The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [9]
I was in the area recently and, curious to see what local people knew of their pre-war history, asked a villager passing by on a horse-drawn farm wagon if he knew where Trochenbrod was. He tilted his head sideways and looked skyward, stroking his chin with his hand, and repeated the name a few times, struggling to place it. His wife, seated comfortably on the pile of hay behind the driver’s bench, began gently whipping him with a stalk of grass as if to prod his memory and muttered “The Jews, Sofiyovka.” “Ahh, yes, the Jews, Sofiyovka, Trochenbrod,” he shouted triumphantly, “Down that way,” and pointed in the right direction beyond the derelict barns and chicken coops of a defunct Soviet-era collective farm.
When Trochenbrod/Sofiyovka became an official colony it was not very big—like some other villages in the area, it probably had thirty to fifty families. But in the case of this strange little village, all of its people, numbering at least 250, were Jewish. By this time Trochenbrod had spawned a new small Jewish village nearby, a sister colony called Lozisht by the Jews, Ignatovka by others. The settlers in Trochenbrod and Lozisht were very close; many were relatives. People commonly thought of the two villages as one larger settlement, and many of their descendants think of them that way even today.
Other Jewish farming colonies were established, especially in the mid 1800s and especially in “New Russia,” today southern Ukraine. These villages were established for the same reasons that Trochenbrod had been established, but they occupied land that was better for agriculture than Trochenbrod’s land. Many of them eventually disappeared because their people could not survive from farming, or tired of it, or returned to towns and cities when eventually the edicts that had motivated their families to become farmers no longer applied.5 Trochenbrod alone continued to grow and prosper and diversify as a Jewish town and regional commercial center.6
Trochenbrod houses were typical of the agrarian Ukrainian style: rectangular, dirt floors, wood-framed stucco walls that were whitewashed, thatched roofs that sloped toward the long sides of the houses, and often window frames with carved wood patterns that stood out quaintly against the stucco walls. The front third of many houses, the part facing the street, was the all-purpose room for sitting and special meals. If the family had a workshop or a business, the space might be adapted to accommodate that activity. A front door opened into that room. In the middle section of the house were two bedrooms: a narrow corridor ran alongside them connecting the front room with the kitchen room at the back of the house. On the side of the house, toward the back, was a second door that opened into the kitchen room—this is where people ate most of the time, much as people do everywhere today. The kitchen room had a wood-burning oven and stove that also distributed heat through clay ducts to other rooms of the house. The kitchen typically had a trap door that led to a root cellar, which was used to preserve vegetables for winter meals and also helped preserve dairy foods in summer. Behind the kitchen room, in the backmost part of the house, was a walled-off section that sheltered the animals and opened onto the family’s farmland. Above, for all or a part of the length of the house, was an attic, most often used for storing hay. Each house also had an outhouse and a shed in back. This basic homestead model continued to serve many Trochenbrod families, especially the poorer ones, well into the twentieth century.
The single street that ran the length of Trochenbrod was little more than a broad muddy path. To drain the street as much as possible, the townspeople dug drainage ditches along its sides and laid planks across the ditches to make bridges to their homes. The early settlers soon began planting willow trees along the street, probably because willows help protect against erosion,