Where will I be? A Baltic (Time) Travel Log
by Dave Goldstone
November 7, 2023
Where will I be when I go back home?
Who will I see when I’m all-alone?
And what’ll I do?
I had just returned from a tour of the Baltic States when I had this vision of our ancient past:
I am the progeny of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob but I don’t have to look back as far as biblical times to find these descendants. My father’s name was Abraham, my great grandfather was Isaac and grandfather was Jacob. Both were driven by faith or circumstances to search for a promised land.
In the Bible Abraham leaves his father who was an idol maker in the city of Ur and follows this one invisible God to the land of Canaan, which is, more or less where the nation of Israel is today. From the very beginning, thousands of years ago, Abraham and his own progeny were beset with problems resulting from climate changes and with existing tribes competing for land and resources and of course, family issues that could turn in-laws into pillars of salt!
You could follow the Old and New Testament as a kind of ancient history book but it is to me more like a historical novel. Some of the characters may be based on legends and unexplainable events are explained as miracles, which can only happen with the help of a higher power from the heavens or perhaps from a darker side of the universe.
About a hundred generations have passed since a voice inside Abraham’s head told him to go to Canaan, settle there, and become the father of a new nation. If this was some kind of contract with the almighty it is evident that Abraham never read the fine print, complete with battles with the locals, dysfunctional families, and fighting over who’s god is better or worse. In certain ways nothing’s changed in the last 4,000 years, give or take a century, except for that moment 2000 years ago when the Judeans and the Levites, the last remnants of the patriarchs and matriarchs of Canaan were exiled from their promised land.
My great grandfather, Isaac Kurtz, grew up in the village of Kovno, Lithuania in the 1800’s. I knew very little about him except for an old sepia toned photograph taken of him wearing the cap of a Rabbi. During his lifetime there were 36 synagogues n Kovno. Now, there is just one.
Up until the turn of the 20th Century the Jews of Kovno flourished. The local Lithuanian farmers and laborers gazed at them but not with admiration. The Jews, who were first brought into Lithuania as captives in the 1400’s, were not Christian or Lithuanian. They were an invasive breed of traders and shopkeepers living in the city. They never got seemed to get their hands dirty. Isaac Kurtz was one of them.
Isaac’s son, Jacob, a local tailor in town, married a woman named Sarah, Sarah Berszack. Upon experiencing the increasing hostility to their Jewish community Jacob and Sarah found a way out of Lithuania. He and Sarah immigrated to England and took the name of his British half brother, Morris Goldstone, to hide his Litvak heritage. In Manchester Sarah gave birth to Rebecca and Aaron. Again they left Manchester for the United States where Sarah’s sister and brother had already settled. They too had changed their name from Berszack to Berren.
Jacob and Sarah moved to New Britain Connecticut. They had 3 more boys. The last would be Abraham, my father. The four boys all shared one bed in a tiny apartment outside of Hartford. Rebecca, the oldest daughter took special care of Abe who as a child had contracted infantile paralysis (Polio). The family then moved to the South Bronx. Rebecca worked at a garage and helped pay for Abe’s education. Jobs were difficult to find during the depression but Abe excelled on his civil service exam and was able to get a city job.
He met Harriet Block at the Scaroon Manor, a resort in the Adirondacks similar to the Catskills. Harriet and her twin sister, Charlotte lived in a two bedroom apartment in Brooklyn with their Mother Anna, and Grandfather, Phillip Sklar. Phillip had been a boot maker in Mariampole, a small village a few miles south of Kovno. His skill as a boot maker gave him an important contact with the local police who would warn him of planned pogroms coming to the village. He and his wife Jenny began immigrating to the U.S. with his 11 children beginning at the turn of the century.
Harriet and Abe moved into that Brooklyn, apartment where they would spend the next 50 years of their lives. That’s where I was born with along with a million others like me to immigrant and 2nd generation families in Jewish neighborhoods all over the borough.
Abe’s older sister Rebecca never married having worked to take care of her younger brothers and then her father, Jacob, in her apartment in the Bronx. When she would travel out of the city Jacob would stay with us at our apartment in Brooklyn. I would sleep on the couch when grandpa came. In the morning he would come out of my room and walk slowly with his cane to the living room and sit and read the Yiddish Daily Forward. He smoked Kent cigarettes. We would have to find an ashtray for him since no one else was allowed to smoke in our apartment. I never heard him say a word of English. I can hardly remember his voice. He was so quiet. His life in Kovno, Lithuania and Manchester England died with him at a nursing home a few blocks away.
Phillip my great grandfather on my mother’s side of the family and his wife Jenny left Mariampole at around the same time that Jacob and Sarah left Kovno. The pogroms would be followed by the Soviets and then the Nazis. The wanderings of the Jews of Europe and Asia can be traced back to the original exiles of Judea. There was always a need for a new promised land”. This time it would be the USA and in doing so they saved their families.
No one in this Promised Land where my family all live refers to us as “settler colonizers” but many murmur under their breath about how we control everything around them and are therefore responsible for not just the county’s, but the world’s problems.
Dorothy and I decided that it was time to visit Lithuania, the roots of our family trees. We took the train from Vilnius to Kovno, now known as Kaunas. A tour of Kaunas wasn’t on the group tour that we were on but our tour guide, anxious to accommodate us, called a friend of hers who was a retired guide and lived there. “You can take the train to Kaunas in the morning and she will meet you at the station. Do you know people there?” Dorothy answered: “Our relatives are there”. I had to clarify that remark: ”No honey, not any more”. This was by no means a homecoming…”
We took the train for the hour-long ride. The train was sparkling clean, quiet, and smooth. It was nothing like any train-ride in the five boroughs. A middle age woman in her 60’s with strawberry blond hair under a wool cap greeted us at the station. She would be our guide.
She drove us around Kaunas describing the sites. Although not Jewish herself she was aware of all the Jewish sites. We passed through a lovely street of well-kept houses. “This is a beautiful section of town. It’s where the rich Jews lived…” She said.
We stopped at the home of Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese Diplomat that saved 6,000 Jews during WW II by issuing transit permits against the orders of the Japanese government. Our guide looked at us with a blank stare: “Do you want to see this? There’s a fee that you’ll have to cover” I started feeling that she was more of a driver than a guide and I started to feel estranged from this town. We found that Lithuania had many monuments to the horrors of the Soviet Occupation before and after the war but not a word about the Nazi’s except at the Jewish sites. No one wanted to talk about the Nazi’s and their Lithuanian collaborators.
The next stop was the location of the gate to the Kovno Ghetto. It was a street corner on the north side of the town with a tattered old house decorated in some symbolic covering that looked like broken mirrors. A lone monument described the area with the map of the Ghetto carved into the stone. The adjacent streets had old wooden houses that could have been over 100 years old. I imagined them on unpaved streets with wagons pulled by horses. They looked abandoned but we saw flowers in some of the windows. It is possible that Jacob might have recognized some of the houses but nothing else. Somewhere there must be photographs.
This could have been their end had they not left their homes and come to Boston Harbor and Ellis Island before the US began to restrict immigration.”
It was getting late. Our guide drove us back to the train station. Back in Vilnius we caught a cab and gave the driver the name of the hotel our group was staying. A block from the hotel the cab stopped. There were temporary bollards closing off the street to vehicles. Across the street from our hotel in in a large public park there was demonstration. Young people were chanting something to the beat of a base drum. As we walked past the park we could see some of the banners. It was a Pro Palestine anti-Israel rally. “Israel, get out of Palestine” one read but there was one lone young man standing on top of a bollard silently holding the flag of Israel. “I know how you feel”, I thought.
This was the first leg of our journey through the Baltic States. We spent three days in Riga, Latvia. A few blocks from our hotel was the Riga Ghetto Museum, a nondescript brick factory building next to an open lot. When you walked into the building you were overwhelmed with exhibits, pictures, photographs of what this beautiful town must have been like for the Jews only 80 years ago. Outside the museum there was a block-long wall covered on both sides with pictures and names of Synagogues, schools, camps, and people that were lost in the brutality of the Germans and their local collaborators.
Our last stop was Estonia, known for high technology and beautiful super models with long legs and straight blonde tresses falling over their shoulders. We went to a Museum of Art. It had an amazing variety of artwork. At the entrance to the first gallery we saw a video of the history of Estonia presented on a large wall. The narrator was speaking in Estonian with English translations in white at the bottom of the screen. When the narrator spoke about the influence of the Nazi invasion of the Baltics I read these English words: “and by the end of the war, Estonia was the only nation in Europe that was Jew free…”
Dorothy and I are here today in this country because our ancestors left their home knowing that that the village that they grew up in wasn’t their home anymore. We, as a people, continue to follow this one invisible god to the land of Canaan, which is more or less where Israel is today or to the United States, the land of the free and the home of the brave, a place that we hope that we might always call home… or do we need to keep a bag packed when we the exiles of Judea must find another place to call home in a new promised land.
Where will I be when I go back home?
Who will I see when I’m all alone?
You tell me, what am I going to do?
David Crosby
Dave Goldstone is BHC co-president. He writes about his family, life in Brooklyn and memories of his many years as a visitor, and now resident, of Bethlehem, NH.