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Gorodok,
Vileika District, Belarus |
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Changing Gorodoks In my thank you letter, I asked how she knew it was that Gorodok and not Ostroshitskiy Gorodok. She wrote back about having seen a map made between the two World Wars, and Gorodok was in Poland. |
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"We were very happy to be in Poland," Shirley Karben would jest. "We
simply could not stand those Russian winters."
With all this evidence, it was not difficult to dispose of the the
remaining erroneous assumptions that had led to the wrong Gorodok.
Our supersleuth researcher had mentioned the existence of a couple of films about our Gorodok. |
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Thanks to the National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis University, they can be obtained as videos. The one entitled "Horodok" was easy enough to find in the alphabetical list of offerings. It is silent, and most of the film is devoted to the visit of a benefactor, who is pouring milk and distributing bagels to all the schoolchildren at a long outdoor table. The stills here I captured with a digital camera. I made a shot of a sign over something that appears (in the frame left) to have been boarded up. It was in mirror image in my photograph. Turned inside out, it then clearly read "UBERSZTEJN." That qualified as a "eureka" moment. Below, more scenes from the video. |
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Another video -- about presumably the wrong Gorodok
-- came to mind. I viewed it again and was
astonished to see some of the same footage, much less of the benefactor
pouring milk, and more scenes of Gorodok. Plus voices.
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Twelve and seven-tenths miles east-northeast
of Minsk would not have put Ostroshitskiy Gorodok in Poland between the
two World Wars. It then began to make sense why there are so
many in our family with ties to
