I started to teach myself Russian in March 2007. Originally I began because I was doing genealogical research and I felt like I needed to be able to read my old russian records myself. There are some excellent books that help educate you about the format of these records and some clues to deciphering the handwriting. I decided about that time to visit my family’s shtetl in Vishki, Latvia. In this part of Latvia, most people still speak Russian. English is rarely spoken outside of the few hotels in Daugavpils, the largest city near Vishki (and the 2nd largest city in Latvia). So I decided it would be good karma and decidedly practical to learn some Russian. What could be easier? As it turns out, almost anything. :-)
Of course I started with Google searches and found that there were some pretty good pages for learning Russian. Teaching yourself a language is not easy and Russian is a tough challenge for a native speaker of English. OK, Mandarin Chinese and Arabic are harder, but fortunately I don’t have to read any records in Mandarin Chinese or Arabic.
I did learn enough Russian so that when I visited Latvia in August 2007 with five months of self-taught Russian under my belt, I could say to someone, “Мой дедушка родился здесь в Вишки.” (My grandfather was born here in Vishki) and could actually understand (a little) of his response after he asked for my surname. In Vishki, where miraculously the Jewish cemetery survived WW2, I found the grave of my great-grandfather and spoke with a woman, Veronika Galvena, whose best friend when she was a girl was named Tanya Dumesh. My family’s surname “Dumes” was written as both Dumes (Думес) and Dumesh (Думеш) in the old records. She said that Tanya had a daughter, but she didn’t remember her name. The person who introduced me to this lady, Lolita Kozlovska, lives in Daugavpils, and after I’d returned to the US, she sent me an email with what she believed could be the address of Tanya Dumesh’s daughter in Daugavpils.
So I hand-wrote a letter in Russian to Julia Aleskevica and to my great surprise, two weeks letter received an email from Julia’s daughter Marina (in English — Marina is quite fluent and teaches English) saying that they visited my family history website and that we are indeed cousins. Tanya Dumesh’s father was my grandfather’s 1st cousin. We had no idea there were family members who stayed in Latvia (in fact, the knowledge that we had come from Latvia had been lost — but that’s another story…) and certainly no idea that cousins had survived the war. Julia wrote and told me how her mother survived WW2.
While Marina speaks excellent English, Julia and Tanya, Julia’s other daughter, do not. I exchange emails in Russian with them and also with my friend Leizer Dumesh from Riga (no relation, but he was born in Vishki in 1930) on a frequent basis, and when I next return to Latvia to meet them, I want to be able to fully express myself and understand them. This video is of my cousins inviting me to come visit with them.
