MEMOIRS OF SHERESHEV

By MOISHE KANTOROWITZ

Chapter 3.B

Our class had between 20 and 25 pupils, mostly boys.  In those days parents used to put more emphasis on educating the boys, particularly when it came to Jewish education.  The more affluent parents used to send their daughters to Hebrew school too. The poorer parents used to send their daughters to the Polish school where education was free.  Only a few girls attended Heder and just for some months or a year, while the boys continued for years at a time.  A couple of years later it became compulsory for boys and girls to attend school. There were however some parents for whom the Hebrew school was, although parochial, not religious enough and kept on sending their children to Heder.  My parents did not subscribe to it, and when I enrolled in grade 1, my sister was promoted to grade 3 and remained a head of me by 2 grades right through school. 

Right at the outset of my schooling, I developed a preference for certain subjects, of which I will speak later but I remember the dislike I felt towards the Hebrew language.  Maybe because of the teacher who was very  strict with his pupils, 6-year-old children of grade 1.   To my amazement a year later in grade 2, that feeling left me completely and I used to sit during this teacher’s lessons and wondered why I hated him and his class the previous year. The teacher’s name was Joel WALDSHAN.  He was the son of a rabbi in Shereshev but as Shereshev had a rabbi already, he was given the title of Dayan. (assistant to rabbi and in charge of settling disputes and answering questions of law).  The teacher Joel had a wife and 2 sons.  The older one Yaakov, my age, was in my class and the younger one by 2 years, David.  Yaakov was an excellent pupil, particularly when it came to Hebrew.  A couple years later, he tried his hand at writing poetry.  The later events put an end to his ambitions and his life.  They all perished in the small Shtetl of Ivanevke (Iwanow) near Pinsk. 

My parents began to look for a place to move closer to the center of the Shtetl.  The center itself, was a cobble-stoned square some hundred by a hundred and twenty metres, surrounded with the biggest houses in the Shtetl.  Part of some of those houses served also as business establishments.  That is, part of them were converted to stores.  Two of those houses served as inns and restaurants.  In the middle of the square was an ancient building, some 50 meters long and 20 meters wide, whose origin nobody knew.  It was built of large bricks that had not been used for over 200 years.  The building was referred to as the “Radd-Kromen” (row of stores).  Its wide sides faced east and west.  The east side had 6 separated entrances that served as entrances to the 6 stores on that side.  On the west side, there were only 4 doors that led to the 4 larger stores on that side.  There were also 3 doors on each of the 2 narrow sides of the building, that is, the north and south sides. In the middle of the narrow side of the building, was an arched thoroughfare.

During the winter of 1929-30, my father bought one of the stores on the west side, the larger stores.   It was on the most extreme south end of the west side and was precisely across from my father’s brother, my Uncle Reuben’s house and store, which were both under the same roof.   My father bought it from a very distinguished member of the community, Mordechay LESHTSHYNSKY, (LESZCZYNSKY), who was also the father of Mushka LESZCZYNSKY, my father’s brother Joshua’s wife.   He, Mordechay, decided to give up his yard goods store as he was then a man in his 70’s, and lived with his daughter Sara-Esther, who was then in her 40’s and single.  In those days, she stood little chance of getting married.  Her father had enough for himself and daughter.  Whatever merchandise he didn’t sell , he took home and slowly sold it out from there. 

Sometimes in the early fall of 1929, on a Saturday afternoon, I came to my Uncle Reuben and Aunt Chashkas’s house. They, that is my aunt and the maid, were still fussing in the kitchen, cleaning up after the Sabbath meal, which was a bit late in the day.  I noticed a stranger in the living room, of medium height, and a prominent stomach.  The stranger looked at me and asked my uncle, “Who is he?”  It is Itzak’s sons, as my father used to be referred to.  When I got back home, and after telling my parents about the stranger in my uncle’s house, they told me that it was Herschel, my Aunt Chashkas’s brother, who just came back from the Soviet Union.   I found out later that he, Herschel PINSKY, after spending the years of World War 1 deep in Russia, missed his chance of returning to Shereshev, and got stuck in the Soviet Union, after the Revolution. A dozen years later, he managed to sneak across the border into Poland and back home.  Not having much to do in Shereshev, he moved to Warsaw, where he established a trucking business. 

In late fall or early winter 1929, we moved to a new location.  It was to Judke, the shoemaker.  He had 2 separate half houses under one roof, living in one of them, he used to rent out the second.   Now we were no more than 100 meters from the town square or the so-called market place.  The distance to school got shorter too, by a couple of hundred meters.  It wasn’t so far before, but in the cold wintry mornings, to be there by 8 o’clock, in a time when snow wasn’t shoveled, for a 6-year-old boy was not a picnic.    That winter my mother used to walk with the 2 of us, my sister and I to school.  Quite often, my grandfather Lazar Bear, used to come from his house, in those bitter cold mornings, to walk us to school.

In spring of 1930, my father started to get the new store ready for opening.  He decided to have a cellar built under the floor of the store.  It was the first time anybody did it in that building.  It entailed to lift out the wooden floors, whose boards were 4 inches thick, and at least a century old.  The smell of the wet cement is still in my nostrils.  Then came the building of the shelves and counters.   My father wanted everything to be just right.  He also decided to leave a space between the front shelves facing the door and the wall behind for storage.   For that purpose, metal bars were needed to hold the additional wall.  My father took me to the blacksmith to order them.  I stood there watching as the blacksmith took out the red-hot bars from the fire, one at a time, and hammered them in the required shape.  I, not knowing better, as soon as the bar lost its red glow, went over and touched it, fortunately with only the tip of my fingers, burning them badly.  The next couple of weeks, I attended school with my fingers bandaged.   The beneficial part of it was that I could not and did not have to write in school, nor do any written homework. 

When our store was ready to be opened, the district government in neighbouring Pruzany, decided to send a commission to check the distance from the store to the nearest church.  There was in pre-war Poland a law, stating that a liquor store had to be a certain distance from a church.   Any church, Catholic or Orthodox.   Yet, it was not applicable to a Synagogue.  It says something.  The nearest church, a Russian Orthodox, was on Kamieniec Street.  The inspectors set out to measure the distance using a 50-meter long tape.  Every 50 meters, they used to put there one of the many onlooking boys.   So they could see how many 50-meter lengths they had.  Why they could not mark down on a piece of paper the 50-meter lengths they had measured, should be accredited to the many Polish jokes going around. 

One of the boys asked to stand in was a friend of my cousin Alkhonon (Harold) AUERBACH.  The 12 year old, asked me , a 6 year old, what it was all about.  I guess my answer was not clear enough to him, and he asked my cousin Harold to explain.  I am mentioning this episode because he, Harold, is the last of the family that I can remember seeing in Shereshev from that moment until the day of their departure a couple months later.  At the end, the distance from the store to the church was sufficient and the store opened on time. 

The summer arrived and with it the summer vacation.   My mother as far as I can remember, was always a bit on the heavier side and suffered from diabetes.   The last couple of summers or springs, she used to go to  a spa resort in the Carpathian Mountains called Krinica.   Leaving a nice bit overweight, my mother used to come back a much slimmer person.   Somehow she used to get back her weight by the time she was going to Krinica the following year.   In her absence, besides the maid, one of our grandparents, my mother’s parents, used to stay with us.  They stopped doing it when our father came back to Shereshev permanently. 

The first time my mother took in a Jewish maid was in 1930. She was “Nyomka BENJAMIN´s¨ granddaughter.  Why do I mention the grandfather, instead of her parents?  No.  She was not an orphan.   It is because that “Nyomka” was the patriach of the “Pampalach.”  The best way to describe the Pampalach is as a kind of tribe or clan, which consisted of around 25-30 families, related to each other biologically or by marriage and whose common denominator was a chronic poverty that afflicted all of them.  Because of that poverty they were compelled to take up the not so dignified trades and professions in the Shtetl.  While some of them managed to eke out a living like many other poor Jews in the Shtetl, the others had to supplement their meager income by being brokers to horse dealers (in itself not a reputable occupation) as well as horse skinning, which took place only when a horse died from sickness, over work, or age.  

That girl, by the name of Tzivia, did not stay with us too long.  She spent the days with us, meals included, but went home to sleep.  Once I recall, someone from her family, brought in some food for her in a tiny pot.   It was some kind of a treat.   She began to eat it at once.  To our question as to what it was, she said that it was an unborn calf, which was taken out from a just slaughtered cow. We turned away in disgust.

It was summer 1930, my uncle Shloime received his so-called “First Papers” after living in the states for 2 years.   That gave him the right to apply for the rest of his family to come over.   That is, his wife, my Aunt Esther-Leiba, and their children, that were still in Shereshev.   The oldest son in Shereshev, was Avreml, (Abraham), who meantime married a girl from Shereshev, by the name of  Channa (Anna) MAISTER, an extra ordinary beautiful girl, the daughter of Daniel the blacksmith and Malca.  The hot love affair between Abraham and Channa was no secret in the Shtetl.  Of which some 40 years later, my father’s cousin in Israel, Chaim SHEMESH said to me that a best selling novel could have been written about that affair.

Shortly after the marriage, Abraham left for Argentina, leaving temporarily his wife in Shereshev with her parents, until he was able to bring her over 4 years later.  Left in Shereshev, were my uncle Shloime’s 2 daughters, Chvolke (Helen), and Rose and 3 sons, the oldest Leepa (Leo), the second Alkhonon, (Harold,) and the youngest Eli (Elijahu).  The day of their departure came, the tragedy of parting in those days, is difficult to comprehend, for departing as a rule was forever. More so when parents part with a child like what my grandparents went through 2 years earlier saying good-bye to their son, my uncle Shloime.  Now the time came to say good-bye to his wife and children. Knowing how much my grandparents loved their children and grandchildren and their devotion to them it is heart wrenching for me to think about it even today.  My aunt Esther-Leiba was also leaving behind her parents, two married sisters and a married brother all with children.

There was a kind of tradition to the way people used to leave Shereshev. you fill up a couple of boxes or crates as well as a couple sacks with what was considered indispensables in the new world, like samovars, copper pots and pans, dippers, candlesticks, feather pillows and comforters, some personal clothing etc. Loaded onto a hired wagon and while the wagon owner was holding the reins to make sure that the horse proceeds very slowly, those departing were following the wagon, entering every house they pass to say good bye to the residents. After all we all new each other from birth.

The families of those living in the houses used to start escorting the departing from the start and as they made the stops house by house some of the residents used to come out joining the family in escorting. And so the crowd grew, couple by couple family by family through the main street Mostowa turning right on Pruzaner street to the very end of the Shtetl. At that time almost half of the Jewish population was around and behind the departing who were crying with the escorting.  In this very same way we accompanied my aunt Esther-Lieba and her children. I remember crying as we got back home. How much I understood of what was happening I don’t know. It is quite possible that I cried in sympathy with my mother who cried bitterly. I remember the heap of money my father put in front of me to quiet me down as I was sitting on a table. A few days later he took it back in the form of a loan.

Despite the fact that my mother and her parents, my grandparents Laizer-Bear and Freida-Leah, had two years to come to terms with the idea that my aunt and children would be leaving, it was a very difficult moment from which I don’t think they ever really recovered.  For my mother their departure was even more difficult and her loneliness even greater a few years later when her parents, my grandparents, passed away. 

My aunt Esther-Lieba left behind in Shereshev her parents Moishe and Pesha WINOGRAD, a brother Israel and wife Genia WINOGRAD with children and two married sisters; Tzina and husband Feival LEIMAN with two daughters Sarah and Chaya, the second sister Ghytl with her husband Yaakov-Meir KABIZETSKY with five daughters.

In retrospect and in consideration of the events that took place only one short decade later, despite the pain and hurt of parting and the years of longing and yearning, it was a lucky moment, a fluke of events that got them out of Europe. Beginning with their oldest son Jacob, who was the first to set out across the ocean in 1921 and became instrumental in their coming to the U.S. thus saving them from Hitler’s clutches.