I dream of Odessa, not the modern city, but the way it was just over a century ago, when my mother Florence Granofsky Arkin’s family still lived there. In his novel, The Five, Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky poured out his feelings of love for Odessa: its reddish yellow cliffs, statues, and palaces, the “forest” of masts on boats in the harbor, and the multitude of languages spoken by sailors. Isaac Babel devoted many of his short stories to Odessa’s vivid characters, such as pious Hasidim, ferocious whip- and saber-wielding Cossacks, and teamsters—the gangsters who ruled the Jewish quarter of Moldavanka.

In fact, in 1897, Jews constituted Odessa’s second largest ethnic group (34 percent)—exceeded only by the Russians at 45 percent. Robert Weinberg, in The Revolution of 1905 in Odessa: Blood on the Steps, explains how Jews exerted considerable power in commerce, factories, workshops, unions, and revolutionary groups. Odessa was only a hundred years old when my grandparents were residents. It was a thriving Black Sea port and one of the Russian Empire’s crown jewels. Yet, by the closing days of the 19th century, overpopulation and competition from other seaports triggered business shutdowns and unemployment. War fever, revolutionary unrest, and anti-Semitism pervaded the atmosphere. These are the conditions under which my Odessan grandparents and their extended, interrelated families—the Granofskys, Shichmans, Bronfeins, and Engers—existed.

Wedding of Sol Granofsky and Annie Bronfein, New York, 1915

The wedding portrait of Grandpa Sol (Shoel) Granofsky and Grandma Annie (Anna, Chana) Bronfein is high on my list of favorite family heirlooms. The newlyweds were surrounded by Granofskys: eldest brother Max was best man, sisters Betty and Celia served as bridesmaids, and Max’s daughters were the flower girls. The Granofsky members of the wedding party made an imposing group.

Annie stands out as the one person I immediately recognized, essentially the same as I had known her in the 1950s. She was frail and a bit timid, even then. I never knew Grandma Annie as being so thin; my mother recalls her as sickly much of the time. Anna’s loving kindness is the quality that really shines through the ages. She was responsible for the policy of open house every day, any time, prevailing at the Granofskys. Their house in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, (then “Odessa-by-the-Sea,” but now the name better applies to Brighton Beach) always seemed to be filled with aunts, uncles, cousins, and older folks, of whose identities I was only vaguely aware. Aromas of Eastern European Jewish cooking wafted through the rooms and then to the outdoors. Annie took on my Aunt Edythe Spruck‘s family, including five boys, as tenants, so clamor, rather than calm, reigned. I Remember Mama was a TV series from 1949 to 1957 that I always associated with my grandma. Although the characters were Norwegian immigrants in 1910 San Francisco, the

Certain anomalies surfaced in my recollections of Grandma Annie. She was the quintessential housewife, as most women of her day were labeled. However, Aunt Edythe’s youngest son, Eugene Spruck, sent me a copy of a most unusual photograph. My grandma appears in the middle of a group of garment workers posing in their workshop. Apparently, she worked in the garment trade for a short while before having children. My mother surprised me by confiding that her mother’s favorite song was “Ochi Chernye” (Dark Eyes), a Russian—some say gypsy—folk song. While I listened to several versions on YouTube, I found it difficult to reconcile the song’s incredible passion and intensity with my grandmother’s quiet and gentle ways.warmth and strength of family ties bore a striking resemblance to those of my own relatives.

Other curiosities appeared when I examined Sol and Annie’s 1915 marriage certificate. She was recorded as Annie Brown, the only place I saw this surname used for her. Maybe Grandma made an attempt to Americanize and simplify her name from the foreign-sounding Bronfein. In addition, the bride’s mother was noted as Yetti (for Ida) Enger, the first time I had heard that surname.

The Bronfeins’ 1906 passenger manifest shows a seemingly intact family making the trans-Atlantic voyage. From my experience in researching immigration patterns, I have found that almost every other family immigrated in bits and pieces, normally with the husband/father coming over first and then buying tickets for the rest of the family’s passage. In this case, Ele (Elias) and Ita (Edith) had the company of my grandma Chana and eight additional children. The Bronfein family patriarch, Elias, must have been quite a successful tailor to have afforded all those steamship tickets.

Maybe he had some assistance from his son Max (call him “Mottel the Tailor”), who had his own clothing business in Manhattan. Max was the Bronfein pioneer, having arrived in America in 1902. My aunt, Sylvia Kerman, explained that Uncle Mottel had fled from Russia to avoid 25 years of service in the czar’s army. I remember him clearly at the Granofsky house as a wizened old man, neatly dressed, one pants leg pinned back, crutches at his sides. Max had lost a leg to diabetes, a Bronfein family curse.

My challenge was to “transport” myself back to Odessa to the time it was the Bronfeins’ home. The opportunity arose in 2005 when I noticed a JewishGen posting for an Odessa Group, formed by Anita Citron through RootsWeb. She had found Galina, who worked in the Odessa archives, to locate and copy documents for group members. Within a few months, for a minimal fee, Galina mailed me two magnificent documents in Cyrillic lettering, the Odessa censuses of 1905 and 1908. The earlier census includes the names of the entire Bronfein clan. Grandma Annie, entered as Chana, age 15, is on the lower right, fifth from the bottom. Her parents’ names and those of 11 brothers and sisters also are listed. A sad note lies next to the entry for sister Maria (Mary): “Died in Odessa, 1900”. Of course, I never knew Mary, my grandmother’s eldest sister, but I did know well her younger daughter, Sophie Weitzman. My parents and I lived in a basement apartment in Sophie’s house in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, for the first year of my life. She always lavished special attention and affection on me. I made it a point to visit Sophie in her old age, when I dropped in on Grandpa Sol in Miami.

Several months ago, my mom’s first cousin, Sid Silverstein (on the Bronfein side), related an amazing story. Mary Bronfein had an elder daughter, whose name, so far, remains unknown. She emigrated from Odessa to Shanghai, China, circa 1937. When the Japanese invasion of China seemed imminent, the Women’s International Zionist Organization helped relocate Jews to Palestine. Sophie learned of her elder sister’s exodus, which included travel in a closed train from San Francisco to Bayonne, New Jersey. There, the two sisters, long separated by time and distance, momentarily greeted each other through the train’s window. Sid believes they later had a proper reunion in Israel.

The middle left side of the 1905 Odessa census lists the eldest brother, Idel Bronfein, born in 1874. The 1908 census shows the same Idel and his wife, Sosia, with their two boys, Iosif and Leivi, and daughter, Miriam. I grieved at finding Iosif Bronfein, grandma’s eldest nephew, on a Yad Vashem Page of Testimony. Submitted by his niece, the entry explains that “Iosif was a metal worker who entered Army, USSR” during World War II.

The website of the Jewish Genealogy Society, Inc. <www.jgsny.org> holds a wonderful database of the names of more than 100,000 Jewish soldiers in the Red Army who were killed. The abstract’s comment, “Missing in Action”, left me wondering: dead? prisoner of war? deserter? I turned to the indefatigable genealogist Stewart Driller, who found the original document from the Central Archive of the Defense Ministry of the Russian Federation (TSAMO). Translated into English, it reads: “Bronfejn, Iosif Ilich. 1900–1944, born in Odessa, called to service at the local army office in Ivanichevskia, Odessa. Foot soldier in the Red Army, rifleman, Missing in Action.”

In Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945, Catherine Merridale explains, “to go missing in action was a dishonorable fate” (p. 113). A missing corpse apparently meant dishonor to the family. The Center for Jewish History in New York hosted a conference on November 16, 2008, at which Jewish veterans of the Red Army who fought in the “Great Patriotic War” (as the Russians call World War II) told their agonizing, but inspiring, tales. Later, I approached one man whose chest was covered with medals. He examined the Iosif Bronfein document and explained, through a translator, that my mother’s first cousin was definitely not a deserter. I hope the matter is settled.

By re-examining the Bronfeins’ passenger manifest, I illuminated a whole new generation of the family. The first entry is for a 65-year-old widow, Sure Injcer, who named the same Max Bronfein as the person to whom she was going in America, so Sure probably traveled with (and possibly was related to) the Bronfeins. The 1910 Federal U.S. Census lists a Sarah Angier, a 70-year-old widow, referred to as “mother-in-law”, living with Elias and Yetta Bronfein and children. With the realization that Sarah was Yetta’s mother (and my great-great-grandmother), I had gone back an additional generation. I made my annual pilgrimage to Mount Judah Cemetery in Queens, New York, where the Granofskys are buried. Near the grave of my mother’s brother, Elliot Granofsky, loomed the massive, tree-ornamented headstone of Sarah Unger (or Ynger)—in the section of the Odessa Mutual Relief Association—who died in 1917 at the unlikely age of 95. The cemetery office listed her as Sarah Zuzir Engier, age 78.

A thorough search of the ItalianGen site <www.Italian Gen.org>, which lists New York City deaths, pointed me to Sarah Suzir. Her death certificate, obtained from the New York Municipal Archives, gave her last address as 37 Clinton Street. I knew Ida Bronfein (whose death certificate named her parents as Morris Engeer and Sarah Shmuklerman) had predeceased her mother by about five years. So, with whom could my aged great-great-grandmother have been living in the interim?

I used Steve Morse’s website <www.StephenMorse. org> in conjunction with the New York Public Library’s map division to determine the assembly and election districts for Sarah’s address. Using this information as a finding aid to the 1915 New York State Census, I learned that Sarah Engier was living with the family of another daughter, Esther Schwebelman. That was when I learned that my great-grandmother, Ida Bronfein, had a sister!

Returning to the Granofsky-Bronfein wedding photograph, I see my grandfather as a man I never knew. Sol projects an image of awesome strength, self-assurance, and determination. Sol/s Hamburg passenger list declares he was a schneider (tailor), a Granofsky family tradition. Like many immigrants, he fought his way up the ladder to success. Grandpa started his business by buying clothing at a “fire sale”, then making sales from a pack on his back. At some point, he acquired a pushcart from which he hawked his goods. By pouring profits back into the business, Sol became proprietor of a men’s clothing store. The Depression struck Sol and his brother, Max, hard, and a 1934 notice in the New York Times proclaimed their bankruptcy. My mom added the fact that the family lost its house, and for several years was forced to crowd into an apartment. Sol eventually triumphed over adversity by purchasing another house and store.

Events in 1905 Odessa prove, even more dramatically, the forcefulness of Sol Granofsky. Grandpa related to me his experiences during the 1905 Revolution and subsequent pogroms, and the efforts of the Jewish self-defense group that killed those carrying out the pogroms:

I remember people marching in the streets, carrying red banners, shouting “Land! Bread! Freedom!” First the Cossacks came. We let them pass. Then the muzhiks (common people) came. We (Jews) were on rooftops with our rifles. We shot them. I saw the red crosses on ambulances taking away the dead people.

Group portrait of a Bund self-defense group at the cemetery with the banner-draped corpses of three of their leaders, Visotski, Sheltipsi, and Yekhiel, 1905

The YIVO website <www.yivoinstitute.org> has an extraordinary photograph of a Jewish Labor Bund self-defense group in Odessa. Although I can’t prove my hunch, I believe the tough-looking teenager, second from the lower left corner, is my grandfather. My sister, Phyllis Stumacher, says Sol told her he was wanted by the czarist police; his nom de guerre (war name) was “Red,” probably more because of his bright red hair than his politics. He spent much of his last five years in Odessa hiding underground.

Most Granofskys, alone or in pairs, filtered into the United States, through Ellis Island in the first decade of the 20th century. Why could I not find the immigration records of my great-grandparents, Chaim and Frieda Granofsky, and some of their children? Two clues helped solve the mystery. The 1930 U.S. census shows the couple as having been born in Romania. I had always assumed that all the Granofskys were from Odessa. My mom mentioned many had settled in Montreal, Canada (and also Israel). At the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) branch in New York, I searched rolls of microfilm about border crossings from Canada into the United States. In these records, I found two sets of passenger manifest cards for Chaim, Frieda, Sosia (Sylvia), Pearl, and Moishe (Maurice, Morris) Granofsky. In 1921, they had tried unsuccessfully to gain entry into the United States, but were “debarred” for reasons I do not know. They tried again the following year and succeeded. The Granofskys had traveled from Montreal, but were born in Ghyash, Romania, a locality that may be Gasca, Moldova, today.

I asked my aunt, Sylvia Kerman, how Sol Granofsky and Annie Bronfein are related. She did not hesitate to answer that it was through the Shichman side of the family and, like my mom, believed they were second cousins. I opened up a new frontier by ardently researching the Shichmans. It is apparent from the marriage certificate of Paul Shichman and Sylvia Granofsky (whose mother was Frieda Shichman) that this was a marriage of first cousins. Such marriages were common in the family. Furthermore, interesting three-family combinations kept cropping up in Nachman (Nathan) Shichman’s documents. His marriage certificate names his mother as Simma Enzierr. Could this have been a daughter of Sarah Enger? But Ida Bronfein was also Sure’s daughter. The multiple sides of my mother’s family seemed to be moving closer together and intertwining! Nathan’s petition for naturalization contains a Shichman (himself), a Granofsky (Grandpa Sol) as a witness, and Louis Silverstein (married to Rosie Bronfein) as the second witness. I was getting close to finding the “smoking gun,” definitive evidence of how my grandparents are related.

Wedding of Morris Granofsky and Ann Kleinman, 1930

I contacted two more of mom’s first cousins: Dan Shichman, son of Paul and Sylvia, and Esther Diamond of the Granofsky line. Dan sent a spreadsheet detailing Shichman family members, as well as a priceless photograph of Morris Granofsky’s wedding, picturing 21 Granofskys and Shichmans. In an hour-long telephone conversation, Esther helped me put together the pieces of the family puzzle: Sarah Enger was the mother of Sima Shichman, the grandmother of Frieda Granofsky, and the great-grandmother of Sol Granofsky. The same Sarah Enger was the mother of Ida Bronfein and the grandmother of Annie Granofsky. The ancient lady Sarah was my grandparents’ common ancestor.

Sylvia Kerman thought deeply at my mention of Sarah Enger’s name. “Yes, sure,” she recalled excitedly. “I was named for her—my birth name was Sarah. Everyone said she was a good woman.” Then Aunt Sylvia breathed life into my ancestor, who was born in 1839. “Did you know that Sarah had her eye on Sol for Annie? From her sickbed, she called them together to hold hands.” I was left utterly speechless!

My Odessa dreams are not only about titanic battles, cargo ships with exotic goods being unloaded in the harbor, and merciless pogroms. I see the faces of real people, my own ancestors, going about their everyday lives. I am comforted by the fact they worked together, socialized with each other, even sometimes intermarried. A friend, Anatoly, recently gave me a CD-ROM about Odessa entitled Odessa: New Monuments, Plaques and Buildings. I love watching the sights of the city, and listening to the sentimental violin music, and I imagine my families in that city.

Jeffrey Arkin