KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
to improve and decorate the fronts of their houses. Businesses in town included a blacksmith, wagon maker, two rope weavers, several small flour mills, at least one oil mill, Ba - ruch Golub’s grain and lumber mill, and numerous shops. Ludvi- pol survivor Pesach Kleinman remembered watching blindfolded workhorses plod in circles at the Shemesh family’s oil mill, where the children were permitted by Shechna Shemesh to dip their own bread into the delicious hot oil. The center of life on weekdays was the marketplace, a round area with stalls in the center and shops, including two sweet shops, lining two sides. The iron-rimmed wheels of farmers’ carts sound- ed like machine guns, tak! tak! tak! as they passed over the cob- blestones. Arje Katz, a Ludvipol landtzman (Yiddish for someone from your own town) and childhood friend of Aharon, fondly re- called carp and shlion, a tasty reddish fish that his family bought at the market from local farmers who moonlighted as fishermen when it was too cold to work in the fields. Statistics from 1920 indicate that 78 percent of Ludvipol’s total population of 2,145 was Jewish (1,680) and that nearby Selishtch, too, was mostly Jewish, with 847 Jews in a town of 1,272.’ Ludvi- pol and Selishtch each had a Polish church, both of whose leaders were “good people who watched out for the best interests of the Jews,” said Katz. At least two local Gentile families were singled out by survivors as being both wealthy and kind: Vasily Menchi- kow, who let Jews pasture their cows on his land, and Moraviow, who lived with his wife and children near the town hall. Larger than the church, and the biggest place in town, according to Arje Katz, was Baruch Golub’s huge mill. “The Golubs were top people in town, very well known by everyone and very well respected,” said Katz. Although the mill supplied electricity for battery-operated radios, people relied mostly on the moon and oil lamps at night. Yona Blueshtein (Raber) remembered that on long winter nights, young people would go for a horse-driven sleigh ride and 1
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