Back to Russia!

The second talk I did at the IAJGS Conference in Warsaw last month was Back to Russia!, about the experiences of my grandfather Louis Frankenstein and his cousin Jack Schwartz during the First World War. They had both emigrated from Gombin in Poland to London in 1913, Louis was around 20 years old, Jack a couple of years younger.

During the War they were both caught up in an episode about which little appears to be known, even by historians of the period. This was an agreement between the British and Russian governments for a reciprocal exchange of conscripts, so that Russian subjects living in Britain, and British subjects living in Russia, would be liable for military service in the country they were living in. This agreement was known as the Anglo-Russian Military Service Convention, 1917.

I have only been able to find one book which deals with this episode, War or Revolution: Russian Jews and Conscription in Britain, 1917, written by Harold Shukman, a historian whose father went "back to Russia" under the Convention. Apart from Shukman's book - which is excellent - and a couple of unpublished PhDs, which were also very helpful, I found just a chapter here, a few quotations there, and nothing else. I have even drawn a blank with a number of historians whose main focus is the contribution of British Jews to the First World War, and the effects of the War on the Jewish community - even the specialists were not able to provide any useful leads.

So the story told in this talk is based on what I have been able to glean from these sources (listed at the end of the Handout, which you can read or download), and on documents found as part of my own research into the lives of my grandfather Louis and his cousin Jack. This involved, amonsgt other things, pursuing Freedom of Information requests with the National Archives, and with West Yorkshire Police.

I must say at this point that neither my family nor the Schwartz family had the faintest idea what our respective grandfathers "did during the War". We have a photo of my grandfather in some sort of military uniform, but I couldn't find any record of his military service; he doesn't appear in the British Jewry Book of Honour, which is a thoroughly researched roll-call of thousands of Jews who served in the British Forces in WW1. There is a Jack Schwartz listed in the Book of Honour, indeed there are several, and his family thought he fought in France. He didn't.

Here's the Presentation I used for the talk. Click on the image below, and you will be taken to the Presentation page. You'll be asked to give yourself a name - it doesn't matter what name you use. Then you just click on the 'Slideshow' icon - it's the blue triangle, just left of centre above the slide.  This gives you the Slideshow in all its full-screen majesty. 

You can play through it using the Spacebar, the Return/Enter key, or the right-arrow key. Most of the slides have two or three components that appear in sequence, one at a time. You'll just have to imagine the commentary that goes with them. Jan did an audio recording, but we haven't got round to processing it yet, let alone matching it up to the slides. 

When you get to the end, or feel you can't take any more, just press the Esc key.

Is this the Missing Link?

You know that moment when you're looking for something, and you find something else? Well, this is one of those moments.

Last week I met my Frankenstein 3rd Cousins Eve and Alan for the first time. We're 3rd Cousins because my great-grandfather Jankel Josek and their great-grandmother Rifka Laja were brother and sister, born around 150 years ago in little villages near Gombin in Poland. It turns out they both live about 15 miles away from me, but we had completely lost touch - I don't think our families had had any contact since my grandfather died over 60 years ago.

In the 1900s and 1910s, several members of our Frankenstein family emigrated to England. Jankel and Rifka's younger brother Moszek (Morris) came around 1905, and then 3 of his nieces and nephews came a few years later, all in their teens or early 20s. These were my grandfather Lajb (Louis) Frankenstein, Eve and Alan's grandmother Frajda (Frieda) Rajn, and Jankel Lajb (Jack) Szwarc, son of Bajla, who in turn was a sister of Jankel, Rifka and Moszek. So basically, it looks like each of these four siblings sent one member of their family to start a new life in London.

I know that Louis and Jack arrived in 1913. Whether they came together or separately I don't know. At the moment we don't know when Frieda came, but she must have come before the outbreak of the First World War in July 1914, because travel across Europe would have been impossible after that. In any case, by 1916 all three of them were getting married, all in the same place, at the Philpot Street Synagogue in Mile End in the East End of London, the area that most recent Jewish immigrants headed to on arrival.

When Jack first arrived, he stayed with Uncle Morris, and worked with him in his tailoring workshop, run from his home in Mile End. Jack got married in March 1916 from an address nearby, in Bethnal Green, and at that point he was no longer living with Morris. I know nothing of Louis until his marriage in November 1916, when he was living not in the East End, but across town in the West End. But then his bride was a West End girl, living just round the corner, in the shadow of the Post Office Tower (which of course wasn't there at the time).

I was interested to know more about how the 3 young cousins came to end up in London. Did they come together? Did they stay together? Did Uncle Morris offer lodging and work to Louis and Frieda, as he did to Jack? And why did Louis end up in a different part of town?

Eve and Alan didn't have any details on Frieda's arrival in London and her first few years there. They weren't even sure whether she and Aaron had married in London, or in Poland, before they left. So after our meeting I checked online, and found they had indeed married in London, in 1916. I ordered their Marriage Certificate. I was hoping the certificate would throw some light on where they were living at the time, and maybe help answer some of my questions.

Well it did throw light, but from a most unexpected quarter.

This is from the marriage certificate, shown above. They were both living in Blyth Street, Bethnal Green, but at different addresses. Maybe that's how they met? Who knows.

Wait a minute. I've seen Blyth Street before. Didn't someone else live there at some point .... ?

This is from the 1911 Census for Barnett Frankenstein and his family. It's the same house. Not just the same street, but the same house.

It's only 2 years ago that I first came across Barnett and his family in the records, and I've managed to make contact with a number of his descendants. Together we've been trying ever since to establish whether our two families are connected, and if so, how. There are a couple of circumstantial clues that suggest we probably are:

• Firstly, Barnett gives his birthplace as Gombin, which is our Frankenstein town, and so far all Frankensteins found in the records for that area are members of our family. There are none that aren't.
• Secondly, the Ashkenazi Jewish tradition was to name children after deceased relatives. The effect of this is that names are not repeated from father to son, but usually skip a generation, and are passed down from a grandfather or great-grandfather. Barnett uses exactly the same names for his sons as are repeated throughout the 19th Century - and longer - in my family: Jack, Woolf, Lewis, Isaac. Notice that in this same generation, my grandfather is Louis, and his cousin is Jack Szwarc.

Neither of these on their own would be convincing; together they make a stronger case, but it's still not quite definitive. The coincidence of address looks like a third clue, albeit from 5 years earlier. The case is building.

Well, next up, this is from the Post Office Trade Directory for 1916:

They're still there in 1916, at 28 Blyth Street. So when Frieda got married in March 1916, her fiancé Aaron Hyman was staying with Barnett Frankenstein. Of all the households in London - alright, of all the households in the East End - he was staying with Barnett.

Barnett is family. We still don't know exactly where the link is, but I think there's sufficiently convincing evidence here to meet the Michael Shade Genealogical Proof Standard. 

So this is one of those moments. Hello to a whole new branch of the family. Hello to new cousins. Dozens of new cousins!

David Frankenstein, 1899-1918

Last Thursday we laid stones on the grave of my cousin David Frankenstein, also known as Franks, who died nearly 100 years ago. I say "cousin" for short - he's actually my 5th Cousin; our common ancestors are my 4x-great-grandparents Jakob Wolkowicz and Bajla Moskowna, who were probably born around 1760. I had been tracing his branch of the family, and came across his First World War service record a couple of weeks ago. We were going to Belgium for a few days last week, and sought out the cemetery where he is buried on the way back.

David was born in Hackney, London, in 1899. His grandparents Izrael Frankensztajn and Fejga Szajna Rozenblum had come to London from Plock in Poland around 1870, either just before or just after the birth of David's father Harris. David was the eldest of 5 children born to Harris and his wife Ruth Leapman. The other children all went on to marry and raise families in London, as far as I have been able to track them, but I have not as yet managed to establish contact with any of them.

David was called up to serve in the British Army in October 1916. His service record is very difficult to decipher, but he appears to have been sent to France some time during 1917. He seems to have been wounded at some point, and sent back to the UK. He then returned to France on 26 May 1918, to be posted to the Duke of Wellington's Regiment. This regiment took part in the Battle of the Selle, in late October, and in the attack on Valenciennes, a week or so later.

It was during this attack that David lost his life, "killed in action" on 1 November, along with some 60 of his comrades. They are buried in the municipal cemetery in the village of Préseau, a few kilometres south of Valenciennes. There are a hundred or so war graves in this cemetery, and David's grave is the only one marked with the Mogen Dovid, suggesting that he is the only Jewish soldier buried there.

Ten days later the Armistice was signed, and the War ended. The tragedy was not yet over for David's mother Ruth, however, as Harris died the following March. Within 4 months she had lost her eldest son, and then her husband.

Meet the Szwarc family

The Szwarc family, Gombin (Poland) 1918

I have just this weekend had my first contact with another ‘new’ cousin, Belinda from Israel. This afternoon she sent me this photo of her grandparents, Towje Aron Szwarc and Bajla Frankensztajn, with 9 of their children. Two more had died young, and there was one more to come. Bajla was the sister of my own great-great-grandfather, Jankel Josek Frankensztajn, so Belinda is officially my Second Cousin Once Removed. She is named after Bajla, her grandmother.

The little boy seated on the right, whose feet don’t quite touch the floor, is Belinda’s father Pinhas (Paul), here aged about 5. In the middle at the back stands Jankel (Jack), the oldest son, aged about 23.

I had never seen this photo before, and thought it quite wonderful. Now that Belinda has identified all the people in it for me, I think that, for our family, it is also quite historic. Here’s why.

My own grandfather Lajb (Louis) Frankenstein and his cousin Jack Szwarc both left their home town of Gombin, in Poland, during 1913, and came to London. Louis was 21 and Jack 17. They may even have come together, we don’t know. They both found work in tailoring, Jack in the East End of London, Louis possibly in the West End. They both married in 1916. Jack’s first child Phillip was born in September 1917, and Louis’s first child, Esther (my Auntie Essie) was born in April 1918 (sadly, she died earlier this year, aged 95).

I have been trying to trace their lives in Britain for a couple of years now, and a couple of the documents I have come across deal with their military service during the First World War. In 1917 Russia and Britain, allies in the war against Germany, came to an agreement - the 'Allied Convention' - whereby all Russian nationals in the UK who were eligible for military service, would either have to ‘return’ to Russia and enlist in the Russian Army, or they would have to join the British Army. This included people from Poland, which was part of the Russian Empire.

Louis in the British Army

The vast majority of the Jewish community in the East End of London had come from areas within the Russian Empire, and this agreement was particularly aimed at them. The two cousins, along with thousands of others, had difficult decisions to make. They chose different paths: Louis stayed in the UK and joined the British Army, whilst Jack opted to go ‘back’ to Russia.

Under this scheme, a number of boats, with a few thousand men in total on board, sailed from London to Odessa, on the Black Sea, between August and October 1917, and Jack was on one of those. He eventually returned to London in September 1919.

In the end, he did not fight in the War, because the Bolshevik Revolution occurred shortly after he arrived, in November 1917, and Russia immediately withdrew from the War. I do not know whether the recruits from the UK were expected to carry out some form of military service in the Red Army, after the end of the War, or whether they were freed from service altogether.

The War between Britain and Germany continued until November 1918, so Jack would not have been able to travel across Europe to return to London before then. Until I saw this photo, I had no idea where he went, or what he did, in those two years.

What the photo tells us is that he did in fact return to Gombin, some 1300km from Odessa. Belinda’s identification of the younger children dates the photo in 1918 or possibly early 1919, and Jack's presence confirms this. I think it may even have been taken especially for Jack, so that he could take it back to London as a memento of his family, and to show to his wife. It is quite probably the only photo ever taken of the whole family together. I don’t think they were ever again all in the same place at the same time.