Zaritsky-Polonsky Family Album

Table of Contents (?)

Site Page Counts
Public: 510
Restricted: 677

Birth and Early Life
I was born in Paris, France in 1907. I was named after my paternal grandfather, who died before I was born. He was a religious scholar. When he was of age to be conscripted to the Russian army he drank a very corrosive liquid in order to be disqualified for service. It damaged his digestive system very badly and he died very young in hellish pains.

From Kobryn
My parents were Ester (nee Kaufman) from Chomsk and Moshe Zaritsky from Kobryn. … Moshe was a yeshiva student in his youth and at a certain age became secular. When the revolution of 1905 broke out, my father joined the revolutionists. When the revolution failed, he sought escape, to avoid being arrested. So they arrived in France as Russian citizens and there I was born...

Return to Kobryn
When the dust of the failed revolution disappeared, one and a half years later, my parents returned to Kobryn…

My parents sent me to a somewhat more modern school than the Cheder owned by Ephrayim Polonsky, who was also a teacher there, and father of my future wife, Rachel.

In the Polish high school, Rachel and I were very close friends and in love. With time I came to admire Rachel's noble soul and it strengthened my love.

When I was aged 13, we returned from Bolshevik Ukraine to Kobryn, which then belonged to the Polish state.

About My Father
My father's former teacher – a Rabbi, head of the Yeshiva – wanted to see his student's son. So he came to visit us in Kobryn, where we stayed with my grandmother Chana's house. He then told me:

...in all the years I have never had among my students a student similar to your father – a superior scholar. I heard that he has become secular and excels in mathematics. God bless him.

That was the first time I heard that my father was a Yeshiva student.

As a student in high school my father and I tackled together, almost every evening, sophisticated mathematical problems. From time to time my father liked to digress to philosophical questions. We enjoyed it. He had a serious stock of knowledge in this field, having read a lot of very well known universal philosophers. I was almost ignorant in this field but was curious to listen to my father's philosophical views and at time express, warily and with a lack of self-confidence, my own views. This is a brief description of my relationship with my father upon his return the second time from the States, where he and my mother separated. He was eager to keep a good relationship with me. My father supported himself teaching mathematics and English in Kobryn in a Tarbut Hebrew school.

..My father never attended a formal school .. he was an autodidact par excellence.

To Lodz
At the age of 4-5 my parents chose to dwell in Lodz, Poland, a textile town, for a while. My father's business was concentrated there… When we returned to Kobryn I attended Ephrayim Polonsky's school… I was sick with Angina, developed into arthritis which affected my heart, and I was bed-ridden for half a year. ..WW1 broke out and my father found an unknown-to-me way to evade conscription….

Notes:

Page Last Updated: 12-Feb-2014