Bubbe's Place: Stories

Life in Koshovato

Bubbie Sonya and Zeide Menashe grew up in the same town. They live in houses that had dirt walls and floors. Zeide told me how they made the houses. The men would erect a wooden wall and pack mud against the outside. The dirt walls were 18 to 24 inches thick. Sometimes the men built two separate walls with an air space between. On the coldest days, the women stuffed straw in these spaces and burned it to make the walls warm. They needed these very thick walls to keep out the intense cold, as they only had fireplaces to keep them warm.

In Sonya’s house they had hard dirt floors. When they prepared for the Sabbath, they would wash the floor. Now how can you wash a dirt floor? Sonya would make a paste of clay and water to smear over the floor. She applied this with careful palm strokes, all going evenly in one direction. When the floor dried, she would make border designs with pastes and dribblings of different colored clay. Then she would guard her floor from the careless steps of brothers and sisters until it dried hard and all was ready for the Sabbath.

Sonya’s house had a roof made of thatch (bundles of straw). The roofs were very thick so neither rain nor snow would come through. They brought water into the house from the town well in the street. There was a privy (outhouse) nearby. There was no electricity. People used oil lamps for light and in place of a refrigerator they had a root cellar deep in the coolness of the earth.

In the whole town of Koshovato only two people subscribed to a newspaper, the doctor and the pharmacist. A newspaper was a terrible extravagance. A book was much more sensible. No, there were no radios or television sets. The light was too dim to read by so they spent the evenings telling stories as the women and girls fluffed feathers and the men and boys sorted beans.

In those days, people traveled by horse and wagon. When Menashe was six, a visitor came in a car to their town. He did not see another car for twelve years. There were trains, but not to their town. Most roads were made of dirt, but in Koshovato some streets were paved with stone blocks.

Sonya’s father was a maker of willow rakes and barrels. After the High Holy Days, in October, he would take twenty men and they would travel to the forests to make willow rakes and boards. They would live and work there all winter. Just before Passover, in the spring and summer they would make barrels. They dipped the boards in tubs of boiling water. This made the wood pliable. Then they bent the wood to form barrels.

Menashe’s father was a merchant. He had a general store where he sold beans, flour, grains and some liquor. The Korostoshevsky family was a little more prosperous than the Gubenkos. For example, one room in their house had a wooden floor. Behind the store, they, like the Gubenkos, had four rooms to live in. One room was the parents’ bedroom. Another bedroom was for the girls. The boys slept on couches (benches) in the living-dining room, and there was a large kitchen.