My Grandfather's Shtetl

In the 1970's I interviewed my grandfather about his life. This is the section on his life in Lithuania in his own words. Link to view the section on leaving Lithuania and Coming to America

I was born in Lithuania. I lived there until I was about sixteen or seventeen. We lived in a little town just like a village, Josvainiai.1 I don't remember how many Jewish families we were. We had a synagogue and a public bath.

My father was a tailor and if he made three rubles a week it was a pretty good living. If he made five that was a good week's work. He used to make ladies' and mens' clothes. He was not one of the best tailors. Mostly he worked for the peasants around there. The peasants would come into town and order. When a rich farmer had a lot of men working for him he couldn't take them into town so he would come and take the tailor and his helpers out there where they worked. They would make some clothing for the workers. A lot of times the peasants didn't come into the town or he (my father) didn't have enough work so he had to go out in the villages looking for work.

I'm from my father's second wife. He had four daughters and one son from the first wife.2 Their mother died. I didn't know them. They left the old country before I was born. When I came to this country I just happened to meet them. There were three of us left (from the second marriage).3 I had one brother and one sister. I was the youngest of the brothers. I had a sister who was younger. I don't know whatever happened to her, probably Hitler. She (my mother) had more (children) because before I was born two or three died. In Europe a child (who) wasn't real healthy and strong didn't last very long. In the first year he died. I must have been a pretty strong kid.

When I was a little boy I must have been kind of blond because I had a little brother who passed away at two or three years old and he was a little blond. My father was light completed. I think he had blue eyes. The blond came from my side of the family. My mother was dark. My mother was a dark woman.

My parents called me Motel4. I was named after an uncle who was a cantor. My father used to say: You are named after such a great man, a cantor, and you are such a wild kid. In our part of the country of Lithuania when you are small they call you Leh - Motelleh. In Poland they call a little boy like a grown up person but not in our part of the country. Then they called you by your name and then the name of your father or mother. They very seldom called you by the last name. Motel Zlatta or Motel Koppil. Across the street from us his name was also Motel and he was Motel Atalls. I was a day older than him. His brother was the same age as my younger sister. I picked the name Milton5 when I came to America. That's the name I like.

I think that my people are descended from Austria someplace because my father's dialect was not like the
Lithuanian people speak. His was more like the Austrians. In the olden times the Jewish people when they were expelled from Palestine they didn't have no surnames. They called themselves Motel son of Koppil son of Moishe but after a while there was a law that you have to have a surname, a family name. Hoffenberg is kind of a Germanic name. My father didn't pronounce it Hoffenberg. In Russia there is no H in the beginning of a word. There is a "G" sound. They called it Goffenberg instead of an "H". My father used to pronounce it Hauffenberg according to the Germanic dialect.6

I had a first cousin he comes from Boston named Morris Hoffenberg who opened the first flower store in Boyle Heights (area of Los Angeles). I met a man by the name of Hoffenberg and he looked like Morris Hoffenberg of the flowers. He told me that the Hoffenbergs originated somewhere in Bucovina, Rumania(7), and from there they emigrated to Lithuania and a lot of them emigrated to South Africa. Years ago it wasn't so easy to get into the United States and things was not so good in the United States. It was hard here too. During the crisis of 1907 it was hard. South Africa was very prosperous. My father's cousins' sons went to South Africa.

My mother's maiden name was Chiat. In Hebrew it means tailor. When I was in Israel I tried to see if there was anybody by the name of Chiat. A sister married a cousin of my mothers. I tried to see if I could locate them. They told me there was a Dr. Chiat but I didn't have a chance to locate him. He could be a son of my sister. If you go to Israel on a tour you have no chance to look for family because it is a planned tour. You have a guide. They come to take you in a bus. At 8:30 or 10 o'clock you have to be in the front of the hotel. From there you go to different places.

When I was a little boy my father went to synagogue on the Sabbath and little kids remained at home. I was too young to go. My mother used to tell me, "Motelleh, get up on a chair and sing for the women." Women used to come over to visit my mother. I must of had a good voice. I still remember what I sang. What I sang I had heard from the cantor in the synagogue. I must have been about three years old then.

My father used to sing I remember, and I had an older brother, a half brother named Sam Hoffenberg.8 He had a beautiful baritone voice. Probably now he would have made a great singer but this was 75 years ago and years ago people didn't think so much about it. I sang in choirs. I never trained to be a cantor. If I did I could have made a nice cantor, a very famous cantor but I didn't, so it takes ambition more than talent.

There was one school for the whole neighborhood around and Jewish boys didn't dare to go. The others would probably murder them. My schooling was in Hebrew. In the old country before three they don't cut a boy's hair. Then when he is three years old they cut his curls and take him to the Hebrew school, to ABC. It is called cheder. It is bible study. A lot of kids three years old went in their pants yet.

When you get to be six or seven you already know quite a bit, especially biblical history, the laws of Moses, all the history of the Jewish people, the way they were enslaved in Egypt, the way they came to Egypt. That's all you learned, mostly Jewish history, the Bible and the history of our people. They teach you arithmetic, a little bit but not too much. There were many teachers. You learn Hebrew and then the rabbi doesn't have to explain anymore. You understand it. The boys in my class, we spoke Hebrew among ourselves. I spoke Yiddish, the mother tongue, than I spoke Hebrew and Lithuanian, the language of the people around there, and Polish. I understood Russian quite a bit. I spoke four or five languages. I speak Yiddish very well but there is a language that Yiddish writers use that I don't understand because we didn't use that kind of words. There's a lot of literary words like in English. There's a literary English like a professor when he starts speaking. We use the everyday language. Same thing over there.

When I went to cheder they told children so much superstition about murders and robbers and different things. They don't know that it makes a bad impression on a child. We used to go to cheder at night because the day was not long enough. They had been telling so many stories about robbers and murders and demons and all kinds of things so when I would come home from cheder I would feel like somebody was following me and I would turn around and look. When I would get about two or three doors from our house I'd run like lightening. I would jump right up on the porch and get into the forehouse and lock the door, hook the door from the inside. Then I would feel good. My father used to tell me that if I don't say my prayers before I go to sleep
I wouldn't be able to get into the heaven. There would be a great big black dog laying there that wouldn't let me go in. The people were superstitious with evil eyes and this and that. I remember my mother carried me in her arms. I must have been a couple of years old. I wore a long white nightgown. It had red stripes in the shoulders. That (red) was against the evil eye. Everybody was superstitious in the old country.

We didn't have no yeshiva in our town, only cheder. The last rabbi I had was already teaching us Gemara. That's advanced study. I used to love learning especially at night before we went home. We read the history, the tanach, the prophets. It tells you about the history of the Jewish people and I used to love it but I didn't have a chance to go to school.

My brother's name was Charles.9 He was called Haskall. He was a well learned man. He went to yeshiva, to college, until he was about eighteen or nineteen years old. He was supposed to become a rabbi but he quit. He didn't become a rabbi. He could perform the prayer at the pulpit. He was older. He learned to be a very educated man but I didn't have a chance. my father wouldn't pay for it for me.

I stayed in cheder until about twelve years old, then they put me to work. My father didn't have enough money to pay the teacher. You had to pay. It was not free. My father put me to work but I didn't like to work. I was too young. Eleven years old, twelve years old, you don't like to sit and be a tailor. A boy of eleven or twelve years old is a wild kid. He don't know nothing until he becomes a little older. Girls become more settled then boys. Before I couldn't even walk. Ask me why? Because I used to run like a wild bronco. When you are a young, healthy boy in a small town you do not walk.

In the old country when a boy became bar mitzvah he knew all the brochas, the prayers, because he went to cheder. You didn't have to teach him like over here. They send a boy to school and spend money and teach him the prayers and this and that, a speech and all that. Not there, over there when a boy becomes bar mitzvah they call him up to the Torah, "Mordecai ben Koppil." They call you up to the Torah when you become thirteen. Until you are bar mitzvah you pray and everything else but they don't call you up to the Torah and you don't put a tallis on (a prayer shawl). A boy before thirteen doesn't wear a prayer shawl but when you become bar mitzvah you can wear a tallis. They never used the last name there. They called you by your father's and your grandfather's names. They call you Mordecai ben Koppil ben Moishe (Milton son of Koppil son of Moses).

For a while the Lithuanians were not anti-semitic but after a while they kind of became anti-semitic. It's in the blood. With the mother's milk they inherit that. I remember when I was a boy of about seven or so I walked through a village and little kids maybe two years old, bow legged, came out and threw rocks at me. You had an awful time. The trouble we'd have was with the peasants. We'd fight with other boys all the time. We would go out on a Saturday. My father and mother would have a good meal and fall asleep and us boys would run out to the River Susue. (Sue-swa) It had two mills, the old closer (mill) and then they had the new mill further away up the river. We would go out and run over here and run over there. We'd go out of town and the gentile boys would attack us. When I was there I used to speak the language so I would tell them, "Wait now, you're going to come into town. We're going to get even with you." They used to leave us alone.

I was not afraid of the gentiles. I knew a lot of them because my father was a tailor and they used to come into town. I spoke the language. When you speak a language with people then you are not so strange to them. They were mean. They were plenty mean to us.

My house was a log cabin built out of logs. Most of the roofs there were made out of straw. When I was a boy, I don't know how old, I would climb up on the roof. The town was surrounded by woods. There was forest all around and it looked like that was the end of the world because you couldn't see further then the forest. When you put a straw roof on you put on bundles of rye and that rots and gets tough and gets waterproof and no water can go through there but if you walk on it you break the seal. My father didn't like it (when I climbed on it) because when you climb up on a straw roof it will leak.

I'm eighty-three or eighty-four, I don't know exactly. Eighty-four or eighty-five years is almost one hundred years ago. Life was different. The town where I was born was a regular little small town. I don't remember
how many Jewish families there were but mostly around there were peasants. They had fields. Next to our lot was a peasant, a farmer, who used to raise a lot of grain.

We had in our house a big garden. We used to plant potatoes. The whole house had two compartments. One had a little bit of a room like a shed. When times were good we lived in the big apartment. It had wooden floors but the other little place had dirt floors. Most of the time we lived in the small apartment and rented out the big one to somebody. Next door was like a bedroom that was rented to an old couple.

We had two ovens. One was a big oven. They used it to bake the bread. Before Passover they used to bake matzah there. A baker would rent it. They would make the matzah. They would roll it down flat and bake it. The baker would sell it to the people. They couldn't make matzah themselves. The baker used our oven because it was big. We had a big brick oven built. The little oven was built for warming the house.

We had a cow and a goat. We used to have milk and butter. When it was too cold to milk her outside we used to take her into the place in the house. We raised her from a calf so she was used to going into the house if you gave her a chance. We had chickens. We also kept them in the house.

We took the chickens to the rabbi slaughterer, the shochet. He used to kill chickens and the same one would kill cows. We took them down and he killed them according to the Jewish law. According to Jewish law a chicken or an animal must be killed mercifully. The other people had a more crueler way. I remember when I was a boy I worked in a village. A guy wants to kill a lamb. He gets a hold of the lamb between his legs and cuts from the neck down. According to Jewish law that's cruel killing. Killing must be merciful. The Jewish people when they wanted to slaughter a cow or a bull or anything like that they tied up his legs and dropped him down and the rabbi slaughterer would come over and kill him. When he is cutting the throat he is not allowed to stop in the middle. If he stops then the animal is not fit to eat anymore by the Jewish people. They would give (sell) the meat to the gentile people, they were allowed to eat anything. He (the shochet) had a long knife, a halef they call it. The shochet had it tested so there shouldn't be a nick in it. After he cut the cattle's throat he would go over it and see if there was a nick in the halef. If there was a nick he disqualified the cattle because the cattle had pain. The idea was to kill the cattle without pain, to bleed it. Jewish people were not allowed to eat any blood, that's why they used to salt meat and take out all the blood. After they killed the cattle they opened up the cattle. If they found anything wrong with the lung the cattle was disqualified for the Jewish people to use it. If the cow was sick you couldn't use the meat. We bought the meat from the kosher butcher. Chickens you would take to the rabbi slaughterer. The Jewish people never killed their own chickens or anything. There was no icebox. In the winter it was cold enough. Don't forget this was 75 years ago.

People didn't have baths in the house. They had to go once a week at least into the public baths and one day a week was for women. The rest of the time was for men. Most of the time the men came on Friday for the Sabbath. I was a little fellow, I'd get up on the top. It was so hot throwing a bucket of water from the oven on the rocks. It is real hot and you take a broom and one guy gives another one a rub down. We had a bath in Los Angeles many years ago on Pecan Street in Russian Town. I used to go every week on Thursday night. You know, I used to take a bath every morning but when it came to Thursday my body was itching like anything because you get used to that steam. When my son Donald was a little fellow I started taking him along with me. He said, "Let's go fitsbot." He couldn't say, "Let's go Shvitbud." He liked it. I put him on the bottom bench and gave him a rub with the broom. He enjoyed it.

There was a big river called Susue. In the spring when the ice melted it used to be a mile wide. After a while the water would recede and you could walk across almost. They would drive across. They had a bridge made out of two boards across the water. When I was a little fellow my sister and some of the girls from the neighborhood went to wash. They would run across that bridge but not me. I had to walk through the water. In a certain spot it was very, very swift and knocked me down and I fell into the water and got up and fell in again. Finally the girls on the other side saw me and they pulled me out. I was all wet and I got the croup. I didn't want to go home. Finally a neighbor was coming by with a team of horses. He said he would take me home in broken Yiddish. I didn't go. Finally he told them in the house that I was all wet by the river and crying
so Charles came over and carried me home. Every time I would get cold I would get the croup until sixteen or seventeen or older.

In the town there was a square like a shopping center. That's where all the stores were. The whole town consisted of four blocks, four streets. The street where we lived on they used to call it Kedainiaigahs because it was the street to go to the big city. The street that you used to go to the big city of Kovno was Kovnogahs. We had a street Vilkijagahs and Susuegahs for the river.

Josvainiai was the name of my town. It was ten miles from the bigger city Kedainiai. We used to walk. If you had money we would hire an expressman that drove and picked up passengers. Most of the time we would walk all the way.

Kovno is the capital of Lithuania now. I come from the state of Kovno. Other states were Vilna and Suvalk. Kovno is a big city. In Lithuania they call it Kaunas. I come from that part of Lithuania.

Lithuania was quite a powerful country. They were domineering Poland and after a while the Russians beat them all up and they became a state of Russia. Russia conquered Lithuania and Poland. When Russia conquered them they made states out of them. At one time they even wanted to forbid the Polish language. They wanted everybody to speak Russian.

When I got to be around fifteen I think, I went to visit my mother's family. They lived in another town, also a small town10. I never knew them before. You didn't travel so easily there. I was in Kovno once to visit some relatives. There I met a second cousin and I fell in love with her. It was puppy love. I never met her again there. I left to the United States. I came to Milwaukee and there I had a cousin. I met one of my cousins and worked in Wisconsin for a while, then I came into Milwaukee and met this girl and when I met her in Milwaukee she wasn't so interesting any more. Sometimes puppy love, you think "Oh!" and if you get married right away then you get cooled off after a while. I met her in Milwaukee and I didn't like her anymore.

We didn't have many Hasidim in Lithuania. They used to come once in a while but Lithuanians were not Hasidim. They were Orthodox but not Hasidim. We used to make a lot of fun out of them and the Hasidim used to call the Lithuanians not very pious Jews because they weren't as pious as the Hasidim. There were more Hasidim in Poland then Lithuania.

In the synagogue there was a prayer where they read the curses. They were afraid to say it so they would have a poor guy who didn't have money to pay to be called up to the Torah to give a donation. They would call up a half-wit and give him that part where they said all the curses. Anybody wouldn't want that part so they would get a half-wit. It was called teruchit. If you are not going to do this you are going to be cursed with this. Anybody who was not a half-wit wouldn't want to do it. It was just once a year. On Yom Kippur they had the confession of sins, all the sins that you committed. I didn't commit some of the sins. I didn't even know what some of them were.

When Japan and Russia were at war in 1905 they were thinking that they were going to take boys of eighteen or nineteen to the army. Lithuania was just a part of Russia. They were talking that they were going to draft boys. Generally when you become 21 you had to report for military service. You were examined and if you were fit you had to go to the military. They Jewish boys didn't like to go to the military because they weren't treated good in Russia. Russia didn't treat our people good. They don't treat them good yet. Nobody wanted to be in the military for three years or so. They tried not to be. My father didn't have enough money to send Charles to the United States. Charles was six or seven years older (then me). He was afraid that they might take him to the army. My father wrote to the daughters and son from the first wife for them to send him a ticket to send Charles to the United States. He had a chance to get married to an old maid that had money. If he had married then there would be enough money for them to go to the United States but he didn't want to. He would rather go to the army then to marry some of the old maids. Finally they sent him a ticket and brought him out here and he learned to be a good tailor and made pretty good so after a while when I got to be about sixteen or seventeen he sent for me. He sent a ticket for me to come to New York. He wanted me to meet my sisters from my father's first wife.

My father didn't want to go to America. He was too religious. Seventy-five or eighty years ago they wanted to take him out but he didn't want to go. When I left the old country my sister Libby must have been twelve years old or something like that. After the First World War we don't know what happened to them. It could be that they left the old country before Hitler. When I was in Israel I tried to find out but I didn't have a chance.

After the First World War they became lost. I kept in touch with them for a little while and then the Russians took our family from our part of the country in Lithuania. It was too close to the German border. They moved them out because they didn't trust the Jewish people. They moved my father to Kovno. Kovno was quite a ways from there. I guess he was too old and he passed away in Kovno. They moved them out of their home and it was kind of a hardship for them.

¹ Josvainiai (Jasvainiai or Yasvainai) is 45 miles north of Kaunas (Kovno) at 44o15'/23o50' and is about 10 miles from Kedainai (Kedainai, Keidany, Kiejdany, Kuidany). From Where Once We Walked (Mokotoff and Sack, Avotaynu Inc. 1991) Yosvine (Josvainiai) - Kedan District

Yosvine is near Kedaini (6 miles), Ayragola (15), Chaikishok (11), Bobt (13) and Datnuva (12), in a valley surrounded on three sides by the Shoshava River.

The market place was in the center of town. Near it were 4 roads called Keidan, Ayragola, Kovno and Shoshava. In 1897, 534 Jews lived there. Most were expelled during World War I. During their absence, a large part of the town burned down. After the War, some returned. Before the Holocaust, the Jewish population was 270, about 70 families. They lived around the market place and the nearby streets. From Lithuanian Jewish Communities by Schoenberg, 1991.

² Esther, Rachel, Rose, & possibly one sister unknown, brother Sam.

³ Charles, Milton, & Libby

⁴ Motel (Mottel) is derived from Mordekhai (Mordecai) Biblical. Esteir, 2:5. Notwithstanding that the name could be a derivative of the name of the Persian god, Merodakh, the Talmudic Sages, in the Tractate Hulin, 139b, state that the name is Aramaic and composed of two words Mor Dekhi which means bitter freedom. Mordekhai was of the Tribe of Binyamin. He authored the Megillat Esteir, read on Purim. From Jewish Personal Names - Their Origin, Derivation and Diminutive Forms by Rabbi Shmuel Gorr.

⁵ In the 1910 census Charles Hoffenberg was living with a Max Hoffenberg. Milton's daughter Charlene said that Milton was also known as Max and when he married Anna Dubin she didn't like the name Max His name was legally changed from Motel to Milton when he became a U.S. citizen on November 12, 1943, District Court of United States at Los Angeles, Certificate No. 5850352.

⁶ According to "A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames From the Russian Empire" by Alexander Beider, Avotaynu, 1993: Gofenberg(Courland, Kovno) A: Hof(en)berg [German] court + mountain. Another translation from the Historical Research Center is that Hoffen is Hope in German so Hoffenberg is "Hope Mountain."

⁷ Bucovina (Bukovina) is a fairly large region that is now in NE Romania and SW Ukraine. It was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before WWI and part of Romania between the wars. ibid

⁸ Sam Hoffenberg was born October 1869. He was married to Fannie who was born September 1871. They had three children: Dora, born June 1991; Rose born February, 1893 and Herman born May, 1895. Sam died in Chicago on December 16, 1932.

⁹ Charles was born in 1886 in Josvainiai, Lithuania and died June 5, 1928 in Detroit, Michigan. He was married to Ettie Weisenthal. They had three children: Emily, Mamie and Karl.

¹⁰ Zlatta Chiat came from Ramygala, Lithuania according to Charlene Jaffe. Ramygala is located at 55o31'/24o18' about 45 miles north of Kaunas.