The (website) "My Shtetl -- Jewish Towns of Ukraine" gathers information about Starokonstantinov -- "Old Constantine" -- the town from which, in 1895, my courageous grandparents emigrated to America. The site is in Russian but it can be mechanical translated into awkward but intelligible English.
Some of my friends of European extraction have been able to return to the old country villages where their families originated, but that option is not available to me. Trust me, there's no pilgrimage to Starokonstantinov in my future -- even if the town happens to survive the Russian invasion and the rockets. My grandparents did not bring to Ellis Island happy memories and nostalgia or pique my curiosity with warm fuzzy memories of their earlier years. Nevertheless, Starokonstantinov provokes my curiosity. For how many decades did my ancestors live in this so-obscure-to-me town? How did they manage to survive?
One of the compilers of the My Shtetl website, Yevgenii Schneider, has unearthed a report on Starokonstantinov written in 1884 by a certain N. I. Zuts, a lieutenant in the 45th Azov Infantry Regiment. Why or for whom these paragraphs were written I have no idea, but some of it largely duplicates information that I have previously posted. According to Lieutenant Zuts, Starokonstantinov was founded in 1505 as the village of Kolyshchentsy in a grant from the king of Poland to one Ivan Labunsky. On January 5, 1561, Labunsky's descendants sold Kolyshchentsy to Prince Konstantin Ostrozhsky. Three months later, Ostrozhsky was permitted by the king to found a city first called Konstatinov, then Novokonstantinov, and finally in 1632 renamed Starokostiantyniv. A castle was constructed in 1571. In 1620, the city passed into the possession of the princes Zaslavsky, and in 1682, to the princes Lubomirsky. Starokonstinov became part of Russia in 1793.
(It seems to be the case that Ukraine was a largely unpopulated or underpopulated frontier until a few hundred years ago. When and why did my people decide to try their luck on this vast semi-empty plain?)
Zuts expresses frustration that it hard to count Jews because of "the special conditions of their life, which is generally distinguished by great mobility and inconstancy with respect to place of residence: in the city there are many Jews who live permanently or for a very long time due to their trade and other affairs and are not included in the city population. Jewish houses, not being the property of one person, and sometimes constituting the property of several families, cannot serve as data by which, even desirably, with a small error, it would be possible to determine the number of their inhabitants. When concluding marriages among themselves, many, even the majority of Jewish families, accepting a son-in-law for a year, two, three or even five years, depending on the marriage conditions and the son-in-law's property status, subsequently move to other localities."
The good lieutenant seems genuinely mystified by the communal customs of the Jewish population. Zuts admires one aspect of Jewish life: "the charity of the Jewish residents is expressed primarily in the fact that poor Jews receive help from the wealthier ones. Independently of this, there is a Jewish Hospital in the city, located in a house built with public funds and maintained with money donated by two wealthy Jews, Israel Epstein and Abraham Krasnoselsky."
And Zuts adds this very interesting detail of Jewish life. "All Jewish houses are built almost according to the same plan and the same model, having the character of a guest house, i.e. on both sides of the corridor there is a row of rooms; each room has a door into the common corridor and is also connected to the neighboring rooms by doors, mostly double-leaf. Consequently, each room has 3 doors and only the corner rooms have 2 doors." Zuts describes what is familiar to me as a "shotgun house" -- a style not at all rare in the new world but apparently exotic to the lieutenant.
The website also contains a few pictures of houses typical of Jewish inhabitants. As far as I can tell, these are recent photographs of older homes in various states of repair.
The website does not make it clear who, if anyone, is living in these houses today.
In addition, Evgeniy Schneider appends a brief history of the Jewish community of Starokonstantinov. I've transcribed it.
"Jews have lived in Starokostiantyniv since the end of the 16th century. In 1629, there were 130 Jewish families (about 25% of the total population), and the community was the second largest in Volyn. During the Khmelnytsky period, the Jews of the city and the surrounding area took refuge in the fortress. On the Ninth of Av, the Cossacks broke in and killed everyone. Starokostiantyniv was also destroyed several times by the Haidamaks in the early 18th century. But Jews continued to settle there, and in 1765, 1,801 Jews were registered in the city and its surrounding area. In 1802, the number of Jews was 2,053. In 1827, when Tsar Nicholas I issued an order to mobilize Jews into the Russian army, serious unrest broke out in Starokostiantyniv. In 1847, there were 6,611 Jews in the community, and in 1897, 9,212 (60.7% of the total population). Most of the local Jews were Hasidim, followers of the tzaddikim of the Chernobyl and Sadagora dynasties. In 1911, the city's population was about 20,000, including 11,800 Jews. With the establishment of Soviet power in Volyn in 1920, the Jewish community was disbanded. By 1926, there were 6,934 Jews in the city (41.3% of the population). There was a secondary school with instruction in Yiddish.
At the end of 1931, there were 4,837 Jews in the city (about 33% of the population), of whom more than a quarter were deprived of the right to vote ("disenfranchised"). The Germans occupied Starokostiantyniv on July 8, 1941. In late August 1941, the Jews were confined to a ghetto. The Jewish population of Starokostiantyniv and its environs was exterminated in a series of actions from August 1941 to November 1942. Today, the town has a small Jewish community, "Shalom." In 2012, it had 80 members." A tragic story.
The website posts another picture that intrigues me. It's an old photograph, probably from the the turn of the last century, of Jewish workers in what is called a "cigarette factory." I know that when Isaiah came to America, in 1895, he made his living rolling cigars. I just wonder if he followed a trade that he had begun in Starokonstantinov. Would he, perhaps, have recognized any of these contemporary, doomed Jewish workers?
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