I have spent several days over the summer sitting in at art exhibitions where my paintings are on display. An article about two Soviet cartoonists recently caught my eye, reminding me that many artists over the years have not had it so easy.

Boris Efimov was born in 1899 to a family of Jewish petty traders from Kiev. This makes him just a couple of years older than my grandmother, and from the same neck of the woods. In 1922 Efimov was persuaded by his brother Mikhail, a publisher and journalist later known under his pen-name Koltsov, to move to Moscow and earn a living from his art. He became the most lauded Soviet graphic artist of his time, and swung with the tide of official Soviet opinion, meaning that he was well treated by a succession of governments, from Lenin all the way to Putin.

Efimov work consisted mostly of flattering caricatures of Soviet celebrities and contrastingly harsh images ridiculing the regime’s enemies. Thanks in part to his brother, he became acquainted with many important personalities including politicians, publishers and critics. In 1924 he was described by Leon Trotsky (before the latter’s political downfall and exile) as ‘the most political of our graphic artists’. Trotsky wrote the preface to Efimov’s first album of drawings published in 1924 and the artist repaid him with subtle compliments (see illustration, left: ‘British Military Expert Repington is Trying to Define the Exact Size of the Red Army’, 1924. Every soldier is shown with the face of Leon Trotsky, alluding to the fact that he was a founder of Red Army. David King Collection, Tate Archive).

In 1926, after the British and Polish governments approved the shooting of four communists in Lithuania, Efimov published a cartoon showing Austen Chamberlain, the British foreign minister, and Polish premier Jozef Pilsudski applauding the execution. The British Foreign office issued a diplomatic memorandum to the Soviet Union, which was seen as something of a coup for Efimov. Pilsudski did not react.
​
Victims of political persecution became key targets for Efimov’s cartoons, even though many were former contacts and patrons of his. He attended the show trials of 1937 and 1938, which destroyed Stalin’s political opponents, sketching defendants that often he knew personally. These included the Soviet diplomat Christian Rakovsky, the Troskyite and journalist Karl Radek, and Nikolai Bukharin, one of Stalin’s leading rivals. His cartoons sometimes appeared on the same day as their subjects’ executions.

Efimov’s brother Koltsov was arrested in 1938 and executed two years later, leaving Efimov fearful for his own arrest. Luckily for him, his reputation within the regime was strong enough to save him.  Stalin considered him useful and personally forbade anyone from harming him. Naturally, in return, Efimov was unable to refuse to undertake work in support of the regime.

Throughout the war years he specialised in drawings of Hitler and other Nazis, images that proved popular among the Soviet forces. Efimov was awarded the most prestigious state honours, including several Stalin prizes and an Order of Lenin. He became the most celebrated cartoonist in the Soviet Union and, probably, the country’s richest artist. Albums of his caricatures were printed in their millions in the USSR and abroad.

Efimov died in 2008, at the age of 108. During his long life he created more than 700,000 pictures, and until his final years he continued to attack enemies of the state. When asked how he managed to live for so long, he replied, “I don't know. Maybe I have lived two lives, one of them for my brother”.

Efimov’s life contrasts sharply with that of fellow Soviet cartoonist Konstantin Rotov (1902–1959), who was loved by the people, but was sentenced by Stalin to fourteen years of prison and exile.

Rotov had been extremely popular in the interwar years, indeed he was better known in his time than the now famous artists of the era Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Marc Chagall. His mildly humorous cartoons appeared on an almost daily basis. In 1939 one of his drawings provided the image for a large mural in the Soviet pavilion in the World Exhibition in New York. He also produced the occasional political caricature, ridiculing so-called enemies of the people, but only did so reluctantly.

In 1940 Rotov was arrested for a cartoon titled ‘Closed for Lunch’ depicting a horse and sparrows, that he had drawn in 1934 but was never published.  The sparrows are shown patiently waiting for their lunch (horse’s dung) while the horse is eating from the nosebag. The hint at the hunger in the USSR was obvious to his contemporaries. A fellow artist saw the picture and reported Rotov to the secret police. He was charged with ‘defamation of the Soviet trade and cooperation’, tortured and sentenced to eight years in a labour camp.

When his term came to an end, Rotov was sentenced again, this time to exile in Siberia. He was able to return to Moscow only in 1954, after Stalin’s death. He immediately resumed drawing, producing illustrations for fairy tales and fantastical stories, such as Adventures of Captain Vrungel and Old Khottabych. These became (and still are) very popular, although few remembered his name and past fame. He died in 1959, his health damaged during his years of imprisonment.
​
This blog post is taken from an article by the historian and Tate Library Cataloguer Andrey Lazarev. View the full article here: https://www.tate.org.uk/research/features/two-soviet-cartoonists

I was in Warsaw earlier this month to give a talk at the IAJGS conference on Jewish genealogy, which provided an opportunity to visit this fascinating country. Agonising glimpses of once vibrant Jewish communities abound, but it is the sense of what has been lost that is palpable everywhere.

I cannot remember when I first became aware of the Holocaust. Most likely it was when, at the age of 13 or 14, my mother gave me a second-hand copy of The Diary of Anne Frank. Later, at 19, I visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Israel. Strangely I don’t remember being shocked by either of these (although I do recall a feeling of nausea at the piles of shoes at Yad Vashem); perhaps I felt that they confirmed information I had already absorbed.

As an adult, books by Primo Levi and other survivors, including an absolutely chilling account of the workings of Treblinka by Chil Rajchman, broadened my knowledge. Yes, the details are sickening, but familiarity with the events of the Holocaust has become so universal that I’m not sure it is ever possible to really imagine the enormity of what happened in Europe in the early 1940s.`

Visiting Poland certainly brought the horror home to me. One day my husband and children went to the Wieliczka salt mines, while I visited Auschwitz. Beforehand, I tried to explain to my eight-year-old daughter why I was not going with them. I only told her the most basic elements, but her face wrinkled up and she told me to stop. That night, frightened by my stories, she was unable to sleep.

The tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau, conducted by a guide whose great-grandfather had survived the camps, was haunting. Appalling, gruesome, sickening….there are no words that can do justice to the horrors perpetrated there. The visit is something everyone should experience. It records events that should never be allowed to happen again. And yet humanity does not seem to learn. Since then, ethnic cleansing has been perpetrated in former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, in Darfur, in Myanmar and elsewhere. And the far right has experienced a resurgence across much of Europe.

Most shocking though, was the sense of absence. In Krakow and in Warsaw, both cities with large pre-war Jewish communities – around 60,000 in Krakow and 400,000 in Warsaw, around a quarter and a third of the population, respectively – the loss is palpable. In Krakow, several vestiges of the old Jewish quarter remain – synagogues turned into museums; a cemetery where one wall has been built using fragments of gravestones shattered by the Nazi occupiers; shop fronts adorned with the names of their Jewish former owners. Indeed there is something of a revival of Jewish culture and heritage, with concerts of klezmer music, a Jewish festival and the Israeli ‘Hummus and Happiness Bar’, as well as a museum of photographs documenting the area’s Jewish life and loss.

In Warsaw it is the dearth of remnants of the Jewish community that is so chilling. The Germans razed the city to the ground as they fled the approaching Soviet troops. This makes the tiny fragments that remain all the more shocking: a single street that survived the demolition of the ghetto, pockmarked with bullet holes; a narrow fragment of ghetto wall; a synagogue that miraculously survived – one of over 400 that used to exist in the city; metal strips traversing the pavement at intervals, marking where the wall stood from 1940 until the ghetto was liquidated in 1943, when its inhabitants were herded onto cattle trucks and sent to the death camp at Treblinka.
​
And, in the sparkling new Jewish museum, exhibits marking hundreds of years of Jewish life in Poland come to an end not during the war, but afterwards, when the remaining few Jewish survivors returned to their villages to be welcomed not with sympathy and understanding, but with rampant anti-Semitism and fresh pogroms. The foundation of the state of Israel provided the escape that the remaining Jews needed, and they fled, en masse, in 1948.

Only in recent years have a few Jews begun returning to Poland, to rebuild their lost culture and commemorate those who have been long forgotten. Of course anti-Semitism is still rife among some sections of society, indeed a recent law making it a crime to accuse the Polish nation of complicity in Nazi war crimes prompted international condemnation. But there is a sense that many are now celebrating and commemorating Poland’s Jewish past, rather than smothering it.

Until this year, I had never been to Canada. It had never even made it onto my bucket list. With hindsight, it seems a strange omission from my extensive travels. After all, my father came from Winnipeg, Manitoba, and I have a plethora of relatives dotted across this vast country.

Just a few months ago I knew almost none of my Canadian relations. But they all knew me, for I am the family historian, the depository of our family’s stories. Five years ago my book was published, based on my grandmother’s recollections of growing up in Russia: a Jewish girl living through pogroms, World War I, the Russian Revolution, Civil War and the famine that followed, and her eventual escape to Canada in 1924. Thanks to this book, I am a seen as something of a celebrity, but only among my own family.

This year’s trip came about thanks to some cousins from Toronto who were visiting London last December and wanted to meet up. Have you ever had that experience when you meet someone for the first time and it’s as if you’ve known each other forever? Well, it was just like that.

They invited me to a family celebration in Toronto in May, where I would have the chance to get together with several of my Dad’s first cousins, among myriad other relatives. Some of them I had been in touch with for many years during my research for the book, but had never met. I took the opportunity to organise some talks and media publicity about the book while I was there, and also to visit Winnipeg.

Dad never talked much about Winnipeg, except to tell me repeatedly that it was the coldest city on the planet. He left as a teenager, without finishing high school, and as far as I know, he never went back.

I never visited Canada when I was growing up. Childhood trips to see Dad’s family were to Los Angeles, to where his parents, sister and several cousins had all relocated in the 1950s and 60s, escaping the snows of Winnipeg for the Californian sun. Dad himself had settled in LA in 1955, where he picked up his education again after several years of bumming around, studying at Santa Monica City College (Dustin Hoffman and James Dean were fellow alumni from the same era, Dad used to say) then UCLA. From there he won a scholarship to Cambridge, where he met my Mum, and that’s the reason I turned out to be English.

Although I had researched my family’s Russian origins in great depth, I had never paid much attention to the Canadian part of our story. But since Dad died in 2012, his life experiences too have become part of our family history.

On arrival in Winnipeg I was welcomed like a visiting dignitary. From the airport, I was thrown straight into an interview with a journalist from the Winnipeg Free Press, had time just to jump in the shower before the press photographer arrived for a photo shoot, then was whisked away for an evening reception held in my honour in the very luxurious home of a distant cousin.

One of my publicity events in Winnipeg took place at the city library. Afterwards, the curator of the library’s historical collection showed me its copies of Henderson’s Winnipeg Directory, an amazing resource that was published annually from 1882 listing all the city’s inhabitants by name, along with their address and place of work.

I found my grandfather and great-grandfather listed, initially under their Yiddish name, Kuperschmidt, then later Coopersmith and finally Cooper, living at 303 Flora Avenue, the house where my father would later grow up. My grandmother was listed from 1925, living on Euclid Avenue and working at the Globe Bedding factory.

Dad’s cousin Adele later took me on a tour of the area where the family had lived. That section of Flora Avenue was demolished many years ago, but on my return home I dug out a photo of my grandmother with my father as a little boy, taken around 1935, which I’m guessing shows the house in the background. On Euclid Avenue, we couldn’t find my grandmother’s first Winnipeg home, but came across that of her great-uncle, who had immigrated to Canada in 1914 with his family so that his sons could avoid conscription to the Russian army.

Winnipeg, at the confluence of the Assiniboine and Red rivers, was the first permanent European settlement in the Canadian West and grew rapidly in 19th and early 20th centuries as the gateway to the new frontier land of the prairie regions. Town planners designed the city with wide boulevards and grand buildings, aiming for it to become the Chicago of the North.

But, as happens in gateway cities, new immigrants came, and then they left – to settle the prairies or to move to Toronto, Vancouver, or the US – places with a less hostile climate and greater opportunities. Winnipeg never lived up to the dreams of its early pioneers and town planners. Knowing my Dad's cosmopolitan tastes, I can see why he wanted to leave. But in finally visiting Winnipeg, a little part of me definitely felt like it was coming home.

From and article in Argus Offline, Summer 2018.​
A Forgotten Land by Lisa Cooper is available on Amazon.com, Amazon.ca and Amazon.co.uk.

The Jewish Review of Books published an intriguing piece in its latest edition, featuring two books about anarchists, both of them Jews who had recently immigrated to the US from Tsarist Russia. The anarchist movement has been largely forgotten amid the later polarisation of the world between Communism and Capitalism. But in the US alone, in the early 20th century there were several hundred thousand anarchists, and they outnumbered Marxists in the country. They stood for the creation of a peaceful, stateless anti-authoritarian society, in which people would freely join together to govern themselves. Anarchists played a significant role in both the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Spanish Revolution of 1936.

Jewish immigrants from working-class families were prominent in the anarchist movement in the US, pursuing arguments in New York’s lively radical Yiddish-language subculture. They were not ashamed of their Jewish heritage, but rejected Judaism and held an annual Yom Kippur Ball, mocking the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

Jacob Abrams was born in present-day Ukraine in 1886, coming to America in 1908. He gained fame and notoriety in the US after he organised a protest in August 1918 in reaction to Washington’s decision to send 15,000 troops to intervene in revolutionary Russia. They distributed leaflets in English and Yiddish around New York’s immigrant district, the Lower East Side, calling for workers to participate in a general strike. “An open challenge only will let the government know that not only the Russian Worker fights for freedom, but also here in America lives the spirit of Revolution.”

Abrams and his co-conspirators were swiftly arrested and tried under the espionage act, receiving sentences of up to 20 years. Their appeal went to the US Supreme Court and became famous as a trial for free speech, and a compromise was reached offering the prisoners’ release provided they leave for Russia – their birthplace – at their own expense and never return to the US. In November 1921 they set sail for the Soviet Union.

Abrams spent five years in the USSR, and quickly gained the impression that it was not the workers’ utopia that he had dreamed of. He and his wife were assigned a space in a communal apartment, a single room shared with three other people. He found people hungry and dressed in rags. He gained permission to set up Russia’s first automatic laundry, which operated out of the basement of the foreign ministry. But his protestations about inefficiencies and graft were ignored and eventually led to charges of anti-Soviet activity being brought against him. He quit his job and was immediately evicted from his home as his accommodation was tied to government service.

He eventually managed to convince the authorities that he would be of more value to the revolution if he continued his work abroad and, surprisingly, he and his wife were given passports. They left for Mexico, where Abrams became director of the Jewish Cultural Centre and published Yiddish books and newspapers, and later became a close friend of the exiled Leon Trotsky.

Sam Dolgoff was born in Vitebsk, in present-day Belarus, in 1902. His father Max had been a rebel back in Russia, where he enraged his own father, a rabbi, by renouncing religion. He left for America to avoid being conscripted into the army, and was joined by his wife and son in 1905. Sam was a socialist by the age of 14, but he soon concluded that the socialists were mere reformers who were not really interested in uprooting the capitalist system or transforming society. When he started expressing these views at meetings and publishing his ideas he was expelled from the socialist party for insubordination.

He joined the Industrial Workers of the World in 1922, becoming a migratory worker and activist. He is described as having “a strong face, a rugged Russian Jewish face, wild black hair swept back, acute black eyes behind the glasses, a prominent nose,” and apparently looked like he combed his hair with an eggbeater. Later, in New York City, he joined with a group of Italian anarchists to found the Vanguard Group, an anarcho-communist group that largely propagated the ideas of the 19th century Russian revolutionary anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, and in 1954 he helped form the Libertarian League, which held weekly forums featuring non-anarchist speakers.

In the 1960s, Dolgoff despaired of the new wave of anarchists, whom he described as “half-assed artists and poets who reject organisation and want only to play with their belly buttons”. He scorned the young radicals’ embrace of the new Cuban leader Fidel Castro, decrying him as a Stalinist dictator, and campaigned on behalf of the Cuban anarchists that Castro had attacked and exiled.

As the review concludes, both these men accomplished little, they failed to achieve the goal of an anarchist society and to attract enough believers to their cause to keep the movement alive. But “they were dreamers… their dream was a noble one and worthy of being remembered”.
  
For the full review, click here https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/3222/free-radicals/
The J. Abrams Book: The Life and Work of an Exceptional Personality by Jacob Abrams, trans Ruth Murphy
Left of the Left: My Memories of Sam Dolgoff by Anatole Dolgoff

It was a real thrill for me to visit Canada last month, to catch up with relatives, some of whom I had not seen for many years, and to get to know dozens more that I had never met before. It was my first visit to Winnipeg, where my family immigrated to when they left Russia and the town where father was born and brought up. Of particular interest was a trip to Winnipeg’s North End, where so many of the Jewish community settled.

The area centres around Selkirk Avenue. The Manitoba Historical Society has some great descriptions of Selkirk Avenue in the early 20th century. The street is named after Lord Selkirk, who was the first to encourage European settlers to the area and helped establish the city of Winnipeg. A four-block miniature park nearby was also named after him.

The street was the heart of the Jewish North End. There were Jewish bakers, kosher butchers and two grocery stores owned by Goldenberg and Rosen. A confectioners called the Five Cent Store was owned by a Mr Saidman, who sold no item over five cents, mostly candy, ice cream, pop, popcorn and sunflower seeds, which made him famous. And a fur and cap store stood on the corner of Selkirk and Charles Street. The Hebrew School was around the corner, and next door to it lived the chief Rabbi. The Queen’s Theatre was on Selkirk and played to capacity with Jewish talent.

The Pritchard pool, police station, chicken and egg dealers, barber shops, a church, synagogues, horse barns, watch makers, a tent and awning store and sign painter were all located within a block or so. In fact, the North End of Winnipeg around Selkirk Avenue was just like the shtetl that the Jews had left behind in Eastern Europe, a shtetl that they recreated for themselves half way around the world. And here in Winnipeg, even the climate was familiar, with long, fierce winters and brief, hot summers.

Little is left of the Jewish North End today. A lone Jewish baker’s shop sits on Selkirk Avenue, selling all variety of knishes, over a dozen different types of bagels, blintzes and the most enormous cinnamon buns. Now the area reflects subsequent waves of immigration from other parts of the world, while the Jews have largely resettled in fancier parts of town or moved away to other cities across Canada and the US.

In the main public library, Henderson’s Winnipeg Directory is an amazing resource that was published annually from 1882 listing all the city’s inhabitants by name, along with their address and place of work. Searching the directory for 1926, I found my grandmother listed, living on Euclid Avenue and working at Globe Bedding, and my grandfather at 303 Flora Avenue, the house where my father would later grow up. That section of Flora Avenue has since been destroyed, but I am guessing that this photo of my grandmother with my father as a little boy, taken around 1935, may show the house in the background.

After one of my talks in Toronto, an audience member asked me, why did your family choose Winnipeg? My response, that I didn’t think anybody actually chose Winnipeg, drew laughter among the cosmopolitan audience. But another attendee pointed out that trains bringing settlers from the boats docking in Halifax, Nova Scotia, made no stops until they reached Winnipeg. Canada was inviting immigrants to settle the prairie regions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, giving away or cheaply selling off fertile farming land. Winnipeg, the meeting point of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers, was the gateway to this new frontier land.

Some Jews joined farming cooperatives and settled the prairie land. But Jews had been deprived of the right to own land back in the Russian Empire and most felt that farming was not for them. Instead they settled in Winnipeg in great numbers, as did Ukrainians, Mennonites, Germans and Scandinavians, although some of these groups assimilated more quickly than others.

I was interested to read this week of the death of the Viznitzer Rebbe Mordechai Hager in New York at the grand age of 95, for I have a distant (although unconfirmed) connection to the Viznitzer rabbis. My great-great-great grandfather, Akiva Hager (pictured), was in some way related to the Hager rabbis of Viznitz, but even back in the 19th century, apparently no-one in the family could actually put their finger on the blood link that connected them to the esteemed rabbis. Nevertheless, the family was always aware of how distinguished the Hager name was and sharing the name meant that they commanded respect among the Jewish community in which they lived.

The Viznitzer rabbis were one of the most famous and revered dynasties in Hassidic Judaism. The sect was founded in the mid-1800s by Rabbi Menachem Mendl Hager in Viznitz (Vyzhnytsia in Ukrainian), a village in the foothills of the Carpathian mountains now in southwest Ukraine. Mordechai Hager was born in 1922, in Oradea, Romania, known in Yiddish as Grosswardein. His father, Chaim Meir Hager, was the fourth grand rabbi of Viznitz, and moved the dynasty to Grosswardein during the First World War. The Viznitz rabbinical dynasty today has congregations in Israel, London and Montreal as well as New York City and state.

Despite sharing the revered family name of Hager, my forefathers made the decision to drop the name in order to save my great-great-great grandfather Akiva from conscription. At that time, in the mid-19th century, Jews were a particular target of Tsar Nicholas I’s military recruiting officers, known in Yiddish as ‘happers’.  The happers were supposed to take boys aged between 12 and 18, but often recruited (some would say kidnapped) younger children, some as young as eight or nine, to fulfil their quotas, bundling them into uniforms meant for youths twice their age.

Military service lasted a full 25 years, but most did not survive that long. It took only days for the Jewishness of the new recruits to be squeezed out of them like water from a sponge. They were barred from following the kosher laws or keeping the Sabbath, or even from speaking Yiddish. Any boy who insisted on holding fast to the dietary laws – refusing to eat pork or soup made with lard – was beaten with a rod or deprived of drinking water.

And however firm their Jewish resolve, the boys were unable to avoid marching or performing drills on the Sabbath. At the end of a ten hour march, having eaten nothing but dry bread, the young recruits would arrive exhausted at their destination and were often forced to kneel until they agreed to convert to the Orthodox Christian faith. If they continued to refuse, they had to kneel all night. Some boys would take their own lives rather than agree to convert. Others would be beaten and starved and died from fever or exposure before ever setting eyes on a battlefield.

As well as changing Akiva’s name to avoid such a fate, his family refused to let him attend school or any other formal institution – it was well known that Jewish boys who tried to enrol in a Russian ‘shkole’ could find themselves offered up as recruits for the army. So Akiva avoided conscription but never learned to read or write.
​
By the time Akiva was in his late teens, Tsar Nicholas upped the conscription rate still further as Russia headed towards the Crimean War. Wealthier families tried to bribe the conscription officers to stop them from taking their sons, but there was no guarantee of success. Akiva’s family didn’t have the money to pay a bribe and instead they sent him to the dentist to have all his teeth extracted, a procedure that must have been horribly painful in the days before anaesthetic, and altered his appearance for life. But the loss of his teeth was successful in keeping Akiva out of the army, and had that not been the case, I probably wouldn’t be here today to tell his story.

I recently came across a surprisingly interesting series of articles about Jewish surnames from the Russian Empire. It turns out that there’s much more to this dry-sounding subject than meets the eye.

In Eastern Europe, Jews acquired their last names between the end of the 18th century and the middle of the 19th, following a series of laws forcing them to adopt hereditary names. Before that, the only Jews with surnames were those belonging to certain rabbinical dynasties. For the rest of us, our ancestors would have been known by their name and patronymic, their father’s name, as in Abraham ben Moses or Nathan ben Israel.

Surnames across the Russian Empire have their roots in several different sources. Those derived from towns or cities in western Germany, such as Auerbach, Epstein, Ginzburg, Halpern, Landau and Schapiro were particularly prestigious, passed down through rabbinical families living in western Germany during the 15th and 16th centuries before they or their descendants migrated eastwards.

The high frequency of the name Epstein, for example, results from its old age; the earliest reference, from Frankfurt, dates from 1392, and the migration of a rabbi bearing this name to Eastern Europe. It is testimony to the prestige of his lineage rather than a large number of migrants from the town of Eppstein.

Unusually, many were derived from women’s first names, such Belkin, Dvorkin, Malkin, and Rivkin – derived from Belka (Beyle), Dvorka (Deborah), Malka, and Rivka – far more than prevailed outside the Russian Empire. This may be partly because it was often Jewish women who were outwardly facing in areas like commerce and the marketplace, while their menfolk studied in Yeshiva or worked from the home as craftsmen. Many women would have been better known to the inhabitants of a locality than their husbands.

Additionally, a tradition already existed in Eastern Europe before the 19th century of giving men ‘nicknames’ based on female first names, for example, the famous Polish rabbis Samuel Eidels (1555-1631) and Joel Sirkes (1561-1640), both ending in the Yiddish possessive suffix -s. Numerous names of the community leaders in Lviv found in Polish documents from the 1740s–1770s belong to the same category: Bonis, Cymeles, Daches, Fayglis, Menkes, Minceles, Mizes, and Nechles. This naming tradition could have had a direct influence on the names adopted at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries in the same area, as well as in southern Ukraine and Bessarabia.

Just how common these matronymic names were once Jews were required by law to adopt surnames varies from place to place. Surnames based on female names were particularly common in the Mogilev province in eastern Belorussia, where they covered 30-40 percent of the Jewish population. Almost all of them were created by using the East Slavic possessive suffix –in. In many other areas the percentage is only in single figures.

The naming process was administered by the Jewish administration, the Kahal, and it is likely that local Kahal authorities were largely responsible for choosing a model for the distribution of surnames, some choosing to follow matronymic lines, others opting for other patterns.

In the Novogrudok district of Minsk province, one third of Jews received names derived from male given names and for another third surnames were drawn from local place names by adding the suffix -sky. In a number of districts of Volhynia and Podolia, artificial surnames with attractive meanings like Goldberg ‘gold mountain’, Rosenthal ‘valley of roses’, and Silberstein ‘silver stone’ covered about one third of all names, while one quarter of names indicated the occupations of their first bearers. In the area southeast to Kiev, two thirds of Jews received names ending in -sky based on local towns.

Less likely to be true, according to Alexander Beider, a linguist and expert on the subject of Jewish names, is the common perception that Jews paid money for the best names – the attractive ones like the above-mentioned Goldstein, Rosenthal or Silberberg. The widespread nature of attractive-sounding names, and the relative scarcity of derogatory ones supposedly assigned to those too poor to pay a bribe, would appear to debunk this myth. In addition, Beider says, the existence of a list of names and their bribe price across a wide area covering different jurisdictions is simply not feasible.
​
This post is based on a series of articles in The Forward by Alexander Beider, a linguist and the author of reference books about Jewish names and the history of Yiddish.

For more see: https://forward.com/opinion/395078/why-do-so-many-jewish-last-names-come-from-women/d.com/opinion/395078/why-do-so-many-jewish-last-names-come-from-women/
And: https://forward.com/opinion/391341/did-jews-buy-their-last-names/