CHAPTER TWO
Stavishche: 1911–1917
Soon after his marriage to Rebecca, Isaac was drafted into the Russian army under Tsar Nicholas II. As a member of a select group of young men whose physical fitness rendered them more capable than others to sustain rougher climates, he became a shooter with the 39th Siberian Rifle Regiment. He was sent to Khabarovsk, Siberia, located on the eastern end of the Russian Empire, just nineteen miles from the Chinese border. One could see the shores of China by standing on the Khabarovsk side of the Amur River.
Isaac, along with many other young soldiers from nearby villages, gathered at the station in Belaya Tserkov before traveling forty days and nights by train to get to his unit in Khabarovsk. As his train departed, the new recruit caught a fleeting glimpse of his new bride through the window but had no idea that she was already expecting their first child.
Although Isaac was stationed in Siberia—famous for its exiled prisoners and frigid temperatures—it was the only warm winter that he ever spent in Russia. He slept in a bunk by an ongoing fire in an officer’s wooden cabin, where he was ordered to remain near the heat of the flames to help shape the leather he used in making the commanders’ boots. On his breaks, the young soldier swaddled his feet with flannel portyanki before donning his own boots. Isaac enjoyed time away from his assigned shoemaking duties with long walks in the crisp, Siberian air. It was a dry and pristine climate with the most spectacular snowfall.
Back in Skibin, on August 11, 1912, exactly one year and one day after her parents’ wedding, Channa Caprove, a chubby ten-pounder with large, almond-shaped eyes and a heap of dark hair, entered the world. Shortly after the birth, Rebecca, who supported herself as a seamstress, moved out of her family’s overcrowded homestead in Skibin with her cherub-cheeked baby and into a one-room place six miles away in Stavishche.
The highlight of her social life as a young mother and wife of a soldier was the weekly gathering of her friends at her home every Sabbath evening. Just before sundown, they met by the fields neighboring their local pond and dug up and filled their pails with yellowish clay. The group then looked forward to their main event: they painted Rebecca’s floors after smoothing them over with clay! This seemingly mundane activity gave young people in small shtetlach across Russia an excuse to socialize.
With Isaac away, Rebecca and her group of friends were unaware of the mounting anti-Semitism growing around them. In nearby Kiev, a Jewish superintendent of a brick kiln was falsely accused of murdering a boy in a Jewish ritual blood libel case that drew international attention. Despite the promotion of anti-Jewish sentiments led by the Black Hundreds throughout the trial, Menahem Mendel Beilis was acquitted by a jury in October 1913.
Rebecca also did not know of a minor assassination that took place in another small corner of a long-forgotten empire—one that would soon thrust Russia and its soldiers into a global conflict. The June 28, 1914, murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, by a Bosnian Serb student in Sarajevo set in motion a series of fast-moving events that soon escalated into a full-scale war.
Isaac, preparing for his return home to Stavishche after a three-year stint as a soldier in the largest army in the world, was called back to his post. Russia, which was bound by a treaty with Serbia, announced the mobilization of its vast army in her defense. Isaac soon found himself getting ready for combat in what would later be dubbed “the War to End All Wars.”
World War I—Impending Doom
On the eve of World War I, two-year-old Channa had still never laid eyes on her father. The precocious toddler envied her pretty but skinny four-year-old neighbor, Rose Lechtzer, whose father, Elia, received a medical exemption from serving as a soldier in the tsar’s army and remained home with his family during the war.
Just twenty days after Germany declared war on Russia, Channa and her mother stood in the same crowd as Rose and Elia when a natural phenomenon catapulted over the skies of Stavishche. Channa watched as Rose sat on her father’s shoulders while “looking through a piece of smoked glass at the sun.” Somehow Elia, a bright Jewish wheat and grain dealer, knew that there was a complete eclipse of the sun. “Everyone was sure it forebode an evil event,” Rose would later write.I
It was August 21, 1914, a somewhat cloudy morning, when astronomers from around the world gathered in Russia to stargaze and unlock the secrets of the universe. Curious onlookers flocked to the center of Channa’s village just a few hundred miles north of the Crimean expedition, where the path of the total eclipse of the sun would fall. By midday the clouds seemed to disappear. The superstitious people of Stavishche interpreted the scientifically spectacular event as a sign of impending doom. However, the evil event that the Jews spoke of would not show its ugly face in the pleasant townlet for another three years.
Isaac Caprove finally returned home to Stavishche in 1915 as a war hero. He endured two gunshot wounds to the legs and spent several months lying on his back in a sparse Russian hospital room. While anxiously making his way back to his bride, the newly discharged soldier showed off his war wounds to his childhood buddies, which included a scar where a bullet entered and passed through the soft tissue in his upper thigh. After finally arriving on Rebecca’s doorstep, the biggest news that he would learn, both to his shock and joy, was that he had fathered a little girl.
Soon after his arrival home, the young shoemaker rented one of the many tiny houses that were attached to the Stavishcha Inn and settled his family in the back rooms. At the front of the building was a large display window, where people could look in and watch Isaac in his new boot factory, as he made high leather boots by hand, using the finest nails to attach the soles.
Nine months later, in July 1916,II Channa’s younger sister, Sarah Leah, who was named after Isaac’s mother, entered the world. Isaac, who had missed Channa’s entire infancy, was overwhelmed with happiness at being present for the birth of his second daughter and was in absolute awe of this little creature, whom they nicknamed Sunny. While up until this point, Rebecca had been the sole recipient of Isaac’s adoration, this attention was now superseded by their second child. Sunny forever remained Isaac’s favorite.
Living in a town without running water, the modest Caprove home benefitted from a prime location close to a well. Their vaser deliverer (water deliverer), Chaim-Mayer, performed a daily balancing act with two pails attached to a wooden rod, which hung over his shoulders. He pumped fresh well water into the pails and then filled up the large barrels on top of his wagon before delivering them to his customers. If he missed a few days of work, his customers had to bathe in the bathing pond.
Inside the Caprove family’s house, a large fireplace and chimney, which was heated with wood, straw, or charcoal, resembled a small baker’s oven. It served a dual purpose: to cook and to heat both sides of the wall. The floors, made of hardened clay, were cold, so they would huddle by the fireplace for warmth. Above the oven was a crawlspace that was accessible to Channa and Sunny by climbing a small ladder. The girls passed many evenings there together, where they cuddled to keep warm in their cozy hiding place.
One of the family’s biggest pleasures came during the warmer months, when they took long walks to the outskirts of town. After all their chores were completed, friends and relatives would follow a path to Count Branicki’s estate. All residents of Stavishche were given free access to the grounds of the count’s estate and enjoyed sitting on the benches that were shaded by very old pine and poplar trees leading up to Branicki Palace. In the flat valley where the grand manor house stood in the shape of a horseshoe, it was as if they had accidentally stumbled upon paradise. Botanical gardens with exquisite plants, roses, and lilac bushes were set among wooded rolling hills.
On the slopes of a few hills that were connected to the gardens below, a beautiful, landscaped square had been set up by Count Branicki’s father more than half a century earlier. While standing at the highest point of the Stavishche Park, the Caprove family could look down and see a stunning view of a huge pond linked to the Gniloi Tikich River; from another slope they could see the charming village, filled with white cottages trimmed with green lawns.
Not far from the cottages, up a hill near a wide, old-fashioned Ukrainian road, there stood an old brick windmill weathered by time and missing many of its sails. Artists often sketched the blackened windmill, which also caught the attention and imagination of Polish writer Tadeusz Micinski, who set his novel Wita in Stavishche.
Channa’s bubbe Fay Cutler loved to join her daughter’s family on their walks whenever she was visiting from nearby Skibin. Young Channa always made a point of picking small bouquets of lilacs that grew in the count’s gardens because they were her grandmother’s favorite flowers. The grouping of the purple lilacs in bloom that formed a hedge in the botanical gardens was a constant attribute of springtime in Stavishche. Fay’s eyes lit up at the sight of the vast gardens that were in full bloom. It was almost as if she was reminded of another life as she inhaled the intoxicating fragrances of those lilacs.
As Isaac’s business blossomed, Rebecca hired a maid, a peasant woman named Sophia. For two and a half years, they lived a comfortable life. Since Channa was the daughter of a tsar’s soldier, she was one of a handful of Jewish children who would soon be eligible to attend a Russian gymnasium (school).
To prepare their four-year-old daughter for school, Channa’s parents arranged for an old rabbi to tutor her at home. The children in Stavishche playfully called him “Mosh-calla-zoo-doelus,” a nickname that the old and impatient rabbi failed to appreciate. The first day that he came over to tutor her, Channa infuriated him by running and hiding under a table. “You can’t find me, Mosh-calla-zoo-doelus!” the little girl screamed out to him. She clearly wanted the rabbi to come and search for her; it was all a game. Her embarrassed mother angrily yelled, “Channa, come out this instant!”
The rabbi was educated in the yeshiva; he was considered a melamed (teacher of young children). The scene was reminiscent of that described in the old Yiddish lullaby “Oyfn Pripetshik”:III
Oyfn pripetshik brent a fayerl, Un in shtub iz heys;
Un der rebbe lernt kleyne kinderlech dem alefbeyz;
Un der rebbe lernt kleyne kinderlech dem alefbeyz.
Zet zhe, kinderlech, gedenkt zhe tayere, vos ir lernt do;
Zogt zhe noch a mol un take noch a mol: Komets alef o.
(On the hearth a fire burns, and the room has heat.
And the rabbi teaches all the little ones all their ABCs;
And the rabbi teaches all the little ones all their ABCs.
See now, little ones, listen children, don’t forget it please.
Say it once for me and say it once again, all your ABCs.)
The children who had already mastered their alefbeyz under the tutelage of the old melamed went on to continue their studies at either the Jewish chedar or the Stavishche School, which the peasants simply referred to as “the Teaching Place.”
Although times were still relatively peaceful in town, early signs of religious discord were becoming more frequent at the Stavishche School, where three of Channa’s older cousins, Sarah, Sheva, and Daniel Cutler, were students. Jewish enrollment was severely limited, but the Cutler children were allowed to attend because their father, Yunkel, had once been a master iron worker for the tsar’s army. Two other Jewish girls in town, Dvora Golditch and Rochela Faynzilberg, also attended classes with them.
After peasant boys threw pebbles at Dvora and Rochela as they walked together to school, Dvora’s father, Shika de Potch, insisted on driving them to and from the schoolroom each day in his fancy horse and carriage. In another act of anti-Semitism, the same boys chased Sarah and Sheva and pulled harshly on their hair.
The greatest act of violence was directed at their brother Daniel. With Daniel present, the teacher openly displayed anti-Semitism in the classroom. One day, the school master singled Daniel out when he announced to the class, “Do you know why Daniel was not in school yesterday? Yesterday was a Jewish holiday; Daniel is a Jew.”
The peasant children stared and made faces at him that entire morning in the classroom. After school ended, the children were allowed, and even encouraged, to beat Daniel up. With their teacher’s approval, they tore his clothes and kicked him.
The black cloud that the Jews of Stavishche feared would appear after the moon’s spectacular alignment between the earth and the sun now hovered directly over them.
1. I. Source: Both quotes from this paragraph are from the written family history of Rose Lechtzer/Lichtzer (Lessure) Mayers.
2. II. Sunny’s birth entry was recorded on July 22, 1916, in the metric book for Stavishche. However, it is not known if that was the actual date of birth or the date it was finally recorded. Sunny celebrated her birthday in June.
3. III. “Oyfn Pripetshik” (On the Hearth) is a well-known Yiddish song written by Mark Warshawsky (1848–1907).