No. 19 Vol. 2
My Life Publications • 973-809-4784
February 2023
Livingston Lawyer Honors Ukrainian Pogrom Victims with Translation of 1937 Book
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By Alexander Rivero obody said it would be easy. Or quick. But after two decades of working on it in his spare time, Sidney Shaievitz has finally completed his translation from the Yiddish of a 670-page book on the Jews murdered in the 1919 pogrom in the Ukrainian shtetl of Felshtin. The original book—the Felshtin yahrtzeitbook—was published in 1937 in New York, in Yiddish. “The most difficult task was the grinding out of the translation not only from the Yiddish itself but from the Russian, Ukrainian, and Hebrew,” says the Livingston attorney, who speaks a sound conversational Yiddish but admits to lacking the literary Yiddish necessary to translate upon first reading. Shaievitz employed a small team of research assistants and translators throughout the years to help him speed up the process. In his own time he worked diligently on the project as well, surrounding himself with the original texts and a stack of dictionaries in the languages mentioned above. The book itself takes a deep, anthropological look into the daily lives of Felshtin Jews in a typical Eastern European village, and uses these detailed accounts as a springboard from which to plunge into the massacres themselves, which took place in February of 1919. The narrative is filled with eye-witness accounts of attacks by Ukrainian soldiers, and detailed descriptions of some of the crimes. Shaievitz’s mother was herself a survivor of Felshtin, and had introduced a copy of the book to her young son. After her death, he dove into the history of the Felshtin pogroms, thinking it a helpful contribution to a community unaccustomed to even talking about those times due to their barbarity. In the process, Shaievitz founded the
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UNLIMITED YOGA CL ASSES Sidney Shaievitz holding both the original copy of the Felshtin yahrzheit book, and a copy of his translation of it, available now for purchase.
Felshtin Society, partially as a means by which to raise funds. “I felt that the public should be made more aware of what happened in Felshtin,” says Shaievitz, “especially the descendants of the survivors, many of whom, like my own mother, avoided talking about what happened to them.” Shaievitz originally hired a translator to translate the continued on page 4
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