APPENDIX H

Fates of the Villagers, 1920s

Each of the Stavishche villagers described in these pages experienced his or her own miraculous tale of exodus from the shtetl. They are fascinating stories of survival, relocation, and, for many, just plain luck.

For those fortunate enough to have close relatives in the United States, letters of unimaginable hardships were sent along with desperate pleas for help. Just as Barney Stumacher had received such a letter from his elderly father in Belaya Tserkov begging for help, others from Stavishche pleaded with their family members to come to Europe and save them.

Philip Postrel^I

Philip Postrel, whose father was Yehuda Leib (Leb),^II once the keeper of the bathhouse in Stavishche, received a letter that was sent to him in New York City in February 1921 from his recently widowed relative, who had lost both her husband and son to pogrom violence. Stranded in Bessarabia with no hope, she begged her American relative to come to her rescue. Postrel wrote and signed the following affidavit in the state of New York that accompanied his emergency passport. Many Americans who faced a similar situation were frantically scrambling to obtain passports in order to return to Europe to save, as their desperate relatives aptly reminded them, “their flesh and blood.”

Phillip Postrel, being duly sworn, deposes and says:

I am twenty-six years of age, a naturalized citizen of the United States, residing at 222 St. Nicholas Avenue, New York City.

I am an ex–service man, having had active service abroad, fought in various battles in the recent war, wounded, having performed my duties of a citizen loyale and faithfully to the best of my abilities and received an Honorable Discharge, as can be verified by the records in the War Department.

At present I am in business in the stationery and cigar business for myself in the city of New York, but the needs of my immediate relatives, such as my sister and her family and cousins are so great that I must give up my business temporarily and render them such relief as there may be in my readiness and ability to do so.

They are at present stranded on the Russian Romanian border, as I am informed and believe, and are actually starving, having no means whatsoever and nobody to take care of them or in any way help to assist them in their dire wants of the most elementary necessities of life. If I do not go up quickly with my aid and assistance, I fear, I have ground to believe that they will all perish and not survive.

I therefore make this affidavit with the purpose of inducing the State Department to grant me a passport immediately for the purpose above set forth, so that I might save yet that which was left from the ruin caused by the last few years of war and European disturbances, and I respectfully request that a passport be granted at once.

Sworn before me this day of [illegible] 1921:

Signed by the Notary Public of New York County.

(Signature) Philip Postrel^III

Other villagers, who did not have the luxury of calling upon relatives to save them, found other ways to escape the hardships and cruelty of their lives in Stavishche.

Shika de Potch (Yehoshua Golditch the Postmaster)

Shika de Potch held an important position as the Jewish postmaster of Stavishche. When government officials traveled through the poor village,^IV he supplied them with fresh horses and carriages, which were kept in two large stables on his property. His dwelling was such an important fixture that the first floor housed a bank and the only telephone office in town. His daughter Fania was one of the first telephone operators in Stavishche.

Shika de Potch, later known in America as Sam Gold, fled with his younger daughter, Dvora, to Boston, Massachusetts. After borrowing money from his wealthy landslayt who were already established in the New World, Shika de Potch was finally able to bring over the remainder of his family. On July 8, 1923, less than two months before the Caprove family set foot on Ellis Island, the SS Carmania docked at Boston Harbor carrying his wife, Esther, and their two sons.^V It was at the immigration center that the postmaster’s wife first realized that their eighteen-year-old handicapped son, Hymie, might be denied entrance into the country. Hymie was a deaf-mute.

Esther and her older son, Bennie, who as a boy spotted Count Branicki riding in the first automobile in town, devised a plan. They would not, under any circumstance, leave Hymie behind and were determined to get him through the crucial first round of examinations. Esther stood closely in front of Hymie in line, and Bennie stood right behind him. When the official assigned to their section asked Hymie questions, he moved his lips as Bennie shouted out the answers.

The obviously distracted official was fooled, and everyone made it through the first round of examinations, enabling the family to eventually reunite on the Boston pier.^VI

In America, Sam Gold struggled to earn a living and was demoralized when he experienced difficulty finding a job. He eventually secured a position as a rag and burlap bag sorter. He was probably among the hundreds of other Jewish immigrants who flooded the Boston area in the early 1920s and found work in the prosperous rag businesses owned by the Cutler and Wise families of Chelsea.

Sol Moser

Sol arrived in America in 1921, wearing his older brother Schmuelik’s^VII Russian leather boots. His cousin Harry Goldberg was conscripted into the Russian army and did not return in time to leave with his parents to America. Harry’s sister died of typhus while waiting for her passport. So Sol’s aunt, Mima Motley Goldberg, plucked the resilient orphan and his older sister, Goldie, off of the streets of Belaya Tserkov^VIII and brought them to America in her children’s place.

Once in New York, however, Mima Motley, who was kind enough to bring the children to America, was unable to support the two waifs. Sadly, the children once again found themselves in a familiar situation—bounced around from relative to relative. Eleven-year-old Sol found himself selling newspapers on the subway in New York City. He often slept there, too, falling asleep to the alluring smell of ham sandwiches that the Gentile riders munched on as late-night snacks.

While dozing off on the subway to the forbidden yet delicious aroma of pork, Sol was occasionally haunted by memories of screeching pigs in Stavishche. During the First World War, when German soldiers invaded the village, Sol would watch as they threw live pigs into boiling water so that the animals’ hairs would fall out before they ate it. The Ukrainians, at least, would slit the pigs’ throats first, but German soldiers left the pigs to squeal in pain.

Sol could not doze off in any location without remembering some horror that he had endured in the Old Country.

In New York, his fifteen-year-old sister, Goldie, agreed to marry a bank teller named Dave and was finally able to provide her younger brother with the first home that he had known since their parents, Haika Stepansky and Itzie Moser, died. Goldie and her new husband opened a bakery in New York, similar to the one that the Moser family ran in Stavishche. Sol and his cousin Daniel Cutler, idealists who believed in the trade union movement, organized a strike on Goldie and Dave’s new establishment. Chased by the police, the two teenagers separated in an alleyway and escaped capture. The incident did not, however, go over well with Sol’s furious sister; the duo failed to escape her wrath.

Goldie eventually forgave the boys. The mischievous pair later ran a business together in Brooklyn called Sol and Dan’s Produce. They were wholesalers who bought produce directly from farmers and filled up their trucks, delivering fresh fruits and vegetables each morning to retail establishments.

Just a few years later, Sol, an idealist who believed in Tikkun Olam (repairing the world), joined the Young Communist League (YCL). It was an era when idealist young people in America, who believed in fighting for the rights of immigrant sweatshop workers, flirted with Communism. It was at one of those YCL meetings that Sol met his future wife, Dorothy.^IX

Chiah Sura Spivack

Chiah Sura, known for her skills in cupping, an old healing technique similar to acupressure, and her husband, Dovid Spivack, finally received news, a few years after they last saw him, on the whereabouts of their handsome son, Leib. He was drafted into the tsar’s army during WWI and was immediately mobilized to the German front.

After the Treaty of Brest Litovsk finally ended the war between Germany and Russia in 1918, a Jewish prisoner of war who returned to Kiev Guberniya stopped in Stavishche hoping to give the couple news; it is believed that he may have later found and told them while in Romania.^X He had spoken with Leib in a POW camp located in Austria called Kleinmunchen (“Little Munich”),^XI and their son wanted to send them his regards.

His parents and younger siblings blindly hoped that Leib would soon return home, but he never did. Between 1919 and 1920, the family fled with most of the Jews from the village, as violent pogroms broke out, one after another. After each attack, they returned home to their shattered town in hopes of receiving word of their son.

Eventually, it was no longer safe for Jews to remain in Stavishche. Chiah Sura, Dovid, and their two youngest children, Mendel and Nechama, made their way to Bucharest, Romania. In June 1922, Dovid bought steamship tickets to take the family to America but decided that he could not leave without conducting one last search for his son. It is believed that Dovid went to Kleinmunchen on a mission to find his beloved Leib. However, he had no success. There were never any letters or news of his whereabouts; Leib had disappeared into thin air.

With heavy hearts, the family eventually set sail for America and were reunited with their oldest daughter, Minnie, who had immigrated in 1908. Many of Chiah Sura and Dovid’s relatives owned candy stores in New York City and the surrounding area. Chiah Sura continued to perform her Old World cupping techniques on her loved ones in the United States.

At the same time that they departed for America, many of their Spivack (Spivak in Israel) family members immigrated to the Holy Land. Chiah Sura’s nephew Avram Postrelka,^XII who was already known in Eretz Yisrael as Avraham Harzfeld, was a pioneer in the Labor Zionist movement and helped many Stavishchers in need.^XIII During the 1920s, the police chief of Tel Aviv was also a former Stavishcher; when his many landslayt arrived in Palestine, jobless, he took them into the police force.

Chiah Sura and Dovid Spivack died heartbroken in their adopted country, having never learned the fate of their son.

Sarah Cutler

Sarah was delirious. Childbirth in the New Country was surely safer than when she was born to her parents, Esther Moser and Yunkel Cutler, back in Stavishche in 1904.^XIV In her delirium, the new Mrs. Herman Antanir flashed back to one of her earliest memories of her childhood in Russia. A cute toddler with curly blond hair, Sarah wandered into the nearby wooden home of an elderly Jew. A Russian bandit was pointing a gun at the head of the old, bearded man, who wore long payas and a yarmulke.

“Say your last prayer, Jew!” the bandit barked at him.

“Neyet!” the young girl screamed at the bandit, and she wrapped herself around the leg of the elderly victim.

The bandit was unable to pry the clinging child loose. Instead of shooting the old man, he left the shack in frustration. Even the vicious thug could not bring himself to injure or murder a child as beautiful as Sarah Cutler.

Sarah, still delirious, then dreamed of the time, a few years later, when she sat with her mother by the bedside of Esther’s dying 103-year-old great-aunt, Rochel. Rochel, possibly Stavishche’s oldest resident and the aunt of Esther’s father, the respected cantor David-Yosel Moser, held Esther’s hand tightly.

“Your next child will be a daughter,” she told her devoted grand-niece, “and you will name her for me.”

Rochel’s deathbed prediction came true. However, Esther, who tended to her four other children while they suffered from the measles, became ill during her fifth and final pregnancy. A baby girl, whom she named Rochel, was born to her, but the baby did not survive the day. The old woman’s dying wish to have a living namesake was not to be—at least, not yet.

Fifteen years later, Esther’s oldest daughter, Sarah, who was in labor with her first child in a New York City hospital, had a vision: old Aunt Rochel appeared before her and bowed down to her. Sarah interpreted this spiritual visit from her elderly aunt to mean that she would soon give birth to a daughter. Her child, born in 1929, bore the Jewish name Rochel. Sarah believed that it was good luck to name her child after a woman who had lived such a long life. And so this child, Rochel, was one of the first of the new generation of Stavishchers born in the Golden Land.