealogy made this moment truly satisfying and worth all of the searching and stumbling my way through the building of my tree. It was one of many moments that I could celebrate and proudly show my mother, who delighted in the rediscovery of her grandfather's life through the records he left behind.

After my mother’s father left the family when she was only two, Abraham became the most important male figure in her upbringing. It was a role that he relished, and to which he gave his whole heart. My mother would tell me stories of her doting Zadie. One of her favorites recounts how he would invite her into his bedroom, hand her a chocolate-covered cherry and tell her in feigned confidence that she was his favorite grandchild. Her heart would swell with the warmth of this loving gesture, and she didn’t mind when she saw her brother leaving the room ten minutes later with his own chocolate-covered cherry and the same broad smile.

Felicity and Abraham, late 1950s

He'd take the family to Mohican Lake in the Catskills in the summer. After a day at the swimming pool, he'd invite his grandchildren on a walk and would pretend to discover coins under rocks which he'd give them. My mother loved him completely, with an unmatched purity. There is something in the love we can share with our grandparents and older relatives. Untouched by the day-to-day responsibilities and complications of family life, there is a purity that remains with us lifelong.

It was on his naturalization documents that I learned of the village where Abraham was born in 1902. Written by an immigration court clerk as “Lamachintsi, Roumania,” I was able to identify it as the small village of Lomachyntsi, on a bend in the Dniester River in the very northeastern tip of the Bessarabia governorate of the Russian Empire. Abraham was a gifted student.

Family lore tells that as a young man he was inspired by the great dream of communism, for which he was prepared to give his life. He enlisted as a revolutionary soldier, believing that a communist Russia would bring an end to the anti-semitic violence that had plagued his childhood. His ideals were dashed when he found that the ugliness of anti-semitism pervaded the Red Army as well. Heartbroken and deeply incensed at the injustice of religious hatred, he could see only one option: to leave his home for America. Towards the end of 1920 he traveled by train from Bucharest to Antwerp and then paid his fare to cross the Atlantic in January of 1921.

This was not only a uniquely life-changing decision, it was a form of protest. A protest of the barbaric ignorance which manifested as the horror of pogroms, violent riots aimed at the massacre and expulsion of Jews. It was in Kishinev, the capitol of Bessarabia, that a 1903 pogrom received worldwide attention and became known as the first act of anti-semitic mass violence of the 20th century. Anti-Jewish violence escalated at the outset of the Russian Civil War in 1918. Abraham was deeply traumatized by the pogroms he experienced in his youth. Even as a grandfather, forty and fifty years later, my mother remembers him waking in terror, crying and shouting inconsolably. By leaving for America, he refused to let his spirit be broken. He was resolute in escaping and finding a world where his spirit could expand into the grandeur he knew lay dormant in the human heart. He would find this grandeur in Yiddish poetry, to which he would devote his life.

More fascinating details emerged through the discovery of a short biography on Abraham in the Yiddish Leksikon, a biographical dictionary of important Yiddish literary figures, which again was helpfully shared with me on Facebook. After immigrating in 1921, he lived in Waterbury, Connecticut, where he graduated from high school in 1922. He attended the Jewish Teachers Seminary, and from 1925 to 1936 he taught in Workmen’s Circle schools in Erie, Pennsylvania and the Dorchester section of Boston. From 1936 to 1938 Abraham was employed by FDR’s Works Progress Administration, including work on the WPA’s Universal Jewish Encyclopedia.

Abraham, standing at center, with school group, 1930s

It was in Erie that he met Freda Yanovsky, also of Russian Jewish origin. She was a rarity, a beauty with blue eyes and light hair, and Abraham was immediately smitten. They met in a cafeteria restaurant through a group of mutual friends, which led the movie theatre. As Abraham recounted it, she bought him a candy bar, so he felt obliged to propose to her in return. They were married in October 1926.

Freda was born in 1902 in the shtetl Mezhirich, a largely Jewish village near the city Rivne in modern day Ukraine. Mezhirich was famed as being the home of Dov Ber ben Avraham, the first successor of the founder of Hasidic Judaism. Freda’s family emigrated to Canada in 1921, where less than a week later the family was recorded in the 1921 Census of Canada. In December 1923 Freda went off on her own, boarding a train for Chicago. She would become a US citizen six years later.

Freda Yanovsky in the 1920s

Both Freda and Abraham were born on the eastern edge of the Russian empire, within a six-hour drive in modern day Ukraine. An inspection of their 1930 and 1940 US census documents reveal fascinating details about the movement of the Russian border between the world wars. Both were born in territory which was lost by Russia during WWI and regained in WWII. Not only did these border changes have political implications, they held tragic personal implications for Jewish residents, for the border of Soviet Russia also marked the limit of Nazi influence. 

In 1927 Freda and Abraham welcomed their first and only child, little Chana. They spoke Yiddish in the home, so Chana didn’t learn English until she went to school. Soon she was speaking fluently and wanted an American name, choosing ‘Daisy.’ When she was involved in a harrowing car accident, neighbors knocked on Freda’s door and told her that Daisy had been hurt. It took some time for Freda to realize they were referring to her daughter. Later Chana settled on the name Anne after reading Anne of Green Gables.

Anne and Abraham Tabachnick, 1940s

She was proud of being Daddy’s girl. “After all," she would often say, “I was an only child and my father brought me up to be an intellectual like him.” She was a precocious artist, in which her father delighted. At 18, she attended the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts on a scholarship, and had her first show of paintings at 24. She went on to a long and acclaimed career as an expressionist painter, winning many honors and awards including exhibiting at the MoMA and receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983. I knew her as my fierce and loving Bubbie, and her transcendent art always graced the walls of our family home.

After raising Anne, Freda played a central role in the upbringing of her grandchildren Felicity and David. She loved to grow houseplants and was always cooking. My mother’s favorite was her Bubbie’s matzo brei, softened matzo cooked with eggs and butter, and she usually had a pot of chicken soup on the stove. Abraham would bring over friends and colleagues and Freda was always happy to host and offer a meal.

Freda and Felicity, late 1950s

Along with Abraham’s teaching work, his life in newspapers began in 1928 as a member of the editorial board of Idishe Velt, “The Jewish World,” a Yiddish newspaper in Philadelphia. In 1941 he was hired as a news editor for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in New York City, a wire service for the Yiddish, Hebrew and Anglo-Jewish press, a position he would hold for the remainder of his life. He wrote for The Jewish Daily Forward, a nationally circulated Yiddish newspaper with offices and press in The Forward Building at 175 East Broadway in New York City, close to his home in the Seward Park Coops.

Anne and her children lived with him in the apartment, and my mother would sleep in his study. He would sit at the typewriter and begin his work at 5 AM while she was still asleep. When asked what her grandfather did for a living, she would say he was a ‘typewriter.’ 

Before that they lived in a tenement in Spanish Harlem. Abraham would park his prized car on the street and pay the local Puerto Rican boys a quarter to look after it. Anne had an apartment in the same building, and the kids would go back and forth. They would put on their grandparents clothes and then go out and knock on their door, believing in their disguise they would be mistaken for strangers.

Concurrent to his professional pursuits, Abraham cultivated his true passion: Yiddish poetry and literature. He debuted in print in 1923, and went on to write poems and critical essays for Yiddish publications across North America and in Israel. He compiled the anthology Di shtim fun yidishn poet, "The voice of a Yiddish poet,” in which he recorded and interviewed over twenty American Yiddish poets. My mother recalls his massive tape recorder which he kept in his study along with countless reels of electronic tape. These recordings are still studied by students of Yiddish language and culture.

Abraham at his typewriter, around 1940

He also participated in the compilation of poetry volumes, and published books of his own poetry, essays and criticism. A member of the Yiddish Writers Union and the Yiddish Pen Club, critics considered him among the most important representatives of Neo-Impressionism in Yiddish literature. “Tabachnick’s essay is truly a classic,” wrote Melekh Ravitsh about his book Abe shtoltenberg, “written with calmness, it has the form to include the maximum... It is chiseled as one piece, shot through with love and understanding.”

Abraham with the Yiddish poet and playwright Itzik Manger in the 1960s

I dug out a box of family photographs which my mother fortuitously kept in storage at her apartment, and which I could use to augment my online research. I had opened it in the past, mostly to look at baby photos of me and my brother or younger pictures of my parents. Now a budding genealogist, I combed through the thousands of photographs with an eye for black and white; images of ancestors to scan and add to my tree. I did not suspect the revelations I would uncover in this unorganized collection.

There were many photos of Abraham, at various ages, at work or with his wife, daughter and grandchildren. While Freda was more reserved, Felicity recalls her grandfather as very charismatic, dashing and aware of his style. He was naturally photogenic, his striking face splendidly and bluntly chiseled.

Abraham and Freda studio portrait, 1940s

I found several priceless photos of Abraham’s family, carefully passed down, providing our sole connection to the old country. Many had handwritten notes in Russian on the back, which had never before been translated and provided clues to their lives. I found an incredible group photo from the late 1920s of Abraham’s mother Pearl with his younger siblings; his brother Yuzef, sister Luba, and their unnamed older brother. In another photo, set in a frame by Abraham, a twenty-something Luba regards the camera squarely wearing a pearl necklace with a slight Mona Lisa smile. 

Yuzef, Pearl, Luba and brother, late 1920s

And a magnificent sepia-toned portrait of Yuzef as a young man, hair carefully combed, calmly gazing past the camera. A fountain pen noted in Russian on the back, "Your brother Yuzik Tabachnik perished in 1942. He was 24." It took me some time to consider the implications of this terse note, until then a google search led me to the following passage on Wikipedia, “From 1941 to 1942, 120,000 Jews from Bessarabia… were deported to ghettos and concentration camps in Transnistria, with only a small portion returning in 1944.” 

Virtually all of the Jews of Bessarabia who failed to leave their homes and join the retreat of the Soviets in 1941 were killed by the Nazis in collaboration with the Romanian state, either of disease in the ghettos and camps or murdered outright. Abraham’s family straddled the border between interwar Romania and Soviet Russia, a border which shifted twice before the end of the war. Depending on which side they found themselves, their experience would have varied dramatically. Other than Yuzef, the fate of the Tabachnicks during the Holocaust is unknown. 

Yuzef Tabachnick around 1940

I was shocked and humbled at this discovery; Zadie's baby brother had been murdered, along with so many others they had known. How would it have felt to receive this news from a continent away after a long separation? Perhaps to protect her from the pain of this tragedy, none of this was spoken to my mother. We shed bittersweet tears as we contemplated the unimaginable pain, loss and suffering of such immense and senseless violence, now made somehow more real through this note on the back of a photo.

After scanning and organizing the photographs in my tree, I thought I had found all the available records for my great-grandfather, however I decided to make one last exhaustive search. I scrolled through pages and pages of irrelevant search results until I came to a photo I had overlooked before. A volunteer had photographed a headstone in Cedar Park Cemetery, just west of New York City, and posted it online. It was listed under the name Avraham Ber Tabachnik. I clicked the link. The birth year listed was a year earlier than my great-grandfather’s, but the death year was the same, and there was a partial translation of the Jewish script carved into the stone: “Yiddish writer and critic.” Again my heart stopped. Could it be? I raced to have it fully translated, and to my astonishment each detailed confirmed that it was indeed the genuine headstone of my great-grandfather.

More incredible was the blank space on the right half of the stone, left for his dear wife. But she’d passed more than 15 years ago! How had this happened? An undeniably tragic revelation, yet as I reflected it made perfect sense. Freda had lived for over thirty years after her husbands death and died as a centenarian. She had lost her memory some years before and outlived her only daughter. Her grandchildren were still teenagers when their grandfather died and don't remember his burial, so unfortunately there was no one alive who knew to reunite her with her husband in the grave. I know however, that this poignant circumstance is compensated by the life they lived together and the many years they spent in a loving household.

Abraham was a fan of boxing, and Felicity remembers him dancing around the living room shadowboxing for exercise. After his first stroke he started to take preventive measures, and along with the exercise he quit smoking at his doctor’s suggestion. Eventually, however, his health caught up with him and, as reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency where he worked for so many years, he collapsed at his desk at 3:40 PM on June 13th, 1970, and was taken to Bellevue Hospital where he died soon after. My mother recalls going to see him that afternoon. “I came to the apartment. I think my mother was on the phone. She hung up and she said, ‘Your grandfather died,’ and I shrieked. I was like, ‘No, no, no!’ I just loved him terribly much. I can't believe I still cry about it, so many years later. I just loved him very, very, very, very, very much. He was very sweet and filled my heart with love.”

I thank Abraham for the gift of my Jewishness, the gift he carried with him as he escaped from a Jew-hating Europe which attempted to extinguish our sacred flame; the Jewish tradition and culture which despite countless and continued attempts at subverting continues to carry its gift to the world. I see Abraham in me and I thank him for the gift he gave me a century ago when he began his long journey all the way to America, through his detention in Ellis Island and his release, until he found a new home in which he could dream anew.