Roots and routes

Sometime after 1900 Labisch Levin left his home in, or maybe near, Gomel, a town in the south east of what is now Belarus, and set off to build a new life in England. He may have thought he was heading for America, but London was where he landed and where he stayed. He, like many others, was hoping to escape the oppression and violence to which Jews were routinely subjected in the Pale of Settlement, the area on the western fringes of the Russian Empire to which Tsarist laws restricted them.

He was aged around 40, and brought with him his three children, and maybe his wife. Or maybe it was his second wife, Annie, that accompanied him, with her own child. Or maybe they came later. Not long afterwards, his niece Zlata, aged 18, came too, and stayed with the Levins for a while, maybe a few years. In their new country Labisch became Lewis, and Zlata became Sarah.

In 1905, in the aftermath of war and a crushed revolution, Moshe Shreibman, aged 20, from Pinsk, left his uniform and his family behind and made the same journey into the unknown. In London he became Morris. A few years later he met and married Sarah.

Within a couple of years, Lewis's sister Michla - Sarah's mother - arrived, together with two of her sons, Myer and Herschel. Another son, Eliezer, had died, or been killed; another, Shmuel, had married, and stayed in Gomel. Michla's husband David Ilitovitch had died sometime previously.

Between them, Lewis Levin and his sister Michla had nine children who survived into adulthood. These nine went on to have thirty of their own, and their children in turn have migrated to many different parts of the world. Many links have been stretched or broken. Now, a hundred years later, some of Lewis and Michla's great-grandchildren - and great-great ones too - are trying to find out who these mysterious people were, where they came from, how they lived, why they uprooted themselves, how they made new lives in strange places. And pondering the heritage they have left us.

Four of us - Ralph, Mark and myself from the UK, and Dan from the USA - are about to embark on a short research tour of some of the places in Belarus that we think might be significant in our families' histories.

View Belarus in a larger map

Between us we represent three of the four surviving children of Michla Levin and David Ilitovitch.

Coffee at the airport. What does the week ahead hold in store for us?

We hope to use this blog to pass on some of the stories we hear, and invite family members to contribute their own memories and tales. Maybe in this way we can get a little closer to those brave people who, a hundred years ago, took such a giant leap into the dark. And maybe get a little closer to each other, too.