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buildings and the people and the shop windows and the cars; it was so exciting! I dreamt that when I grow up that’s what I’m going to do, I’m going to live in the big city.
    Trochenbrod’s economic expansion and diversification and extension of its market reach continued at a brisk pace until late 1939, bringing with it more than a doubling of Trochenbrod’s population, from sixteen hundred people to over five thousand in Trochenbrod and Lozisht, in the interwar period.
    Some of that population growth resulted from people moving to Trochenbrod from surrounding cities because they married into Trochenbrod families; or because it was a uniquely desirable place where one could earn a living, enjoy a rural environment with many city conveniences, and live in a Jewish town; or both. Some of the population growth happened because more people stayed in Trochenbrod than before: it had become more difficult to gain entry as an immigrant to many destination countries, including the United States, and now as more of a commercial center than an agricultural settlement the fixed acreage of Trochenbrod did not limit livelihood opportunities the way it had in earlier generations. And some of the population growth was caused by a minor baby boom spurred by economic recovery, a measure of stability, and the prospect of a decent, possibly even prosperous long-term future in Trochenbrod.
    A rapid expansion of social initiative also started in the mid-1920s and continued into early 1939, with political, spiritual, educational, and cultural expressions. Zionism took strong hold in Trochenbrod, as it did elsewhere in Eastern Europe in this period. Virtually all young people were organized into Zionist movements that spanned the political spectrum from far left to far right. The most robust Zionist youth movement in Trochenbrod was Beitar , which had a strong self-defense orientation. Even Ryszard Lubinski, the only Gentile born in Trochenbrod, was close to Beitar :
    There were Jewish organizations in Trochenbrod, and sometimes they fought among themselves. Do you know of an organization called Beitar ? I was close to the people in that organization. The head of it was someone named Anshel Shpielman. That organization wanted to fight for Palestine, for a Jewish state in Palestine. The other organizations wanted to negotiate for land, and that caused some conflict among them.
    The Zionist groups met regularly. Sometimes separately and sometimes in cooperation, they had educational programs; put on plays; held evenings of Hebrew music and dance; conducted special holiday events; promoted the use of modern conversational Hebrew; and sent more than a hundred Jewish “pioneers,” to Palestine. A return to the Hebrew language, which was to be the language of the new Jewish state, was one of the basic principles of Zionist youth groups. By the mid-1930s, the language of Trochenbrod, Yiddish, was joined by widespread use of modern Hebrew in homes and at some public meetings. Formal and informal Hebrew language classes proliferated. Trochenbrod, that little isolated town in the midst of Ukrainian villages and forests, even produced poets and essayists who published their work in both Hebrew and Yiddish.
    A point of pride among many native Trochenbroders is that in 1938 the first training course outside Palestine for Etzel officers was conducted in Trochenbrod. Etzel was an early Jewish nationalist organization associated with the Beitar Zionist youth movement. Etzel members believed in the use of military force to create a Jewish state in Palestine. Menachim Begin, who fought the British in Palestine as a Jewish terrorist and later became prime minister of Israel, was an Etzel leader. Trochenbrod offered the nationalist Zionist leaders of Etzel a unique set of circumstances for their military training: relative remoteness from the eyes of disapproving Polish authorities; a rural environment with both open land and forest land; a concentration of