Trochenbrod had become truly a regional town.
One sign that this was happening is the town’s appearance in Poland’s first official “Illustrated Directory of Volyn,” published in 1929. The directory listed only places that were economically or touristically significant, and Trochenbrod was considered one of those. The entry for Sofiyovka reads,
Eleven kilometers east of Trostjanetz is Sofiyovka. It is an industrial town.… The easiest access route by rail is through the Kivertzy station (22 kilometers). The main industry is leather-working, and there are over 20 small leather workshops. In addition there are many Jews there; they are farmers. The town is built on pilings on swampy land, and during the spring snow-melt the water rises to the floors of the houses. There is a new and sizeable wooden church, built with pine and oak, funded by the Radziwills.
Yes, a church! More on this later.
Also in 1929 there was an entry for Sofiyovka in Ksi ȩ ga adresowa Polski , a privately published Polish business directory. The entry listed about ninety nonfarm businesses in Sofiyovka in a wide variety of sectors that included shops, workshops, small factories, and traders. Next to each type of enterprise appear the names of the proprietors of those businesses. Many prominent Trochenbrod family names show up there—names that today are spread throughout North and South America and Israel, and also throughout this book: Antwarg; Blitzstein; Bulmash; Burak; Drossner; Fishfader; Gelman; Gilden; Gluz; Halperin; Kerman; Kessler; Potash; Roitenberg; Safran; Schuster; Shpielman; Shwartz; Szames; Wainer. In this Ksi ȩ ga adresowa Polski entry the only distinctly Polish names in the long list of Sofiyovka business proprietors are those who run the government-monopoly vodka and tobacco shops.
The breadth of enterprises in this town as early as 1929 may be surprising at first, considering the extent of physical and personal devastation suffered there in the wars. But after having recovered in basic physical terms, stabilized in human terms, and settled into the idiosyncrasies of the Polish administration, around the mid 1920s Trochenbrod had begun to reclaim its place as a regional commercial center with renewed energy. And while some Trochenbrod families never recovered the economic well-being they enjoyed before World War I, and some now even scraped along mostly with the help of money sent by relatives who lived abroad, as the 1930s got under way, many Trochenbrod families were beginning to do relatively well and saw that a comfortable future might be possible in their town.
It’s a safe guess that a policy of economic diversification in order to promote growth and stability in Trochenbrod never crossed the mind of anyone who lived there. But, willy-nilly, that is what happened. Diversification of economic activity is a time-honored family strategy, especially among rural families, to pin down a dependable stream of income. Add to that the unusual range of economic opportunities presented by involvement of Trochenbrod families in both agriculture and town businesses, an entrepreneurial heritage handed down from urban roots, and a potential market that included a dozen or more villages in the area, not to mention three cities, and you have the formula for a community of people who would discover and seize a wide variety of economic opportunities. And once they seized one they immediately began to build on it.
A good example of this was Moishe Sheinberg. Moishe was somehow involved in the butcher business in Trochenbrod when he noticed that, like Jews, Polish people for some reason did not eat the hind quarters of cows. He figured that there must be lots of castoff cow rumps he could sell to Ukrainians. Indeed there was. He was able to buy these parts relatively cheaply and then sell them at market in Kivertzy. Moishe was, of course, strictly kosher: he would never eat the nonkosher meat he sold.
Then there was Avrum Bass. Avrum