THE FIRST HUNDRED YEARS
He lay crumpled in the street, dead, my grandfather. He had been among the determined few who brought comfort and food to families suffering in the epidemic. Soon enough he contracted the disease himself.
As World War I slowly began moving towards its conclusion, a typhus epidemic arrived in Trochenbrod. People had been weakened by years of hardship and suffering brought by the war, and now they were succumbing to the epidemic. The danger of infection kept almost everyone from visiting the miserable households of the sick. My grandfather, Rabbi Moshe David Beider, loved Trochenbrod’s children. He brought treats to them in the stricken households, played with them, and read to them with an air of normalcy that gave them hope.
Trochenbrod’s street was a broad, straight, dirt path running north and south, nearly two miles long. It was lined on both sides with houses, shops, workshops, and synagogues. Behind each house the family’s farm fields stretched back about half a mile to forests on the east and west sides. On wet fall evenings like the one when my grandfather died, Trochenbrod smelled of mud and manure and hay and leather, of potatoes cooking and smoke from woodstoves and pine from the forest. When Rabbi Beider collapsed, an early light snow had begun to fall, a snow that dusted the houses and the people trudging home, and reflected their outlines in the dim light of candle lanterns hanging from trees that lined the street. It was dusk. Except for the sound of a mother calling her child to dinner and the faint murmurs of evening prayer in the synagogues, Trochenbrod was quiet.
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What happened at the very beginning? How did this unusual little town of Trochenbrod get its start? There are no founders’ documents, no formal records, no photographs. Even the hand-written running historical account said to have been maintained by successive Trochenbrod rabbis was lost in a synagogue fire between the wars. There is no way one can be absolutely certain about anything. Although interviews I conducted with native Trochenbroders and the memoirs of others that had passed away yielded stories handed down about the first settlers, the stories were far from consistent. I found, though, that I could stand those stories against the facts of Russian history, Eastern European history, tales still circulating among villagers in the Trochenbrod area, even against the lay of Trochenbrod’s land today, and piece together the truth, or as close to the truth as we can come.
In the late 1700s, corruption within Poland1 and a succession of land and power grabs by neighboring countries led to three partitions of Polish territory. In the last of these partitions, in 1795, the Kingdom of Prussia, the Austrian Empire, and the Russian Empire fully divided Poland’s territory among themselves, and Poland ceased to exist as a sovereign nation. Russia took Poland’s lands east of the Bug River, and these lands, with their sizeable Jewish population, became part of Russia’s Jewish Pale of Settlement. With some exceptions, Jews in Russia were allowed to live only in the Pale of Settlement, which had been established a few years earlier by Czarina Catherine the Great. The Czarina’s thinking was that by restricting Jews to a defined area, Czarist governments could work their will on them more effectively, and could prevent the Jews from infiltrating Russian society and perhaps even coming to dominate the budding Russian middle class. The Pale stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and was home to between five and six million Jews.
In the early 1800s, Czars Alexander I and Nicholas I issued a series of decrees defining and then redefining and then redefining again the place and obligations of Jews in the Russian economy and society. They forced rural Jews, already constrained to the Pale of Settlement, to move from the villages and small towns where they lived to the larger towns and cities of the Pale. There government functionaries could more easily monitor, control, tax, and conscript them. Jews could not own land, and rural Jews were merchants, tradesmen, and craftsmen, not farmers.2 They arrived in the cities largely without resources, and many became destitute because they could not practice their rural trades there. The decrees also denied Jews basic civil rights like equality in the court system and education, and imposed heavy taxes on them. But the decrees exempted from their oppressive measures Jewish families that undertook farming on unused land. Not too many Jews were likely to take advantage of this half-hearted effort to put more land under cultivation, since Jews knew nothing about farming, and chances were that unused land was the land least suitable for farming. Yet the decrees made Jews want to stay as far away from the Czarist government as possible, and rural areas were the best place to do that.
Trochenbrod-Lutsk Area
The historic province of Volyn3 is today the northwest corner of Ukraine. When Volyn became part of the Russian Pale of Settlement after the 1795 partition, it already had a rich Jewish history going back more than eight hundred years. To evade the anti-Semitic provisions of the new decrees, in 1810, or perhaps a bit earlier, a few Jewish families from the Volyn cities of Lutsk, Rovno, and the much smaller Kolki quietly began homesteading in an isolated spot within the triangle formed by those three cities. They settled in a marshy clearing surrounded by dense pine forests. The land was the property of a local landholder named Trochim, who was no doubt happy to let the Jewish settlers try to extract value from the otherwise useless property. A creek tumbled out of the forest and ran through the clearing before disappearing into the woods again. There was a shallow spot where travelers on a trail connecting villages in the area would ford the creek. The place was known as Trochim Ford. The word for ford in Russian is brod. To the Yiddish-speaking settlers, Trochim Brod eventually became Trochenbrod. The first baby was born in Trochenbrod in 1813.
It was extremely hard for the first settlers. Imagine the fathers and sons who went there to prepare the place enough so they could bring their families. They drove their horse-drawn wagons to Trochim Ford wearing their city clothing, unloaded their tools and belongings, gathered wood, lit a fire, and slept under the stars the first night. Wild animals roamed the area, and the Trochim Ford clearing was heavily infested with snakes. Those first settlers must have been terrified by the howls and grunts and slithering noises they heard all night long, even as they were filled with happiness that maybe, just maybe, they really would escape the day-to-day hardships and indignities imposed by the Czarist authorities. The next morning, after morning prayers and something to eat, they must have taken a good look around and wondered, can we really do this? They were city Jews who had been shopkeepers, petty traders, and artisans; they knew nothing about farming. But they pushed on, clearing brush and cutting trees from the forest to make primitive shelters for themselves, and later constructing simple houses for their families. Villagers passing by on the trails gave them farming tips, but they learned how to farm mainly through hard work, privation, and trial and error.
Jewish settlement at Trochenbrod expanded slowly, until in 1827 Nicholas I issued a decree that forced conscription of Jewish boys into the Russian army until age forty-five. The Czarist government saw this as a practical and compassionate way of eliminating the Jewish problem, because obviously after twenty or thirty years in the army isolated from his relatives, the forty-five-year-old man would no longer be Jewish. This decree provided an exemption for Jewish families that settled as farmers and worked unused land. The result in Trochenbrod was a surge of newcomers and, as was finally made possible by Volyn administrative regulations, outright purchase of the land by the settlers.
The land at Trochim Ford had not been settled before because it was almost completely unfit to farm: it was a marshy depression in the forest far from any main roads. It was a clearing amid forest lands because trees could not grow in the low, wet soil there. Although trails crossed the clearing, they led to villages that were miles away through woods and other marshy areas. The isolation of the spot meant that a trip to any market would be long and arduous and dangerous. Farming did not suggest itself as a promising way to make a living in this place. But this was a place that was far away from the Czar and his government operatives, a place where Jews were likely to be left alone. It was a perfect place for Jewish settlement.
Even city Jews knew they could not farm on marshy land, so they dug long drainage ditches that stretched behind their houses along the sides of each family’s farm field to the edge of the forest. This was backbreaking work, work that made it possible for the new Trochenbrod families to grow crops, and work that those families could not know would offer a path to life in a distant future then unimaginable. All the while, the settlers observed Jewish law and custom strictly, just as they had in the cities they came from. Slowly the years passed and the settlers began to get the hang of it. These Trochenbroders, among only the handful of Jewish farmers in the world at that time, became known in the surrounding villages for their farming skills.
Even so, the soil was poor and the settlers found it impossible to survive only from crops grown in Trochenbrod. Many of them turned to livestock to supplement their crops, and from that, in time, they developed a thriving trade in leather and leather goods and in dairy products. To give themselves more of a livelihood they also drew on their urban experience and set up small shops and provided skilled trades like carpentry and glazing to Ukrainian and Polish villages in the region. These other villages had remained virtually unchanged farming villages for hundreds of years; Trochenbrod, adapting to its circumstances, set itself on a different course.
In 1835, eight years after his conscription decree, Czar Nicholas I issued a new “Law of the Jews.” This one required all rural Jews to be in agricultural “colonies,” farming villages recognized by the government, and also required them to have passports and permits to travel from these colonies. The idea was to prevent Jews from setting up as farmers to avoid the conscription and other anti-Semitic laws and then quietly moving back to towns and cities. Trochenbrod was forced to come out of hiding, to become an official colony.
In the mid-1820s, a group of twenty-one Mennonite families left their village of Sofiyovka, seventy miles northeast of Trochenbrod, on the Horyn River. They were moving on because after working hard for over fifteen years, they decided that their agricultural efforts yielded too little in that marshy area. They contracted to settle on land owned by Count Michael Bikovski in a sparsely populated area about twenty miles northeast of Lutsk, and established two small new settlements there. One of the new Mennonite settlements, Yosefin, was set up three miles west of Trochenbrod. The other was just south of Trochenbrod, and was named Sofiyovka, after the village the Menno-nites had left. There is no record of the relations between Trochenbrod’s Jews and Sofiyovka’s Mennonites, but they must have been good because both groups were peaceful and quiet types who tended not to concern themselves with other people’s business. About ten years later these Mennonites abandoned their new small villages in order to join relatives in a larger Mennonite settlement in the southern “New Russia” region, where local officials were more welcoming to Mennonites.4 Yosefin was repopulated by ethnic German families. Families like these, which eventually came to be known as Volksdeutsch, originally moved east looking for good Ukrainian farm land, and became one more ethnic group that lived for generations in Volyn and neighboring areas.
About the time that Yosefin and Sofiyovka Mennonites were leaving their villages, Trochenbrod’s elders and the Russian government agreed that Trochenbrod would be designated an official colony so that the Trochenbroders could stay in their village. From now on it would even appear on maps, and official colonies needed Russian names. No one knows exactly how it came about, but Trochenbrod was given the name of the Mennonite settlement that had been immediately to its south, and probably incorporated its territory. From then on everyone, Jews and neighboring Gentiles alike, knew the village, and later the town, as both Trochenbrod and Sofiyovka.
I was in the area recently and, curious to see what local people knew of their pre-war history, asked a villager passing by on a horse-drawn farm wagon if he knew where Trochenbrod was. He tilted his head sideways and looked skyward, stroking his chin with his hand, and repeated the name a few times, struggling to place it. His wife, seated comfortably on the pile of hay behind the driver’s bench, began gently whipping him with a stalk of grass as if to prod his memory and muttered “The Jews, Sofiyovka.” “Ahh, yes, the Jews, Sofiyovka, Trochenbrod,” he shouted triumphantly, “Down that way,” and pointed in the right direction beyond the derelict barns and chicken coops of a defunct Soviet-era collective farm.
When Trochenbrod/Sofiyovka became an official colony it was not very big—like some other villages in the area, it probably had thirty to fifty families. But in the case of this strange little village, all of its people, numbering at least 250, were Jewish. By this time Trochenbrod had spawned a new small Jewish village nearby, a sister colony called Lozisht by the Jews, Ignatovka by others. The settlers in Trochenbrod and Lozisht were very close; many were relatives. People commonly thought of the two villages as one larger settlement, and many of their descendants think of them that way even today.
Other Jewish farming colonies were established, especially in the mid 1800s and especially in “New Russia,” today southern Ukraine. These villages were established for the same reasons that Trochenbrod had been established, but they occupied land that was better for agriculture than Trochenbrod’s land. Many of them eventually disappeared because their people could not survive from farming, or tired of it, or returned to towns and cities when eventually the edicts that had motivated their families to become farmers no longer applied.5 Trochenbrod alone continued to grow and prosper and diversify as a Jewish town and regional commercial center.6
Trochenbrod houses were typical of the agrarian Ukrainian style: rectangular, dirt floors, wood-framed stucco walls that were whitewashed, thatched roofs that sloped toward the long sides of the houses, and often window frames with carved wood patterns that stood out quaintly against the stucco walls. The front third of many houses, the part facing the street, was the all-purpose room for sitting and special meals. If the family had a workshop or a business, the space might be adapted to accommodate that activity. A front door opened into that room. In the middle section of the house were two bedrooms: a narrow corridor ran alongside them connecting the front room with the kitchen room at the back of the house. On the side of the house, toward the back, was a second door that opened into the kitchen room—this is where people ate most of the time, much as people do everywhere today. The kitchen room had a wood-burning oven and stove that also distributed heat through clay ducts to other rooms of the house. The kitchen typically had a trap door that led to a root cellar, which was used to preserve vegetables for winter meals and also helped preserve dairy foods in summer. Behind the kitchen room, in the backmost part of the house, was a walled-off section that sheltered the animals and opened onto the family’s farmland. Above, for all or a part of the length of the house, was an attic, most often used for storing hay. Each house also had an outhouse and a shed in back. This basic homestead model continued to serve many Trochenbrod families, especially the poorer ones, well into the twentieth century.
The single street that ran the length of Trochenbrod was little more than a broad muddy path. To drain the street as much as possible, the townspeople dug drainage ditches along its sides and laid planks across the ditches to make bridges to their homes. The early settlers soon began planting willow trees along the street, probably because willows help protect against erosion, but also to add life and color and shade in the summer. For the generations that followed, and for the sons and daughters of the town who later emigrated abroad, those trees lining the street were a prominent part of the image of Trochenbrod they held in their minds. To this day the site of Trochenbrod’s street remains marked by a double row of willow trees and bushes.
The Jews of Trochenbrod were Hasidic Jews.7 In an 1850 decree the Czarist government outlawed Hasidic dress. The decree was resisted in Trochenbrod but nevertheless had an impact, and Hasidic dress and the practice of Hasidism itself slowly waned over the decades that followed. Yet the town always remained religiously observant. Even toward the end of the ninety years left to Trochenbrod at this point, when some young people became openly nonbelievers, everyone went to synagogue on Sabbath and observed all the religious holidays. It was required by the heads of families: no family would be shamed by having a son out and about when all the men in the town were at prayer in the synagogues.
At the same time that America’s Civil War was ending in 1865, Czar Alexander II promulgated a law allowing Jews to change their status from “farm-villager” to “town-dweller” without giving up their land. This time the idea was to allow Jews to keep their farms and return to cities and towns from which they could move about freely and avoid the permit system for ensuring they lived in their villages. But they had to pay a price: in the towns they would be subject to conscription laws. The conscription laws were no longer universal: now a quota of conscripts was set for each community. Those who were conscripted were still required to serve until age forty-five. The Jews of Trochenbrod figured that if they could convince the government to change Sofiyovka’s status from a colony to a small town they could stay in place while avoiding the hated passport and permit system for traveling to and from the cities, where they had relatives to visit and business to conduct. By this time Trochenbrod had begun selling its dairy products in the cities of Lutsk, Rovno, and Kolki.
Trochenbrod’s elders petitioned the government and were granted town status, figuring they’d find other ways to avoid conscription. This they did by employing tactics that were widespread in the Pale of Settlement: falsifying or avoiding birth records, hiding their sons or having them flee the town when government agents came looking for conscripts, sending their sons to faraway cities for long periods of yeshiva study, and regularly changing family names, so that every son born would be recorded as a “first-born,” exempt from conscription.
Nevertheless, the conscription problem created a dangerous situation for rural Jews. When the obligation to supply a son to the army fell on a wealthy town family, they could hire professional kidnappers to snatch another Jewish boy to serve instead. Gangs of such kidnappers, chappers they were called, roamed urban and rural areas looking for suitable targets. Trochenbrod lost a number of young people this way. In his memoir published in Israel in the 1950s, Trochenbrod native David Shwartz recounts a childhood memory—it must have been at the turn of the century—of a letter arriving from a stranger saying that he was looking for a brother he had not seen in many years. The brother’s name was that of David’s grandfather. The mysterious letter-writer eventually visited. He looked very much like David’s grandfather, they had a tearful reunion, and he stayed with his brother in Trochenbrod for a few days. But he remained a stranger. They could not really connect; there was a gulf of life experience that could not be bridged even by brotherhood. The visitor had been kidnapped by chappers as a youngster. He said he was a general in the Russian army and had been baptized, but now he was thinking of fleeing Russia and returning to Judaism. Then he left Trochenbrod and was never heard from again.
By 1880 Trochenbrod was visibly being transformed into a bustling little town. Behind every house there was a kitchen garden and a small farm that supplied the family table and often also provided produce like potatoes and cabbage for market. Many Trochenbrod families also raised livestock for dairy, meat, and hides. Many hired Ukrainians from nearby villages to help with gardening and farming. But bit by bit, as the years went by, Trochenbrod’s economy came to be dominated more and more not by farming but by nonfarm enterprises—commerce, craftsmen, workshops, small factories like oil presses and flour mills, and non-agricultural professions like teaching, healing, and kosher slaughtering.
David Shwartz recalls in his memoir some of Trochenbrod’s people as he knew them near the end of the 1800s. At this point in Trochenbrod’s economic diversification the types of nonagricultural activities tended still to be relatively basic, though beginning to modernize.
[There was] long-bearded Motty, in summer a house-painter and in winter he worked in my father’s tannery; Shmuel Shimon the shoemaker, a very good man, who used to go from house to house to wake people up for prayers; Yosel the teacher; Abe who owned an oil press; Itzik the weaver; Shmerl the Shochet;8 Wolf, another shoemaker; Chaimke the bathhouse keeper; Moshe Motia the tailor; “long” Chuna the butcher; Chaim Yoel the carpenter; Wolf the scribe; Ziviz the midwife; Motke Zirelis the candlemaker; Berel from the feed-mill; Shmuel the healer; Benzion who had a tannery; Shmilike, who owned a tannery, a little synagogue, and a bathhouse; Yaakov Leib the cooper; Hirschke Katzke who kept a bar; Yankel the blacksmith; and Itzy with the nose.
There is a belief, or at least a suspicion among some surviving people born in Trochenbrod—including the only Gentile born there—that the famous humorist and author Sholom Aleichem secretly visited Trochenbrod, and from there drew the inspiration for the characters and shtetls he portrayed, including the well-known Tevye the Milkman stories and his tales placed in the village of Kasrilevka. One Trochenbrod native dismissed my skepticism about this with an irrefutable, “Sholom Aleichem so perfectly captured the spirit, the way of thinking, the life, the characters, the struggles, the devotion to God of our town, how could he not have seen it with his own eyes?” More than a few people born in Trochenbrod spoke to me of their home town as if it had been a typical Volyn village portrayed by Sholom Aleichem. But many of these now elderly Trochenbrod natives left the town when they were quite young; we can’t be certain where their image of Trochenbrod came from.
Certainly Sholom Aleichem captured widespread qualities of Jewish shtetls, especially in the late 1800s in the Kiev and Volyn regions of the Pale of Settlement. Shtetl is the diminutive for the Yiddish shtot, which means “town.” A shtetl was a relatively insular Jewish community in an exclusively Jewish section of an Eastern European town—essentially a Jewish village within a Gentile town. The qualities of shtetl life have been reflected lovingly and with great warmth by many Jewish artists, and introduced widely to Western audiences since the mid 1960s through the musical production Fiddler on the Roof. The central themes in shtetl life and culture were home and family life; the synagogue, Sabbath, and Jewish traditions; patching together a livelihood from urban commerce and trades; and protecting all that from outside influence, from physical attack, and from oppression by the Czarist regime. These themes certainly were central to life and culture in Trochenbrod. The circumstances that made Trochenbrod different from all the Kasrilevkas and Anatevkas were that it was a free-standing Jewish town, not part of a larger town that included Gentiles; it was relatively isolated; and most of its townspeople, whatever else they did, were also farmers.
An 1889 census recorded 235 families in Sofiyovka. At that time European Russia was rapidly industrializing. The government was building a branch of the Warsaw-to-Kiev railroad between Kovel, a transportation hub fifty miles northwest of Trochenbrod, and Rovno, a relatively large city and major trading center thirty-five miles southeast of Trochenbrod. The most direct route would bring the railroad tracks along the southern edge of Trochenbrod, and the plans were drawn up that way. Trochenbrod elders didn’t like that idea: they worried about the noise, the hulking encroachment of the government and the outside world on their quiet and uniquely Jewish way of life, and the danger to their wandering livestock. Using the argument about danger to their livestock, the elders successfully petitioned Russian officials to place the railroad tracks on the other side of the forest to the south of town—and by doing that, assured Trochenbrod’s relative isolation for its remaining fifty years.
To this day a glance at the map shows the Kovel-Rovno railroad line bearing southward unnaturally from Kovel to Kivertzy station northeast of Lutsk; then continuing on its southeast path until it meets up with the Lutsk-Rovno highway about eight forested miles south of where Trochenbrod used to be. From there the tracks follow a path east and then southeast to Rovno and beyond. Kivertzy station was twelve miles from Trochenbrod by unpaved road. Though it took half a day to get there by horse-drawn wagon, it made Warsaw, Kiev, and the world accessible to Trochenbrod. The railroad figured heavily in partisan activities in World War II, since the Nazis made Rovno the administrative center for their Reichskommissariat Ukraine, and, as we’ll see later, the forest provided good cover for partisan demolition squads.
According to census data, by the end of the century the combined population of Trochenbrod and Lozisht was over sixteen hundred Jews. The town’s population was growing steadily because it was enjoying a relative economic boom. As Trochenbrod passed into the early twentieth century it boasted flour mills, oil presses, long-distance cattle traders, an extensive leather and leather-goods sector, dairies and a flourishing dairy-goods sector, a glass factory that took advantage of the sandy soil and nearby forests, and close commercial relations with markets in the three cities and a number of towns in the region.
Trochenbrod began to have more regular contact with the outside world than before, and its people were becoming more aware of the major military, diplomatic, and political happenings in Europe, and even, to a degree, in the United States. Many Trochenbrod boys and young men studied at yeshivas as far away as Lublin, Lodz, and Mezerich in modern-day Poland, and Vilna in modern-day Lithuania. To deal with administrative issues, like placement of the railroad tracks, Sofiyovka emissaries traveled as far away as Moscow. Trade interests took some Trochenbrod businessmen to cities hundreds of miles away, to Warsaw, Kiev, and beyond. Jewish newspapers from Warsaw and other Polish cities, carrying news of both the Jewish world and the larger world, now reached Trochenbrod. Emigration from Trochenbrod to the West, especially to the United States, was fairly brisk in the late 1800s and the early 1900s, and the immigrants sent letters home to Trochenbrod about life and events in their new countries.
And so, despite its relative isolation, as the new century began Trochenbrod was entering the modern world step by step. And yet this unique little town called Trochenbrod remained essentially what it always had been: most young men were sent to yeshivas to study Torah; the whole town celebrated weddings; farming activity was central to community life; being a rabbi and a scholar was the highest and most respected achievement; and when a famous rabbi visited from a big city, the whole town went out to greet him, families would compete to have him as their guest, and his visit was celebrated night after night during his stay. And on the Sabbath, Trochenbrod’s Jews did no work, lit no fires, bore no burdens. Despite the relentlessly encroaching world, in the whole town of Trochenbrod, Saturday, the Sabbath, remained a day only for peace, rest, and prayer. In Trochenbrod, as was typical of shtetls, everyone lived for the Sabbath. In all the personal accounts that have come into my hands, Sabbath holds a special place in Trochenbrod memories. For example, David Shwartz reminisces in his memoir about Sabbath in Trochenbrod in the early twentieth century with obvious wistfulness:
Each family had a mill in which the wheat was ground into flour. From the barley they prepared tasty cereals. Each family possessed a wooden mortar, made from the stump of a tree and burning a hole in the root. To use in this they made a pestle for crushing. The barley was put into the hot oven after the bread had been taken out. Inside the oven the barley dried and after that it was put into the mortar and crushed with the pestle. This work was always kept for Thursday so that they would have enough crushed barley for the Sabbath meal.
On Friday everyone finished work early and after lunch everyone, young and old, would dash to the ritual bathhouse to take a bath, would then get dressed in Sabbath array and would go to the synagogue. In summer it was a pleasure to hear the friendly greetings “Shalom aleichem”9 and the music of the voices of the fathers and children was carried from the synagogues the length of the street and would enter into every limb. After supper we would sit out on our front steps and breathe in the delightful scents of the grass, the blossoms and the pine trees of the Radziwill forest. We had no electric light but there was light in our hearts and our eyes sparkled and illuminated the darkness around. We used to sleep soundly and peacefully without fear of burglars or thieves.
On the Sabbath morning one would awaken to the sounds, coming through the open windows, of the chanting of psalms or the reciting of the weekly portion of the Torah. Neither did the women stand idle. They had to wait for the Gentile who came to milk the cows on the Sabbath and for the Gentile cowherd who took the cows out to pasture. After the early morning prayers we would drink the tasty chickory from a pot warming on the oven. The milk was well boiled with a thick skin on it. Only then would we put on our kapotehs10 and girdling cords and our prayer shawls with the tzitzis11 tucked into the cords and we would go to the synagogue in whole families, grandfather, father, sons and grandchildren; a whole regiment!
We came home gaily and in high spirits, made kiddush,12 washed (even the very small boys) and smacked our lips over the calves’ foot jelly and chulunt13 that only an angel could have baked so deliciously in the oven, and were served with potato pudding (“kugel”), and if there was a piece of stuffed intestine (“kishke”) in addition, then it was indeed a Sabbath meal of the first order. After eating the meat out of the chulunt and the tzimmes14 we said grace and went to bed.
We were no sooner up than the hot tea, which was taken out of the stove, was on the table. Then the whole family would go out for a walk around the fields and gardens to see and take pleasure in the way all was sprouting, growing, and blooming. Only a villager can realize what this means; a town dweller can never understand it. Many would stroll in the Radziwill forest. The children would pick the wild berries with their mouths for, on the Sabbath, it was forbidden to pick by hand because that was defined as work. After the walk the men would go to the synagogue for the afternoon prayers and would return home to “shalosh seudes,” “the third meal,” a good “borsht” whipped with cream, and again the singing of the zmires [Sabbath songs] would resound throughout the townlet. After evening prayers we made “havdala,” the ritual prayer differentiating between a holiday and a routine day. The women would then go off to the cow stalls to milk the cows and churn the butter, as it had to be ready for dispatch to Lutsk early on Sunday morning.
Everyone lived for the peaceful routine of the Sabbath, and the year was marked by the Jewish holidays. People gave the date of their birth as so many days or weeks before or after the nearest Jewish holiday. Shmilike Drossner, another pre–World War I immigrant to the United States, had this to say about Hanukah, the Jewish “Festival of Lights” holiday, in Trochenbrod:
To tell you how we lit our candles on Hanukah in Trochenbrod, I can tell you as follows, and you will think it is funny. We took ordinary potatoes, cut them in half and made a small hole in each half, and put a little oil and piece of cotton, and then we lit it. The rich probably had candles, but the average person did not have candles and used potatoes instead. The tradition with handing out Hanukah gelt15 and playing with dreidels16 was the same as in this country. Also the tradition of making all kinds of latkes,17 especially raw potato latkes which were very popular. It was really a treat, and a lot of work supplying the latkes as everyone had good appetites and were not on diets.
About Sukkot, or Sukkos, the Feast of Tabernacles, the Jewish fall harvest celebration for which families build a small temporary hut for eating outdoors during the seven-day holiday period, Shmilike explained:
Everybody had a sukkah [temporary hut], which they made with their own hands. But our grandfather, Yuda Meir, had one that was sort of stationary, and it was only necessary when Sukkos came to put the finishing touches on it. Most of the time we froze in there, as the cold weather started earlier in Trochenbrod than here. Some of the sukkahs were so frail (they were made from corn stalks) that some of the animals such as cows, etc., would push in the walls and cause damage. In spite of all this, we enjoyed the holiday.
Baking matzah, the unleavened flatbread eaten during Passover, was a complicated matter at that time, according to Shmilike:
I want to explain how matzahs were baked in Trochenbrod. The people in Trochenbrod rented a house [in the town] for four weeks before Passover. Then they started to clean it thoroughly to make sure it was kosher. Then each family bought flour enough for their family and they hired girls and women to do the work. One man took care of the oven, and when one family’s matzah supply was baked it was carried in a bag made of linen hung from a long post and was delivered that way. Then they started on someone else’s matzah, and so on, until they had baked enough for everybody. This isn’t as simple as it may seem. The water that was used in mixing the flour was brought in before it got dark, for the next day, and it was then put in a barrel. It was brought up from a well, one bucket at a time.
You didn’t ask about the Passover wine, but I will tell you anyway. Everybody made their own wine of raisins.
About the Passover horseradish and also potatoes, they were grown in our own backyard and we had enough to use all year and also to share with others that didn’t have any. They were of the finest quality, the best in our town.
Morris Wolfson came to America from Trochenbrod in 1912. His account offers another window into life in the town as it flowed on the currents of expansion of the late 1800s into the early 1900s.
Every day my father, Wolf Shuster, labored over the shoes he made, and once every two weeks he went the twelve miles to the regional market in Kivertzy, where he sold his shoes to Gentiles. My family owned a cow that gave us milk. The cow, chickens, ducks, and produce from the vegetable garden made us almost self-sufficient. Every house had a garden that stretched back to the woods.
The three hundred or more Jewish families of Trochenbrod (there were no Gentiles in our town) lived almost completely separate from the Christians. The train that stopped twelve miles from our town was our only way to reach faraway places. And this was a luxury few of us could afford. One of my earliest memories was my first time out of our town when I was about four years old. I was sick, and since of course we did not have a doctor in our town I was taken on a train ride to Kiev to see one there.
Every boy attended cheder [Jewish day school] from ages four through thirteen, in Trochenbrod. Starting in the early morning we sat and studied Jewish books all day on hard benches made from wood. We didn’t come home until after dark. We studied Hebrew, the Talmud, things like that. Our teacher wasn’t really a rabbi, but a melamed [learned teacher]. We didn’t learn modern Hebrew in the cheder; that was left to the rabbi. We only needed to know enough Hebrew to read the Torah and the Talmud.
Even though our studies and work and learning our father’s trade made us grow up quickly, we still had a childhood. Our toys were simple homemade toys. We used to play in the fields. We tried to catch birds. We would make a certain little trap and set it in the field to catch the birds. Of course we would get the birds with the idea of holding it and then letting it fly away.
In our town we spoke Yiddish. To the Gentiles we spoke Russian and Polish. Probably more Polish, because Trochenbrod was so close to the border, many villages in the area had Polish-speaking peasants. We used the languages of the Gentiles when we did business with them.
A wedding was a joyous event in Trochenbrod; everyone participated. I remember that marriages were arranged by the fathers without the children’s permission. Two fathers would meet in the field. “If I’m not mistaken,” one says, “you have a girl sixteen years old and my boy’s seventeen. I think they would be alright.” After deciding on a dowry which could be money or food and board at the bride’s parents’ house for a certain amount of time, the fathers shook hands and this way decided their children’s fate. At the wedding everyone danced, men with men and women with women. Meanwhile the nervous bride and groom sat at the ends of the long table and looked at each other wondering what would be. Despite what each one thought, the match was accepted. There were no Tzeitels, no refusals, and no Chavas, no intermarriages. Not in our town. [Tzeitel and Chava are two of the daughters in Fiddler on the Roof.]
Until I was ten years old, when they used to say the word Jerusalem, or Yerushalaim, I had no idea that it even existed in this world even though I went to cheder. I thought it was something on top of a mountain in heaven. The only outside thing that everyone knew about was America, the land of opportunity. We were aware only that things were good in America. Everybody wanted to get out and go there where everyone did alright. We thought that the sidewalks were made of gold. America was our goal and how to get there was our major problem.
In the early twentieth century, as the world moved inexorably toward World War I and Russia moved inexorably toward the Bolshevik Revolution, ideological currents coursing through Europe began to seep into Trochenbrod. Communist, Labor Zionist, Beitar (a right-leaning Zionist youth organization that stressed self-defense), General Zionists, and other secular movements sprouted in the town. Trochenbrod became somewhat more up-to-date, with a wide assortment of religious, cultural, and social organizations, and an ever-expanding array of businesses. By the time World War I erupted in 1914, many Trochenbroders were regularly visiting the nearby cities several times a year for trade, medical attention, government affairs, to buy things not available in Trochenbrod, to have their photographs taken, or to call on relatives. Trochenbroders knew about and argued about world events and Eastern European and Jewish affairs. The town continued to prosper and diversify in terms of the numbers and variety of economic activities. It increasingly became a commercial center for Ukrainian and Polish villages in the region, even as it managed to remain relatively isolated and deeply religious.
By this time, not only had Trochenbrod’s nonagricultural activities diversified quite a bit and prospered, its agriculture had also diversified. The main crop and staple of the Trochenbrod diet was potatoes, as it had always been. But now farmers also grew wheat, rye, oats, barley, and a variety of vegetables—cabbage, radishes, carrots, cucumbers, beans, corn, tomatoes, and beets. They raised cows for milk and other dairy products, and chickens, geese, and ducks for food, for cooking fat, and for feathers to make pillows and bedding. The nearby forests provided blueberries, red currants, and huckleberries, as they do still today. On the whole, because Trochenbrod families lived on the land, they always had plenty to eat, unlike Jews who lived in truly urban towns and cities, who often suffered from hunger. When they could work it out through a friend or relative, Jewish families that lived in the cities in the region sent their marriageable girls to Trochenbrod in the summer for fattening that would make them more desirable.
David Shwartz wrote,
In autumn the potatoes and beans were harvested. The potatoes were stored under the beds and the beans in the lofts. Potatoes for Pesach [Passover] and for seed were buried in a hole dug in the garden: on one side those for Pesach and on the other the seed potatoes for sowing. The potatoes which were sweetened by the frost were used for baking at Pesach. There was plenty of goose-grease (shmaltz), and from Purim18 onwards eggs were stored in preparation for Pesach. Every householder would fatten geese and turkeys from which he would get enough shmaltz for the whole year. In winter, meat was scarce and the main dishes were potatoes and beans. The families were large and they used to make dumplings, puddings, and pancakes, all from potatoes. The city Jews indeed called us the “Trochenbrod Potatoes.”
We had all kinds of small factories, workshops, and tanneries. There were shoemakers, tailors, teachers, carpenters, blacksmiths, locksmiths, painters, bricklayers, foresters, brickmakers, sawmills, wheelwrights, feed mills, oil presses, a glue factory, and a glass factory. The Jews made a good living. There were in addition all kinds of stores and shops: glaziers, wood dealers, butchers, cattle dealers, dealers who supplied geese and eggs and dairy products to Lutsk and Rovno and to places as far away as Prussia, and contractors who supplied horses, straw and meat to the army.
There were many Jews also who lived by their land alone and also all the above-mentioned tradespeople worked their own fields, either alone or with assistance, in addition to their professional work. Apart from corn and wheat the land produced all. We had to buy nothing apart from bread and meat. The very poor people who did not have enough money with which to buy bread and meat for the Sabbath, made do with potatoes and beans, and each for himself was happy and contented with his life. We lived an organized and wholly Jewish life and we practiced Jewish rituals in accordance with Jewish law.
From the 1880s through the 1930s, except during World War I, Trochenbrod sent waves of immigrants to North and South America, and between the wars to Palestine as well. The earliest mention of an immigrant to the United States in Trochenbrod family histories is 1880. But as was the case throughout Eastern Europe, the largest wave from Trochenbrod was in the first decade or so of the twentieth century. There is a wealth of Trochenbrod family stories and memoirs describing the experiences of immigrants from Trochenbrod in the years leading up to World War I.
For many Trochenbroders, especially young men, there were lots of good reasons for emigrating from Trochenbrod at that time. Stories of unbelievable economic opportunity in America were trickling back to Trochenbrod, while physical expansion to accommodate the children of Trochenbrod families was not possible because the town was hemmed in by forests owned by wealthy Polish gentry who were profiting nicely from the timber. Though Trochenbrod’s relative isolation had shielded it from anti-Jewish hooliganism so far, reports of pogroms and anti-Semitic attacks across Russia suggested trouble ahead. Oppressive anti-Jewish regulations were in still effect throughout Russia, such as restrictions on education, employment, business pursuits, and movement; and while Trochenbrod suffered from these restrictions less than most Jewish communities, long-term economic and social prospects under the Czarist government were clearly grim for all Jews. Finally, Trochenbrod’s young men were threatened with conscription into the Czarist army during the Russo-Japanese war in 1904 and 1905, so at that time a great wave of them stole the borders and found their way overseas.
Trochenbrod immigrants went to the United States and settled in larger cities like New York; Boston; Baltimore; Cleveland; Pittsburgh; Detroit; Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; Columbus; and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In South America, some went to Argentina and some to Brazil, but also to Venezuela and Cuba. In Argentina, the German Jew Baron de Hirsch established a Jewish colony called Rivera not far from Buenos Aires, to which he sent many Russian Jews, including a number of Trochenbrod families, for a better life. Some Trochenbrod immigrants went first to places in South America, to where their travel was paid by sponsors or where they had relatives, and after a period moved to the United States.
In 1910, a rabbi born Moshe David Plesser, who after a child or two had changed his name to Moshe David Pearlmutter to help his sons evade conscription, accepted a position as the Berezner Rabbi in Trochenbrod. He came from the town of Verba, about forty-five miles south of Trochenbrod, where his father was a rabbi and scholar descended from a long line of rabbis well-known in the Volyn region. A follower of the Berezner Hasidic sect, Moshe David jumped at the chance to relocate to the town that was now known among Volyn Jews as a place where, incredibly, being a Jew meant being what everyone else was. The Berezner synagogue was located toward the southern end of Trochenbrod on the west side of the street, and Rabbi Moshe David Pearlmutter moved into the house next door with his wife Bella and their eight children. In 1912 Bella gave birth to their ninth and last child, a son they named YomTov—holiday, a day of happiness. In order to have this child, too, recorded as a first-born ineligible for conscription, Moshe David, my grandfather, again changed the family name, this time to Beider.
In an article written in 1945 in Palestine by an immigrant from Trochenbrod, Moshe David Beider is remembered as the Chief Rabbi of Trochenbrod, though there was no such formal title, highly regarded by the townspeople. He was “a great scholar and very educated in matters of the wider world,” and was an ardent Zionist. He was known as a very personable man who was attentive to the needs of the people of Trochenbrod and had a special affection for its children.
World War I brought devastation and hardship to Trochenbrod, as it did to much of Europe. As the front between the Habsburg Austrian troops and Russian troops shifted back and forth through the area around Trochenbrod there was intense fighting and widespread destruction. The glass factory and several other small factories were destroyed, livestock were confiscated, homes and shops were looted, and remittances stopped arriving from relatives who had emigrated abroad. The economy of Trochenbrod was decimated; the people were terrorized and brutalized.
In late 1915, Habsburg Austrian troops pushed out the Russians, under whom Cossacks had been allowed to ransack Trochenbrod, pillaging, raping, and murdering. When the Austrians occupied Trochenbrod they at first requisitioned all food to feed their troops, returning only scraps to the townspeople, and they imposed forced labor, requiring everyone to cook or wash or sew or make leather goods or tend horses or in some other way support the army, even on the Sabbath. During the nine months of Austrian occupation Rabbi Beider continued his teaching programs for the children in order to give them structure and routine and purpose as best he could. At the same time he cultivated a good relationship with the Austrian commandant, with whom he was able to converse in German and discuss world events. He convinced the commandant that productivity would increase if he allowed the people of Trochenbrod to observe the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, have a more reasonable workload at other times, and improve their nutrition. As a result of Rabbi Beider’s diplomacy and the relative civility of the Austrian troops, the Jews of Trochenbrod considered that they had been treated better under the “Germans” than the Russians. The memory of this later served them poorly during World War II.
As the war wound down and Trochenbrod began the long process of recovering and rebuilding, the town was left in the hands of the Russians. In 1917, the year of the Bolshevik Revolution, the typhus epidemic rippling through Eastern Europe struck Trochenbrod. After suffering years of hardship during the war, the people of Trochenbrod yielded easily to the disease and were strained to their limits to care for their ill family members. Terror and despair were in everyone’s eyes. Anguished parents looked on helplessly as rashes spread over their children’s skin, they began violently coughing and vomiting and crying out in agony, and finally coughed up blood and surrendered their exhausted bodies. Authorities boarded up the homes of families where typhus struck, believing that would help check the disease. Rabbi Moshe David Beider, too, was struck by the infection. On a damp fall night, as an early light snow fell and he was stumbling home from the house of an ailing family, my grandfather collapsed in the street and died.
1. More precisely, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
2. There were some rare exceptions, where Jews farmed land they had purchased in the name of a non-Jewish collaborator. Jews generally had not been farmers for nearly two thousand years. The explanations scholars give for this include government prohibitions on Jews owning land, government or local cultural occupational restrictions, the higher return to Jewish literacy investment that could be obtained from urban trades and professions than from farming, and conflict between Jewish religious practice and the demands of agriculture.
3. Also known as “Volhyn” and “Volhynia.”
4. Some of these Mennonite families immigrated to the United States in 1874.
5. The few remnants of Jewish farming colonies that still operated in this area after the Soviet Union was created were absorbed into Soviet collective farms and not heard from again. I found no record of any operating in what became eastern Poland between the wars.
6. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, in response to pogroms in the Pale of Settlement, the German-French philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch and his Jewish Colonization Association supported transportation of Jews from Russia to new Jewish agricultural settlements they established in Argentina, Canada, and elsewhere in North and South America (also in Palestine). On the whole, these settlements did not survive very long; most of the immigrants or their children moved to urban centers. In one case, however, a settlement named Rivera, in Argentina, does survive today—not as a Jewish town, but as a multi-ethnic town substantially smaller than Trochenbrod was.
7. Hasidic Judaism, or Hasidism, is a subset of Orthodox Judaism that originated in the mid-1700s in a town just southeast of Volyn province. Hasidism emphasized spirituality and joy as key elements of Judaism, in contrast with the typical emphasis at that time on religious scholarship. Different Hasidic sects organized around specific rabbinic leaders, called Rebbes. Hasidic men usually wore dark kaftans, white shirts, and dark fedoras or large round fur hats. Hasidism gradually became a worldwide subset of Orthodox Judaism, but by the early 1800s it was already the rule among Jews in Volyn and neighboring provinces.
8. Ritual slaughterer for kosher meat.
9. “Peace upon you,” a traditional Jewish greeting.
10. A kaftan worn for Sabbath and holiday services.
11. Tassels on the corners of prayer shawls.
12. A prayer sanctifying the Sabbath.
13. Slow-cooked stew, a Sabbath specialty.
14. Baked dish of mixed ingredients.
15. Coins given to children during the Hanukah holiday.
16. Spinning top used for Hanukah games.
17. Potato pancakes, a traditional Hanukah dish.
18. Festival of Lots, a happy holiday that falls about a month before Passover.