The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod

by Avrom Bendavid-Val

  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 Troch
enbrod 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 loo
ked 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.