MEMOIRS OF
SHERESHEV
By MOISHE
KANTOROWITZ
The first
vegetable to appear was Shallot. The local farmers used to pinch off the green
long stems and sell it by the bunch. The stems had to be open to make sure
there are no little green worms in them, washed, cut into one centimetre long pieces, mixed thick with water, vinegar and
sugar and were served as the first salad of the season to go with meat. Next in vegetables came lettuce, a week or
two later small round radishes and one after another cucumbers, cauliflowers,
still later the first carrots, tomatoes, beets and others.
The first fruit of the
season were the early cherries, a yellow cherry with no particular taste. A couple weeks later the real cherries appeared, dark red and sweet. There were no real coolers or freezers in Shereshev in those days, yet people had to keep those
perishables for as long as possible. As
soon as the fruits appeared on the market brought in by farmers from the
surrounding villages my mother started to provide and to store for the winter,
beginning with cherries. We had at home
a little wooden barrel of some 30-35 centimetres in
diameter and 60-65 centimeters in length lying on its side. It was given to us by my grandmother AUERBACH
when she sold her house after the death of her husband. To my recollection it was always full with
fermenting cherries in sugar and vodka.
It had a faucet on one side to let some of the delicious cherry-brandy
out with which my grandmother Freida-Leah used to
treat some of her special visitors.
Through the large opening on the side, which was always plugged up with
a large cork, my grandmother used to fish out with a spoon a few cherries and
give it to my sister Sheva and me. This barrel of cherries and brandy was never
empty. As soon as the new cherries
appeared, my father used to buy a pail full. My mother with the help of the
maid used to wash and pit the cherries and pour them through the opening of the
barrel, which was partly full with last year’s cherries. On top of it my mother used to pour in a
couple kilograms of sugar, adding to it a bottle of vodka. This brew used to ferment for a couple of
weeks and turn into a real cherry brandy which privileged guests used to relish
more then the well known in Poland "Baczewski”
liquor that my father used to sell in our store. This little almost full barrel was left
behind with everything else when we were expelled from Shereshev.
After the cherries, the
strawberries came, which farmers used to bring by the wagon full and sell by
the quart or kilo, if the farmer owned a scale. During the strawberry season we ate it in
different ways, as plain strawberries with sour cream and buttered bread as a
snack or as a dessert I used to add sugar having a sweet tooth. Once in season, my father used to buy 10-15
kilo at once, my mother and the maid used to pick it over, wash it, put it into
a large copper basin, cover it with a thick layer of sugar, and let it stay for
48 hours. By then the sugar was absorbed by the strawberry juice and
vice-versa. The entire copper container
was then placed on the stove covering all burners and cooked for a couple of
hours. While cooking the foam that used
to form was taken off with a spoon and was the most delicious thing I have ever
tasted.
And so we used to start
the season of preparing preserves and jams for the year. Next came the
raspberries that used to be prepared in 2 ways. One, the same as the
strawberries, the other used to be strained after cooking through a piece of
linen and only the syrup or rather the liquid was saved. After staying in the cool cellar for a day or
two, it used to jell and turn into a raspberry jelly of the purest
quality. The same was done with cherries
and plums. Blueberry preserving had an
additional purpose. It was preserved as
we used to say in Shereshev, “It should not be
needed”, that is just in case, for it was believed, that blueberries were a
great medicine for stomach ailments, particularly for dysentery. Last in fall to be preserved were the
cranberries, which are as a rule very sour.
In order to make them palatable, they had to be boiled kilo for kilo
with sugar. For me, with a sweet tooth,
it was never too sweet, but I ate it as my mother served it with meat for
dinner. For the winter, my mother used
to fill up a shelf full of large earthen jars with cranberry jam,
it was also used on bread as a snack. We
would also dry apples and pears particularly pears as they required less
work. They had to be washed, cut in half
and strung on a fine cord with a large needle and put in the heated bake oven
for 24 hours. Apples on the other hand
had to be peeled and sliced into thin slices, which required more time and were
not much in demand for us youngsters as they were not as sweet as pears.
Although there was no
shortage of cucumbers in Shereshev proper, produced
by the local farmers, most of the cucumbers came from the nearby village of “Waszki”, 2 kilometers away.
This village was unique for it represented a classical as well as a
characteristic village of my province Polesie that
one can only read about or dream about now, but they were plentiful in Polesie and the entire Prypec
basin.
The
The last few weeks of
school year 1933-34, went by fast, but with a touch of apprehension, for my
father decided to do with me as he did with my sister Sheva,
namely to transfer me to the Polish school.
Because of my poor knowledge of the Polish language, I, too, like my
sister, had to lose an entire school year.
Having just finished the 4th grade Hebrew school, I was
accepted in the 4th grade of the public Polish school. Never the less I considered myself lucky, for
the boys that had at the same time graduated from grade 7 Hebrew school were
accepted to grade 5 Polish school, thus losing 3 years while I lost only one.
All due to the lack of the Polish language, for it is my opinion that the level
of education in the Hebrew school of the other subjects was somewhat higher
than in the Polish. A phenomenon that is
applicable even today between public schools and private ones.
The summer vacation was
as pleasant as always, yet one could feel uneasiness among the Jews of Shereshev. People
began reading the newspapers more thoroughly, but nobody shared the reason with
us 10 year olds. I recall one day as the
newspapers arrived carrying the headlines announcing the death of the most
popular Hebrew poet. It read, “Chaim NACHMEN BIALIK
is Dead”. I
believe that it made a greater impact on us youngsters than on the grown-ups,
for we had just begun to study and memorize his beautiful and moving poetry.
Predominantly 2 Jewish
papers were read in Shereshev, the rightist “Der moment” and the leftist “Der Haint”. Both of those papers were printed in
To subscribe to a
newspaper for one person was too expensive, so people used to pair up in 2 or 4
thus creating a partnership to one paper.
My father and grandfather were partners to one paper. When one was finished with it, the other got
it. If there were 4 partners to a paper,
the paper was in use all day. Some
partners used to get it the following morning.
Three kilometers (1.8
miles) from Pruzany, in the direction of Shereshev and a kilometer (.6 miles) off the main road, was
a village called “Shubitch,” whose inhabitants were
farmers. Next to their fields, was an
estate belonging to a Jewish man by the name of BRZYZYNSKI, a decent
respectable humane and committed Jew.
The estate consisted of the main building, a big house with many rooms,
and a couple smaller buildings for the help, a couple long buildings with
individual rooms and kitchens, a few separate cabins and some stables and barns
for the few dozen cows and horses, as well as some sheds for farm machinery. All this was surrounded by many hectares of
land and pastures. But the main
attraction of this estate was its forest, which was divided in half by a road
leading from the estate to the main road of Pruzany
to Bialowieza via Shereshev. One half of the forest close to the village
was on low ground and consisted of leafy trees.
The other half was on higher sandy ground overgrown with pine
trees. It was this part of the forest
that attracted many wives and their children from Pruzany
and a few from Shereshev for the summer. With the increase in our family my mother had
to give up our yearly summer vacations in Domaczewo
which was over 100 kilometers (60 miles) away and a strain on my mother and my
little brother Liova as well as my two little sisters
Sonia and Liba, still an infant and she had to settle
for the much closer “Shubitch”. There at BRZYZYNSKIs
my mother could rent a large room and a kitchen where she could cook meals for
the family. My father used to stay at
home to keep the store open and come out on Friday afternoons with the bus that
was commuting between Shereshev and Pruzany returning the same way on Saturday night.
It was stylish in those
days to put on weight and this was the purpose of going to the country. So my mother used to spend entire days making
us delicacies so we should eat more. The
requisite was two eggs and a glass of milk 3 times a day. In order to drink the milk, my mother used to
bribe me with a piece of chocolate.
After this we were suppose to eat a regular meal. Not surprising that we
did not want to eat and even my mother’s bribes did not help. My mother’s entire effort of those hot days
remained untouched on the table. Is it
then surprising that those laden tables with all sorts of good foods, that I
refused to eat, haunted me throughout the dark and hungry days of
As far as I remember, the owner of the estate had 4 sons and 1
daughter. The oldest Label some dozen
years older than I, built like a wrestler, left for the
It seems that for my mother, one month of such a “rest” in the country
was enough, and she and the children used to return home. I continued to stay on for a week or two with
my Aunt Chashkah, my father’s brother, Rubin’s wife
and children. I returned with him on a
Saturday night by bus for I did not enjoy a return trip home by horse and
buggy, a buggy full of bags, baggage, bedding, dishes, and other things that
women used to take along for the summer.
In order for my uncle and me to catch the
With the end of the summer vacation 1934, I went back to school. Unlike other years however, instead of
finding myself amongst my last year’s classmates, I found myself in an entirely
new and strange environment. Gone were
the familiar friendly faces of my playmates and peers, the common interests,
the familiar layout of the school.
Instead, I found myself amongst school children who spoke a hardly
familiar language and who knew each other but ignored me. They seemed to be rougher in conduct and
language. Their dress was somewhat
different and so was even their smell.
The school was situated in the court lane which was over half a
kilometer farther from our house, than the Hebrew school. It had many more rooms, 2 of each from grade
1 to grade 4, grades 5, 6, and 7 had single rooms, due to the attrition and grade
failure. Grade 5 was usually the largest
class, but by the time it reached grade 7, it had shrunk to the customary 40
pupils in class.
Being a much larger school than the Hebrew one, it had a much larger
yard, partly surrounded by a fence, a large space between the school and the
road, was planted with osier(?) that was used by the students for art and craft
lessons. A sturdy fence was separating
the schoolyard from the street, along and behind the fence in the yard, was a
long ditch of a hundred meters (325 feet) which used to be full of stagnate
water all year long. In an exceptional
hot summer the water used to dry out for a few weeks and the dead tadpoles and
frogs could smelt for quite a distance.
The ditch was overgrown with trees on either side. The most noticeable were a couple of huge oak
trees whose branches covered not only the ditch, but reached over the fence and
the other side of the road. In the end
of August an unusual amount of acorns used to fall off those oak trees and
cover the road almost ankle deep as nobody bothered to pick them up.
There were around 450 students in that school as compared to 125 in the
The school office took up a large room having to accommodate a dozen
teachers, two of them local men. One of them, was a single middle aged man who lived with his middle
aged single sister and their mother in a huge wooden house that served once as
a rich landowner’s mansion. In fact, his
ancestral home, for unknown to me reasons, in the last one or two generations,
had lost its glitter. The financial
situation turned bad and the house that once served as the seat of a rich and
powerful Polish landowner took on the form of a shabby thread bare, almost
haunted relic of former glory. Even the
large yard the fallen fences and neglected orchard added to its ghostly
presence. The whole place seemed to be
haunted and people avoided it. Even
youngsters from the neighboring houses did not dare run in and grab some ripe
appetizing apples or other fruit. So
they lay there rotting in the weed overgrown orchard.
I recall as an eight or ten year old boy, I was taken along by my Uncle
Hershel, on a Saturday afternoon, when he and his group of young men and girls
went to visit their former teacher, the sister of my teacher WUJTKOWSKY. I vaguely remember the inside of that house,
the large rooms full with furniture for which I could not see a purpose, the
carpets on the floor and more on the walls depicting all kinds of exotic places
and fantasies. It had countless couches
and heavily padded chairs and a large black grand piano in the middle of one
room. The windows were heavily draped
and did not let in much daylight. One
detail all those things had in common that did not escape even the notice of a
10 year old boy was the old and worn out look of everything.
This teacher, WUJTKOWSKY, whose family lived under Russian rule for
almost 2 centuries, retained their Polish identity and language. He did not feel bitter or hurt and remained a
decent man who fulfilled his job exemplarily as a teacher.
The second local teacher was a man of about fifty by the name of
LEONCZUK, who graduated from a Teacher’s Seminary during the Czar’s reign. When the Poles took over the territories of
western Bialorussia and
The language of instruction in school was, of course, Polish but, among ourselves, we, the Jewish children spoke Yiddish. The Christians spoke a white Russian dialect
as in their home. Conversation among
Jews and non-Jews was conducted in the local white Russian dialect. There might have been in the school of 450
students, a dozen or fewer students that spoke Polish. They were the children of the government
employees that came from
The first year in the Polish school was a very difficult one for
me. I had trouble communicating with my
teachers as well as with the non-Jewish students. Fortunately some of the Jewish students had
the same problem, and as the saying goes, “Troubles shared in common are
endurable”. However, my father used to
make sure that after school I came to the store and he used to go over with me
all I learned in school and made sure that the homework was in order.
I still cannot understand where and when my father learned Polish, for
his background was Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian.
Yet he spoke and wrote a perfect Polish to such an extent that when a
Jewish man had a problem or was in trouble with the government and had to
explain himself in writing, be it a petition or an application and forward it
to the higher authorities in the nearby district town of Pruzany,
they used to come to my father to write it for them and not to the local
barrister. One of the reasons being that
my father did it as, we say in Hebrew, “L’shem
Mitzvah”, (for the sake of a good deed and not for pay).
For a non-explainable reason I developed a taste for Polish history and my father made sure
that I memorized each lesson, to such an extent that in every term I used to
get the highest mark in it despite the
language problem. My other highest mark
in class was for mathematics, which I continued to receive up to
graduation. The only challenger in math
used to be the other Jewish boy in class Leizer
EISENSHTEIN. This EISENSHTEIN’s
father Yaakol-Berl who was considered a progressive Melamed (private
teacher-instructor), started giving private Hebrew lessons to my sister Sheva as soon as she transferred to the Polish school, and
the same happened to me. So every day he
used to come to us at
The order of school days changed for me, too. In the Hebrew school we attended six days a
week, excluding Saturday (the Sabbath), while Sunday was an ordinary school
day. In the Polish school we had to
attend Saturday under the threat of expulsion in case of absence. However, Jewish children were not obliged to
write on Saturday, which they would not do in any case, even under the penalty
of expulsion. So we Jewish children sat on Saturdays in school, without having
touched a pen, pencil or chalk. In that
school I came for the first time face to face with outright Anti-Semitism. Of course, I had heard about it, but really
did not understand it. There were two
teachers, a married couple by the name of GULAWSKY. They lived on a short little street called Kapielica at the end of
Shortly after the Sukkoth
holidays (Tabernacle holidays), my grandmother Freida-Leah
AUERBACH began to feel weaker and started to spend more and more time in
bed. My mother had to make every meal
for her, if and when my grandmother felt like eating. My sister Sheva and
I used to go see our grandmother as soon as we got back from school. Despite the fact that our grandmother was
only one house away from us, my mother preferred to have her with us. Right before Chanukah (the Eight-Day holiday
commemorating the purification of the