To the current generations, a great deal of the family history has been lost to the passage of time and the deaths of the emigrant generation. What exists here is a consensus of the memories of the stories told to the current generations, along with the contents of a precious few "oral history" tapes made over the years, and the merging of these with published documentation of the lives of Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe at the turn of the century.

Unfortunately, at this point, we have less information on the European and migration history of the Kalikow side of the family, but we hope to learn more, and weave it in.

The late 1800's were turbulent times for the Jews who had lived, to say the least, trying times, in Russia for several hundred years.

March 1, 1881, Alexander II, czar of Russia, was assassinated by revolutionary terrorists. Within several weeks, a waive of pogroms, inspired mostly by agents of the new government, spread across Russia.

During the reign of Alexander II, many Jews had experienced modest hopes of winning equal rights as citizens. By the 1880's, this hope was badly shaken. Prior to this time there had been only a trickle of Jewish emigration to America -- 7,500 between 1820 and 1870, and approximately 40,000 in the 1870's.

At no time could the life of Jews in Russia have been described as comfortable. Rarely were the Jews able to ease their guard against blows from above and below, Bureaucrats and folk, and never could they see themselves as citizens like all others. Repression took the form of economic harassment and legal humiliation, sometimes pogroms and accusations of ritual blood murder. At intervals these policies would be eased a little, and Jews would be allowed, as part of a tendency toward westernization, to settle outlying southern and western districts. With the conquest of new territories in the south during the middle of the eighteenth century and the partition of Poland a few decades later, the number of Jews under Russian domination greatly increased. For a time Catherine II welcomed Jews as merchants and traders who might stimulate the economy.

Once the Holy Alliance sealed the defeat of Napoleon and stabilized Europe, the condition of the Russian Jews deteriorated. The reign of Nicholas I, from 1825 - 1855, proved to be a nightmare. Over 600 anti-Jewish decrees were enacted, ranging from expulsion from villages in which Jews had traditionally resided to a heavy censorship of Yiddish and Hebrew books; from meddling with the cirriculums of Jewish schools to conscription that took Jewish children away from parents, often at ages between 12 and 18, for periods of up to 25 years.

No wonder that Alexander II aroused enthusiasm among the Jews. He reduced the period of military service to 5 years; opened the doors of the universities to some Jews; and permitted Jewish businessmen to travel to parts of Russia from which they had been barred.

With the death of Alexander II, and the 1881 pogroms, it was no longer possible, even for the Russified middle-class Jewish intellectuals, to hold much hope. Though not as bad as Nicholas, Alexander III, Alexander II's successor, pursued a steady anti-Jewish policy.

By the 1880's, some Jews had settled in the larger cities, such as Warsaw or Lodz. Within a few decades, the number of Jews moving from the shtetl to urban concentrations increased sharply. The shtetls were nestled in the crevices of a backward agricultural economy where Jews were prohibited from ownership of land and had to live by trading, artisanship, and by their wits.

All through the last third of the 1800's, the economic situation of the eastern European Jews kept getting worse. In a 4 year period from 1894-1898, the number of Jewish paupers increased by about 30 percent. The emancipation of the Russian serfs had a damaging effect on those Jews, not large in number but still important in the Jewish economy, who had worked as agents of the nobility or as economic middlemen disposing of the peasants' produce. Jewish petty officials and traders tended to be squeezed out, and, as a result, many rural Jews were compelled to seek employment in the cities.

In the 33 years between the assassination of Alexander II and the outbreak of World War I, approximately one-third of the east European Jews left their homelands. Circumstances often made it unavoidable that the Jews flee from Russia, Poland, and Romania. They moved westward not only because life was hard under the czar, but because of elements of strength that had been forged in the Jewish communities and flashes of hope sent back by brothers who had already completed the journey.