We wish to thank the Jewish Publication Society of America for their generosity in allowing us to reproduce this material.
Wolfson was a leading scholar in Semitic Philosophy and was the Littmen Professor of History at Harvard, honored by Harvard and two US Presidents, buried in the Ostriner Society Cemetery section.
The beginnings are in a land swept by the Baltic winds, in a community
where intellect and indigence were the staples of existence. In the autumn
of 1887—the year that Bernard Berenson, originally also from Lithuania,
was graduated from Harvard College—Harry Wolfson was born in Ostrin, a
quiet town of about two thousand situated near the border of White Russian
and Poland. The town was established in the fifteenth century by Casimir
IV, duke of Lithuania and king of Poland, in order to exploit the thick
forests of the region. In the late nineteenth century a large part of the
forest around Ostrin belonged to the Polish patriot, Prince Drutski Lubetski.
Near the center of the town flowed the Ostrinka River; along the bank of
a fork of the river was a windmill that was linked to the town by a quaint
wooden bridge. A rural post office near the market-place was open only
three times a week. There was no doctor in the town; one had to travel
about 20 miles to the town of Stuchin for medical help. The only means
of travel was by horse-drawn wagon: one left daily in the afternoon for
Grodno, carrying mainly passengers the 32 miles and returned to Ostrin
the following morning; another wagoner drove 120 miles to Vilna once a
week to transport beer, household accessories, and farm implements. The
population was about equally divided between Christians and Jews; there
was also a sprinkling of Muslim Tartar families.
Wolfson’s first published piece, written when he was a high school
student, was a series of sketches of his native place, which opens with
the following picture of the town and its inhabitants.
Ostrin is a small town, surrounded by thick forest. In its center is a wide, sandy marketplace which contains the town well. On one side of the marketplace stands the white church building encircled by a stone fence; one the other side stands the black, wood synagogue with its trebled roof, which is never closed. A number of narrow, unpaved streets, commencing at the marketplace, run in curved lines for about half a mile on each side. The houses around the market and those near it are inhabited by Jews, who are the merchants, the mechanics, and the professional men of the community. These are hewed log houses built at a distance of some yards from each other. Their roofs are shingled, their windows high, and in some cases the frames painted red and white. At the extremities of each street the moujiks [sic] live in their humble thatched dwelling places, each of them having in its front a well, a pen, some tress, and a dog lying in wait.The sketches portray an idyllic rural community knitted together like a single family. The atmosphere was traditionally religious, the church and synagogue being spiritually as well as geographically the homes of the people. Catholic peasants with their products and shepherds trailing their flocks mixed amiably with the Jewish tradesmen on weekdays; business was conducted mainly on barter. Both respected their own Sabbaths; gravely and sedately the folk exchanged greetings on the public square. Life appears to have been free of serious group conflict. The friendliness between the religious groups was due in part to the peasants’ pride in their tradition of independence; their forebears had never been serfs but always had been subjects of the king.
Wolfson’s family occupied a wooden frame house on the marketplace, facing the entrance to the Orthodox church. It was an excellent vantage point for observing the life of the town. And hardly anything escaped the boy’s eyes. During the winter the priests from the church would often drop in at the Wolfson home after mass to warm themselves at the fire and sip glasses of hot tea. On the other side of the marketplace lived his cousin, the Savitsky family, who occupied the only two-story house, It was built of brick and the street floor was used for a krom, a hardware and general store. Nearby were the offices of the police and the lumber companies which engaged in cutting and carting logs from the surrounding wolf-haunted forests.
Wolfson was the second child and oldest son of a family of seven….—and there were no public schools … The boy performed phenomenally in his biblical and talmudic studies. He had already developed the mental sharpness—the meaning of the root word for Ostrin is “sharp”—which was a characteristic trait of the Lithuanian Jews.
The starosta (lay elder) of the church frequently visited the Wolfson’s house…[to listen to the boy]
The great events in Ostrin, as in all towns at the time, were fire and famine; as a consequence, births, marriages, and deaths were frequently dated by catastrophes. There was a great fire in 1887, and Wolfson’s birth date was spoken of as “six months after the big fire.” On the occasion of a fire when the boy was eight years old, everyone ran from the villages to see it. The police corralled all the men to pass the water buckets. When they pulled Wolfson into the line, the starosta said to the police, “This boy should be excused. He is a dochovna, a spiritual person,” and he was excused.
Wolfson drew upon his memory of a fire of another sort in a sketch he wrote as a high-school student, entitled “The House That Jacob Built.” It is a story of Jacob who, after many years of labor, built a home in Ostrin and, to the delight of his wife Elka and their children, gradually added a potato cellar, a chicken coop, a tile stove bench (“large enough for half the village to be seated on and discuss the events of the world”), and a double set of windows to protect them from the fierce cold of winter. Jacob took great pride in his house, called it his palace, and enjoyed entertaining his friends. He was sad only because he could not welcome his brother who had disappeared. In the midst of his happiness, he received a notice from the town clerk that either he must pay the government three hundred roubles as a penalty for the failure of his brother to appear for military service or his house would be confiscated. Here, as Wolfson tells it, is the climax of the tale.
“Three hundred roubles,” murmured Jacob. “Where shall I get it? I don’t believe they will take away my house. There is still justice in St. Petersburg. No! They will not have my house.”At this time, too, Wolfson displayed a marked talent for drawing. His Hebrew grammar book, preserved by his grandmother from the Ostrin years, is covered with a gallery of local personages of all types. They show, apart from a natural gift, a keen observation of detail and an interest in the varieties and oddities of nature…[discussion of his aunt’s collection of his work]
The first of October came accompanied by the first snow. Early in the morning, while Jacob was still in the synagogue te morning service, while Elka was working in the kitchen and the children were still asleep, a gendarme entered the house with several soldiers and said roughly:
“Remove the rubbish, Jews. The house does not belong to you any more.”
Without any ceremony, the soldiers began to carry out every movable object from the house. The children woke up and began to cry. A crowd assembled in the street. Old women blew their noses and wiped their eyes with their aprons, and old men shook their gray heads murmuring: “Harsh laws, harsh laws!”
Meanwhile Jacob returned from the synagogue and, seeing the big crowd around his house, his furniture standing on the street and his half-naked children sitting in the snow, he stopped short for a while, but all at once he turned aside and disappeared. The soldiers kept on doing their duty without uttering a word, and, after completing, they shut the door and put a waxen seal on the latch.
“Where is Jacob?” cried Elka.
“Where is Jacob? The crowd repeated the question to one another. “Why does he not got and find a place for his children?”
Suddenly smoke came out from the cracks of the house.
“Where is Jacob gone?” Elka cried again with a wild voice.
The smoke grew thicker and thcker and a tongue of fire appeared.
“Good people, go and find my Jacob!” shrieked Elka.
The fire increased and now the whole roof was involved in flames, and amidst these flames was a pale and horrid face. Jacob appeared in the attic window, spreading his hand toward heaven.
The wooden synagogue near the marketplace, the hearth and heart of the Jewish community, absorbed the life of the growing boy. The center of worship and study, veiled in a mesh of religious ceremony and custom, it was literally never closed. In one of his written sketches of the town there is a description of shepherds who assemble in the marketplace with their hoses at night to sing songs “full of sadness and longing” before departing for their night vigil on the pasture grounds:Except for ice-skating and snowball fights during the winter, there were no other games or sports. Young Harry spent much of his time in the musty beth ha-midrash, the communal and study hall of th synagogue. Given to browsing among the books there, he discovered that many of the volumes had come from his great-grandfather’s library, stamped as their pages were with the man after whom he had been named. He was fascinated with one set of the Mishnah; it had copious marginal annotations by the then rabbi of Ostrin Jacob Zvi Shapiro, a cousin of the Hebrew poet Constantine Shapiro, who died in 1900; the notes had been used in his commentary on the Mishnah, Tifereth Ya’akov, which was incorporated in the great Vilna edition of the Talmud published by the Romm Brothers. In this manner, Harry accumulated information about the cultural history of Ostrin, which dated back at least to the seventeenth century when, as apart of the Grodno region, the community was represented in the Lithuanian Vaad (1623-1764), the Jewish assembly that was also known as the Council of Four Lands. Touching a thread here and catching a thread there, the boy wove them into a mental tapestry that he never forgot.
While these are thus singing on the street, the Jews, both young and old, are sitting in the synagogue, studying their large thick books, before the light of tallow candles. They find their poetry in solving intricate Taldmudical problems and refresh their dry souls after a day’s work, with charming Oriental legends. But sometimes the younger ones leave the synagogue silently, and taking position in the same market not far away from the former singers, show that they, too, have music in their hearts. Their songs are of quite a different character. They sing about martyrs who have offered their lies for lofty causes, about an old desolated land beyond the sea which once was flowing with milk and honey, or about a happy future and the final triumph of righteousness. Till [sic] late, very late in the night, this mixture of voices rings in that peaceful town.
In his ninth year Harry appears to have exhausted the educational resources of Ostrin. His parents arranged for him to continue his studies in Grodno. In existence since the second half of the fourteenth century, Grodno was an ancient seat of government with one of the oldest Jewish communities in Lithuania. … He lived with his maternal grandparents, Shmuel Aryeh and Michleh Savitsky, …His grandmother’s hospitality was proverbial, as was her cooking. Her recipes were much sought after by young matrons: especially admired was her Sabbath cholent, a concoction of meat and potatoes mixed with plums and spices which (like old-fashioned Boston baked beans) simmered in an earthen pot for many hours before being served. Equally envied were her confections: ingberlach, long, dainty stick of sugar, ginger, and almonds filtered through honeyed syrup; and kuchlech, egg-and-sugar cookies baked to a golden tint. …
By 1903, the political oppression of the czarist regime and the grinding poverty of the Jews in Russia and her provinces had impelled the Jews to leave their ancestral homes and seek a better future in the Americas. The great migration to the New World was in progress; almost every Jewish family in Lithuania sent one or more of its members abroad as immigrants. …
Wolfson arrived with his sister Mamie in September 1903—the rest of
the family arrived four years later—and they joined their father in Ossining
a few days before the High Holy Days. The Jews of the city consisted of
approximately forty families, half of them recent arrivals from Ostrin;
they lived in the Irish section on the hills on Charles and Willen Streets…