The surname Bleitrach is notable first for its rarity and for the instability of its spelling, characteristics common to Jewish names of Eastern Europe. The Jews, for fairly legitimate reasons, had only relative trust in the authorities and resisted the new rule on family names as long as they could. While in an official setting they had to adopt family names, among themselves they kept the traditional use of "ben" or "bas." The gap between the imposed civil registration and internal usage explains why, over several generations, a single lineage could see its name transcribed in divergent ways across the registers — Polish, Imperial Russian, German, the French of the host country.
The variants *Blajtrach*, *Blejtrach*, *Bleytrach*, and *Blaitrach* all point back to a single Yiddish etymon in which the element *blajt-* / *blei-* evokes, in a plausible Germano-Yiddish reading, lead (*Blei* in German, *blay* in Yiddish) — the morphology of the name, with its *-trach* ending difficult to attach to a stable Slavic root, argues for an origin in the Germanic lexicon transcribed through Yiddish phonetics, then re-Polonized in the civil registry records of the Congress Kingdom of Poland. In Yiddish or German, it would be "fils" or "sohn" or "er." In most Slavic languages such as Polish or Russian, it would be "wich" or "witz." This name, however, escapes these usual patronymic suffixes, which makes it more akin to the descriptive, occupational, or toponymic names characteristic of the second wave of Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic attribution.
The Jews constitute, in Eastern Europe, a significant religious and ethnic minority; successively driven out of most of the states of Christian Europe, they had taken refuge in Poland, where they gradually formed, from the 15th to the 18th century, a distinct nationality by religion, customs, and language. The latter, Yiddish, is a German dialect — thus the onomastician Michel Roblin, in the *Revue Internationale d'Onomastique*, situated as early as 1950 the linguistic substratum from which names such as Bleitrach emerge [Roblin, 1950]. The surname, in its various spellings, therefore belongs to the Yiddish stock of central Poland, and its *Bleitrach* spelling — with -ei- rather than -aj- or -ej- — most likely betrays a late Frenchification through graphic transcription of Polish or German documents upon entry into France.
Before being dispersed by the 20th century, the Bleitrach lineage, like so many other Jewish families of its area, has its roots in so-called "Congress" Poland, that administrative entity born of the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and placed under Russian suzerainty until 1918. Warsaw and Łódź, the two cities with which the surname is most frequently associated, were there the two major poles of Polish Judaism: the former, administrative and cultural capital, the latter, a textile metropolis in dazzling expansion from the 1820s onward, which drew a massive Jewish immigration from the surrounding *shtetlekh*.
On the eve of the First World War, Warsaw was home to the largest Jewish community in Europe, and Łódź the second largest in Polish territory. The Bleitrachs attested in these cities probably took part, like the majority of the Jews of Congress Poland, in the artisanal and commercial economy — tailors, weavers, peddlers, small merchants — which supplied the textile city of Łódź with its workforce and its intermediaries. The everyday language there remained Yiddish, Hebrew that of worship, Polish and Russian those of the administration. This linguistic superposition explains both the graphic plasticity of the name and the fluidity of identity in which these generations lived until the upheavals of the 20th century [Encyclopaedia Judaica, *s.v.* "Warsaw" and "Łódź"].
It is possible, though not documented by the consulted sources, that the name arose by ramification from one of the neighboring forms — *Blajtrach* remaining the most probable spelling in the Polish registers before 1918 — and then became fixed in one branch or another on the occasion of an emigration or an act of naturalization. As things stand, no published genealogy traces the lineage back beyond the 19th century, and the absence of documents in the Zakhor corpus naming the Bleitrachs explicitly calls for caution.
The early 20th century saw a major displacement of Jewish populations from Poland toward Western Europe and the Americas. The pogroms of the Russian Empire, then the instability of the reunified Poland of 1918, and still more the economic crisis of the 1930s, provoked an exodus of which France — and singularly Paris and Marseille — became one of the destinations. It is within this movement that the documentation on the Bleitrach family must be situated.
The best-documented case is that of the paternal family of Danielle Bleitrach. Danielle Bleitrach's book, published this summer of 2019, "le temps retrouvé d'une communiste," is a book of memory, a book of history, a political book, very personal and very political, like this extraordinary life of a daughter of a feminist Prisunic saleswoman, a Jewish grandfather who died at Auschwitz, a great-grandmother who had known the Paris Commune. This crucial information, relayed by the militant press in 2019, attests that at least one branch of the lineage had reached France before the Second World War, and had taken root there — the mention of the Paris Commune on the maternal side placing the family within a milieu of French workers and militants, while the surname Bleitrach, transmitted through the paternal line, remained the marker of the Polish origin.
This configuration — a Jewish father of Polish origin, a mother from the French working class — was typical of the generation of Jewish children born in France in the 1930s. Her maternal family was of working-class origin. Her mother, Jeanne Biressi, a saleswoman at the Prisunic in Marseille and then in furniture, was a member of the Communist Party; her grandmother was a militant at the UFF (Union des femmes françaises); her grandfather, a tramway worker, had been active in the CGTU. The Marseille household into which Danielle Bleitrach was born in 1938 thus embodies this encounter between the Polish Jewish diaspora and the southern working-class tradition, an encounter of which the surname Bleitrach becomes the onomastic emblem.
The Second World War irremediably fractures the lineage. Occupied Poland becomes, from 1939, the epicenter of the extermination: the Warsaw ghetto, created in November 1940, and that of Łódź, the oldest and the last to be liquidated, absorb and then eliminate the near-totality of the Jewish communities of the two cities that sheltered the roots of the name. On 22 July 1942, the eve of the 9th day of the month of Av in the Jewish calendar, the Germans undertook the mass deportation of the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto. The deportations of the summer and autumn of 1942 toward Treblinka, followed by the crushing of the ghetto uprising in April-May 1943, annihilate the Bleitrach who had not emigrated.
For the French branch, the catastrophe takes on a more singular face. Danielle Bleitrach's paternal grandfather, a Polish Jew settled in France, is arrested and deported to Auschwitz, where he is murdered [*Faire Vivre le PCF*, 2019]. This murder inscribes the lineage in the long list of Jewish families of foreign origin handed over by the French state to the Nazi occupiers, and it explains that Danielle Bleitrach was born in 1938 into a Jewish family. Her early childhood was, in her words, "marked by fear, — fear of the count, of the star, of the round-up, and later of the never-spoken mourning.
The collapse of the Polish Yiddish world does not affect only the dead. It deprives the survivors of the communal backdrop that would have permitted, in ordinary circumstances, the reconstitution of filiations: synagogue registers burned, cemeteries desecrated, civil registry archives scattered or destroyed. The Bleitrach lineage, like most Jewish lineages of central Poland, thus loses a considerable part of its genealogical memory prior to 1939 — a fact which, as much as the extermination itself, explains the rarity of attestations in the historical corpora and the near-impossibility of tracing back, for the majority of branches, beyond three or four generations.
The generation born in France shortly before or during the war inherits a double memory: that of pulverized Polish Judaism, and that of the French Resistance, of the communist maquis, and of the hope of reconstruction. Danielle Bleitrach, in whom this double memory finds its most elaborate expression, becomes the intellectual figure through whom the surname Bleitrach acquires its public renown.
Danielle Bleitrach (born 1938) is a French academic, sociologist, journalist, essayist and novelist. She has published, mainly in collaboration, various works on the working class, the labor movement, urbanization, Latin America, and Nazism. Her academic trajectory is rooted in leading French institutions: Danielle Bleitrach (born 1938) is a French sociologist and journalist. From the 1970s through the end of the century, she was CNRS researcher and lecturer at the Aix-Marseille University, focusing on the sociology of the working class and urbanization. From 1981 to 1996 she was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of France, then the National Committee of the Party. She was also assistant editor-in-chief of the party weekly Révolution. She has contributed to La Pensée, Les Temps Modernes and Le Monde Diplomatique.
His communist commitment, early and enduring, explicitly draws its roots from the dual family memory. This student period also corresponded to his first political engagements. She joined the French Communist Party in 1956. Strongly influenced by the role the USSR played against Nazism, she anchors her thought and militancy in a legacy where the destruction of her grandfather at Auschwitz founds, more than any theoretical abstraction, her fidelity to antifascism. The bibliography of Danielle Bleitrach — whether *L'Usine et la vie* co-written with Alain Chenu in 1980, the works on Latin America, or *Temps retrouvé d'une communiste* published in 2019 — composes an intellectual edifice where the sociology of the working class enters into dialogue with the memory of the Shoah and the long history of the French left [Éditions Delga]. It should also be noted, within the same family, the works of Danielle Pereillo-Bleitrach on medieval Provençal iconography — Danielle Pereillo-Bleitrach, Étude iconographique du prieuré de Saint-Paul-de-Mausole et de l'abbaye de Montmajour — which attest to the continuity of the name in the French intellectual landscape of the second half of the twentieth century.
At the threshold of the twenty-first century, the Bleitrach lineage is distributed across a few principal centres, all stemming from the Shoah rupture. France — and more precisely Marseille and the Paris region — constitutes its best-documented core, thanks to the public visibility of Danielle Bleitrach and her intellectual descendants. The Americas, mentioned as a secondary destination in the initial notice, probably harbour other ramifications stemming from the migrations of the interwar period and the immediate aftermath of 1945, when survivors of the camps and displaced persons found in the United States, Argentina or Canada lands of refuge. In the absence of a centralised genealogical census for so rare a surname, these branches remain, at the time this book is written, largely yet to be reconstituted.
Geographic dispersion is accompanied by an onomastic dispersion: depending on the host countries and civil registry officials, *Bleitrach* may have stabilised in its French spelling, while *Blajtrach* or *Blejtrach* persisted in documents inherited from the Polish civil registry, and *Bleytrach* or *Blaitrach* appeared sporadically in American records. This graphic plurality, far from being a mere accident, constitutes one of the keys to genealogical research for descendants: any exhaustive Bleitrach tree must integrate these variants and accept that the name as it presents itself today is the sediment of several administrative crossings.
The lineage, as we can see, is not a lineage in the dynastic sense — it is an archipelago: a few attested individuals, a rare name, an erased Yiddish, a living political memory, and a documentary silence on the generations before 1900 that neither history nor research will likely ever be able to lift. It is this archipelago, more than a linear filiation, that the surname Bleitrach gives us to ponder today.
