Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #20 Zatur'ya

The Zaturensky town

Zaturensky in the Belarus records

If you go to the Belarus database on JewishGen and do a search of Revision Lists for the name "Zaturensky", the results are quite striking.

Zaturenskys in Belarus: 102

. . . of which in Nesvizh: 98

. . . . . . . . and elsewhere: 4

The name is almost unique to the small town of Nesvizh, more or less in the centre of the country.

These Revision Lists were compiled periodically across the Russian Empire, in an attempt to keep track of the population for the purposes of taxation and conscription. The Lists we have for Nesvizh cover most of the 19C, up until the 1870s. Here, as in many places, they are more or less the only records we have, as vital records - birth, marriage & death - are scarce across the whole of Belarus. There are just a handful of late 19C Zaturensky birth records from Pinsk, and I have not been able to identify any members of our family from them. Most of these Pinsk records indicate that the father is registered in Nesvizh, signifying that he was originally from there. This reinforces the impression we get from the Revision Lists  - that Nesvizh is the Zaturensky town.

There is a good reason for that.

The Zaturensky village

Just 15km from Nesvizh (present population 14,000) is a little village called Zatur'ya (pop 450). The name "Zaturensky" signifies "a person from Zatur'ya". Remember that until the end of the 18C, most Jews in the Russian Empire did not have fixed surnames. They generally used patronymic names, identifying themselves as the son or daughter of so-and-so, such as Movsha Khaimovich - Movsha son of Khaim.

However, if someone moved from their native place to a different town or region, their new neighbours would sometimes refer to them by their place of origin. So for example, in a town like Nesvizh, Movsha Khaimovich from down the road in Zatur'ya could be distinguished from Movsha Khaimovich the shoemaker who has always lived round the corner, by calling him Movsha Khaimovich Zaturensky. My great-great-grandfather.

The village is named for a nearby river called Tur'ya - "Za Tur'ya" means "on the Tur'ya". In 1587 it is mentioned in a tax record as an estate belonging to the Radziwills, a powerful Polish noble family. Jews first came into the area from Poland during this period, often brought in by the Polish nobles to act as estate managers and tax collectors. This did not necessarily endear them to the local peasantry.

Our village?

There is a fascinating website called 'Our Village' maintained by a local teacher from a nearby village (Yushevichi/Rakovichi on the map), dealing with local history. It highlights the way the lives of Jews and Belarussians were intertwined in these villages throughout the centuries. They each kept their respective religious and social customs, and never intermarried, but they lived side-by-side, and they were economically interdependent. Their languages, Yiddish and Belarussian, borrowed words and turns of phrase from each other, and even jokes and insults. The website is in Belarussian, but Google Translate does a wonderful job!

From the satellite view, you can see that the village of Zatur'ya consists of a single main street - "Central Street" - with one other street parallel to it for part of its length. I would hazard a guess that the original settlement, in the days of the Radziwill estate, is located just above the crossroads to the left of the photo, with the River Tur'ya just to the left of that. The Jews who worked for the Radziwill estate in the 18C may well have lived just there.

My guess is that some time before the surname decree, ie by the turn of the 19C at the latest, my ancestral family moved from this village to Nesvizh, where they became known as "Zaturensky" - "from Zatur'ya" - and the name stuck.

Leib and his horse

Here's the story of Leib and his horse, from the 'Our Village' website mentioned above.

Sketches of the past: Leib's horse

To this day, when a good horse doesn't want to work, the villagers shout at him that he's like "Leib's horse", and they do not spare the whip. 

In fact, the Jew Leib once had a heavy Belgian horse, to the envy of all the neighbours, very strong, but quite stubborn and slow. Often older people, looking at the coat of their own horse, recalled: "Wow, that was some horse that Leib had!".

Leib loved and respected his horse. Even when it got old.

"Leib, how old is your horse?"

"Twelve."

The following year, Leib was asked again:

"Leib, how old is your horse?"

"Twelve."

And so again for years to come. 

Since then, when an elderly person is confused, they say: "You're as old as Leib's horse!"