"A Hole in the Heart"
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"A Hole in the Heart" |
Boruch Chaim Cassel was born in Keidan in 1877, the son of a tailor. He had a traditional Jewish kheder education, but also studied Russian and other secular subjects. As a young man he was considered a "maskil" -- an exponent of Jewish enlightenment. He served in the Russian army as secretary to an officer. and after his discharge moved to Riga, where he worked as a bookkeeper and merchant.
Active in Jewish affairs, he collected Yiddish folksongs in 1898-99 around Keidan, and submitted (with a friend, Aaron Leib Pick) more than 140 of the selections published in the "Ginsburg-Marek" collection entitled "Evreiskii Pesnii v Rossii" (Jewish Folksong in Russia), published in St. Petersburg in 1901. He also served as secretary of a Zionist organization (probably a Khovevei Tzion chapter) in Riga.
In 1904 he emigrated to the U.S., arriving in New York on the steamship Kaiser Wilhelm II. He made a living at a succession of small enterprises, including a Bronx tobacco store, a printing shop, and an import-export firm called the "Russian-American Agency of Commerce" which did business until the early 20s. He also tried -- unsuccessfully, it seems -- to arrange literary ventures; from 1906-8 he received at least a half dozen letters from the famed Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem, regarding the English translation and U.S. publication of some of the latter's stories, including "Motl Peyse dem Khazns" and "The First Jewish Republic."
Although he adopted the English name Bernard, he was known as Ben by his family, and his Keidaner friends never called him anything but "Alter", a Yiddish nickname (meaning "old one") often given to children as a good luck token.
He married Anna Duberstein in 1916, and raised three sons. In the 1930s he served as editor of the monthly bulletin of the Keidaner Assn. of New York, his landsmanshaft. In that capacity he wrote a number of historical essays, sketches and memoirs about his native town. He died at his home in Sea Gate, Brooklyn, in June, 1941.