Tag: Keidan
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B. Cassel
My grandfather, Boruch Chaim Cassel, was born in Keidan, then part of the Russian empire, in 1877, and arrived in New York in 1904. He had served as a clerk in the Russian army and worked as a bookkeeper in Riga, but his first business enterprise in the U.S. was a candy store. The photos…
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Unburying the past
From 1935 until his death in 1941, my grandfather, Boruch Chaim Cassel, edited a monthly bulletin called “The Keidaner,” a publication of his landsmanshaft, or immigrants’ club. The Keidaner Association of New York began in 1900, like all such groups, as a mutual-aid society. Its members, recently arrived in the U.S., helped each other find housing, jobs…
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Graveside
Kedainiai today is a town of about 25,000, situated near the geographical center of Lithuania, supported mainly by agriculture and ag-related processing. There’s a fertilizer plant, an ice-cream dairy and a number of cucumber-packing businesses. (Even in my grandfather’s day the town was famous for its cucumbers.) Sadly, though, for Jews like me, the most…
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Kedainiai
I came to Lithuania for two reasons. One was to revive my flagging Yiddish language skills. The other was to revisit Kedainiai, which I did this weekend. As some know, I have been obsessed with this place since about 1990, when I discovered my grandfather’s memoirs about his home town, called Keidan in Yiddish. As…
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