War, famine and persecution inflict profound changes on bodies and brains. Could these changes persist over generations?
A few years ago, my husband was contacted by genealogists tracking descendants of rabbis from the Lithuanian shtetl of Kelm. The impoverished little town was known for its fierce schools of Talmudic learning, or yeshivas; it was a centre of Mussar – a strict system of ethics based on logic and the rigorous practice of mindfulness, a meditative approach to self-reflection and prayer.
The massive genealogy we ultimately received by email spanned five continents, 16 generations and almost 400 years of grief. My husband's forebears, rabbinical ancestors of the Kelm elite, were prominent in 1648 when Cossacks stormed the town of Nemirov, then in Russian Poland, now in Ukraine. Some 6,000 Jews had sought refuge behind the fortified walls. But Cossacks carrying Polish flags tricked their way in, reportedly killing children, boiling victims in vats, and flaying them alive. Jehiel Michael ben Eliezer, the rabbi of Nemirov and my husband's great(x9)-grandfather, ran to the cemetery hoping at least to be buried – but he was clubbed to death, then left to rot. The Martyr of Nemirov is his historic name.
After the slaughter, the rabbis fled to other shtetls across the Pale of Settlement – the swath of Europe covering parts of Poland, Lithuania, Russia and Ukraine where Jews were allowed to live. In 1768, Jehiel's great-grandson Rabbi Zvi Hirsch of Lysyanka in Ukraine was killed by Cossacks, who chased him from his home near Kiev through Romania and Bulgaria to the Turkish border, hundreds of miles away. Four years later, my husband's great-great-great-grandfather Eliezer Gutman was born in Lithuania, in the city of Plunge. By 1810, he'd moved to the hardscrabble shtetl of Kelm, becoming the town's chief rabbi and establishing a yeshiva that became renowned. He died in 1831, aged 58.
Like other Jews forced to flee the Ukrainian pogroms, the Gutmans of 19th-century Kelm were poorer than ever. And under the Second Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, they were subject to an onerous draft that took conscripted Jewish boys from age 12 and as young as eight; military service was for 25 years. My husband's great-great-grandmother, Eliezer's daughter Rebecca, was called 'the Golden Belly' in the genealogy because she bore four daughters and five sons who all became rabbis. Like so many other Jews of their generation, most of her offspring booked passage for New York City.
One of those daughters gave rise to a criminal gang so notorious that they were on the front page of the New York City papers for a solid year in 1902. They scammed poor Italian immigrants into buying fake jewellery, and when victims couldn't pay up, they threw them in a fake jail the family rented from corrupt city officials, controlled by fake cops paid by the family. This line of descendants lived in relative luxury in an elevator building on Grand Street, on New York's Lower East Side; all their weddings were performed by my husband's great-grandfather (youngest son of 'the Golden Belly'), the Manhattan rabbi Judah Sacks. Another of the daughters helped to bring to Jerusalem what would become the massive Mir Yeshiva, founded in 1814 in Belarus; today, it is one of the world's largest centres for the study of the Talmud, fuelled by Mussar, the ethical system honed by the rabbis of Kelm.
Cousins who stayed behind in Kelm were slaughtered when Nazis gathered them into the courtyard of their great yeshiva and shot them on 29 July 1941; they are buried in a mass grave on a local farm. But most fanned out, landing at the forefront of medicine, law, cosmology, the arts – worldwide. Accomplished, yes. Brilliant, yes. But even when advancements of medicine expanded the lifespans of others, many from the red-haired Kelm clan didn't live long. The genealogy tracked it all. Rabbi Judah Sacks died in New York City in 1903, aged 58. My husband's uncle Meyer, a Los Angeles rag-trade impresario, dropped dead after a massive cerebral haemorrhage in 1975, aged 58. My husband's mother, a torch-song singer, had longstanding heart failure; a great-granddaughter of the Golden Belly, she dropped dead from salty food on a Caribbean cruise in 1997. The most influential leader of Mir in modern times, a cousin to my husband, was such a rock star that his funeral, at age 68, drew thousands of black-coated mourners weeping and pounding the streets of Jerusalem in 2011.
