❖ Notes on Occupations

Coachman
A driver, teamster, carter, someone who drove a cart and hauled goods.

Bricklayer
In the 1920s most houses in Troskunai were wooden, but they all had brick ovens and chimneys. So bricklayers were mostly oven makers.

Peddler
Avraham used to go to the villages to buy up ANY merchandise: pelts, dates, corn, hides, flax. He would buy it to sell or to accumulate it. He and his sons bought or sold anything they could. They would go to a village and meet someone on the way, a goy, one of the villagers. They'd learn from him that someone in the village had something to sell. Everyone wanted to be the first for the gravy—the hide, the cow, or anything. If it was a kosher cow (without a blemish), they would bring it back to our town and the shochet would cut it up and sell it to the Jews. He also sold chickens, eggs, and everything else.

— description by Alter Resnick

Some peddlers were learned and very pious men. They would carry around a holy book to read while they rested their feet and the horse grazed, or if there was nothing to do.

— Hirsz Abramowicz, Profiles of a Lost World (YIVO, 1999)

Turner
Turners used a wood lathe to make cylindrical objects like canes, umbrellas, and pipes for smoking.

Shingle Maker
Shingle-making was a cooperative undertaking, with various tasks performed by different people: two would do the sawing, one the splitting, two the planing and two the grooving.

— Hirsz Abramowicz, Profiles of a Lost World (YIVO, 1999)

Agent/supplier (yiddish: שאַפֿער [shafer])
Someone who procured supplies and arranged their delivery.