The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod

by Avrom Bendavid-Val

  I also collected documents related to Trochenbrod—books, memoirs, maps, college theses, government documents, and photographs. Ivan began uncovering Trochenbrod artifacts in his village and giving them to me on my visits. Eventually, realizing that the few remaining native Trochenbroders were now very old, I hurried around the United States, Brazil, Poland, Ukraine, and Israel videotaping people who had spent their early years in Trochenbrod and could describe what life there was like.

  I began my research as a sort of family project, finding out about the particular Jewish shtetl1 that my father came from; I didn’t know that my father’s home town had historical significance. It wasn’t a village as I had first thought, but a town, a bustling free-standing commercial center of over 5,000 people that grew out of an isolated farming village set up by Jews in the early 1800s. It existed for about 130 years. Trochenbrod was unique in history as a full-fledged “official” town situated in the Gentile world but built, populated, and self-governed entirely by Jews, that thrived as a Jewish town until its destruction in World War II.

  To be sure, Trochenbrod had those shtetl qualities captured with warmth and appreciation by Jewish artists the likes of Sholom Aleichem and Marc Chagall. But because Trochenbrod was relatively isolated, and because the people in Trochenbrod were farmers as well as shopkeepers and tradesmen, those shtetl qualities were undiluted, magnified, and connected with the outdoors and a farming way of life unknown in other shtetls. Trochenbrod’s isolation and total Jewishness gave Trochenbroders a feeling that they were largely in control of their own destiny as a town, away from the shifting laws of prevailing governments. It brought about a relaxed Jewish atmosphere where the Sabbath, Jewish holidays, and weddings were celebrated not just in the town but by the town; it opened space for Jewish entrepreneurial freedom and creativity to an uncommon degree; and it led to a powerful sense not only of family but of community, a community somewhat insulated from what was around it, where everyone knew everyone else and shared their lives, their moral values, their religious values, and their traditions. Trochenbrod’s story adds a new dimension to the history of Eastern Europe and Eastern European Jewish life.

  When I finally decided to write a book, and gathered together all my notes, taped interviews, historical documents, maps, books, artifacts, and other materials, I was surprised by an outpouring from many families who heard about my project and wanted to help preserve and promulgate Trochenbrod’s story. They offered me family photographs, some going back to the 1800s. They also offered artifacts for me to photograph, and informal memoirs in which forebears long gone described their lives in Trochenbrod.

  I’ve been deeply gratified and grateful to the many people from six countries who contributed material and gladly participated in taped interviews. They made it possible for me to walk Trochenbrod’s vanished street and see in my mind’s eye the hustle and bustle of people buying and selling and arguing and greeting each other, while children run and play, secure as if among family wherever they were in the town. I could hear solemn melodies from the synagogues and rousing songs from Zionist youth meetings, and the clatter of horse wagons and the calls of peddlers from the villages advertising the goods in their wagons that awaited their Trochenbrod customers. What a gift from all the people who wanted to help me bring Trochenbrod back to life, and what a gift across the decades from that lost town in Ukraine that was Trochenbrod.

  The main text of this book comprises four chapters covering successive periods in Trochenbrod’s history. Readers who want a clear sense of the geographical relationships among places mentioned in the text may want to scan the maps located on pages x, xi, 5, 57, 77, and 83 before reading. Chapter 4 is followed by an epilogue describing what happened to Trochenbrod and its descendants to this day. Photographs and images of many key figures and locations in Trochenbrod’s history are featured in the central photo insert.

  I draw heavily on firsthand accounts in the text, but some readers may enjoy reading still more such accounts, so I included them in a section at the end called “Witnesses Remember.” These accounts will add richness to a reader’s sense of what life was like in Trochenbrod and the surrounding villages.

  I’ve italicized Yiddish or Hebrew terms in the text. If they are not translated in the text, then the first time they appear they are translated in footnotes. They also appear in the glossary, after the “Witnesses Remember” section, where some translated terms are accompanied by pronunciation help and fuller explanations.

  Following the glossary is a chronology that provides the dates for milestones in the history of Trochenbrod and also some contemporary world events for context. After that is a section that lists all the print documents I consulted and tells how those documents came into my hands. It also lists the film, photographic, interview, and other sources that informed my presentation of Trochenbrod’s story. Last is the acknowledgments section, in which I list all the people who helped me carry out research and prepare the manuscript for this book, noting the particular help each person provided. The list is organized geographically.

  Because of fluid territorial control and the presence of large numbers of Polish, German, Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish speakers in that part of the world, often called the “Borderlands,” any place name can have many variations. To keep things simple I’ve chosen one name to use in the text for each place, and stuck with it. Usually I use the name that was common in Trochenbrod during the interwar period.

  1. The Jewish section of an East European town, which functioned almost like a separate Jewish village. Literally “townlet.”

  Chapter One

  THE FIRST HUNDRED YEARS

  He lay crumpled in the street, dead, my grandfather. He had been among the determined few who brought comfort and food to families suffering in the epidemic. Soon enough he contracted the disease himself.

  As World War I slowly began moving towards its conclusion, a typhus epidemic arrived in Trochenbrod. People had been weakened by years of hardship and suffering brought by the war, and now they were succumbing to the epidemic. The danger of infection kept almost everyone from visiting the miserable households of the sick. My grandfather, Rabbi Moshe David Beider, loved Trochenbrod’s children. He brought treats to them in the stricken households, played with them, and read to them with an air of normalcy that gave them hope.

  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.

  – –

  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 17
00s, 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 land. Not too many Jews were likely to take advantage of this half-hearted effort to put more land under cultivation, since Jews knew nothing about farming, and chances were that unused land was the land least suitable for farming. Yet the decrees made Jews want to stay as far away from the Czarist government as possible, and rural areas were the best place to do that.

  Trochenbrod-Lutsk Area

  The historic province of Volyn3 is today the northwest corner of Ukraine. When Volyn became part of the Russian Pale of Settlement after the 1795 partition, it already had a rich Jewish history going back more than eight hundred years. To evade the anti-Semitic provisions of the new decrees, in 1810, or perhaps a bit earlier, a few Jewish families from the Volyn cities of Lutsk, Rovno, and the much smaller Kolki quietly began homesteading in an isolated spot within the triangle formed by those three cities. They settled in a marshy clearing surrounded by dense pine forests. The land was the property of a local landholder named Trochim, who was no doubt happy to let the Jewish settlers try to extract value from the otherwise useless property. A creek tumbled out of the forest and ran through the clearing before disappearing into the woods again. There was a shallow spot where travelers on a trail connecting villages in the area would ford the creek. The place was known as Trochim Ford. The word for ford in Russian is brod. To the Yiddish-speaking settlers, Trochim Brod eventually became Trochenbrod. The first baby was born in Trochenbrod in 1813.

  It was extremely hard for the first settlers. Imagine the fathers and sons who went there to prepare the place enough so they could bring their families. They drove their horse-drawn wagons to Trochim Ford wearing their city clothing, unloaded their tools and belongings, gathered wood, lit a fire, and slept under the stars the first night. Wild animals roamed the area, and the Trochim Ford clearing was heavily infested with snakes. Those first settlers must have been terrified by the howls and grunts and slithering noises they heard all night long, even as they were filled with happiness that maybe, just maybe, they really would escape the day-to-day hardships and indignities imposed by the Czarist authorities. The next morning, after morning prayers and something to eat, they must have taken a good look around and wondered, can we really do this? They were city Jews who had been shopkeepers, petty traders, and artisans; they knew nothing about farming. But they pushed on, clearing brush and cutting trees from the forest to make primitive shelters for themselves, and later constructing simple houses for their families. Villagers passing by on the trails gave them farming tips, but they learned how to farm mainly through hard work, privation, and trial and error.

  Jewish settlement at Trochenbrod expanded slowly, until in 1827 Nicholas I issued a decree that forced conscription of Jewish boys into the Russian army until age forty-five. The Czarist government saw this as a practical and compassionate way of eliminating the Jewish problem, because obviously after twenty or thirty years in the army isolated from his relatives, the forty-five-year-old man would no longer be Jewish. This decree provided an exemption for Jewish families that settled as farmers and worked unused land. The result in Trochenbrod was a surge of newcomers and, as was finally made possible by Volyn administrative regulations, outright purchase of the land by the settlers.

  The land at Trochim Ford had not been settled before because it was almost completely unfit to farm: it was a marshy depression in the forest far from any main roads. It was a clearing amid forest lands because trees could not grow in the low, wet soil there. Although trails crossed the clearing, they led to villages that were miles away through woods and other marshy areas. The isolation of the spot meant that a trip to any market would be long and arduous and dangerous. Farming did not suggest itself as a promising way to make a living in this place. But this was a place that was far away from the Czar and his government operatives, a place where Jews were likely to be left alone. It was a perfect place for Jewish settlement.

  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 Trochenb
rod. 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, Jews and neighboring Gentiles alike, knew the village, and later the town, as both Trochenbrod and Sofiyovka.

  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.