A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [87]
Wide, flat plains extended as far as the eye could see, here and there arching up in gentle hills, crisscrossed by rivers and pools, dappled with marshes and forests. In the city itself there were three or four "European" streets with a handful of official buildings in neoclassical style and an almost unbroken facade of two-story apartment buildings with wrought-iron balconies, where the middle class lived. A row of small shops occupied the ground floor of these merchants' homes. But most of the side roads were unpaved tracks; they were muddy in winter and dusty in summer. Here and there they were edged with rickety wooden walkways. No sooner had you turned into one of these side roads than you were surrounded by low, broad-shouldered Slavic houses, with thick walls and deep eaves, surrounded by allotments and innumerable ramshackle wooden huts, some of which had sunk up to their windows in the earth and had grass growing on their roofs.
In 1919 a Hebrew secondary school was opened in Rovno by Tar-buth, a Jewish educational organization, together with a primary school and several kindergartens. My mother and her sisters were educated in Tarbuth schools. Hebrew and Yiddish newspapers were published in Rovno in the 1920s and 1930s, ten or twelve Jewish political parties contended frantically with each other, and Hebrew clubs for literature, Judaism, science, and adult education flourished. The more anti-Semitism increased in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s, the stronger Zionism and Hebrew education grew, and at the same time (with no contradiction) the stronger became the pull of secularism and of non-Jewish culture.*
Every evening, at ten o'clock precisely, the night express pulled out of Rovno Station, bound for Zdolbunowo, Lvov, Lublin, and Warsaw. On Sundays and Christian holidays all the church bells rang out. The winters were dark and snowy, and in summer warm rain fell. The cinema in Rovno was owned by a German named Brandt. One of the pharmacists was a Czech by the name of Mahacek. The chief surgeon at the hospital was a Jew called Dr. Segal, whose rivals nicknamed him Mad Segal. A colleague of his at the hospital was the orthopedic surgeon Dr. Joseph Kopejka, who was a keen Revisionist Zionist. Moshe Rotenberg and Simcha-Hertz Majafit were the town's rabbis. Jews dealt in timber and grain, milled flour, worked in textiles and household goods, gold and silver work, hides, printing, clothing, grocery, haberdashery, trade, and banking. Some young Jews were driven by their social conscience to join the proletariat as print workers, apprentices, and day laborers. The Pisiuk family had a brewery. The Twischor family were well-known craftsmen. The Strauch family made soap. The Gendelberg family leased forests. The Steinberg family owned a match factory. In June 1941 the Germans captured Rovno from the Soviet Army, which had taken over the city two years earlier. In two days, November 7 and 8,1941, Germans and their collaborators murdered more than twenty-three thousand of the city's Jews. Five thousand of those who survived were murdered later, on July 13, 1942.
*Menahem Gelehrter, The Tarbuth Hebrew Gymnasium in Rovno (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem, 1973). The Tarbuth schools were Zionist and secular.
My mother sometimes talked to me nostalgically, in her quiet voice that lingered on the ends of the words, about the Rovno she had left behind. In six or seven sentences she could paint me a picture. I repeatedly put off going to Rovno, so that the pictures my mother