Day 4 - Відвідування Перемишляни - Visit to Peremyshlyany

Вівторок - Tuesday, October 12
After breakfast in the hotel, I went off to the post office to mail a letter, and when I got back Alex was waiting in the lobby. He told us that he'd spoken to a contact in the state archive, and that there was no record of the name "Schechter" in Peremyshlyany. Unfortunately, dad didn't have that much information, such as a street name or the surnames of any other relatives from his father's side of the family to go on (and there's really no one left to ask). All he did remember was that his father told him that he grew up on a dairy farm outside the town (like Tevya), and that he walked 4 kilometers (or was it 4 miles?) to school in town. 

With this information, we set out on the to road to Peremyshlyany. There was a decent amount of traffic, and the cobblestone roads made the drive rather loud and bumpy. Our driver, Oleh, navigated these obstacles with great skill. The morning was cold and foggy (it rained the night before), which cast an eerie pall over the landscape.


We drove for about 30 minutes until we saw the sign for Peremyshlyany. There were two signs, actually - one was the regular road sign announcing boundary of the town, and another was a monument built to commemorate the 550th anniversary of the town.

son & father

Entering Peremyshlyany

zoom-out of the sign

ooh, symbolism.

standing on the sign

farmer on a horse cart.

We drove into the center of town to walk around and get a feel for things. Alex pointed to a plaza with a statue of Bohdan Khmelnytsky were the synagogue once stood. Afterward, we walked around the town (I was admiring the ornate ironwork on balconies). The village was very rural - most of the houses had yards with vegetable gardens and livestock. We walked through the market, where you could by sausage, bread, lingerie, etc. Then we drove up a steep hill to the Jewish cemetery. All of the stones, save for a few, were toppled or removed, and there were chickens, ducks, geese, and turkeys roaming freely. At one end was a chapel, inside which the Chassidic rebbe Meir Peremyshlaner and his wife are buried. We could not go inside, but in the window, hundreds of kvitelekh left by his followers were visible.

balcony

another balcony

building on the corner

Cossack statue

this type of fence was a pretty typical vernacular style

ducks

chickens

beets (of course!)

Dad w/ billy goats

sidewalk

Soviet-era construction

the crossroads

bauhaus

cemetary

turkey and chicken in the cemetary

broken Matzevah

chapel

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Day 3 - Sightseeing in L'viv

First, before I get into my journal, a digression. The is no such thing as "the Ukraine." It's just Ukraine. As a matter of fact, in a number of Slavic languages (including Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian), there is no concept of direct (the) or indirect (a, an) articles at all. They just don't exist. Besides, we don't talk about "the France" or "the Japan" or "the Finland." To the best of my knowledge, the only countries we refer to in English as "the..." are ones with an adjective modifying a noun (the United States/Kingdom, but just "America" or "England"; the Russian Federation, but just "Russia"). Well, there is the Netherlands, but that literally means "Nether Lands," so here "Nether" is an adjective. And of course the proper name of the country is Holland (not the Holland). Perhaps the "the" is a remnant from Soviet times, when there was an adjective in the title (the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic), but when talking about other former Soviet satellite states, we don't talk about "the Georgia" or "the Latvia." Anyway, let's get back to our regularly-scheduled program, shall we?

Понеділок - Monday, October 11

After a nice breakfast (сніданок/snidanok) in the hotel restaurant, our tour guide Alex showed up and we wasted no time hitting the streets to see the city's many historic Jewish sites. Alex's depth of knowledge of L'viv's history, but Jewish and general, was astonishing. He pointed out house where members of the Jewish community once lived, stores they once owned, places in which they once prayed, etc. Of special interest to me were the shops advertising their wares that were once sold there in Polish, Yiddish, and German, reflecting the former population of L'viv, when it was part of Austria, then Poland, with a large Jewish population. A few of these painted advertisements remained, framing the doorways of these shops, now frequented by people who, for the most part, speak none of those languages.

an old dairy mart, selling milk, tea, coffee, butter, sour cream, etc.

"Skład" means store; not sure what the other stuff means, but the Ukrainian over the doorway says "coffee" and "tea," so this must be a cafe now.

After walking past the old Jewish hospital (built in the Moorish Revival style), which is now a maternity center and down Sholom Aleichem Street, we made our way to a park commemorating the L'viv Ghetto and the thousands of people who were murdered by the Nazis. The park was just off of a square that was a popular bus stop, and Alex tried to flag down a cab to take us to the train station where people were shipped off to Belzec, the largest concentration camp in this region. We also drove to the location of a smaller camp located on the outskirts of the city, which was called Janowska. There was a marker denoting the location, and a memorial plaque, but none of the buildings remain. The area is now just woods.

former Jewish Hospital

Magen David design is visible from the inside of the door looking out

Plaque indicating the apartment where Sholom Aleichem lived in 1906.

L'viv Ghetto memorial

train station

Janowska site

 We then took a cab back into town, past the deteriorating Stalin-era prison and some concrete block high-rise apartment buildings, back to the Ploshcha Rynok area. Nearby was the medieval part of L'viv - a large brick wall and arsenal building still stands, apparently housing a museum of weaponry. Once, two synagogues stood here - one is now a paved-over square, and the other, the Golden Rose is supposedly, eventually, being rebuilt (it was the oldest synagogue in Ukraine, built in the 1500s, but it was destroyed by Nazis). Right next to the Golden Rose site is a "Jewish" style restaurant which has no set price; you're supposed to haggle over the bill. Very subtle.

 Next we walked back into the commercial area, across Prospect Svobody, and flagged a cab to take to see one of the city's two active synagogues. (I should mention here that once, there were 40 synagogues in the city, and pre-WWII, 1/3 of the population was Jewish. Now, not so much, estimated at around 2,000). We also passed a statute of one of L'viv's most infamous former residents, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who wrote "Venus in Furs," about which the term "masochism" was coined. Oh, Marianne Faithful is a relative of his... Anyway, we got to go into the synagogue, but we couldn't meet the rabbi because he was out of town, and we never made it back to see a service.