07 Jul Avrum Averbukh Auerbach (1883-1963)
In Belaya Tserkov, Russia
Velvel’s pupils, private and yeshivah, disappointed him. “Never become melameds,” he warned his sons. “No profession is less rewarding: you give your heart to convey precious knowledge but it doesn’t penetrate your pupils’ minds. All you get at the end of the day are a sore throat and not enough money to put food on the table. But,” he always noted, “every Averbukh branch produced at least one melamed.” We will never know what branches he referred to.
One pupil that did not disappoint Velvel was his oldest son Avrum (Avrimele to everybody but not to Velvel who frowned at using diminutive names unless they were deserved which did not seem to ever happen.) Not as tall, he was otherwise a copy of Velvel both in appearance and ability, homeschooled by him, his pride and hope, the heir apparent.
Avrum’s teenage years fell on the chaotic start of the twentieth century in the Russian Empire. For him and most Jewish youth cooped up in shtetls, the urge to annihilate the old order took priority over everything else.
Of all the ideologies vying for audience, Avrum was drawn to anarchism. He participated in clandestine gatherings, wrote fiery leaflets in Yiddish, improved his Russian to translate anarchist literature into Yiddish. Velvel did not know of Avrum’s involvement but he volubly disapproved of the nonsense that called for utter destruction before attempting to envision “und vus veiter (and then what.)”
Socialist, bolshevik, anarchist—labels meant nothing to him. Passionate revolutionary speeches made no sense, and could lead to nothing good, considering that the fervent listeners consisted of the uneducated and the gullible. They would throw aside tradition – and then what?
One night, Russian gendarmes trashed Velvel’s house looking for Avrum who, by accident or design, was not home. They turned over the featherbed searching for his leaflets, rummaged in the oven, and—the ultimate insult!—rifled Velvel’s books. Confronted by the familiar “you, sitsilist (socialist, in Velvel’s broken Russian), suppose you prevail – und vus veiter (and then what)?”
Avrum was not to be swayed by his father’s fury over the desecrated books. He lectured Velvel on the merits of anarchism. He recommended to walk away from the doomed world of yesterday, along with its Torah, and to read more relevant literature.
Cautioned repeatedly of the power of a word, Avrum’s siblings faced for the first time an inconceivable dramatic transformation that words had brought about in their thoughtful, brilliant brother – they carried the fear of those words through their lives, they instilled it in their children.
Already displeased that Avrum had found his own match, Rose Nikolayevskaya, a daughter of a balmalukhe, thus diminishing his chance of having scholarly offspring – ven ikh makh a shidduch meine liebe zol haben a zein mazel, ven meine kinder makhen a shidduch meine sojnem zol haben a zein mazel (when I make a match for my children my loved ones should have such luck; when my children make a match themselves my enemies should have such luck) – Velvel could not forgive his son’s turning his back on his tradition. Not merely a son, but a shining star, an heir to everything held sacred. “Now you are an anarchist, then you’ll become a sitsilist, then you’ll become a murderer” – an insight on his country’s path too visionary for most of Velvel’s contemporaries, drunk on utopian dreams, to comprehend.
In Philadelphia, United States
In 1906, Avrum followed the family of his bashert to the United States.
Ellis Island. Dining hall. First meal. 1909. Source unknown.
He ended up in Philadelphia where, based on documents we discovered, another Averbukh branch had arrived earlier. He became Abraham Auerbach and raised three children. In the beginning, he worked third shift at a factory as a weaver and a presser. During the day, he wrote.
Declaration of Intent to Naturalize for Abraham Auerbach (born Avrum Averbukh in Belaya Tserkov, Russia). Completed 10/3/1912. Citizenship granted 8/31/1915.
U.S. Naturalization record for Abraham Auerbach (born Avrum Averbukh in Belaya Tserkov, Russia). District filed 4/21/1915. Citizenship granted 8/31/1915.
The now-defunct New York Yiddish newspaper Der Tog, The Day, published his short stories. His wife complained, “Mir haben nicht was zu essen und du schreibst (we have nothing to eat and you write.)”
Velvel pretended not to hear when Sheina-Gitel read Avrimele’s letters out loud. Once, reacting to his son’s admission that perhaps he had been overly enamored with anarchism, Velvel observed, “Why did I have to lose my son and he to travel so far to understand such a simple thing?”
In later years, Avrum became a dry goods salesman, according to the 1920 census, then an insurance agent and he taught at the Gratz College, a school for Jewish studies in Pennsylvania—a melamed, after all. Anarchism discarded, he turned to Zionism. In the early 1960s he spent several months in Israel. Avrum had expected a show of reverence there that befitted a scion of a renowned rabbinical dynasty but if his lineage elicited any recognition, it must have been muted. He did not talk, nor did his children ask, about the relatives and the landsleit in Israel, thus making them untraceable.
Avrum died in 1963. A sympathy letter to his older daughter, Beatrice, from a cousin named Gershon delivered a news flash: Avrum had written his family history and left it for safekeeping with Gershon who intended to publish it, health permitting.
Judging from the casual tone and absence of a surname, Beatrice knew Gershon well. Apparently unimpressed, she did not reply or share the news. Her son inherited the letter after she passed away thirty-three years later. In 2012, it caused a sensation at an impromptu family reunion of Avrum’s grandchildren’s generation. No one recalled hearing of a cousin Gershon. The manuscript was lost.
*****
On March 25, 1975, the son of Avrum’s sister Esther landed in the United States as part of the Soviet-Jewish immigration tide. Avrum’s daughter Ruth, known as Ray, responded to his ad in a Philadelphia newspaper. He forwarded her address to Leib, their uncle in Leningrad. She spoke no Russian or Yiddish but her husband, Michael (Misha, for short), who came to America at the age of ten, knew Russian.
Leib, already gravely ill, wrote to Ray to expect more Averbukhs soon. She was sad that her father had not lived to see the family he missed so much and anxious about her ability to help in a meaningful way. Her house was small, her town offered few jobs, newcomers should head to big cities to benefit from English classes and expert guidance by Jewish charities. To Leib’s ear, these reasons would sound like excuses to shirk her duty, maybe to cover up greed – she did not write back.
On November 16, 1975, Ray greeted her Aunt Esther at the airport. Esther was a baby when Avrum left Russia seventy years before. Dazed and barely standing up after the long flight from Moscow, she was leaning heavily on her son’s arm and did not seem to grasp who Ray was.
When I made it to Chicago in 1976, I was under my mother’s orders not to contact Ray. She was outraged by Ray’s disrespect of Leib and would personally clear the air. Days after joining me in 1977, she did just that with a short-but-to-the-point letter: “Ray, I am your first cousin Rakhil. Our Uncle Leib, had longed to hear from you. He died last year. I don’t need anything, so you can respond.”
Ray called. She cried, Misha was apologizing in Russian. Of course, her father would have been appalled by her blunder, but please understand that she was afraid Leib would misunderstand her. (Ray expected her children would be appalled, too. She kept her blunder secret from them until I unwittingly gave it away decades later).
In the summer of 1978, Ray and Misha drove their impressive, pale-blue Oldsmobile to Chicago. My mother dismissed my warning that Americans favored air-conditioned hotels over stuffy bedrooms: “Ray is not an American, she is family. A hotel will be a slap in the face!”
When I saw my mother and Ray sitting on the sofa, serene and smiling, an image of another first cousin swam before my eyes – a surreal moment. “You remind me of Khaya, Dinah’s daughter, in Kiev.” “That’s what your mom says. My father had never mentioned that I took after Aunt Dinah.”
Rakhil Babinskaya, Ruth (Ray) Kricheff. Chicago. Year 1978.
First, my mother and Ray shared their childhood experiences. My mother lost her father in 1919 and lived through WWI, pogroms, Civil War, and hunger. She contracted scrofula aka tuberculous cervical lymphadenitis. Swelling of neck lymph nodes and poor blood clotting persisted for the rest of her life. Roughly at the same time in Philadelphia, Ray and her siblings, Solomon and Beatrice, spent months in separate foster care homes when their parents were placed in a TB sanatorium. Luckily, someone arranged for the kids to remain connected with relatives and each other and for a professional photographer to take pictures.
Ruth (Ray), Solomon, and Beatrice Auerbach. Philadelphia. Abt. 1917.
Ruth (Ray), Beatrice, and Solomon Auerbach (adult unknown). Philadelphia. Abt. 1918.
(In the mid-1950s, when antibiotics became available, they were again treated in a sanatorium but then Ray visited them while her boys played on a large lawn in front of the building.)
Molded in different worlds, cut off for two generations, the cousins waxed nostalgic. Ray remembered Avrum’s relief at finding a letter from the old country in the mailbox. He demanded silence while he read it out loud, the Yiddish original then English translation. Now, she felt guilty for not listening. My mother remembered Avrum’s missives, the clandestine rays of sun into Stalin’s dungeon, especially Ray’s greeting card inscribed “From Rukhlya to Rukhlya.” Sniffling, she confessed to burning the card and the letters, and Ray corrected: “The inscription was ‘from Rokhl to Rokhl.’”
Ignoring Ray’s shushing, Misha regaled us with tales of her intellect. Imagine: to unwind after a shift at a button factory, she would, still in her street clothes, solve a New York Times crossword, the king of puzzledom, in minutes, and in ink! And, he chuckled, Ray’s vocabulary so impressed their boys’ teachers that they took her for a college professor and complained of the kids’ naughtiness in a deferential tone.
The translation duty passed to me when my parents diverted the conversation to the experiences that Avrum had dodged. Revolution, hunger, pogroms, Gulag, wars. Communal apartment living. Chronic shortages. Antisemitism at every turn. Fear, constant fear. Emigration, a miracle enabled by the valiant American Jewry.
In a shamed voice, Ray and Misha admitted that they couldn’t see themselves in the life we had painted and that the American Jewry had much to atone for. It had idolized Stalin, wished him success, envied those who had not sailed to America before the revolution. It dismissed rumors of arrests and executions as capitalist propaganda and jealousy. Until the horrors of Stalin’s reign were revealed in the mid-1950s, American Jewry shut its collective mind to the reality of Soviet Jewish cultural icons disappearing and families left behind opting to sever ties with relatives in the West.
We were duped, Misha kept repeating. He, for example, had dreamt of immigrating to the Soviet Union, working on a farm, contributing to a free and fair society. Too proud to come emptyhanded, Misha had been pinching pennies to save for a tractor, a gift to Stalin for taking them in. Sheer luck that Stalin died when he did. In another year or two it would have been too late: Ray’s family would have ended up in Gulag for spying, and we, for betraying our motherland.
*****
Read about Avrum Averbukh’s (Abraham Auerbach’s) parents and siblings in Averbukh, Kuppershmidt
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