| Len's uncle
A visit to an uncle: Wolves
in the forest
Before I went to the yeshiva, I was quite young at that time, very young. Of course, I traveled with my mother during my early childhood. I recall going once to an uncle, a brother of my mother’s, for a visit.
My uncle lived on an estate that he was renting from a Russian nobleman and it was during harvest time. His help was all taken, all busy; so he sent a girl about 14 or 15 years old. She came with a nice wagon and horse to meet us at the steamship — we arrived on a steamship from my home town.
It was towards evening—it was about sunset, and we started out towards my uncle’s home almost in the dark. So we traveled in the dark. We had to travel through a forest, through the woods, through a primeval forest hundreds of years old, maybe. But there was a road, a narrow road in the forest, and we traveled through the forest.
When it got real dark, we saw little fires in front of us; and the horse stopped, wouldn’t run. The girl told us those are wolves.”Their eyes are very noticeable at night. They look like fire. They are running because they are being chased. Otherwise they would have attacked us.” That’s what she told us. And it was true.
Again, we stopped over at her father’s house. Out of the forest, there was a village. That’s where she was from; she lived in that village, a family that lived in that village. She said, “We’ll stop and rest up for an hour or so.” We stopped there, and we walked into the house. It was dark. I recall the man—her father—the girl’s father walked out, and he brought in some kindling, some little kindling from the roots of a pine tree. They are full of, what shall I say, oil or grease. And he lit the lamp. He put it on his lamp.
That’s the first time I ever saw such a lamp; it consisted of a great big frying pan with holes in it, and chains attached from four or six sides, and they reached up to the ceiling. In the ceiling there was a pipe which was made of tin or iron, or I don’t know what, but it went into the roof. If they light something on the frying pan, the smoke will go up through that pipe. It wouldn’t settle in the house. So he put the kindling on, and he lit a match, and of course it got bright.
The house was illuminated, so I recall asking him—I said, “Don’t you have a lamp?” He says, “What do you mean, a lamp? This is a lamp.” I said, “No, a lamp that’s made of glass like a bottle on a stand and you fill it with kerosene, and it has a wick in it and a globe.” “No,” he said, “we don’t have it.”
I said, “They have it in town in Parichi. It’s not far from here.” He says, “I’ve never been to Parichi. I have no business there. What will I go there for?” He says, “We have a couple of Jews in this village, and whatever we need, we’ll buy there. We need a herring, or a bagel, or anything else, we get it from him, from the storekeeper here.”
So that was the sort of a lamp I saw, people that never had seen civilization yet. I said before that when I was a child, I never had heard of a telephone or electricity. But, this man had never had heard of a kerosene lamp. Oh, I suppose they have all this civilization already introduced for many, many years. This is one of the episodes.
When I went to my uncle’s house, I remember my uncle’s son, a boy of my ageÑmaybe a year or two older. His name was Shlomo. His last name Katznelson. He told me that the house of the poretz, that means a nobleman. The word poretz in Hebrew really means a vicious animal. The Jews used to call the nobility “poretz.” The people, the poretz himself, thought that it was a very fine, becoming name. They didn’t know that poretz means a vicious animal.
So my cousin told me that last night they had what they call an achoteh. Achoteh means they go hunting. They were hunting for wolves, because there were many wolves in the vicinity, and a number of noblemen from around the district got together, and they were hunting wolves. That’s why we saw those wolves running. They were running away from the hunters, and that’s why they didn’t stop. This is on one of my trips
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