The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [30]
Despite being the only Jewish town in Europe, Trochenbrod was never widely known, even among Jews. But its unique character meant that neither was it quite as obscure as thousands of other Eastern European shtetls. More than a few Jews sought it out as a place to live and many more as a place to visit, a place where they could see and breathe the air of a Jewish town—and good country air, at that. The special quality of Jewish life in Trochenbrod may have contributed to creating a somewhat outsized share of relative notables in the Jewish world. Eliezer Burak, a Trochenbroder who moved to Palestine as a Jewish pioneer in the 1920s, wrote an article about his beloved Trochenbrod that was published in Hebrew in Tel Aviv in 1945. In it he recalls a handful of Trochenbrod’s “famous people” from just before and during the interwar period, especially those who helped spread Jewish culture.
Rabbi Yehezkel Potash, the permanent “Starusta” [government-appointed “Elder”] of the town in the days of the Czarist government. He was a scholarly and learned man, and served the people of Trochenbrod well with his honesty and intelligence.
Hirsch Kantor, a comedian who was master of his profession and very talented. At weddings and other gatherings he would bring joy to everyone with his rhymes and his cleverness.
Rabbi Moshe Hirsch Roitenberg, the scholar, ran a cheder in the town, and also served as a cantor, and he too had great talent as a comedian. His jokes were published in the newspapers Heint and Moment, which pleased him a great deal. Journalists would come all the way from Warsaw to interview him.
Two high-level Communists: Motel Shwartz who was a well-known Commissar in the Odessa fleet, and Yaakov Burak who was an admiral on a Russian warship and a university graduate. In the period of the Soviet purges Shwartz disappeared, and Burak drowned with his ship near Kronstadt in the war between the Bolsheviks and the Whites. These two had studied many years in the Slobodka yeshiva, and Motel Shwartz was even a certified rabbi.
Yisrael Beider, a son of the Rabbi Moshe David Beider, was a teacher in nearby Olyka, and after that moved to Mezerich near Brisk [Brest-Litovsk] and continued his literary work as a poet and essayist in both Hebrew and Yiddish.
Yitzhak Aronski, a young and talented journalist, a feature writer published widely in Polish Jewish newspapers. He helped establish “The Volyner Shtima,” which was published in Rovno, and founded a library in Trochenbrod as part of his personal mission to encourage widespread reading of newspapers and books.
Hitler goose-stepped onto the scene in Europe, became chancellor of Germany in 1933, and in 1934 signed the German-Polish nonaggression pact. Among other things, the pact essentially left no restrictions on Nazi propaganda in Poland. From 1934 until Hitler’s invasion of western Poland in 1939, Poland’s repression of Jews, along with anti-Jewish hooliganism and actual pogroms, echoed those in Germany with slightly less shrillness. Relatives abroad were urging Trochenbrod families to leave. But Trochenbrod had not been directly affected much by anti-Jewish hooliganism, apart from the occasional Sunday brawl, and was prospering and modernizing like never before. The few who did consider leaving were torn.
By the late 1930s, Trochenbrod had become the place to shop and do business in the region. Many elderly Ukrainians today remember visiting Trochenbrod as children with their parents, and being awestruck at everything that was available for sale there, at the nice houses (“like ours, but bigger, better, nicer, and with nice things in them”), and at the hustle and bustle in the street. The intense regional commercial activity in Trochenbrod meant that during the workday, parts of