At the end of our journey to Ukraine, an obvious question arose, a question that touched the very essence of our having been there—what was the meaning of our desire to visit lands in which we were not born, where we did not grow up, and about which we only knew from our parents’ stories? The answer is perhaps that we humans, like trees, grow with roots. Yet if we offer the search for roots as the answer, we will be using a banal and worn-out phrase that has lost its deeper meaning. All that will remain of it will be a sixth-grade school assignment, perhaps an important one, through which the child constructs a family tree.

“A few years before her death, my mother drew, at our request, a map of the shtetl. She did not do it willingly.”

Journeys to the hometowns of our parents are complex phenomena, multi-layered and full of contradictions. Are these searches into ourselves easy to handle while outside our homeland? Are these searches for place names that sound familiar? Are we at last coming to terms with our denial of our parents’ motherlands? Is it an attempt to comprehend them, their customs, their longings, their stories about “that place” “over there”? And where is “there?”

Perhaps feelings of curiosity and rejection, interest and resentment, all joined together when I set out on this special, moving and exciting journey.

Let me start with the last part, my visit to my parents’ shtetl near Lviv. The shtetl used to be part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Later my parents became Polish subjects and at present it is in Ukraine.

My father made aliyah (immigration) to the Land of Israel (Palestine) in the 1920s, straight from the deep forests rich with berries and mushrooms to the scorching and barren Jordan Valley. He paved the road to Tsemach and built Rutenberg’s electric power station. Fourteen years later he traveled to Poland to visit his family. The myth whispered often around us as children was that upon hearing of the visit of the chalutz, the pioneer, all the shtetl’s young girls put on their fanciest dresses and stood in line hoping to be chosen as the bride to be taken to Palestine.

Of all the girls, my father chose my mother and together they went to Haifa in 1934. My mother and I went to visit the shtetl in 1938. It was in Poland at the time. We sailed in a boat full of mothers and their children to stay for six months with our family. Signs of the approaching war were everywhere; most of the Jewish-owned shops were closed and the atmosphere was heavy with gloom. My father must have heard the depressing news, and he managed to get a certificate—a visa—for my mother’s youngest sister, Manya, to enter Palestine. He even registered her in a high school in Haifa.

My mother and I sailed back to Palestine in the last boat to leave Poland before the outbreak of the war. Manya stayed behind, as did the hundreds of mothers and children who had come from Haifa after us to visit their families. We were the last to return from Poland. Manya stayed behind—her parents found it too difficult to let her leave for a desolate country.

A few years before her death, my mother drew, at our request, a map of the shtetl. She did not do it willingly. She couldn’t understand why any of her children wished to go to a place to which she never wanted to return, and which she didn’t even want to remember. But we insisted, and she drew a map of the central square of the shtetl. She did it more than 50 years after she had bid a final farewell to her family and her hometown.

A square and the town hall were in the center of the shtetl. The square was surrounded by single-story houses, most belonging to the families of mother’s Jewish friends. Under some of the houses she noted the names of the families that had inhabited them. For her own home she added more details. Some distance from the houses she drew a row of acacia trees with benches under them, and opposite—a sidewalk where the girls would parade in their Shabbat best, to see and be seen.

This precise memory, which she tried to silence and put behind her, betrayed her. She could remember everything—people, scenes, events, atmosphere, food and relatives.

The Shtetl

When we came to the shtetl, to our amazement almost everything was still there, everything except what is most important—the people.

We stood in the square, and little by little the townspeople started congregating around us. The older ones, and there were a few, remembered—Klinghoffer, the doctor, Atlas, Vogler, Wollach and Satin—my mother’s family. And of course, they also remembered Manya. One person was her classmate, another sat near her in school. The name “Manya,” which was uttered so often by my mother and always with great pain, came up again and again in the shtetl to which she had belonged and from which she was cruelly taken.

The old people told us of the Jews who had lived in the houses that surrounded the square. The houses are still there, low, with sloping roofs, windows pointing toward the street, just like in some familiar pictures, like in the fragmented stories we heard here and there. They pointed to a partly destroyed house, “Here L. Katz used to live.” This was a name I frequently heard in my youth. After the war L. Katz appeared with her daughter in Haifa, almost the only remaining souls after the Holocaust.

Before the war the shtetl had some 2,000 inhabitants, most of them Jews, a few Poles; on its outskirts lived the Ukrainian peasants. Today there also are 2,000 inhabitants, mostly Ukrainians, some Poles, and even some Russians, but there isn’t a single Jew.

The building that used to be the synagogue serves as a movie theater now. The bakery that once belonged to my mother’s family now is a grocery store that mostly sells liquor. The little shops that sold odds and ends, the doctor’s office, the textile store and the other small businesses about which I had often heard, all disappeared, were wiped out, along with their owners.

To our question “What happened here?” we were given the answer that the Jewish inhabitants were taken to a certain place in the shtetl and transferred somewhere. Suddenly a young woman came toward us, riding a bike, all excited and breathing heavily. She had heard that we were looking for people who knew my mother’s family, especially Manya. She said that for many years she had heard the name from her mother—stories of a Jewish friend who used to live there.

“Is your mother still alive?” I asked.

“Yes, naturally, but she is working in the field, harvesting potatoes.”

We drove to the field. The hope of hearing from somebody who personally knew and remembered my mother filled us with excitement and great anticipation. We reached an old, thin, bare-footed, partially dressed woman who was working in the middle of a large field. After a few words of explanation, she started with an incessant stream of words. Our translator helped us understand.

Yes, Manya was her close friend. They used to sit next to each other in class. She was very good in mathematics. All Jews were good in mathematics. Every day she would go after school with Manya to the bakery and would be given a fresh bun. She even remembered her older sister—my mother—who used to help in the bakery. No, they never visited one another at their homes.

“Is Manya still alive?” she asked..

I pressed her hand tightly, a rough, veined hand. This helped me listen and absorb every word.. I gave no answer to her question.

From there we drove to the river where my parents had learned to swim. It continued to flow as it had and as it will flow in the future. Others, different people wade in its waters or sit on its banks and glance at the sights around them. I studied the photograph I held of three young women, my mother and her friends, in the swimming suits fashionable at the end of the 1920s, a picture that testified to the life and pleasures of youth then and there, traces of an inerasable past.

Nobody could tell us about my father and his family. We were unable to find his house or any other signs that he had lived there.

Continuing On

We rode in a stuffy bus for many hours after the visit to Odessa, going in the direction of Kyyiv. On our way we passed Uman, Zhytomyr, Berdichev, Miedzyborz, Ivano-Frankivsk, Buczacz and many other towns. It was there that such great Jewish thinkers and writers as Agnon, Bialik, Shalom Aleichem, Berdichevsky, Klausner, Dubnov and Zhabotinsky lived and wrote. These are the lands where Pinsker, Achad Haam, Sokolov and the Chovevey Zion movement, founders of Jewish-Israeli history and culture, were active.

I kept telling myself: know whence you have come. The names and the places bring us back to what used to exist, to the home of Bialik in Odessa, to his school, to the place where he met Ravnitsky and many others for a cup of tea poured from a gilded samovar, to where El Hatzipor, that song of longing for Zion, was written. Later we went up to the second story of the enclosed yard, where various groups of Zionists used to meet. I must also mention the Sobiesky Spring and the Anderman Hotel in Buczacz, from Agnon’s famous story, Oreach Nata Lalun (A Guest for the Night).

I tried to examine my inner self. What emotions did these sights, the remains of a whole, rich life arouse in me. Was it excitement? Was it compassion? Was it pain, or perhaps even rage? What should I say about the scenes I saw? Should I start with “Once upon a time,” in the language of fairy tales? Or should I call this experience a visit to a country of emptiness? Only our own knowledge of history could fill the vacuum left by all that was missing. I tried hard to understand my experience, but the answers changed with the landscapes and the sights.

Ukraine as seen through the windows of the bus was dotted with flocks of geese lumbering slowly along or a shepherd or shepherdess watching over a single cow. They were planted there, as though they grew out of the soil. Peasants walked from one village to the next burdened by sacks of produce they had gathered, striding, weighed down and weary. Heavy-set peasant women sat beside the road near piles of potatoes and apples they had for sale. Their heads were covered with colorful scarves. They were clad in layers of dresses with heavy woolen stockings on their feet. Pictures from stories I heard in my youth came to life and changed from minute to minute.

Countless personal stories were recounted on the bus. Everybody listened attentively. It was remarkable how many of our co-travelers had their own “Manyas.” They remembered names like Esterke, Sofia, Brachka and Luba that were uttered in pain, in whispers with bitter sobs. A separate reality, cut off from our Israeli existence, emerged on the bus. We withdrew into ourselves and tried to digest our experiences.

Visiting Rovno

And there was a story within a story:

In Amos Oz’s book A Tale of Love and Darkness, his Aunt Sonya described the town of Rovno, their family, the Mossmans, their home, all that once was. Since the title of our journey included the phrase “In the Steps of Writers,” we went to Rovno to see the house, in the steps of Amos Oz, as well as those of Aunt Sonya.

Some 40 people gathered in front of a house, today a simple unassuming structure. Passers-by looked at us amazed, and a short woman in sandals on a cool gray day clung to us. One of the occupants of the house came to us, and we asked to enter. More precisely, N. of Oz’s family, asked for permission to come in.

She disappeared inside, and we remained with the woman. She was Jewish, a retired widow. She looked at us with yearning eyes and gave us an address in Kiryat Bialik. “Please, do send them my love and ask them to write.”

In the meantime N. emerged from the house. “It was difficult to form an impression,” she said. The house was divided, and five families shared it. One could not see the entire house.

Back on the bus N. called Sonya in Tel Aviv. We listened. All of a sudden the literary Sonya turned into a real Sonya. “Sonya, we just came back from your house in Rovno. We found it!” From the other end—silence. “Sonya, five families now live in the big house.” A pause. “Sonya, why are you crying? We all stood in front of the house and were shaken up.” Again silence. “We even entered the building that once used to be the Tarbut Gymnasium; we went in and saw where you studied.” “Okay, don’t get so excited. I’ll say ‘Thank you’ to everybody in your name.”

I do not know why this phone call made me shudder, but it seemed that all our friends in the bus shed a tear with Sonya in Tel Aviv. These links to lost childhoods, adolescences, youths. The intensity of excitement and distress were pounding inside me, and it seemed that the others on this journey had the same reactions. I had no doubt that what my eyes absorbed on the trip as an outsider viewing the landscapes, the people, the communities, fed my emotions. I made comparisons, organized the details, recreated stories and tales, and also judged and criticized, carried hostility and grudges.

Buczacz

It wasn’t only our private experiences that touched and moved us. There was another story: In Buczacz, while visiting the local high school where several of our spiritual fathers studied, we met a Hebrew-speaking Ukrainian. The man used to be a gastarbeiter (foreign worker) in Israel, where he worked for three years for the electric company. Next to him stood his little daughter whom he came to pick up at the end of her school day.

“I am so happy to have an opportunity to speak Hebrew,” he told us. The little girl kept her silent, sad eyes.

“I didn’t see her for three years when I was away, and now all I do is take care of her. My wife left a couple of years ago. She went to Italy.”

“What is she doing there?” “I don’t know.” “When will she come back?” “I don’t know, but in the meantime I am here with our daughter.”

The whole conversation took place in Hebrew which the man wanted to practice. He followed us wherever we went. When we stopped he said something to his daughter in Ukrainian. The little one started to sing a Hebrew song, whose words were hard to identify, but whose tune was easily recognizable.

“I brought her many discs with songs from Israel, and she has learned to sing them,” he said.

This was the only time the little girl smiled, a little girl whose parents were workers in foreign lands, and she must have felt that she was a burden.

How strange it was to meet a Hebrew-speaking Ukrainian under those circumstances, while thinking of the history of the relations between these two nations over generations. Those times were filled with brutality and hatred, bloodshed and much pain. It was very strange to think of a country whose forests were filled with mass burial pits for our innocent people, and to have felt empathy for the locals whom one met.

Ukrainian Landscape

The Ukrainian landscape was captivating. It was not dramatic, and there was nothing especially stirring in it, but there were fields as far as the eye could see, and to the northwest there were shadows of the Carpathian Mountains, and still more hills and forests.

The Ukrainian urban landscape, at least most of what we saw, revealed poverty and long neglect. The houses had been standing since the early 1900s, and it was obvious that they had seen better days. One could notice in them signs of the beauty and the architecture of the period, but a rich imagination and a strong will were required to be impressed by them. The dominant Soviet structures overshadowed the remnants of the old esthetically pleasing buildings that one could discover here and there. There were huge, graying housing complexes, with peeling plaster and whitewash, in which poor human beings lived in total wretchedness.

The people I saw during our travels in the villages were heavy, clumsy, with wrinkled faces, walking with a heavy gait, laboring over land that grew potatoes and corn. They cultivated some vegetables in their backyards—small sections of soil that barely supplied their daily bread.

I saw the inhabitants of larger towns who endeavored to be more Parisian than the Parisians themselves. Women walked on high heels as thin as knitting needles, and men wore suits and ties on warm, humid days. Their efforts by and large were not successful. Their looks and the way they talked still gave away the fact that they had been part of the Soviet Union.

Conclusion

Lenka and Sasha accompanied us when we drove to my parents’ shtetl. We left the group for a day, going westward from Lviv. Lenka, a professional translator, served as our mouth and ears, and Sasha was our driver. I feel that I have to tell about them. Amid the intense, exciting experiences we had over the 10 days of our travels, they were an island of tranquility, of simple natural relations between human beings. They helped us to unwind for a few hours from the pressures that we felt during those days.

I opened my story with the account of the visit to the shtetl with them. But at the end, when we were spiritually and physically exhausted, Lenka and Sasha brought us to a local restaurant in another town. There we had kreplach and vereniklach (pyrogen), concluding in this manner an experience which we had imposed on ourselves. These dishes reminded us of my mother’s kitchen which was a great love of my father’s.

In their memory we embarked upon this journey, and to honor them these words were written.

Nira Keren, who lives in Israel, is a writer of children’s books.

Avotaynu 2007; 23(4):40-43
DOI: 10.17228/AVOT20070440
Copyright © 2008 Avotaynu, Inc.