Perhaps the first antisemitic joke in my life directed at me personally was about me being mixed rather than simply Jewish. A classmate learned that I had both Jewish and German ancestry and exclaimed, “I’ve just discovered the cause of spontaneous human combustion!”

Growing up in a secular, and indeed mixed, family in post-Soviet Russia, I knew I was a Jew but had little understanding of what that meant. I did have a half-uncle I’d never met who was a rabbi in Jerusalem and a fancy silver Kiddush set collecting dust on a shelf in my grandmother Irina’s apartment.

But that same grandmother, who largely raised me, also had an old Lutheran Bible in German and photographs of noble ancestors with names like Woldemar, Adolph and Charlotte. “Our family once owned a castle in the Baltics”, she would tell me.

Right, the German side of my family was Baltic German. This is very different from Germans from Germany proper. The Baltic Germans, now a largely extinct community, were originally descendants of Teutonic crusaders who came to what’s now Latvia and Estonia in the Middle Ages, well before the emergence of the modern idea of German culture and national identity.

When the region was conquered by the Russian Empire, its Germans retained their privileged status and noble titles and were effectively allowed to maintain a state within a state. Although Latvia was part of Russia for centuries, most of its estate owners, government officials, pastors and merchants were culturally and linguistically German. What they were ethnically is a more complex question – after all, a majority of Latvia’s population was Latvian.

Up until the late 19th century, a Latvian peasant who moved to the city, acquired higher education or became a successful entrepreneur would almost inevitably switch to the German language, and their children or grandchildren would be accepted as Baltic Germans even if they had no ancestral connection to the Germanic crusaders. A 2020 paper on Baltic German identities by French historian Lucie Lamy mentioned a respondent named Kārlis who was half-Hungarian and half-Latvian but identified as a Baltic German because he was raised in this innately multiethnic and globalized but universally German-speaking, Lutheran and socially privileged subculture of old Riga.

This is exactly what happened to my grandmother’s paternal ancestors: her father Woldemar Johann Victor Pruss (Voldemārs Jānis Viktors Prūsis in Latvian, and later known as Vladimir in Russian), baptized Lutheran and raised in a German-speaking household, was mostly descended from ethnic Latvians and a bit of Estonians rather than “actual” Germans the way we know them today.

Woldemar’s father Johann Adam Woldemar Pruss (Jānis Voldemārs Ādams Prūsis) was a decorated military doctor in the Imperial Russian Army who was granted a noble title for his service. Multiple generations of his ancestors on his mother’s side, the Priede, Dāle and Lesiņš families, were involved in international trade out of Riga’s sea port.

Woldemar’s mother Charlotte Wilhelmine Johanna von Morr, too, had roots in Riga’s port quarters: her great-grandfather Miķelis Sproģis, a Latvian of humble origins, worked as a maritime pilot on the river Daugava. However, by the time Charlotte was born, her family had already acquired a noble title – her father was the headmaster of one of the most prestigious schools in the Russian Empire located right next to the emperor’s summer palace.

Naturally, the aggressively egalitarian Soviet Union wasn’t fond of this type of background. One of Woldemar’s uncles was executed as an alleged Latvian spy during Stalin’s Great Terror and the other died in a Gulag camp. Woldemar’s younger brother was sent to do forced labor in a grim mining town north of the Arctic Circle. Eventually, he was shot there for his political views. The fact that my great-grandfather survived the 1930s is a miracle, but he didn’t emerge from this period unscathed.

After a few years of working as a tram maintenance technician in Saint Petersburg, Woldemar enrolled in a history program at the local university. There, he met Musya Shklar, a fellow history student. She was born to a Jewish family in Vitebsk. Her father, a poor cabman named Khayim, and her mother, a seamstress whose name I sadly don’t even know, died young. After a few years at her grandfather’s place in a Belarusian shtetl called Lepel, she ended up in an orphanage in Saint Petersburg.

When Woldemar and Musya fell in love with each other, Woldemar’s noble parents were furious. A poor and orphaned bride with manners far from aristocratic, not Lutheran and moreover – Jewish! Surely, Charlotte Wilhelmine Johanna Pruss, née von Morr, dubbed “Baba Lötti” in my grandma’s memories, wasn’t fond of her son’s choice. In fact, the story goes that she refused to talk to them both and stayed in her room while they were at home for the first few months. Eventually, she did accept Musya and from that point on, treated her as if there was no prior animosity whatsoever.

In 1938, when Woldemar’s younger brother Nicolai Wladislaw Adolph Pruss was executed in a labor camp, the Soviet government banned the entire family from living in the USSR’s largest cities. This is how Woldemar and Musya ended up in Atyrau, then a small desert town in Kazakhstan. When a teachers’ institute was established in Atyrau, Woldemar was offered the position of head of the history department and Musya became a lecturer.

Shortly after his wedding, Woldemar started going blind. It was something genetic, untreatable. Eventually, Musya became his eyes and hands. She would read out loud from archival sources for him and write down his thoughts and conclusions. His PhD thesis and a dozen research papers on the social and economic history of rural areas along the Russia-Kazakhstan border were all written like this.

While it is Musya as my mother’s mother’s mother that makes me halachically Jewish, the little knowledge of Jewish culture I did have as a kid came from my father’s Jewish side. The way Musya brought up her only daughter Irina didn’t have much Jewish about it. Raised atheist, speaking Russian and some German, my grandmother has always been a “daddy’s girl” closer to Woldemar and his Baltic culture.

Being just as much of a “granny’s grandson” myself, I’ve been disproportionately interested in the Baltic side of my heritage ever since I started doing family history research. Over the past few years, I’ve ordered copies of historic records from a dozen of archives, compiled a tree of well over a hundred direct ancestors, learned about great-grandfather’s famous second cousins and more – up to finding a poem Woldemar’s father translated from Ancient Greek into Russian as a high school student in the 1890s.

In the meantime, I also traveled to Latvia three times, started learning Latvian, visited churches where my ancestors were baptized and even found living distant relatives of my grandfather Pavel, Irina’s husband, who is coincidentally also part-Latvian. Now this newly found family and I are trying to find the gravesites of our shared ancestors, the Driksons family from Patkule (those were non-Germanized peasants, so even more “authentically” Latvian in a way). Their gravestones were lost to time and we want to put up new ones.

Being a history grad and a journalist, this Latvian genealogy hobby eventually led me to a more ambitious project: digging in the archives to document the life stories of late Russian Empire-era Latvians, including those unrelated to me, who ended up on the shores of the Caspian Sea – in Atyrau, where my grandma was born, and in Astrakhan, where I spent some of the best years of my life and met my wife. Hopefully, this will become a book.

This may sound like a weird trajectory for a relatively recent oleh who Hebraized his name and lives in Israel. I’m certainly spending more time doing Latvian things than I am doing Jewish things, and while I am undeniably Jewish and will always remain that, I have to confess I’ve been to Tel Aviv’s only Lutheran church – mainly for the organ music – more times than any synagogue.

This felt like a bit of an identity crisis before a recent talk with my grandmother Irina when I called to congratulate her with her 83rd birthday. She told me something I never knew: her beloved father Woldemar hardly ever told her of his living relatives, let alone ancestors. Perhaps it was fear instilled by Stalin’s terror, and it was indeed smart to not tell a little girl in Soviet Kazakhstan that her uncle was an “enemy of the people” and her grandfather briefly served in the White Army.

Grandmother told me that everything she knew of the Prusses, the von Morrs, the Priedes came from her mother, Musya, a poor Jewish orphan so far removed from the world of pre-Soviet Baltic nobility. Musya loved and respected Woldemar and his parents so much she took pride in their history as if it was her own – and whispered what she knew to my grandma, then a little girl, when Woldemar couldn’t hear. Even the “castle in the Baltics” quote from my childhood, a huge exaggeration as my archival research has shown, came from Musya, not Woldemar himself.

The antique cabinet Woldemar’s father received as a gift from a rich patient in Finland in the 1910s, the old Gothic script Bibles – the family heirlooms I grew up with – turns out they, too, were found and reobtained by Musya, not Woldemar, after she returned from their Stalin-era exile to Saint Petersburg. Woldemar’s younger sister Helene my grandmother and mother visited in the 1970s? Again, it was Musya who found her home address well after her husband’s death and brought them there.

Looks like I’m not the only Latvia-obsessed Jew in the family! And great-grandmother Musya, of course, is very good company. By the way, meet her!

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)