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

Chapter XVIII.  People and the Awakening of Love in Horodenka

In Horodenka there lived also the Gloger family. People called them "the Yerischkes," after their eighty-year-old progenitor, Yerichem. This old man's face was always flushed and happy from the last vodka he had just tossed off. He had small, cunning, bright eyes which twinkled under his bushy eyebrows, and a thick yellowish-white beard that looked as if the wind had blown it to one side — in reality, it grew only on one side. And it looked as if it were made out of flax and wood shavings. He had eight sons, seven of whom were married; they were all glaziers and carpenters. They were simple, uneducated men, big and strong and daring.

Horodenka trembled before the Glogers, especially before the youngest, who was stocky and broad-shouldered and defiant. His name was Srul Kune. The Glogers had frequent violent quarrels among themselves, the wives in particular envied one another and were always wrangling, often one brother would not speak to another for years. But when one of them had a fight with an "outsider," they all rushed to help him.

And anyone who was in need and appealed to one of the Glogers would be warmly and generously helped. The youngest, Srul Kune, the most feared of them, was the readiest to help and the kindest. His circle of friends included the journeyman carpenters, the butchers, the horse dealers, and the porters, who followed him blindly. He often went with them to visit the poorest people to find out if they were going hungry. Then he went to the rich and used threats and blackmail to force them to help the starving poor. The rich hated him and wrote anonymous information and complaints against him and sent them to the county officials, but the poor and people of moderate means loved and revered the Glogers, particularly Srul Kune.

On Thursdays the poorest people always went from house to house begging, and Srul Kune and his friends found out from them who gave and who did not. Once on such a Thursday the rich and miserly Herr Offenberger was in a bad humor and threw the beggars out and said that he would give nothing and, furthermore, he was not going to let himself be blackmailed by that tramp Srul Kune and his gang any longer. Soon the town was talking of nothing else. And Friday night Herr Offenberger's house "accidentally" burned down.

Everyone knew that it was Srul Kune's work; everyone was pleased, but no one said a word about it.

Early on Saturday morning a crowd was standing by the burned ruins of Herr Offenberger's house, and Srul Kune and his friends passed and he said, "Good Lord, what a sin — to start a fire on the Sabbath! But certainly God Himself has done this, to punish Offenberger for his hardheartedness to the poor."

Offenberger was insured against fire, but in spite of that he suffered a large loss. He began to give alms again, indeed more generously than before; but he got the county officials to bring a new and harsh set of gendarmes to Horodenka. Among these new guardians of the law there was one sergeant who sported a twirled mustache with the turned-up points on a level with his eyes, so that his angry glances darted through the extreme ends of it and you had to avert your eyes when he looked at you. Anyone whom he did not like, he arrested on the least suspicion, and was always beating people up at the police station. He often visited Herr Offenberger, who treated him to a vodka, and he "bought" a great many things from him without paying for them; he would say, "Yes, Herr Offenberger, there will be order here now!" And Herr Offenberger always greeted him in friendly fashion with the words, "Greetings, Herr Order!" Soon the whole town was calling him "Herr Order."

Once, on a market day, Srul Kune got into a fight, and Herr Order came up and arrested him. His friends wanted to free him by force, but Srul Kune shouted to them, held out his hands for the handcuffs to be put on, and only said, "Yes, there must be order in Horodenka, and there shall be." So he was led away, and the town was in great excitement, and the next day he was let out, and he said not a word about it.

No more than two weeks had passed before Herr Order was waylaid one night, disarmed, and fearfully beaten, one of his two long-pointed mustaches was cut off and he himself was delivered at the hospital like a bundle of refuse. But his rifle, with bayonet attached, his saber and sword belt, his pouch with its chains and handcuffs and its gold sergeant's tassel, and his terrifying hard hat with its blue-black feathers were all delivered to the district police station with the following letter:

TO THE OFFICERS OF THE ROYAL AND IMPERIAL GOVERNMENT IN HORODENKA:

Tonight we found the sergeant of gendarmes completely drunk in a ditch, where he was soiling the Kaiser's uniform and the Kaiser's weapons; we carried the drunken sergeant to the hospital to sober up; we are herewith delivering his weapons, his uniform, and his helmet to the officers of the royal and imperial government. Long live the Kaiser!

Srul Kune Gloger and Friends

Froim Gloger, from whom we had rented the bakery, had a boy about my age, Moische Mendel. We went to school and to cheder and to steal fruit and to "find" horseshoes together, and shared a thousand secrets. We told each other everything we knew, everything we wanted to know, and everything we suspected. We were both beset with a great longing to develop our muscles and to satisfy our curiosity. When we devoured a fresh loaf of graham bread with butter in secret together, we immediately felt our muscles and were convinced that they had become harder. When we sucked a good marrow bone, we believed that it made our own bones stronger. When we ate heart, or kidneys, or lung, or liver, it was perfectly obvious to us that the corresponding parts of our bodies were thereby fortified. But we also believed that to be strong without being intelligent was not enough, so we began secretly buying boiled or fried brains in little restaurants in order to develop our minds.

About this time a park was opened in Horodenka, with plenty of gardenhouses and benches and trees and flowers and seesaws and swings and other amusements. It was called the "Promenade Garden. Saturdays and Sundays and even weekday afternoons you could see hundreds of young men and girls gathered there. First there were groups of boys and groups of girls, then words and jokes would pass from group to group, then couples would begin to pair off, and soon people would be saying, "He and she are going together" or, "He and she are speaking together." And when he and she "went together" or "spoke together" for a long time, then people said, "He and she are playing at lovers" or "going as lovers."

Saturday was the day of real excitement. Early in the morning the young workingmen went to the synagogue, but more to meet one another than to pray. From there they would go to the shadier taverns, buy one another vodka or a bite to eat, begin to feel carefree, say a good word or a bad word for sundry hims and hers, and then they would walk to the Promenade Garden.

The girls would already be there — dressmakers, seamstresses, milliners, housemaids, and what not. Couples soon formed, and soon there were "romances" and “love affairs” and mocking songs and adventures and elopements and even small tragedies. Especially when some girl from the upper streets, from the "better circles," became infatuated with some bold handsome journeyman and "stooped" to love him. Then the parents on both sides rushed in and there would be a flight and a secret marriage and lawsuits and scandal and general excitement.

This was all quite new to Horodenka, for the older generation used to say, "We never dared to do such things!" Suddenly people dared. It was the first generation to manage without marriage brokers.

Every young fellow who thought anything of himself and wanted to be considered grown-up began to "go with" girls, or even to "play at lovers." The air in the Promenade Garden was heavy with rumors and gossip about love and lovers. You suffered the pangs of love, you sacrificed yourself to your feelings, you suffered in your soul, you pretended to be melancholy. You read novels that were so exciting that they made you dizzy.

One was the famous story of the suffering, despairing suitor who was locked in a tower by his rival and left to starve to death. Finally, utterly desperate, he jumped from the tower — and just as he jumped, his lady love drove up in a big hay wagon, and he landed in the hay and not a hair of his head was hurt! And lover and beloved fell into each other's arms and wept tears of joy, together with the reader.

Then there was the story of the young baron who, despite his wicked relatives, loved his own chambermaid. He was driven out and banished with her, and they wandered through the world, begging in rain and snow and frost, till at last they both collapsed and fell into a ditch and lay there together, and the instant before they breathed their last the postman roused them with a letter which said that the baron had at last inherited the estates of his dead grandfather, and he went happily home, and made his unfortunate beloved, the despised chambermaid, a real baroness. . . .