Babinsky, Shlyapochnik (1874 – 1945) & Itinerary

29 Jun Babinsky, Shlyapochnik (1874 – 1945) & Itinerary

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My Paternal Grandparents

My paternal dédushka, Borukh Babinsky, and bábushka, Khaya Shlyapochnik, were born in Berdichev, a town in northern Ukraine.

Evidently, the onset of the Pale of Settlement had found the Babinskys’ ancestors (then known as Bobinsky) residing in the town of Kamenets-Litovsk

and the Shlyapochniks’ in the town of Levkov,

since that was where the nineteenth century censuses listed them.

So, Borukh, Khaya, and their siblings, who were at least the fourth generation Berdichevers, counted as residents of Kamenets-Litovsk and Levkov, respectively. All these towns sat within the Pale of Settlement and contributed more than its fair share to the total of thirty thousand Jews murdered in Ukraine in the late 1910s-early 1920s pogrom years. Considering that their parents had not sought a shidduch for their children in their ancestral towns, the link to their places of origin must have grown weak by then – Borukh and Khaya’s children were unaware of the connection.

Borukh Babinsky

Borukh was the third of four sons of Khaim and Perlya Babinsky. He was born in 1874 – his tombstone states: “Died May 7, 1944, in his 71^st year of life.” Or in 1881 – the 1897 census lists him as a 16-year-old. Recording of life events was not of top importance at the time.

Research did not locate Khaim’s ancestors or siblings. They must have been experts at avoiding Tsar’s record-takers. An established blacksmith, Khaim owned three two-room iron-roofed adjoining houses (what we would call one-bedroom townhouses), two brick and one wooden, a later addition that almost kissed the outhouse with its wall. He lived there with his children: Zelman, Nuta, Borukh, and Veniamin, and their families.

The houses crowded a single lot on Brodskaya Street, 173—a street named in honor of Lazar Brodsky, Jewish sugar mogul and philanthropist.

Even had there been a choice, the Babinskys would have opted to stay close – they drew strength, and warmth, from each other.

Each of Khaim’s sons named one of his boys after him. Thus, Avram had a younger brother and three first cousins called Yefim (Fima, for short), a Russified version of Khaim. The name traveled down the line – here is Fima’s Life Story written by Khaim’s great-grandson Yefim.

Whereas his brothers followed in their father’s footsteps, Borukh became a typesetter at a Jewish publisher located near his house. Berdichev boasted several such businesses, but this was the biggest. Jewish publishing houses existed in Eastern Europe as far back as the beginning of the 16^th century. The Pale of Settlement hubs, Berdichev one of the most prominent, printed all flavors of religious literature in Hebrew and Yiddish, including Cabbalistic and Hassidic. Over the centuries, the ebb and flow of benevolence bestowed by local powers upon their lesser subjects had never choked, completely or for long periods, the profession that the People of the Book considered sacred.

The proximity to his place of work was vital for extending the life of Borukh’s shoes, as snow and mud made streets impassable. Galoshes did not help much because they got stuck in the street mush pulling the shoes with them.

(As of 2011, the building of the publisher still stands on Karl Liebknecht Street, one of Berdichev’s thoroughfares named, post-revolution, in memory of the co-founder of the German Communist Party. The one-story squat brick structure painted white—words “state printing house,” a Soviet feature, laid out on the gable—in its current life a strip mall, hosts eateries and service establishments of fledgling local capitalists. Before the revolution the street was called Evropeiskaya (phonetically Yevropeiskaya), the name returned after Russian full-scale invasion in February, 2022).

A man of few words, Borukh was so quiet that his presence often went unnoticed. His hands, disproportionately large and unexpectedly strong for his narrow build, were nimble and never idle; if not working they were rolling tobacco into his next papirosa.

Most evenings he immersed himself into copying Hebrew texts he could barely read from manuscripts borrowed at work onto pages he had fashioned, with ant-like patience and precision, from papirosa paper, then crafting binders from cardboard scraps to hold together the delicate diminutive books that the damp house soon turned into pulp. His record in the 1897 census noted proudly: “Master at making papirosa-paper books.”

Khaya Shlyapochnik

Khaya (later Russified to Klara) was the oldest of three children of Elya and Tsilya Shlyapochnik. The family rented a house on Zhitomirskaya Street, 119. Elya was peddling fabric from a cart for years before scoring a corner of a storefront on a Berdichev market street.

Elya demanded the family mark life dates of ancestors to ensure that one’s own memory not be forsaken. There was hardly a week without a trip to the cemetery. In Kiev, Khaya’s children gathered at the gravesite shared by her, Borukh and their son Khaim, seven times a year. One, to observe the tradition of honoring the departed prior to the High Holidays; six – rain or shine – for the birth and death anniversaries.

Khaya attended classes for girls that taught Judaism and basic secular subjects. She especially took to arithmetic. Her schooling ended at the age of twelve. It would not occur to her, nor would she be permitted to continue it.

Borukh and Khaya – the Couple

If born in 1874, Borukh was eleven years older than Khaya, quite an aberration for a first-time marriage in the era of across-the-board teenage shidduchim. It is possible that a vague rumor was true that his previous marriage had ended with his wife’s death in childbirth.

Borukh and Khaya had six children:

my father Avram,

Rakhil (Roza),

Rejza-Malka (Manya),

Freida (Liza),

Ethel (Emma),

Khaim-Iser (Musya).

The Shlyapochniks, blessed with uncommon longevity, were also known for doggedly dredging their elders’ memories  to ensure that the children were named after deceased kinfolk, as tradition demanded. Unless, of course, a name, sadly, freed up in time for a baby’s birth. A name not linked to the family would leave a child without the protection of a blood-related namesake. Shortage of names was a problem to be proud of and an acceptable reason to stray from tradition occasionally, but they never did.

Khaya, too, resolved not to stray and, another tradition, not to relinquish the right of a first-time mother to decide her baby’s name. She loved to tell her grown children that she was the first in line for a girl’s name after a female relative had recently passed away. Two months before the baby was born, a boy’s name freed up when her great-grandfather Avram died. He was 103 years old. The baby was a boy.

Borukh was ecstatic about his son whose naming assured a long and successful life. He adored his daughters, proud to father four beauties that would not need dowries to entice a throng of shadchanim with the most tempting matches. “And after my last is taken,” he said, “people will tap on my window and ask if I have more.”

As fathers did in those days, Borukh commanded unconditional obedience. But it was Khaya, pragmatic and, as Avram put it, strategic, whose skill and judgment kept the family afloat, no small achievement on the budget comprised of Borukh’s measly wages and the coins her brothers-in-law could spare.

Tall and substantial, she walked lightly with her head held high. Able to pay attention to detail while keeping her eyes on the goal, Khaya ignored small annoyances. No amount of pressure could shake her even-tempered disposition.

My mother called her a commander-in-chief-and-peacemaker-in-one. Not fond of housework that dominated her life, Khaya stuck to the most economical and least-creative but filling diet: borscht, of course, and potatoes and cabbage separately, or combined in vareniki. The repetitive mundane tasks let her mind indulge in its favorite activity: making up and solving math problems.

Occasionally, she assisted at a nearby bakery when the owner’s wife was in labor or on predawn erev holidays, or on Fridays. She mocked the owner’s order: “Gish erein noch a bishl washer, das shein mehr a broyt (pour in a little more water, it will make more bread.)” His lisp produced sh instead of s; Avram imitated it masterfully and so often that I believed it to be a folk adage.

Khaya got paid with leftover bread, if there was any. When there was, she carried it home swathed in a spare shawl. Sliced, dried in the oven and eaten with hot water spruced up by a lump of sugar held between one’s lips, this treat was a noticeable, albeit sporadic, contribution to the family food regimen.

Many decades later, in the abundance of the United States, Avram still luxuriated in the taste of dried bread dunked into unsweetened tea, sipped through a sugar cube.

Against the laws of chemistry, the cube lasted through an inordinate number of tea cups and left a morsel to savor after the last sip. “This is a true dessert,” Avram used to say.

The Babinskys and WWI, Revolution, Civil War, Pogroms.

World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the typhus epidemics, and the civil war upended normality between 1914 and 1923. The Jewish population of the Pale of Settlement was used to intermittent pogroms but during these history-defining upheavals, anti-Jewish riots were unrelenting and especially vicious. Berdichev, in the center of the free-for-all, suffered terribly. Only occasional German conquests during WWI brought respite from the destructiveness of the natives. The orderly and courteous Germans helped women carry water from the well, apologized for the disruption caused to families with whom they were quartered, and paid for their purchases.

In 1918, came the Civil War. In 1919 alone, 100,000 Jews in the region were murdered in pogroms that proved the favorite pastime of the motley collection of gangs and armies spawned in the turmoil.  It pushed aside all their mutual enmities. In his story In the Town of Berdichev, Vasily Grossman says that the town changed hands fourteen times held by “Petliura, Denikin, the Bolsheviks, Galicians and Poles, and even Tytyu”, among others.

Borukh, a young man, was not able to work full-time any longer: his chain-smoking and the lead and ink vapors inhaled at work caused non-stop cough and stomach cramps. While the world was falling apart around them, Borukh’s brothers managed to feed the entire extended family by shoeing horses and fixing carriages for anybody who would not kill them and sometimes paid them. For months at a time, their teenage children rarely saw the outside of the cellar. Girls would risk rape, boys would face compulsory enlistment, the punishment meted out swiftly by the victors of the moment.

Emaciated and terrified, all of Avram’s siblings and most of his Babinsky cousins dodged typhus and the endless robberies, extortion, and bloodcurdling pogroms, even those of 1919.

(Looking back, Avram had no other explanation of how they had made it out in one piece. He credited this outcome not to luck but to the Babinsky loyalty, the closing of the ranks in the face of danger. And to the quick thinking of his father and uncles who had shaved their faces in time to deprive the mobs of all persuasions of one unifying entertainment: tearing out, burning or shearing beards of Jews.)

The Babinsky Dynasty.

Once stability returned, part of the Babinsky extended family, including most of Khaim’s grandchildren, scattered throughout the Soviet Union. Zelman’s offspring moved to Rostov; Nuta’s – to Kherson; Borukh’s – to Kiev; Veniamin’s – to Moscow.

When the city fell to the Nazis in July 1941, tens of thousands of Jews were wiped out – children, pregnant women, the elderly. Seventy-two of them – Babinsky; the survivors took a tally. Borukh’s branch had evacuated in time. They wound up in Tashkent, Uzbekinstan, for the duration of the war then settled in Kiev.

Borukh, Khaya, and their youngest, Khaim (Musya), died within months of each other. Musya succumbed to tuberculosis at the age, Avram was adamant, of twenty-seven, though the tombstone says: “Died March 29, 1945, in his 20^th year of life.”

Avram’s sister Liza died of pancreatic cancer in 1967. He and his three sisters immigrated to the United States. All of them developed vascular dementia at the end of their long lives. They were buried in the Chicago suburbs.

(The tombstones show the correct patronymic Borukhovich / Borukhovna, but in everyday life, all siblings used the Russified Borisovich / Borisovna. Avram’s official patronymic was Borisovich; he attributed the error to the chaos of the 1920s, when his first Soviet passport was issued.)

*****

Avram kept in touch with his first cousins until his emigration in 1977. I only met one, Nuta’s son Yefim. In 1961, Rakhil and I spent my summer break at his house in Kherson. He did not have children, but I was not bored. His genuine interest in my teenage stories and his jokes at the expense of his short stature made me feel at ease – he needed a stool to perform his ob-gyn surgeries. In August of that year, the Soviet Union began erecting the Berlin Wall. Rakhil concluded that a new war was in the offing. The unhealed scars of WWII triggered a knee-jerk belief in the return of bloodshed and devastation and of the Nazi’s Judenfrei appetites multiplied by local enthusiasm. The adults’ anxious whispers and the urgency in their grim faces were freezing my insides.

Rakhil wanted to return to Kiev right away. Yefim did not let her finish the sentence, “You are not going anywhere alone with a young girl. We are family. Whatever comes, we are in it together.” He stood tall and powerful. I felt as protected behind his back as I had behind my father’s.

*****

The Berlin Wall, now just touristy remnants, was half-century old when I set out to track down my second cousins or their progeny, the descendants of my Great-uncles Zelman and Veniamin. For a long time, my stubborn internet searches, in English and Russian, produced unrelated or not-responding Babinskys. As hope was slipping away, two miracles happened:

1. The web served up a breadcrumb to Zelman: Anatoly Zinovievich Babinsky. A son of a Zinovy – Russified Zelman – simply had to be a relative! And he was, as you’ll find out below.
2. My first cousin, i.e. Borukh’s grandson, had a flashback with the name and phone number of a Veniamin’s grandchild.

Thus, I was instrumental in reuniting Zelman’s and Veniamin’s branches that, it turned out, had lost touch at some point. (Plus, Zelman’s granddaughter recalled that her father (and mine) had a second cousin in Rostov, Yevsey Babinsky, who lost a son in the last days of the war. Khaim had a brother! Yevsey was that brother’s grandson.)

DIGRESSION:  KEEPING VENIAMIN’s MEMORY ALIVE

May 24, 2026. Announcement by Veniamin’s great-grandson living in Israel: “Today, with G‑d’s help, we made a donation for a parochet [curtain] for the Aron HaKodesh in the synagogue at the Education Department of the Beitar Illit Municipality, in memory of our dear grandmothers and grandfathers! This is the embroidery with the dedication.”

Translation of the dedication:

“This parochet is donated in exaltation of the souls of our dear parents and grandparents: Aaron, son of Yaakov Weinberg, of blessed memory, and Mina, daughter of Shlomo Gurvich, may she rest in peace, natives of Vilna; Kopel, son of Moishe Postovsky, of blessed memory, and Sheindel, daughter of Binyamin [Veniamin] Babinsky, may she rest in peace, and their daughter Sophia, may she rest in peace, natives of Berdichev. May their souls be bound up in the bond of eternal life. Dedicated with deep gratitude by their families: Mikhoel Yeheskel Weinberg, psychologist at ShaPa”H Beitar Illit, and his parents – Eliyahu and Mila (may their days be prolonged in well-being).”

*Note: ShaPa”H / SHPX (שפ”ח) is an abbreviation in Hebrew for Sherut Psychology Khoukhi (psychological-educational service).

END of DIGRESSION

*****

It was not lost on us that the miracle was not merely locating Anatoly Zinovievich but allowing him to be located even though he was Babinsky on his mother’s side. She kept her maiden name after marriage and gave it to her children to protect them from her husband’s blatantly Jewish surname. Anatoly’s father’s first name, the source of his patronymic, was merely a fortuitous coincidental namesake of Anatoly’s mother’s great-grandfather Zelman.

Fast forward a dozen years… A member of a social media group helping research Jewish ancestry in Berdichev caught sight of my age-old post and connected me with his landsman whose grandmother’s maiden name was Babinsky. She was Nuta’s granddaughter. I learned that Nuta was run over by a horse carriage at the age of twenty-four. That, in addition to a son, Yefim, whom I met in Kherson, he had two daughters who had never heard of my father’s branch. That one of his daughter’s lived with her family in her uncle Zelman’s house. To think that their children, my second cousins, still lived in Berdichev when I was looking for the Babinskys on my two trips there…

The Shlyapochnik Dynasty.

When Khaya’s brother Fima turned ten, he took charge of the store after cheder classes, freeing up Elya for lugging bales of fabric to less poor customers. According to records, Fima’s real name was Iser. No pictures or memories of him survived. I knew of him from the Avram’s inscription “…to Uncle F. Shlyapochnik…” on the back of a pre-WWII photograph of Avram with Fima’s daughter Lusya.

She married the personnel manager of a large publisher, a position that presumed an ideologically pristine qualifications: Communist Party membership and non-Jewish ethnicity. Lusya secretly procured hard-to-find train tickets for us when we needed to go to Moscow for our exit visas. She delivered them late in the evening, asking in advance that Dima and I, the traitors of the motherland, remain out of sight. Lusya’s children refused to acknowledge their Jewish kin.

*****

Khaya’s sister Kreina immigrated to the United States in 1922. Her letters from Chicago described various New World wonders, the most outlandish – a stove that cooked so cleanly that a woman did not need to wear an apron. Khaya took her baby sister’s bragging with a grain of salt. Breaking off the correspondence in the early 1930s did not prevent Avram from being labeled a cosmopolitan and losing his job in 1951, but it might have saved him from arrest or worse.

When Avram immigrated to the United States he expected to meet Aunt Kreina’s children and maybe Kreina herself, she was only ten years older than him. The humongous Chicago phone book listed hundreds of people with Kreina’s married name… as he remembered it. We called each of them. We placed an ad in the Chicago Tribune. To no avail. Kreina’s family had vanished.

*****

In the 2000s, already the internet age, my effort to trace the Shlyapochniks resulted in a single hit, Avram’s third cousin in Toronto, Canada. She and I felt an instant bond to such a degree that she immediately traveled to Chicago to meet me. She summed it up, “When I’m talking to you it’s like talking to my mother.”

Her mother traced her roots to Brusilov and Khodorkov, shtetls near Berdichev. She came to Canada in the early 1900s, but most of the branch had ended up in Argentina. We hypothesized that since our Shlyapochnik ancestors had favored the Greek name Todros (from Theodoros, “gift of God” in Hebrew), they must have migrated through Greece. The last Todros, the brother of my great-great-grandfather, was born in the mid-1800s.

(Once, long before my genealogical quest, an older gentleman stopped me in a store. “Are you Greek?” he asked eagerly. When I shook my head, his smile disappeared. “You are not Greek? So, who are you?” He sounded bewildered, disbelieving.

Long before that episode, back in Kiev, a Ukrainian literature professor known for making Jewish university students retake each test many times just for the pleasure of watching them squirm, rewarded me with a wide smile and the highest grade on the first try. He complimented me on my dark hair, dark eyes, and shapely dark brows, just like his. Folk songs and tales celebrated these features as stereotypically Ukrainian, but were, most probably, gifts from the Greeks, Crimean Tatars, Turks and Jews among them. As a matter of fact, I know now that he looked Greek himself.)

*****

In 2024, I received a priceless Hanukkah gift in the form of an email from a subscriber to jewishgen.org: “I saw you listed as interested in Berdichev Shlyapochnik. I am doing a very large project on ancestry to list families from Berdichev… If you have access to ancestry [ancestry.com] look for the name Katie Shlyapochnik…” The name of the tree was “Kreina / Katie Shlyapochnik / Gottstein”. Her family did not appear in the Chicago phone book because Avram did not remember her correct married name and because, according to the Federal Census, she had moved to California in the 1940s.

The tree contained a bonus: Elya’s younger brother Borukh Shlyapochnik, in the U.S. since 1911. Avram, a little boy at the time, had no memory of him in 1977. If he did, we would have been looking for him and his descendants in Chicago and they would have led us to Kreina. Too late for Avram, but his aunt returned to the fold eventually and brought his great-uncle with her!

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