Documenting Maine Jewry : Family Recollections

THE ALPERTS AND COHEN FAMILIES OF BANGOR
by Jordan S Alpert, San Francisco, 1990

The history of the Alperts and the Cohens may be divided into two distinct though overlapping periods. The European era spanned more than one hundred and twenty years beginning in the 1820's with Reuben and Soshe Esther Alperowitz of the Vilna gubernia and concluded in 1942 with the deaths of their last known descendants to remain in what had become the Soviet Union. The emigration of their children and grandchildren who first settled in Bangor Maine in 1882, and who became known as Alperts and Cohens, marked the beginning of the American period.

After piecing together fragmentary evidence accumulated from a wide variety of sources, a portrait emerged of a large family that lived and worked in the forests of Lithuania and first came to Maine six years before my grandfather was born. The portrait, however, was dependent upon the reconstruction of historical events and relationships for which critical data were often listed or missing.

Securing information about the generations born prior to 1900 was especially difficult. Lithuania was governed by Poland until the late 18th century when it was absorbed by Russia, made independent in 1918, returned to Poland in 1920 as a result of the First World War, restored to independence in 1939, annexed by the USSR in 1940, occupied by the Germans in 1942 and then reoccupied by the Soviets in 1945. What few civic records that may have been kept by the provincial governments under which the family resided were probably lost during the First World War and the ensuing period of revolution, civil war and war between Poland and the Bolsheviks. These events caused massive damage to the Lithuanian and Belorussian territories and undoubtedly wreaked complete havoc on the facilities where such records would have been stored. The materials that survived were then subjected to the ravages of the German invasion. As a result, in most cases all that is known about the lives our oldest ancestors are the few fragments handed down to those who now constitute the family elders, nearly all of whom were born in this country after 1910.

The absence of Russian public records meant that vital statistics including birth, marriage and death dates had to be estimated for nearly all non-immigrant ancestors. Most estimated birth dates were calculated by subtracting twenty years from the birth date of the subject's first born child, if known. For example, the birth date of Yankev Alperowitz is unknown, but his first child, Samuel H., was born in 1873 and as a result, Yankev's birth date has been estimated as 1853. The average marriage age used in this calculation is nineteen and the assumption is that a child was always born within one year of the parents' wedding.

The year of death has also been projected in situations where enough information was available to allow for the formation of a hypothesis. It has been deduced, for example, that Reuben Alperowitz's death occurred in 1890 based on the incidence of grandsons bearing his name. Of Reuben's male grandchildren, none were given his name until the births of Yankev and Itka's youngest son in 1891 and Samuel M. and Dora's first son in 1892. Both grand- sons emigrated to Bangor, where each became known as Robert Cohen. The naming of Nathan and Rosa Cohen's youngest sons, Samuel (b.1883) and Louis (b.1886), as well as Maishe and Merke's youngest sons, Israel (b.1884) and Isidor (b.1886), seemed to eliminate Reuben's death as having occurred until after they were born, as at least one of them would have been named for this grandfather. These methods don't apply equally well to all situations where dates are unknown, but they do produce reasonable date ranges in most instances.

Much of the information compiled about the activities of the earliest family members in America derived from the oral accounts of their children and grandchildren. These were supplemented and verified, when appropriate, by sources such as naturalization petitions, passenger ship arrival records, birth, marriage and death certificates, census records, city and regional directories, newspaper accounts, personal memoirs and letters. These sources, however, presented a variety of problems. The Federal Census, for example, reported the name, age, occupation, nationality and citizenship status of each resident, but this data often reflects the difficult conditions under which it was collected. Census takers had to record facts from wary residents who spoke little or no English; and many of those who could communicate often provided vague or misleading information about birth and immigration dates of household members thinking that the authorities were gathering statistics that could result in the kind of harassment they had left behind in Russia. (The specter of military service and discriminatory taxes was always present in the minds of villagers when the census takers came calling in Russia. Parents often did not register their children and otherwise mentioned as few members of their household as possible.) In other instances only a child was available to supply the requested information and this went into the record books whether it was accurate or not. As a result, numerous immigration and birth dates in these sources conflicted with those found elsewhere.

Naturalization petitions, on the other hand, included facts supplied directly by the applicants under circumstances that called for impeccable accuracy. Unfortunately there was not a land rush attitude among the immigrants to become citizens. A vague mistrust of government that carried over from the old country, as well as the perception that citizenship wasn't necessarily valuable, left many immigrants as resident aliens for their entire lives. (Citizens could vote but benefits such as social security did not appear until the 1930's.) Moreover, the petitions of those who did apply for naturalization did not automatically yield bountiful information. Each state generated their own forms and usually required very little personal history from the applicant; it was only after the turn of the century that the federal government issued a standardized form that requested detailed background information from each applicant.

The problem of identifying and then following the movements of family members was exacerbated by the number of names affixed to the same person. The casual way in which names were changed in 19th century Russia, the renaming of the immigrants when they were processed as aliens, the variety of personal names, some Yiddish and others Hebrew, made the task of tracing individuals through avenues outside of the documents available in Bangor itself almost impossible. (The practice of maintaining two names, one for civic use and the other, a sacred name for use in the synagogue and in all Hebrew documents, dates back hundreds of years.) When relatives with identical names were discovered in the same town, or if an individual simply disliked the name that was first selected or had been assigned, yet another change would be initiated. For example, despite the fact that Samuel M. Cohen's 1893 citizenship petition recorded this name, he was listed in city directories of the time as Simon Cohen and then, including the 1900 census, as Simon M. Cohen. He was finally listed as Samuel M. Cohen, but no one knows what the ''M'' signifies except that it was probably added to set himself apart from nephews Samuel H. and Samuel N. Cohen. Simon Cohen's eldest son, Samuel (b.1892), finally added a ''Jr.'' to his name to distinguish himself from his cousins and uncle. (Both Samuel M. and Samuel H. bore the Hebrew name Simcha, which means ''joy.'' Samuel M. was affectionately known by his greatnieces and nephews in Bangor as the ''Fette Shimsel'' whereas Samuel H. was known to his contemporaries strictly as ''Sam.'' Because the personal names used in Europe and carried over to this country were often just a contraction of their sacred names, it was common that the same name was used by different people though their original names were different. Simon Alpert, whose Hebrew name was Shimson, not Simcha, was, like his uncle, called ''Shimsel.'') Other alterations were more mysterious.

It is almost impossible to present an untangled picture of the names our ancestors went by in the old country, or the names their American descendants knew them by. Sometimes names were transformed on documents for ancestors that never came to America simply so that these would conform to the names their descendants had adopted. The results included Yankev and Itka Aperowitz being converted to Jacob and Ada Cohen, and Reuben and Soshe Esther Alperowitz to Robert and Esther Cohen - the latter adjustment being made by Isidor Alpert when he supplied the personal information for his uncle Samuel M. Cohen's death certificate in 1928. (Nathan Cohen's 1901 death certificate listed his father as Reuben but the space for his mother's name was left blank.) Different children of the same European parents compounded the problem by anglicizing the names of these parents in as many ways: Itka became Ada, Edith, Edna or Etta or depending upon the translator. At least half of Merke Alperowitz's descendants referred to her as Miriam (Merke is an old Russian-Jewish name that is also used as a term of endearment), whereas the other half had never heard this name. One granddaughter, Lillian Heller, who was brought up by Merke, was unaware that other descendants had translated this to Miriam. Familiar names have been used in appropriate settings within the text and anglicized names - the official names taken in this country - have been used in charts and the family index. Original names, if known, have been included in parentheses where applicable.

A number of crossroads were reached during the early stages of my research that required decisions about what the perspective of this history should be. I had originally intended to write about individuals and families, not about Russians, Lithuanians, Poles and Jews; because the struggle between the minority nationalities of Eastern Europe and their Russian masters was central to the issue of immigration, it soon became apparent that it was impossible to separate the family from the conditions under which they lived. One story could not be told without the other. The concurrent breakdown of Eastern European signature Jewish orthodoxy made the period between 1882 and 1918, when the Alperts and Cohens came to this country, one of the most cataclysmic in Jewish history.

Although, for the most part the Alpert-Cohen ancestors were young when they came to this country (their average age of under twenty made them a forward-looking and ambitious group) too many individuals cited the experiences of their parents and grandparents that had direct corollaries in the themes I found in the histories of Russia and Poland to imagine that the past released its grip the moment the immigrants set foot in America. It is regrettable that the limitation of space has forced me to compress several hundred years of complex activity into a few pages.

The Alpert-Cohen story begins with the lives of Reuben and Soshe Esther Alperowitz and concludes with a brief survey of the activities of their grandchildren and most of their great-grandchildren. Whether by chance or design, it was Bangor, Maine where the first Alpert-Cohen �migr� put down roots and it was Bangor and its environs where more than half of the descendants of Reuben and Soshe Esther were born and raised. For this reason, this book also reviews the lives of all of their Bangor descendants born prior to 1920, regardless of which generation they may fall. (It should also be mentioned that I set out to be as democratic as possible in terms of the space allocated to each of my subjects, but this goal was not always practical. While, for example, little enough is known about the personalities and activities of Reuben and Soshe Esther's seven children, in the cases of Chivia and Sarah virtually all of the information that has survived focuses on their husbands. As for the generations that are closer to us in time, I have recorded what I have been told. Hence, when the salient facts of a family member's life have been presented in terms of the achievements of their spouse, or if a husband and wife's careers were intertwined, or if their relationship had a special significance to the overall direction of the family, this is what has been included. Consequently, with the exclusion of Reuben and Soshe Esther's children and grandchildren, spouses are generally not reviewed.)

The migration to Bangor spanned a period of nearly forty years that, for the sake of comprehension, has been presented by surveying the activities of the nucleus group, the Nathan Cohen family, and then expanding the discussion to reflect the arrival, residence and occupations of Nathan's brother, nieces and nephewsm some of whom were at first associated with Nathan's children. These relatives came based on their age and the worsening social conditions in Russia.

The ten year gap between the arrival of Nathan and his brother Samuel M.; the decade that passed between the arrival of S.H Cohen in 1889 and his sister Alice; the twenty-four years that elapsed between Nathan's settlement in Bangor in 1882 and Isidor Alpert's relocation from New York to Maine in 1906 - these constituted the waves of immigration to Bangor. In all, the lives of over one hundred people are reviewed, beginning with the patriarch and matriarch themselves, and traversing the expanse of forty-four grandchildren born over forty-three years. Out of this effort, it is hoped, will emerge a greater understanding of the challenges faced by our ancestors, and the sacrifices they made for us.

Like most families who were classified as Russian when they arrived on these shores, the Alpert-Cohen immigrants had traveled from lands that had become part of the tsarist Empire only a few decades before their departure. As residents of the Lithuanian province of the Polish Commonwea1th, which was a hybrid of the old Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland, they had fallen under the rule of the tsars with the final partition of Poland in the last decade of the 18th century.

Although Polish control had been a fact of life in Lithuania for over two hundred years prior to the Russian conquest, close ties had existed between Poland and Lithuania since the 14th century when the Polish gentry and Lithuanian aristocracy obtained rights in each other's country. A political alliance was formed in 1401 which was followed by the establishment of a single dynasty fifty years later. Separate civil structures and armies were still maintained but after another in a series of wars with Muscovy (O1d Russia) left Lithuania's treasuries depleted, political unification with Poland became complete. The Union of Lublin (1569) established a common legislature and government, but allowed Lithuania to retain the status of a separate duchy as well as its own laws.

By the end of the 18th century the economic and political condition of Poland had deteriorated to the point that the commonwealth's revenues were forty times smaller than those of France and ten times smaller than those of Russia. When other monarchs were creating effective systems of taxation and large armies, the kings of Poland had an inadequate budget and a small army and thus were unable to stop the military advances of Austria, Prussia, and Russia. In three actions between 1772 and 1795 Poland was divided between her more powerful neighbors, with Russia taking almost 62 percent of the land and 23 percent of the population.

Theoretically, the tsarist government allowed Poland to maintain autonomy as an independent kingdom with Polish continuing as the official language, but with the local administration employing pro-Russian Poles. The long term strategy, however, was to fully integrate the Poles into the Russian mainstream - an objective that was impossible to achieve if for no other reason than the historic antagonism that existed between the Polish and Russian nationalities. Poland's large Jewish population was especially problematic for the tsarist government in that Jews had not been allowed in the Russian Empire for over two hundred years. This policy originated during the 15th century when Russia, which had been a collection of warring principalities, consolidated under one ruler and one religion. The result was that Muscovy, which had adopted Greek Orthodoxy, came to regard herself as the one repository of True Faith in the world and as the successor of both Judaism, which was held in contempt, and Catholicism, which was viewed as degenerate and corrupt. A succession of tsars then issued a variety of edicts designed to prevent the ad- mission of alien elements into their society. Vladislav (1610-1613), the last of the tsars to be elected, agreed in advance that no churches of the Catholic or any other non-orthodox denomination would be allowed in Russia and that Jews were not to be admitted to the Empire whether on business or for any other purpose, whereas Elizabeth Petrovna (1741-1762) expelled the few thousand Jews that were absorbed with the annexation of the Ukrainian and White Russian territories.

At the first partition of Poland in 1772, Catherine II (1762-1796) issued a proclamation welcoming her new subjects and promissing the continuation of all the rights they had enjoyed under their previous rulers. For the Jews, the most important of these were immunity from enserfment and the privilege of maintaining their own laws and tribunals under the Kahal, a self governing body established by a Polish charter in 1551. By the third partition (1795) the legal and social autonomy represented by the Kahal was no longer acceptable to the Russian government; however, since this organization, which also acted as the tax collecting authority in Poland, contributed enormous sums to Russia's treasury it was allowed to survive, but only within a designated area. In view of this and to placate merchants who protested business competition from newly arrived Jews, the stage was set for the establishment of the notorious Pale of Settlement.

The Pale was, in effect, a giant ghetto comprising some 386,000 square miles, or 5 percent of the Empire, to which Jews were restricted to living. Alexander I (1801-1825) originally retained the old code of laws of Lithuania within the Pale, hence the shift in government did not have noticeably harsh effects. Jews were allowed to live in two districts outside the Pale, could buy land and were allowed into schools. After the defeat of Napoleon those circumstances changed. First, Alexander initiated actions to limit Jewish economic activities in the hope that this would break down their historic isolationism, then old restrictive laws that had been loosened were suddenly enforced and Jews were expelled from the regions they had been invited to occupy only a few years before.

The accession of Alexander's brother, Nicholas 1 (1825-1855), initiated an era of ultra-reactionary rule. Firmly dedicated to the principles of Orthodoxy, autocracy, and the national way of life, Nicholas imposed numerous measures, including strict censorship, to stop the influence of Western ideas. Believing that military duty would break down the separatism of alien groups, Nicholas required twenty-five years service from all males above the age of eighteen. Jews, who had been exempt from service until 1827 by payment of a special tax, were also liable on a selective basis for an additional six years duty at special training camps which commenced at age twelve. In a confidential memorandum, Nicholas wrote that ''the chief benefit to be derived from the drafting of Jews is the certainty that it will move them most effectively to change their religion.�1 But the Jewish reaction to this policy was to resist even more stubbornly the tsarist intrusion into their way of life. In the words of historian Simon Dubnow, Jewish life was �dominated by rigidly conservative principles.

The old scheme of family life, with all its patriarchal survivals, remained in force. In spite of the law, embodied in the Statute of 1835, which fixed the minimum age of the bridegroom at eighteen (and that of the bride at sixteen), the practice of early marriages continued as theretofore. Parents arranged marriages between children of thirteen and fifteen. Boys of school age often became husbands and fathers� The slightest deviation from a custom, a rite, or old habits of thought was met with severe punishment. A short jacket or a trimmed beard was looked upon as a token of free thinking. The reading of books written in foreign languages, or even written in Hebrew, when treating of secular subjects, brought upon the culprit untold hardships. The scholastic education resulted in producing men entirely unfit for the battle of life, so that in many families energetic women took charge of the business and became the wage earners while their husbands were losing themselves in the mazes of speculation, somewhere in the recesses of the rabbinic literature.

In Lithuania the whole mental energy of the Jewish youth was absorbed by Talmudism. Mentality, erudition, dialectic subtlety were valued above all else. Yet, as soon as the mind, whetted by Talmudic dialects, would point its edge against the existing order of things, or turn in the direction of living knowledge, of �extraneous sciences�, it was checked by threats of excommunication and persecution. Instructive in this respect is the fate of one of the most remarkable Talmudists of his time, Manasseh ben Joseph of Ilya.

The rabbi, born in 1767 in Smorgon, was a disciple and intimate of the Vilna Gaon (see below) which alone would have qualified him fro renown, but he went on to become famous in his own right. Dubnow writes that �while keeping strictly within the bounds of rabbinical orthodoxy, whose adepts respected him for his enormous erudition and strict piety, Mannaseh endeavored to widen their range of thought�� His was an unconventional voice, advocating social responsibility and the teaching of mathematics and the sciences in religious schools during a time when such ideas were violently opposed by the ultra-orthodox rabbinate. Manasseh�s literary debut in 1807, The Solution to the Problem, gave �vent to his grief over the fact that the spiritual leaders of the Jewish people kept aloof from concrete reality and living knowledge.� When the book appeared, many rabbis burned it and made every effort to suppress it. This was just the beginning of his troubles. �Ten years later,� writes Dbunow, �while residing temporarily in Volhynia, the hot-bed of hasidism, Manasseh began to print his religio-philosophic treatise, The Teachings of Manasseh. But the first proof sheets sufficed to impress the printer with the �heretical� character of the book, and he threw them together with the whole manuscript into the fire. The hapless author ten managed with difficulty to restore the text of his �executed� work, and published it at Vilna in 1822. Here the rabbinical authority pounced upon him.� The book had not yet left the press when the rabbi of Vilna demanded that unless certain revisions were made the book would be publicly burned in the synagogue yard. Manasseh relented; however during his finals years he published two pamphlets in which he harshly criticized the shortcomings of Jewish life, the early marriages, the one-sided school training and the fear of modern knowledge. Manasseh�s last post was as rabbi of Smorgon in 1827, but he resigned after a year, refusing to be involved in the conscription of Cantonists. He died in 1831 and his writings were lost in a fire which broke out in Ilya in 1884.

The battles that raged between the few progressives such as Manasseh and the traditionally orthodox rabbinate were mild compared to the uproar caused by Hasidism, which espoused a more emotional and less intellectual approach to religion. Beginning in the mid-18th century this revivalist movement initiated by the charismatic Israel ben Eliezer, who became known as the �Baal Shem Tov,� swept through Eastern Europe and was embraced by millions of Jews. But Hasidism never gained many followers in Lithuania where the forces of rabbinic Judaism were the most entrenched. Besides introducing what Vilna�s rabbinic establishment regarded as all kinds of heresies into religious practice ''many (Hasidim) punctuated their prayers with shouts and shrieks And worked themselves up to such a state of exaltation that they danced and sometimes even turned somersaults.''

Controversies between religious factions often assumed regional lines, and these formed the basis for important distinctions between Lithuanian and Polish Jews of a hundred years ago. As Lucy Dawidowicz observed in her memoirs of Vilna, �aside from the distinctive dialect of their Yiddish speech which immediately identified them� Lithuanian Jews also fashioned a temperamental typology, which the Vilna Jews embodied par excellence.� These characteristics were strange and annoying to the Polish Jews who were more disposed towards Hasidism. Jacob Maratek (1883-1950), a Polish village Jew who had only war s met one Litvak prior to his conscription into what he calls �Fonya's [the tsar's] army� recorded his impressions of the Lithuanians this way:

For a Jew in Fonya's army I could hardly have been better situated. Yet, I must tell you, I felt very much estranged in my new position. Why? Because most of my new comrades were not at all what I was accustomed to think of as Jews. What they were was Litvaks, Jews from Lithuania, and not only did they seem to me, in my Polish innocence, not to look like Jews, but at first I had such a hard time understanding their nasal crabbed Yiddish, I preferred to converse with them in Russian. But my problems want deeper than that.

Back in Warsaw, you see, almost the only Litvak I had ever known was this professional labor organizer, a man as cold blooded as any gentile, who had taught me how to arrange work stoppages, lockouts, strikes, acts of sabotage, and even how to intimidate (that is, beat up) such class enemies as strikebreakers and stonyhearted bosses.

Exposure to such a hard-boiled character had of course done little to erase my childish prejudices, born of such expressions as �I saw two Jews and a Litvak,� or �a Litvak has a cross in his head� (based on the suspicion that the Litvak's rigorous emphasis on study and religious observance, without the Hasid's sense of mystical joy, would one day surely lead him to apostasy); either that or, on the ungenerous charge that a Litvak is so calculatingly pious, he repents even before he sins.

But the most painful social barrier between the Litvaks and me arose from the unhappy fact that - in contrast to myself, a runaway from yeshivah at age twelve there wasn't one of these fellows who couldn't learn.

I don't mean just the Five Books of Moses with the commentaries of Rashi, with which, thank God, I was as familiar as a Jewish child nowadays is with the baseball scores. But the only ''learning'' my Litvak comrades considered worthy of the term was a total immersion in the labyrinths of the Babylonian Talmud�

For an adult observant Jew to have remained as unschooled as I, of course, was not merely a challenge to them, but a provocation, and, in their one-track-minded Litvak way, they were resolved to elevate me to their own level. Thus, for instance, one me while rushing to get ready for rifle inspection, I momentarily misplaced my watch, and one of the Litvaks found it.

�don't ask what I went through before they'd let me have it back. After all, how could they return my property until due determination had been made whether or not it constituted a ''found object�, that is whether I had dropped it or deliberately put it down, and whether on private property or in the public domain, and what unique identifying marks, if any, I had placed upon it, and whether the loss of my watch was analogous to the legal fiction concerning lumber displaced by the tides of a river, and whether or not I could be reasonably supposed to have already �despaired� of finding my lost property � in which case it would have been rendered hefker, ownerless.

They were not sadistic; they merely fell like hungry wolves upon the slightest pretext to relate their learning to a real-life situation.

Far from being brutalized or corrupted by Fonya's army, these wretched Litvaks, even at bayonet practice, out the rifle range, or on cross country rides, would unreel talmudic pros and cons as lightly as a blacksmith hammering horseshoes. And they had yet another intolerable trait. Not one of them was descended from anything less than a rabbi. For no amount of money would you have found among them one man who would admit to descent from ordinary Jewish parents.

Worst of all, as my brother Mordechai resignedly pointed out to me, they were probably telling the truth. Their part of Lithuania indeed was renowned as a district where, as they say, even a dog could �learn�, and every Jew was as steeped in ancestral merit as a pig is steeped in mudd.

Just how enduring the differences between Polish and Lithuanian Jews were may be judged by a portrait of a 19th century Lithuanian town in Worlds That Passed, whose author dedicated an entire chapter to defending the townspeople against Hasidic detractors. The author states that �the Lithuanians indeed hated the hasidic rabbis� They regarded them either as lunatics or as swindlers who exploited the ignorance, stupidity and superstition of the simple folk.� But this was because �the scholar of Lithuania was by nature a sober man with a logical head, and he weighed in advance the pros and cons of his acts. Fro a man of brains with a keen intellect he had deep respect. He would ever give precedence to the man of intellect over the most God-fearing man, who runs to the Mikvah (ritual bath) every little while and imagines that he has thereby become the intimate of the Almighty.� Moreover, �it is a gross error � and the adherents of Hasidism have fallen into it � to assume that the Lithuanian Jew naturally was a cold-blooded and dry individual, a man incapable of enthusiasm or exaltation. The Lithuanian Jew is capable of ecstasy and exaltation as is the most ardent Hasid, but he grows enthusiastic over a nice point of casuistic interpretation that calls for great mental effort��

The dimensions of the conflicts surrounding Hasidism were far more divisive than can be recounted here, except to note that the Gaon of Vilna, Elijah ben Solomon, who was regarded as the spiritual leader of 18th century Lithuania, forcefully opposed the influence of Hasidism; and that the gaon, whose character type was the exact opposite of the Baal Shem Tov�s, was known as an ultra-rationalist. (Gaon is a title that means �eminence.� Historian Israel Cohen observed that �in a range of knowledge, profundity of learning, intellectual grasp and originality of research, [Elijah] towered not only above all his contemporaries but also above all rabbinic scholars of five centuries before him; and he has not been surpassed or approached since.�) The influence of the Gaon�s teachings endured in the religious character of Lithuanian Jewry for many decades after his passing and thus it seems likely that the traits of dryness and intellectualism which continued to be associated with the Litvaks, even after rabbinic Judaism had eroded, originated at least in part with him. Indeed, this perception of the Litvak continues to this day for as one contemporary author states, �the work [Litvak] has a pejorative or ironic ring, and it usually refers to personality trains popularly associated with the Lithuanian Jew: skepticism, coldness, rationalism. Sometimes the word is used for a person bearing those traits even when he is not from Lithuania.�

The threat of heresy that Hasidim represented may have preoccupied the religious authorities, but this was overshadowed by the much greater threat to the survival of Jewish youth posed by the prospect of twenty-five years service in the tsar�s army. Military life in Russia incorporated hardships that were unknown elsewhere in Europe, with the army in many respects operating as a reformatory institution. (Nicholas believed that the army was a perfect environment to iron out the wrinkles in wayward Russians, including the Jews who were forced to provide conscripts at a rate far greater than their proportion to the population as a whole. Horror stores abounded of forced conversions where the use of torture to induce victims to be baptized was commonplace.) Baron van Haxthausen, a Prussian military man who spent 1843-4 traveling through Russia, observed that the army was composed of criminals first, �then stupid, lazy, and infirm persons; and last of all respectable workmen. The recruitment thus, as it were, removes the scum from the country, and transfers it to the army; but all these classes of recruits have one thing in common, that none has the slightest inclination fro their new heroic career.� In the early part of the 19th century a 50 percent mortality rate among first year recruits led to the Russian peasant proverb �When your son goes into the army, bid him goodbye, because you will never see him again.� In fact, service was so dreaded that the peasants actually held funerals for their conscripted sons.

The aura of doom surrounding military life was exacerbated by the method employed in raising an army. Because there was no regular conscription in Russia at this time, the government simply demanded a certain number of recruits from landowners and villages as the need arose. Men between the ages of twenty and thirty-six were faced with the possibility of recruitment without notice, and this kept the population in a constant state of anxiety. The roundup of conscripts was accompanied by scenes of violence and despair with men fleeing into the woods, followed by peasants and soldiers armed with cudgels and ropes to catch them. Captured recruits were guarded like convicts, usually arriving at the depot in chains. Those who were fortunate enough to escape found no shortage of sympathetic households in which to hide - that is, until the government established severe injunctions against harboring evaders. A family caught conceding a recruit was forced to furnish two substitutes, and if none could be provided the two most implicated in the crime were sent to Siberia.

Although military duty was reduced to five years by Alexander II (1856- 1881) it continued to be an enduring source of antagonism between the regime and its subjects. The introduction of a lottery system lessened the agitation created by the constant possibility of being drafted, but regulations prevented Jews from being admitted to military academies, becoming officers or holding other positions of responsibility. Moreover, unlike their comrades who could reside where they pleased after discharge, Jewish soldiers were forced to return to a life of second class citizenship in the Pale. (Certain circumstances freed men from service in the army: families with either one male or a father with three children were not subject to recruitment - one of the reasons perhaps why people married so early in Russia. Families also had the option to pay substitutes to assume the places of recruits, a practice which was popular until 1876 when the tsar declared that recruits could only be substituted with men of the same faith.) By the time of Alexander III's rule and the introduction of the infamous Temporary Laws in 1882, the government issued a ruling holding the entire family responsible for the failure of a conscript to report for duty, even if the man had emigrated or died. A fine of 300 rubles was levied (a veritable fortune to many families), which applied only to Jews, and if this was not paid, the government auctioned the household goods to collect it. The year after 1,200,000 rubles were paid on behalf of four thousand conscripts who ''failed to appear,'' entire families packed up and left Russia for good.

It was during the reign of Alexander II (1856-1881) that the underpinnings of the traditional Jewish way of life began to erode. The Vilna rabbinate continued to vigorously oppose the advance of secular knowledge, but this could not prevent the intellectual reformation that was gradually occurring. Many young Jews abandoned religious orthodoxy and instead focused their energies on the deteriorating social conditions that resulted from the continuation of the tsarist regime. Although conditions temporarily improved during the early years of Alexander's rule, the movement toward further liberalized policies was suspended after the Polish insurrection of 1863 which many Jews supported in exchange for promises of emancipation. A previous attempt (1831) to end the Russian domination of Poland, Lithuania and the Ukraine lead to the establishment of a military government, and hangings, imprisonment or exile to Siberia for the perpetrators. The 1863 attempt caused tsarist authorities to impose a harsh series of measures designed to suppress all nationalistic elements in the society and to assimilate the minorities into the cultural mainstream as rapidly as possible.

The principal, but not exclusive, object of these policies were the Poles, who posed the greatest threat to the Russian administration. The Polish and Lithuanian languages were replaced by Russian in the schools, Polish was eliminated from official correspondence and even removed from shop signs. When edicts failed, land and property were confiscated and suspected resistors were imprisoned or exiled to Siberia. By 1865 Jews and Poles could no longer buy land and it was not until 1885 that peasants of Polish origin were allowed to buy farms exceeding 2.7 acres in size. In 1864 the governor of the Lithuanian province believed that ''within a dozen years Russian nationality would establish itself firmly in the country.� Instead, in the years 1864-1914, nearly 25 percent of the population of Lithuania emigrated, mostly to the United States.

By the early 1880's waves of racial violence incited and then condoned by the government were used as an excuse for massive new restrictions on Jewish civil rights. These restrictions, introduced through the Provisional Regulations of May 3, 1882 (which became known as the ''May'' or �Temporary Laws''), governed Jewish economic activities, occupations, property and residence rights, military service requirements and educational opportunities. Including the legislation already in place, over one thousand articles scattered through fifteen volumes of the Russian Code (to which were added ministerial instructions and secret circulars) governed the Jews. With the advent of the Temporary Laws, Russia confirmed her status as a medieval state within modern Europe. Although serfdom had been abolished through the Emancipation Acts of 1861, as late as 1894 more than 80 percent of Russians citizens were still classified as peasants and an equal portion of the population was illiterate. Most people lived on the edge of destitution amidst conditions so primitive that fewer than one out of twenty people reached the age of sixty. Infant mortality rates in the villages were as high as 66 percent and of those who survived to adulthood to work in the factories, one out of every two died before the age of forty-five. Farm laborers earned only twenty-four kopeks a day (twelve cents at the official exchange rate of 1900) - a wage that constantly kept them at the brink of starvation. In the cities, factory owners wielded absolute authority over workers who usually earned in one month what their American and English counterparts earned in one week. A man could barely survive under such conditions, but if he had a wife and children they too were forced into the mills just to avoid starvation.

This atmosphere was the catalyst for the formation of groups of Jewish workers who met secretly to discuss the inhuman conditions found in Vilna's factories and shops. In 1897 these workers ultimately formed the Bund, a quasi-socialist labor organization. The original intent of the Bund was to effect economic changes in the relationship between factory owners and workers; however it soon adopted a revolutionary charter after recognizing that the Jews would still be subject to tsarist oppression even if all of their demands for better wages and working conditions were met. The Bund was opposed by Polish revolutionaries who believed that al1 insurgent activities should be directed toward achieving an independent Poland. Jewish employers, rabbinical authorities and Zionists also opposed the Bund for economic, religious and nationalist reasons; nevertheless, within a few years the organization gained 30,000 members in the Pale where extensive printing activities were conducted and self-defense groups organized to counter the pogroms.

The atmosphere of civil unrest intensified when the Japanese launched a surprise attack on Russia's Pacific Squadron on January 26, 1904. As the months dragged by, the war's impact on an already depressed economy be- came severe. The call up of reservists first affected the industries in which they were employed and then caused a boomerang effect when domestic income be can to falter and other industries laid off thousands of workers. Within a year dissidence had spread to the point that nearly every industry in Russia had been closed down by strikes on one or more occasions. Unrest was not limited to the cities as peasants began joining political organizations, helping themselves to their landlord's grain and timber and eventually burning down estates.

Within this environment lived the Alperowitz ancestors. They were a family of timber men: Reuben Alperowitz was a forest surveyor by trade; his sons and the husbands of his daughters were also engaged in a variety of timber-related occupations in an area which was renowned for its forests. The Alperowitz family lived in the village of Sosenka in the southeastern region of the Vilna gubernia. Its location on the west bank of the Viliya River (from which Vilna, which this river passes through, took its name) made it an ideal vantage point for its residents to supervise the movement of logs down the waterway.

The village itself, whose name derives from Sosna, the Polish word for �pine,� may have been established by a graf (landowner) of the region. Beginning in the early 17th century the Polish nobility created nearly nine hundred townships on their estates in Lithuania, granting to the inhabitants timber and farming rights to the surrounding area. In the 19th century these lands were often leased for exploitation by the residents or by local capitalists who employed the residents to manage the harvest of timber. (A typical arrangement permitted anybody to cut timber upon payment to the landlord of one ruble per tree, a fee which allowed the buyer to cut down �what, where and when he wanted for an entire year.�) The only accessible reference on the subject indicates that Sosenka was situated on lands belonging to the Bohdanowicz family; however, the manor nearest to Sosenka was that of Starzynki, a mile or two to the east. This estate included large tracts of forest and its own adjacent village which bore that graf's name.

Sosenka was inhabited almost entirely by a handful of peasants according to the earliest account available. In 1865 only eighty-five inhabitants were recorded there, including seventy-nine emancipated peasants, three servants employed in the manor house (at Starzynki?), one discharged soldier and two members of the schlachta (nobility) who were residing abroad at the time of the count. There is no official mention of Jews, but measuring by its population Sosenka would not be classified as a shtetl, which usually held from 250-300 families.

By 1890 there were some thirty houses and 226 inhabitants, but a 1933 map of the Vileika district indicates Sosenka as a small village that had barely grown in forty-three years. One road still served a community of thirty-five or so dwellings. The closest railway station was located in Vileika, ten mikes to the west, but this was not established until 1904 when the Shedletz-Bologoe line was built.

Sosenka's origins are understandably difficult to determine; certainly no facts survive as to exactly how the Alperowitz family arrived in such an obscure place. Presumably Reuben or an ancestor settled there because of their association with forestry. Their origins notwithstanding, typical villages of the area were very rustic or primitive depending upon the locale. According to one observer, cottages were

generally made of stone and boards, plastered over and covered with a coating of whitewash and are covered with a straw roof, frequently green with growing moss. Between the rows�runs the unimproved thoroughfare. Twenty and thirty of these cottages and a few trees comprise a village. In one room, which is generally neatly whitewashed, the entire family live, eat and sleep; in another...dwell the cows, pigs, chickens and geese. There are roughly carved chests and a couple of deep alcoves in the better class of homes, each containing its gigantic wooden bed piled with gorgeously colored rugs and immense feather pillows. The great brick or stone stove is the most conspicuous object of the interior, frequently serving as a bed during the long winter nights.

The territory surrounding Sosenka was reorganized numerous times under a series of complex governmental structures. The third and final partition of Poland (1795-1797) resulted in the establishment of three western gubernias which the Russians originally designated as Lithuania, Belorussia and the Ukraine. These gubernias were divided into smaller administrative districts in which local governments were headquartered. Vileika, ten miles west of Sosenka, was annexed by Russia in 1793 and during the third partition it was promoted to the rank of a district town in the Belorussian gubernia. More towns were added to the Vileika district, which in 1842 was transferred to the Vilna gubernia. After these new boundaries had been established, Sosenka, which had been incorporated in the original Lithuanian gubernia at the time of Russian annexation, found itself in the southeastern region of the Vilna gubernia, within the Vileika district. Further reconfigurations occurred as a result of political and administrative circumstances, most notably after the Polish insurrection of 1863. Among other measures taken to promote justification of the area, the authorities discontinued use of the name Lithuania (although Nicholas I had established the same prohibition fifty years before, the name had continued to be used even in official documents) and divided the region into smaller gubernias including Vitebsk, Minsk, Mogilev, Kovno, Grodno and Vilna. Boundary lines were redrawn several more times over the next eighty years culminating in the 1940 Soviet re-annexation of independent Lithuania. As a result, Sosenka is now incorporated within the Vileika raion, Minsk oblast of the Belorussian SSR.

By virtue of its location in the Pale of Settlement near the border of the and Minsk gubernias, the population of the Vileika district was predominantly a mixture of Lithuanians, White Russians and Jews. Changes in government and the migration of peoples brought different cultural influences to the area, the most forceful of which was Russian, but most inhabitants became Russianized in very superficial ways. The Alperowitz immigrants, for example, spoke Yiddish, applied Polish spellings to their names and told their children they were Litvaks. They neither referred to nor considered themselves as Polish or Russian, As for their attitudes toward the Russian government, as SAD remarked in her memoirs, �I always thought that my father [Israel Alpert] never learned the language of the country of his birth, but in reflection, it is possible that it was so repulsive to him that he never, in my presence, ever indicated that he knew a word of it.�

Despite its minute size Sosenka still managed to have a synagogue, but it did not have a Jewish cemetery. The closest one, located a few miles away in Ilya, must have been established prior to 1882; after the institution of the Temporary Laws, Jews were forbidden to acquire land outside village boundaries for such purposes. There was a rabbi, Aaron Alperowitz (Reuben's son-in-law), but according to one former Sosenkite, Lena Koplovitz-Kaplow, ''there were only a few Jews... so when there was a major religious question they went to Ilya where there were more jews.'' Size, however, was not the only factor accounting for Ilya's religious authority. Although its 829 Jews comprised 58 percent of the total population in 1897, the community reflected in the glory of its long departed and controversial rabbi, Manasseh ben Joseph. Here also had lived the legendary Valentine Potocki who became known as Abraham ben Abraham, the ''righteous convert.� Potocki, a Polish Count who had converted to Judaism, was discovered living in Ilya by the authorities, who then burned him at the stake when he refused to renounce his new faith.

Sosenka also had a priest to serve the Orthodox residents. Although the population generally lived in religious harmony, another member of the Koplovitz family, Sarah Rubin, reported that Sosenka was not immune to conflicts. On one occasion it was discovered that a crucifix was missing from the Christian cemetery and the village Jews were accused of stealing it. A mob gathered demanding that the cross be returned, but when the Jews could not produce what they did not have, the scene began to grow violent. A relative of Sarah's managed to escape by swimming across the river to summon help; however, the incident had been resolved by the time the Cossacks, who usually came to wreak havoc, not restore order, had arrived on their horses. A little girl had taken the crucifix to play with.

There are few details available about the lives of our earliest known ancestors. Reuben, who was born circa 1823, presided with his wife, Soshe Esther, over a family of at least seven children born over a period of twenty-three years. The two sources that mention his lineage indicate that ancestors named YankevNeshe figured in the background, as his parents or grandparents. There is also evidence that Reuben�s paternal grandfather was Nathan, a name Reuben conferred upon his eldest son. (Reuben named his second son Yankev. The cusom of naming the eldest son after the paternal grandfather was popular in Europe, thus it is possible that Reuben�s father was Nathan and Yankev his grandfather. If Reuben�s father was alive at the time of the birth of Reuben�s first son, it would preclude this naming; it is also possible that Yankev was Reuben�s eldest son and Nathan his second son. Although a family tradition discussed below implies that this may have been the case, the ages of Yankev�s children suggests that he was younger than Nathan.) It is probable that Maishe Alperowitz, a lumber man from Sosenka who married Reuben and Soshe Esther�s eldest daughter, Merke, was Reuben�s brother. It is also probably that Chivia Alperowitz Fine, the mother of two daughters who married Merke�s youngest sons, was Reuben�s sister. There was also another Alperowitz family in Sosenka (a brother and two sisters); given the size and ethnic mixture of the community, as well as other factors, it is quite possible that these were siblings of Reuben as well. (See Appendix Two for a discussion about these relationships.)

A letter written in the 14th century recorded the history of Reuben�s ancestors who left Germany in the earliest waves of Jewish immigration to Lithuania. This document also instructed that it be passed from generation to generation through the eldest son of successive families. It ultimately reached the hands of Yankev Alperowitz, who, like each of his ancestors, added inscriptions to it; and then finally passed it to his son, Eliohu. Yankev is thought to be Reuben�s second son and Eliohu appears to be the second of Yankev�s sons. Perhaps Yankev retained the letter after Nathan�s departure for America. Likewise, the letter may have fallen to Eliohu after the departure of his brother, Samuel H., or (as one descendant believed) Eliohu may have been Yankev�s eldest son.

Almost nothing is known about Soshe Ester. The only clue to her background is that a sister, Neshe, wed Chaim Kappellowitz of Dokscyze (circa 1861) and among their children was Yankev, the husband of Reuben and Soshe Ester�s second daughter, Chivia Alperowitz.

Reuben�s prestige in Sosenka must have been considerable for he has been described as the wealthiest man in town and the owner of the largest house � which was outfitted with the unheard of luxury of a copper sink. One source stated that he was occupied as a surveyor-assessor, evaluating timber properties and then managing harvests by selecting those trees ready for cutting; however, the circumstances of his life, particularly the large commitments to the ongoing financial support of sons-in-law and grandchildren (see below) and the accounts of various descendants suggest s that he was a man of more substantial means than such an occupation would provide. It is probably that he employed his professional skills and relationships in forestry to operate as a timber merchant, for evidence indicates that he was a member of the merchant class.

A statute issued in 1851 divided Jews into five classes: Guild merchants, petty traders, artisans, laborers, and those with no definite occupation. There were also raznochintsy - professionals such as doctors and engineers. Membership in the merchant guilds which had been formed prior to this time, was desirable in that members paid reduced taxes and, until 1874, were exempt from military service. By 1851 the merchant guilds included over 27,000 Jewish members in the Pale, nearly 96 percent of whom belonged to the Third Guild. Presumably Reuben was a member of the Second Guild (the Third Guild was eliminated in 1863) as the ranks of the First Guild, which permitted unrestricted rights of residence, were filled with the wealthiest traders. First Guild merchants were required to have paid a business tax of 800-1,000 rubles per year for at least five years prior to 1882 simply to qualify for the listed privileges extended after the advent of the Temporary Laws - a sum far greater than a man from a place such as Sosenka would seem likely to be in a position to pay. (To put these figures in perspective, the entire agricultural income from the nearby estate of Starzynki amounted to 3,796 silver rubles in 1865.)

Among Reuben and Soshe Esther's children at least Nathan, Merke, Chivia, Sarah, Simcha and Leah lived in Sosenka, and all were apparently born there. That there were more children is suggested by the substantial age difference between the eldest and the youngest as well as the total number of offspring, which by 19th century standards was rather low. It is most likely that other children may not have survived to adulthood, for there is no evidence to suggest that others remained in Russia or emigrated to different countries. Apparently all of the children of Merke, Chivia and Sarah were r born in Sosenka as were four of Nathan's seven children; of the others, two were born in Dolhinow and the youngest in Maine. Simcha's first child, Reuben, (b.1892, later Americanized to Robert) was probably born in Sosenka as well; the rest of his offspring were born in Maine. All of Yankev's children were born in Dunilowicze.

The Alperowitzes remained in Sosenka during a time when the wholesale expulsion of Jews from townlets and villages was occurring throughout the Pale. This may have been due to another government edict: only Jews who had settled in villages prior to 1882 were allowed to remain there, but those wishing to relocate from towns to villages were prohibited from doing so. To force the Jews into the towns the government banned further leasing of real estate and houses to them and in 1887 rescinded their right to move from one village to another.

Among other statutes that had a direct effect upon the Alperowitz family was the conferment of a surname, for according to KAG the original family name was Mazar and this was ''changed by a Czarist official in [Isidor Alpert�s] grandfather's day - Reuben Alperowitz, a timber man�'' That two of Reuben and Soshe Esther's children, and the descendants of a third, adopted the Cohen name upon immigration to America may be accounted for by the relatively brief period of me that the family carried the Alperowitz name.

When and where the first surname was established is unknown, however, when the time came for Jews to assume permanent fancily names, a popular procedure was to draw on their tribal lineage, which in this case is kohanic. According to one authority on the subject, because many government officials frowned upon or actually forbade the use of any Hebrew in the naming process many Jews created names out of combinations of letters that were significant to them alone. One advantage of such creations was that it afforded the opportunity for Jews to preserve the Hebrew element of the name without disclosing the Hebrew word. Under these circumstances, priestly descent could be indicated by several combinations or abbreviations of letters including the contraction of the Hebrew mizera Aaron, meaning �from the seed of Aaron'' resulting in the name Maza or Mazar.

If the Mazar name was first assumed when the family lived under Russian jurisdiction, perhaps a government statute (issued in 1804 and reiterated in 1845) requiring Jews to adopt surnames was responsible. The assignment of the Alperowitz name, on the other hand, may have been based on Reuben's place of residence, particularly if he was living in or near Sosenka at the time. Sosenka's location a few mites east of the much larger town of Kurenets, where Alperowitz was the most popular family name, may explain the name change if Reuben was registered as a resident there. It has been estimated that as many as 30 percent of the Jews of Kurenets bore this name simply through residence or registry there, though most of the families were unrelated.

When the Alperowitz children reached the appropriate age it was the responsibility of Reuben and Soshe Esther (with, perhaps, the assistance of a matchmaker) to see them married to suitable mates. That wives and husbands were not to be found in Sosenka almost goes without saying, for the opportunities were necessarily limited in a community of that size. Consequently, the sons all married outsiders: Nathan's bride was the daughter of Rabbi Kramer of that vicinity (possibly Dolhinow); Yankev traveled to Dunilowicze, where his wife Itka apparently resided; and Simcha selected a bride, Dora Koppelowitz, from the nearby village of Tlya.

Finding husbands for the daughters may have been tougher and probably involved lengthy negotiations with the parents of the grooms over matters such as the size of the dowry and the length of time that the newlyweds and their children could expect to be supported by the bride's father. Support included room and board for an agreed upon period of time, usually fifteen years; but it was not at all unusual, depending upon the occupation of the son-in-law, for the support period to run indefinitely. The more prosperous the bride's father, the more expensive the proposition was likely to become. (Not everyone thought that this custom, called kest, was a good idea; Rabbi Manasseh ben Joseph of Ilya was an outspoken critic, regarding kest as counterproductive.) It was under these circumstances that mates were lined up for the daughters, including Maishe Alperowitz for Merke (apparently Reuben's brother - see Appendix Two); Yankev Kappellowitz from Dokscyze for Chivia; a rabbi, Aaron Alperowitz, for Sarah (this match probably included a �lifetime support clause� as rabbis were not expected to engage in income producing work other than what they received from their congregation; in Sosenka, this could not have been anticipated to be much); and after two or three suitors were rejected, Barnet Anselowitz for Leah.

Reuben's death from cancer in 1890 must have been a catastrophic event for the family who appear to have been almost entirely dependent upon him for their living. The consequences for Merke's family were particularly severe as her husband's death, which occurred during the same period of time, left her with several youngsters to raise with no means of support. With her father gone she night naturally look to her brothers for help, but Nathan had left for America in 1882, Simon emigrated a short time later (1892), and yanked had gone off to raise a fatly in Dunilowicze. This left the economic destiny of the family in the hands of Sarah's husband, who depended upon Reuben for his living, and Chivia's husband, Yankev Kappellowitz, who had probably worked with his father-in-law. Soshe Esther spent another thirteen years in Sosenka before she died, circa 1903.

NATHAN was the eldest of the Alperowitz children, born October, 1844. He married Rosa Kramer (b.1840), the daughter of Rabbi Meyer Kramer, around 1864. According to one of their grandchildren, Nathan was determined to �marry tall'' and Rosa, who was over six feet in height, qualified. The couple lived in Sosenka where their first two children, Sarah and Max, were born in 1865 and 1867. Simon and Jacob were born in Dolhinow in 1869 and 1873 (perhaps Rosa's family resided there), whereas their fifth and sixth children, Ann and Samuel N., were born in Sosenka in 1878 and 1883. Louis was born 1886 in Maine.

As is the case with his siblings, practically nothing is known of Nathan's activities prior to his emigration from Russia. Because of his residence in Sosenka it is presumed that he worked in forestry with his father.

Nathan's relocation to America was triggered by two critical events. The assassination of Alexander II in 1881 caused series of pogroms that resulted in the deaths of nearly 50,000 people and although this and subsequent waves of violence bypassed the area surrounding Sosenka, no locale was regarded as safe. The fact that Nathan's sons were approaching draft age also figured prominently in the decision to leave. The pathway of officially sanctioned emigration, however, was not yet available. Until the 1880's very few people left Russia, for the tsars, who considered Russian citizenship a privilege, had enforced rigorous laws limiting emigration. From 1870 to 1881 no more than three thousand people per year were allowed to leave the country; but a gradual relaxation began to occur and 1882 counted nearly ten thousand Russians entering the United States. Among these were Nathan Alperowitz and his son, Max.

The exact circumstances of the family's departure have been obscured with the passage of time, but this much has been remembered: Nathan arrived in Boston in 1882 with the intention of settling there. He found work but was harassed to the point that he packed up the few belongings he had, returned to the train station and purchased a ticket for the farthest destination north that his money would take him. This was Bangor, Maine.

(The account of Nathan's experience in the ''big city'' was told by several people and this provided the reason why he left; however, it is probable that his settlement in Bangor was less accidental than this story implied. At the time of his arrival, Bangor was the second largest lumber port in the world and Nathan certainly must have believed that his lumber background could have been useful there.)

Simon was apparently smuggled out separately, for he traveled steerage to the U.S. on his own. After Nathan had been gone for almost two years his eldest daughter, Sarah, married Hyman Epstein, whose family was in the lumber business in Dokszyce. Soon after their marriage, Hyman left for Bangor and was followed a short me later by Sarah, who traveled with her brother-in-law, Harry Epstein. Rosa and the rest of the family left in 1884; lingering accounts of a midnight border crossing indicate that their departure, like most others of that time, was unofficial. Over the next two decades Nathan's sister Lqah and brother Simcha would emigrate, as did eighteen nieces and nephews.

Nathan left Russia an Alperowitz and became, upon his arrival in America, a Cohen. His establishment of the new surname may have been as much a result of circumstance as intent. He had traveled to America with a friend whose name was Cohen and when this individual gave that name to the immigration officials, Nathan, who was also a kohen, gave the same name. It was a common practice among immigrants to give their tribal names to officials, as they often did not identify with the names that had been assigned by the governments they had just left behind. It is also probable that Nathan considered the Alperowitz name dispensable given the conditions under which it originated.

The adoption of the Cohen name was followed by Nathan's brother, Simcha, who arrived in 1892 and their nephew, Samuel H., who arrived in Maine in 1889; however, Isidor Alpert (b.1886), the youngest of Maishe and Merke's children and the first to arrive in America in 1904, retained the Alperowitz name. Perhaps his hereditary name was more meaningful to him because he was a second generation Alperowitz and the Cohen name less so because of his more secular orientation. KAG noted that her father ''cast off religious customs when he came to America'' and although he ''was a kohen, traditionally the descendants of the high priests of Israel, with certain religious privileges still reserved to them, he never mentioned it to his children.�

MERKE, born 1845, was the eldest of four daughters and thus assumed the responsibility of helping raise her younger brothers and sisters. She married Maishe Alperowitz who was a forester, most likely in association with Reuben, and had nine children, five of whom emigrated. Maishe died when Isidor, the youngest, was three or four years old which left Merke to raise, with the help of her eldest daughter Shprintze, at least three remaining children. (Later it was Merke who took charge of the gravely ill Shprintze's daughters, with whom she lived until 1913 when Shprintze finally succumbed to cancer.) The family remained in Sosenka where, according to KAG, they were �very poor;�

Pages from Book of the Prophets with the Hebrew inscriptions (left) �birth of a daughter Sarah, born Tuesday morning, the day after Succoth, 1865 in Sosenka;� and (right) �birth of a son Menachem Mendel [Max], Sunday morning, May 8, 1867 in Sosenka.� The sixth inscription reads �birth of a son Shmuel [Samuel], Thursday in the morning, fifth day of June 1883 in Sosenka.�

Nathan Cohen inscribed the birth dates of each child on the bottom of successive pages of The Book of the Prophets. There are numerous other inscriptions in the book, which was apparently a gift to the original owner, whose identity is uncertain: an end csheet includes the words �to my friend Yakov and his wife.� Perhaps it belonged to Nathan�s grandvather, who, it seems, was named Yankev (the diminutive of the Hebrew name, Yakov). The book was handed down to Nathan, who apparently as a youth wrote, �this book belongs to Nussan Ha-Kohen� in several places (Nussan was Nathan�s Hebrew name, whereas Ha-Kohen means �the priest� and refers to the family�s tribal descendance). From Nathan the book went to his eldest son, Max, who recorded �this book belongs to the boy Menachem Mendel� and the quixotic �Menachem Mendel Nussan Alpert.� �Ben� (sort of) could logically be insterted before Nussan; Aaron Alperowitz also used the name Alpert in Russia. Yet another owner wrote �this book belongs to Moshe Mayer of Dolhinow.

Last Updated : June 1, 2008