The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [62]
We had lots of cousins. A cousin wasn’t a cousin, like here; a cousin was a sister or a brother—there was no difference. We lived together, we slept often together, and played together, and went to school together. We didn’t know the difference between sisters or brothers or cousins.
At least twice a month, every other Friday, I would go with a girlfriend of mine, and we’d both carry a basket. We’d go house to house, we’d collect baked goods and pastries and candy or whatever one could give, and we’d take it to the poor people. I started doing that when I was a very little girl; a lot of children did that in our shtetl. Of course I’d always steal from the things that we gave from our house, because when we started we had a lot from our house already.
In Trochenbrod there were no cars. There were a lot of merchants who had horses, and they would go to markets—there were a number of markets in different towns in the area—and they would sell cattle or buy cattle, or sell fruit and vegetables or buy fruit and vegetables; they were traders. That was a big big thing, going to market, for quite a few people in our town.
Everyone worked the land. They had big gardens, acres and acres. So besides providing food for their families, they had a lot to sell in the market, and make money this way. And also a lot of people had cows, and the milk would be picked up to make butter and cheese and so forth; so they made some of their living from that. We had a goat, and I had chickens, and I even had a horse at one time that I loved to ride, no saddle of course.
When I was little there was no electricity in our shtetl and there were no paved roads. And then, toward the end of the 1930s, they were paving the road, we had some electricity, and the town was beginning to develop more and more and more. Communication began to happen. Everybody read the Forward and talked politics. My father bought a radio. The first radio in Trochenbrod! That was so exciting; everybody came to see how it was being installed. There were big wires strung above and then going into the ground; I remember men working on it. We also had a phonograph, a wind-up phonograph.
I remember hearing Polish music on the radio. And then the President of Poland, Yuzef Pilsudski, was making a speech of some sort. I don’t remember what he said, of course, but I remember hearing people saying, “Ooh, Yuzef Pilsudski is going to speak, Yuzef Pilsudski is going to speak,” and that’s when I learned the name Yuzef Pilsudski.
My eighth birthday party, I think it was my only birthday party. My little friends came. One brought me a bobby pin for a present, and another brought me a ribbon, and another one some pretty colorful rubber bands. Can you imagine that today? Bobby pins and ribbons and rubber bands? But it was so exciting … I was more fond of that than if I would get today a thousand-dollar gift.
Once my father brought a rabbi—I don’t remember from what city he was—but he was a very famous rabbi, a scribe, and we put him up in our house for a few weeks. My father dedicated a Torah scroll to the shul [synagogue], and this scribe was there writing it. People would come and donate what they could and the scribe would write a sentence or a paragraph in their name. It meant a great deal to everyone. My father put me on top of the closet, an armoire they call them now, and I’d watch the people as they came into our house and make their donations. I watched the people coming and going, but I didn’t understand what it was all about. Then the rabbi—I can see him with his big round fur hat and long beard—explained it all to me. That was very special.
We knew about Easter and Christmas. You could go into the postmistress’s house, and they had a beautiful tree at Christmas time. They would come and buy things for the holidays—my father’s shop was right next door to the post office. There was one little play I was in at the Polish school where I played the part of an angel. I don’t remember what it was about, but it was Christmastime.
The postmistress