Keyword "Belarus"

I remember a man whose name I cannot recollect. […] On every Thursday, the market day, he would go around with a cloth bag and collect silver coins from the shopkeepers; by the way, some of the shops were so tiny that they looked like small cupboards [...].

The wooden synagogue near the marketplace, the hearth and heart of the Jewish community. […] The centre of worship and study […], it was literally never closed.

People spoke Yiddish, prayed in Hebrew, learnt Polish, and talked in Belarusian with their non-Jewish neighbours.

Fejga’s shop was the prominent one – the largest and the richest, where you could buy chocolate, sweetmeats, and Glauber’s salt. At Fejga’s you could hear the latest gossip from the vicinity of Haradzishcha.

Indura has lost its Jewish flavour…

The town is of a considerable size and quite densely built up. It trades mostly in linen, of which fairly large quantities are sold. Horses and cattle are traded during ten annual fairs.

 
At first glance, Kobryn seems to be a beautiful and elegant town because it is all interspersed with orchards and partly surrounded by a canal and by the Mukhavets River...

The town boasted for its shoemakers, tailors, home-owners, annual-fair days, market days, as well as for its fires.

Here the people saunter along at a very slow pace. Life in Mir does not exactly have the hustle and bustle of New York City!

[We] had our own house – one storey, with seven rooms and a kitchen – some acres of land, chickens, two cows, a vegetable garden, a few fruit trees. So we had a supply of milk, and sometimes butter; we had fruit and vegetables in season; we had enough bread – which my mother baked herself; we had fish, and we had meat once a week – on the Sabbath. And there was always plenty of fresh air.

I wanted to begin by saying that I left Pruzhany, but which of you, dear readers, is strong enough in geography to know about Pruzhany?

Radun was a quiet shtetl with low houses. Their straw roofs were blackened with mould, and tiny windows were often skewed to one side because of age.

Lie down and sleep, little one

Listen, I will sing you a song

A long, long time ago, far, far away,

There was a town

Playing with his peers a game of the strange-sounding name “klipa” in 1930s Slonim; listening to visiting cantors in the Slonim synagogue; together with his father reading newspapers that had been imported from Warsaw or London; learning Latin at school; and going to the synagogue every Saturday and on holidays, Briker lived in a big world.

People come here to study to become rabbis, not only from different parts of Russia and Europe, but also from all over the world – from America, or even from Japan. [...] and the Jews here [...] do not chatter like magpies, in a foreign language; no, they firmly cling to their faith, customs, and tongue...

Zhaludok had three schools with instruction in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish, and two synagogues – the old and the new one. I remember Rabbi Sorochkin; there were branches of the Hechalutz and Beitar organisations.