Aunty Ann with husband Joe Casey - Jewish Immigrants often ended up with Irish sounding names when immigration officers couldn't pronounce their real ones.
Zelda with her Aunty Ann, who made sure she was fed and told her old folk tales fro Russia
Annie was the eldest of my mother's sisters, plain of face and roly-poly plump. Having no children of her own she devoted herself to my good. She and her husband, Joe, ran the millinery shop at islington Green, but as it had no upper part, they lived with us above 27 Upper Street. Mum lacked the culinerary skills and to be honest she preferred working in the shop to anything domestic. Annie cooked for us all and made sure i was fed properly. She would spoon the chicken soup into my mouth, overcoming my reluctance to eat by keeping me amused with her folk tales of animals in the woods leading little girls either into trouble or out of it, according to my good or bad behaviour. After the last spoonful of soup was swallowed I was rewarded by the sight of a pretty picture of Red Riding Hood on the bottom of the plate and by a big hug from Aunty.
In the evenings, before bedtime, she would settle me comfortably into her capacious lap and recount stories of the homeland. Russia was still vivid in her mind despite the years she had lived and worked in England. She told me of the little village in which they lived, just outside a small town called Sowalki. Being a master carpenter, grandpa Ginsberg was much admired by the other villagers and they wanted him to teach their sons his craft.
Those were the times of the pogroms, with savage attacks on the Jews. History records that within a period of four years massacres were perpetrated in no less than two hundred and eighty four Russian towns and the total number of victims was estimated at 50,000. Those were the cold facts but Annie told me stories of her own experience in her own way. She told me of coassacks galloping into the village. "They would crack their whips in the air above their heads and whoop loudly" she said, and my eyes would open wide with fear. "They would ride in on a Friday night, the Sabbath, when all the Jewish men were in the synagogue praying,i could have no conceptio of the enormity of what she went on to describe, but i could sense from her voice the dread she must have felt.
She described the looting of their home and how they beat her and the other children with their horse whips for trying to rotect their mother from attack. it was many years later before I understood that she meant rape. "All the little ones would hide behind the stove, huddling together, crying, shutting their eyes, trying not to see what was happening," she said sadly, "Nobody came to helpp them."
The word "Cossack" was always uttered in a tone of such loathing and fear that I grew up thinking of them as the devil incarnate. Mind you, she also used the same tone when she spoke of the Bolsheviks. It was very confusing.
I think it was annie's stories that fostered my interest in Russia novels. In my teens I read all I could get my hands on; War and Peace, Crime and punishment, and the stories of Chekhov. Auntie had never read them. Yiddish was her first language but even that she could not read as had so little schooling.
Annie also told me how in 1905, when Grandpa was to be press-ganged into the army to fight in the Russo-Japanese war he decided to escape to England. The story goes that recruitment sergeants wre stationed in the village and there was no free access or exit. Everyone was stopped and searched and passes had to be shown. Grandpa escaped by hiding in the hay piled high on a farmer's cart. Naturally money had to change hands to compensate the farmer for his risk but aunty always emphasised the great risk Grandpa took. "it was so hot and stifling in the hay that he nearly died."
How he got to England after that i never knew and how grandma survived aloong in Russia of those difficult times of revolutions and pogroms has always been an even greater mystery to me. She had four young children and another one on the way when he left. All that my mother told me was of the misery of their journey on the "Cattle boat" across the North Sea from Hamburg. Annie was sent over first to help Grandpa establish a home, and then the others arrived in England in 1911. I still find it difficult to understand how they managed the journey. On her own Grandma had to carry the luggage, made heavy with her silver sabbath candlesticks and other treasures. Then there was her bedding to contend with - can you imagine grappling with a huge king-size feather-filled, bulky duvet (called "paranah" in Yiddish) and her continental-size feather-filled pillows, all tied up with string? The mind boggles. On top of that she had to keep control of the four lively young children with her.
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