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up for the outdoor ceremony. Children recited poems and sang songs, and one of the women baked a huge challah and danced while holding it before the bride and groom. It was a time to forget everything else and rejoice. The bride and groom performed their rituals under the wedding canopy—sips of wine, wedding ring, reading of the ritual wedding contract, seven blessings, more sips of wine, and smashing a glass underfoot. A wedding feast was rounded out with schnapps and vodka; a toast, another toast, and then another toast; merry singing and dancing, men with men, to the unbridled exuberance of a klezmer band. A klezmer trio was brought from Kolki for every wedding: Tzalik, who beat the symbols and drums; Chaim, whose fingers danced wildly on the clarinet; and Peshi, the fiddler with a big white beard. There was nothing like a Trochenbrod wedding—that’s how it seemed to Trochenbroders.
    Under the Polish administration a regional public school was established in Trochenbrod—it was actually located in Shelisht, a hamlet between Trochenbrod and Lozisht that was really a part of Trochenbrod. In this school young Trochenbroders were exposed to Polish-language studies, mathematics, literature, and other secular subjects, and Jewish subjects as well. Ukrainian children from nearby villages also attended this school, and were playmates with their Trochenbrod classmates during the school day. Several Trochenbrod natives to this day have strong memories of participating in Polish-language plays at school, like Little Red Riding Hood , even while they rehearsed Yiddish plays in Trochenbrod’s cultural center or Hebrew plays in their Zionist groups.
    Prince Janush Radziwill—of the same Polish Radziwill family that later in the century Jackie Kennedy’s younger sister, Caroline Lee Bouvier, married into—owned vast lands in the region of Trochenbrod. These lands included the forest that bordered fields on the east side of town. The Jews of Trochenbrod often grazed their cattle in the Radziwill forest, took Sabbath walks and picked berries there, from time to time would quietly cut down a tree or two for their own use, and in a manner of speaking considered it their forest. This drove a running cat-and-mouse game with Prince Radziwill’s forest rangers, but on the whole the people of Trochenbrod had cordial relations with the prince himself. Prince Radziwill’s palace was in the small town of Olyka, about twelve miles south of Trochenbrod. To this day there is a horse trail heading south from where Trochenbrod used to be that is known as the Olyka trail.
    In the late 1920s, Prince Radziwill built a Catholic church at the edge of his forest, just east of the northern end of Trochenbrod, to serve about thirty Polish families that lived southeast of Trochenbrod. No one knows why he built the church exactly in that place, but the result was that on Sundays a large group of Poles walking to and from church passed through Trochenbrod’s muddy street in their go-to-church finery, almost as if promenading in Lutsk, with their priest at the head of the crowd.
    Some natives of Trochenbrod recall that young men in these strolling church groups would, as they passed through town, strike at townspeople just to show who was boss. Tuvia Drori, who was born in Trochenbrod and fled to Palestine in 1939, declared, “Yes, they would hit Jews on their way to church; it was a mitzvah [good deed] for them!” But other people who spent their youths in Trochenbrod think the scuffles were incited by young Trochenbrod men who sometimes taunted the Poles on their way to church. Shmulik Potash (not related to Ellie and Basia-Ruchel), who also left for Palestine in 1939, remembers the processions as a good thing for Trochenbrod because while walking through town churchgoers often stopped into a Trochenbrod shop to buy something.
    Basia-Ruchel Potash was first exposed to serious anti-Jewish behavior by the church processions.
    It was on a Sunday, on the