Our earlier posts about Tsemach Pick raised questions about his life in the Soviet Union, his 1952 death and his descendants. We knew only that he was the younger brother of Aharon Pick and a friend of B. Cassel; that he had introduced Jewish folk music to the Latvian musicologist Emilis Melngailis in 1899, and that he had had a long career in medicine, specializing in occupational health and safety. His son, Ilya Pick, fought in the Red Army during World War II and left the army in 1952. We didn’t expect to learn more until, early last month, I received an email from Moscow:
Hello! My name is Boris Isaakovich Chernov. I was born and live in Moscow. For more than 50 years I have been married to Evgenia Chernova, who had the surname Pick before her marriage. Evgenia is the daughter of Ilya Pik and, accordingly, the granddaughter of Tsemakh Davidovich Pick and Mere Pick (née Kaplan).
What followed was a long and fascinating email exchange, enabled by the Google translation app since Boris writes only in Russian and me only in English. Here are his additions and insights, which I’ve edited only for clarity and length:
The fact that I found on the Internet (a great achievement of mankind, harmful, but much more useful) a link to your site about Keidan, his history, people was a great gift for us.
Tsemach was born in Keidan on December 19, 1882. He received a medical degree in 1913 at what was then called Yuryev University, now called Tartu in Estonia. While working as a doctor with Jewish refugees during the turmoil of World War I (the same years that his brother Aharon was training in France), he became interested in preventative medicine. Living mainly in Moscow, he specialized in occupational health, developing legislation aimed at improving the health of industrial workers and taking leadership roles in state agencies that oversaw hygiene, safety and sanitation. By the mid-1920s he was teaching occupational health at Moscow State University. He became a renowned scientist, a doctor of science, and a professor in this field, and was highly respected by mining unions until his death. He died of cancer in 1952.
Tsemach’s son Ilya, 1916-1990, lived and studied in Moscow, qualifying as a communications engineer and serving in the Red Army from 1941 until 1952. He and his wife, Lyubov, had two daughters, Galina in 1946 and Evgenia in 1949. Galina has two daughters, Elena and Yulia. Elena has three sons and lives in Canada; Galina, now widowed, lives in Israel, helping her daughter Yulia raise three young children.
Evgenia and her husband Boris, married more than 50 years, live in Moscow. Both worked for many years at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (now the Russian Federation). Both are retired. Their son, Mikhail, born in 1973, after graduating Moscow State University in mathematics, received a PhD from Pennsylvania State University in Economics and Finance and taught for seven years at Columbia U. in New York. There he met his wife, then a trader at Goldman Sachs, originally from St. Petersburg. Now he teaches finance at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Clearly a talented family!
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