PORTLAND'S GERMANS-FROM-RUSSIA CELEBRATE HISTORY

The Oregonian; Portland, Or.; Apr 8, 2000; JULIE SULLIVAN of the Oregonian Staff;

Abstract:

They're the work of a near-forgotten people who dressed like Russians, spoke like 18th-century Germans and became as much a part of the Portland landscape as the churches themselves. This weekend, the community has a chance to celebrate the life and legacy of "Die Stille im Land" -- the quiet people in the country -- who settled roughly between North and Northeast Alberta and Russell streets, between Northeast 15th Avenue and North Mississippi and Albina avenues, more than a century ago.

Growing up in the old neighborhood of Albina, [Steve] Schreiber knew the Schmidts, the Schneiders and the Millers. But it wasn't until he inherited his late mother's genealogy papers that he became hooked on their history, joining the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia that meets at the Rivercrest Community Church and creating a global electronic community with a Web site, www.germans-russia-pdx.com.

On Sunday, for the first time ever, the four main regional organizations that focus on family history will gather to help people search for their Eastern European roots. The American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, the Jewish Genealogical Society of Oregon, the Genealogical Forum of Oregon and the Oregon Historical Society will come together as part of Winterfest, in conjunction with the Portland Art Museum's Stroganoff exhibit. It is a celebration that reaches back in time, when Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard was Union Avenue and the Albina neighborhood was known as "Rooshian Town" or '"Little Russia." Separate and distinct from the Russia town built by Russian and Polish Jews on the southwest of downtown, the eastside neighborhood was a village of German speakers.

Summary: Descendants of people who lived in the old Albina neighborhood have a chance to trace their roots

Down on the corner in Albina, you'll find the clapboard churches, the Foursquare, the Philadelphia Missionary Baptist, the Allen Temple. The music is different, the congregations diverse, but the cornerstones are all the same.

"I don't think a lot of people even know about them," said Steve Schreiber, 43, senior manager for aviation finance at the Port of Portland.

Growing up in the old neighborhood of Albina, Schreiber knew the Schmidts, the Schneiders and the Millers. But it wasn't until he inherited his late mother's genealogy papers that he became hooked on their history, joining the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia that meets at the Rivercrest Community Church and creating a global electronic community with a Web site, www.germans- russia-pdx.com.

On Sunday, for the first time ever, the four main regional organizations that focus on family history will gather to help people search for their Eastern European roots. The American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, the Jewish Genealogical Society of Oregon, the Genealogical Forum of Oregon and the Oregon Historical Society will come together as part of Winterfest, in conjunction with the Portland Art Museum's Stroganoff exhibit. It is a celebration that reaches back in time, when Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard was Union Avenue and the Albina neighborhood was known as "Rooshian Town" or '"Little Russia." Separate and distinct from the Russia town built by Russian and Polish Jews on the southwest of downtown, the eastside neighborhood was a village of German speakers.

Neighborhood pride

With no English and no education, many of the people hauled garbage, creating, along with Italians, a system of family-held garbage businesses that survives today. They built at least six clapboard churches in the neighborhood before 1927.

Ray Koch, 73, was born in a home in Northeast Portland, where his father hauled garbage and his grandfather cleaned Jefferson High School. As students, Koch and his two brothers would be called in to translate whenever the administrators needed to give the older man instructions. The senior Koch never did speak English, but in the span of a generation, the three Koch boys achieved success, becoming, respectively, a doctor, a Ph.D. and a dentist.

"We did what we were supposed to," Marie Krieger said. "We assimilated."

Each day, Krieger, 89, clips the obituaries of Germans from Russia from Portland to Ritzville, Wash. In 10 years, she's clipped more than 8,000. When her immigrant parents arrived in Portland in the 1930s, there were many Germans from Germany, but Germans from Russia, including Catholics, Mennonites and the evangelicals from the Volga and Black Sea areas, had arrived by special route.

They were the offspring of German colonists who, in the 1760s, agreed to farm the Russian prairies in exchange for tax breaks, freedom from military service and independence. They settled on uncultivated land establishing villages along the Volga River and along the Black Sea in a landscape so harsh it transformed them, historians say, producing a culture of thrift, piety and the expression, Schreiber says, that "Work tastes better than food."

Privileges lost

The people prospered, but by the 1870s, Czar Alexander II repealed their special privileges, conscripting the men and forcing Russian to be taught in the previously isolated and independent German schools. An estimated quarter of the colonist families immigrated to the United States, among more than 1.6 million people who came from Russia between 1901 and 1910. Thousands of other Germans from Russia went to western Canada and South America. The German Russians journeyed first to the American Midwest, but the best land was gone and so, following railroad's western expansion, settled in the communities of Greeley, Colo.; Lincoln, Neb.; and Eastern Washington. Hundreds went to Portland, where relatives and jobs in factories and mills awaited.

The biggest number appears to have arrived between 1890 and 1905, working in the mills and railroad, as maids in the grand homes of the West Hills and in the businesses along Union Avenue.

Krieger's mother and father couldn't write, and her mother never learned to read. But their daughter drove a combine to pay for her college tuition. She graduated from Washington State University by the time the family moved to Little Russia in 1935. The young teacher worked as a maid until she met her husband, Walter C., in church. Eventually the couple married, and he worked in the garbage-hauling business for 36 years. The couple paid for their house before they married and moved in. Today, her living room couch is the original davenport, and she still makes her own laundry soap of animal fat, borax and lye.

But she too, moved from the neighborhood. During the Depression, families moved for jobs, and World War II sent the neighborhood boys first to war, then, through the GI Bill, to college and finally, to the suburbs.

Strife in Russia

Their success, though, was bittersweet. The relatives they left behind in Russia endured almost 80 years of deprivation. More than 170,000 died of starvation during the Bolshevik Revolution. In Portland, the Volga Relief Society, organized at the Zion Congregational Church in Albina, sent enough relief to feed more than 135,000 in Russia.

Lenin, who allowed independent ethnic enclaves, had created the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of the Volga Germans. But by 1928, Stalin had begun to destroy the two pillars of their lives: their farms and their churches. By 1941, they were viewed as spies and saboteurs, and the state exiled them to Kazakhstan or sent them to prisoner camps in Siberia, where two in 10 women survived, said Nancy Bernhardt Holland, executive director of the American Historical Society for Germans from Russia based in Lincoln, Neb.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, thousands have returned to Germany, where once again, they are viewed as outsiders.

For Schreiber and other Portlanders, the historical society is a way to reach those relatives, respect the past and understand the present. "I think it comes from very deep longings to be attached," said William Wiest, professor emeritus at Reed College and the son of Germans from Russia who travels from Russia to South America meeting other descendants. Often they sing the old songs, from the only possessions the Portlanders carried: the Bible and the Volga Songbook.

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Caption: Color Photo by ROGER JENSEN of The Oregonian staff