My Little Life

MY

LITTLE

LIFE

BENJAMIN VINAR

Copyright © 2014 Benjamin Vinar.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-0739-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-0741-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-0740-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014910408

Archway Publishing rev. date: 08/22/2014

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1 Beginnings

Chapter 2 Loss of Paradise

Chapter 3 Local Types

Chapter 4 Coming to America

Chapter 5 First Glimmerings

Chapter 6 Our House and Neighborhood

Chapter 7 Childhood Terrors

Chapter 8 Childhood Trauma and Illnesses

Chapter 9 Early Childhood

Chapter 10 Public School

Chapter 11 Hebrew School

Chapter 12 Relations with Other Children

Chapter 13 Childhood Pleasures and Amusements

Chapter 14 Life with Father and Mother

Chapter 15 Religious Life

Chapter 16 Recollected Scenes

Chapter 17 High School

Chapter 18 The Musical Life

Chapter 19 Growing Up

Chapter 20 Mother’s Impact on My Life and Thinking

Chapter 21 Hyman

Chapter 22 Leaving Home

Chapter 23 Law School

Chapter 24 The Army

Chapter 25 Rochelle

Chapter 26 Mother’s Children - Growing Pains

Chapter 27 My Law Office

Chapter 28 Who I Am Is What I Think

Chapter 29 Reflections

Valediction

Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more; it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

—Macbeth

January 25, 1998

PROLOGUE

I am sixty-two years old, racing rapidly toward sixty-three. I do not feel old; I have never felt young. From Washington a great scandal surrounding the young President of the United States is unfolding by the hour on every television channel. He may go down in disgrace, but he has gloried for years in a meteoric rise to the top of the nation’s society which, in this decade, is the same as the top of the world’s society.

Dreams dreamt in my childhood years have remained nothing more than dreams for me. Great accomplishments that I imagined for myself as a child were always far beyond my reach. Existing in a corner of my profession and subsisting modestly, I look into the mirror of the past at the person I was what seems so short a time ago and find that most of the mirror is blank. Events and people that were so much a part of me I thought they would be stamped forever in my memory are gone—erased—and nothing but impressions remain in their place. Soon those, too, may disappear, as the past fades ever faster and what remains of the future hurtles forward with an undeniable gravitational pull.

I am therefore taking stock, before it is too late, to record what remains of memory, so that my children may have a picture, however sadly abbreviated, of where they come from and what motivated me and who their grandparents were—something I sorely miss and wish I had been left. Those antecedents, however humble and perhaps insignificant in the scheme of things, yet burned so bright in my early years that I do not want what is left of them to be wholly blotted out.

They are not the stuff of which presidents or mighty achievers were made. But they are the combination that went to form four lovely children, my son and three daughters, in whom I see so many of my own failings and what may pass for virtues, renewing themselves seemingly for eternity. And so distinctly I recognize my own emotions and passions in them. And I do so love and empathize with them and their sadnesses and their little joys and pleasures and their righteous anger because, more than anything else, my existence centered on emotion, not intellect, accomplishment or reason. I adore their sympathy for misused friends, their unwillingness to abuse a trust, their little nobilities of soul which will surely pass unnoticed by a callous world but without which they would have been a disappointment to me. Their emotions, their feelings, make them precious to me, more than anything else ever could.

Who, then, am I, after all? Who were my mother and father?

BEGINNINGS

CHAPTER 1

MOTHER

On October 12, 1896, as the Nineteenth Century was drawing to a close, my mother was born in a little town named, variously, Ostrog in Polish, Ostrov in Russian and Ostroh in Yiddish, in Volhynia, a piece of the Russian pale that was the darkest corner of Jewish life. Three and a half years before that, on April 30, 1893, my father was born in the same town. They came from different social strata and it was not romance but literally the fortunes of war that brought them together as they—together with many others—became fugitives from a disintegrating society that had once been rock-solid.

The town of Ostrog was a largely Jewish community of about eight thousand souls, living among five thousand Christians¹ and a few dozen Moslem tatars. It is difficult to imagine such a little backwater as a treasure house of Jewish history, but such in fact it seems to have been. It was the home of no less than the Maharsha (Rabbi Shmuel Eliezer Idlish), one of the most outstanding Talmudic commentators, together with other Torah luminaries. Before Poland fell to its Russian and German neighbors, the town was an important border outpost for Poland. Its alternate name of Ostrog may derive from the Polish word for a spur, ostroga. The town’s great synagogue served as a fortress which, in times of invasion, was manned by crews of the town’s Jewish and Christian communities together.

Ostrov or Ostrog sat in Volhynia, the eastern-most province of the short-lived state of Poland that replaced the kingdom swallowed up two centuries earlier into the Russian empire by Catherine the Great when she, Austria and Prussia divided up what had once been the Kingdom of Poland among themselves. That province lay in a corridor between the virulently Jew-hating province of White Russia a hundred miles or so to the north and the (if possible) still more virulently anti-semitic Ukraine practically next door to the south and east. Volhynia was not a part of historical Poland but the western-most branch of the Ukraine, the western half of which the crippled giant of Russia lost to the armies of the new Poland in the aftermath of the First World War and which it forcibly re-annexed to the Ukraine after the Second World War. The Yiddish I learned and spoke at home is indigenous to the Ukraine. It is no more Polish than it is Lithuanian or Galitzean, and I have as much difficulty understanding the pronunciation of Polish-born Yiddish speakers (with their oys where we say ai, their oo’s where we say ee and their aw’s where we say oo) as they have understanding mine. Poland is Pailan, not Poylan, thou is pronounced dee, not doo, and kosher is koosher, not kawsher.

In what should be the finest years of a young woman’s life my mother was destined to see her town occupied, in turn, by German Army troops, Bolsheviks, Ukrainians, tatars, cossacks, and finally the Poles, who at last reclaimed their own. None of these brought the slightest succor for the Jews who suffered—and many of whom died—through their invasions and occupations.

Ostrov² in Russian means island. The town of Ostrog or Ostrov lay in the bend of two connecting rivers, the Horyn (in Russian, Goryn) and its tributary, the Vilya. Fortuitously, or by some irony of fate, when my parents blundered from Russia through the United States to try to establish a new home, they settled in the City of Rock Island, Illinois—a city likewise located in the bend of two connecting rivers—the Mississippi and its tributary, the Rock. Neither city was an island. Ostrov owed its name to the fact that the rivers surrounded it on three sides and led its inhabitants to think of it as a water-surrounded island. Rock Island drew its name from the two-mile-long limestone island in the Mississippi River adjacent to it, on which a fort had been built in 1816 and which later became Arsenal Island. A two-storied wooden block house (the second story set at 45 degree angles to the first floor) with cannon ports was set up there in 1916 on the centennial of the building of the fort, and for all that most people now know it could as easily be one of the original block houses that was built with Fort Armstrong.

Mother was one of nine children born to BenZion and Oodel (Adele) Sheinman, of whom only three reached their teens, and only my mother and her sister Rokhel lived to maturity. Hindeh, who appears as a lovely blonde child alongside my mother’s darker version in an old daguerreotype, died of leukemia around the age of twenty. My mother’s other little siblings, boys and girls, died of such childhood diseases as croup and diphtheria when they were infants. Mother described how she would try to climb into their cribs and be with them when she heard them coughing out their lives, and how my grandmother chased her away to prevent her contracting their illnesses. Probably she need not have bothered. Mother and Father both had iron constitutions. I recall hardly a day in our lives together when either of them had so much as a cold. Well into old age neither of them ever needed prescription eyeglasses, though they used dime store glasses to read. (Father sneezed a great deal, and frequently wore galoshes, even on sunny winter days, to prevent the spread of what he thought was an incipient cold. Only late in life when such things became common knowledge did my parents realize he was suffering from an allergy.) In an age before modern medicine, and in one of the more backward countries of the earth, the fact that a child managed to reach adulthood was an indication that she had the genetic make-up to assure continued resistance to disease in adult life.

Lung and throat diseases like diphtheria and smallpox were not the only threats to life abounding in the air and water of eastern Europe. Most frightening to its inhabitants, judging from its constant invocation by Mother as a curse word, was the deadly and highly contagious cholera, which once passed through Ostrog when Mother was a child. In those days there was no known cure or remedy for it, and it occupied the kind of mystique in my mother’s mind that cancer holds in the public mind today. To contract it was virtually an assurance of a painful and unavoidable death within a matter of days as the victim dehydrated from ceaseless vomiting and diarrhea. These were the hurdles that only the fortunate or those with the constitutions to resist such diseases were able to overcome and survive into adult life.

Genetic resistance to disease, however, was not enough to preserve the life of my mother’s sister Rokhel in the hostile Europe into which they were born. The lives of Rokhel, her two little daughters Henya and Lucy, and my mother’s mother were snuffed out by the Germans near the beginning of World War II, when they were led to the forest with the rest of the Jews of the town, stripped and left without food or water for days in the heat of summer before being machine-gunned. One of the more vivid memories left to me is my mother, in all the years after that, staring at the wall and crying, remembering them. The world was not kind to her—not as kind as it was to the murderers of her family, whom the Marshall Plan promptly restored to economic health and whose offspring enjoy all the good things life has to offer.

Mother and her children would have suffered the same end to their lives but for the route to America that severe privation and the specter of starvation caused her and my father to take in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. The Revolution was the single largest factor in my parents’ lives. Until it came their lives, even in the punitive environment that their Russian and Polish neighbors and government created for their Jewish inhabitants, seemed golden from their limited individual perspectives. After the Revolution nothing would ever be the same or as good for either of them. Yet I should not complain of the Revolution. Without it I would never have come to be, nor would my brothers. It was the Revolution that was the cause of my parents—until then a most unlikely match—being brought together, marrying, and, finally, moving to the United States.

My grandfather BenZion was the owner of a tailoring establishment that served the local nobility and bourgeoisie, or so Mother told it to me. He employed a number of workers, and made fur coats and pelerines for landowners and military officers. Mother told me he was well enough known that people came to him for his work from quite a distance. According to Mother her parents were well off for their day. They lived in a house in town, on a paved street near the post office. I remember seeing it in a tiny photograph Mother had of her street. It seemed a little house, not at all impressive. But she assured me that the homes of many of her Jewish townsfolk were far poorer. I used to assume that Mother was gilding the lily in her descriptions, but discovered later from books that were written about the town and its residents after the Germans destroyed them that everything she told me was accurate. Pinkas Ostro, or Notebook of Ostro, edited by BenZion H. Ayalon-Baranik, a book written half in Hebrew and half in Yiddish as a memorial to the town and its murdered inhabitants, includes Mother’s father in its sketches of the population of the town. He was prominent enough to merit mention even though, as the editor notes, he was fortunate enough to have died before the tragedy of Ostrog. Here is the description it gives of him:

Bennie Sheinman was an especially popular ladies’ tailor in Ostrog and its environs. He was a talented craftsman who created high quality products. He was much in demand, and regularly employed more than ten workers. He was well situated and owned a house on Third-of-May Street, one of the nicest streets in town. He allowed his children to study [apparently this was not the general rule] and was an exemplary man and father [Mother adored him]. He was a modest man, one with a big heart and an open hand. His wife Adele was exactly like him. She was widely known in town for her modest readiness to help any Jew who came to her in need. Bennie Sheinman had the good fortune to die a natural death shortly before the world catastrophe, in contrast with his wife Adele, their daughter Rokhel, her husband Zusia Shambon and their children Lucy and Henny, all of whom were killed by Hitler’s murderers.

In the only photograph I have (or, rather, my daughter Jacqueline has) of him he appears dapper, a large mustache curving below his nose. If pictures do not lie—and in those early days of photography the subject’s facial expression was far more natural and less posed than in the so-called candid photos of our time—then my grandfather was a very friendly, happy man, judging by the way the sparkle in his eye and the openness of his smile come through. According to my mother, that was in fact his personality. How unhappy for him that in the end his little fortune was to disappear in the Revolution. His life was to end in a bout with pneumonia which Mother attributed to his having served a term of imprisonment in a damp and dank Russian prison for the very Jewish crime in the Russian pale of draft evasion. Mother told us stories of the prison mates he met there—a pickpocket who demonstrated his prowess with Grandfather’s gold watch comes to mind; the rest I have forgotten.

He was to be the more fortunate of Mother’s parents. My grandmother, Oodle, was to end in a mass grave in a forest outside her town on a hot August day in 1942 (the year may be wrong—the month is not). Before that August day the town’s Jewish residents suffered daily tortures at the whim of the occupying German army. One incident recalled by Joseph Galitzki in Pinkas Ostro involved a pair of heavy-duty shoes made by a Jewish shoemaker for the commanding officer. The commandant said he didn’t like them, and ordered the head of the Judenrat to bring ten Jews for him to execute as punishment for giving him unsatisfactory shoes. The members of the Judenrat rendered themselves up, rather than picking anyone else.

I recall a small photograph of a square-jawed matriarch, walking with her daughter Rokhel and Rokhel’s little girls, the photograph taken a few years before all of them were killed. Mother described my grandmother as a woman of an iron personality, very much the disciplinarian of the household. It was to her father that my mother—little Bassie—would run in order to escape her mother’s scolding, even as her great granddaughter, my daughter Jackie’s little Bassie—ran to her very loving father for comfort. True to form, my daughter is the stern disciplinarian of her household.

Mother’s recollections of her girlhood were idyllic: of carriage rides through Polish forests to a country dacha for a summer vacation, with wolves (probably supplied by a child’s imagination) howling in the distance a la Count Dracula, of education in a gymnasium where she was awarded a gold-leafed volume as a prize in one of her subjects (probably literature—Mother had a ferocious memory for poetry and used to entertain me hourwise with translations into Yiddish of the poems of Pushkin and Lermontov, which she still remembered by heart), of the drama of living in the middle of the First World War, replete with bombardments (including one where her father was caught in the outdoor privy when cannon shells began to fall), investment of her town by the German Army, and the spectacle of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath in Poland—a series of invasions and counter-invasions from Ukrainians, tatars and cossacks that resemble nothing so much as the fearsome scene in the Balkans of the late 1990’s after the falling apart of Yugoslavia. It may sound strange to describe these latter adventures as idyllic, but in the mouth of a master story-teller like my mother that is how they seemed. In her stories of how—to get a ration of food for herself and her mother—she worked as a young secretary for the Bolsheviks when they seized control of Ostrog and marched in their parades, a red kerchief on her head, and disavowed all connection with them when they were driven out by the Polish Army (or it may have been, in the disordered series of invasions and counter-invasions of the day, by the Ukrainians or the Whites), Mother managed to make an entire world come alive for me in a thrilling way.

The word romantic could probably have been coined specifically to describe Mother. Her life with us was lived on two planes—on the mundane plane of reality where she rose before dawn every day, went to an unpaved low-ceilinged basement and loaded buckets of coal and banked the furnace and then spent the day cleaning, sewing, cooking, and tending to my father’s store below the house where we lived; and on the romantic plane of the mind, where she recalled an earlier life in storybook terms that in my childhood days seemed more real than life itself. How much of her recollection was accurate and how much colored by the years, by hardship, and by the youthful years in which she had lived what she recalled for me, I have no way of knowing. But some of it was surely true, perhaps most of it. And I am certain that for her the memories were not invented but absolutely true, whether or not all of them actually happened the way she recalled them. Hers was a nature that believed in the supernatural—that everywhere about her hovered ghosts and witches, and that witches rode the tail of the airplanes she flew late in life, howling in the wind. With such an outlook, can anything less than a romantic view of life emerge?

Hard as life was during the war and the Revolution that came after it, she found the excitement of youth in them, too. She remembered with romantic fervor a young Polish officer who was hidden in her house during the town’s occupation (I do not know whether by the Bolsheviks or by the Russian White army) and of the sad song he used to sing about how the spring would never come for him. Apparently he was an accurate prophet. For a short while she thrilled to the drums and bugles when she marched with her fellow workers in the Red parades. But in short order, everything fell apart. Revolution left Poland, independence came, but the prosperity of a family built on paper Russian money disappeared with the Russian government and the Russian ruble; and Mother and her family were doomed from then on to poverty.

Enter my father.

FATHER

Father came from a background at once very like and very different from Mother’s. His education consisted of one year of cheder. His father—my grandfather—Shlomo Chaim, after whom my oldest brother, Hyman, was named, died when Father was seven, and it is my understanding that at that point his formal education ended. According to Mother, he then lived an undemanding life, the favorite of his mother, my grandmother Dvossel. I am told he loafed around a good deal with boyhood friends, and took up cigarettes long before he reached his teens. That habit was to grow on him with life-threatening consequences. He carried it with him to America and, though he could ill afford it, smoked two packs of Lucky Strikes every day, coughing harshly from the (to me) foul smelling smoke hanging all around the house and his store until one year (when I was a teenager) his doctor convinced him the habit was damaging his heart. Nicotine patches and similar devices to ease the transition from addiction were unknown in those days, and even had they been available I sincerely doubt Father would have used them. He did not function that way. One day I came home from school and Father did not have his habitual cigarette in his mouth. From that time until his death in 1967 from a spreading bladder cancer, he never touched another cigarette in his life.

We should be careful not to conjure up the picture of a New York youngster hanging around street corners or candy stores and smoking cigarettes with a gang of delinquents. There were no street corners or candy stores in Ostrog, nor, so far as I know, any gang of Jewish delinquents (which is not to say, however, that there were no Jewish toughs in town). A more likely picture is that of a small town Iowa youngster at the turn of the last century with no responsibilities, loafing in the town park or fishing in the creek—someone, say, out of Hello, Dolly.

Father came from an initially smaller family than Mother but one which, except for my grandfather, managed to have all its members survive into old age. He had a younger brother Sam, and two older half-sisters, Brocha and Marym. Grandmother Dvossel had been twice widowed. One of the half-sisters was Dvossel’s daughter by her first husband; the other was a child of Father’s father, who apparently had been a widower matched with a widow when he married Father’s mother. I do not know which was which, but was told by Mother that in order of favoritism Marym got the harshest treatment, and I have the vague impression that she was induced to leave home as early as possible and seek her fortune elsewhere. If that is so it must be she who was Dvossel’s first-born, and probably was seen as a hindrance to her remarriage. Sam, the little boy, got saddled with the drudge work, and when he was only twelve years old somehow got passage to America, where he wound up in the same community as his half-sister Marym. He must have been a scrappy little boy and a doer. He found himself a beautiful young Jewish Litvack, Rose, with whom even Mother—who envied and detested Rose and Sam for slights, real or imagined—admitted he lived a life of lasting love and devotion. From the poorest of beginnings Sam and Rose as well as Marym and her husband (Shmayah Baker) worked themselves up to lives of wealth and comfort by the time Father, a broken and humble immigrant, came knocking—not too welcome—at their doors in or about 1927.

My grandmother Dvossel seems to have dealt in livestock of one sort or another, and sold meat products from her house. Apparently the family, though not particularly well off, did not want. From Mother’s family’s perspective, they were common, not part of the finer Jews of the community. The productive part of Father’s younger years was to go to the market to buy and sell occasional cows. Whether he dealt in horses I do not know, but he had a lifelong fondness for them that probably stemmed from his youth.

The sights and smells of the village life in which he grew up continued to appeal to Father long after he left Europe. When we children were growing up in Rock Island, I recall that cowboy movies hardly appealed to my mother but they were a favorite with Father, because he loved to see the cattle and watch the horses galloping. Once at a Ringling Brothers Circus to which we had free tickets (in exchange for permitting the circus to tape its posters to the show windows of the store), Father saw a troupe of mounted cossacks. I recall the joy with which he conversed with them in Russian, a tiny spark of the old life he had known brought back to him—so strange when I think back of the terrible time he had known at the hands of cossacks in Poland, and so telling of the tremendous hold that the loss of childhood has on all of us, even to the disregard of questions of good and evil. Even Biblically. Even in Isaac, the patriarch who epitomizes faith in God.

Jacob, the Talmud teaches, was a student, who loved hearth and home. Esau, his brother, was a strong and violent hunter who loved the great outdoors and had no use for study. Yet it was Esau, not Jacob, that Isaac loved best, and in whom he recalled with nostalgia the smells of the field when he gave him his final blessing. Father delighted in those smells, and so for that matter did I. The most delicious scent I have ever smelled, and which invariably recalls my childhood to me whenever (rarely) I still chance upon it, is the smell of new-mown hay or grass—sweet but not cloying, more beautiful than any rose. On hot summer evenings, for a brief respite from the tedium and sweat of the day, Father would take our family for a drive in the farmland at the outskirts of town. A welcome breeze blew through the wide-open windows as he drove, and with it the smell of the fields, the grass and the hay. Those were Father’s, and our, simple joys.

WAR AND REVOLUTION

The world changed forever in August 1914 and its aftermath, and my parents were swept up and many of their friends and relatives were consumed in the horrible age that year ushered in. World War came to Poland and Russia, as it would again in 1939, with more fury and destruction than anywhere else in Europe.

The corruption that had long gnawed at the Russian army as much as at the Russian court and society, found an army without ammunition or able generals, repeatedly defeated and forced back by the proficiency of German arms and generals. Cannon fodder was sought by the Russian military to fill the great gaps opened in their ranks by the enemy, and Father was then in his early twenties, ripe for the draft of Foniy Ganeff.³ By this time he was alone at home with my grandmother: Sam, Marym and Brocha were in the United States struggling to establish themselves and starting families.

Like many of his Jewish compatriots, Father had no feeling of patriotism for the king and government that treated their Jewish subjects in the same manner as the governors and police of our Southern States did their black population in turn-of-the-century America. Self-inflicted injuries to eardrums, toes and fingers in order to avoid the draft were the order of the day among them. Some such attempt at rendering himself draft-exempt caused my eponymous grandfather’s imprisonment. Father had a better solution. He managed to obtain deferments as the sole support of his mother, by paying the necessary number of gold rubles to the members of the draft board. The solution that had hidden Father from the tsar’s army would prove to be of no avail, however, when the new danger posed by the Revolution appeared.

As Russia’s battle losses increased, Ostrog came to know invasion. Cannon shells exploded over rooftops. At some point in time (probably with Russia’s capitulation and surrender of the Ukraine to Germany under Lenin) the German army invested the town. With German domination came German discipline—for good and ill. Order and cleanliness were enforced. Putzen sie Deutsch! was a command the citizenry was expected to obey. The German occupation also brought with it installation of a water and sewage system, something Ostrog had never had.

The fortunes of war brought reversals in positions of the armies. Either the occupying force was needed elsewhere to deal with crises (perhaps in France?) or some counterattack forced them to withdraw; or it may have been the Bolshevik Revolution that brought about the change in occupiers. I never got the order of events straight in my mind when I heard the stories from Mother as a child. But end it did, and not for the better.

The autumn of 1917 saw wholesale famine throughout Russia and the pale. In October the rotten timbers of the Russian Empire collapsed, the tsar abdicated, Kerensky’s provisional government tried to continue the overwhelmingly unpopular war and was overthrown by the Bolsheviks, and the country faced repeated onslaughts from White and Red Terror, as half a dozen competing interests and armies fought each other for control of the area.

First and foremost were the Bolsheviks, who were attempting to consolidate their control of as much of the tsarist empire’s territory as possible, claiming to be the legitimate new government of Russia. Opposing them was the White army of General Denikin. And set against both was the Polish home army, struggling to establish a free Poland. Within the vortex of these armies swirled other forces—Ukrainians, cossacks, and tatars. Somewhere—but not into Ostrog—there also entered a Western expeditionary force composed of American, British and German soldiers, for the purpose of aiding the Whites and ousting the Reds. This last indescribably stupid act would help for a long time to reinforce with popular support the coming Soviet dictatorship’s paranoid hostility toward the West.

In the wake of Naziism and the Holocaust, few Jews today and far fewer people other than Jews appreciate the terror that was unleashed against the Jews of East Europe by those events. Not since the days of the hetman Chmielnicki and his Ukrainians’ murder of an estimated fifty thousand Jews in the middle of the seventeenth century had a comparable destruction been seen by the Jewish people. The notorious Kishinev pogrom in the pre-war Ukraine (thereafter Rumania and now Moldava), which saw the massacre of approximately eighty or ninety Jews and the beating and maiming of several hundreds,⁴ touched off an international furor, led by none other than America’s President Theodore Roosevelt. The pogroms unleashed by General Denikin’s White Army, abetted by Petlura’s Cossack and Ukrainian allies, made Kishinev seem very small potatoes. When the fighting and the White Armies were finished (in 1921 or 1922) and the Poles were established inside Poland and the Bolsheviks controlled Russia, tens of thousands of Jews (some estimates have run as high as a hundred thousand) had been butchered, most at the hands of the Whites and Ukrainians. Much of this butchery took place in the dark corner of Russian Poland-Ukraine where my parents lived.

In a very real sense, the mass murders of Jews by the White armies and their allies (whom, it deserves to be noted, the Western democracies supported with men and arms) set the stage for the Nazi genocide that was to follow twenty years later. Nothing on the scale of these massacres had been seen in Europe (the Armenian massacres took place in Asia minor) since Chmielnicki’s time in the east and the Huguenot massacres in France the century before that. The scant sympathy the Jews who were murdered received in the West could hardly have been lost on the men who came to power in Germany.

As hostile as most of Europe was toward its Jewish inhabitants, nowhere could a more vicious and unreasoning hatred of Jews be found than in the Ukraine. Anti-semitism among the upper classes and the clergy in France, Italy and even Germany was tempered with disdain for or humor at the popular myths of blood libel and Christ killing that were brandished by the poor and the uneducated. Not so in Russia, and particularly not so in its southern Ukrainian province. No church in Europe, from highest to lowest, was so firmly and viciously confirmed in the mind of its hierarchy and priests that Jews were Christ killers and deserving of death as was the Orthodox Church of Russia. No ruler was so firmly convinced of this as the Tsar of All the Russias (one of which was the Ukraine). And in twenty years Germany would find among the priests and peasants of the Ukraine willing and eager recruits to practice on a monstrously more massive scale the same kind of atrocities they perpetrated on their Jewish residents during the period 1918-1921.

The viciousness of Ukrainian antisemitism certainly had much to do with the history of Jewish-Polish cooperation in the late middle ages, when the shoe was on the other foot and the Kingdom of Poland ruled the Ukraine and parts of Muscovy with an iron hand. That the Jews served their Polish masters as managers and middlemen was something the Ukrainian serfs and peasants must have held bitterly against them. When first they turned on the Poles with fire and sword, they killed and hated them as bitterly as they did the Jews, hanging them together with dogs and their slogan: Jew, Pole and hound, all to the same fate bound. But times changed quickly, and defeated Poles found it easy to join their Ukrainian enemies in attacking their erstwhile friends, the Jews.

The Jews’ service to the Poles could not have been all of the story that drove Ukrainian antisemitism. What part their theology played in embittering them against a people that their priests taught them should be accursed, who participated in dominating them, is something we cannot know; surely it played a significant role. But the most significant role, inevitably, had to be that of the Ukrainian psyche itself, just as the Holocaust was the satanic offspring of the peculiar German psyche.

Someone caught in the middle of a tornado cannot describe the cloud and funnel—he knows only the experience of being torn by the winds within. Someone lost in a forest and attacked by wolves can describe only what befell him, not what was happening throughout the forest at the time. My parents had their experiences. They are not the whole story. They were simply their part of the story:

Revolution and the collapse of the government brought the specter of famine which had haunted the poor of Russia to the doorsteps of all. My mother’s, and her family’s, prime concern became finding some means to eat. The (temporarily) conquering Bolshevik organization needed workers for its offices and marchers for its parades. Work for the Bolsheviks meant payment in kind with food. Jews who had never let treif meat touch their lips accepted whatever sausages and other food the Reds provided. Mother went to work for them, and marched with a red kerchief on her head when they held their parades. So did a great many in town like her. The motivation was not ideology, but hunger. Nevertheless, Mother recalled, she liked the bands and the music and enjoyed marching in the parades as something thrilling. At that time, realization of what it was she was being thrilled by had not yet set in.

One of the things the Bolsheviks did when they seized control in Ostrog was to empty the prisons. The streets became filled with men who had been convicted of all sorts of crimes, and life became increasingly fraught with fear. The Jewish residents had a particular fear of the tatars let loose from the prisons, who shared with the Cossacks a reputation for disdain for life and for the law. Looting began, along with intimidation and extortion of homeowners.

Trivialities could lead to tragedies. Mother recalled an incident in which a cigarette almost cost the rabbi’s son his life. My grandfather BenZion, it seems, smoked cigarettes. A gang of rowdies let loose on the town by the Bolsheviks demanded a cigarette from him. When they demanded more, he told them he had no more. When they pressed him he told them to ask the rabbi’s son, since Grandfather knew he smoked. The gang then turned to the rabbi’s son, who soon emptied his pack giving his cigarettes to them. When he ran out of cigarettes the crowd became angry, and a lynching was barely avoided.

Another thing the Bolsheviks did was to comb the territory they controlled for conscripts for the Red Army. With the Whites and the Poles battling them on all sides, filling out their ranks was essential. The Bolsheviks cast a net for draftees more efficient than that of the tsar’s army which Father had earlier bought his way out of. This time he was rounded up and placed in a camp in town with other conscripts. The prospect of serving in the Red Army did not appeal to Father. During his first night in camp he sneaked out, made his way to the riverbank nearby, swam across and made his way back to town. He stayed off the streets and hid in an attic for I do not know how long until the danger of being picked up again had passed (probably with the expulsion of the Bolsheviks). Then he returned home and, for a while, life more or less resumed its normal pace for him.

Then came the Whites, bringing with them Cossacks.

As soon as the Bolsheviks were driven out came the turn of the Jews. Cossacks rampaged on horseback through the streets, while Mother and her family and the other Jews of the town cowered in cellars. Anyone found on the street was attacked, and was either whipped, slashed or shot. Bullets shattered windows and looting was a foregone conclusion. With looting came terrorization and slaughter. Unlucky householders found their homes invaded by the quasi-military mob, who shot and stabbed whenever they felt the urge.

Father, then a young man in his mid-twenties, was at the home of a family friend when a mob of Cossacks broke in and played out a savage scene that could have been enacted by Comanches in the American Wild West or the Manson family in our own time: parents, children, cousins—all lay slaughtered in pools of blood when their tirade ended. Miraculously, my father somehow was left alive, together with the only other survivor of that unhappy household, a little daughter who had hidden in terror under the table (whether in the kitchen or dining room, I do not recall). The Cossacks decided to have some sport with Father, and forced him to dodge and jump as they swung their sabres at him. Tiring of their game, and sated by the quantity of blood they had already spilled, they didn’t pursue him when he snatched up the surviving child and ran with her into the street and his mother’s house.

Even in the midst of tragedy there was comedy. Father recalled an occasion when the Jews in town (here we would use the expression everyone in town) were worrying about one or another armed group rumored to be heading for Ostrog. A number of them had gathered in the street worrying about it when someone came running with news that a stranger had just been sighted. The gathered townsfolk grabbed sticks and whatever came to hand and assailed the newcomer before he could say a word. Only after they had displayed their bravery by thoroughly thrashing the unlucky fellow did they learn that this was a poor Jew like themselves trying to escape from wherever he had come. Though the retelling does not evoke any suggestion of humor to me, Father used to laugh heartily whenever he retold it. Perhaps the beating they administered to the newcomer was not so severe. Or perhaps this was just a real-life version of a Mack Sennett comedy enacted in a street in Poland.

The Whites did not remain in control of Ostrog very long, either. Poland, which had been robbed by Russia for so long of its territory, was nearby and its armies did not halt at the border of the former kingdom but took as much more as their armies could conquer. The Poles had no more use for their erstwhile Russian rulers to reimpose the rule of the tsars than they had for the Reds or the Jews who comprised part of their leadership. I was a child when Mother told me the stories of the battles that took place and the occupying powers that came and went. I do not remember the details or the order of events. But when it was over (or so people at the time thought), around the beginning of the 1920’s, both the Whites and the Reds had been driven out by the new Polish home army, and an independent Poland (and another competitor in a wide field for the title of Jew-hating champion of the world) was created. Its prime minister was the world-famous pianist Paderewski and its dictator the head of the Polish Legion and anti-semite, Pilsudski.

The change from almost two centuries of Russian rule created new problems and confusion for the non-Polish minorities—of which the Jews were by far the largest—who had been living in Poland during the era of Russian dominance. Until 1917 the official language of Poland was Russian. Business had been transacted, and books and street signs written, in the Cyrillic alphabet. Polish was not only not commonly used (except among Poles in social conversation)—it was illegal to speak it.⁵ Suddenly the tables were turned, and the Poles, newly in control of their own destiny, were determined to stamp out all traces of the hated Russian dominators just as the Russian bureaucracy had been to stamp out any smoldering cinders of Polish nationalism. Now Russian became the banned tongue.

My parents had no bone to pick in favor of the Russian language, but it was the only non-Jewish language in which they were fluent. Polish had been prohibited and was not taught in the Russian gymnasium Mother had attended, and it certainly was not in vogue in the one-room cheder my father briefly attended. But now Russian-language signs came crashing down, and the Latin alphabet and its strange consonantal spellings bloomed. Learning Polish became a necessity. Mother recalled an incident in the very early days of the newly established Polish state when she and her sister were travelling in a coach in which a Polish officer (Mother grandly titled him a colonel, though he may have been