The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [8]
Even city Jews knew they could not farm on marshy land, so they dug long drainage ditches that stretched behind their houses along the sides of each family’s farm field to the edge of the forest. This was backbreaking work, work that made it possible for the new Trochenbrod families to grow crops, and work that those families could not know would offer a path to life in a distant future then unimaginable. All the while, the settlers observed Jewish law and custom strictly, just as they had in the cities they came from. Slowly the years passed and the settlers began to get the hang of it. These Trochenbroders, among only the handful of Jewish farmers in the world at that time, became known in the surrounding villages for their farming skills.
Even so, the soil was poor and the settlers found it impossible to survive only from crops grown in Trochenbrod. Many of them turned to livestock to supplement their crops, and from that, in time, they developed a thriving trade in leather and leather goods and in dairy products. To give themselves more of a livelihood they also drew on their urban experience and set up small shops and provided skilled trades like carpentry and glazing to Ukrainian and Polish villages in the region. These other villages had remained virtually unchanged farming villages for hundreds of years; Trochenbrod, adapting to its circumstances, set itself on a different course.
In 1835, eight years after his conscription decree, Czar Nicholas I issued a new “Law of the Jews.” This one required all rural Jews to be in agricultural “colonies,” farming villages recognized by the government, and also required them to have passports and permits to travel from these colonies. The idea was to prevent Jews from setting up as farmers to avoid the conscription and other anti-Semitic laws and then quietly moving back to towns and cities. Trochenbrod was forced to come out of hiding, to become an official colony.
In the mid-1820s, a group of twenty-one Mennonite families left their village of Sofiyovka, seventy miles northeast of Trochenbrod, on the Horyn River. They were moving on because after working hard for over fifteen years, they decided that their agricultural efforts yielded too little in that marshy area. They contracted to settle on land owned by Count Michael Bikovski in a sparsely populated area about twenty miles northeast of Lutsk, and established two small new settlements there. One of the new Mennonite settlements, Yosefin, was set up three miles west of Trochenbrod. The other was just south of Trochenbrod, and was named Sofiyovka, after the village the Menno-nites had left. There is no record of the relations between Trochenbrod’s Jews and Sofiyovka’s Mennonites, but they must have been good because both groups were peaceful and quiet types who tended not to concern themselves with other people’s business. About ten years later these Mennonites abandoned their new small villages in order to join relatives in a larger Mennonite settlement in the southern “New Russia” region, where local officials were more welcoming to Mennonites.4 Yosefin was repopulated by ethnic German families. Families like these, which eventually came to be known as Volksdeutsch, originally moved east looking for good Ukrainian farm land, and became one more ethnic group that lived for generations in Volyn and neighboring areas.
About the time that Yosefin and Sofiyovka Mennonites were leaving their villages, Trochenbrod’s elders and the Russian government agreed that Trochenbrod would be designated an official colony so that the Trochenbroders could stay in their village. From now on it would even appear on maps, and official colonies needed Russian names. No one knows exactly how it came about, but Trochenbrod was given the name of the Mennonite settlement that had been immediately to its south, and probably incorporated its territory. From then on everyone,