The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [52]
Also probably because of Sofiyovka Jews, we stayed alive, and I am alive today. Why? When the Russians took over in 1939 they wanted to send us to Siberia because they saw my mother as a Polish official. But the Jews of Sofiyovka said no, and they begged the Russians to let us stay. The Russians talked to the people in Sofiyovka, and then told my mother, “Everyone says that you are a good person and can be trusted, so we will not send you to Siberia, you can stay.”
And Trochenbrod’s Jews were good to her. For example, she couldn’t even get water. Every time she would go out to get water—we had to walk a little bit to bring water from a well—some Sofiyovka man would see her and stop her and say, “No, no, I’ll bring the water for you,” and they would go to the well, and fill up her bucket, and bring it back to our house. So they respected her and wanted to help her.
The children were learning at the cheder every day. All my friends were there in the cheder. I had no one to play with, so I’d go and listen under the window of the cheder, especially in the summer when the windows were open and I could hear what happened inside. They would learn in Hebrew by memorizing. Since I was standing there listening I would learn by memorizing also, even though I couldn’t read and didn’t know what it meant. I would just repeat the sounds over and over. One time the teacher called on one of the boys to say several lines. He began reciting the lines, and at one point he made a mistake. That made the teacher very angry, and in the usual way at this school the teacher gave him physical punishment and yelled at him, “Why do you say it wrong?” Sometimes the teacher would hit the pupil’s hand with a stick, and sometimes he would hold his mouth open and spit into it for saying a wrong answer. So the boy answered, “Ryszard told me.”
But it wasn’t true. I knew Yiddish as well as all my friends—I can still speak Yiddish today, especially after some vodka—and from listening at the cheder window I knew the Hebrew words better than some of my friends. Sometimes as I was walking in the street, people said, “Look, this is the one who helps the Jewish boys in the cheder,” because I really did whisper the answers sometimes to help my friends—but always the correct answer. I still remember Hebrew words. Listen: Baruch atoh adoinoi eiloiheinu melech haoilom …1
I remember two oil factories in Sofiyovka, oil presses. One was right after Ellie Potash’s house, the other was owned by the Szames family. They were face to face on opposite sides of the street. They had very complicated machinery; it would be in a museum today. Ellie Potash had another house, which was his workshop, next to the post office where we lived. The Jewish school, the cheder, was across the street from us, and down a little bit. There was a synagogue a few houses further down, with a very strange rabbi—he was very loud; when he prayed you could hear him everywhere in Trochenbrod.
You know Tevye the dairyman, from Sholom Aleichem’s stories? In the introduction to one of his books there is some information that Sholom Aleichem was a tutor of Jewish studies for the daughter of a very wealthy Jew from Sofiyovka who had a lot of land. Sholom Aleichem later married this girl, and the property came into his hands. But he divided it into smaller parts, and finally sold off everything. I always wondered if it’s the same Sofiyovka.
I think Sholom Aleichem was in Trochenbrod because behind the house that was the post office where I lived, there was a large field that belonged to one family, that later was divided into small sections. One row of sections belonged to Potash people: Potash, Potash, Potash, one after the other. Another row belonged to Szames people, who were related to Potash: Szames, Szames, Szames, one after the other. So maybe that was the big Sholom Aleichem field divided