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Oct. 1, 1993
The Sheltering Sky
How One Sukkah Holds within It Many Memories
By Toby Axelrod
All our huts are temporary, I guess. Right now the
home of my grandfather, Jacob, my Zede, in Great
Barrington, Mass., is unoccupied, slowly decaying,
letting in almost as much starlight and rain as
his sukkah was designed to do.
That sukkah is one-of-a-kind. Every year, after
Yom Kippur, Zedea rabbi who emigrated
from Poland in 1925-would enlist the help of a
neighbor to open his sukkah. Not a traditional,
transient structure, Zede's sukkah was a shed
separated from the house by a narrow alley
crammed with a hoe, rakes and other garden
tools.
The shed's peaked roof opened at the top,
via ropes and rusty pulleys attached to high posts
on either side of the structure. Zede, a little man,
his head covered with a black yarmulke and
pants held up with two belts, would stand at the
foot of a post and pull hard on the rope. With a
creak the pulley would start to turn. Slowly the
roof would open, revealing the latticework ceiling,
a Star of David at its center and last year's
s'chach corn huskspoking through.
Inside were a wooden table and several folding
chairs, obscured in later years by a jumble of
rags, boxes of old belongings, furniture and a
mirror. These would be shoved aside so we could
sit at the table and eat in the sukkah's moldy interior.
Though the building now is falling to ruin,
damaged by vandals and New England winters,
my memories are untouched. Like the temporary
dwellings of our Jewish ancestors in the desert,
my Zede's sukkah stands again through the telling.
408
I learned from him about telling. In his heavy
accent, he would speak of life in Luboml, Poland
(now Ukraine), at every opportunity. He didn't
need to close his eyes to rememberhe only
pointed his finger and the shtetl streets would
assemble, its inhabitants come to life.
"It was right in our town. I'll never forget it,"
began many stories, including my favorite one
of Sukkot in Luboml.
"I remember his name: Kalman Farvele. He
lived over here, and we lived over there," he
would say, pointing his finger. Farvele and his
wife, whose name never came up, lived near
Luboml's train station and operated an inn where
travelers "could get a bite to eat."
But the inn "was small, and he wanted to
enlarge it," said Zede. "So every year Farvele
would build a sukkahwith a foundationmaybe
15 feet closer to the road." After the holiday,
the new sukkah would become part of the
restaurant. Soon, on a road where "maybe two
horses and wagons could pass, now there was
room for only one to go."
The townspeople complained, but Zede
guessed the police had been bribed to overlook
the problem. The people persisted, declaring that
"Farvele could keep the sukkah for one week,
but when it came time for Simchat Torah it had
to go."
And now my Zede would begin to chuckle.
"I'll never forget it," he would continue. "A
man named Avrom Rachel Brandelhe was
strong like an oxhe picked another fella, a
strong guy, and they tied two ropes onto the
sukkah and they took the ropes on their shoulders."
The two pulled the whole sukkah into the
middle of the road.