Abraham DOBRY

The story

Born on 24 February 1866 at Pinsk, in a Belarus then under Russian rule, Abraham Dobry was the son of Youdel Dobry and Léa Schmenkler. He married Liebow Baratz and made his career in the two trades that went together in the Russian Empire at the end of the century: sugar and banking. The Ukrainian sugar industry was then among the most powerful in Europe, and it needed credit as much as it needed beet — those who financed the refineries ended up running them.

He became director of the Russian branch of the Bank for Foreign Trade in Kyiv, a board member of the All-Russian association of sugar producers, and ran several sugar-refinery associations — those of Artemivsk and of Alexandre. These posts made him one of the men who decided credit in a region where beet fed tens of thousands of families, and where the smallest bad harvest was felt in the banks of Kyiv.

The war brought him into politics through the door of business: he sat on the finance commission that negotiated the trade agreement between Ukraine and Germany, in 1918, in the months when Ukraine was trying to exist as a state between the Russian collapse and the German occupation. The agreement signed in Berlin traded recognition of the young republic for a million tonnes of grain in six months — which Ukraine never delivered. It lasted no longer than the regime that had signed it.

The Bolshevik revolution swept it all away. His family fled Russia and settled in Paris, where he died on 6 September 1936. The family grave in Division 96 carries three names: his own, that of Israël Dobry (1876-1935) and that of Jacques Braslavsky (1860-1936). The inscription gives his birth as 9 March 1867 and cuts the month in Roman numerals, as it was written where he came from.