Historical Background and Interviews
I. Ludvipol: A Modem Shtetl Ludvipol: A Modern Shtetl
Warsaw, as well as Russians in stately Kiev, about 160 miles east of Ludvipol. A clue to urbanites’ view of the region comes from a scene in The Doll in which a man who wears old, unfashionable clothes to a performance at Warsaw’s Grand Theatre is greeted by titters and whispers that he must be “some squire from Volhynia.” But as the town built its economy on land-based industries, by the mid-nineteenth century Ludvipol was thriving. Community re- cords show 286 Jews were living in Ludvipol in 1847. In that year there was a paper factory in the town as well as two Jewish phar- macies, ten Jewish stores, a number of Jewish craftsmen, and a local branch of the national Association of Jewish Craftsmen. The town also had a Jewish inn that was frequented by lumber mer- chants and other travelers. Pogroms terrorized Jews early in the 1880s in other parts of what is now the Ukraine, but there is little evidence of pogroms in Lud- vipol at that time. By the end of the nineteenth century, Ludvipol’s population had increased to 1,428. Most of the residents — 1,210 — were Jews. As their numbers grew, Jewish culture flourished. The town had five synagogues, a rabbi, and three kosher butch - ers during this period. It also benefited from a network of Jewish cultural institutions in the surrounding region, such as a rabbinical seminary and a Hebrew printing press in Zhitomir, eighty miles to the southeast, about halfway to Kiev. Ludvipol’s population continued to grow with the brisk trade that developed along the Slusch River. Logs from the region were sent down the Prypet River to the Bug and Vistula rivers and fi - nally to the port of Gdynia on the Baltic Sea. Sales of cattle and horses flourished in Ludvipol, and businesses large and small made money from the sale of secondary agricultural products, such as goose down, sunflower and other seeds that were pressed for oil, hog bristles, livestock feed, and fertilizer. Only thirty-five miles away was the larger town of Rovno (population forty thousand by 1931), with a busy railroad junction. Into this region, with its rural economy and modest but live- ly Jewish cultural institutions, World War I and the Bolshevik
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