balaban

THE BALABANOFF LINE

An Attempt To Draw The Family

Lines Between Myself And

Erstwhile Russian Royalty.

By Izzy Ess Of Nobless Oblige

Vladimir Balabanoff was appealing to TheTzar of Russian that he was the only surviving member of his clan.  All the rest had been loaded with cold steel and iron pellets and had died of wounds inflicted by the Russian enemies, of which there were so many.  The Balabanoffs had so proudly borne the Russian banners that would lead Red Russian Armies into battle since the Mongols and the Tartars had divided up Eurasia, to draw the territories of the Chinese and the Russian Empires, stretching from the Bering Straits o’er the edge of Europe and the Caspian.  The Persian and the Turkish-Ottoman Empires were already waning, and the lines were drawn by diplomats and generals.

What Balabanoff did not know was that some kith and kin of his had run away and settled in a fertile land, the Ukraine, between the cities of Kiev and of Odessa, in a stetl known as Mavskievska, or Naskievska, which contained a Jewish core of Balabans.  Even now the Cossacks of the area, the Hooliganers of the Lithuanians and Latvians and the Estonians, would regularly raid the village, killing all the Jewish boys and men and raping all the Jewish girls and women.  What the Hooliganers did not know was that the girls and women hid the men and then deliberately offered up themselves, for sex and rape, to hide the fact that all the boys and men were hidden in the basements and the outhouse holes so full of garbage and the poop of this small stetl.  And, so the Balabanoff Jews survived and flourished only to be devastated by the world-wide epidemic of the flu and to be evacuated by some kith and kin in North America, the Canada and the USA.  Today, you may walk up to any Balaban and surprise the man or woman by telling him you know just where his ancestors had lived and died.  They might even know that grandpa, grandma or some kith and kin had seen the well-preserved Lenin body when it was brought to the old city of Odessa for a viewing by the Ukrainian big farming populace, including the old Balabanoffs.

It’s suffice to say, that Tzar Nikolas did insist that Vlad would lead his troops right into danger, and Vladimir the Balabanoff’s only Russian bearer of the Russian Banners, would thus lead the Red young Army Men and Women into battle with some one or other enemy.  Our Vlad was no one’s fool.  He bolted and he ran due west and then due south and found his kith and kin in the Ukraine, in old Mavskievska.  He met and married a young Jewish girl who bore him 14 healthy children, all good farmers and good dairy persons.  He lived to be a half a century until he, too, was killed by Lithuanian bad Hooliganer.  He’d had to watch, while half of his own children were killed in the big world-wide epidemic,  that had already killed more millions with the deadly flu.

In Toronto and in Montreal, in New York and Hamilton, the Balabanoffs changed their names to Balaban.  Perhaps the most famous of them were the Balaban and Katz of movie houses and the Bob, a Balaban, who is an actor in the Hollywood suburb of old Los Angeles of California.  My mother was a Balaban, a Pollia who changed her name to Polly and then her last name to the Sommers who was my father who’d had his name foreshortened from the Sommerstein that was his father’s name.  I, in fact, embody the original spirit of my grandfather, the Yitzchok Balabanoff of Mavskievska, in Ukraine.  Of course, the clerk at Hamilton’s St. Joseph’s hospital refused to write my birth certificate with Yitzchok, so my father chose the nickname, Izzy, which is on my old Canadian birth certificate from February, 1938.  And, it’s on my old Canadian Passport, too.

So, I sit here in Welland, Canada, and write about the Balabanoff’s who descend for Russia’s Fife and drummer core, the first to die in any battle Russia chose to fight about five hundred years, ago.  If my writings are recorded and remembered five hundred years from now, then someone will have access to this ancestral history, if they are interested in it.

THE END

© izzy sommers, md

Welland, Canada

Hallowe’en, 2013