MEMOIRS OF SHERESHEV
By MORRIS
KANTOROWITZ
To the best of my ability
I'll try to look back into the farthest corners of my memory to recall the
earliest years of my childhood. As
unbelievable as it sounds, I recall I wasn't much more than two years old when
we lived, that is my parents, my sister Sheva and I,
in my grandparent's, my mother's parent's, Laizer-Bear
and Freida-Leah Auerbuch's
house on Ostrowiecka street. It was a long low-lying
house built from the standard 6 by 12 inch thick timber of which the houses in Shereshev were built.
The wooden floor, because
of the age of the house was almost lying on the ground. The floors of the
bedrooms, however, were higher than in the rest of the house, thus forming an
elevation at the entrance to the bedrooms of some half a dozen inches. I can see myself as a child of no
more than two years old sitting on that elevation, with my feet resting on the
lower part of the floor singing a children's song about a little room containing
a hammer, a metal bowl and other things. I can still hear the melody of a couple
lullabies and remember some of the words that my mother sang to me putting me to
bed. The first one was a story of a
maiden who was forced to marry the king and leave her true love behind. The
song was a sad one and more so the melody, which always succeeded in making me
sad. The other song was about a young maiden in whose garden was a well to
which her lover used to come every evening to get his fill of the cool
quenching drink. As a child I took it literally to mean "the cool water".
My mother used to sing to me in
Yiddish, it was some years later that I learned that it was a translation from
Hebrew, written by the great Hebrew poet Bialik and
is known in Hebrew literature under the name "Yesh-Le-Gan". Still later I realized that the poet didn't
refer to the cool water literally.
I also remember a morning before
Pesach (Passover.) The garden behind the kitchen window looked neglected. The
snow has recently melted exposing the unkempt garden-beds left from the
previous fall and the strewn around potato stems. It is too early yet to plow.
My grandfather (mother's father) Laizer-Bear put down
a large copper boiler on the ground in the middle of the garden, making sure
it's not close to the house and elevates the boiler with the help of three
stones placed underneath. Carrying two pails at a time he makes a couple of
trips to the well filling up the boiler with water. He starts a fire under the
boiler and shoves the end of a long metal rod into the fire.
After a long while the water in the
boiler starts to bubble. At the same time the end of the metal rod in the fire
becomes flaming red. My grandfather with the help of a rug picks up the cooler
end of the rod sticking the red-hot other end of the rod into the boiler. The
water explodes with a geyser of hissing steam and bubbles furiously. By then there is a circle of neighbors around,
each with a bundle of cutlery in their hands, tied together on the same cord,
but each utensil separate, a couple of inches apart, like a long gigantic jewels
string. My grandfather takes from
each of them a string at a time dipping it three times in the boiling water.
After the cutlery comes all sorts of other dishes. Several years past before I
learned that my grandfather was making kosher for Passover (designated as clean
and proper by Jewish dietary law) our and the neighbors cutlery and dishes for Pesach (Passover).
As far as I remember my grandparents
(my mothers parents) lived already by then in their
other house almost across the street in the house of my mother's grandfather,
Nathan-Shepsl Goldfarb, after whom I am named. (As
one of my two middle names is Nathan, the other is Aaron.)
Because my father was a war invalid,
the Polish government in 1924 gave him a "concession". That is, a permit to run
a restaurant in which alcoholic drinks could be served as well a retail sale of
unopened bottles of alcoholic drinks.
The sale of liquor was under strict government supervision in
My father therefore had to move to
that village Wierchy. As there were only a handful of
Jewish families in that village, my mother preferred to remain with me and my
one and a half years older sister Sheva in Shereshev and live with my grandparents, my mother's parents
house which was almost across the street from where we lived. The house in which my grandparents lived did
not differ much from the one we lived in, just a bit smaller. Behind the house
was a shed in which my grandparents kept firewood for the winter and behind it
was a stable, which served as a storage place for all kinds of odds and ends.
Why it was called a stable I never knew, for my great-grandfather was a tailor
by trade and I doubt if he ever had a horse, unless a cow.
That house like the one we lived in,
stood back from the street some 20 meters and the space between the house and
the street was taken up by a well looked after garden, at which end near the
road grew two big maple trees whose leaves in the fall the neighbors used to
collect, using them to put under the loaves of bread while they were being
baked. A much larger garden extended
behind the house, which had a large pear tree at it's left side.
I was three years old when we moved
in with my grandparents, my mother's parents. As they had no more use for the
house we used to live in, my grandparents sold it. A few months later I got sick with pneumonia.
My grandparent's house was an old house that was built
in a time when people were more concerned with preserving heat than overhead
space, nor was there much concern or belief in the theory of fresh air. As a
result there wasn't much air for a three and a half year old boy with a bad case
of pneumonia to breathe, and I had just about stopped. In desperation my mother sent for her only
brother still in Shereshev (the other two left for
the
That very day a doctor was brought in from
the neighboring town, Pruzany, her name was Ola Goldfeine and she immediately
suggested that I should be moved to a larger and roomier place. My mother then decided to move to my other
grandparents, my father's parents, Yaakov-Kopl and Chinkah Kantorowicz.
My grandfather Kopl as he was usually called
was the mayor of the Shtetl, a very respectable
member of the community of Shereshev and vicinity. Of
medium height, broad shouldered with a little protruding stomach, a rosy healthy
looking face and a red beard, which, despite his age, showed very few gray hair.
My grandmother Chinkah
was a tall slim woman who had absolute authority in the house. Even my
grandfather Kopl, accustomed to giving orders, used
to submit to all my grandmothers decisions. At least that is how it seemed to me
as a child.
My grandparents from my father's side
were part of the few rich members of the community. They had a big house on the
main street called "Mostowa" (bridge
street) because of the bridge crossing the street. Indeed, only four
houses down the street was that wooden bridge over the river. Behind the house
was a building constructed from the same heavy six inch thick timber that the
houses were built of. That building served all kinds of purposes at given
times. During the First World War my grandfather kept horses, a wagon and
certain farm machinery there. As I found out later my grandfather used to farm
during the First World War, having to feed a wife and nine children. Those four
years were very lean years in our part of the world. However my grandparents
from my fathers side faired much better than those of
my mother side, because of the grown-up children like my father and his older
brother Shevach, who were both of military age. My
father's older brother never returned home after the first
world war, buried somewhere in the vast expansions of
Through all those fifty or more years
my grandfather had a hardware store, which gave him a comfortable living. For my
time that building behind the house served not only as a wood shed but more
importantly as a warehouse for the store.