I have been interested in genealogy since I was a little boy, when my father would tell stories about the Old Country that he had heard from his father. His family came from the Ukraine, and there were many versions, some of them, it seemed to me, romanticized. My father’s first cousin, Esther, lived near us in Washington, DC, and from time to time, she and her husband would visit us. When I was about 12, I asked if she knew the names of all her uncles and aunts. I supposed that since she was in her late teens when she immigrated to the U.S, she would have known something of the larger family. She named all her uncles and aunts and some of their children. In 1958, this was well before the fall of the Soviet Union, computers, and the Internet, so I couldn’t do much beyond that. Besides, the family wasn’t much interested in what I was finding.
Nevertheless, I made a pest of myself by asking repeated questions. Esther seemed distracted, and finally, almost as an afterthought, mentioned an Uncle Peter who, she said, beat up a policeman and was taken to a police station where he was killed. I didn’t know what to make of this story, and I thought that since she was reluctant to talk about it, she might have made it up in order to get an annoying kid to stop bothering her. Besides, Peter didn’t seem a likely name for a man whose brothers were Jacob, Moses, and Isak.
Fast forward 50 years to 2008. I am working as a social worker in a community mental health agency in Vermont. Over the years I have spoken to many relatives who gave me much information about those who came to America. The Atlantic Ocean was the great divide. I met several relatives on other lines who had come to the United States in the 1970s, but most knew less than I did. During the years of the Stalinist repression, people didn’t talk much about their Jewish roots. By the 1980s, I had given up the idea that I would get much further in my genealogical endeavors.
One day while sitting in my office, I noticed a message on my office telephone voice mail from the executive director of my agency and wondered if I had committed some blunder. As it turned out, he had been contacted by a man from Switzerland who had been surfing the web and found a picture of me on the agency website receiving some sort of award. The man contacted the executive director, who passed along his e-mail. This man lives in Geneva, Switzerland. His name is Jacques Paul Stitelman. Since my name is Paul Stitelman, my interest was piqued. We exchanged e-mails, and I learned that Jacques is an artist who works as a social worker. Since this also is my biography, I began to think that there might be something in genetics after all. After comparing notes, we found that his great-grandfather and my grandfather were brothers. His great-grandfather was the very same Peter (Petakia) that my cousin Esther had told me about all those years ago.
My grandfather, Jacob, immigrated to America in 1904. His brother was murdered in a pogrom in the family shtetl (Yanoushpol, now Ivanopol) between 1903 and 1905. His children and other relatives were severely traumatized—which may be why Cousin Esther was so reluctant to discuss these matters. Jacques’ grandfather immigrated to Switzerland in 1905 and later opened a business in Paris, where they lived when the Nazis invaded France.
In July 2009, Jacques and his daughter visited New York, and we had a family reunion of sorts at my daughter’s apartment in Brooklyn. I invited a niece of my father, and Jacques brought along a cousin of his who lives in Canada, but was raised in Israel. Numerous stories were told. I learned of relatives who had stayed in Russia and were killed by the Nazis in 1941.
We spoke about Jacques’ aunt and father who were involved in the resistance and rescued Jewish children by smuggling them into Switzerland. They spoke of their role in the founding of the Jewish state. I also learned that Jacques’ father, a psychoanalyst by profession, built a boat and sailed around the world for several years.
The Internet has been of inestimable help in our discovery of each other, in filling out our family tree, and finding Stitelmans we never knew existed. But there is also an element of luck in all this—not least of all the luck that in 1904 Jacob Stitelman and his wife left behind a world of hostility and danger and came to America.
Paul Stitelman is a clinical social worker living and working in Vermont. He has pursued genealogy as an avocation for 40 years. He also was trained as an artist and art historian and continues to create art.
