Jack Blanc (he changed his surname to Blanc from Blank)

Jack Blanc was my father.*(1)
He was born with the name Jacob Blank on August 20th, 1909 in the Byelorussian district, (at that time), of Podolia, (Podolski in Russian), (which was at that time in the Russian Empire), to a Jewish family.
In 1921 he and his younger brother Albert, and his mother Rivka, (nee Snyder), escaped from the civil-war torn area of the now re-unified Ukraine, which declared its independence after the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917. His father Moishe (Morris) had gone to Canada in 1914 to Winnipeg, Manitoba, to work as a tailor and earn the money to send home to them to be able to follow him, and flee the anti-Semitism of Russia.
It was a non-Jewish man who risked his life twice to get them across the river which separated the Ukraine from the Kingdom of Romania. The boat was fired on the first time at least and it was a miracle that he or any one of the Blank family was not hurt. The steamship tickets were lost in the horror, and my grandmother had to earn the money as fast as possible by making home-made wine in order to buy the steamship tickets again. (The story goes that my father and my Uncle Albert (his brother), passed the tme by counting the money my grandmother earned.
A bit of background is needed here:
As you will read, a little further on, you will see that the Ukraine was not a safe place for anyone to live, but because the Bolshevik Red Army said all Jews were of the Provisional Government reactionaries, who would be supporting the "White" Army, and couldn't be trusted, and most of the Provisional Government's White Army believed all Jews to be Bolsheviks, Marxist and/or Communists*(2), it was much worse for Jewish people, so thence the haste in trying to emigrate to Canada.
The western Ukraine (which included Podolia), had been part of the Russian Empire's province of Byelorussia since about 1795, and included the "Pale'" which was the name of the area, which had been annexed from Poland*(3), where the Russians had forced most of the Jews to live, beginning during the reign of Tsarina Catherine the Great.
The war was between the White Army of the Provisional Government, (which had been set up after the Februaury 1917 Revolution) and the Red Army of the Bolshevik Soviets (after their Revolution of October 1917).
(The Ukraine's independence was short-lived as the Bolshevik Soviets forced it into the Soviet Union in about 1921, as one of the "founding republics of the Soviet Union," as it had the natural resource of wheat and had been the "bread basket" of the Russian Empire, and therefore the new Soviet Russia could not do without it.)
I am in the process of writing this biography/history of my father and the Blank family, however I am not ready to post any further information at the present time
I hope to add more information in the near future.

Footnotes:
*1 My father changed his surname to Blanc in 1954 for business reasons.
*2 Especially since Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky, (the 2nd most influential Bolsheviks
after Lenin), were Jewish.
*3 the Kingdom of Poland had been partitioned and annexed by the Empire of Austria-Hungary, the Kingdom of Prussia, and the Russian Empire, three times between 1772 and 1795. Unfortunately as the Poles had allowed many Spanish Jews, who were fleeing the Spanish Inquisition, to come to Poland, during the country's Golden Age, as a result of the partitions most ended up living in Russia, whose rulers were prejudiced against them and who caused hateful propaganda to be spread about the Jews so that the ignorant and poor serfs and peasants would be prejudiced aginst them too.