The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod Read Online Free Page A

town on a faster path to modernity—technological, commercial, cultural, social, and political. During the wars Trochenbrod had rubbed up against Russian, Austrian, Polish, and Soviet troops. Some young men had fled to distant cities to avoid the troubles in Trochenbrod or to attend yeshiva, and they returned more worldly wise; some had been taken into the military and were exposed to a secular world and nonkosher food. This all laid the groundwork for a Trochenbrod that during the interwar period had growing ranks of secularists, political movements from the far left to the far right, and businessmen whose enterprises reached out to the larger world.
    This is not to overstate the case. Trochenbrod remained surrounded by forests, far from any reliable transportation route for motorized vehicles, and completely and somewhat insularly Jewish. It continued to be a town, a complete town, governed by Jewish custom: always observing the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, always strictly kosher and following Jewish dictates, always filling up its synagogues, and always greeting visiting Jewish scholars with celebrations. For Jews who knew about the town and for most who lived there, this, together with its farming character, lent Trochenbrod an out-of-place and out-of-time almost magical quality.
    As the 1920s gave way to the 1930s, Trochenbrod was thriving again. Its economy was increasingly becoming the center of trade, artisans, agroprocessing, and light manufacturing for a region stretching in a radius of more than ten miles. Much has been made, and rightly so, of the uniqueness of Trochenbrod’s Jewish farmers at that time. One of the most eloquent expressions of the wonder of this was written by the Israeli writer Jacob Banai in his 1978 book Anonymous Soldiers :
    Sofiyovka is the name of a small Volyn town in which in the fall of 1938 the first Etzel 1 course took place, in which I participated. The Jews led their lives in Sofiyovka as if it was their kingdom. That is where I first encountered Jews who worked in agriculture. In Sofiyovka I saw Jews walking behind their plows; a Jew who takes his cows to the field, and when the time for prayer has arrived he stands in his field and prays as if he is standing in a synagogue.
    That picture deeply ingrained itself in my memory, and it was the first taste I had of our vision of a Jew in his homeland. I also saw children there, not organized in any activities, but actually small children playing in the fields, dancing and singing Hebrew songs. What a magical place was this Sofiyovka!!!
    Memories like this, perhaps reinforced by what lingered in the minds of children who left Trochenbrod at a very young age, and also the memoirs of people who left Trochenbrod well before World War I, have given many today the notion that Trochenbrod was essentially a farming village. In fact, by the 1930s, and perhaps well before that, no one in Trochenbrod actually made their living from farming. Although everyone worked their land to some degree, the livelihoods of most Trochenbrod families, or by far the larger part of them, now came from retail shops, leather-related businesses, construction trades, small-scale manufacturing, and trading.
    By now, growing numbers of Ukrainians and Poles from surrounding villages were employed in the town’s fields, houses, and sometimes even businesses. It became more and more common for people from surrounding villages not only to shop in Trochenbrod but also to sell things there house to house or from their wagons. Trochenbrod was, as before, one long street with houses, shops, workshops, small factories, and synagogues, but now also with public buildings like schools, a cultural center, the post office, and the constable’s office lined up along it. Many houses had already been rebuilt or were now being rebuilt, improved, and enlarged; and now most shops had their own storefronts and carried an ever-increasing variety of goods. As it embarked on the 1930s,