The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [6]
Trochenbrod’s street was a broad, straight, dirt path running north and south, nearly two miles long. It was lined on both sides with houses, shops, workshops, and synagogues. Behind each house the family’s farm fields stretched back about half a mile to forests on the east and west sides. On wet fall evenings like the one when my grandfather died, Trochenbrod smelled of mud and manure and hay and leather, of potatoes cooking and smoke from woodstoves and pine from the forest. When Rabbi Beider collapsed, an early light snow had begun to fall, a snow that dusted the houses and the people trudging home, and reflected their outlines in the dim light of candle lanterns hanging from trees that lined the street. It was dusk. Except for the sound of a mother calling her child to dinner and the faint murmurs of evening prayer in the synagogues, Trochenbrod was quiet.
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What happened at the very beginning? How did this unusual little town of Trochenbrod get its start? There are no founders’ documents, no formal records, no photographs. Even the hand-written running historical account said to have been maintained by successive Trochenbrod rabbis was lost in a synagogue fire between the wars. There is no way one can be absolutely certain about anything. Although interviews I conducted with native Trochenbroders and the memoirs of others that had passed away yielded stories handed down about the first settlers, the stories were far from consistent. I found, though, that I could stand those stories against the facts of Russian history, Eastern European history, tales still circulating among villagers in the Trochenbrod area, even against the lay of Trochenbrod’s land today, and piece together the truth, or as close to the truth as we can come.
In the late 1700s, corruption within Poland1 and a succession of land and power grabs by neighboring countries led to three partitions of Polish territory. In the last of these partitions, in 1795, the Kingdom of Prussia, the Austrian Empire, and the Russian Empire fully divided Poland’s territory among themselves, and Poland ceased to exist as a sovereign nation. Russia took Poland’s lands east of the Bug River, and these lands, with their sizeable Jewish population, became part of Russia’s Jewish Pale of Settlement. With some exceptions, Jews in Russia were allowed to live only in the Pale of Settlement, which had been established a few years earlier by Czarina Catherine the Great. The Czarina’s thinking was that by restricting Jews to a defined area, Czarist governments could work their will on them more effectively, and could prevent the Jews from infiltrating Russian society and perhaps even coming to dominate the budding Russian middle class. The Pale stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and was home to between five and six million Jews.
In the early 1800s, Czars Alexander I and Nicholas I issued a series of decrees defining and then redefining and then redefining again the place and obligations of Jews in the Russian economy and society. They forced rural Jews, already constrained to the Pale of Settlement, to move from the villages and small towns where they lived to the larger towns and cities of the Pale. There government functionaries could more easily monitor, control, tax, and conscript them. Jews could not own land, and rural Jews were merchants, tradesmen, and craftsmen, not farmers.2 They arrived in the cities largely without resources, and many became destitute because they could not practice their rural trades there. The decrees also denied Jews basic civil rights like equality in the court system and education, and imposed heavy taxes on them. But the decrees exempted from their oppressive measures Jewish families that undertook farming on unused