Readers: Who's reading from Eastern Europe?

Readers: Who  (or what) are you?

Lately I've been getting a lot of hits to this blog from eastern Europe: Ukraine, Romania, a few from Poland and Russia.

Are you real readers?   There's not quite enough of you, every day, to suggest that an unfeeling bot is merely registering my site as it orbits the blogosphere.  I think you're real. I hope you are.

If you are real, what brings you here?  Do you sew?  I had a pen-pal once, for a short time, who lived in Russia and liked to sew.  I sent her several packages of patterns and at least once, fabric.  I'm sure she didn't receive them all; I'm not sure if any made it to her. I was warned not to trust the mails, but I didn't have much choice.

Sometimes people land here from searching on a particular sewing pattern number.  It's fun to see how McCalls 6844 turns out fitting on a real body, and proud pictures of sewing projects, modeled on surprisingly unstandard sizes, are always being posted online.

Are you hackers?  Eastern Europe is notorious for hackers. A Bulgarian friend who lives here in NJ (I have a few hits from Bulgaria) says that underemployed computer whizzes in his home country amuse themselves by hacking.  But where could you get to from my blog?  I don't even bank online.

Are you Jews?  Or Jew followers?  In my fantasy, you're relatives; my father's mother was born in Kiev, I'm told, and grew up in a little town outside the city called Kopaigorod. His father was from nearby Shargorod.  My other grandparents, similarly typically, came from Poland. But if you were undiscovered relatives you'd have to do some searching to find me, even online, since neither maiden name (fairly common) nor married name (much less so) appear on the site.

On the other hand, if you go to Soundcloud, as I sometimes do to hear clips of my radio-storyteller daughter, I find lots of Pavels and Borises and the like with my husband's Russian-sounding last name. So he (and my daughters) might have distant cousins in Russia whose grandparents made it home from wherever they survived the Holocaust, didn't know the American branch well enough to tell us, and gave rise to musicians two generations later who post on Soundcloud. And maybe you guys just googled yourselves one day and then scrolled all the way down to the fourth page of search results, and there I was. Google knows where to find me, somehow, even though I haven't linked the blog to my Google account.

You could be interested in Yiddish; People bump into this blog from searching on "forschpeis," a Yiddish word (appetizer) that I used many blogs ago.  Obviously this is not a hot SEO keyword. In fact, it's just about the only keyword that ever shows up among reported search terms that lead to my site.  Obviously someone's bidding on all the other words...

You obviously read English.  Even if you don't write English too well, or at all, write and tell me if you're real. And what brings you here?