Genealogy Moments: "Eureka!" or "Bummer!"

“Aha!” or “Eureka!” moments can be genuinely life-changing. There is nothing like them. These are experiences, often in a flash, of striking insight, of eye-opening realization. Chances are that neither you nor I have had a history-altering epiphany as did Isaac Newton over a falling apple or as did Alexander Fleming when he discovered penicillin as a result of keeping a messy lab!

For the rest of us, there is the fascinating twilight time between wakefulness and sleep when the mind can enter what is termed “hypnagogia.” Researchers describe this as a fluid and hyper associative state of mind. I find this to be a rich source of “Aha!” ideas for projects I am working on or for problems I am trying to solve.

As a clinical psychologist, there is nothing more satisfying than observing a client having an “Aha!” experience in my office.  This is a magical moment when the person recovers an important memory, a piece of his or her history. This experience can often be transformative. When clients imbibe true insight, I feel it, too. It's an unmistakable shift in shared awareness.

I shall never forget the time a client recovered memories of a repressed sexual assault – just by noticing a root beer can. He suddenly understood why he never liked the taste of root beer: his drink that fateful night had been laced with a sedative. But for years he had “forgotten” or, more likely, repressed the memory over his shame of being abused by a female teacher. The “Aha!” awareness helped my client see his relationships with women, with authority figures and with his wife in a whole new light. Truly, the moment can only be described as life-enhancing.

One activity that has a high probability of “Aha!” moments – and which is becoming increasingly popular – is researching our own personal histories. According to published surveys, genealogy is the second most popular hobby in the U.S. after gardening; and, truth be told, it is the second most visited category of websites, after pornography! 2017, according to records, was a watershed year in researching family histories and in DNA ancestry testing. I did genealogical research myself for my granddaughter’s Bat Mitzvah; concentrating only on my granddaughter’s female ancestors, I was able to trace back 11 generations on my wife’s side of the family. But in contrast to this lineage of luminaries related to my wife, I found little I did not already know about my maternal and paternal grandmothers. By coincidence, my brother did a DNA test and discovered we are 97% Eastern European. No surprise there. We knew that our paternal and maternal grandparents originated from Lithuania, but we knew little else.

Val Karan, Paul Hill, and Orv Karan

Then in January, my brother got an email from an architect in New York City by the name of Paul Hill. He, too, had been doing research on Ancestry.com: he thought we might be related since his grandmother Polly had a sister named Gitel who had a son named Herman who had two sons named Val and Orville! That was us, alright, but we were shocked: we never knew that our Bobbe Gitel had any siblings. Yet now we found out there were other siblings as well, including sisters Polly, Batsheva, Pearl, Leia, and Shlova, and a brother Shlomo. 

We arranged to meet with Paul who, it turned out, is a tireless researcher. Although he describes it as a “nearly limitless task,” he is passionate in trying to flesh out the distant past.

From Paul we made many “Eureka!” discoveries: we learned that his grandmother Polly (b. 1883) and our grandmother Gitel (b. 1890) were raised in a town in Lithuanian called Vilkomir or Ukmerge. Their father was a rabbi and accountant by the name of Yitzchak (or Isaac) Chasman who was born in Svedasai in 1845, and their mother was Rivke Rudnik Chasman who was born around 1850, possibly in Kovno.  They had 7 children.  Rivka died around 1918, possibly in Odessa, where the family had gone during WWI.  

Background knowledge of Yitzchak Chasman's family only goes back to the names of his parents, Frieda and Chaim.  What was particularly interesting was how many relatives we suddenly acquired through the extensive Rudnik clan. My brother and I were overwhelmed by the sheer number of relatives we saw on the family tree Paul created. 

The prime ancestor was Moishe Rudnik, our great-great grandfather and father of Rivke Rudnik.   Polly was close to many of the Rudniks, and probably so was our grandmother Gitel; this connection may explain how Polly and Gitel, although both young girls, were able to leave their homes in  Lithuania and somehow make the long and arduous trek to America.

Assisted by cousins in the Rudnik clan, Polly made her way to Liverpool, England, then to NY,  then to Texas and finally to Cleveland where she married and had a daughter and three sons, one the father of Paul Hill.  Another Chasman sister with the married name of Batsheva Wald went to South Africa: she had 4 children,  descendants of whom are still living in South Africa.

Our Grandmother Gitel was already married with five young children, including our father; she lived in a dirt floor home in Vilnius for five years while our grandfather Ray travelled alone to America, found work in a junk shop (he had been a blacksmith in Lithuania), and set up a home for his wife and family in Madison, Wisconsin.

Somehow Gitel, maybe with the help of Rudnik relatives, made the long journey with five small children (although, tragically, a baby daughter died on route to America). 

Paul showed us a picture of our great-grandfather and some of his children taken in the 1920’s, after Rivka and Batsheva had passed away and after other siblings and grandchildren had left for the New World: Shlova (b. 1875) and her husband Henek Zirnowski (b. 1870) are seated on the left of our great grandfather with two of their sons standing behind them, and Shlomo (b. 1871) and his wife Hudal (b. 1874) and two of their sons are on the right hand side of the page.

My Great Grandfather, Great Aunts and Uncles, and Second Cousins

We had always believed that none of our relatives lost their lives in the Holocaust, that our parents and grandparents and all their relatives had emigrated from Europe before the war. It turns out that many of the Chasman clan stayed in Lithuania. Shlomo died in 1931 around age 60, and our great grandfather Yitzchak died in his 90’s in 1937. Sadly, all the other relatives and their children and grandchildren depicted in the picture perished, except for Yaacov (rear left) and Yosef (rear right).  The Nazis conquered Vilkomir on June 25, 1941; and sometime between September 4 and September 4, 1941, all the Jewish residents, including our great aunts and uncles and their families, were massacred. The Germans forced the Jews to march to the nearby Pivona Forest, forced them to dig a huge pit, and forced them to undress completely; then the Germans fired at them wantonly with machine guns.

In short, there is a potentially flip or dark side to digging into one’s past. Like a Pandora’s box, the uncovered facts can release unexpected information and unwanted troubles.

Along with the emotional and intellectual rewards that have come with discovering heretofore unknown facts about my paternal grandmother, I must also confess guilt and embarrassment at how I may have treated her when she was alive. She was not a warm and communicative person like my maternal grandmother. I have described her as a diminutive woman who in many ways did not seem to adjust to non-shtetl ways. She stoically accepted her lot in life which was to care for her four surviving children, to tend to their apartment house, and to care for my ailing grandfather to his dying day. When Ray died, my grandmother remarried a man named Jacob Lem who, dare I say, reminded me of Popeye the sailor man. Jacob and Gitel did attend my wedding in 1967, she in a plain button-down dress and simple turban hat; then, as always, she was not in a particularly happy or joyous state of mind. At the same time, I never heard her complain or rail against G-d except when my father died, and she could not accept the passing of her oldest child: at my father’s funeral, she forced the rabbi to open the coffin for her, something forbidden by Jewish tradition, before she could accept that he was truly gone. She remained etched in my memory as a tiny, rustic, unselfconscious, homely attired, docile matriarch who was a symbol of self-sacrifice for the sake of family.

Bobbe Gitel under the canopy at my wedding

But I’ve also come to learn that my grandmother had a secret love affair – with me! You see, I saved a bunch of letters that Bobbe Gitel sent to me after my father had passed away. I had returned to my out-of-state college after taking off a semester to help my mother settle my father’s affairs. I didn’t think too much of the letters at the time and I probably didn’t read them very carefully because they were in Yiddish. But I now needed to follow up Paul Hill’s revelations by having these brittle letters, written on soft notebook paper, translated.

The message in each of her letters is essentially the same: she addresses me as “dearly beloved grandson…my dear child... my beautiful clever child.” She wrote how “painful” it was to her that “G-d took your beautiful father who was such a good man. There is no one like your beloved father. The pain is so strong.” She was comforted in her strong and unconditional belief in G-d whom she said, “will not change His mind;” and she always blessed me and prayed that “May you merit to take children to the Chuppah (marriage canopy).” She reminded me to record and remember the yahrzeits (death anniversaries) of my father and grandfather. She also would enclose a sum of money, $10 or $20, which was a big expenditure at the time: “I wish you, dear beautiful grandson, that you should use it in good health, beloved beautiful grandson.”  She would end the letters with further wishes for “much happiness with much good luck from your grandmother and grandfather, Mr. Jacob Lem and Bobbe Gitel.”

Looking back, I honestly don’t recall ever having any serious conversation with my grandmother. I was not even her oldest grandchild; I had a cousin in California who was born a month before me. But I was the first-born of her first-born child, and I was given the middle name of Yitzchak in memory of her father. I have had a “Aha!” moment realizing that she usually addressed me as “Yitzchak Zev,”  putting my given Hebrew first name in the back seat, so to speak. I hardly realized at the time, but I was beloved and precious in her eyes, especially after my father died.

Now that I am a parent and grandparent, I am aware that we do not expect our offspring to have the same level of love for us as we have for them. While our children and grandchildren love us so much (with lapses perhaps in the terrible two’s and teenage years), they are not supposed to give of themselves the way we should give to them. Yes, while I most likely sent thank you notes to my grandmother, I now harbor feelings of guilt and regret that I did not acknowledge these letters more fully or pay more attention to them at the time.

As embarrassed as I am, I am also excited that genealogy has given me a rare opportunity, a second chance to connect with my Bobbe and with other people in my family whom I did not know or whose lives, lessons and loves may have been muted or hidden. In the nexus of nature vs. nurture, these people have shaped the person I am today. My Bobbe has been resurrected in my mind, allowing me to make more sense of my yesterdays and to add new meaning to my life. And if I have not communicated enough to my own children and grandchildren how precious they are to me, which is most likely the case, this family history can serve as an heirloom that can teach them important sub rosa facts of who they are and where they come from. 

So, I encourage others to follow suit and pursue the hobby of genealogy. For inspiration, there are reality TV shows such as Long Lost Family that help provide aid to individuals looking to be reunited with long-lost biological family members. There is also a documentary movie that opened in many theatres this summer – and one that I urge nearly everyone to see – that highlights the pros and cons of discovering our personal histories. “Three Identical Strangers” recounts the true tale of triplet boys born to a single mother in 1961. The adoption agency entrusted with their care placed them in three separate families. Neither the boys nor their adoptive families were aware that each child had siblings. Then, by accident, at age 19, they discovered each other; the young men were ecstatic, and the media had a field day showcasing how these individuals, reared in quite different circumstances, were uncannily alike. For several years, they basked in their celebrity and fortuitous reunion.

But then suddenly the bottom fell out of their blissful lives; it turned out they were unwitting subjects in a secret experiment sanctioned by the adoption agency and run by psychiatrist Dr. Peter Neubauer, a leading figure of child research in the 1950s and ’60s. The study was never completed or published, and Dr. Neubauer died in 2008. Nonetheless, the “Aha!” discovery of science turning humans into guinea pigs had a devastating effect on the then triplet men; and I felt sad and shameful as well since it spotlighted a creepy underbelly of my profession.

Nonetheless, I remain a big fan of genealogy; and I intend to keep looking for information about my grandmother’s family, particularly the Rudnik side. I intend to follow the example of my newly discovered second cousin Paul Hill and honor the presence of our ancestors on earth by learning any morsel that can be gleaned. For others who might follow my example, there is an ever-expanding array of tools to conduct genealogical research – but be forewarned. One thing about family-tree research is that you never know what you are going to find. In investigating your family history, will you find many “Aha!” or “Eureka!” moments? Will your discoveries make you proud, exalted, and enlightened? Or will you discover embarrassing, scandalous, or unsavory phenomena in your own genealogical forays? Will you open secrets and skeletons or a trove of “Oh no!” or “Bummer!” moments? Caveat Attemptor!