As we near the end of the Passover holiday (sundown tomorrow), I thought a few words about my earliest Passovers would be in order. Until I was 7 or 8, we went once a year for a seder (normally the first seder, I think) to a house on Princeton in University City, Missouri (aha, I bet you didn’t know that streets in University City tend to be named after universities – there’s a Harvard, a Yale, a Princeton, a Pennsylvania, a Dartmouth, a Stanford, a Tulane – you get the idea; by the way, no MIT). Five people lived in that house – there was Neil (he was younger than I), Myrtle and Oscar Roufa (they were Neil’s parents), and Fetter David and Mima Gitel Ridker. I always called the house Mima Gitel’s house, although sitting here today, for the first time maybe, I realize that it was Myrtle and Oscar’s house, and their elderly parents were just living with them. I think.

Thinking back, I realize that I know very little about these people. Neil and I had nothing to do with each other; he wound up dying very young having been involved with drugs and who knows what else at an early age. Oscar didn’t live very long, either, I don’t think. He was quite heavy and he was in the liquor business (I assumed at that time that this was a disreputable business to be in) and had a shop called Happy Hollow Liquors in Wellston Missouri, even then a suburb you knew to stay away from. Myrtle lived forever, but I never saw her in later years. I am sure she passed away in her 90s.

Myrtle and Oscar were Americans. Gitel (pronounced “geetle”) and David (pronounced “duvid”) were from deepest Europe. They spoke with heavy accents. My memory of David is that he was stooped, thin and short, with gray hair. Gitel was also short and (again in my memory) always had a hair net or its equivalent on. I thought then that they were ancient – but looking at the years of their deaths, I see they were then in their mid-70s. Gitel died at 90 in 1967, but I don’t think I ever saw her after, say, about 1952. Probably, it would be more accurate to say 1953, because that was the year that my grandfather, Abraham Margulis, died (at 66), and he was the connection.

Gitel Chervitz Ridker was my grandfather’s aunt, or my great-great aunt. She was the younger sister of my great grandmother (my grandfather’s mother), Mochle Rivka Chervitz, who died well before I was born. In fact, she died at 43, ten years before my mother was born. That’s why my mother’s Hebrew name is Mochle Rivka.

According to what I can gather, there were eight Chervitz siblings, five girls and three boys. My family tree is blank on most of them. But I do know that a few (at least a few) of them winded up in St. Louis. I am not sure when. Did they come at the same time, or separately? I am not sure, although this is something I could find out (and probably should). In my early years, we did visit some Chervitz cousins, but – again – probably after my grandfather’s death, they never entered my lives. Perhaps my mother was in touch with them – I don’t know.

I should say that this line of my family does have some yichus. Yichus? That’s a Yiddish word, which means (I translate so loosely) that someone in your family tree was smart or famous.

Yes, there is yichus in that family. You see, Mochle Rivka and Gitel’s father was Yakov Israel Chervitz, and his father was Gedalia Chernovitz (what happened to the “no” between those generations is one more question), and Gedalia married another Mochle Rivka (who also died even younger, at 29 or 30), who became my great-great-great grandmother. Mochle Rivka (I don’t know her last name, or if she had one other than bat-Baruch) had a father named Baruch, and Baruch had a father named Teveuh (not the one in Fiddler on the Roof), and Teveuh’s father was Hersh (we are now up to great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather).

Hersh too had a father, Ephraim. Ephraim’s mother was Adel, and Adel was the daughter of a man named Israel ben Eliezer, who lived from 1700 to 1760 and became known as the Baal Shem Tov (or Master of the Good Name), the founder of Hasidism. The Ball Shem Tov was therefore my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather, and his father Eliezer my great-great-great-great-great-great-great–great-great-great grandfather. That’s the yichus (assuming yichus goes back that far).

Now, how do I know all of this? I know all of this because Myrtle (remember her?) and my mother’s sister, my Aunt Loraine, did keep in contact and Myrtle gave Loraine a “family tree” and told her to give it to me.

Now, the descendants of the Baal Shem Tov have been well documented, as you might imagine, so I don’t have much doubt as to the accuracy of all of this. But you wonder whether this means anything to me, or whether it will be important for my grandchildren, say, to know that the Baal Shem Tov was their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather. I think so, for sure. And to go on a little more with this, I think he and I would have got along very well; I am sorry that he died 182 years before I was born. We share a lot in common – we don’t like dry religious services, we like to wander around on our own when the weather is good, and we pay a lot of attention to the Jewish world. We would have had a lot to discuss, and I think we would have influenced each other quite a bit.

I guess I diverted a bit from my early seders. Well, we have one more day to discuss them, because this post is already long enough, I think. And if I don’t get to it tomorrow….there is always next year. And maybe, by then, I will know a little more about all these folks, and their lives over 200 years or so in today’s Ukraine, and after they got to America, which at least all the children of my great great grandfather Yakov Israel seemed to have done. And maybe I will trace some of the branches forward – not only those who remained Chervitz, but Yakov Israel’s daughters’ families, some of whom became Rimmels (one of those was my Hebrew teacher before my bar mitzvah), some Rothmans, and some Rutenbergs. I might learn something interesting.