The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [5]
I’ve been deeply gratified and grateful to the many people from six countries who contributed material and gladly participated in taped interviews. They made it possible for me to walk Trochenbrod’s vanished street and see in my mind’s eye the hustle and bustle of people buying and selling and arguing and greeting each other, while children run and play, secure as if among family wherever they were in the town. I could hear solemn melodies from the synagogues and rousing songs from Zionist youth meetings, and the clatter of horse wagons and the calls of peddlers from the villages advertising the goods in their wagons that awaited their Trochenbrod customers. What a gift from all the people who wanted to help me bring Trochenbrod back to life, and what a gift across the decades from that lost town in Ukraine that was Trochenbrod.
The main text of this book comprises four chapters covering successive periods in Trochenbrod’s history. Readers who want a clear sense of the geographical relationships among places mentioned in the text may want to scan the maps located on pages x, xi, 5, 57, 77, and 83 before reading. Chapter 4 is followed by an epilogue describing what happened to Trochenbrod and its descendants to this day. Photographs and images of many key figures and locations in Trochenbrod’s history are featured in the central photo insert.
I draw heavily on firsthand accounts in the text, but some readers may enjoy reading still more such accounts, so I included them in a section at the end called “Witnesses Remember.” These accounts will add richness to a reader’s sense of what life was like in Trochenbrod and the surrounding villages.
I’ve italicized Yiddish or Hebrew terms in the text. If they are not translated in the text, then the first time they appear they are translated in footnotes. They also appear in the glossary, after the “Witnesses Remember” section, where some translated terms are accompanied by pronunciation help and fuller explanations.
Following the glossary is a chronology that provides the dates for milestones in the history of Trochenbrod and also some contemporary world events for context. After that is a section that lists all the print documents I consulted and tells how those documents came into my hands. It also lists the film, photographic, interview, and other sources that informed my presentation of Trochenbrod’s story. Last is the acknowledgments section, in which I list all the people who helped me carry out research and prepare the manuscript for this book, noting the particular help each person provided. The list is organized geographically.
Because of fluid territorial control and the presence of large numbers of Polish, German, Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish speakers in that part of the world, often called the “Borderlands,” any place name can have many variations. To keep things simple I’ve chosen one name to use in the text for each place, and stuck with it. Usually I use the name that was common in Trochenbrod during the interwar period.
1. The Jewish section of an East European town, which functioned almost like a separate Jewish village. Literally “townlet.”
Chapter One
THE FIRST HUNDRED YEARS
He lay crumpled in the street, dead, my grandfather. He had been among the determined few who brought comfort and food to families suffering in the epidemic. Soon enough he contracted the disease himself.
As World War I slowly began moving towards its conclusion, a typhus epidemic arrived in Trochenbrod. People had been weakened by years of hardship and suffering brought by the war, and now they were succumbing