The Village of Zastavia

My life began in the small village of Zastavia, or Zamostia, which lay in a valley, surrounded by gardens, fields, pastures and green rolling hills. Below the hills wound a silver-white river, whose official name we were told was the Leshno.

The village led a poor, quiet life. We lived from what God gave us; this one from a trade, this one from field-work, another from going to town to buy flour, cloth, lumber, or such supplies. A few dozen families pulled in a meager livelihood from working in Asher Guterman’s brewery, which was known thoughout the region for its beer. Outside of that, almost every householder had his own garden, with an animal - maybe a calf, which he raised himself on his own patch of green. Some would rent gardens and fields from the local landholders who lived in the Gentile quarter; the vegetables and produce from these and their own tiny gardens could be sold in the neighboring towns and villages: in Brisk, Kobrin, Orlo,Bialovezh, Vissok-Litovsk etc.

Quiet and peaceful was the flow of life in this village; still and smooth as was the flow of our river Leshno, which lay between the high, green-covered hills. Each one peacefully tended his garden. "By the sweat of his brow" did each one eat the hard-earned piece of bread with his own few vegetables, which the good Mother Earth provided to everyone in full measure.

But suddenly, just as the river would once a year storm over its banks, drowning the surrounding fields and sweeping away the wooden bridges, so also (from time-to-time) would there be a disturbance in the village. A little war, a fight between the Gentile quarter and the Jewish quarter which would destroy the usual idyllic peace of the village. This was not, God forbid, on account of the old, eternal enmity between the "camp of Israel", of the Jewish Quarter, and the "camp of the Phillistines" of the Gentile Quarter...this was merely on accound of an old quarrel over a piece of grazing land, just as Abraham’s field-hands used to fight with Lot’s field-hands in olden times.

The village of Zastavia was at one time, according to the stories of the old men, entirely a Jewish peasant-village. The whole surrounding area with its fields, gardens, and hills had belonged to Jewish householders, who were from the very beginning men of the soil. But little by little, for a number of reasons, the Jewish soil passed over into Gentile hands. If a Jewish peasant needed to arrange a marriage for his daughter, he might be driven to sell his strip of farmland, or his garden, to a Gentile; and with the money, he could put on a proper wedding with all the "seven blessings". If his son didn’t want to go serve the Russian Tzar and had to run off to America, he would again cut off a piece of land and sell it to the neighboring Gentile. If his grown children went off to seek happiness somewhere in the far-away, and the elderly parents simply didn’t have the strength to go out and push the plow, then the last piece of land would be sold to the local property-holder, and with the money they would enjoy their remaining "golden years". And so with the passage of time, the Jewish land fell largely into Gentile hands.

Zastavia also had a large communal grazing-field, which according to old legends had once belonged to a rich Jewish landowner, who had donated it to the village. For years, Jewish animals had grazed together with Gentile pigs. Not that the Gentiles didn’t have their own lush pastures, for their precious cows to graze on...but it seemed that they considered our miserable "Yid’s Pasture", as they called it, to be perfectly adequate for their pigs. It was painful for us to watch the pigs with their big snouts turning our Jewish pasture into a pigsty, but there was little choice....one was, after all, living in Exile.

But the more the Gentile quarter grew at the expense of the Jewish quarter, the more brash they became. They started looking for any pretext or opportunity to snatch away altogether the last piece of Jewish grazing land, so that not a single Jewish animal should have a place to stand. They would sometimes arm themselves with sticks, hoes, and pitchforks, and start a little war...but the Jews of Zastavia, who were themselves no pushovers, armed with implements from "the hands of Esau", would go out to meet the Gentile foe. Blood would flow from both sides. For the Jews, it was a matter of "sanctification of the Name", a case of "holy war", to uphold their Jewish honor and also to save and protect the Jewish animals from "Gentile hands".

Fortunately, these little wars would not last for long. The storm would quickly die down, and the village would soon go back to its normal, peaceful life, as though nothing had happenned.

Directly opposite, on the other side of the bridge, over the River Leshno, stood the City of Kamenetz-Litovsk, which was built on a steep hill upon which were clustered houses big and small, so that from a distance you would think that one stood on top of the other, that one was supported by the roof of a second. As though they held to each other in fear of falling (God forbid) into the deep "abyss" below.

This neighboring town, Kamenetz-Litovsk, which was so near that one might almost stretch his hand out to reach it, looked to the small-town Zastavia as the it were a really, really big city, something that belonged to a different world, from which we "villagers" shrunk back in awe.

Kamenetz was known as a city with learned scholars and students of wisdom. It posessed a dozen Houses of Study, among them a well-known, large and beautiful synagogue, which was something to be proud of; a children’s school for the education of the poor; a rabbinical college for local and visiting yeshiva-students; two cemeteries, an old and a large new one, which served the whole region with "eternal peace" .

Kamenetz was also known throughout the region for its old, historical walled tower, which with its size and height, reminded one of the Tower of Babel. According to old legends, it was built by a long-ago Lithuanian duke. And so that it should be strong as a rock and remain standing "for ever and ever", they made the mortar with egg-yolks instead of water. And so it was indeed as strong as a fortress and its pointed tower seemed to reach all the way to the sky. Flocks of black crows used to take shelter on its walls and ledges giving it an eerie atmosphere. With their endless crowing through the dark nights they cast a terror among the surrounding neighbors, as though in truth they were not really crows at all, but lost, sinful souls, assuming the form of these black, ugly creatures....

The "city" of Kamenetz also had a large market, with a long row of wooden shops. Indeed, from the outside they looked more like dog kennels than shops. But inside they were packed with every kind of merchandise: cast-iron pots, cakes of soap, boxes of nails, packages of tobacco, colorful bolts of cloth, red-colored peasant’s kercheifs, circles of bagels tied to a string, hardware - just about anything you could imagine. In front of the open doors would sit shop-keepers, male and female, all day long; in the summer, frazzled in the heat, and in winter, warming their frozen bones in front of large bonfires. But as soon as a peasant from the villages showed up, they would quickly spring to their feet, each one trying to drag the unwary villager by his sleeve into his own kremmel.

And in the big market days, not to mention the yearly fairs, when hundreds of peasants would come together from the surrounding villages to sell their produce, and in return would purcharse supplies - in those days, you virtually couldn’t rake it in fast enough.....there were Gentiles aplenty for every Jewish shop-keeper...

In contrast, our quiet little village of Zastavia, which lay on the other side of the bridge, had nothing to make anyone take note of it. It rested in the valley, surrounded on all sides as though cut off from the world. Its few dozen ramshackle, cast-away houses with their straw roofs were hardly visible. Living there altogether were perhaps five hundred souls. It had no more that two tiny Houses of Study and an old dilapidated communal bath which could barely hold itself together ...so that if you got out if it in peace you ought to say a prayer of gratitude. Other than the President of the Congregation, we had only one slaughterer, and two or three teachers of the Law. For any further communal services we were altogether dependent on the charity and largesse of the neighboring "city" (Kamenetz), which, like a clucking hen surrounded by its chicks, spread its wings over the nearby smaller settlements.

Between the city Kamenetz and the village of Zastavia there was no particular brotherly love. Because the "big-city" Jews from the other side of the river, who were for the most part merchants, shop-keepers, and tradesmen, used to look down on the small-town Zastaviers, as though we were indeed true yokels..."men of the soil", who spent the whole summer in the "boondocks" between our own gardens and the rented fields, eating black rye bread with sour green pickles. And so they gave us the name "Zastavia Pickles".

From the other side, the Zastaviers used to look at the big-city Jews "from the other side of the bridge" as drudges, pencil-pushers, gluttons and drunkards ... "shop-keepers with the souls of shop-keepers", who thought of their customer as an animal to be skinned...and for calling us by such derisive names, like "Zastavia Pickles", we paid them back with an even sharper, more scornful name: "Kamenetz Towers", which hit them right in the "seventh rib"...it meant that, even though those city-slickers might have full, over-stuffed money-bags, yet when it came to brains, to common sense....they had about as much as their might tower, which kept its nose pointing always to the sky.

Within Zastavia itself, however, there generally prevailed a feeling of comradeship. Indeed, sometimes there would be small disturbances and dis-agreements, such as Sabbath and holy days over an call to the Torah, the Feast of Tabernacles over the reading of a benediction, or simply on account of a piece of land that a neighbor had encroached on, or his animal had snuck into the other’s garden and made a mess: trampled on the vines of the young cucumbers; chewed up the leaves from the beets and radishes. The delinquent animal would get a licking which could be heard all the way to the Gentile quarter.

But it wouldn’t be long before peace would return, as is the way among neighbors, who had to look out for each other...

In those days of peace, when one neighbor would meet another, the first would greet the other with a hearty "Good-Morning", and be answered with a cheerful "Good-Year". If someone needed to load or unload a heavy wagon, a neighbor would soon show up to help, to lend a hand, - because it’s indeed easier with two. If an misfortune occurs...a neighbor is "fallen away", or "ascended his soul" we would put our work aside and come to share the grief together. But if a celebration should come along...a wedding in the village - then all, young and old, big and small, would dress up in their finest Sabbath clothes and come to celebrate, like true "guests of honor", because the whole village of Zastavia considered itself to be one, big family.