KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
he always sold us brisket with lots of fat, a valuable and scarce commodity in our town. I was also related to Alter Tiktin and his wife, Chava, who, like Zlata Stadlin, was one of my grandmother Hannah Golub’s sisters. Alter Tiktin was an important man in Ludvipol. He was the Jewish mayor, representing the Jewish community, which was 95 percent of the population (there was also a Polish mayor). Alter was an employee of the Polish government, which gave him high status; our relationship to the Tiktins raised our family’s prestige. They had one son, Samuel (Shmuel), approx- imately five years my elder. They built a home facing the main street on the edge of town near our mill, past the Habel creek, which flowed into the Slusch River. Chava owned and operated a general store in the house. When I visited my father’s mill, I al- ways stopped at the Tiktins’ house and was treated to chocolates and candy. Our families were friendly and got together on holidays and other happy occasions. Since I had no grandparents nearby, I thought of Tante (Yiddish for Aunt) Chava’s mother, Faigey, as my surrogate grandmother. I loved her very much and visited her often. I enjoyed sports as a child. Soccer was our favorite game, but we also played basketball, and I was a good ice skater. We skated on the river about a mile from town and on a big, low-lying pasture that filled with water and froze over in the winter. There were three square miles of ice. After a heavy snow, when the ice was covered, all the townspeople would come out with shovels and brooms to clear and sweep it away. We used to fashion our own skates from wood. We carved a piece of wood into a triangular shape, then made a groove along the bottom angle or edge, where two of the sides met, and ran a heavy piece of wire in the groove. We drilled two holes in the op- posite “platform” flat side of the wood and threaded a piece of rope through them; we then tied the skate to our shoe by means of the rope.
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