The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [0]
THE HEAVENS ARE EMPTY
Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod
AVROM BENDAVID-VAL
PEGASUS BOOKS
NEW YORK
ON THE WATER
by Yisrael Beider
My brothers have reached the far shore,
Landed on solid ground.
I alone remain on the water, mid way,
My ship heavily burdened.
I was late, thought I could hurry and reach the other side.
But then, night fell.
And who knows how long until day.
The ground where I stand is like the froth on the water.
I see a little star,
A sparkling from far away.
My brothers are sending greetings to me.
Their flame burns there on the other side.
This poem, originally in Yiddish, was found among newspaper clippings that Yonteleh Beider had saved. It was written by his brother and probably published around 1939 in Podlaiyisher Tzeitung (the Podlayisher Newspaper), in Mezerich, Poland, where he was living at the time. The Podlayisher Tzeitung published many Yiddish poems by Yisrael Beider.
This book is dedicated to my father, YomTov (Yonteleh) Beider from Trochenbrod. He went to Palestine in 1932, changed his name to Chagai Bendavid, immigrated to the United States in 1939, and died thirty years later in Washington, D.C. He mentioned Trochenbrod infrequently, yet his longing and affection for it were unmistakable. The memory of that affection impelled me to find a way to stand where that mysterious place was, to try to feel the soul of it, and inspired the years of research that led to this book.
Chagai Bendavid is the one holding the cigarette in this photo of a construction crew in Tel Aviv, in 1934.
CONTENTS
Preface Next Year in Trochenbrod
by Jonathan Safran Foer
Introduction The Back Story
Chapter One The First Hundred Years
Chapter Two Between the Wars
Chapter Three Dusk
Chapter Four Darkness
Epilogue The Story Continues
Witnesses Remember
Glossary of Hebrew and Yiddish Terms
Chronology
Sources
Acknowledgments
Preface
NEXT YEAR IN TROCHENBROD
If the Diaspora could be run backward, if Jewish history, itself, could be funneled and compressed into a single location—some place that captured the vibrancy and catastrophe, the yearning, invention and destruction—we might find ourselves in Trochenbrod. The more I’ve learned about the singular shtetl—and the great portion of my knowledge comes from the book in your hands—the more strongly I feel that it was the most special place ever to have existed.
In 2002, I contributed my novel, Everything is Illuminated, to the small and diverse library of books devoted to Trochenbrod. It is a highly fictionalized response to a trip I made, as a twenty-year-old student, in an effort to find the woman who saved my grandfather, Louis Safran, from the Nazis. The book was an experiential, rather than historical, record of Trochenbrod. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say it was a deeply personal expression of one young man’s experience in his destroyed ancestral homeland.
The Heavens are Empty is the definitive history of this definitive place. If this book feels more fantastical than my novel, or than any novel you’ve ever read, it is because of Trochenbrod’s ingenuity, the Holocaust’s ferocity, and Bendavid-Val’s heroic research and pitch-perfect storytelling. This rigorously journalistic book reads at times like science fiction, at times like magical realism, at times like a thriller, and always like a tragedy. You might find yourself crying most at the parts that aren’t sad.
Jews conclude the Passover seder—the recounting of the Exodus from Egypt, and perpetually relevant movement toward freedom—with the words, “Next year in Jerusalem.” It’s an odd statement, as most of us who live outside of Jerusalem could, if we wanted, be in Jerusalem this year. We are not there because we choose not to be.
But the statement does not refer to a Jerusalem that can be found on a map; it refers to an idea. Next year in a place of redemption, a place where the shards of creation are gathered together and we are more like the stories we