Back in the 16^th century, Poland was a feudal country and a source of trouble to many people. The Cossacks populated Russia, from the Nesta River all along the Black Sea. Originally these Cossacks were under the rule of the Tartars, the remnants of the Huns who had come here. Peter the Great had driven them out with the help of Poland. But when Poland went "from bad to worse," it was divided up between Russia, little Germany, and the Austrian Empire (the mountainous parts including the Carpathian Mountains, Transylvania, and part of Romania.) The first breakup of Poland happened at the end of the 16^th century. At that time Poland extended down to about twelve miles north of the Black Sea. At the end of the 17^th century, the Austrian Empire got into trouble and Romania became an independent country. Towards the end of the 18^th century, Turkey conquered part of Greece, part of Bulgaria, and part of Romania.

Our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, even great-great-grandparents (yours and mine) never lived in Poland. We originally came from the Austrian Empire. They controlled the territory that is now practically half of Germany, way down to the Balkans and some of the Balkan countries outside of Greece and Transylvania. Eventually Queen Marie Teresa of the Austrian Empire, at the end of the 18^th century, got into a mess and made an enemy of Germany, Russia, and Britain. Most of all, she made an enemy of the Jewish people.Three times during her lifetime, she ordered the Jewish people out of her dominion. Then she let them buy the privilege back by taxing them way over their heads. At that time everybody had to take a name to register for identification. It went back and forth like that until the breakup of Poland.

There are several ways that we know that our family was in the Austrian Empire. Mainly we know by our names and our coloring, and also our language and our accent.For example, we had very few "Mediterranean heads" in our family. We had blue eyes and "towheads". With high cheekbones and long faces, we could be sure that we were mixed with some of that stock that was closer to the ice.

Another way that I have of knowing where we come from is that none of our names or our ancestors' names end in "ski". We took the names of our professions, that's the way they did it.So if a man was a student, they called him Lerner, and if he was a sochet (Kosher meat slaughterer), they called him Schecter (my name).In Russia when they were ordered to take names, they took Russian names; in Poland, they took Polish names. In the Austrian empire we took the names of our professions and trades. It’s been Lerner as far back as they had to take names - between 1735 and 1755.

One other observation of mine about our origins is that my father spoke the same Yiddish as my Bubby (Nessa) did, and she was not a Litvashka. If she’d had a Polish accent, we'd have heard her use it.

We should realize that there was no such thing as racial purity for Jews in Europe.While Jews in Poland lived in peace from the 7^th century until the division of Poland, the rest of the Jews in Europe had been raped and murdered and beaten a thousand times. Four times in the history of Europe (from the time of the Visacots), the rabbis had to allow the children (whose fathers were not known) to come into the Jewish community or we would have been decimated.From then on the precedent was set that genealogy could only be established for certain through the mother's side. It was a rabbinical decree. When the Jews were in Babylon, where the Talmud was written, the Roman armies drove Jewish women to be prostitutes for their soldiers who were abroad, just like Hitler did.Since those times, the rabbi has had the authority to decree that if a mother knows it is her child that guarantees that it is a Jewish child.

Getting back to our geographical origins.When the Austrian Empire broke up and Russia became big and powerful and the Turks came down, our ancestors moved into that part of Transylvania that was originally Austria and became Romania. My father, Morris (Moshe) Schecter, had second cousins on his father's side that came from Pasaravia, which was ultimately a province of Russia and a province of Romania, moving with the tide of battle between the two countries.The Turks had part of Romania. The decision to do away with Transylvania came when Turkey was in a position to take away the Crimea and large territory from Russia. It was the time of the Crimean War (1853-85). Either Russia was going to grab up the Dardanelles or Turkey was going to take away the Crimea and have full control of the Black Sea.That is why the European nations (including Britain and France) came in and put a stop to the thing. The Treaty of Paris (1856) let Turkey keep a large part of Europe that they had taken and gave Romania the area of Transylvania.

Many Jews, very late in the 18^th century and before the Crimean War, moved out of this Romanian part of the country because there was a lot of Turkish influence there. Our relatives got out and went from Transylvania, which was under Austria, and came to Russia early in the 18^th century. They couldn't go far into Russia because there was a Pale of Settlement. The Pale designated those regions in Russia in which Jews were allowed in live. The Jewish Pale established in 1792, was made up of the areas annexed from Poland.Even within the Pale, Jewish population was subjected to many restrictions, which were in force until the Russian Revolution of 1917.

So when we got out of Romania, we settled in the Province called Odolia, which became Kamanisk (district of) Podolia, when Russia took over. I was born in Tulchin, in the Ukraine, about nine hours train ride from Odessa. Kamanisk Podol'sk is about fifteen miles from Tulchin, not far from the Romanian border. Muldow was the part of Romania where we came from.In fact, Bubby Nessa's maiden name was Muldover. She had a brother Leib (Muldover) whose sons went to Argentina. I remember having a map with Balta on it, which was where my uncle, your Zadeh, Chaim Lerner came from.He came from Balta when he came to marry our Bubby, my Aunt Rose.

Rose lived with us before she got married. When she got married, she went to live with her husband, Chaim Lerner.Their first baby, a boy died. Joe was born in 1900, and then Deborah, the baby girl that died in infancy after your Zadeh left Russia.The reason he left Russia for America is an interesting one. He used to go to Denmark and buy herring (Jews were herring eaters). The man he worked for used to make him open up the crates of herring and put in more salt and it used to kill him to be cheating the public. He used to say, "Some day"....He was on the liberal side, in favor of the underdog.In fact, he was the first Jewish baker in Montreal to join the Union.

One time he went to Denmark, on the Baltic Sea for Machess herring (the good herring). Only that time when he went to buy the herring he continued on to Hamburg, Germany, took a boat and came to Montreal. He went to Montreal because he had a lantzman there. There were three or four from Tulchin that he knew very well. He went to work for a baker and learned the baking trade, saved money, went into hock for a steamship ticket and sent for his wife who came to Montreal with the two children, Joe and Moe. (There is some discrepancy about the year, but it was probably 1905. Sol's father came out later in 1905-06 and Sol came to Montreal in 1906.)

Rose was six or seven months pregnant when Chaim left. She had a difficult pregnancy with Moe. Not only that, she was heartbroken. Her husband didn't tell her that he was going away to America. And one child died when he was gone. When it came time to give birth, she didn't want to take a chance so she went to her sister's (our house) to live with us.

Years later, in Montreal, she told me what a difficult time it was in Odessa. The houses in Odessa are built European-style. There's a court with an entrance and all the house are inside, tenement-style, with a watchman there. But Jews weren't privileged and had to live in a certain section. So at night when she started her labor, my father called for a cab to go to the hospital. But there was a curfew for the Jews after a certain hour. And this watchman didn't want to let them out. My father said, "Can't you see she's going to have a baby?" "Yes, but I can’t let any Jews out. "He was a little guy and my father was quite tall, and my father yelled at him, "If you don't let her out, I'll break your neck! "My father was meek man but this time he cursed the watchman out. So he let them out, the droshke was waiting outside and they went to the hospital where she had her baby.

My mother, my father, and my Aunt Rose were all in Odessa together. The rest of our family was at our home in Tulchin. In order to get to Odessa from Tulchin, you had to take a drushka from Tulchin to Venetza then go by train to Odessa. My father's father and grandfather were shochet (people who killed meat for kosher). In Europe in those days, a man couldn't come into town and set up shop. These were small, poor communities where there were only enough people for a certain number of shochet to make a living, maybe two or four. So the privilege of being able to live in that community was that profession was passed onto our children - "hazukah" - a privilege or birthright. But my father was left-handed and a left-handed person was not allowed to be a shochet. They tried hard to break him of that but they couldn't. So he really had no profession. "He lived off the air" was the saying.When he got married he had to do something, and through a person who knew somebody there, he became a clerk in a commodity-buying house. He was the dealer for people who came to Odessa to buy wheat. At the time, they used to import lots of wheat from Odessa. My father would go out in the countryside and show the different kinds of wheat stored in elevators. He used to come home to Tulchin for Rosh Hashonah and Pesach. The rest of the time he was out making a living, traveling around showing the wheat for export. My mother was able to live [there] because of the "hazukah". My father sold his birthright to be a shochet to outsiders and bought a house so my mother had a place to live in. That was in Tulchin, where my mother was near her family - her sister Rose (Bubby Lerner), and brothers David and Sol Chaim and her mother, our Bubby Nessa who had given birth to thirteen children, but only these four had lived.So my father sent money from his job in Odessa to my mother in Tulchin.

You must understand the condition Jews liven in there.People worked very hard all week, they lived within a settlement and didn't go out. Business was done on a very different scale. No rip-off, no horse thieves. They didn't take anybody to court. A man was as good as his word.If there was a difference of opinion, they went to a dyan, a learned Jewish judge based in the community. This was only if they couldn't settle the difference of opinion between themselves was all just between Jew to Jew.

A wealthy man used to come every week to see if my mother got the letters from her husband with the weekly check.You see, there was no post office delivery - in fact there were no street numbers, not even necessarily street names - just "over there". So my mother had to go to the post office for her mail.This man would check to see if she received the money and if not, he told her to be sure to come any time to borrow a couple of rubles - not to be without food over Shabbos. Talk about food, a chicken had to go for a family of six over Shabbos. They used everything - the feet, the neck - they had to make it last and it was difficult.Bread you could eat all you like. Sometimes even with a little sugar on it, or schmaltz (melted chicken fat).

I remember the day Aunt Rose and the children came to live with us.I remember in the cold weather were we slept on top of the stove. You climbed up over the oven (it was a king of oven like in bakery) and there was large area like a heath that we could sleep on top of.Our house had four rooms - a kitchen, bedroom, living room, and "olke", which was like a den. I remember when my father used to come home (I was a kid), and Willie and I would sleep in the den so that my folks could have the bedroom, the others the hearth.

Aunt Rose was married the first time when she was about eighteen years old. It was an arranged marriage, but he was "not good" and not a good husband. So she had a "ghet", a Jewish divorce. There were no children. She used to tell me she carried me to "chedar" (Hebrew school) when I was three years old. I don't remember.

Bubby Nessa Muldover married a schoolteacher, a "malamed", by the name of Mayer Soloman Sirota. In Europe there were two kinds of teachers, those that start kids on their studies - that teach them "chumash", and those that teach them Talmud. Zadeh Mayer Soloman was a full "malamed", a great Talmudist, a very learned man.

Uncle Joe and Auntie Pearl Lerner recall...
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