Was my missing grandpa Joseph a Jew?.
Being a commissar in the years of the Civil War, proficiency with the language in question, why, the name itself might serve a bunch of circumstantial evidence for the assumption. However, the high percentage of the chosen people’s offspring among the revolutionary leaders of the period does not remove the possibility of exceptions. The language could have been picked up while being an errand-boy and/or shop assistant at a store of some Jew merchant. As for the name, let's not forget that even such a hardened anti-Semite as Comrade Stalin was his namesake… Still and all, my mother, when introducing herself, preferred to change her patronymic, taking root from an Old Testament handsome character, into its Russianized rustic form: “Osipovna”…)
Her dark mellow eyes Galina inherited from Katerinna Ivanovna (or Katarzyna Janovna?) whose affinity with the tribes of Israel seems doubtful enough.
Firstly, in the red corner of her kitchen there hung a dark lacquered board with some glum-bearded saint (I can’t say of which religion or nationality, could be a Catholic as well). Besides, she fattened a pig in her shed, Masha was her name, for slaughter.
But, again, the icon might have taken root as a camouflaging part of the interior in the time of Nazi occupation, while the restrictions of kosher diet can be overruled with the common Ukrainian proverb – “Need teaches eating cakes with lard”.
Of course, all these unanswerable questions will arise after the return of your ancestors from their marriage registration at Konotop ZAGS, but we are not to tag on them all that way, we are taking a U-turn so as to trace the line of your grandfather’s father’s origin.
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That line is simple, straight, and down-to-earth. In a word, Mikhail Ogoltsoff was a peasant.
In the depths of the Ryazan land, there is the district center of Sapozhok and at nine or eleven kilometers from it (the distance depends on who you ask the question), lies the village of Kanino. My father liked to brag that in its fat days the village had about four hundred households.
The shallow ravine with a sluggish soundless brook rolling along its bottom splits the village into two halves. Back in the blessed days of yore, the stream banks served the grounds for the long-standing folk amusement “Battling Walls”, aka collective fist-fight. The men from one half of the village devotedly punched the other-half dwellers, smashing their teeth out to mark some of church holidays or celebrate a mild-weathered Sunday. Yeah, once upon a time folks knew a thing or two about stimulating entertainment…