The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod Read Online Free PDF

it cost!
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Candy store
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Carpenters
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Cattle traders
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Clothes, ready-made
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Dairies, which bought milk from Trochenbrod families and sold dairy products in local shops and in Lutsk, Rovno, and Kolki
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Dressmakers
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Fabric shops, very popular throughout the region because few people bought ready-made clothes
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General store
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Glaziers
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Grain mills, the largest of which was located on the east side of the street in the far north end of town. It had a motor with different attachments for chopping or grinding a variety of raw inputs. Farmers from throughout the region went there to have their grain milled or their hay chopped into more edible feed for their animals.
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Food, other than produce
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Furniture makers
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Haberdashery
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Hat maker
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Heating system builders
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Herbal remedies
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Horse traders
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House builders
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Ice—the ice was cut from a pond at the far north end of town.
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Inn
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Iron-working
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Lumber mills
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Matzah- ma king (in season)
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Metal products like nails and other small items
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Midwifery
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Oil presses, to which farmers from all around brought their oil seeds to be crushed, and pressed to produce cooking oil
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Pharmacies, called aptekas, run by the local feltchers , paramedics who treated minor ailments and injuries. When someone was seriously ill they had to be taken to a hospital in Lutsk or Rovno or even Kiev—lengthy, arduous, and potentially dangerous journeys.
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Produce shops
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Restaurant
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Kosher slaughterer
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Tailors
    There was also a slaughterhouse and a bathhouse, although not on the main street.
    The heads of many families in Trochenbrod were professional traders who regularly frequented regional markets by horse-drawn wagon. They took their products to places like Olyka, Kolki, and Kivertzy, where there were fixed weekly market days for different kinds of products. Some were produce traders—they sold produce like potatoes and cabbage from the fields of Trochenbrod families and bought produce and food products like flour and sugar to sell in Trochenbrod. Others sold Trochenbrod-made goods, especially leather goods, at these markets. Still others traded in livestock.
    Trochenbrod supplied artisans—glaziers, house builders, carpenters, builders of cooking and heating systems, painters, bricklayers, roofers, and other specialists—to villagers as far as fifteen miles away. Fifteen miles was the distance a man could walk from Trochenbrod in a day, and then return to Trochenbrod in a day after the job was completed, and avoid night travel made dangerous by robbers, hooligans, and wild animals.
    The commercial breadth of Trochenbrod—the almost dizzying array of economic activities in a relatively small and isolated town, the far-flung trading and artisan connections with other places, and the magnetic pull on buyers and sellers from surrounding villages—often came to mind second after family and friends in the reminiscences of Trochenbroders I interviewed. But it tended to be first in the memories of Ukrainians still living in the area today. For example, the first time I visited, as we were trying to locate the site of Trochenbrod we saw an aged woman bent over, working, in the fields of the neighboring village of Domashiv. We asked if she could point us toward the site of Sofiyovka. She slowly straightened up from her hoeing and looked at us stern-faced for a moment, as if to say, “Who is this asking me such things?” Then, as if thinking, Oh, I see you’re foreigners looking for that place … what a place! a huge grin broke out across her weathered face and she twisted and pointed. “There,” she said, “Keep walking in that direction through the fields on the other side of that grove and you’ll see a small black monument that marks the north end of Sofiyovka. If there had been no Germans you wouldn’t