Morris Berlind’s Description of Life in Borshchagovka,
Surviving the 1919 Pogrom, and a New Life in America
(Paper courtesy of Lisa Berlind)
“We never sat on it, of course. For how can one sit on a work of art? But it was awfully nice to look at, and to know that we had a couch.
And that is how Morris, as he does now, brought happiness into our lives, in a house with a ‘Tree that Grows in Brooklyn’ (with apologies to Betty Smith who wrote that book).”
These are the words of Eve Berlind Robbins, which I found in an album put together eight years ago in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of her brother Morris, my paternal grandfather. Morris and Eve were two of Anna and Wolf Berlind's six children. A Jewish family from the Ukraine, the Berlinds were part of the great post-World War I rush of immigrants from Europe. As is clear from Eve's remembrance, the family did not have an easy time in Brooklyn, but no matter how hard they worked and how poor they were, their lives were infinitely better than the situation they had left behind.
Morris Berlind was born on January 8, 1908, in a shtetl called Boorshivka. The small Jewish community had only one paved street, which was lined with shops. One of these belonged to Morris' father, Wolf. Starting at about age six, Morris and his older brother, Hy, went to the cheder, an elementary school where Jewish children studied Yiddish, Hebrew, Torah, and commentary, to prepare for the ceremony of a Bar Mitzvah and to learn the information necessary for taking on adult roles in the Jewish community. Wolf also arranged a private tutor to teach his sons arithmetic, geography, and Russian. While the language of the community was Yiddish, shopkeepers needed Russian and Ukrainian to communicate with the Gentile peasants who lived on the outskirts of the town. Although cheders for girls did exist in some shtetls, Morris has no memory of what kind of education, if any, his sister Bella received in Boorshivka. The two youngest children, Eve and Mollie, were too young for school during their years in Russia.
The rhythm of community life came to an abrupt halt when Morris was ten. In the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917, remnants of the Czarist army roamed the countryside, terrorizing the Jewish communities; the soldiers were often joined by the Christian peasantry living on the outskirts of town. In 1919, Boorshivka fell victim to one of these pogroms. The town was razed, shops and houses burnt, and many people killed, including Morris' maternal grandmother, Haike Rabinowitz. The rest of the family escaped by hiding in a cellar, but after three days, desperate for food, they sent Morris out. He encountered a marauding soldier, and owes his life to the soldier's assumption that the boy was dead after being hit on the head with the soldier's gun and left in a ditch. Morris was unconscious for eight hours and the dent in his skull can still be felt; "That's why he doesn't think straight," his wife jokes.
Boorshivka was irreparably destroyed. After burying the dead, families left to find shelter, food, and survival elsewhere. It was an aimless flight, the only goal being to escape what Morris calls a "burning hell". The Berlinds stayed briefly with Anna's sister Golde in a nearby village before moving on to the capital, Kiev, about a hundred miles north of Boorshivka. There they remained for about nine months, supporting themselves by selling old clothes and artifacts at the Jewish Bazaar. Morris remembers filling up a keg with water and carrying it around the bazaar, peddling "fresh, cold water”. On one afternoon, a Cossack asked for a cup; unfortunately, by that time of day the water was neither very fresh nor particularly cold. The customer took one taste -- and flung the contents of the cup over the boy.
During the stay in Kiev, Morris reached his thirteenth birthday, the age of adulthood, according to Jewish law. The family arranged a Bar Mitzvah for him by walking into the nearest synagogue and telling the rabbi that the boy was thirteen. The ceremony is an important one, but the family, living essentially as refugees, had neither the time nor the money to make it special for Morris.
Wolf had never intended Kiev to be more than a temporary stop. The family thought that they could not find economic stability and a life free from fear unless they left Russia. Wolf hoped that his brother, Moishe, who had emigrated to the United States in 1910 or 1911, would help the family travel to America. In an effort to contact Moishe and to reach a port from which they could find a ship to the States, the Berlinds left Kiev, and slipped across the Dnestr river into Poland under the cover of darkness; they had no papers, so all of their border crossings were illegal. Eventually reaching Bucharest, they established contact with Moishe, and he sent them two thousand dollars to pay for the trip. Moishe had borrowed the money from a relief agency organized by Boorshivkans who had immigrated before the first world war, and now wanted to help their fellow townspeople scattered across Europe. This assistance made the rest of the journey much easier than the Berlinds' previous penniless wanderings. On December 18 or 19, 1921, Wolf, Anna, and the five children boarded a ship in Antwerp which brought them to Ellis Island in early January. Their names were promptly anglicized by the immigration authorities; Morris’ was originally Menasha. However, this was minor compared to the problems the officials could cause for immigrants, especially those who were sent back to Europe for medical reasons or because the quotas of the 1921 immigration law had already been filled.
For their first seven weeks in New York, the Berlinds stayed in Moishe's apartment in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. The neighborhood was populated mostly by Jewish immigrants, many of whom were Russian; it was comparable to the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the same era. Moishe, who was the proprietor of a small grocery store, borrowed more money to set Wolf up in a similar store about a mile away, with three small rooms for living behind it. Despite the crowding and the poverty and the worries about family members left behind, the family was happy to be in the "New World" and to have a chance to start their lives over. Like many Jews, they knew that this migration was permanent, because they had nothing to return to. Morris’ older sister Bella remembered this time for the fiftieth anniversary album in her own inimitable style:
"Well this story goes back to 1922, or 1923, or 1924.
Mom and Dad had their first Grocery store on Livonica and Hopkins Ave.
Right under the Elevated Train.
The noise was unbearable when a "Train" passed by.
But that didn't stop Menasha from "singing".
Yes, that's what I said "singing" to himself.
As soon as Menasha came home from school, he helped out in the Grocery,
by cleaning, sweeping, ... and singing.
One of the customers took Menasha to a cantor, who hired him as a "choir
boy," as soon as he heard him sing.
Since the cantor had a contract in Phila. to conduct the Jewish holiday
services, Menasha went with him to Phila. And of course we were all so
proud of him.
But it didn't last long I mean his Professional Career. The growing up as
a Teenager his voice started to "Change."
As is typical among lower class immigrants, all the older members of the family contributed to the family economy; Anna helped Wolf in the store, as she had done in Boorshivka. Hy and Bella found jobs and worked during the day, attending school in the evening; the younger children went to day school. The public schools in the area, accustomed to accommodating non-English speaking immigrants, had a special class that consisted of nothing but intensive English. At the end of the term, Morris was placed in 5B, the second half of fifth grade. When he was ready for high school two years later, the family, increased in size by the birth of Irene in 1924, was still badly in need of money, not only for daily survival, but also to pay back the money which had been lent to them. Morris was old enough to add his own contribution to the family income, so he changed from day school to the New Lotz Evening School and worked during the day. His first job was making leather wallets in a basement workshop. The involvement of Jews in Manhattan's garment industry is legendary, and Morris found his next job here, pushing garment racks from the manufacturer to the retailer or a warehouse. In 1926 he apprenticed himself to an upholsterer, which proved to be a lucrative profession, as Eve mentioned in her story. Morris earned forty-four dollars a week, and gave forty to his father.
In 1928, at the age of twenty, Morris graduated from high school. After the ceremony, he was waiting on a street corner to catch a bus that would take him out to celebrate with friends. However, when the bus arrived, it skidded in the snow and ended up pinning him against a wall, fracturing his leg. He spent three months in the hospital and three more on crutches. The loss of his wages was a severe hardship for the family. In 1933, Wolf and Morris won a court settlement concerning the accident: three thousand dollars went to the lawyer, $1750 to Wolf because he had been deprived of the wages of his minor child, and $1250 to Morris, which made him quite a wealthy man. He lent three hundred to his brother Hy, who used it to establish a wholesale distributing business. A year or so later, Morris joined "the business," as it is still known in the family despite the fact that it was sold in 1971. Morris was a salesman at first, but he later became a partner. The brothers dealt in hardware, houseware, electrical wiring devices, gardening supplies, and gifts, and did quite well, becoming comfortably middle-class as they worked their way up the fabled ladder of success.
After graduating from high school, Morris had registered at Saint John's University in the city, but his run-in with the bus delayed his college career. After recuperating, he did attend evening classes for a year, but family necessities and the onset of the Depression forced him to drop out again. During the Depression, the upholstery shop had enough work that the men could work two or three days a week; Morris supplemented his income by peddling light-bulbs imported from Japan. He was never able to complete a college degree, but has taken a variety of courses over the years, recently at Elderhostels.
At some time in the late twenties, after the statutory five-year waiting period, Morris became a citizen of the United States. During this same period, in the tradition of Jewish involvement in social and labor issues, he laid the foundations for his lifelong commitment to activism and leftist politics. The immediate benefits, however, came from his attendance at a socialist camp in 1932, where he met Ruth Fischer, a like-minded young woman. On November 29, 1934, during Thanksgiving vacation because neither could afford to take time off from work, they…
[End of extract]
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