I am a “Horodoker" now
My grandmother grew up in David-Horodok, a Jewish shtetl in Russia where she learned Yiddish folksongs. Her family fled the pogroms and she brought her repertoire of Yiddish folks songs with her.
When I was a kid, we always had shelves filled with blank cassettes. They sat in nice stacks, just lying in wait for when my grandma called for me to bring her a blank tape and the tape recorder. I dreaded this moment. One minute I was splayed out on the couch watching sitcom reruns, and the next minute I was sitting next to my 75-year-old grandmother and her boyfriend Yacov, recording them while they sang their Yiddish folksongs.
She and Yacov called me away from the television every few minutes to help them with the buttons. They would sing a song, and I would stop the tape. Rewind the tape. Listen to their voices and stop the tape. Rewind again. Then start the process over and re-record their voices. I never understood this, tape recorders were fairly simple machines in the late 1970s. These were intelligent people who fled one continent and successfully made their way to another one. At the time, I didn’t understand that she didn’t really need my help; she wanted me to know the songs of the Jewish diaspora, the music of my family that she had brought across the ocean.
I knew all about my grandmother’s Yiddishkeit life in Pasaic, NJ, where her family settled. That she was a well-regarded Yiddish folksinger in the Jewish immigrant community in Pasaic and at Unser Camp and later Camp Boiberik, both camps for Yiddish-speaking adults who cared about maintaining and preserving Yiddish culture. But I didn’t know anything about the place where she learned and gathered these songs - David-Horodok - the place she lived for the first sixteen years of her life.
In the summer of 2019, my cousin Phillipa and I spent a few days with my mom to interview her to make sure we had all the family stories written down. My mom was the last one left in her family and was the Yiddish culture bearer of our family. I had always known my grandma was from David-Horodok and that her family fled around 1917, but I had never seen the name in writing and thought it was one of those hard to spell Yiddish words. I intended to research the town, but between the pandemic, my getting a full-time job, inertia, and a whole range of excuses, I never did. Now that I am on this bagel quest researching Jewish history, I wanted to refamiliarize myself with the details of my mom’s family. So I opened up the ‘family history’ Google folder, clicked the August 2019 interview_with_mom document, and read the first sentence of my notes. “They lived on a dirt road in the David-Horodok shtetl (that is the name of where they lived).”
So last Tuesday, I typed David-Horodok into the search engine and found a treasure trove. I learned that about 5,000 Jews remained in David-Horodok before WWII, but by the end of the Holocaust, they were gone. Almost every Jew was murdered, and of the few that escaped, many went to Detroit. Well, Detroit got my interest; I bagel quested there last Spring. So I googled a little more and found that a David-Horodoker landsmanshaft was organized in Detroit in the 1910s (landsmanshaft is a mutual aid society of Jewish immigrants from the same European town) and has a website with oral history archives and a descendants of David-Horodoker Facebook group. I am now in touch with some of the women who seem to be the main organizers of the group. One of the first emails I got said, “You are a Horodoker now,” which I never knew I wanted to be, but am now thrilled to be. I learned they took a group to Cuba to meet the Cuban Horodokers and a group to Argentina to meet the Argentinian Horodokers (where I have family I have never met). I am digging into the webpage. My cousin and I plan to go to their December annual gathering in Detroit. It is a whole thing. And there is nothing I like better than a whole thing.
A good friend once described me as someone who likes to live my life in regret. Which right now, is a good thing, because the amount of regret I feel that I did not type David-Horodok into the search engine while my mom was alive is large. It will feed my thoughts during my insomniac hours with the details of how much fun my mom and I would have had looking through this website together during the last months of her life. Not to mention my grandmother and aunts and cousins all came to Ann Arbor in 1996 for my wedding, and we could have road-tripped to Detroit. Yesterday, as I aired out these regrets to my best friend, she said something wise. “Yes, the best time to have googled David-Horodok was in 2019 while sitting with your mom and cousin. But the second-best time to have googled David-Horodok was last Tuesday.”
Love it. Now I dig out my grandfather’s memory doc and figure out if there is a similar group for his village. Thanks for the inspiration.
Fantastic! The photos are incredible- I never realized how alike your mom and grandma looked.