Bubbe's Place: Stories

Introduction:The Trip to Koshovato Landsmanschafft

My dear children, let me tell you how the idea of putting these stories together into a book has come about. You yourselves have listened to these stories for many years. We Gubenkos, Gussmans, and Kostoroffs have always tried to pass on their family history, from one generation to the next. But on a particular summer afternoon in the late 1980's, I realized that the family treasure does not consist of money or jewels, but of these stories.

In them private life, the larger Jewish saga, world history, and our individual personalities all intersect. At the time, my mother and father (your bubbe Sonia and zayde Menashe Korostoff, of blessed memory) were already in their eighties. They could no longer manage a long car trip by themselves. So they came to me, the daughter. I was a "youngster" in her late fifites, with you three kids already grown, and the eineklach, grandkids, on the way.

"Let me get this straight," I said to them, wrinkling my forehead. "You want to visit the landsman cemetery plots in Brooklyn?" (Landsman is a person who came from the same village in the Old Country.) "We live in Philadelphia and you want me to drive you to New York? Your address for the cemetery is: Brooklyn, New York?"

The 1980's, you remember, were a little before the days of the Internet and OnStar. I had to work a lot harder to get a real address and good directions! First, I telephoned to every Jewish cemetery in the New York City Yellow Pages. To each office I explained, "I am looking for graves of people who once lived in a small town called Koshovato in Eastern Europe. Yes. Koshovato, or Koschewatoje. About 120 kilometers southwest of Kiev, southwest of Boguslav, southeast of Tarashta. Before World War I the village contained six or seven thousand souls, including about one thousand Jews (or two hundred and fifty families.)"

At last I had a likely address for the cemetery. There was no question about what to do. I loved my Mama and Papa so I drove them to visit their deceased landsmen.

With only one or two missed turns I found the cemetery. Mama and Papa had brought a box of little stones-not much more than pebbles-with them. At almost every grave, they reminisced about the deceased, placed a pebble or two on the headstone and mumbled a prayer. Some stories I had heard many times before, some were new to me. I expected to be bored or depressed, but instead was exhilarated.

The day became a celebration of the life of a town from long ago. The shtetlach, villagers, stood, moved, struggled and danced again in my mind as Mama and Papa spoke about them. Before our arrival there were few mourners' stones to be seen, but we were changing that with the box of stones and our slow procession.

Now it is time for me to save these stories for you. Paper is better than voices or tape recordings. Read them to Sammy, Dan, Aaron and Joel. And you, eineklach, read them to your kids, too, after we're gone.