Samuel Lewis Shane - Early Life

Early Life

Shane was born Sholem Luzar Olshansky, or Sholem Luzar ben Moyshe HaCohen v’Esther. on April 14, 1900, in Ryzhnyifke, (in Russian Ryzhanovka ) in the Kiev Gubernya, Ukraine, Russian Empire. Ryzhnyifke was a shtetl, or a small market town with a primarily Jewish population, serving the surrounding peasant villages. The family ran and owned the inn, the only building in the town with a wooden floor and "porch." Sam was the first child, so his parents were probably married in 1899. It was an arranged marriage. Esther was about 16 or 17 years old and Moyshe was probably 25 years old. Family oral history suggests that the family had run the inn for 300 years.

Sam remembered having very little to eat as a small child. He also remembered being carried to kheder (religious school) as a child by the young men who helped the teacher; the streets were dirt, and in summer either deep mud or deep dust not navigable by a small child. He started kheder when he was three years old as was the custom. He also held memories of a series of pogroms (organized attacks on Jewish communities). The peasants in neighboring villages would warn them when the Cossacks were coming, signifying a coming pogrom. Some of the houses and the synagogue had pogrom cellars in which they would hide during such a rampage.

His mother used to pick the children up to kiss a photo of Moyshe, their father, in America. His father had left Russia in 1903 to avoid being drafted into the Russian army for the Russo-Japanese war. Shane came to Philadelphia in 1906 with his father's youngest brother Bernard, his mother Esther (née Dzubati; in America the name was changed to Sabbath) and his younger brothers Edward and Bernard.