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By Root 761 0

Empire, finally collapsed in 1918. But the Treaty of Versailles signed at the end of World War I did not concretely define the border between the reconstituted Poland and the newly constituted Soviet Union. Immediately, Poland and the Soviet Union took up arms over control of the borderlands area that included Trochenbrod. Again the front moved back and forth through the area. Again Trochenbrod was ravaged. When the Polish were the occupying force they expressed their loathing of Jews in the form of beatings, forced labor, looting, raping, and confiscation of food. When the Soviets were the occupying force they preferred to confiscate property from wealthier people, take over businesses, and hunt for imagined Polish spies. The fighting in this secondary war finally ended in 1920, and in 1921 the Treaty of Riga that divided the borderlands between Poland and Soviet Russia was signed. This is when Shaindeleh Gluz heard her name called in the center of Trochenbrod, and then made her way to the United States. Trochenbrod was now in Poland.

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For this period of Trochenbrod’s history there is a great deal of source material—though never enough, and some of it contradictory. I found good maps; hand-written Sofiyovka civic records; directories that included Trochenbrod survey information and descriptions; memoirs; and references to Trochenbrod, usually brief references, in several books. Sources like these made it possible for me to draw the physical, commercial, and human outlines of Trochenbrod in the interwar years, but not the content within those outlines. What did the street look like? How did the people dress? How did the ways Trochenbroders made their living affect community life? What were the relations like between rich and poor? How did the Jewishness of the place express itself? What did the kids do in the summer? In short, what was the feel of the interwar Trochenbrod, this “last” Trochenbrod? What was it like to live there?

I was lucky to fall under Trochenbrod’s spell at a time when a few dozen people who knew Trochenbrod firsthand were still alive. I talked with people born there from 1912 through 1932, and who left as late as 1942. I was able to hear a different perspective, how Trochenbrod and Trochenbroders appeared to Ukrainians and Poles living in other places in the area, from people who still live there and remember well their childhood visits to Trochenbrod. Personal recollections, as unreliable as any one of them might be, collectively made it possible to fill the outlines with the feel of Trochenbrod, with a sense of what was it like to live there. My father left Trochenbrod in 1932; I was capturing things he would have told me.

Trochenbroders usually went to Lutsk, about 20 miles and the better part of a day’s journey away, for studio photographs, or had photographs made by itinerant photographers who from time to time set up temporary studios in Trochenbrod. This explains why you can look through hundreds of photographs from Trochenbrod and see the faces of its people, most often stiff and posed, and nothing of the town’s physical appearance. By the 1930s box cameras and 35mm cameras were readily available, and at least some people who visited Trochenbrod, usually immigrants returning to visit their families, snapped outdoor photos. Some Trochenbroders had cameras also, but their photographs were lost in the Holocaust. The one Trochenbroder who was technologically attuned, who photographed outdoor scenes, and survived the Holocaust with her photographs and other personal belongings was the Polish Catholic postmistress of the town, Janina Lubinski. I met her son, Ryszard Lubinski, in the city of Radom, two hours south of Warsaw, and with happiness he gave me most of the photos of 1930s Trochenbrod that appear in this book. They add a layer of concreteness to Trochenbrod like nothing else can; they allowed me to see the town my father grew up in.

When my father marked his bar mitzvah in the early 1920s, the combined population of Trochenbrod and Lozisht was the same as it had been twenty years earlier,