If Jewish surnames represented towns, imagining how the places once thrived before the Holocaust is a sobering reminder of how an entire way of life was wiped out forever
September 30, 2021 14:08
Those of you immune to the appeal of fine speech radio may be unaware of Finkelvitch. On Tuesday mornings on Times Radio it forms a segment of a much grander entity called The Matt Chorley Show. It consists of Lord Finkelstein of Pinner and me in conversation with the loquacious and always witty host.
Anyway, recently Matt has been running with a conceit to do with the fact that his surname is also the name of a town in Lancashire. He’s not from there, but it’s fair to assume that there is some connection so, like US presidents to Ireland and Scotland, he’s visited, got the local football club scarf and everything.
Last time Danny and I did a Finkelvitch we found ourselves musing for a moment on what habitations that bore our surnames might be like. If you travelled between Finkelstein and Aaronovitch at any time in the last century how might you get there, what would you find at either end and would come away with a scarf?
Chorley was a cotton town. Its river is the Yarrow, and rising above it are the West Pennine Moors. Wikipedia tells the questing reader that the town is “overlooked” by a prominence called “Healey Nab”. If you have driven from Manchester to Preston you will have passed close by. Just north of 30,000 people live there. It has two local newspapers and sounds nice.
Aaronovitch and Finkelstein, on the other hand, have to be imagined. The latter is a town in that part of Galicia that was once Austria-Hungary, has been Poland and is now Ukraine. The former is a village in that area of the Baltic hinterland that was once Russia, has been Poland and is now Lithuania. Finkelstein is only overlooked by an old Habsburg fortress, while Aaronovitch is on land so flat that nothing overlooks it. Finkelstein is on a wide river whose name is a single syllable. Aaronovitch has a stream that widens into a pool near where the forest begins.
You should have seen Finkelstein in its heyday! Galicia was never a rich place but it needed its doctors, merchants and teachers and the Jewish community — nearly half of the population provided many of these. They built in stone, boasted a railway station, a cinema even and the main synagogue was a place of beauty. Young scholars came from all over the Empire to study at its yeshivot or its university or its medical school. There were two Jewish newspapers, one in Yiddish. The people were observant but liberal and when they died, intricate headstones were laid in the Jewish cemetery.
To get to Aaronovitch from here you’d take a train from Finkelstein station to Warsaw. Then you’d change at the splendid central station for the service to Wilno. After that you’d be on your own. Perhaps a charabanc was headed into the hinterland, as far as the paved track lasted. After that it’ll be a cart pulled by a mule or even an ox.
Whereas half of Finkelstein was stone, Aaronovitch is all wood. Some of the houses are large, with fenced areas around them full of chickens and the occasional dairy cow. Some are tiny and stagger under the weight of their roofs, and seem on the edge of giving a sigh and falling on their sides. Many are hovels. A wooden synagogue sits near the centre of the village, reached — as are all the dwellings — by a rutted mud path. There are three shops, one for food, one for everything else and the third a tavern. The only language spoken is Yiddish. But if you come on a special day you’ll hear singing, you’ll see dancing and you might even think people could be happy despite the poverty.
Unlike Chorley, if you go back now to find Finkelstein and Aaronovitch they won’t be there. In the town that was once Finkelstein the small museum is run by a charming woman curator who doesn’t seem to know anything about Jews, though the stone synagogue is still there and houses a pharmacy. But walk a little way out to a small plateau of overgrown, fallen stone and you will find yourself reading Hebrew inscriptions.
Of Aaronovitch there is no evidence at all. None. Not a road, not a signpost. My grandparents left the wooden village in 1904 and arrived, illiterate, in the Port of London to make a life in a country they knew nothing about. Those who remained or their children were driven or marched to forest ravines and sand dunes, and no stones were raised.
Some of the Finkelstein people went to Palestine, some to America. Some — give thanks! — made extraordinary escapes. Most went to the ghettoes and thence to the camps and to the same oblivion as the Aaronovitchers.
And that is why there are no Chorleys for Danny and me. It is one, vast gap.
