The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod (4 page)

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
kapotehs
¹⁰
and girdling cords and our prayer shawls with the
tzitzis
¹¹
tucked into the cords and we would go to the synagogue in whole families, grandfather, father, sons and grandchildren; a whole regiment!