Four Going to America “On the eve of World War I, about five million Jews, 94 percent of Russian Jewry was still living in the Pale.” —Samuel Kassow * Motye: 1920 The world in 1920 was not good for the Jews of Ukraine, particularly in the western provinces, where my father and his two brothers and sister still lived. The country was caught in a brutal civil war, with the old czarist factions, the Whites, pitted against the Red army. Poland was fighting to regain a hold in the east, and the Ukrainian nationalists were fighting to establish their own state. The international interven- tions in support of anti-Bolshevik forces intensified the conflicts. You didn’t know from day to day in the borderlands of Podolia who was in charge. There were many days that the towns were left with no civil authority at all. Bandits and robbers roamed freely in many parts. * Kassow, S. http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Shtetl 59 60 A Man Comes from Someplace Ukraine and borders * Unrest reigned throughout the early 1920’s. Pogroms were now rampant, with the numbers of Jews killed in 1919-1920 reaching 250,000—or a million. Numbers are unclear. The only hope was to get out. When my father was living with his sister Beila in Dunaivtsi, he had been hearing that many Jews were trying to escape the massa- cres in Russia by stealing across the borders to Romania or Moldavia or Poland, where you could leave without a passport. He wanted to go in the worst way when he was in Dunaivtsi, but Beila’s husband and mother-in-law urged him to stay. Now it seemed as if there was no way out. In Podolia, as my father found out, if you went anywhere without carrying your papers, your life was in danger. You could be picked up, and without question, killed. In early 1919, his brother Moishe had made his way some 250 treacherous miles to Odessa to find a way out. Given that the French and English occupied Odessa at the time, it was still possible to leave * Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/HistRegUkr.jpg.