Archive for December, 2011
I first read Russell Hoban in about 1982, at the suggestion of my English literature teacher. Hoban’s post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker is set in East Kent, where I grew up and was attending school, which fact no doubt played some part in the recommendation. Whether it was otherwise an appropriate recommendation for a teenager is rather doubtful (although no more doubtful than the early works of Ian McEwan and the complete oeuvre of Samuel Beckett, which were also on the list my teacher gave me to while away that particular long summer holiday).
It was only when Hoban died earlier this month that I realised that he was not an Englishman but an American, and in fact the American-born child of Jewish immigrants. In the 1930 US census, he appears as the five-year old Pennsylvania-born Russell Conwell (sic), and is described as being the nephew of the newspaper advertising editor Abraham Hochban and his wife Jennie, Yiddish-speaking Russian Jews from Volhynia (or “Poland, Voline”, as it says in the census return). Wikipedia states that Russell was the son of this couple and that Conwell was his middle name not his surname, so presumably there is a clerical error in the census and/or a mistake on Wikipedia.
Abraham or Abram Hochban had married Jennie Dimmermann in Philadelphia in 1915 and became naturalised as a US citizen in 1922.
He had arrived in Philadelphia on 30th November 1913, on board the “Frankfurt” from Bremen in Germany. He appears in the incoming passenger list as Avram Gochbahn, not Hochban or Hochbahn. It is always worth remembering when undertaking genealogical research involving Russian records that the Russian alphabet lacks the letter H and uses the G instead. It is therefore not unusual to find names which we expect to begin with an H to be shown with a G in Russian language records and in English or German language records for which Russian language documents have been the source (as is the case here). Avram is recorded as being aged 19 (i.e. born circa 1894), single, and a clerk; his address (and that of his next of kin, his mother) appears to be Warschau (i.e. Warsaw).
The naturalisation papers give his date of birth as 3 June 1894. The passenger list states that Abraham had been born in Ostrog in Volhynia (now Ostroh in Ukraine). However, the naturalisation papers suggest that he was actually born in “Orgeiw”, Bessarabia (today Orhei in Moldova) but had been resident in Ostrog before emigration. Where was he actually born? Research would be necessary to determine this but it may be that Orhei, which like Ostrog had a thriving Jewish population, is the better candidate. In this instance, the need for caution is thrown up by the discrepancy in the records but, even where records appear consistent, one should still be cautious – across the Russian Empire the names of towns were often also the names of provinces or districts, and it cannot be automatically assumed that the town itself is intended.
The latest Bluebird Research Google Map is a work-in-progress showing the location of the Yezidi villages of Kurdistan. At present, the map shows primarily those villages which are extant and were not destroyed during the post-WW2 era in Iraq, when Yezidis (and other Kurds and minority groups) were subject to periodic persecution, sometimes of genocidal ferocity, by the Baathist state in Baghdad.
Sites of destroyed villages will be added where they can be ascertained. These will be evident when the map is viewed at higher magnification – the settlement will often appear as if rubbed out and few if any traces may be visible on the satellite image.
In addition, the map shows some of the modern collective villages into which Yezidis (and others) were forced during the Baathist rule. Generally, the population of four or more villages were deported from their centuries-old traditional settlements in the mountains and rehoused in planned but usually poorly executed collectives on the plains. Sometimes the collective would be named after one of the source villages; alternatively, different quarters of the collective might be named after the razed mountain villages, with the former inhabitants of each living in the eponymous neighbourhoods.
The location of the Yezidi villages of the Republic of Armenia is shown on Bluebird Research’s Google Map.
Old and new names of the Yezidi settlements are given. Armenian script can be and is transliterated into the Latin alphabet in a number of different ways, and the map legend gives some variants as well the standard modern name form.
If a village is shown without comment, it means that it is understood to be a wholly Yezidi village, as is the case especially with the two clusters of villages in Aragatsotn province, respectively west of Talin and around Alagyaz.
Some of the ancient Yezidi places of habitation in Aragotsotn, especially those NE of Mount Aragats, have been claimed to date back to the 11th century (and certainly they date back to at least the 16th century). Others are of much more recent origin, having been settled during or after the second decade of the 20th century, when Yezidis fled oppression in Turkish lands in eastern Anatolia.
One old Yezidi village in the Marmarik valley has not been located exactly, nor its modern name ascertained. This is Soukh-Bulakh (or -Bulagh, the Turkic word for a spring), which appears in a 19th century Russian gazetteer as a small Yezidi settlement of 16 “hearths”. It is possible that the site has been abandoned. Please contact us if you know the location of this village.
Bluebird Research would be pleased to hear from any family historians researching Yezidi ancestry.