[Page 93]

A town in the district of Kamyanets Podilskyy, 15 kilometers away. The Jewish community there counted about one hundred families, which supported itself principally through small trade and crafts. In the town, there was a synagogue, “Cheders” of the old type, an “Improved Cheder” and also a Zionist organization and a “Linat Zedek” group. After the First World War, five of the townspeople immigrated to Israel.

[Page 94]

[Page 95]

My small hometown - fifty-sixty houses among dozens of Ukrainian villages on their fields and their gardens and their forests - what will I mention about you?

You didn't have great men - many great scholars, famous rabbis, cantors whose names were known. Famous artists did not emerge from you; the routine life of a small congregation in the Pale of Settlement flowed through you; Jews, simple “Amcha,” engaged in small trade, in poor shops. And your craftsmen - tailors and cobblers - made a living sewing furs and boots for the peasants in the area. Weddings and the visits of the Hasidic “rebbes” were the only events that breathed life and sent waves of awakening and enthusiasm.

However, one exceptional, rare, and extreme thing was found in the town of Balin. Something that had no precedent in other towns and cities in the vicinity and perhaps not only in this vicinity: Balin was blessed to have a Jewish hero live there, a wonderful hero who seemed to be a direct continuation of a chain of legendary ancient heroes and whose image captivates from remote generations.

I will tell, therefore, what is stored in my memory of the character and misdeeds of this hero and may these matters please be a headstone for the grave of my town - a small community that perished in the flood of blood and destruction.

Israel Nettes was his name (his father's name was, apparently, “Nette” or “Natan”), his height was a little below average, broad shoulders, solid, muscular, well-shaped, light, and flexible. His facial expression was intense, alert, but his eyes were full of mischief and laughter. He had five or six children and he lived in the back of the town in a house rented from an old non-Jewish woman - a scion of a privileged Polish family that had declined. This house was different from all the houses in the town as it had a spacious yard surrounded by a fence of boards standing next to each other vertically, many of them leaning diagonally, black and rotten. In the yard, there were a few fruit trees, a large stable - a low and dilapidated wooden hut - and a deep well whose source was dry.

Israel's occupation was not fixed and, from time to time, he tried his hand at different livelihoods. He was a tailor, then a hatter, and finally - during the period when I left my childhood and gave my opinion about him - a grain merchant. In those years, the years of the first decade of the twentieth century, many of the townspeople in Podolia were drawn to the grain trade: they would wander through the surrounding villages in light carts, drawn by one horse or two, and buy from the farmers the harvest of their land.

Israel Nettes made a partnership with Shmuel the ragman and they became merchants. Their flimsy cart resembled a large poultry cage with wheels attached to it and their pair of horses were called “retarded cats” by the townspeople. Israel himself, who was a witty “joker” and whose thought was always amusing, would say

[Page 96]

that at the incline of the mountain, he and his partner Shmuel would load the horses on the cart and push it up until they reached the slope.

They would tell of a miracle in the town, how Israel Nettes managed to save himself and his partner from robbers who had a regular resting place in the large forest of the village of “Tskiva (=Snitivka)” and terrorized the surrounding villages. Armed with axes, those robbers once chased after the two merchants who were traveling in their cart. It was on a summer day in the twilight after sunset. The “cats” harnessed to the cart could not save their owners and the distance between the pursuers and the pursued kept shrinking. So Israel stopped the horses, stood in the cart in a firm stance, and pulled out of his pants pocket the hand scales that weigh light packages. He pointed the tool with a vigorous movement towards the pursuers: “Go away, and no - I shoot! one, two …”

In the gloom of the twilight, the copper of the number board glistened and the hook on which the weighed package was hung was tilted forward… Before Israel counted “three,” the robbers jumped into the bushes and disappeared into the thick of the forest.

Israel was full of vitality and antics. At Simchat Torah and welcoming the “Rebbe” - he was at the head of those who were happy and making others happy, dancing and singing tirelessly and sweeping the entire crowd after him. He was involved with the young people of the town who liked him because of his stories. Israel used to narrate with rare talent about his adventures in travels and wanderings, exaggerating and tying incident to incident and incident within incident, fascinating his listeners and bringing them sometimes to laughter and sometimes to gaping mouths and widening eyes from so much tension - and in the end, when he reached the peak of intrigue and life-threatening danger, he would finish: “And of course I would not have remained alive, were it not that the whole tale was one big lie from beginning to end …”

Twice Israel saved the entire town from holocaust and destruction. The first time occurred during the period of disturbances after the Russian war of 1905. A number of disturbances had already passed over many communities in the Pale of Settlement and now unrest had also begun in the vicinity of the town of Balin. One day - it was market day - the town was flooded with an unusual amount of farmers from the surrounding villages who came in their carts - they, their wives, their sons and daughters. An ominous sign was evident in the fact that they brought almost nothing with them to sell - the carts were full of empty sacks intended to receive the loot … They wandered through the shops, harassed the shopkeepers, and any other Jew they encountered. Then they appeared in the middle of the market on the pile of sacks of one of the tall carts, two or three speakers who incited the audience to get rid of the Zhyds, “the murderers of the Messiah and the bloodsuckers of poor and innocent farmers”… The crowd became heated and burst into shouts of rage in a moment and the evil began.

At that moment Israelik, Israel Nettes, jumped on the orators' wagon. He waved his hand and called aloud: “Listen to me, farmers, respectable proprietors!”

The sight of the only Jew who dared to appear in the heart of the roaring crowd (all the Jews of the town were already hidden in their locked houses) astonished the farmers and they quieted.

Israel continued: “Look, I am the only Jew standing here among you. You have it in your power - of course - to eliminate me in an instant and also to destroy the entire town. Those who are locked inside their homes -

[Page 97]

old men, women and children - will not stand against you. But where are the young men, every good young man, who are strong? - they are not in the town, they were already ready for this hour of turmoil. They are now spread out in the surrounding villages, lurking in hiding places next to your houses, your granaries, your barns… each of them is equipped with something full of kerosene and worn, dry rags. As soon as the cry of the robbed town is raised, the fire will take hold in your villages, the flames will spread from house to house, from granary to granary, from barn to barn, and when you return with the spoils, you will find in front of you only smoky wood. And now - the choice is yours! Do as you wish!”

He jumped from the cart and disappeared before the crowd awoke from its astonishment. And when they awoke - they were all gripped by the spirit of escape, a stampede. The whips lashed the horses' backs, the carts rattled, pushed each other out of an excess of haste, tangled with each other, and were left to the sides amid the sounds of swearing. The market emptied out and the town was saved.

A second act of rescue was carried out by Israel several years later and this time he proved not only the courage of his spirit, but also the ease of his arm. I was already an adult at the time and the event remains etched in my memory in all its details. To a certain extent, I even participated in it, although - like other young people like me - only passive participation.

It was a late winter Saturday. The snow was still falling in a thick layer and the sky was low, full of dark gray clouds, the air was humid. It was in the afternoon, the time of the Shabbat nap.

At that hour, a large convoy of sledges, loaded with quarry stones, appeared in the town. A sugar factory was then being built in the village of “Makovo” and the stones for the building were supplied by the quarry in the village of “Zalenchi”; the road between the two villages passed by the outskirts of the town of Balin. For some reason this time, the peasants, the stone carriers, parked inside the town itself and the large caravan of forty sledges stretched from the entrance of the town to its end. The peasants - tall, muscular men - tied the bags of fodder to the necks of their horses and some of them started knocking on the shutters of the closed shops; they demanded to sell them smoking tobacco, matches, edibles - and when they didn't respond, they knocked over a shutter here and a shutter there with a shout and sent their hand in looting. A wild debauchery immediately broke out among the rest of the group and from the houses that had been broken into were sent screams of fear.

I was then with my elder brother, Yirmiyahu, in Uncle Fischel's house. At the sound of the shouts, we dashed outside and at the sight of the rampaging gentiles, we immediately ran to Israel Nettes. He lay down on the wide oven cornice - a typical oven for gentile homes in Ukraine - and slept peacefully.

- Goyim are rioting in the town! - we shouted.

He shook off the fur he was covered with and quickly jumped on top of the oven. He didn't wear his outer clothes, just put on a light winter coat, put the fur hat on his head, and took out some object from the desk drawer with his back turned towards us. We did not see what this object was even when he turned towards us because the hand holding it was pulled inside the sleeve. (Later it turned out that it was the riveted iron plate that is worn on the palm.) He ran to the center of the town, we lagged behind him. We saw in the distance that he stopped by Moshe Tabachnik's kiosk and the peasants immediately surrounded him in a tight ring and started

[Page 98]

to beat him with the gun butts that were in their hands. It was as if he sank and was swallowed up in the dense crowds, but suddenly the ring broke, the peasants recoiled to the sides wailing and screaming and began to run away, with their faces and skulls dripping blood. Now the doors on both sides of the street opened and people who were encouraged stood in the doorways and threw wood chips at the fleeing goyim, taken from the stockpile of wood used for heating in the winter.

- Idiots! - Israel rebuked them - Do not throw pieces of wood! Do you want to give the goyim better weapons than the whips in their hands?

He stood bareheaded (the fur hat had disappeared), his face and scalp scribbled with red stripes, swollen, from the blows of the whips, but he was in a good mood.

- I'm not asking you for any help - he said with a laugh - only that you run fast after the escapees and cover up the blood that was spilled on the snow.

Large and dense blood stains reddened in the snow by the kiosk, the place of the skirmish, and along the escape route. We ran and obliterated them by rubbing with the soles of our shoes and by piling fresh snow from the sides.

- And now, untie the horses from the sleds and bring them into my courtyard, - Israel commanded - I will not return the horses until they return my fur hat, one of them knocked it off my head during the commotion.

This order was also carried out immediately. Israel's courtyard filled with horses, the abandoned sleighs stood outside, and the defeated wagoneers gathered near the “cloister,” the Christian house of worship located some distance from the town. They dressed their wounds and held a council until the evening. In the evening, a delegation came from them to Israel, asked for pardon and forgiveness, and returned the hat. Israel returned the horses to them and, after a sip of reconciliation at the expense of the coachmen, the caravan set off on its way.

A few years later, Israel emigrated with his family to his relatives in London and nothing has been heard of him since. I heard that one of his sons visited Israel after the establishment of the state and met with one of the Balin expatriates who are here. He said that his father was no longer alive, but I don't know if he died before World War II or after the war or perished during the “Blitz” on London.

Please let his memory be - a memorial candle for all of the small town that sheltered in his shadow until the terrible shadow came, the shadow of the complete extinction from which there was no escape again.

[Page 99]

Born in 1896. He received a traditional education with a secondary educational level and attended lectures in philology at the University of Kamyanets Podilskyy. In this city, he taught Hebrew for several years, participated in varied cultural work, and for two years (1919-1920) he even served as the president of the Jewish community within it. He was also active in the Jewish self-defense organization and went with a company of fighters to the battle in the nearby town of Orynyn against the Petliura army, which was about to invade Kamyanets Podilskyy.

In his plays, Ashman revealed the talent and natural sense of a talented playwright who stays as far away from external effects as possible and strives towards discovering the intricacies of the human soul. The plays, ten in number, were presented with great success by “Ha-Matate,” “Ha-Ohel,” and “Habima” (this last presented “Michal Bat Shaul”), among them also at the International Theater Festival in Paris and by troupes of amateur and professional actors in various places in Israel and abroad (the United States, France, Canada, Argentina, and others). Two of the plays, “This Land” and the trilogy “Michal Bat Shaul,” won the Keren Govinska Prize and the Zemach Prize by means of the “Habima” theater.

In addition to operas and operettas, Ashman translated several plays from foreign languages into Hebrew and dramatized “The Travels of Benjamin III” by Mendele Mocher Sefarim and “Menachem Mendel the Dreamer” by Shalom Aleichem. He also authored textbooks and anthologies, and these several years he serves as the chairman of the Association of Composers and Authors (ACUM) in Israel and devotes much of his time and energy to the protection of creator's rights (“copyright”).

[Page 100]

  Kamyanets Podilskyy, Ukraine     Yizkor Book Project     JewishGen Home Page

Copyright © 1999-2024 by JewishGen, Inc.
Updated 16 Feb 2024 by JH