A Big Thank You to Cousin Ilya for verifying Boris Fuchs' surname!

From Fuchs (aka Fux in Odessa) and Germany -> Borisoff in the USA                         

On June 29, 2026, Ilya Grigoriev-Fidelman wrote...

Love (Marie) was the key... A Fascinating and Interesting Story...

Paul Borisoff's grandparents both studied at Stern Conservatory in Berlin in the early 1910s, and they most likely met there. Coincidentally, they were both originally from Odessa. The grandmother was the daughter of Sonja Fidelman (Drobatschewsky), and that’s how Paul and I are related. The grandfather was named Mischa Fuchs.  After emigrating to the United States, he changed his surname to Borisoff - the surname inherited by Paul.  Fuchs comes from the Yiddish word for "fox," while Borisoff was derived from the first name of Mischa Fuchs's father, Boris.

When recently Paul asked me a couple of questions about tracing his possible Fuchs ancestors and I checked some old documents, I realized that I quickly become entangled.  There were at least ten different Fuchs families in Odessa by the end of the 19th century, and every year at least ten children with that surname were born there - good luck sorting them out.   So I started looking for any secondary information I could find - parents' names, maiden names, anything that might help - because the dates were completely unreliable; in filling out documents in the 1920s and 1930s - immigration records, for example - people reported any dates but real ones, perhaps not intentionally, more likely they simply no longer remembered the correct dates, strange as that may seem today.

In his U.S. immigration papers, Mischa stated that he had two brothers.  First was Isaak, who remained in Berlin, and another brother, Alexander, lived in Los Angeles.  Alexander had immigrated to the United States earlier, in 1923, directly from Russia. His immigration records revealed that his wife’s name was Maria, they married in Odessa, and that they had three children. What caught my eye was the name of their eldest daughter, Love Marie.  That unusual name gave me something to grab onto. Within minutes I found her own marriage record, and there, at last, was her mother's maiden name - Shargorodskaya.   Bingo!  That single detail instantly narrowed the field among the countless Fuchs families in Odessa.

From there, the whole story fell immediately into place. And now I have the pleasure of telling it in full.

On September 3, 1889, a someone named Boris Fuchs, described as an Ottoman subject, married Reiza Krasner in Odessa. The bride was twenty years old; the groom was twenty-five.  Reiza's family came from the town of Tulchyn in central Ukraine, and her father's name was Chaim.  The marriage record, however, tells us almost nothing about Boris Fuchs beyond the fact that he held an Ottoman passport.  Where had it come from?  Perhaps he had travelled to Palestine?

On May 18, 1891, in Odessa, their first child was born - a son, Moisey (Moses).  In 1892 they had another son, Michel, who died a year later.   In 1893 came a son named Iser-Khuna (Israel-Elkhonen); in 1896, a son, Leyb; and in 1898, another son, Yehoshua.

In all the earlier birth records, Boris Fuchs is described simply as an Ottoman subject. But the record for Yehoshua's birth contains three new and important details. First, he is listed not as Boris, but as Ber. Second, his father's name is mentioned – Moisey (Moses).  And third, he is described as in the process of obtaining Dieveniškės registration, which meant that he was in the process of obtaining citizenship in the Russian Empire, with official registration in the shtetl (now town) of Dieveniškės.

Dieveniškės lies in present-day Lithuania, barely six kilometers from the Belarusian border.  What an extraordinary distance from Odessa, but perhaps the choice was due to the fact that relatives lived there?  Indeed, the 1883 census for Dieveniškės includes a Fuchs family (also known as Rabinovich):  Orel Shavtel, his wife Keyla, and their daughter Sora.

Between 1898 and 1906, no further birth records for children of Boris (Ber) Fuchs have been found in Odessa.  This may be because the family was living in Dieveniškės during those years, or because pregnancies ended unsuccessfully.  But in 1906 a daughter, Sarah, was born in Odessa.

In 1918, Boris Fuchs's son Yehoshua married Maria Feiga Shargorodskaya in Odessa.  This is the very marriage record that finally allowed me to establish beyond a doubt that this was the Fuchs family from which Paul's grandfather descended. Yehoshua and Maria had two daughters, Love Marie, born in Yalta, and Helen, born in Odessa, and later a son, Bobby, born in Los Angeles.

In the early 1920s, Yehoshua (by then known as Alexander) and Maria Fuchs made their way through Romania, via Galați and Constanța, to New York, and from there to Los Angeles. In 1923 they applied for U.S. citizenship and changed their surname from Fuchs to Borisoff.  Mischa Fuchs - who I now believe was in fact the eldest son, Moisey (Moses) Fuchs - married Maria Drobatschewsky in Berlin in 1923 (Maria's mother was Sonja Fidelman) Their son Boris was born there in 1925. Only in 1934, fleeing the Nazi takeover of Germany, did they join Alexander in Los Angeles. Once in the United States, Mischa Fuchs also adopted the surname Borisoff. 

To summarize, Boris Fuchs’s children were:

• Moses (Mischa), 1891-1964, Paul Borisoff’s grandpa.
• Michel, 1892-1893
• Iser-Khuna (Isaak, John), 1893-1977
• Leyb (Lev), 1896-1941
• Yehoshua (Alexander, Sasha) 1898-1983
• Sarra (Sonja), 1906-2002

Whereas the three brothers emigrated to the United States and settled in Los Angeles, the fourth brother, Leyb (Lev), remained in the Soviet Union.  Before the Russian Revolution, their father, Boris Fuchs, owned a hosiery manufacturing factory in Odessa. His business is listed in the Odessa Yellow Pages in 1910-1914.  So far, I have not found any documents describing what happened to him after the Bolsheviks seized power, but it was common at that time for the soldiers to confiscate businesses and burn them down.  Boris's wife, Reiza (also known as Rosalia), relocated to Novosibirsk, one of Siberia's largest cities, together with her son Leyb (Lev). When Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Leyb was drafted into the Red Army during the general mobilization. The family's last contact with him was on July 17, 1941.  Beginning in August 1941, he was officially listed as missing in action and his next of kin was recorded as his mother, Rosalia Fuchs, who in 1941 lived at 33 Shchetinkina Street, Apartment 4, Novosibirsk. The younger sister Sarra, born in 1906, later married someone with last name Frenkel, and also ended up in California, but in San Diego. But it appears that her descendants and those of Mischa Borisoff eventually lost touch with one another.