The Letters between Lev & Fenya – Goldstein, Battalen, Challov & Ronen Family Histories

The letters between Lev and Fenya were written between sometime in 1910, which I believe is the year they met, and April, 1913, when Fenya finally joined Lev in New York. During that time Fenya lived in Kiev and Lev lived in Voronezh, possibly sometimes Kiev and elsewhere, and then New York. There are letters to Fenya from her family and friends after she emigrated, as well as from friends while she was still in Russia.

We do not have any of the letters that Fenya wrote to Lev while he was still in Russia, only those that she sent to him in the US; therefore what we know of her during that time can only be gleaned through Lev’s responses to her letters.

The translators noted that Lev’s Russian was clearly not his first language, that his spelling and grammar were poor. Why did they write to each other in Russian, rather than Yiddish, a language they both knew well? Perhaps one or both of them couldn’t write fluently in Yiddish, or perhaps they didn’t want their parents to be able to read the emotional letters that flew back and forth. However, it is also the case that a series of nineteenth century Russian laws designed to assimilate the Jewish population promoted Russian education at the expense of traditional Jewish education.[1] By the time our grandparents were growing up, they were most likely being educated as much if not more in secular schools than in cheders.[2] Like young people everywhere, they probably wanted to be modern and thus different than their parents.

For years the letters were tied up in a knipple (knot) in a piece of cloth. They remained in Lucy Battalen Fass’ home on 1320 East 7th Street in Brooklyn, NY, until my mother Ethel Battalen Goldstein convinced Lucy to give them to her. Ethel knew a Russian immigrant hairdresser who translated a couple of the letters. In 1999, Ethel gave me the letters and I began to seriously undertake their translation.

I worked with two graduate students in the Slavic Languages Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Laura Little and Alice Harris; Ethel provided funds so that I could pay them. I photocopied the letters and gave the translators family trees to familiarize them with the characters they encountered in the letters.

The bulk of the letters were translated by Lydia Vaynshtayn, z”l. Lydia had been an English teacher at a high school in Tashkent, and arrived in Madison with members of her family during the Russian refugee immigration of the early 1990’s. Lydia had red hair, a sparkling personality and a little dog that she loved dearly. She lived in a nearby retirement community and we had her over for dinner a couple of times. The translations reflect her idiosyncratic use of the English language. Sometime around 2014 I worked with a young Russian Jewish woman, Catherine Vakhnina, who sorted through unidentified fragments and disconnected pages. She was able to reconstruct several letters this way, based on textual context, handwriting and quality of the paper and pen. She also translated the last remaining untranslated letters.

THE LETTERS OF THE BATTALEN-RONEN FAMILY, WITH TRANSLATIONS

IN-COUNTRY PEN PALS

THE LONG WAIT

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