WINTER IN OUR TOWN

Slichos were not the only type of preparation performed before the winter season; it was necessary to prepare the house for the freezing months to come. * Surprisingly, there were nice days in the winter too.

THE REAL PURPOSE OF 
A NEWSPAPER

It always seemed to me that the first thing that signaled the approaching winter was that all hands in our house were enlisted, from big to small, to attach the double winter windows. The regular windows were meager protection from the frost outside during the cold winter. Before the winter, they added additional windows to each window (double windows). But around the windows there still remained cracks through which the frigid air made its way in. These cracks had to be stuffed with long strips of newspaper that were pasted onto them.

First, newspapers had to be collected; and like everything in Russia, even a newspaper was hard to obtain. The local papers (The Kolkhoz and The Village) were tiny, pathetic and hard to read. The articles were smeared and scribbly on the outside as well as on the inner pages. In addition, the papers’ distribution was dismal and they were published fairly irregularly.

I would pass by the small print shop and through the window I would see Mozhverov turning the wheel on the printing machine. Mozhverov was a Jewish bachelor who, as people would say, wasn’t completely finished (or “half-baked”). I remember a sharp line from my father: It looks as though Mozhverov is also the editor of the paper.

And so, we needed to obtain the big national newspapers from Moscow, Izvestia and Pravda. I don’t remember how many – not large – pages these newspapers had, four or eight, but it wasn’t easy to buy them. The one kiosk always got a small bundle of newspapers for the entire town. Every day there was a line in front of the kiosk and the package did not provide enough for all.

Nowadays, in free countries, it is hard to understand how necessary and useful a newspaper was in this miserable Soviet country. The Krolevetser readers did not really enjoy reading the “ideological” content of the news and articles replete with propaganda. Even without reading it they knew what it said and they quietly cursed the terrible Red government. But they really needed the paper and this was for more than one reason:

All sorts of products and food were wrapped in these newspapers. Likewise, the paper was used, by big and small, as a substitute for the toilet paper that was used in “bourgeois” countries. Tobacco smokers rolled the tobacco leaves in newspaper. The newspapers were needed for various other purposes too.

THE USUAL COLD WINTER

We very much needed newspapers in order to seal the cracks in our double windows. A family member would cut a large number of paper strips and someone else would smear paste. Over “there” one couldn’t buy ready made glue; we had to make it ourselves. A sticky paste was made from potatoes and this is what was smeared on the strips of paper. Then one of the adults would take the strips with glue and paste them in the cracks.

That was just the first step. In the winter we also had to set up a round iron oven in the dining room. Long and wide pipes extended out of this oven and reached the kitchen chimney through which the smoke exited the house. Both the oven and the pipes were needed to warm the dining room and the other rooms. The oven would occasionally have “fits” and would spread the smoke in wisps throughout the house. This was because the bitumen with which they lit the hearth failed to burn properly.

The day that winter took up residence in the town is when the winter “hell” began, mainly for my mother. The house was very cold in the morning. The wintry hearth had already completely cooled. When my father went to work, my mother had to tramp through the snow in the bitter cold and bring logs from the shed in order to heat the kitchen fireplace. The pieces of wood were often damp and it wasn’t easy igniting them and then cooking soup or porridge.

Then my mother went to the market to buy something to eat. She would return, as I remember, frozen, but her face shone with a motherly smile when she came back with a laden basket.

It wasn’t only my parents who went out in the ice and in storms. They brought the little children outdoors to the outhouse. It was hard enough during the day and much harder and bitter when one needed to go out at night.

The hardest and most dangerous work during the frozen winter was when my mother had to draw pails of water on her own from the well at the foot of the mountain (even the water carrier had been dismissed from his job). What could be worse than carrying pails of water on the slopes of a slippery mountain? It was even more dangerous to approach the well, which was surrounded by mounds of ice.

I remember that my father and grandfather insisted, after a short time, that my mother not fetch water in the winter. “Somehow or another we will find a sheigitz and pay him well to bring water from the well,” they told her.

GAMES AND ILLNESSES

There were other difficult winter conditions, but I will recall some positive times for us children. It often happened that there were pleasant winter days when the sun shone and all the children and youth “besieged” the mountain with sleds and skis and other improvised things to slide on.

We too, my two sisters and I, played on the mountain. My sisters used a sled and I slid on “half a ski.” My nephew Berel Shapiro used the other, whole ski (the “skis” were his). Till this day I am amazed that the many shkatzim and shiksas did not bother us.

During the winter season, we children had all the standard winter illnesses such as bronchitis. There were doctors, medication, cupping, mustard compresses, and so on. Over there, they were very stringent about remaining at home like prisoners for many days even after the illness passed.

However, there were many advantages to lying down at home with the flu. For example, as financially tight as we were, in the good days, when we could buy as much bread as we wanted, they bought white bread, a roll, for the patient!

There was an anecdote they would tell about better days before the Revolution. A child from a poor family went to visit his friend on an ordinary weekday and saw that the friend was eating a roll and butter. This was quite a novelty for the boy. He knew that white bread is eaten on Shabbos or Yom Tov or when someone was sick. He asked his friend, “If you are eating this now, what will you eat when your condition improves – as for me, my head is starting to spin and I think I’m going to fall to the floor.”

MIRACULOUS LANDING

I remember the noise and commotion amongst the townspeople when a plane flew by and something went wrong with its engine and it had to land in the large field near Krolevets. The residents of Krolevets found out about the exciting event. Was this a ho-hum incident? A real plane had landed so close to us! Groups of people began streaming towards the field where the plane was and gazed upon it in wonder. Who among us had ever sat on a plane or had even been in the proximity of such a wondrous machine?

The truth is that the plane looked like one of the earliest models. It had double wings, one above another and it had only two or three seats, but to us, it was an amazing “guest,” and everybody wanted to “welcome” it, including myself. There were definitely things to discuss: How did this “chevraman” made out of metal manage to rise up in the air (may such never befall us) and fly like a bird? Wonder of wonders!

In the 30’s, an attraction came to Krolevets – a “parachuting tower.” It was a tall tower made out of wood from which boys jumped with a parachute. Go figure why it was necessary for a little town like ours to have a tower to teach boys how to parachute.

Whenever someone parachuted, people gathered to watch. The tower was set up near the small public park. As far as I can recall, the parachuting stopped during our last period in Krolevets. And, as a woman from Krolevets recently told me, there is no tower there now.