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Sept. 16, 2005
Taking a journey into our history
Traveller finds life in former shtetl remains almost unchanged
for more than a century.
BARBARA TAYLOR FREEDMAN
In May of 2004, I went on a guided tour of eastern Europe that
began in Warsaw and continued to Krakow, Budapest, Vienna and Prague.
I visited the Jewish quarters in all of these cities and also spent
a day at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
While planning my trip, I realized just how close I would be to
"my" shtetl of Zhvanets in Ukraine, so I arranged a private
tour. I flew from Warsaw to the city of Lviv in a two-propeller,
30-passenger LOT (the Polish airline) plane. The flight took only
an hour and a half but, in that time, I entered the 19th century.
In Lviv, every modern amenity is available to the sophisticated
traveller, but when I left the city and drove into the country,
the world as I knew it changed dramatically.
My tour organizer, Alex Dunai, met me at the airport. He is a large,
happy man with a big smile who greeted me with a bear hug, as if
I were a long-lost relative. Dunai had organized my tour and arrived
with my guide, Svitlana Kovalyk, and my driver, Bogdan Melnik, who
drove a four-door, older model Mercedes. Kovalyk is fluent in five
languages. Melnik spoke only Ukrainian. My tongue and the Slavic
languages were not yet acquainted.
So, I was to begin my journey to Zhvanets, my village, my shtetl,
where my great-grandfather, Hanech Shapiro, and all 10 of my great-uncles
and -aunts were born and my grandmother, Rifka Shapiro Taylor, was
married. The village is so small that it is not even on a current
map.
Although the actual driving distance was short by North American
standards, only 300 kilometres, the drive from Lviv to our overnight
stop at Kamianets-Podilskyi took five-and-a-half hours. The trees
lining the highway reminded me of drives in the countryside almost
anywhere in the world – except here I saw a few people on the
road in horse-drawn carts.
As we drove, we passed many small villages. The homes are set back
about 15 to 20 feet from the road and the yards are fenced. On the
road side of the fence, benches and chairs are placed where the
neighbors come out to sit, chat and gossip.
We passed elderly men and women tending the family cows as they
grazed in the grassy areas between the fences and the highway. All
the women I saw wore scarves, babushkas, tied around their heads.
I saw countless people of all ages working in their gardens or on
larger plots of land behind their homes. This wasn't just a pastoral
scene from the 19th century. This was survival. Twenty-nine per
cent of the 47 million people in Ukraine live below the poverty
line. Every family in a rural area has a cow, chickens and a plot
of land. Their crops are vital to their daily needs. Potatoes are
a staple.
We arrived in Zhvanets the next morning. At the turn of the 19th
century, according to an 1897 census, Jews made up 67 per cent of
the population in Zhvanets. I did not expect to find any living
relatives there, as my ancestors, the Shapiro and Taylor families,
left between 1904 and 1912. In 1941, the Jewish population was totally
annihilated in Zhvanets and the surrounding areas.
We were given a tour of the Jewish cemetery and the former Jewish
area by Petro Bratvanovych, a sprightly 92-year-old historian. We
drove first to the ruins of an old synagogue overlooking the Zhvanchik
River, which had once been used for defence. There were a few broken
tombstones lying about and a cow grazing in the field. It was sad
and made me feel very strange.
We then went to the Jewish area near the marketplace. Bratvanovych
pointed to a couple of homes and said, "That was Guttmann's
house," and, "That is where Seltzer stored his wares."
We saw the site of one of the original synagogues, part of which
is now occupied by a bakery; the other, an empty, overgrown lot.
My Bubbe Rifka may have been married there.
Then the mayor, Mykola Borysovych Makovski, or Nick, for short,
joined our group and we all continued on to the cemetery. It was
like being in a Tolstoy novel.
We walked into the woods to see the Jewish cemetery. I felt quite
emotional. The stones that I saw were tilted, leaning towards the
ground, but did not appear to be broken. I scraped many layers of
moss off one of the stones.
We stopped at different points around the village and met some of
Bratvanovych's former students. One was an 83-year-old lady who
remembered lighting candles on the Sabbath for a Jewish family.
The next morning, I decided to return to Zhvanets to have a quiet,
more reflective look at the shtetl. It was market day and we arrived
at the square just in time to see that, over a period of 100 years,
not much had changed. People were selling and people were buying.
There was a hatchback station wagon with the back open, displaying
a pile of freshly baked breads, including round loaves that looked
like challot. Many people were selling shoes. They were displayed
on blankets on the ground and on the hoods of cars. It reminded
me that Bubbe Rifka had gone to Kamianets-Podilskyi to have her
wedding shoes repaired.
I could see in my mind's eye what the village square would have
been like in the 1800s. I could hear the haggling over a loaf of
bread or a piece of fish for Shabbat.
I am thrilled that, despite my trepidations, I decided to embark
on my small journey. It was small in terms of distance and time,
but will loom forever large in my memory. I had the privilege and
the opportunity to briefly glimpse the life that my great-grandfather,
great-uncles and great-aunts and my bubbe and zayde lived.
I bless my family for their courage – courage beyond anything
I can comprehend, in leaving a small dot on a map in Ukraine to
journey across the ocean. They were no longer able to endure the
hardships, the poverty and the pogroms. Yet, they endured conditions
on the ships that we can't even imagine. They had no money and they
did not speak English. But had they not left, I would not be here
to tell their story.
Barbara Taylor Freedman is a member of the Jewish Genealogical
Society of B.C.
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