The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [4]
I was hooked. I had to know more. I had to know more about Trochenbrod. I had to know more about the villages in the area. I had to know more about the land here. I had to know more about the forests. I had to know what life was like in Trochenbrod. Over the next twelve years I returned again and again, usually helped by Alex, and also by Ivan Podziubanchuk, an inquisitive and enterprising farmer in Domashiv who became a good friend. On one trip I studied records in the State Archives in Lutsk; on another I walked the length of Trochenbrod’s street just to feel its reach and also to look in the ground for artifacts; on another I visited villages in the region and collected firsthand Ukrainian and Polish memories of Trochenbrod; on another I explored partisan history in the area. On one trip I sneaked onto a Ukrainian air force base, lubricating the way with bottles of bourbon I had brought with me from home, and was surprised to see jet fighters bunkered along the runway as we took off in a tiny canvas airplane I had hired because I had to see from above how the clearing that Trochenbrod had occupied was set among the surrounding forests.
I also collected documents related to Trochenbrod—books, memoirs, maps, college theses, government documents, and photographs. Ivan began uncovering Trochenbrod artifacts in his village and giving them to me on my visits. Eventually, realizing that the few remaining native Trochenbroders were now very old, I hurried around the United States, Brazil, Poland, Ukraine, and Israel videotaping people who had spent their early years in Trochenbrod and could describe what life there was like.
I began my research as a sort of family project, finding out about the particular Jewish shtetl1 that my father came from; I didn’t know that my father’s home town had historical significance. It wasn’t a village as I had first thought, but a town, a bustling free-standing commercial center of over 5,000 people that grew out of an isolated farming village set up by Jews in the early 1800s. It existed for about 130 years. Trochenbrod was unique in history as a full-fledged “official” town situated in the Gentile world but built, populated, and self-governed entirely by Jews, that thrived as a Jewish town until its destruction in World War II.
To be sure, Trochenbrod had those shtetl qualities captured with warmth and appreciation by Jewish artists the likes of Sholom Aleichem and Marc Chagall. But because Trochenbrod was relatively isolated, and because the people in Trochenbrod were farmers as well as shopkeepers and tradesmen, those shtetl qualities were undiluted, magnified, and connected with the outdoors and a farming way of life unknown in other shtetls. Trochenbrod’s isolation and total Jewishness gave Trochenbroders a feeling that they were largely in control of their own destiny as a town, away from the shifting laws of prevailing governments. It brought about a relaxed Jewish atmosphere where the Sabbath, Jewish holidays, and weddings were celebrated not just in the town but by the town; it opened space for Jewish entrepreneurial freedom and creativity to an uncommon degree; and it led to a powerful sense not only of family but of community, a community somewhat insulated from what was around it, where everyone knew everyone else and shared their lives, their moral values, their religious values, and their traditions. Trochenbrod’s story adds a new dimension to the history of Eastern Europe and Eastern European Jewish life.
When I finally decided to write a book,