The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [11]
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