Even as a child, I dimly understood that there were deep and complicated reasons why my family was small. Reasons that could never be fully understood, but that the world would come to explain with words like Holocaust and genocide. And I did enjoy the love of my parents and their surviving brothers and sisters. Indeed, as a child I remember sometimes even feeling lucky to have so much attention showered on me.
Still, as I grew older, I began to envy my friends. Having a brother, a sister, or even a cousin to share my experiences, or just my thoughts about my parents, seemed very appealing. I became very good at making friends and finding "alternative communities" which served as a substitute family. But as my parents' older brothers and sisters began to die, belonging to a family with whom I shared a history seemed ever more attractive, yet increasingly less available.
Now, I knew that there were other people with the same last name as myself. And since my father had told me that his great grandfather had been one of seven brothers, the chances seemed good that at least some of those Schattners were my "cousins". In fact, I had been told that even William Shatner, of Star Trek fame, was a descendent of one of the seven brothers. Still the task of figuring out which Schattners were actually my relatives, and just how we might be related appeared quite daunting.
Then, about a year ago, I stumbled across a tool that made the task more manageable. Called the "Phone Disk", it is a telephone directory of the United States on CD-ROM. I typed the name "Schattner" and in moments had a listing of approximately 100 names and addresses of Schattners throughout the U.S. I composed a form letter in which I explained that I was looking for relatives and described the area in the Ukraine around the towns of Kuty, where my grandfather had grown up, and Czernowitz, where my father was born. Then I selected about 20 of the names ( I picked the ones with the most "Jewish sounding" first names, e.g. Isaac or Isidore or Max) and sent them my form letter. I fully expected not to get a single reply.
I was wrong. Two weeks later, I received my first response, from David Schattner in Lexington, Kentucky. "Yes, my grandfather came from Kitev in the Ukraine. I've wondered for years whether I have other relatives. I think we might be related." Indeed we might. From my father I learned that Kitev was the Yiddish name for Kuty. Since Kuty never had more than six thousand inhabitants, it was hard to imagine that we were not related. Over the next weeks and months I continued to receive phone calls and letters from different parts of the country. Invariably, the families came from Kuty or Czernowitz or some other town a few miles away.
Encouraged by the response, I sent out more letters. I went to the library and searched foreign telephone books for people with my last name. I knew that during World War II, European Jews fled to all parts of world looking for countries where they might escape from the Nazis - Canada, Australia, South America, Palestine. Perhaps some members of my family had survived the war in this way. So I sent out more letters, not knowing whether the recipients would be relatives or whether they would even be able to read English.
Again I was amazed by the response. A man named Marcelo Schattner telephoned me excitedly from Buenos Aires saying "Yes, my grandfather lived in Kuty before he immigrated to Argentina. I had thought the entire rest of my family had been killed." Wendy Shatner called from Toronto and confirmed that her grandfather - who was also the grandfather of her cousin William Shatner, the actor - had indeed been born in Kuty and had changed his name to Shatner when he immigrated to Canada. Naomi Schattner wrote back to me from Rio de Janeiro and Yehuda Schattner from Haifa. Leah Schattner wrote to me from Israel where she had immigrated only six months earlier from the former Soviet Union, apparently the only member of the family to have survived World War II and the Soviet aftermath in the Ukraine. I even received letters from other Peter Schattners! The father of one of these Peter Schattners had been born in Kuty and had fled the Nazis by going east - first to Shanghai which was a safe haven for Jews at the beginning of World War II and later to Australia.
Occasionally, a letter or call would provide a direct glimpse of my Father's childhood - for example, when Judy Schattner Wulkan turned out to be the grand daughter of a (distant) cousin who had tutored my Father in Hebrew seventy years ago. Or when Yael Schattner wrote about her late husband, Mordechai, and my Father realized that Mordechai was actually his second cousin, Max Schattner, who he had known growing up in Europe but had lost track of when Max had emigrated to Palestine (and changed his first name) in the 1930's.
Mostly, there were no such direct connections. Nevertheless, I
was struck by bond I felt with almost all of my correspondents -
whether
they were older folks happy to talk about their childhood memories, or
younger people who shared my interest in their family roots. I
might
not know just how we were related - but I certainly experienced a
feeling
of family in talking with them.
As my collection of "branches" of the family tree grew, I became
increasingly curious how we were all related, and what sort of lives
our
ancestors had led. However, these are not easily answered
questions.
People often know the names of their grandparents, but rarely do they
know
the names of their grandparents siblings or parents.
In the United States and many other countries, census, church and
birth/death/marriage
records enable studying one's family history . The Mormon Church
has especially extensive records - even if one's family is not
Mormon.
Using their database I was quickly able to find records of non-Jewish -
and presumably unrelated - Schattner families of Germany dating back to
the 1600's.
Unfortunately, for Eastern European Jewish families, genealogical
research
is much more challenging. Records were rarely kept, or had been
destroyed
by the Nazis. Records that did survive World War II generally
disappeared
afterwards within the Soviet bureaucracy. Since the breakup of
the
Soviet Union, this situation has begun to change. However, for
the
time being, getting useful family information from the former Soviet
Union
is still extremely difficult.
However, I have had some luck. I received a photograph of an old tombstone with an inscription that confirmed my Father's belief that several members of the family had been rabbis in the 1800's. Examining a 1930's Vienna telephone book (available at the New York Public Library) revealed the names, addresses and occupations of relatives who had moved to Vienna during World War I. Best of all, a few of the people I contacted had made family trees of their own parts of the family which made it possible to figure out how some of the new branches fit in. From one of them I was even able to find out how my branch of the family fit into the bigger picture.
So now I have created myself a family. With names of several
hundred
people spread out over 5 continents and all stemming from a few
villages
in Eastern Europe. And including more than a few people who -
even
though we've never met - think I'm some kind of a hero for helping to
figure
out how we are all related. It's been far more of an adventure
than
I possibly imagined when I copied the list of 100 names from the
CD-ROM.
So where do I go from here? I've met a few of my new relatives in
New York and California. And since I've always enjoyed traveling,
the idea of having invitations from new "cousins" around the globe
makes
for pleasant day dreaming about the next time I'll be able to take a
nice,
long trip. And in the meantime I've gone back to the
telephone
directories and started sending letters to people with the same names
as
my other grandparents...
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