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Town Life
What was the town like?
Physical features
D. Schreiber’s memoirs
mention Kernitzke’s lumber yard, a sugar beet
factory several miles from the town, Tronski’s
Orchard (Tronski was a rich Polish
landowner), a statue of Peter the
Great in front of City Hall and a Greek Catholic Church.
There were 2 synagogues one very big one
and one small one. There was also a
Jewish cemetery on the small hill in the city. According to a recent visit
to the cemetery by Krystyna Dudzińska,
a research assistant at Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at
the University of Warsaw, many tombstones (matzevas)
still exist. A further description of the cemetery is provided by Jewish
Heritage of Ukraine as follows: “The town contains a Jewish cemetery, where there are hundreds
of tombstones from XVIII-XIX centuries. The
cemetery is located on the round hill above the town, and overgrown with
thick bushes. A significant number of grave stelae
have carved decorations, similar in style to the decor of the Jewish cemetery in Satanov. The town had a wooden synagogue, a typical
example of Podolsk wooden synagogues of the XVIII century, which was burned
in 1939”.
The
village had a public library, the history of which is described here.
Surrounding the town
were huge wheat fields. From the memoirs: “We fed our cow with, among other
things, beet pulp from the beet-sugar factory which was several miles from
the city. Every so often I would go to the beet-sugar factory with the
peasant whom mother sent for a load of the beet pulp. On one such trip,
late in August, we passed through huge wheat fields. The wheat was tall,
ripe, heavy with seeds, and reddish and orange in
color. I got off the wagon and asked the peasant to go on without me, and
to pick me up on the way back. I climbed up on a little hill where there
was a huge tree and sat under it watching the wheat waving to and fro as
the wind blew it in various directions. I had read about ocean waves, but I
had never seen any. ‘This is what ocean waves must be like’ ”.
The Smotrych
River flows by Gorodok. As described in Wikipedia
the Smotrych River is “A left-bank tributary of
the Dniester River that flows southward for 168 km through Khmelnytskyi
oblast …With a width of 10–15 m (40 m at its widest point), the
river is particularly notable for its tall banks, which give it a ravine
like appearance. It is used for water supply, irrigation, and fishing. A small
hydroelectric station is situated on it, as well as the city of Kamianets-Podilskyi and the town of Gorodok (Khmelnytskyi oblast).”
People
In 1897 the Jewish
population was about 3,200 (37%) out of a total of roughly 8600
residents. According to D.
Schreiber’s memoirs the “town proper” contained mostly Jews. In any case
Jews made up a substantial part of the town’s population. Surrounding the
town were mostly Ukrainian and Polish peasants.
Relations between Jews
and non-Jews based on Schreiber’s memoirs could be described, overall, as
amicable. His mother spoke better Ukrainian than his father so she had a
closer relationship with the peasant population who made up a considerable
number of the clients in his father’s law practice. “A good portion of my
father’s practice consisted of ‘partitioning’ of real estate among the
children of deceased peasant farmers. Litigation usually arose because the
land could not always be divided into equal geometrical parts without
running the risk of some children having the poorest land and some the
best. When my father failed to get them to agree to an equitable division,
it was necessary to file a petition in the court praying for such a
division.”
“My mother was a housewife, but without
her aid, father’s peasant clients would have owed him much more than they
did. She managed to get father’s fees paid in commodities (fruits,
vegetables, eggs, chickens, a calf or a cow). Most of the peasants knew my
mother’s terms and before talking to my father about a case they would come
to the kitchen with a sack of potatoes, apples or onions for my mother as a
down payment for father. In the fall, the peasants, knowing my mother
wanted cabbage for sauerkraut, would bring barrelfuls of cabbage heads and
help her cut them, salt them, and otherwise prepare them for storage in the
barn for winter.”
The story of the stolen
shoes as described in the memoirs of D. Schreiber illustrates an encounter
between Jews and Gentiles that appears to be one of neighbors on good terms
working out a problem with their children. The two chapters relating the
incident “Abraham and Isaac” and “The Shoes
were Found”.
Another chapter
describes warm encounters between the woodcutters, D. Schreiber and his
mother. See “The Woodcutters”.
However, there could
also be a dark side to the relationship between the Jews and Gentiles as
shown in the following story from his memoirs, “I Was
Horsewhipped”.
Additionally,
the Czarist system of anti-Semitic laws and regulations was always in place.
D. Schreiber’s father was a lawyer but his “… rights to practice law were
not the same as those of lawyers who took the Christian oath. The chief
limitation was on the number of cases he could try in a year before the
several courts. This meant sharing his fees with Christian lawyers a good
many times. Occasionally, a Christian lawyer would return the favor by
soliciting my father’s help in a difficult case.”
Another
problem for the Schreiber family was that some family members were engaged
in the anti-Czarist activities, which put them at odds with the authorities
and ultimately led to the family’s decision to immigrate to America.
Jewish children were not
allowed to attend the schools of Gentile children. In the case of D.
Schreiber, he received his education in basic subjects at home. “In our
home, we learned Russian- we learned geography, literature, history,
geometry, arithmetic, algebra – everything that
was taught in schools. My father first taught the oldest brother Hyman, and
Hyman taught my brother Jake and me.”
What were living
conditions like?
The memoirs describe the
home. It was very basic and had certain rural features such as a garden in
the front yard, a cow in the back yard and chickens in the attic. Wood fire
was used for heating and cooking. Water was drawn from the river and was
used for household purposes and for drinking. Here are some chapters from the memoirs
describing the home and the various activities of daily life that went with
it:
·
Our
House
·
Cooking
and Baking Facilities
·
Baking Bread for the Week
·
Heating
Facilities
·
The
Water Carrier
·
Laundry and Bathing
(excerpts from chapters)
What was Gorodok like in the 1930’s?
A very informative picture of Gorodok
and the Soviet Union during the 1930’s, World War II and its immediate
aftermath can be found in A Red Boyhood: Growing up Under Stalin by Anatole Konstantin. This is a moving story of a boy
that begins with the arrest and execution of his father in 1938 by Stalin’s
secret police. When the Nazis invade the Soviet Union he flees with his
mother and younger brother to Central Asia. After the war he finds his way
to the American sector in Germany and later emigrates to the U.S. The book
is available through Amazon Books.
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