Historical Background and Interviews
I. Ludvipol: A Modem Shtetl Ludvipol: A Modern Shtetl
— trying to gain their independence. The roots of Jewish culture in eastern Poland and the Ukraine were very old and very deep, and Jews are believed to have lived in the area as early as the tenth century. It was not until late in that century that the Polacy (people of the fields) became Christianized and their country, Poland, became a nation in the eyes of the Pope and other European powers. As early as the eleventh century, Jews in Lutsk (Luck, in Polish; Lodz, in Yiddish), the ancient provincial capital of Volhynia — located about seventy miles west of the site that later became Ludvipol — formed craft guilds and participated in city council decisions about the levying of taxes. Lutsk eventually became a famous center for Torah study, with many yeshivas. Many of the earliest Jews to arrive in Poland were Yiddishspeak- ing Ashkenazim migrating from France and Germany. In their new home, “they seem to have been welcomed. In 1264, the Statute of Kalisz, signed by Prince Boleslaw the Pious, gave Jews a wide range of rights, including equal treatment in Polish courts.... In the mid-fourteenth century, Kazimierz the Great, known to Jews as ‘the king who was good to the Jews,’ provided a haven for refugees flee - ing the Hundred Years’ War, the Black Death, widespread famine, and anti-Jewish atrocities [and] confirmed the rights given to them in the Statute of Kalisz.” 1 King Kazimierz also gave the Jews a prime tract of land near the Vistula River in the royal city of Krakow. That neighborhood, where Jewish institutions destroyed during the Ho- locaust are now being rebuilt with help from Jewish communities in America and elsewhere, is still known as Kazimierz in his honor. In addition, Jews clustered in shtetlach (small towns and villages) where they were a majority or near-majority of the population. By the seventeenth century, Jewish merchants, so wealthy that they rode in coaches-and-six and had pages to attend them, were a common sight in Lvov, a large, cosmopolitan city about 140 miles southwest of Ludvipol. 2 Jews formed a vital part of the connective tissue of the economy Yiddish-speak-
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