COPYING EMAIL EXCHANGE BETWEEN BRUNO-KEN SHIOZAWA AND RICHARD WISEMAN:
2017 February 1 00:40
Hi Richard,
I hope this message finds you well.
I've started reading Julian's copy of your memoir and am enjoying it very much. I only regret I did not start reading it much sooner, as tomorrow I must head back to Paris from Julian's and Mary-Anne's home where I have been staying the past two weeks.
I was curious about the bracketed paragraph on page 14 in which you note that you could not trace the town of 'Scheshlewitz in the Empire of Russia' which your great maternal grandfather Moses Fagin's British naturalization document indicated as his birth place.
After looking into the appendix Descendants of Hyman Fagin and doing a little sleuthing online, I wonder whether Scheshlewitz is not another name for Swislotz/Swislotch ?
My thinking is this:
Swislotz/Swislotch is no doubt the modern Belarusian town Svislach in Grodno Region, based on the Belarusian, Russian and Polish spellings and pronunciations provided by Wikipedia
Svislach (Belarusian: Свiслач, pronounced [ˈɕvislatʃ] ( listen); Russian: Свислочь, Svisloch, Polish: Świsłocz, Yiddish: סיסלעוויטש) is a town in the South-West of Grodno Region, Belarus, an administrative center of the Svislach district.
If so, and if you take the Yiddish spelling of Svislach -- סיסלעוויטש -- and put it into Google Translate, you will find that it transcribes the Yiddish into the Romanized characters:
Sislevitsh
Is this not very close to Scheshlewitz ?
Sis →
Schesh
lev → lew
itsh → itz
Since Moses' second son by his second wife Rosie, Solomon, was born in "Swislotz/Swislotch" in 1869, it does not seem at all far-fetched to speculate that Moses himself was also born in the very same town. Perhaps the officials who drew up Moses' British naturalization document simply transcribed as best as they could the name of the town as Moses pronounced it to them, quite likely in Yiddish, something close to "Sislevitsh" which wound up recorded as "Scheshlewitz".
One point which does not bear in an obvious way on this question, and yet may be relevant, is that Abraham -- Moses' first son by his first wife Dora -- was also born in "Grodno" in 1860, but in 1862 goes to England, "presumably with his parents since he was only two years of age", as you note on page 13. This is striking, because then in 1869, Moses' second son Solomon is also born in Grodno -- in Swislotz /Swislotch / Svislach, to be exact -- to Moses' second wife Rosie. Does that mean that Moses left his first wife Dora in England and then returned to Grodno where he married Rosie? If so, is it possible he did so in his own birth place Scheshlewitz / Sislevitsh / סיסלעוויטש / Svislach / Swislotz ?
Also, Moses' third child Bessie was born to his third wife Hannil ('Annie') 'about 1871 in Russia' (p. 850). Furthermore, Bessie married one Isaac Dover who himself was born in 'Swislotch, Grodno, Russia'.
In other words, Swislotz/Swislotch sounds like it was the place where all the action was happening, and I wouldn't be surprised if Scheshlewitz turned out to be just an unusual spelling of the very same place.
In any case, I hope the next time I come through London I'll have the good sense to continue reading, and hopefully finishing, your memoirs.
Best,
Ken
P.S. I wonder whether more clues could be found in the Yiddish and Hebrew Wikipedia pages for Svislach.
_______________________________
2017 February 1 17:04
Dear Ken,
Thanks for your clever detective work, all of which sounds very plausible to me. You have read it carefully! I will print your email and place hard copies of it in various versions of the book so that others who read it will have the benefit of your investigations.
As to your question about whether or not Moses left his first wife and returned to Grodno where he married again - the answer is that I don't know. I will leave it to the next generation to find out, I think I have done enough work!
Trust that you are well. Best regards
Richard
_______________________________
2018 February 16 12:39
Hello Richard,
My apologies for taking more than a year to respond to your kind reply to my email about your great maternal grandfather Moses Fagin's birthplace in Grodno. I am relieved that my late night, slightly wine-fueled investigations (or was it port?) did not turn out to be completely wrongheaded.
By the way, I was wondering, would you happen to have a digital copy of your memoir (for example, as a PDF file), and if so, would it be possible for me to obtain it? Every time I pass through our apartment in Nice or Julian's & Mary-Anne's place in Streatham, I hope to read a little further into it, but these occasions are too few and far between. However, if no such file is available or if you prefer not to share digital copies over the Internet, then no problem, I'll just keep reading the hard copy I have access to.
As my parents are staying with Julian & Mary-Anne these days, I just now encouraged my father to try reading at least the first 5~10 pages of your memoir. Not only for the pleasure of reading that gripping opening, but also in the hopes that it inspires him to attempt something like jotting his own memoir. (Actually, he could do read our copy in Nice, but doing so in London felt more relevant somehow.)
I hope you and Sandra are well.
Best,
Ken
_______________________________
2018 February 21 12:43
Dear. Ken,
How very nice to hear from you, and I gather from Mary-Anne that you are in good form. Please don’t worry about your reply - no apologies needed, but I failed to thank you for following up the slender clue about Moses Fagin’s birthplace. Interesting, but I am not going to do anything about it since the book is finished and I am not going to start re-writing it, even though I am tempted to so that I can correct the many typos that I’ve spotted since it went to print.
Anyways, I’m glad you like reading it, and the answer to your query is yes, there is a PDF file, actually more than one, and Julian has one of them on a memory stick, and I do not mind your reading a digital file so please feel free to ask him for it. You can return it at some later, eventual, time.
Warm regards, hope to see you next time you are in the UK.
Richard
