Family anecdote submitted by Michael Eker
This is just a brief snapshot of a family anecdote, and this is the only mention of Yampol. You may find it amusing (or not!), but I'm happy to share it with you anyway. (My grandfather, Sholomo Pincasovich, was always known as "Aba", so I'll use this abbreviation):
"Although Aba could not remember his grandmother, Chave (Eva) well, he had the unusual privilege for a child of having a great-grandmother -on his mother's side - whom he remembered very well. She came to live with the family after the death of her daughter Chave. "The Buba Bassie", as she was known, had been a famous beauty in her youth, and even at around 70, still had hardly a wrinkle. She was small and fragile, and had been married very young to Sholomo, Aba's great- grandfather, after whom he was named, as was the custom among Jews, as he was dead by the time Aba was born. He had been a tall, strong man, but all his life had been in deadly fear of his tiny, fragile wife. She would tell Aba of the tricks she would play on him. On one occasion she told him he needed a new hat. which she would get for him the next time she was in Yampol. But instead of buying him a hat with the rouble he had given her, she bought a bottle of black ink and stained his old hat with it. She kept the money that was over, and being a simple man he never realised that he had been given his old hat back....."
The story sounds so far-fetched that one can hardly believe it to be true. But if it is true, at least it tells you that round about, say, 1896, one could buy enough black ink in Yampol to stain a man's hat(!). Also, that the town must have had at least one shop which sold men's (new) hats, which "The Buba Bassie" could have bought for her husband honestly, instead of thinking up this wild scheme to cover his old hat with black ink (which must have taken her hours, surely, - quite apart from the vast amount of ink she would have needed). All for the satisfaction of tricking her husband, and for what little change from a rouble that was left.
Used by Permission. |
