Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 10, 1993 TAG: 9301080206
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-6 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: KARLEEN WICKHAM SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
FAMILY'S SEARCH FOR ROOTS ENDS IN LITHUANIA
Bob Schulman went to Lithuania last summer in search of his roots.An associate professor of statistics at Virginia Tech, Schulman and a half-dozen members of his family made the journey - the first time the family has been able to return to its birthplace in Lithuania since their grandfather, Harry Schulman, fled in 1902.
Even at the turn of the century, this small country under the dominance of the Russian empire was not a friendly place for Jews.
What Schulman found when he returned 90 years later was that many of the Jews who still live there aren't aware of their roots.
The few who escaped the Holocaust were so terrorized that they did not even tell their children they were Jews. The new generation thought until recently they were just Soviet citizens.
At 15, Harry Schulman would have been drafted into the Russian army. At that time, the Russian empire was the dominant influence in Lithuania.
It was "difficult enough to be Jewish in those days and difficult enough to be in the army, but the combination was deadly," said Bob Schulman.
So at 14, Harry Schulman left Lithuania to come to America alone. He "more or less walked out," a distance of 500 to 600 miles on foot, across Germany's border to the port at Bremen.
He boarded a ship and came over in steerage, joining other refugees, "all speaking different languages, probably poor, scared, but hopeful."
From New York's refugee immigration house on Ellis Island, Harry Schulman went to live with a brother and a sister on the East Coast.
He learned English "with a Southern black accent" from a janitor. At 16 he entered the fourth grade, the only formal education he got.
Within three years, the rest of his family had left Lithuania and settled in New York or Washington. He met and married another Lithuanian immigrant, Bess Feldman, who had left with her family in 1890 when she was 2.
Harry Schulman began delivering pictures for a developer and ended by running a small company, Crown Photo Finishing, in Washington. It was bought out by Kodak.
Harry and Bess Schulman never returned to their homeland, but their son, Cyril, and his wife, Margaret, managed to visit Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Soviet travel restrictions kept them from going to his parents' hometowns.
Cyril Schulman got another chance in June 1992.
On the trip were Bob Schulman; his father, Cyril; his sister, Susan Kirschenbaum; his brother, Jeffrey; an uncle, Martin Schulman; and a cousin, Steven Schulman. All are professionals in the health field except Tech professor Bob and Martin, a businessman.
It was a trip "several thousand miles in distance and about a hundred years back in time," Bob Schulman said.
In Vilnius, he visited a small Jewish museum that had opened in the past three years, since Lithuania's independence from the Soviet Union was recognized.
The curator was "just bubbling over" with her newfound Jewish heritage, although a lot she had to relate was negative.
Schulman discovered that about 95 percent of the Jews who lived in Lithuania before World War II were killed by the Nazis. The Soviet regime never admitted the Holocaust had taken place.
Schulman took a photo in Vilnius of a building's exposed interior wall where a star of David had been scratched into the concrete by an unknown Jew expressing his identity before he was herded away to a concentration camp.
The Schulmans drove to Bess Feldman's childhood village, Pasvalys, where they visited a recently restored Jewish cemetery.
They also saw tombstones smashed into chunks and scattered, a legacy of the Nazis.
About 20 miles west of Pasvalys, the family came to Pekrouis, where Harry Schulman was born in 1888.
The town of about 1,000 has streets of modest, neatly kept frame houses painted mustard, gold, green and barn red. The roofs are cedar shake or tin. A horse-drawn milk cart makes home deliveries.
One of the landmarks they hoped to find was a church.
As they approached the village, they could see twin white steeples three or four miles away across table-flat land. The church was the tallest building in town.
Harry Schulman's father had been caretaker of the church. A brass plaque in the church yard said it had been dedicated in 1878.
In the 1930s, during a 20-year spell of Lithuanian independence, another immigrant from Pekrouis took photos of the town and gave copies to Harry Schulman. The family used them to seek the home place.
Harry Schulman said his family had lived next door to the mayor's house, which was beside the church.
The Schulmans found what they hoped was the mayor's house, although it had been altered quite a bit since the photos were taken.
The home's occupants told the Schulmans' interpreter it was the "old mayor's house."
They ambled to the house next door, "trespassing on private property," Bob Schulman said.
Harry Schulman had never talked much about the house itself. In two pictures taken in his back yard around 1900, there are no buildings.
Harry had said the back yard had a vegetable garden, a cherry tree "with cherries as big as oranges" and an apple tree "with apples as big as grapefruits."
The Schulmans saw a river Harry remembered, 100 yards from the rear of the house.
They also found in the back yard a vegetable garden, an old, gnarled cherry tree and an ancient apple tree - about 40 feet tall with apples on it.
As Bob Schulman's father and uncle stood under the tree, he remembers thinking: "Here were two very old trees and two old guys in their 70s wondering, `Could this be it?'
"They touched the tree and I could feel a connection, right down to the literal roots. They had found the root of their search, the apple tree that their father had played under as a boy. This was it, the place we came from!
"Interestingly enough," Schulman said, "we don't feel the need to go back there again."
The pilgrimage was over.