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B oris Sheynes’s family had a longstanding tradition of being victimized and fleeced by the Russian government. Boris’s grandfather was an eminent rabbi and president of a Jewish community in the region of West Ukraine. The Sheyneses were a dynasty of leaders of the Orthodox Jewish “Chabad” movement, also known as the Chassids. The family traces its roots back to the eighteenth century; but there is evidence of far more ancient origins.
The Jews did not become a part of the Russian empire voluntarily. When, in the eighteenth century, the vast kingdom of Poland had been carved up between three great continental powers, including imperial Russia, thousands of Jewish subjects of Poland fell under the rule of the virulently anti-Semitic Russian monarchs. Upon the proposal of the Russian poet Derzhavin, there was instituted a “pale of settlement” - a fictional borderline beyond which the “zhidy” were strictly forbidden to settle. The Jews of Russia were thus cut off from the metropolitan life of Moscow and St. Petersburg. They were further subjected to the baiting of the police, the royalist Cossacks, and the mob. However, in the teeth of the Russian governmental policy of sequestration, despotism, and bullying, the Jews of the western and southern provinces were able to form a magnificent Yiddish-language culture, in large part under the shaping influence of their religious traditions and rabbinical authorities. It was under those hostile conditions for the Russian Jewry that the Chabad movement sprang into being, dedicated primarily to the celebration of life.
Much of Boris Sheynes’s creative work emanates from his awareness of the Jewish faith and his rabbinical heritage, including his Soviet-era illustrations to Avram Gontar’s Yiddish poetry and his recently completed series of woodcut engravings on selected themes of the Torah (the Scripture). The Artist has always been profoundly influenced by heroic episodes in the Hebrew religious lore, such as the Bible story “David and Goliath,” and also the remembrance of his ancestors. The Sheyneses had historically opposed governmental tyranny and oppression, whether that of the autocratic Czars or the Bolshevik Commissars. As president of the community, Boris’s grandfather had the dubious privilege of meeting with the last two Czars of Russia – Alexander the Third and Nicholas the Second – on their tours of the western provinces. The latter he initially saw when he was still the Crown Prince. At their second encounter, Nicholas II said: “I believe we have met before.” Thereafter, when asked about the Czar, the rabbi commented: “He was a ‘schmendrik’ [the Yiddish for “fool”] back then, and is still one now.” The Russian imperial government conferred on him a medal for his civic contributions, but that award and any records of it subsequently disappeared in the convulsion of the Red October.
Contemptuous as they had ever been of the Romanov Czars, the conservative-minded Sheyneses equally, if not still more intensely, hated the Bolsheviks. The family included neither Communists nor their sympathizers. Boris’s father Isaak and some of his uncles happened to be living in the city of Yekaterinburg, where Nicholas II was imprisoned and eventually executed together with his wife, children and family doctor. The royalist forces were on the rapid advance in an effort to rescue the Czar. Sverdlov, the leader of the infamous Cheka, and his leather-clad henchmen were running amok, brandishing their revolvers. The civilian population was mobilized to dig trenches for the Reds’ defense. When Boris Sheynes’s uncle Iosiph refused, his fellow townsmen accused him of being a White Guard (a royalist) officer in disguise, and he was immediately shot.
Boris’ father Isaak Sheynes was a widely respected man and an expert in his line of work. He had started off as a specialist in the laying of railway tracks and bridges in the Ural and Central Asia, and often lived in frugal and trying conditions, breaking bread and sharing lodgings with railroad workmen, traveling for hundreds of miles on horseback, and braving the inclement elements. In the Ural region, he was paid his wages (as was the local custom at that time) in semi-precious stones. He patiently set aside savings in order to feed his twelve siblings following the death of their father, the rabbi. After the Bolsheviks had taken over in Yekaterinburg (renamed Sverdlov after the head Chekist mentioned above), his own brother Solomon was tortured by the Chekists into revealing Isaak’s accumulation, over the many years of slave-like labor and unremitting frugality, of a cache of gems. Isaak was taken to the local Cheka unit, and an interrogator, thrusting a booted leg in his face, demanded: “Turn over the stones!” Isaak was then taken to an overcrowded jail-cell, where the inmates were packed like sardines in a can, and answered the call of nature on the spot without regard to propriety. One of them, a callow youth, started suffocating and screaming. A prison guard came in and tried to silence the sufferer with a bayonet. Isaak grabbed the bayonet with his bare hands and wrested the rifle from its owner, wounding himself in the process. The guard lost the struggle and fled, but soon returned with reinforcements. Isaak was immediately separated from the rest of the inmates and taken to an inner courtyard where enemies of the Bolshevik regime, both apparent and supposed, were being shot by the dozen. He even heard the victims’ death cries. But the fate willed it that the commandant happened along and took notice of an evidently respectable individual being led off to his execution. He asked what the condemned man’s guilt was and was told about the incident inside the cell. Isaak gave him a ready explanation of his conduct – confronting the abuser of a sick fellow cellmate and being attacked in turn, of which his bleeding scar was proof positive – and was released on the spot. He later told his loved ones that had he not cut himself, he would have been surely killed.
After his miraculous release - attended by the Chekists’ seizure of all his life savings - Isaak and his wife Eva Naumovna (Yochved-Shlyoma Nayahovna, nee Gil’man, daughter of a Berdichev attorney) moved to the new Soviet capital, Moscow, where his illustrious work record in the Ural earned him a respectable post at the Soviet Ministry of Electric Resources. In the bleakest years of the Stalin dictatorship, at the height of official anti-Semitism, Isaak was summarily fired. However, his coworkers, who despite their Russian nationality held him in deep veneration as a fundamentally decent man and a knowledgeable specialist, walked en masse to the Deputy Minister’s office and lodged a protest. That functionary was evidently frightened by such an outpouring of protest over the firing of a single individual, and contended he had no hand in it. Thereupon Mr. Sheynes was promptly reinstated. (An aside – that incident happened in Stalinist Russia, where it was commonplace to either starve to death or vanish in a gulag. A demonstration of co-workers’ support such as that is a rare phenomenon even today in the “free” West.)
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