“As the ancient proverb says, ‘Wickedness issues from the wicked;’ but my hand will not act against you.” — I Samuel 24:14. Logically, it follows that Hashem chooses good people to do good deeds!
By Avraham Dimenstein in Los Angeles
Let me introduce you to my Great Uncle Jacob. I am alive today, along with thousands of my relatives who now reside in Mexico and the United States, because Hashem chose Uncle Jacob to take us out of Triisk, Ukraine, and bring us to Mexico. As a result, we were all saved from the Nazi invasion of Ukraine in 1941, except for one sibling who chose to stay in Triisk.
My great uncle’s full name was Jacob Chizik Meyer. His birth name was Jacob Chizik, but he added the last name of Meyer for some unknown reason. Uncle Jacob left Triisk at the age of 22 and emigrated to the United States in 1903. He left behind his parents and four siblings. Later on he emigrated to Mexico where he eventually owned significant land holdings in the 1920’s. This was only ten years after the dictator, Porfirio Diaz, was overthrown and Mexico became the modern country we know today.
Venustiano Carranza became the first president of liberated Mexico. Then Alvaro Obregon ousted him and became president from 1920-1924. Obregon was a socialist, even though he was a successful commercial garbanzo bean farmer himself, and believed in redistributing unused farm land which he had taken away from wealthy individuals. He then gave this land to the soldiers who had assisted him in his battles against the previous president – Carranza. From 1924-1928 Plutarco Elias Calles took over the presidency of Mexico. However, the previous president, Alvaro Obregon, continued to run the government from the side lines.
Uncle Jacob saw the writing on the wall and was determined to prevent the Obregon/Calles government from taking his land from him. He knew that the only way to accomplish this was to start farming the land. He decided that he was going to bring out ten families, all his relatives, from Triisk, to farm his land. One of these families consisted of my grandparents (Slava and Yacov) and their four daughters. My father, their fifth child, would later be born to them in Mexico. Slava was one of Uncle Jacob’s sisters.
Two of Uncle Jacob’s other siblings, Sheva and Morris, had already moved to the United States on their own. Yiddel, one of his brothers, decided to stay in Triisk, and perished during the war.
Altogether ten families, including cousins and other extended family, moved to Mexico at the behest of Uncle Jacob. They arrived at the Port of Veracruz, Mexico, in 1927. Uncle Jacob settled the families on their respective plots of land, and believed that he had outsmarted the Obregon/Calles government.
One slight detail had been overlooked. None of these ten families had any experience in farming. After Uncle Jacob had arranged for their trip to Mexico, and settled them on their plots of land, all ten families deserted Uncle Jacob and went into various businesses on their own in Mexico. Presumably, Uncle Jacob’s land was confiscated and redistributed to Obregon’s soldiers.
My father, Sam Dimenstein, was born in Patzcuaro, Michoacan, Mexico in 1929, two years after his family arrived in Mexico. The following year, his father, Yakov Dimenstein, was robbed and murdered. A couple of year later, my grandmother Slava and her five children moved to San Francisco to be near her sister. My father was thus raised in San Francisco.
During the 1950’s, when my father was in his 20’s, he decided to leave San Francisco to go to work for his Uncle Jacob in Torreon, Coahuilla, Mexico. Uncle Jacob now owned a mining company in Torreon, where he was mining for gypsum. (Gypsum has various uses in both construction and agriculture.) My father had been planning this trip for a number of years, and had been corresponding with Uncle Jacob.
But his plan of working for his uncle didn’t pan out. My father caught typhoid in the streets of Torreon, after drinking some flavored water (probably Jamaica tea, which is flavored with hibiscus flowers) and was sick in bed while recovering. Uncle Jacob decided that his nephew, who in his letters had described himself as a hard-working guy, was actually a loafer. So my father decided to part ways with his Uncle Jacob.
Uncle Jacob agreed to take my father to Mexico City, and he introduced my father to the other relatives who Uncle Jacob had brought out from Triisk more than 20 years earlier. For some unknown reason, my father did not hit it off with his cousins and now he found himself in a country where he did not yet speak the language, and had only a few friends.
Uncle Jacob went back to Torreon, and my father, unable to make a living in Mexico City, decided to move to a new town in Baja California, Mexico called Tijuana. My father remained in Tijuana and started a wholesale import business there, which remained active until the 1980’s. My father and Uncle Jacob, were both very focused on their respective careers, and never communicated with each other again. My father often quoted his mother Slava who told him that they should always be thankful to Uncle Jacob who had inadvertently saved them from dying in the Holocaust.
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Avraham Dimenstein is an 8th grade teacher at Toras Emes Academy in Los Angeles.