Zev’s Children: The Story of an International Jewish Family

The story of my grandfather and his fourteen siblings is told in Zev’s Children – the Story of an International Jewish Family (London, 2022) as they spread from Kovshevata just south of Kiev to Russia, Scotland, England, Argentina, France and the United States. The family includes a Holocaust survivor in France, Communists and Marxists, businessmen, intellectuals and eccentrics in Glasgow, London, New York, Buenos Aires and Moscow. In the past two years family members in Britain and America, Israel, Russia and Argentina have come together to re-establish connections that began in Ukraine almost three centuries ago. A second cousin in Russia recounts his experiences as a Marxist theoretician and journalist which cost him a spell in Lefortovo before the end of Communism. Second cousins in Buenos Aires recall the family beginnings in Lomos de Zamora while from Portland, Oregon comes the story of a chemical business in Tel Aviv during the 1920s. Zev’s oldest son Zelman was a leading figure in Ukrainian Zionism in the first decades of the twentieth century and his articles in Hebrew newspapers describe visits to Palestine between 1904 and 1912. Zelman joined a Soviet commercial agency in London in 1922 and died in suspicious circumstances having refused a call to return to Russia. His brother Avraham Mordechai (Motti) and sister Ida were on the Ruslan, which sailed from Odessa to Jaffa in December 1919 which began the 3rd Aliya. Motti, became Rutenberg’s senior engineer at the Naharayim. Zev himself died in Tel Aviv in 1931 and is buried in the Trumpeldor Cemetery. The research is based on family interviews, archival studies of digitised Ukrainian records of births, marriage and military registration and literature searches. The lecture will show how the experiences of Zev’s children formed a microcosm of the twentieth century Jewish world.