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to their villages singing hoarsely and with their
faces banged up from having gotten into fistfights
with their drinking companions.
The Village Population
In this area it must be pointed out that, except for
agriculture as practiced by the local landowners
and a few German and Czech settlers, the state of
farming was backward and primitive compared
with other areas of the country.
Many villagers, with holdings too small and
poor from which to make a living, were forced to
look for work outside the village and went to
work during the harvest for the large landowners
gathering potatoes, sugar beets, and other produce,
and during the winter they worked for the
lessees of the forests (mostly Jews), chopping
down trees and bringing them to the sawmill or to
the train
I remember well how the villagers wandered
around at the end of summer and the
beginning of fall, as great numbers of them went
through the city to the railway station, on their
way to their tasks and then on their way back
home. Sometimes they would stay over and
become "guests" of the train station for a day or
two, in order to continue enjoying the sight of the
trains coming and going.
Most of the village population was illiterate;
they were slow moving, apathetic, and lazy, and
their comprehension very slow. Ignorance was
deeply rooted, as if it were destined. The elders
were very pious in their Orthodox religion and
went to church quite often. There was a lot of
superstition among the village population, steeped
in obscurantism. They tended to believe any sort
of fabulous tale.
It's no wonder then that the city-folk, both
Jewish and non-Jewish, saw the muzhiks as inferior
an d took a superior attitude to them. For our
parents the word "goy" meant someone oafish
and silly, such as the village muzhiks, and for
every sin we committed regarding religious matters
we got rebuked with, "A goy like you!"
The term oorl (uncircumcised) also was part
of everyday speech when two Jews were having
it out in front of the non-Jew while haggling over
prices. When a muzhik and a Jew exchanged
THE EARLY DAYS 49
insults and rebukes in the heat of the moment,
while buying or selling, it was really viewed as
"nothing" and soon the injury was redressed and
the bargaining continued to a satisfactory conclusion.
The Jews had specific terms when referring
to gentiles, and these were evidence of the spiritual
and emotional distance between the two
worlds.
In normal times the relationship between
Jews and gentiles was more or less stable, without
anything out of the ordinary occurring. Jewish
families scattered in the surrounding villages had
nothing to fear. They even visited and stayed over
in non-Jewish homes (though they did not eat
anything because it was not kosher), and there
were many Jews who sought out the villagers for
business.
Jewish Occupations
Most of the Jews in the town either engaged in
various crafts or were small businessmen, while a
minority were in industry and wholesale merchandising.
The main craftsmen were shoemakers
and various types of tailors, stitchers (who cut
and sewed the uppers and were known as
zagatovtschiks), masons and builders, hatmakers
and furriers, tinsmiths and blacksmiths, wagon
makers, carpenters, painters, barbers, butchers,
and bakers.
The bakers worked mostly the nights before
market days and fairs, selling to the villagers, as
during the rest of the week Jews baked their own
challas and bread. The wagon-drivers had a semiskilled
profession, both those who had well-caredfor
horses and handsome buggies or nice wagons
for carrying passengers and packages to the train
and to neighboring towns, and the drikers, who
carried lighter freight within town in their rickety
wagons hitched to a single, lame, undernourished
horse.
Some merchants exported agricultural produce,
such as eggs, cattle, horses, grain, skins,
furs, bristles, fish, fresh and dried fruits, lumber,
mushrooms, etc. The export reached the large
cities of Poland, especially Warsaw, and also
Danzig and Germany, through Silesia.
There also were some businessmen who
leased forests and fruit orchards. Workmen,