ZVI-HIRSH
ZAZULYER
(aka HARRY SIEGERMAN)
MY
STORY
In Shereshev
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I was born
in Shereshev, in the district of Pruzhany, in the ( see it in a picture)
At that
time the aromatic dark greens of the forest belt wound its patterns in all
directions, southward across
I was
brought to Chadree, a hamlet ten miles from Shereshov in the middle of the forest, as soon as my
mother was able to travel. My
mother used to say that I was but a year and a half old at a wedding in Chadree, which, years later, I described.
I recall that when I was
two years old, sitting on our cottage doorstep, the peasant women would come
wandering out of the woods with their scythes, carrying large bundles of
new-cut grass or firewood.
Some were driving their cattle home from the meadows in the interior of
the forest. Their songs combined
with the lowing of the cattle, echoing through the evening like a far-off
chorale inside a dark, receding wood. |
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Often I can still smell the zubrova (sweet hay) that the zubers (European bison) (see picture)
loved so
much. They were the only herd left in
I remember vividly my first impressions of the inky forest at night, and of music, in the form of half-chant, in connection with our prayers in honor of the full (?) moon. Father would put on his prayer-shawl and from our hut cross the lonely dirt road to where the forest began. And I always followed. We would stand blinking at the moon. I held the serviette-covered tray, on which lay a candle, the goblet, and the decanter of wine. Father would light the candle and pour the goblet full. His prayer echoed through the forest. He would drink first. Then I would sip, the powerful aroma striking my face. Father always made it apparent that a child’s participation made the occasion even more holy, as Mother’s and Sister’s beaming eyes confirmed when we returned to the hut.
The Czar’s forests are clean as a hound’s tooth, and the moon is the symbol of periodic renewal, cleanliness, and rebirth. For me, I recall, the moon seemed to emerge from far behind the dark treetops, and proceed to admire itself in the pond by the edge of the forest. The breeze would die to a whisper. The odor of pine was overpowering, even to one born in it. "The moon won’t look at me, Father. It’s winking at the stars down in the water," I’d complain. He would laugh till the forest seemed to join in to scare me. |
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The forest was a half-good, half-bad monster which swallowed stray children, but over which the moon kept a watchful eye.] (See forest flowers)
We had
our
misnagid
chants - these use a special kind of note, which it
is forbidden to print in the Torah.
They have to be learned and remembered by the person who leads
them. My father, having been tutored
privately in the country, could remember every note in the long services he
was often called into town to sing for holidays. Going to town for these was a memorable
event for us. That’s where, at the age
of three, I also first heard the regular cantors.
When I
was five and had to go to
cheder we moved reluctantly
back to Shershov - ten miles of green, solemn,
perpendicular trunks from Chadree -. My older
brother had already been boarded there with the family of a “Rebbe” who conducted a
cheder in his own home. Now a town
dweller, I was allowed to accompany my mother and the others back to my
forest on berry-picking expeditions.
With Mother as scout, no one ever got lost in the woods. It was as a returning visitor that I really
got to know them.
The rest of my knowledge of the forest I gleaned
from my father. He had worked for a
family that leased the local lumbering rights from the government. By the time we moved to town, however, that
section was cut. For a short period
after there were still smaller sections nearby on which he continued. He and the peasants would live in the woods
in makeshift huts of logs and bark and sticks. But soon he found himself following the
forest belt almost to the borders of |
In my village, only the few rich had ever heard of vacation. We had the Sabbath, and religious holidays. This could be why we were so religious. In fact we lived from Sabbath to Sabbath, otherwise life for us youngsters would have been awful, since on weekdays we were quite hungry. In the summertime, we could trudge to the forest to pick berries, or mushrooms, but not without a license - it was the Czar’s. Few folks had fruit trees or more than a tiny garden. If it wasn’t for the sauerkraut barrel we would have suffered from pellagra more than we did.
White Russia, or the Northern Ukraine, is a beautiful but flat country broken by rolling land, peat marshes, meadows, and (by far most memorable to me), great, clean, forest-belts. Our little town drew its so-called industry from the forest - particularly hand-made roof shingles, but also
tinsmiths, tailors, trunk-makers and shoe-makers. Other towns had their pottery, brick-firing sheds, and yards, or they were market centers for produce and products. Often the type and condition of the soil determined the prosperity of an entire town, both Jews and Gentiles.
In Shershov the Jewish people were the town, except for the few Russian officials - post-office,
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Cut down trees (and deer’s in the forest) |
assessor, and a policeman or two. The rest of the Christian population was peasants. With a few exceptions, they had their own plots of land which began at the outskirts. They played no part in the inside flow of events nor in the social life, except on Sundays and holidays when they would flock in by horse and cart to go to church. They also came to use the public bath, to trade their wares, and to buy their salt,Swedish herring, strips of iron nails, and shingles, or to order a pair of shoes. If they were prosperous, they might buy an overcoat or dry goods from the Jewish tradesmen. And last but not least, they came to get drunk. A wife would patiently tuck her husband away in the straw of their cart, and herself drive the horse back home. Sometimes the wife would even join her husband and sleepy kids for a much-needed half-sitting snooze. The horse would find his own way, breaking into a trot for the last few miles. He fed on a mixture of meager oats and hay, in a rickety barn which was a lean-to to the peasant's thatched-roof hut. This retention of animal heat was essential, because the peasant was poor and lived without money. Heavy clothing and shoe-soles were still made from animal skins, and a horse, ox, or wife drew the plow. Even taxes were usually paid in farm goods. These were raised on poor, rain-soaked, undrained land. Much of it was sandy, only good for potatoes, or the better kind, for rye.
Most of us
in town had a little garden-plot of potatoes and beans and a few carrots. I never knew or saw a tomato or melon. No grapes, either tame or wild. Berries, yes - the forest was literally
carpeted with blueberries. One could
pick them if one bought a permit. Those kids,
who were old enough to walk for miles to the forest and back, and help lug the
stuff, would follow our mothers to do so.
For this we were allowed to play hooky from school.
The local
officials did not interfere in our lives.
As a matter of fact Jew and Gentile got along famously there, for each
household was a veritable manufacturer.
Some had apprentices, and each brought his stuff to sell on the huge
market square from which the main road and the other smaller ones
radiated. Market days and holidays brought
jugglers, gypsies, and even one-tent circuses to the square. In the middle of the square were town pumps
for fire-fighting, and stalls where shopkeepers set themselves up during the
daytime. In winter they sat over
charcoal fire-pots to warm up.
It's
amazing how little we kids demanded of life.
We would go visit the square to listen in to a discussion of one of the
weekly newspapers. It came to but a few
citizens who could afford it, and from whom the rest got all the news of the
outside. Masticated, digested, and
rehashed, we would bring it into the houses sometimes before our elders heard
it.
I was
brought up in the Orthodox Jewish religion, but none of us were fanatical,
least of all my parents. My grandfather
had even maintained a private tutor, in the country. I am far from being an Orthodox person now,
having my own ideas about deity, creation, and science.
In our
district the Jews were of a strain typical of the forest belt that ran into
Not many
Jews lived easy, even in
Our sector,
for the most part, was Misnagdim (liberals), in
contrast to the Hassidic (ultra-orthodox) sect.
The few Hassidim and their families had their prayer meetings in their
little synagogue. Not knowing their
religious philosophy, we considered them a bit on the fanatical side - gooky. [In
The most
impressive thing I remember was the Sabbath.
We lived for its coming, since the meals were better and our clothing
newer and cleaner. Everyone who could
went to the services in the various synagogues and meeting-places. The "Shul,"
the main one, which stood off the square, had a special history. It was of classic architecture, and inside,
the east wall had the great altarpiece where the holy scrolls were kept. They were decorated with the lions of Judah
upholding the carved tablets with their ten commandments, all of this connected
by a delicate tracery of ornamental floral wood-carving. This artwork was the only kind I knew, except
the hand embroidery of roosters and flowers at home and the similar handiwork
on the peasants' garments.
I knew the
various Slavic people with their different dialects. I used to hang around at the market places,
and listen when they came to the house to visit my father. Yet I knew very little of the language. At home we spoke Yiddish - there was little need of the other languages. On one end of the street lived a Polish
family, and next door to us, past our garden, there was a White Russian
family. They, and their boy, and the
Polish girls, could speak Yiddish better than I. They all had their own short school terms in
connection with their own churches. I
knew their honest lives, their religious holidays, their art, their ikons, and their holy lithographs in full gorgeous colors,
at which I could only allow myself the luxury of stolen glances. Their literature I garbled in English, later.
I remember
the pleasant surprise I felt when I first discovered from a Gentile friend that
he had a Christmas. I had been feeling
sorry for him.
I remember
and know more about these people than some foreign-affairs experts who see
everything from the standpoint of what's-in-it-for-us. Their concepts of borderlines are phony. Their impossible demarcations will never
stand put, not in the Baltics, in
My father
married my mother for several reasons: because she was beautiful, a cousin, and
an orphan. The latter two reasons were
chiefly my grandfather’s. My father had
just turned sixteen and was, he used to claim, already a reliable grown
man. My mother was twenty; it was a sin
for a girl to pass twenty unmarried. My
father didn’t fight my grandfather. If
it was a mitzvah to marry an orphan,
a related orphan, fine, a cousin, fine. She was poor.
No dowry. Fine with him. Grandpa would provide until Father could.
She was
from the nearest little town, where we/they later moved. Father had seen her once, when he was about
fourteen, and she a very fair and copper-haired girl who had long before lost
her mother. He had barely seen a Jewish
girl other than the one or two pimply ones, older than himself, at the
manager’s (?) house, with whom he had practically grown up. Mother to him, despite having no formal
education, was citified and sophisticated, angelic, and had a rich Yiddish
vocabulary. She had the proper word for
everything. Yet she could barely sign
her name - though she could read Yiddish quite slowly.
My mother
was an orphan. My brothers and I each
married either motherless or fatherless girls, or both. That was the humanisitic
quality of our people showing through.
This proves that the "strong" do not conquer the weak.
My mother,
to this day, thinks that all men are honest and all women are good. Even though my father was
often gruff and angry - especially to me, who often got the beatings. One doesn’t beat a daughter, nor my brothers,
the older one a delicate child and another scrofulous youngest who took our
last pennies for cod-liver oil. That
left me. But I wasn’t robust. I was wiry like a rake, and sallow to the
point where I suffered from pellagra in winter.
Our neighbors would refer to me as the one who looks like a dead crow in
the snow.
When
Father came home to town from the woods for the Sabbath, he would give me my
weekly reading and translation assignment.
He’d yell at me, as a good strict father was supposed to, till the
window panes rattled.
A Jewish
father in the old country simply had to test out his children’s education. Religious education, that is; there was no
other worth considering. The first two years of cheder were spent just in learning the Yiddish alphabet and learning to
read. Worldly education, the luxury of addition and subtraction, was obtained
in the very early morning in a class conducted at someone's home for an
hour. There I learned to write the few
words I knew of Russian and Polish, and do sums in simple arithmetic. We kids would congregate there at seven in
the morning and be back in cheder by nine, meanwhile
having run into the synagogue to say our morning services. The religious teachers would look down their
noses a bit at these "worldly-knowledge" teachers. Not essential, they said.
We had to
stay at regular cheder
until five with a break to go home for lunch, unless we brought lunch and used
the extra time to play. In the winter,
we’d come back after supper for evening sessions until
In the old
government of
Once or
twice I was lost in the forest, because of the trees, I'd suppose. I had seen the road, and run to it, but
couldn't see our lone hut though it was only five hundred feet away. I took off in the wrong direction. The road took an L-turn to the north, and, if
I had kept on, I would have probably reached Shershov,
had I lasted that long. But a peasant
saw me and carried me piggy-back to my mother.
I was simply one of "our children," to him. The peasants were like brothers and sisters
to my parents. They didn't know the
meaning of hatred or anti-Semitism.
Why
not? The only reason I know is that the
Gentile church leaders there were not bigoted.
Had they been, during the time rioting spread through the rest of the
Russian Pale, you can rest assured we would have known. But when we moved to town, the priests
assured us that there would be no trouble.
If, on market days, a drunken peasant got troublesome, he would be put
away where he could sleep it off.
I know
about the Polish revolutionaries because my great-grandfathers hid them in
their attics, and in their forest hideouts, and brought them food at the risk
of their own lives. Simply because the
Poles had treated them as human beings, as equals, more or less. Up to that time, that is.
The still
forest is never still. The modernist
cannot cope with it. Only the traveler knows that the forest is up long before
dawn, and is everchanging in form and color and
texture. Only he who comes as a child,
poet, musician, in awe, wonderment, and humility, can know its sounds.
The trees
rub and scrape and gently creak at one another, giving off a sweet resinous
sound. In warm breezes the sounds are
like music; in arctic weather they are eerie with the weight of ice.
Even in its greatest silences, at night,
....a tiny mite will come whispering and mocking into your
eardrums. 'Bizzz-z-z; bizz-st dah? Are you there?
Are you ther-r-r-r?'
Patterns,
images, incidents, and haunting scenes begin to reenter my mind as if tumbling
and somersaulting over each other.
Things to tax, elate, and overcome me.
I wanted to stay on and receive these crazy-quilt mental notes for
storage purposes. But these moving
kaleidoscopic things were torturing my now feverish condition. It was a
thousand times more trying, than trying to take in, remember, compare, and do
justice to a large picture gallery of many galleries, and departments in one
session. Of water-colors, etching,
drawings, oil paintings and sculpture all together, is actually, physically
tiring.
My way to Canada
When I was
eight and a half, in 1903, my father wangled a steamship ticket out of my
mother’s brother in eastern
We went by
horse and cart to the rail line at Linowo, then
through Wilna to the Baltic herring
I
remember, in the
We landed
at
Our family
of seven then moved to
When I
came to