re: #308 HappyWarrior

He’s one of my favorite historians. If I recall your ancestral roots like some of mine are in the former borderland intersections of the former German, Austrian-Hungarian, & Russian empires. Snyder has written extensively about that region. Another guy I like is Robert Evans if Behind the Bastards. He’s not an academic but he tries to understand in a lay person willing to read on the history how the past relates to how we got here.

Pretty good guess!

I will need to check out Robert Evans.

One side of my family is Swiss-German. They came over in the Great German migration after the (18)’48. And settled along the Missouri-Kansas line. In many ways the Civil War in that area was an ethnic war of the earlier English settlers (who mostly came from the South) versus the newly arrived ethnic Germans. And in these kinds of brutal, crude, backwoods fracas, numbers mattered. And there were a lot more German ethnics.

The other side came from Eastern Europe.

One part came from a small market town in the Ukraine. When those who could left, (just before World War 1) there were about 8000 Jews in the town’s 10,000 people. By 1945, there were reportedly 12 Jews left in town. At least 4 members of my immediate family are in the mounds at the forest behind the town. Along with 6000 others. We don’t know where the others are buried.

Another part fled from Moldava to Odessa in 1905 after the Kishinev Pogrom. When the pogrom made it to Odessa, and my grandmother saw Cossacks pulling people off the trams and murdering them because they looked Jewish, the family moved to New York. (Apparently my grandmother didn’t look Jewish to street thugs.)

No direct relationship between family and song. Just the general experience. (Added this clarifying sentence in the edit.)

Kinderjohren - Bente Kahan

Kinderjohren yiddish song from Cracow