Time and Place

One Time and Place We do not live in a void. We never suffer from a fear of roaming about in the emptiness of Time. We own the past and are, hence, not afraid of what is to be. —Abraham Heschel, The Earth is the Lord’s * Novokonstantinov When you asked my father where he came from, he told you precise- ly. He was born and raised in a shtetl, Novokonstantinov, in the guber- nia (province) of Podolia, in Ukraine, Russia. My father pronounced it Neye-constanteen, and referred to it as Constantine. The townspeople called themselves Constantines. The town was on the river, the South- ern Buh (pronounced “bug”), and, until the Nazis built the European highway and bridge that bypassed the town, the ford in the river at Novokonstantinov was a vital east-west passageway for ordinary travel, commerce, and the military over the years. Across the centuries through to the Second World War, thousands of cavalry passed through the rocky ford in the river at Novokonstan- * Heschel, A. (1995). The earth is the Lord’s: The inner world of the Jew in Eastern Europe. New York, NY: Jewish Lights Edition, published by arrangement with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1 2 A Man Comes from Someplace tinov. The town was likely named by the Turks during their occupation of the territory in the late 17th century, but there are prehistoric remains all around. No doubt, Styroconstantinov (Old Constantine) was renamed then, too, and the new town, my father said, was seen at the time of the Turkish occupation as having the potential to become a new Constantinople. The river was a major crossroads between east and west, a trade portal connecting Europe and the Ottoman Empire. The town* is about 11 miles from Khmelnick (northeast) and 8 miles from Letichev (southwest) in the heart of the Jewish Pale, that 400,000 square mile region of the Russian Empire cordoned off by Catherine the Great in 1791. The Pale demarcated the areas where Jews could or could not live. Any area “beyond the Pale” prohibited Jews from residency. This was where my father lived, in a shtetl—a small town, predominately Jewish—in the southwest border province of Podolia, near Poland, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Romania, and Moldavia. It was several hundred miles from the Black Sea. It was green like anything, my father said, with the river winding through the fields and the best fruit in the world, the seasons were like here, but the climate was colder. It was not too big of a town. It was like Brownsville (south- western Pennsylvania), maybe 5,000 or so people. At the turn of the 20th century, it was a thriving Jewish market town, with a big marketplace of 100 stores, several synagogues, ten or more cheders (Jewish schools), and a mikvah (bathhouse). There were two big churches, the Russian Orthodox and the Roman Catholic, and there was a big mansion, my father said, and an orchard, at the end of the orchard was the post office, that’s where we went walking, and there were some kind of benches, where the boys and girls sat talking. The Jews were the tradespeople and merchants, selling to the local farmers who lived in town and farmed the surrounding fields. Every Sunday and ev- * On the culture of the shtetl, see Shandler, J. (2014). Shtetl: A vernacular history. New Brunswick, NY: Rutgers University Press. Roskies, D. K and Roskies, D. G. (1975). The Shtetl book. Jersey City, NJ: Ktav Publishing. Petrovsky-Shtern, Y. (2014). The golden age shtetl: A new history of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press..

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