(Extract from Alexander Granach: There Goes an Actor, Doubleday, Dorian and Co, Inc., Garden City 1945, ASIN B0007DSBEM )

Chapter XI. The County Seat Horodenka — Fierce Competition

THE DIFFERENCE between the village of Werbiwci and the little town of Horodenka was greater than that between the town of Horodenka and any European capital, for Horodenka already had all the insecurity and drive and hurry and competition of a city, while Werbiwci was a quiet, stable, and peaceful village.

In the village men lived by the soil, and they were in contact with it. In Horodenka men lived by one another, next to one another, and yet there was no contact between them. In the village everything was orderly and good; everyone knew where his living came from, everyone knew what he had. People lived with their animals, with the soil, even with the seasons—lived on good terms with them. Misfortunes occurred: often a beast fell sick or a drought dried the soil, or suddenly in the middle of the spring hail came and blighted seed and bloom, Or in the summer, when the work in the field was at its height, a strange big-bellied cloud would appear from nowhere, stumble over a peaceful little native cloud, and pour itself out.

When such things happened, people were not merely unhappy, they got really angry. They looked up at the sky and raged and reviled the ridiculous spring that suddenly brought hail and blighted its own seeds and blooms. Or they made bitter fun of Mr. Summer, whose clouds always rained at the wrong time and at the wrong place.

That is how it was in Werbiwci. There were poor and rich in the village too, and hail and drought and pestilence. But such things were everyone's concern, and people were close to one another and helped one another, But in Horodenka it was otherwise.

In the town men no longer lived by the soil, but by man. In the village people looked up at the: sky and believed that everything was ordered there. In the town it was the Polish property owner Romaschkamm and the Jewish banker Jungermann, that people looked up to because they could make you prosper or ruin you. They had their managers, their agents, who gave out good positions by which people prospered, and on these prosperous ones lived others who were poor, and on them, the poorest of all.

In the village the men all wore the same linen shirts over the same linen breeches, the same sheepskin of better quality or worse. But in town everyone dressed differently. Some, especially the officials, wore short coats and patent-leather shoes and stiff collars and steep hats and gloves and drove around in carriages; while others went barefoot and in rags.

The town was built differently too. Our village was scattered and planless — a house, a garden, then at intervals in all directions other houses, other gardens, better houses or worse houses perhaps; but they all had the same thatched roofs. Horodenka was built in circles. The outermost circle was most like the village. There were many thatched roofs, though here already there were some that were tiled; here the Ukrainian population lived who sold their potatoes and onions and turnips and beans and green stuff and chickens and other produce at market every day.

Next came the middle circle; there you began to see villa-like houses with shingled roofs and flower gardens. There lived the higher officials of the county, the personnel of the courts and the board of assessors, and in the center, hedged in by these two circles, lived the Jews.

How did this center, the Jewish quarter of Horodenka, look? In the middle of it there was the great market place surrounded by public buildings. The post office was the biggest of them but what took your eye was the neat Polish Catholic church with its onion-shaped dome and its clean, white plastered arid painted walls; you could see where two bricks were missing in the belly of the dome, and there owls had made their nests.

The market place was cut in two by the main highway and again by a second highway, so that in front of the church there was a crossroad with four signboards. The road to the east led to the Dniester by way of the town of Usciecka and on to the Russian border. The road to the west led to Kolomea and Stanislau, and on to Lemberg. The road to the south led to Zaleszczyki, the Galician Meran, and the road to the north led to Obertyn, the city of horse dealers and thieves. If you asked a man, "You’re from Obertyn, airen't you?" the prompt answer always was, "You’re a thief yourself!" And then all around lay the forty-eight villages belonging to the county of which Horodenka was the county seat.

The Jewish quarter was divided into two parts by the main high road: the upper streets and the lower streets. The part of the town that contained the upper streets had a promenade framed in a wide avenue of chestnut trees, running from the courthouse, the first large building, toward the west down through the market place, past the church, then southward along the road that led to Zaleszczyki as far as the Baron Hirsch school. The upper streets were swept and sprinkled and cared for by town employees; but no one bothered about the lower streets.

And there was a big ditch in which people dumped their excrement and their garbage and their swill, and in the early morning you could see whole swarms of them with their bodies partly exposed doing the most private things. The lower streets were dirty and they stank, and when no rain or frost came to wash away the filth and clean the air people were simply suffocated. The small wooden houses were set one against another in rows, for it was cheaper to build up against your neighbor's wall, One house pressed and leaned and supported itself against another like those frail, sickly beings who are afraid of being alone. In these houses lived poverty: cobblers, tailors, carpenters, barrel makers, masons, furriers, bakers, and different sorts of carters and porters — all industrious men who bustled around the whole day to earn a loaf of bread for five kreuzer so that their roomful of children would have something to eat.

They waited especially for Tuesday, the day of the market, on which the peasants and Jews from the forty-eight outlying villages came to town. Those Tuesdays, those market days, gave them their livelihood, and then what a scrambling and running and shoving and sweating — you would have thought the world was coming to an end! The most important part of it was the big cattle market outside the town. On market day stallions sniffed the air, recognizing their old brides or getting the scent of a yet unknown virgin, and all, mares and stallions, greeted each other with wild whinnies. The poor cows who hadn’t been milked that day, so that their udders might look tight and full, mooed desperately for help. Sheep bleated their longing for green fields, but the loudest of all were the pigs: they screamed as if someone were cutting slices of ham out of their living fat rumps.

. . . Through all this dart the dealers with their brokers, sweating, bellowing, bargaining, looking angry, slapping their customers' hands, until finally they have brought the difference down to only three gulden — both parties have long been of one mind, the buyer has long since decided to take the horse, the cow, the pig, or the sheep at the dealer's price except for those last three gulden! Finally they meet each other halfway, each concedes one gulden, and with the remaining one they drink to the success of the deal and to the health of the animal.

In the town market place the transactions are smaller. Here the poor peasants display their chickens, their geese or ducks, their grain, their flax, their linen, their oil. Then they go to the shops and buy colored cloth, glass beads, wool to embroider their shirts, sugar, salt, pots, matches, herrings. The restaurants and saloons are packed with the men drinking vodka, beer, mead, rum, eating their bits of bacon or sausage. Many are gay, some drunk; everyone shoves, pushes and talks, his eyes wide open, timid, curious, searching — a child has got lost, a pickpocket is caught, a nervous horse has broken loose and galloped straight into the pottery market. Yelling and bellowing, pushing and pulling, hundreds of offers and bids being made at once. Merry-go-rounds luring and calling. And through it all goes poverty from the lower streets, looking for a chance to earn something. The carpenters offer their boxes and chests, the cobblers their boots and shoes, the furriers and tailors their scraps; in exchange they are offered grain, chickens, geese, ducks, eggs.

The women and the young people are; the liveliest. The women offer white bread, rolls, cakes, cooked peas, beans, piroushki with various fillings: potato, cheese, meat, sweet cherries, sour cherries, blueberries. Everyone runs, bellows himself hoarse as he bids against the others. Competition and cursing and swindling for pennies. . . .

We young children were the wildest of all, because it was fun for us to be there too, to belong to it, to be a part of the enormous congestion. We peddled kvass, which we carried in glass pitchers. It was a sort of apple cider sweetened and mixed according to a secret formula by Feivele Kvasnick, who cheated us. We bought his product because he was the only dealer in town and hated him and sang a mocking song about him:

"Your Feivele, our kvass,
Twenty times come lick my arse.”

We put ice in the kvass; it melted and the kvass got weaker, colder, and we called out our wares glowingly or entreatingly or threateningly:

"Fresh kyass gives might,
Ice-cold and just right!"

or:

"Buy kyass, buy!
Drink it and feel spry."

I was best with threats. I cried out shrilly:

"Kvass, kvass, ice-cold kvass!
Drink kyass and you'll be well.
Pass it by
And end in hell!"

Many an old peasant woman, hearing me sing out my imprecation, only shook her head and crossed herself and bought a glass and gave me a heller extra and told me I mustn't swear. She was quite right; but then I reflected that if I had not sworn, she would neither have bought my kvass nor given me an extra heller. Cursing brings the money in, I thought to myself, and went on crying out my threats and curses and many a Tuesday I earned from thirty to forty kreuzer. This small fortune I always paid over to Father, who praised me for my industry and that made me proud and happy.

And my brother Schabse, who was about a year older than I, earned about one third of what I did, and he was envious and insecure. And that made me even happier and surer of myself; and that was the beginning of a rivalry, of a competition, in the town.

On one such Tuesday my eldest brother Schachne Eber came from the village, and toward evening he went with Father to the dealer, Scholem Luft, and paid him twenty-five gulden, and thus it was arranged that we should open a bakery: Herr Luft was to furnish us flour, giving us credit for another twenty-five gulden for which my brother made himself responsible. So one day we moved from the lower streets, rented Froim Gloger's bakery which was next to Herr Zulaufs property near the Baron Hirsch school — and all of a sudden we were something elegant! We baked black bread and white, and crescents and Vienna rolls, and since we had no steady clientele and all of us shared in the work, we sold everything cheaper than the other bakers, but we were our own best customers, for we could not resist temptation, and, despite strict orders to the contrary, each of us devoured from forty to fifty of the fresh, crisp crescents or Vienna rolls every day. Each of us felt sure that he was the only one who did it, and we all did it. The bakery did not prosper.

My brother Schabse and I went to the Baron Hirsch school, but at night we were awakened to twist crescents or shape Vienna rolls. Now something happened which was to have an important effect on both our lives. My brother was seven, I was six. But he was tall and thin, and I was stocky and strong. I had to look up to him, which annoyed me. When we were called, it took him a long time to awaken, but I jumped up like a weasel. He would resist and cry; I saw this and made myself out to be very alert and willing. That was the beginning and the foundation of my self-confidence. I was praised at his expense; he began to hate me, and I to enjoy his helplessness. He became less and less confident, I more and more so. It was the same thing at school, in the street, and at play. It had really begun with our kvass peddling. God forgive me, it was partly my fault.

And when I saw my brother thirty years later, I had a painful feeling. He had not changed at all. He had grown-up children who treated him as badly as we, his brothers and sisters, used to. He had the same red, weepy, reproachful eyes, and he spoke with the same slight, hesitant stutter, only now he wore a beard that looked as artificial as the beards they put on young supers in an opera chorus.

I had the feeling of having committed a delicate little murder. I took this self-reliance away from him and added it to mine. For we were already competitors; we were not in our village any more, but in the county seat Horodenka, where all the evil traits of city people were already at play: rivalry and greed. Because it is a far greater distance from the village of Werbiwci to the town of Horodenka than from the town of Horodenka to any great European capital.