Discovered Yiddish ‘Book’ of Carpathian Jewish Family in Need of Translation

The Carpathian Mountain Jews (my term) were a Jewish branch unto themselves, having occupied the eastern part of historic Hungary (including parts of what are today Slovakia, Ukraine, and Romania) from before Ashkenazi Jews from Germany came to eastern Europe, dating to the 9^th century CE. They were the oldest sustained Jewish community of Hungary, with eastern origins, and they were treated as separate from the later waves of Jews who came to Hungary. Elie Wiesel was a Carpathian Mountain Jew, born in Sighet, Romania, and he recognized the separate status in the forward to the book Piety and Perseverance: Jews from the Carpathian Mountains. Along with Lithuanian Jews, Carpathian Mountain Jews had the highest fatality rate in the Holocaust, leading to their near-total disappearance from the Carpathian region, and difficulty in reconstructing their unique culture.

Now a rare memoir in Yiddish has surfaced that may help in that reconstruction, and it happens to be in my hands. I am the great-grandson, through my mother, of Samuel Braun (changed to Brown) and Beti Grünberger (changed to Bertha Greenberger), who both emigrated in the 1880s before marrying, from Zemplen and Ung counties in northeast Hungary, to New York City. They settled in Carteret, New Jersey, a town that became an enclave of Carpathian Jews from five families that repeatedly intermarried each other. Sam, the eldest of seven siblings, had four brothers and two sisters, who all came to Carteret one by one, including brother Ferenc Braun (changed to Frank Brown). Unbeknownst to almost all of us descendants, Frank, who was born in 1872 in Serényfalva, Zemplen County, wrote the longhand manuscript of a book, an autobiography, composed over his lifetime in Yiddish and English. The manuscript has been kept by one of Frank’s great-grandsons.

I won’t name the owner of the manuscript until I have permission to use his name, but after contacting him for a family genealogy project, he has loaned me the manuscript so that it can be translated, and it’s now in my possession. It includes 17 pages in handwritten Yiddish and 45 pages in English. The English portion begins with Frank’s journey to New York, so I presume that the Yiddish portion covers his childhood and teenage years in Hungary between 1872 and 1889, probably written before Frank learned English. The Yiddish is inscrutable to me.

The English portion of the manuscript includes a detailed account of Frank’s three-year journey from Hungary to Carteret, involving two boats (that made him very sick), numerous trains, and some walking when he was penniless. Over that time, Frank took multiple odd jobs as a butcher and bartender. Once in Carteret, Frank says that his brother Sam gave him half of the funds to open a grocery store and saloon, a version that makes my mother angry, because Sam’s version was that he fully financed his brother.

The saloon business explains the real cause of friction between the brothers. My grandmother Dorothy, Sam’s daughter, often told the story that her mother, Bertha, should be credited with opening the first battered women’s shelter in New Jersey. Bertha became enraged because the men in Carteret would get drunk at her brother-in-law’s saloon (we didn’t know it was Frank’s) and then go home and beat their wives, many of whom were family. As often told, Bertha demanded that Frank close the saloon or stop allowing the men to get so drunk. When he refused, Bertha organized the women and told them to come to Sam and Bertha’s store when their husbands would come home drunk. Sam and Bertha sold dry goods and furniture, including mattresses. Bertha instructed her eight children to pull down the mattresses each night so the women of the town would have a safe place to sleep. This may have spelled the demise of Frank’s saloon, though that entire story is missing from his memoir.

Frank expounds on issues in the Jewish community, including the split, in the 1940s and 50s, between Orthodox Jews and the growing number of suburban more-assimilated Jews. The latter Frank refers to as “Middletown Jews,” a term then in use that refers to the 1929 book titled Middletown, a sociological study of American suburbia. That book generally neglected the Jewish community, and so Jews began their own conversation about “Middletown Jews.” Frank Brown, who attended numerous lectures at the synagogue, picked up the term and opined about it: “As Middletown Jews are Jews by ‘anti-Semitism’ it was inevitable that the rise of the State of Israel should spell the doom of organized Zionist activities…. The Middletown Jew is a Jew for negative reasons; consequently the problem of Jewish survival still looms large.” That thought is most incisive regarding the current split in opinions between Israeli and American Jews.

This makes me think that thoughts about the Jewish community in Hungary may be in the Yiddish portion of the manuscript. And this manuscript may be important to translate for other reasons. The father of Sam and Frank and their siblings was Lipot Braun (Leopold in German or English). Lipot owned a tavern in Zemplen County, near the point where Hungary, Slovakia, and Ukraine now meet, but he also may have been a shokhet (kosher butcher) as his son Frank also became both a saloon owner and a shokhet. Nearby Nyíregyháza, which was an extremely important center in Jewish history since the Middle Ages, became the scene of an infamous blood-libel trial beginning in 1882, known as the Tiszaeszlár Affair. A Christian girl went missing in the nearby town of Tiszaeszlár and four Jewish shokhets of the region were falsely accused of ritually butchering her. The trial was held in Nyíregyháza. The intact body of the girl was found in the river and the defendants were acquitted, but the affair sparked copycat accusations and pogroms throughout Europe, including locally.

One of the defendants was named Lipot Braun. To date I have not been able to ascertain if this was the same man as my 2^nd great-grandfather. Lipot Braun would have been a fairly common name, but the chances are still good given my family’s choice to emigrate only a few years after the trial. Even if our Lipot Braun was not the defendant, he and the rest of the family would have suffered from the trial’s stigma. Frank talked a lot about antisemitism in the English part of his manuscript. Ironically, the emigration saved a part of my family from the deportation to Auschwitz in 1944 that befell all of our Hungarian cousins who had not left in the 1880s.

I am therefore hoping that the Yiddish portion of Frank’s manuscript will reveal whether his father was the defendant in the blood-libel trial, or at least will discuss the effects of the trial on Jews of the region. Frank was ten years old at the time of the trial.

And there is another matter. We know that at least some of our family were from the old stock of the Carpathian Mountain Jews because of a DNA test I took in 2021. I am a maternal-line descendant of Bertha Greenberger and her maternal grandmother Dvora Radicziner. The mitochondrial haplogroup I inherited from them is A-a1b3, a haplogroup that appears to be limited to Jews with maternal ancestry from the Eastern Carpathian Mountains and Central Asian Turkic people (Turkmen, Kyrgyz, and Uyghurs at least). In Europe, the haplogroup is only found in Carpathian Jews; it is not found in non-Jewish Hungarians, nor in Jews who are not from the Carpathian Mountains.

Indeed, haplogroup A is extremely rare in Europe, most frequent in northeast Siberia and in Native Americans, found in Europe only in isolated groups descended from Asian women. A-a1b3 originated in the Lake Baikal region of eastern Siberia between 18,000 and 12,000 years ago, and has been found in dozens of archaeological samples from across Eurasia (Hungary being the western extreme), the majority of which can be identified as Turkic. Of the archaeological cases of A-a1b3, our Jewish variant is closest to a Xianbei burial from northeastern Kazakhstan. Sister clades of the haplogroup have been found in burials of the Hungarian Conquerors that included Magyars and the group known as Qabars, who appear to have been Turkic Jews from farther east.

Identifying the source of the Carpathian Mountain Jews is an ongoing project that I cannot fully explore here; assumptions about how my haplogroup got from Turkic Siberia into Hungarian Jews should be resisted. My present point is that the five families that resettled together in Carteret, New Jersey – Braun, Schwarc, Roth, Grünberger, and Moscowicz – appears, on the basis of my haplogroup and family traits, to have represented a refugium of Carpathian Mountain Jews. Frank Brown’s manuscript may shed light on this community in Hungary, for which very few sources exist.

Therefore, I am seeking professional translation of the 17 pages of Yiddish. Volunteers should have some professional credentials and have no ideological biases. Frank had some unorthodox views. Pending approval relatives, we are open to finding a permanent home for the original manuscript, though per the principle of keeping documents close to their place of origination, it would be best if this were an institution in northern New Jersey or New York City. Familiarity with Hungarian Yiddish would be ideal. Multiple translations would be excellent.

So please chip in with either offers to translate or recommendations.