Ordinarily, the often-messy and too-often-lengthy process of transforming content from some other medium to the web would be done behind the scenes. Max's family didn't worry about that: let the process be completely transparent!
So: here it is, the current state-of-preparation. Watch this space to see what happens next.
MAX: direct quote of Max’s words
LISA: direct quote of Lisa’s words
NARRATOR: Lisa’s comments about her interactions with her grandfather, Max.
COMM: audiotape or written communication
GEORGE: (communications from) Max and Jennie's fifth son)
PAUL: (communications from) Max and Jennie's fourth son
JENNIE: (communications from) Max's first wife
FRAN: (communications from) Francine, George's wife; Lisa's mother
NORMA: (communications from) Max and Jennie's daughter-in-law
EDITOR: the webmaster, for in-progress and narrative notes
SUBSUBHEAD: a tentative label
IMAGE: placeholder; image in the orginal thesis, often with a caption, e.g. IMAGE: Boy's cheder, Lublin, 1924
Page numbers of the original thesis are given in square brackets, e.g. [4]
Footnotes of the original thesis --given in an end-section, are given inside paired forward slashes, e.g. /2/
Max was born in 1894 so we can expect that his earliest memories date from the earlier years of the 20th century. Most of the documentation we have about Wysokie-Litewskie is from the interwar period, 1920 through 1939. What might Max have witnessed? We know WWI came to Wysokie: we have photos of devasted town buildings captioned "WWI". We have a few additional photos of familiar town buildings which, due to their shabbiness, are presumably of Max's error. But, mainly we must guess, extrapolate back from the later era, assuming that --aside from the war destruction-- little changed in the town.
Footnotes of the original thesis --given in an end-section, are given inside paired forward slashes, e.g. /2/
The stew our ancestors often prepared on Friday for a sabbath meal is commonly known; in Yiddish, cholent. A direct descendant of Wysokie mentioned that her Wysoker family referred to this dish as chunt. Was this variant unique to the town or the local region? Might we recognize unique-to-Wysokie language in Max's words? Unfortunately, we have only an extremely limited sample. Let's keep our ears open to even the faintest echoes of the actual words our ancesters used.
Although the official languages of modern Wysokie are Belarusian and Russian, in the early 21st century town, in informal practice, natives use words arising from a variety of roots, including these and Ukrainian and Polish. We may have the impression that Wysokie is an isolated backwater community, but in this respect it was and is remarkably cosmopolitan.
Circa 1995, Lisa could not have anticipated the internet, sources like Wikipedia, and the truly massive increase in electronic material about Eastern European Jews. As required by academic standards Lisa supported her thesis by citing the information sources she used. In transforming Lisa's work for web presentation in 2025, (1) we've largely eliminated defining common Jewish terms and concepts; the Internet can do that immeasurably better. And because we're not subject to academic requirements (2) we don't attempt to source every data point we mention. So, for example, we report our impressions of Wysokie in Max's time with qualifiers, e.g. it is said... Readers are strongly and warmly invited to contribute their contrasting data.
Information about Wysokie prior to about 1920 is very scarce, so we're strongly motivated to extract every possible bit of information from Max's story.
Some standard reference sources –generally, large collections of data about Eastern European Jewish towns– sometimes give apparently definitive pieces of information, e.g. this many synagogues, that many hospitals. Usually, no citations are provided. Are these data reliable? If supporting information is lacking, we feel justified in expressing doubt.
The picture changed following the resolution of the Polish-Soviet War, 1919 - 1921, at which point Wysokie was restored to Poland. The Poles were moved to modernize and improve -- and Polonize. That resulted in more and better data about the town produced and preserved, for which we can only be grateful.
Max's town, our ancestral town, was known by multiple names in Russian, Polish, and native Yiddish. To simplify, we've chosen to refer to the town by its shortened Polish name, Wysokie. We've met a very few eyewitness survivors; this is how they named their home village.