 Which Gorodok is ours?
How did our people get there? Ancestral towns of some family spouses |
| Which Gorodok is ours?
How did our people get there? Ancestral towns of some family spouses |
| It was a long and frustrating task, looking for
Gorodok spelled with an "H." All that ended the day another approach came to mind. With my best magnifying glass in hand, I opened a large world atlas to the page with Minsk. Our Gorodok was supposed to be "near Minsk." Sure enough, there it is. I had finally found our ancestral town, to the north and a little bit to the east, and spelled with a "G," not with an "H." |
Excited by this momentous discovery, I took from the files now-yellowing notes on conversations from the 1970s with Carl and Dora Karben, remembering they had mentioned other towns nearby. The Ubersteins were from Gorodok, but Carl had grown up in Craznick, which on this map was Krasnoje. Sounded like radishes One town reminded me of radishes, so that must be Radoskovici, where Carl's aunt and uncle had their shop. When his uncle was summoned to the army in 1915, his aunt went to Gorodok to fetch Carl, who was apprenticed to a furrier there. His aunt needed him to run their shop. "So," Carl had said, "I took a 30-mile walk to Radoskovici." Say what? A call to the Belarus Mission at the United Nations not only confirmed the fact that the distance between those two towns is indeed about 30 miles, but it also helped with the pronunciation. According to the Belarus Mission, Ostrosickij Gorodok, which is spelled without a hyphen, is pronounced "Astra-sheet-ski Haar-a-dock" with the emphasis on the "dock." Getting the accent on the right syllable is a challenge. Radoskcovici is pronounced "Radosh-co-veech-ee" with the accent in a most inconvenient place, on the "co," right in the middle of the word. Krasnoje is easier, pronounced "Kras-noy-ah." Gorodok means 'townlet' In reference books made available at the monthly meetings of the Jewish Genealogical Society, I was dismayed to discover many, many Gorodoks. Michael Brenner, a past president of the JGS, told me that Gorodok is a name like Springfield; there's one in Illinois, one in Maine, etc. etc. "There could be a Gorodok-on-the-Don (river) and a Gorodok-near-the-forest," he said. Gary Mokotoff, a founder and the publisher of Avotaynu, the Jewish genealogical journal, explained to me, at the yearly JGS "basics" seminar, that the word Gorodok actually means "townlet," or a little town or shtetl. Details are provided on seven Gorodoks, three of them in the Ukraine, in the book he coauthored with Sallyann Sack, Where Once We Walked: A Guide to the Jewish Communities Destroyed in the Holocaust. Another book, The Shtetl Finder Gazetteer, by Chester Cohen, also mentions a number of Gorodoks in both the Ukraine and Byelorussia. Internet shtetl finder The JewishGen web site, which calls itself "The Home of Jewish Genealogy," has searchable databases with a wealth of riches, including its "Shtetl Seeker." Depending on the criteria entered, one can come up with a dozen Gorodoks, or 28 Gorodoks if variants are included, or 384 Gorodoks if the preferences entered specify looking at all of Russia and including spelling variants. |
|
| Clicking on the coordinates provided for our Gorodok brings the web surfer to Mapquest, which encourages visitors to "join" and make use of its maps, shown on screens laden with advertising banners. The map that came up when I clicked on the coordinates for our Gorodok shows the same towns with spellings different from the Russian spellings to which I had become accustomed. It was Belarussian. |
|
| When everything was Polish "Everything is Poland," he had said, as he photocopied my choices from the YIVO photo archives for a feature about shtetl life for our web pages. "It's like Africa," he explained. "The Europeans went in and divided it up, but it was still just Africa. Well, everything is still Polish." These observations rang true when I discovered in an Atlas of World History the fascinating map, excerpted in part below, showing dominant linguistic groups during the 1800's. |
| The language groups above are: lower case "p" for Polish and "y" for Yiddish. WR stands for White Russia (or Belarus); the area was absorbed into the Russian Empire with the third partition of Poland in 1795. |
Byelorussia renamed itself Belarus in 1989, when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics dissolved. Ostrosickij Gorodok, now Astrasycki Haradok, still exists, Ms. Belskaya of the Belarus Mission said. "It is a small town of only a few thousand." Back in 1998, when I asked Avotaynu publisher Gary Mokotoff how I might find out more about the Ubersteins' ancestral town, he suggested searching JewishGen's web listings for others researching it. I found that 839 people were researching Minsk, but nobody was registered as interested in our town. Several years later, there were maybe half a dozen, none of them related to us Ubersteins. Our Gorodok microfilms available A search of information files listed on the JewishGen® web site, which is another database entirely, led in a different direction, to the Mormons (Latter Day Saints). It showed that among the Jewish records from Belarus available at the LDS Family History Library is a microfilm (#1,794,309) of death records in Ostroshitskij Gorodok from 1872-1917. LDS Family History Libraries are scattered throughout the country, including many cities where CousinsPlus people live, but the records are in Russian. |
|
