A few days after completing this and presenting it to the family, we called back to Rodika (not Rodina) in Opriseni. She said she asked around, and there was someone in the village who remembers a family named Zuckerman from the town, but they were deported to Pridnestrovie (ie. Transnistria). She would forward the details in a letter.

Within a week, I received another phone call. A woman in Israel said a relative of hers had seen my ad in the paper published by the Bukovina Jews World Union, “Die Stimme”, and had sent it to her. She had been crying and in complete shock. She said her family name was Zuckerman, and her father had been born in Oprischeny. I asked what her grandmother’s name was, and when she said Taube, there was no doubt this was the lost relative that had always been the ultimate goal of the research. Alice Zuckerman is the daughter of Avraham Zuckerman, Max’s little brother.

Avraham Zuckermann was born in 1901 in Oprischeny. In fact, the family did spell the their name with two NNs at the end. However, once in Romania under the communists, they switched it to one N, dropping the German spelling. Max said in 1982 that his youngest brother’s name was Avraham, who was a twin to Toba. He was right that Avraham was his brother’s name, and not in fact his father’s name, but he was in fact a twin, probably with Libby as Alice remembers. However, she did not die young. Avraham would have been nine years old when Max last saw him. During World War One, Avraham was drafted into the Austrian army, like the oldest son in the family. What became of the oldest son is unknown, as Alice never knew of any brothers. The one exception of course, were the stories she had always heard about a brother, unnamed, who had left for Canada before the war. From that time on, Avraham knew nothing of what became of his brother. Max however said that he had written letters back home for some period of time. We don’t know what happened to the family during the war, but they were living in Opriseni, Romania after the war. Avraham moved to Czernowitz and married Rosa Ostfeld in 1925. In 1929 Alice Zuckermann was born.

She remembers having five aunts. The oldest was nicknamed Pupa. Her real name is not known. She was called Pupa, because of her looks. Pupa means doll. She married a cousin, so her married name was also Zuckerman. This shows importantly that there were other Zuckermans in Czernowitz that were relatives, possibly the children of Aaron Zuckerman’s brothers. Another sister was Libby, not Liddy as written in the story. Another was Rosa. Rosa is remembered for being extremely beautiful. She was also known for working in a bank, which for the time was extremely unusual. Another sister’s name was Rachel (RaKH-el). Two of the five sisters were married, but had no children, and three of the sisters lived together in the family house in Oprischeny. This is a little strange, as they would have been in their 30s by the time the Second World War started.

Alice remembers going to stay at the Zuckerman family home with the three unmarried sisters in Oprischeny, during her summer holidays from school in Czernowitz. She recalls it as a magical time, staying in a quiet village, in a big country house, surrounded by beautiful nature, and a large garden around the home. As well, the sisters maintained a small factory for producing butter. Although they now lived in Romania, they continued to speak together in their native tongue, German.

Alice recalls her family as being traditional, rather than religious. They went to synagogue for the major holidays, and kept kosher. This changed after the war. Nazism and Communism led to the loss of any tradition. However, unlike the Soviet Union, synagogues were allowed in Romania.
Avraham Zuckerman owned a restaurant in Czernowitz (at this time Cernauti, Romania), outside the downtown, near the airport. The family lived on Transylvania Street. Their home was torn down decades ago, and replaced by block apartments.

During the war, the Zuckermans, along with the other Jews of Czernowitz were deported from the city’s ghetto to Transnistria. Alice and her family were sent to Murafa in Transnistria, the aunts from Oprischeny were sent to Yodinitz in Transnistria.

The three sisters were still living in Oprischeny in 1941, when they were all sent to a different part of Transnistria. After the war, Avraham searched for his five sisters. He was told by those who were with them that all had died. Unlike some concentration camps, Transnistria was a region with a few cities into which all of the Jews from Bukovina were crammed, after marching there on foot. Most died not from organized murder, but through malnutrition, disease and cold. Many were buried in organized plots. One man, named Drucker, took it upon himself to keep an organized list of each person buried. Recently this list was uncovered at Yad Vashem, and it may possibly show where Max and Avraham’s sisters are buried. Because only two sisters were married and they had no children, it seems there is no chance at finding any other first cousins. However, Alice is unaware of any brother’s other than her father, and “the one who moved to Canada”. However, Max said there were five boys at the time he left in 1910.

After the war the Jews who returned from Transnistria to Czernowitz were allowed to flee across the border to Romania. The only remaining Zuckermans found there way to Ploisti (Ploy-EST), a city 60 km due north of Bucharest. In Ploisti, Alice met George Manoiu, and they married. Alice taught languages and studied at the university in Bucharest.

Although we have always assumed Max’s family perished during the Holocaust, knowing know that our cousins and aunts and uncles either survived or were killed during the Holocaust will certainly change our personal association with those historical events and Yom Hashoah each year. I asked Alice why she had never filled out pages of testimony for her aunts, and she said she had always thought about it, but just never did. Had she filled out the forms, I could have reached her directly at the beginning of my research, or other family members who were in Israel ten or fifteen years ago and were looking up names at Yad Vashem would have found out about their family, both those killed and those living. We have decided now to submit their names so others in the future may find their names, and to honour their memory.

A few years before he died, an elderly Avraham Zuckerman decided to take a final trip to his homeland. He boarded a bus which took him first to Siret, Romania. There he visited his mother Taube’s grave. This answers the question of where the Jews of Oprischeny were buried. Alice however, does not recall her father mentioning Aaron Zuckerman’s grave being there. We do know that Taube died very young, at age 47. We can assume that would be somewhere around 1917 (assuming Max was born around 1893, and he was the second oldest, and women married usually had children around 20), possibly due to fighting or food shortages in the war. We don’t know when Aaron Zuckerman died, but Alice is sure he had died before she was born in 1929. It is entirely possible he had remarried in this time.

After visiting his mother’s, and possibly his father’s, grave in Siret, Romania, Avraham then continued his journey across the border into the Ukraine to Czernowitz and Oprischeny. In the town he found one old man who remembered him from forty years before, and called him in Yiddish ‘Avramale’.

Avraham Zuckerman died in Ploisti on December 27, 1985 and is buried there. What a shame the two brothers lived another 75 years and didn’t know where the other was.

The strange question still remains, of why Max named his first son the same as a brother who was still living. It seems logical to assume that Max would not have named his first son after a brother who was alive, especially since he said other brothers had died before he emigrated. Therefore, since his brother (Alice’s father) was named Avraham, and so was Max’s first son, this was probably the name of their grandfather, Aharon’s father. However, since Max named his first daughter Taube after his mother, and his second son after his father, he must have been in contact with his family up to that point. Alice knows her grandfather died before she was born (1929), and if Albert (Avraham) and Aaron were born in 1925 and 1930, Max must have been in touch with his family in those years to be informed that his father had died in the interim, between 1925 and 1929. This is at least fifteen to twenty years after he emigrated, and only ten years before the outbreak of the Second World War.

With the fall of Ceausescu and the Communists in Romania in 1989, Alice and her husband and two children moved to Israel. Today Alice and George Manoiu live in Rishon Lezion, outside of Tel Aviv. Her daughter Daniela (born 1962) lives in Rishon Lezion also, with her husband and daughter, also named Alice (born 1994). Her son Radu Manor, born 1969 (who changed his name to make it sound Hebrew), moved to Vancouver in 2002, where he lives with his wife Laura (also born in Romania and moved to Israel), and their son (born 1996) and daughter (born 2000). Alice was even in Canada in 2003, never knowing her family was here.

When I sent Alice a picture of Max by email, she said they most certainly were related - the eyes, the hair, but especially the forehead! The main difference was that Max had a nicer nose, not so Jewish! Alice said she would describe Avraham’s personality as “an actor”, he loved to dance and laugh, and to be around people, always making strange jokes and acting a little bit eccentric. Just like his big brother.

Unfortunately, there are no pictures of any of the other Zuckermans, as everything they owned was lost during the Holocaust.

Now it is definite that Max’s name was Mordechai ben Aharon Halevi. Is this the correct name on his grave?

I asked Alice what she remembers Avraham saying about Max. He never actually told any stories about him. All he knew was that his brother had left for Canada when he was a young boy, age 9. After that he never heard anything from him. He did often wonder what had become of him. It was only after the Holocaust when it was confirmed that his family had all been killed, that he decided to turn to the Red Cross who were helping reunite families torn apart by the war. He told them of a brother who had moved to Canada, his only remaining relative, and he needed to find him. Avraham was a little shocked when the Red Cross came back with an answer, there was no Marcus Zuckerman of Opriseni in Canada. He could never understand why they couldn’t locate him, and gave up hope of ever having family again. He had never known the story of Marcus Zuckerman becoming Max Brown. See Updates