(exerpted from Does God Eat Us?)

Where am I? Where did I come from?
What am I doing here?

Even newborn kittens, emerging from the fog of fetal consciousness look out on us with bewildered eyes that open with these questions. Children are satisfied with simple fantasies. I, a chatterbox, came in a bag of marbles. My brother, born with white hair, was said to have come in a box of flour and my sister, mother's precious, came, believe it or not, in a great big jar of honey. Grandparents have stories that hold up better. Our folks still tell the story of our great great great grandparents in Russia, in the early 1800s.

Back in the Ukraine, these ancestors, Soocha and SuraBess Litvanchuk, were childless after many years of marriage. In desperation, they went to the rabbi for help.
"Who am I to bless you with a child?" the rabbi chided. "Only God can do that."
The rebbitzen, bringing the rabbi his tea, passed the unhappy couple on their way out. "What's with Soocha and SuraBess?" she asked anxiously.
"Bring them back," her husband said reflectively. (He was a famous rabbi, known in those days for the gift of vision).Without raising his eyes from the Talmud as they returned, the rabbi consoled the downhearted couple with a prophesy: "There'll be a girl to take care of a boy."
A year later, SuraBess gave birth. The labor was long and difficult, so Soocha ran back to the rabbi. "The 'maidel' is come," the rabbi assured him. "Go home. Name her for the mothers." Thus the girl born that day was called Chava Ruchel (Eve Rachel). The following year the boy came, and the rabbi's prophesy was fulfilled.

This is oral history; a modest family experience retold with simple accuracy over the generations until it has become legend, keeping the family names alive in memory. Chava Ruchel married Laiza Farraman. They lived in a family tavern in Lechovitz, Vilna Gabernia, and had eleven children, Aaron, Laban, Chaim, Alchoonin, Soocha, Gershwin, Shmilik, Serouli, SuraBess, Thamar and Esther. Nine survived and, fleeing the pogroms that followed the 1903 slaughter at Kishinov, passed through Ellis Island where the name was changed to Fellman. The family of Eli Litvanchuk came to America also, settling in Manchester, New Hampshire.
Chava Ruchel lived to 104. She was still alive when I was born in 1914, or I would have been given her name, (instead of Hilda for a recently demised great-grandmother Y'huda). She was gone when my sister Evelyn was named for her in 1918. She died alone in Russia, a fact that weighed heavily on her children, but she had the comfort of knowing all her children and her brother's children were safely gone from that land before the Communists prevailed.
Over twenty of Chava Ruchel's great great grandchildren served in the U.S. armed forces in World War II. Four first cousins, (for the record - Sumner Fellman, Irving Barth, Malcolm Fellman and Melvin Freiberg), ran into each other in the Battle of the Bulge--but thanks to the anti-semites of

Lechovitz, none of Soocha and SuraBess's descendants were caught in the Holocaust. It's not easy to keep up with an expanding family through all the name changes, but we make the effort. Laban, Chava Ruchel's second son, married the daughter of a man who had no sons of his own. Following the custom for such men, the father of the bride adopted his son-in-law, who then took his father-in-law's name -- Spector. Laban Spector had three sons, Harry, Jack and Louis, and two daughters; Celia, who married Joe Feldman, and Ida who married Louis Eisenberg. The Eisenbergs had a daughter Annie who married Melvin Reese. They begot Billy who begot Mason. Mason Reese, present day musician remembered as a precocious child actor, is one of four or five hundred assorted Americans, all more or less brilliant, all more or less talented, who, today, trace back to this once "childless couple," Soocha and SuraBess Litvanchuk.

In this manner, Jews have persisted over the centuries, like weeds, repeatedly springing from paired survivors of one adversity to triumph over the next, without ever losing the thread of continuity.
CHAVA RUCHEL FARRAMAN, NEE LITVANCHUK: 181?_ / 191?_