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By Root 781 0

about sixteen hundred people. Emigration, disease, and war privation had offset any natural growth. The first few years after the wars were a period of harsh life and recovery. In the early days of full Polish administration, local commandants imposed forced labor on the Jews of Trochenbrod—building roads, administration buildings, and warehouses in the region; supplying the Polish army with food, clothes, and leather goods; hauling construction materials and army supplies; building furnishings for government offices. That hardship was soon replaced with higher-level official discrimination. Government jobs were denied to Jews. Some trades that Jews had been prominent in, such as vodka and salt, were made state monopolies and turned over to Polish Catholic war veterans to operate. Systematic repression of Jews steadily increased throughout the interwar period. So did regular outbreaks of violence against Jews, and these were ignored if not encouraged by Polish officials. Despite this, and because people in the rural areas tended to get along better than in the cities—Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews each having their own social and economic niches—Trochenbrod’s economy again began to grow and diversify.

Although increased contact with the outside world and a measure of political awareness had come about in Trochenbrod to some extent during the end of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century, World War I and the Polish-Soviet war pushed the town on a faster path to modernity—technological, commercial, cultural, social, and political. During the wars Trochenbrod had rubbed up against Russian, Austrian, Polish, and Soviet troops. Some young men had fled to distant cities to avoid the troubles in Trochenbrod or to attend yeshiva, and they returned more worldly wise; some had been taken into the military and were exposed to a secular world and nonkosher food. This all laid the groundwork for a Trochenbrod that during the interwar period had growing ranks of secularists, political movements from the far left to the far right, and businessmen whose enterprises reached out to the larger world.

This is not to overstate the case. Trochenbrod remained surrounded by forests, far from any reliable transportation route for motorized vehicles, and completely and somewhat insularly Jewish. It continued to be a town, a complete town, governed by Jewish custom: always observing the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, always strictly kosher and following Jewish dictates, always filling up its synagogues, and always greeting visiting Jewish scholars with celebrations. For Jews who knew about the town and for most who lived there, this, together with its farming character, lent Trochenbrod an out-of-place and out-of-time almost magical quality.

As the 1920s gave way to the 1930s, Trochenbrod was thriving again. Its economy was increasingly becoming the center of trade, artisans, agroprocessing, and light manufacturing for a region stretching in a radius of more than ten miles. Much has been made, and rightly so, of the uniqueness of Trochenbrod’s Jewish farmers at that time. One of the most eloquent expressions of the wonder of this was written by the Israeli writer Jacob Banai in his 1978 book Anonymous Soldiers:

Sofiyovka is the name of a small Volyn town in which in the fall of 1938 the first Etzel1course took place, in which I participated. The Jews led their lives in Sofiyovka as if it was their kingdom. That is where I first encountered Jews who worked in agriculture. In Sofiyovka I saw Jews walking behind their plows; a Jew who takes his cows to the field, and when the time for prayer has arrived he stands in his field and prays as if he is standing in a synagogue.

That picture deeply ingrained itself in my memory, and it was the first taste I had of our vision of a Jew in his homeland. I also saw children there, not organized in any activities, but actually small children playing in the fields, dancing and singing Hebrew songs. What a magical place was this Sofiyovka!!!

Memories like this, perhaps reinforced by what lingered