The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod (9 page)

A “Talmud Torah,” a Jewish day school for boys that had a number of teachers and taught the classic Jewish religious texts, thrived in Trochenbrod in the mid-1930s, as did many smaller
cheders
. Most children went to Jewish school for a few hours each day after Polish public school. Families that could afford it also hired private teachers for additional Jewish or Hebrew instruction at home.

Trochenbroders who were youngsters in the 1930s reminisce about the Sabbath using the same words as those who experienced Sabbaths in Trochenbrod two or three generations earlier. It was a day for which everyone prepared by baking
chalah
[braided egg bread] and special
chulunt
dishes that would cook all day over a low fire; cleaning themselves and their houses; sending the children door to door collecting baked goods to give to the poor; and dressing in a manner appropriate for greeting and being in the company of “the Sabbath Queen,” an affectionate moniker for the special Sabbath day. There were always guests for the Sabbath, often merchants visiting Trochenbrod who could not get home before the start of the holy day, on which travel is forbidden. Everyone who was able happily brought someone home from Friday night prayers to share dinner and their home for the Sabbath.

The women generally left it to their husbands to intercede with God in the synagogue while they, together with their daughters, worked on the special Sabbath meal that was served to the family when the men and boys returned from prayer. Following an after-meal nap, families would go for a stroll, visit relatives, meet in a small park to gossip and talk politics, or perhaps let the children run to find wild blueberries in the Radziwill forest. Sabbath was a day of peace, rest, prayer, family, good eating, socializing, making excursions to the Radziwill forest, singing Sabbath songs and pausing to savor the goodness that God, hard work, and Trochenbrod provided.

Ryszard Lubinski, though he was a Polish Catholic, could not help also being caught up in Trochenbrod’s Sabbath:

There were
Shabbos goys
³
in Trochenbrod; I helped with that all the time, to light fires for heating and keeping the food warm. We helped our neighbors with that as friends, to keep the fire going. But there were hundreds of houses in Sofiyovka and Ignatovka, so people would come from the villages to tend the fires for the Jews, and made a little money from that. Most of the houses had the same organization: in the kitchen everybody had a stove and an oven to bake bread. I remember that for
Shabbos
, once everything was made, on Friday they would put it inside the bread oven so it would stay warm for the next day. I remember the smell of that very well.

While a bar mitzvah in Trochenbrod was cause for little more than a piece of sponge cake, some fruit, and a taste of schnapps for the men after prayers, weddings were a different matter altogether. Much of the town showed up for the outdoor ceremony. Children recited poems and sang songs, and one of the women baked a huge
challah
and danced while holding it before the bride and groom. It was a time to forget everything else and rejoice. The bride and groom performed their rituals under the wedding canopy—sips of wine, wedding ring, reading of the ritual wedding contract, seven blessings, more sips of wine, and smashing a glass underfoot. A wedding feast was rounded out with schnapps and vodka; a toast, another toast, and then another toast; merry singing and dancing, men with men, to the unbridled exuberance of a klezmer band. A klezmer trio was brought from Kolki for every wedding: Tzalik, who beat the symbols and drums; Chaim, whose fingers danced wildly on the clarinet; and Peshi, the fiddler with a big white beard. There was nothing like a Trochenbrod wedding—that’s how it seemed to Trochenbroders.

Under the Polish administration a regional public school was established in Trochenbrod—it was actually located in Shelisht, a hamlet between Trochenbrod and Lozisht that was really a part of Trochenbrod. In this school young Trochenbroders were exposed to Polish-language studies, mathematics, literature, and other secular subjects, and Jewish subjects as well. Ukrainian children from nearby villages also attended this school, and were playmates with their Trochenbrod classmates during the school day. Several Trochenbrod natives to this day have strong memories of participating in Polish-language plays at school, like
Little Red Riding Hood
, even while they rehearsed Yiddish plays in Trochenbrod’s cultural center or Hebrew plays in their Zionist groups.

Prince Janush Radziwill—of the same Polish Radziwill family that later in the century Jackie Kennedy’s younger sister, Caroline Lee Bouvier, married into—owned vast lands in the region of Trochenbrod. These lands included the forest that bordered fields on the east side of town. The Jews of Trochenbrod often grazed their cattle in the Radziwill forest, took Sabbath walks and picked berries there, from time to time would quietly cut down a tree or two for their own use, and in a manner of speaking considered it
their
forest. This drove a running cat-and-mouse game with Prince Radziwill’s forest rangers, but on the whole the people of Trochenbrod had cordial relations with the prince himself. Prince Radziwill’s palace was in the small town of Olyka, about twelve miles south of Trochenbrod. To this day there is a horse trail heading south from where Trochenbrod used to be that is known as the Olyka trail.

In the late 1920s, Prince Radziwill built a Catholic church at the edge of his forest, just east of the northern end of Trochenbrod, to serve about thirty Polish families that lived southeast of Trochenbrod. No one knows why he built the church exactly in that place, but the result was that on Sundays a large group of Poles walking to and from church passed through Trochenbrod’s muddy street in their go-to-church finery, almost as if promenading in Lutsk, with their priest at the head of the crowd.

Some natives of Trochenbrod recall that young men in these strolling church groups would, as they passed through town, strike at townspeople just to show who was boss. Tuvia Drori, who was born in Trochenbrod and fled to Palestine in 1939, declared, “Yes, they would hit Jews on their way to church; it was a
mitzvah
[good deed] for them!” But other people who spent their youths in Trochenbrod think the scuffles were incited by young Trochenbrod men who sometimes taunted the Poles on their way to church. Shmulik Potash (not related to Ellie and Basia-Ruchel), who also left for Palestine in 1939, remembers the processions as a good thing for Trochenbrod because while walking through town churchgoers often stopped into a Trochenbrod shop to buy something.

Basia-Ruchel Potash was first exposed to serious anti-Jewish behavior by the church processions.

It was on a Sunday, on the way back from church—they had to pass through our shtetl, the Gentile people—and on the way back from church a bunch of Polish men attacked a bunch of Jewish boys. My uncle was one who was attacked. He was pretty beaten up, black and blue, real real bad. Everyone started to run and close their doors and hide inside because they were afraid for their children and themselves getting beaten up. I saw that with my own eyes. I was screaming, I was hysterical, I was crying. I witnessed other things like that many many times. Mostly it would take place on Sundays, when they would go to or from church through our town. They would call out, “Dirty Jew,” or call us names, or hit us. We tried to stay out of their way. It wasn’t that bad yet. But through a child’s eyes, whatever I saw had an effect on me: I realized that I’m Jewish and I realized that they don’t like us. I realized that I had to be careful and stay out of their way.

Peshia Gotman remembers the church as the object of an adventure more than in connection with the processions:

I remember that church, and how! My mother gave me a good beating because I ran to be at the “otpus”—it’s when they have their services outside, it’s like a big picnic, it’s some kind of ceremony—I was maybe ten years old. I was with a whole bunch of kids. They usually had ice cream, and all kinds of toys; it was like a big picnic, the whole church was having a picnic outside. I got a big spanking for that, because I was not supposed to go to the church.

Perhaps Prince Radziwill had devious intent when he set things up so that Trochenbroders would be drawn to their windows and yards by weekly church processions and would have a relatively good view of the church and the goings-on in its yard. While there were many different perspectives on the subject, there’s no escaping the fact that in the 1930s, the Polish Catholic church and the weekly churchgoer processions were prominent in the life of the Jewish town of Trochenbrod.

By the mid-1930s, many Trochenbroders who had emigrated before World War I, particularly to the United States, managed, despite the Depression, to return to Trochenbrod to visit the town and their relatives. David Shwartz was one of those people. His memoir was inspired by a visit he paid to Trochenbrod with his wife in 1934. Basia-Ruchel Potash remembers with great clarity even today a visit by American relatives well over seventy-five years ago:

In 1933 an aunt and uncle of ours came to visit us. Of course we had a big open house, all of Trochenbrod was invited, and everybody came to the party to honor my aunt from America who had been sixteen or seventeen years old when she left for the United States. They were like big celebrities today. It was so much fun. I was asking her stories about America. I was so curious; I remember her telling us about black people in America, and I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. At the party we took a picture of everyone; and what do you think happened in the middle of taking a picture? The cow came and left some droppings. Everybody laughed; that was funny—in our backyard.

Those who visited reported mixed stories. Most remembered their Trochenbrod with fondness and a rich sense of community and Jewish life that was missing for them in America, and felt freshly the pangs of longing for that way of life when they visited. But they were Americans now, and many saw Trochenbrod’s relative prosperity through American eyes as unacceptable poverty, primitiveness, and removal from modern urban living. Visitors from abroad often brought with them envelopes of dollars, some for their own relatives and some for relatives of their Trochenbrod friends in the States. Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the United States were getting increasingly nervous about Hitler’s rise, and many of the visitors came to Trochenbrod with the aim of convincing relatives to leave. One family tells of their grandparents going back carrying extra suitcases for the Trochenbrod family members they had hoped they could persuade to leave.

Despite being the only Jewish town in Europe, Trochenbrod was never widely known, even among Jews. But its unique character meant that neither was it quite as obscure as thousands of other Eastern European
shtetls
. More than a few Jews sought it out as a place to live and many more as a place to visit, a place where they could see and breathe the air of a Jewish town—and good country air, at that. The special quality of Jewish life in Trochenbrod may have contributed to creating a somewhat outsized share of relative notables in the Jewish world. Eliezer Burak, a Trochenbroder who moved to Palestine as a Jewish pioneer in the 1920s, wrote an article about his beloved Trochenbrod that was published in Hebrew in Tel Aviv in 1945. In it he recalls a handful of Trochenbrod’s “famous people” from just before and during the interwar period, especially those who helped spread Jewish culture.

Rabbi Yehezkel Potash, the permanent “Starusta” [government-appointed “Elder”] of the town in the days of the Czarist government. He was a scholarly and learned man, and served the people of Trochenbrod well with his honesty and intelligence.

Hirsch Kantor, a comedian who was master of his profession and very talented. At weddings and other gatherings he would bring joy to everyone with his rhymes and his cleverness.

Rabbi Moshe Hirsch Roitenberg, the scholar, ran a cheder in the town, and also served as a cantor, and he too had great talent as a comedian. His jokes were published in the newspapers
Heint
and
Moment
, which pleased him a great deal. Journalists would come all the way from Warsaw to interview him.

Two high-level Communists: Motel Shwartz who was a well-known Commissar in the Odessa fleet, and Yaakov Burak who was an admiral on a Russian warship and a university graduate. In the period of the Soviet purges Shwartz disappeared, and Burak drowned with his ship near Kronstadt in the war between the Bolsheviks and the Whites. These two had studied many years in the Slobodka yeshiva, and Motel Shwartz was even a certified rabbi.

Yisrael Beider, a son of the Rabbi Moshe David Beider, was a teacher in nearby Olyka, and after that moved to Mezerich near Brisk [Brest-Litovsk] and continued his literary work as a poet and essayist in both Hebrew and Yiddish.

Yitzhak Aronski, a young and talented journalist, a feature writer published widely in Polish Jewish newspapers. He helped establish “The Volyner Shtima,” which was published in Rovno, and founded a library in Trochenbrod as part of his personal mission to encourage widespread reading of newspapers and books.

Hitler goose-stepped onto the scene in Europe, became chancellor of Germany in 1933, and in 1934 signed the German-Polish nonaggression pact. Among other things, the pact essentially left no restrictions on Nazi propaganda in Poland. From 1934 until Hitler’s invasion of western Poland in 1939, Poland’s repression of Jews, along with anti-Jewish hooliganism and actual pogroms, echoed those in Germany with slightly less shrillness. Relatives abroad were urging Trochenbrod families to leave. But Trochenbrod had not been directly affected much by anti-Jewish hooliganism, apart from the occasional Sunday brawl, and was prospering and modernizing like never before. The few who did consider leaving were torn.

By the late 1930s, Trochenbrod had become
the
place to shop and do business in the region. Many elderly Ukrainians today remember visiting Trochenbrod as children with their parents, and being awestruck at everything that was available for sale there, at the nice houses (“like ours, but bigger, better, nicer, and with nice things in them”), and at the hustle and bustle in the street. The intense regional commercial activity in Trochenbrod meant that during the workday, parts of the town were a Babel of Ukrainian, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, German, and sometimes Russian—and when relatives visited from the United States, English too. The commercial hubbub during the workday was such that one almost forgot that this was a Jewish town.