pdf available - Multiple Choices

The Road to Luboml
A Writer Retraces the Footsteps of Her Grandfather in the Ukrainian
Countryside and Finds Strength and Sorrow
By Toby Axelrod
Oct. 13, 1995
A few months before he died, my Zede told me
something was bothering him. His home-care
nurse had taken him for a drive in town, Great
Barrington, Mass. She drove around and around.
And suddenly, he said, they came to a town
exactly like his own.
"And we drove, and we came to a house exactly
like mine. And I went in, and it was just
the same as this." My Zede rubbed his forehead.
His waking dream confused both of us. But today
I understand his vision anew.
I see it as a premonition: of finding oneself
on a half-familiar road, feet crossing old pathways,
coming to rest in the empty space once
filled by the lives of parents and brothers and
sisters.
Last month, nearly ten years after my Zede,
Rabbi Yakov (Yank') Axelrod, rejoined the Almighty,
I returned to a place I had never seen
but that was familiar: Luboml, the Polish-Ukrainian
town where my Zede began life. He left
alone for America in 1925. Two years later, his
wife and their child, my father, joined him in
Great Barrington, where my Zede was rabbi of
Congregation Ohav Shalom for nearly 60 years.
My return is the rewinding of my
grandfather's exodus. I am traveling with Aaron
Ziegelman, who left Luboml as a young boy in
1938, and Fred Wasserman, director of the
Luboml Exhibition Project (see accompanying
story). Our journey has been mapped out by genealogist
Miriam Weiner of "Routes to Roots"
and her local representative, Vitaly Chumak of
Moldova, our interpreter and guide. As we drive
north from Lvov, Slava Rimar at the wheel, the
416
past becomes present; I have the dizzying feeling
of traveling backward.
We pass through Vladimir Volinsk, where
my Zede went to yeshiva, and Kovel, where he
had relatives; through flat farmland studded with
pine forest, along roads lined with tall topol trees,
reflective white belts painted round their wide
torsos.
At 35 miles per hour on broken roads, we go
back. An aproned woman sits on the grass, selling
apples from a basket. A man holding a stick
stands by the roadside near two cows and a goat.
A little girl wearing a white ribbon as big as her
head crosses the road with her mother.
We stop. Cows in a small herd dance across
the road like delicate ladies, their mincing legs
pressed together. Behind them are the stickwielding
shepherds: she in babushka, he in cap,
each flashing a silver-toothed grin.
A horse-drawn wagon lazily approaches carrying
hay, sacks of potatoes and an entire family
sitting on top, their legs dangling off the sides,
feet bouncing to the horses' steady clop.
Only the rubber tires are new, says Vitaly.
Life seems as I had imagined it to be 70 years
ago. But there are no Jews.
In cement letters taller than me, Luboml announces
itself. Mayor Pyotra Mochnukaccompanied
by two girls in Ukrainian costumepresents
a huge, round bread topped with a tiny dish
of salt.
"Welcome to our town and your town," he
tells us. "We have the same good people today
as many years ago." He kisses my hand.
Many years ago, Luboml was a Jewish town.
Jews were here since the 14th century. In the late