I’ve entertained the idea that Rochla Andrelewitz may’ve indeed posed as her mother or her sister, with her mother (not “father”) or her grandfather (or perhaps her grandmother) being “Gitla”. My great-great-grandmother Katherine Gaydos née Ushinsky certainly posed as her mother “Maria Uscianski” (although she also had a sister named “Maria”), and she claimed that her uncle was her “brother”. Because of what she did, I was thrown off and to thinking that the Haslinskzys were maternal (“half”) siblings of hers. A Krempaszky cousin corrected me (and, from what I understand, I am related to her in more ways than one—as my father’s father was a Krempaszky, and one of his cousins married a Haslinskzy. Either way, we Crypto Jews from what is now Slovakia, Hungary, etc. stuck together as much as our ancestors in Spain, Portugal, etc. stuck together.).
In turn, I had the opportunity to correct her when she tried to say that my great-grandfather Michael Gaydos meant that we were Ruthenian. As I explained to her in a message in some form, Great-Gramddad Gaydos knew exactly what he was saying when he said, “We’re Russian!”
Great-Granddad was formally uneducated (because he had to drop out of school after eighth grade), not unintelligent in any way. It therefore didn’t work when my dad dismissed him by saying that he said that only because he worked for the Russian Orthodox Church (It was a Slovakian Catholic one), and it didn’t work to deny that he knew the difference between “Russian“ and “Ruthenian”. (My cousin seems to have taken the hint, given that she eventually made her family tree public again).
I have written this elsewhere, and wish that I could simply copy and paste what I have already written. I type with one finger on each hand, anyway, and I try to make sure what I say is consistentregardless of whether I write (or type) it or speak it. This is because I am trying to recover an identity that almost went to the grave with past generations (My paternal grandmother is my last surviving grandparent, and my father is still not happy that I found out about our Jewishness). Had someone in the current generations neither knew nor cared to recover it, it would have more than likely been irrecoverable in future generations
As you may have guessed, the protagonist of “Trying to Recover” has autobiographical elements and other elements that are based on the fact that I’m still trying to recover what I began to recover in 2008 (I began doing genealogy research in the prior year, and I figured out that I’m Jewish just months before I was able to confirm it.). I might take at least another 15 years to fully recover it—and that includes that I’m still working to recover what past generations almost took to the grave about Rochla Andrelewitz. Unlike my Krempaszky cousin whom came forward about Great-Great-Grandma Gaydos (although I first reached out to her), anyone who knows what happened to Rochla or which Andrelewitz “Rochla” really was has yet to come forward (and I do credit my Krempaszky cousin for replying when I reached out and conceding that Great-Granddad Gaydos identified with Jews in the Soviet Union, albe cryptically, for a reason).
נצחיה בת אביגדור הלוי צהרנצקי
(Nicole Czarnecki)
PS Even though it is actually the eighth day of Sukkot on the Biblical calendar today, Hamas (ימ״ש) and their supporters (ימ״ש) still tried to take away the simchat Torah. Sabras and olim were thankfully able to fight back, although the pain that Hamas (ימ״ש) and their supporters (ימ״ש) caused will have ripple effects for at least a generation—even among Jews like me whom are not recognized as Jewish by fellow Jews.
PPS I prefer to render my surname as “צהרנצקי”, as it’s closer to the “Zernetzky”/“Chernetski”/“Czerniecki” that we were forced to take (and corrupted to “Czarniecki” and variants thereof to conceal our Jewish heritage).
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