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Our trip started out rather inauspiciously.
Oy! That sounds terrible. It reminds me of Sir Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton's 1830 novel Paul Clifford. The first seven words of that book are all most people ever read, not even the whole first sentence:
"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."
The book's fame spread with the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a "literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels."
Hopefully, my inauspicious introduction can't compete.
Still, it's bad enough that I only left it so you could understand why I'm constantly rewriting. James Thurber advised: "Don't get it right, get it written." But that's when the work really begins. Once, his wife read the first version of something he was writing and said, "Thurber, that's high-school stuff." He told her to "wait until the seventh draft, it'll work out all right."
OK, so let's change my inauspicious beginning to just saying that before we left, I was bummed out. Why? We were all ready to leave from Ramat Beit Shemesh to Ben Gurion Airport when one of my sons realized he had left his passport in his yeshivah dorm room in Jerusalem.
His brother took charge, said "Let's go," and drove him to get his passport.
So there I was, kvetching. I was sure that the whole trip was ruined. And my wife (aka Peshe) was all smiles, insisting there's no problem. Soon, we got a phone call. It was the airline notifying us that the flight was delayed seven hours.
There's an old proverb: "Time and tide wait for no man."
But time waited for a woman. I immediately called the Amshinover Rebbe's mother, a"h, and told her the story.
Then I said, "So who's the real Amshinover Chassid? It's Peshe, not me!"
I can still hear her laughing. (If you don't know about Amshinov, ask me later. Let's just say it's where flex-time flexes its muscles.)
But I'm getting ahead of myself. As they used to say in old radio serials, "When last we left our hero," Peshe had decided to make a pilgrimage to Glina, Bubby's shtetl (Grandma's little village), and visit the graves of her family.
Peshe especially wanted to go to pray at the grave of Rebbe Meir'l of Premishlan (d. 1850). That's where, when Bubby was around 10, her grandmother took her to daven. And what did she tell her to pray for? That a frum (religiously righteous) generation should come from her.
The linchpin in the plan was our nephew Akiva Bergman. Akiva is a Breslover Chassid who spent much of his youth in and around Uman and still maintains a home there. He speaks fluent Russian and Ukrainian and leads tours to Eastern Europe. Akiva became our planner and pathfinder.
My first impression of Ukraine was Kiev Airport.
When we landed there in 2011, it looked more like a bus station than an international airport.
By 2019, when we made our second trip, it was completely rebuilt and modernized.
Even in 2011, though, there was a four-lane highway outside. We all piled into the van Akiva had rented and headed west — destination Glina, Bubby's shtetl.
We started to get a feel for the country when we stopped at a Shell gas station — where the station attendant is also the liquor store proprietor. You can fill your car and your personal tank at the same time.
We didn't drink there. So the next impression was not some alcohol-induced hallucination.
Every mile of the 270-mile distance from the airport to Glina, we felt we were traveling back in time. The further we went, the more time warped, slowed, and then, finally, stopped.
There are phone lines and electricity throughout Ukraine (courtesy of Joseph Stalin, I am told), but most homes didn't have running water.
When we stopped to ask a question in Glina's town hall, we asked if there were normal plumbing facilities at the building. We were assured that there were no normal facilities in all of Glina.
(To jump ahead in our journey, to really to go back in time, you need to go to Anipoli — where we would draw water from a well to ritually wash our hands by the grave of the Rebbe Reb Zusha of Anipoli (d. 1800.)
All through western Ukraine, the main traffic we ran into was horse-driven carts. From the Glina Department of Sanitation (or whoever the guys were that we saw load- ing scattered branches onto their cart) to horses pulling wagons with bales of hay all along the roads, we saw loads of horsepower but hardly any cars.
Looking back, I can understand why Ukraine is having a hard time fighting the Russian army.
While there were few cars all along the 1,500 miles we covered in four days, there was no shortage of traffic cops … waiting for a handout. Akiva warned us about a Ukrainian tradition of police officers stopping drivers … and asking for personal tolls. I thought he was exaggerating, until the fourth or fifth time we got stopped. We saw Akiva arguing with one cop, but both of them were smiling. "What was that all about?" I asked when Akiva got back in the van. It turned out the cop was Jewish. And Akiva told him, "You're my brother. You shouldn't take any money from me."
The cop answered, "You're my brother. You should give me double!"
If I harbored any doubts about the "custom," they were dispelled when we stopped at a souvenir shop outside of Kiev. One of the items on display was a piggy bank with a unique design for depositing coins. The "piggy" was a police officer holding out his hand to receive the money. You can take that to the bank.
Next time, we meet Hannah of Glina…
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Mordechai Schiller is an award-winning columnist and headline writer at Hamodia, the Daily Newspaper of Torah Jewry, where this first appeared. His column has won two awards -- so far -- from the American Jewish Press Association.
Previously:
• One big happy dysfunctional family
• Why Pay Less If You Can Pay More?
• Are We Having Font Yet?
• Why Smart People Do Dumb Things
• There is nothing so sad as a stupid Jew
• Asking For It