Many families have an unlikely hero—someone who quietly
saves the family, so quietly that perhaps most in the family don’t even know
the story of her courage. Sarah
Bordetsky, born in 1906, in the small Jewish shtetl of Gornostaypol, Ukraine,
was one such person. She suffered
tragedy at a young age—when she was around fourteen years old her mother Zlata
was raped and murdered in a pogrom in 1921.
The Ukraine was an extremely unstable place to be after the 1917
Revolution since the Civil War was fought there. For a while the Bolsheviks lost control of
the Ukraine and warring factions of Ukrainian Nationalists and other factions
opposed to the Bolsheviks vied for power and control. In 1921, when the Bolsheviks were able to
vanquish the White army and its many factions, the defeated armies, as they
retreated went into the Jewish shtetls, murdering and pillaging anyone they
could find. Sarah’s mother, Zlata
Oushomirsky, lost her life during one of these pogroms.
Sarah’s father, Lazer
Oushomirsky, had already deserted the family.
Years before, he had left for the US, and remade himself as Louis
Shumer, an elegant and talented tailor.
He had promised to send for his wife and daughter as soon as he could,
but instead, years later, he mailed Zlata a letter of divorce and a five-dollar
bill. After her mother’s brutal murder, Sarah must have felt like an orphan. An
uncle who owned a store took her in and tried to locate her father in
America. Eventually, Sarah’s uncle found
him, and she journeyed alone on the SS Samaria ship to her father in
Boston. In recounting her journey, many
years later, she said so many were sick on the boat and there were many
pregnant women. When Sarah got to
Boston, Massachusetts, her father had remarried, and Sarah discovered she had a
half-sister and a half-brother. Her new
step-mother did not welcome her. She complained she didn’t want another mouth
to feed.
Within a year, Sarah had married
Barnett or Barney Bordetsky, another Russian Jewish immigrant seventeen years
older. Barney had come to America in
1909. Like Sarah, he too had a parent,
his father, murdered in Russia as part of an anti-semitic hate crime. Barney was a master cabinet maker, who longed
to return to the Soviet Union to build the Revolution. In 1931, at the height of Depression, he and
Sarah and their two daughters, ages five and three, returned to Leningrad. Barnett was excited to be part of a
Revolution that had promised equality to all.
He and Sarah were part of the ten thousand Americans who went to the Soviet
Union in 1931 to escape the brutal reality of the Depression. Life in Leningrad was also very harsh. Famine raged in the countryside of the
Ukraine. Starving peasants filled
Leningrad, seeking to escape hunger. Most people lived in communal apartments, a railroad apartment of up to
twenty families, each with a room or two of their own, and all of them sharing
one bathroom. Sarah, Barney, and their
daughters, sick with whooping cough, only stayed in Leningrad nine months. If they had stayed any longer than a year,
they would have lost their American citizenship and never gotten out. They
would have surely been murdered or imprisoned during the height of Stalin’s
purges in 1936 -1938, or they would have died during World War II, during the
siege of Leningrad. Because of Sarah,
the family returned to America before it became too late to get out of Russia.
Sarah Bordetsky died in 1995. In
her last years, she spent many hours humming to herself the Russian love songs
from her girlhood, songs mainly of unrequited love from a country that had not
been kind to her.
In the historical novel, Forget Russia, author Lisa Bordetsky-Williams, explores three generations of family history—the short and tragic life of her great-grandmother, her grandparents’ journeys back and forth from Russia to America, and her own experiences in Moscow in 1980 when she met Soviet Jews, many of them Refuseniks, whose grandparents had been Bolshevik leaders and sympathizers, murdered or imprisoned by Stalin. Forget Russia explores the interlocking connections between people across three generations, across space and time. It looks at the nature of destiny and the ways women in a family seek to transcend inherited trauma.
LINKS
Book website
https://www.forgetrussia.com
Book trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDICgOz-Kqo&t=3s
Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/ForgetRussia
Twitter
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Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Forget-Russia-L-Bordetsky-Williams/dp/1732848041/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=forget+russia&qid=1616968008&sr=8-1
Bookshop
https://bookshop.org/books/forget-russia/9781732848047
B&N
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