On a Very Bad Road to Kamenetz-Podolsk

Yesterday morning we met our guide, Alex Dunai, and began our journey to Kamenetz-Podolsk in the Ukraine.  Kamenetz is the ancestral home of my maternal grandparents and the last ancestral town I needed to visit.  Previously I’ve traveled to my other towns in Belarus and Poland.  I had met Alex at the International Jewish Genealogy Conference and heard him speak, but this was our first opportunity to have an extended interaction.  Alex arrived at our hotel with his new vehicle with a “strong engine” which I would come to appreciate as we navigated roads filled with deep potholes by moving rapidly between lanes while avoiding oncoming traffic. I was grateful to have Alex at the wheel as well as serving as our linguistic aide.  This was clearly not a journey we would have wanted to attempt ourselves.

Once out of Lviv we came to small towns where houses lined the road behind low fences, much as I had seen in Lithuania and Belarus, but the homes were less homogenous in color and style.  Some sported tile work that seemed to mimic Ukrainian needlework.  Farm land surrounds the towns and tall trees have spheres high in their boughs which gives it a very ornamental feel.  Alex told us the spheres were mistletoe.  It was a warm, sunny day and landscape formed interesting silhouettes against the sun. We passed a cemetery of crosses set amongst the trees with their mistletoe ornaments.  Across the road, truncated trees mimicked the form of the crosses. Storks nested high above the houses having just returned from Africa.  As we drove, people walked along the side of the road, many were older women with babushkas on their heads and canes in hand.  Roosters and chickens and the occasional turkey wandered by the roadside.   

After a four and a half hour drive we arrived in Kamenetz Podolsk, clearly the most visually striking town of my ancestral heritage.
An enormous castle/fortress stands in the city like something out of Disneyland, but this is the real

deal. I had seen pictures of it, but one soon realizes that a picture does not do justice to this town.  Below the castle is the area of Karvasary, where the Jews lived in earlier times. 

The  Smotrich River surrounds the city on three sides and flows into the Dinster River.       Two bridges cross the river.  Below are high bluffs and a canyon-like topography which was clearly visible as greenery had not yet filled in the trees.  The bare trees were quite beautiful in their starkness.  We walked across both bridges taking countless pictures as each vantage point offered a new vista.  As we crossed one of the bridges we noticed something we had seen in Lithuania, locks attached to the bridge with names of young couples and a date engraved.  In Lithuania it is a tradition to attach the lock and throw away the key upon marriage.  Apparently this is also done in the Ukraine.

I had the name of the street on which my grandfather lived with his family at the time of the 1897 census.  Alex had determined that the name had changed, but found the location.  The street ended at a large park and the area closest to the park was the older section.  I walked along the first few blocks and took photos of the older buildings, imagining how the family lived in the homes in this area.

In the course of our day we tried a few Ukrainian foods that were new to us.  As my husband is a ‘pescetarian” ( a vegetarian who eats seafood) we had to think about foods that might work in a country of meat eaters.  I was introduced to “green borscht” which is made of sorrel leaves with rice and potatoes.  At dinner we tried “mamaleyga” which is like polenta with cheese with some meat atop.  My pescetarian husband found potato pancakes and mushroom soup to be good meatless alternatives.  He'll be eating a lot of that.

Of Weddings and Locks

As you will recall, last Saturday we sat at a café in the main plaza and watched a string of brides posing for wedding pictures. This Saturday we decided to explore another part of the area, Uzupis. Uzupis means “on the other side of the river” and in fact it is located across the Vilnius River. The early inhabitants were Jewish and their presence dated back to the 1500s. After the Holocaust the houses of the Jews were occupied by the homeless and other vagrants. It was largely neglected for many years. Now it is the area where many artists live and work. Many young artists still squat in abandoned buildings. In 1997 they declared themselves an independent republic complete with their own flag, currency, constitution, president and army (12 men). The focus of the republic is artistic in nature and the President is a poet, musician and film director. One of their first acts as a republic was to put up a sculpture of Frank Zappa.

We walked past some of the large Catholic churches behind Pilies, a street lined with cafes and filled with activity. From there we crossed what seemed more like a creek than a river and followed a wall covered with graffiti into Uzupis. We knew we had arrived when we stumbled upon a square with a large statue of an angel holding a trumpet for which the area is known. We walked down to a café by the river where we had lunch.

Here we decided it was time to try some of the native cuisine and ordered two traditional Lithuanian dishes, cepelinai and beet root soup.










We all have memories of our older relatives drinking borsht, a thick beet soup. Here they add sour cream so it turns a kind of magenta. The cepelinai looks rather gelatinous, but it is actually ground pork encased in a potato onion coating and then appears to be boiled. It is quite heavy inspiring “Lead” Zeppelin jokes.

As we enjoyed our lunch, we noticed a bridal party making its way towards the bridge. We noticed that the bridge was covered with locks and learned that it is the custom of newlyweds to have their names engraved on a lock which they attach to the bridge railing. Then they throw the key into the river. We watched as a second bridal party also made its way onto the other end of the bridge. As we continued our wanderings, we met up with a continuous string of wedding parties. We began referring to them by the color of the bridesmaids' dresses to distinguish one from the other. It seemed as if the entire town had been rented out for a wedding shoot.

We then walked towards town where we found the constitution of Uzupis posted on mirrored plaques in a multitude of languages, Lithuanian, Russian, Yiddish, French and English among them. The constitution outlines 41 points such as “everyone has the right to live by the River Vilnele and the River Vilnele has the right to flow by everyone; everyone has the right to appreciate their unimportance; everyone has the right to be in doubt, but this is not an obligation; a cat is not obliged to love its owner, but must help in time of need and everyone has the right to understand nothing.”

We then found an area of beautifully painted buildings and art constructions. We decided it was time to move on when another bridal party with photographer in tow arrived.

Aside from the bridal parties and the cafes, the area seemed fairly deserted. We stopped at an interesting churchyard were we visited with a British man, married to a Lithuanian, who has recently retired here. After sharing with him that we were in the Yiddish language program, he observed the differences between how the Lithuanians and the Danes had responded to the plight of Jews during WWII. He felt that to this day there is still a failure to acknowledge local collaboration with the Nazi policies.

During one of our frequent café stops one of our new friends shared a joke from an interesting site called Old Jews Telling Jokes. It puts out a new joke every Tuesday and Thursday. One thing we have realized in our travels thus far is how universal Jewish humor is. Whether it was Michael Freydman in Riga or members of the Jewish community in Vilnius, the humor felt familiar. We’ve tried to identify what the quality is and we’ve concluded it is a “bissel” (a little) irony, a “bissel” sarcasm and a “bissel” wit.