“I only knew them as old people. In retrospect, you see that everyone was once young and struggling and trying to make their way in the world.” — Paul Levine
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As a child in the U.K., Paul Levine knew his great-grandparents, Sam and Dora Diamondstein. But like most kids, he didn’t really know them. They rarely talked about their past. At least not to a teenager.
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When Levine was 14, his family moved to Canada. Great-grandfather Sam was concerned. But no one understood why he took such a dim view of a country others saw as filled with promise.
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“Sam warned heavily against the move,” said Levine, now 61, of Vancouver. “He had spent time in Canada when he was young, but nobody knew what he was doing here, or why he left.”
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A box of letters, long unopened, would solve the mystery, with a little help from AI. Although Artificial Intelligence is a controversial tool in genealogy because of its propensity to hallucinate or fabricate information to fill gaps, in this case it would prove invaluable.
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On a trip to his storage unit about a month ago, Levine uncovered a long-neglected box of family memorabilia, including over 100 letters written by his great-grandfather between 1900 and 1926.
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“I had gone down to grab something random, like paint, and I saw it and got curious,” he said.
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The amateur genealogist in the family had always been his late brother Richard, who had undertaken an extensive family research project before his unexpected death in 1999.
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“Everything was in one box, photos and family tree files, and letters,” said Levine.
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Among the items were letters sent from Sam to Dora during their courtship, written in Yiddish. Both had grown up in Latvia, and became part of the Jewish diaspora, displaced after the shtetls (towns) came under increasing persecution.
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Later letters were in English, reflecting their settlement and assimilation in the U.K. after their marriage.
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Levine fed one of the Yiddish letters into Google Gemini, and within moments had a translation.
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The story was immediately intriguing.
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The date was 1901. Sam, then engaged to Dora, had travelled to Montreal in steerage on an emigrant liner, to seek his fortune.
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“It was about how my great-grandfather had landed in Canada, and he was trying to get work. They weren’t taking Jews, so he had to pretend to be an Austrian Christian. He was offered work, but it was a scam. They took his luggage to hold him hostage, and he had to break into an office and steal it back,” said Levine.
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“I earn almost nothing here,” he wrote from Montreal.
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He was unable to get a foothold in Canada. Wages for unskilled new immigrants were about 25 cents a day.
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“When you have no money, there is nothing you can do,” he wrote to his uncle Reuven.
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The international financial crisis known as the Panic Of 1907 wiped out his hopes. “The crisis has thrown people out of work by the hundreds, and I am one of them.”
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He investigated Canada’s difficult prairie homesteading program. “A person has to work at it and make a go of it. … But how does one live?” he wonders. Like any couple, they have misunderstandings, and they encourage each other.
