Robert Bernheim, a professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Maine, removes a bagel from a mixture of water, barley malt and honey, where it was boiled before baking. He is wearing a Montreal Expos baseball cap in place of the traditional Jewish kippah, to honor his great-great grandfather Fievel Brill, who owned a Jewish bakery in the town of Kanczuga in Poland. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer There are lots of ways to search for your family history: by reading old letters, diaries and newspapers; scrutinizing old photographs, and marriage and death certificates; visiting city hall for property and tax records; or – popular these days – spitting into a tube and sending it off to test your DNA.
Robert Bernheim, a South China resident and assistant professor of history at the University of Maine at Augusta, had a less orthodox method in mind when he and his wife, Patricia, took a monthlong sabbatical in Kanczuga, Poland, this spring. He hoped to uncover, recover really, his family story through baking bagels in a town that hadn’t tasted them in more than 80 years. As he wrote in an email from Poland, “This corner of the world is truly a bagel desert.
” In the late 19th and early 20th century, though, Bernheim’s paternal great-great grandfather, Feivel Brill, owned a Jewish bakery on Kanczuga’s bustling town square famous for its rolls, challah, rye bread and bagels, that last a bread that Jews in Poland were making at least as far back as the 17th century.