Art of a Jewish Woman by Henry Massie

bathtub, and the toilet was an outhouse in the cobblestone yard. They still used washbasins at home with water heated on the stove and went to the public bathhouse weekly. By the mid-1920s, there was electricity for lighting until 11 pm. They also had a small buggy with two large wheels, a driver, and one horse.
    Church Street ran two blocks up a gentle slope to the Catholic church. “It was large and beautiful, baroque in a modest way, not over-decorated, not smothered in gilt and flowers. When I was small I thought it was the finest church in the world. Our neighborhood was mixed Catholic and Jewish. On Catholic holy days there was a lot of drinking, so everyone cautioned the children to stay indoors and lock the doors and windows. But I never saw anything bad happen. I and the other kids used to say to each other that we should never look through the iron fence around the Catholic deacon’s house. We might, God forbid, see the priest walking in his garden, and something terrible would happen to us.”
    Sometimes they’d play a game of dare with each other and run to the fence, peep through, run back and brag, “Saw the priest, saw the priest,” even if they hadn’t. But she didn’t believe as she had been told that the Catholics were dangerous or that they would throw rocks at Jewish children. One day she marched out of the house and walked to the market square, which was full of Poles from the countryside celebrating a holy day, and when she came back she told her parents, “It is a lie, a big lie! I don’t want to live that way.”
    Her father said to her, “If you won’t listen to me, you will have to go to Kolno, where your grandparents will watch you.” There was that kind of tension between her and her father. With her mother, it was more like a distance. Felice didn’t trust her.
    Hanka Reshevska Tetenbaum lived next door and had a small bookstore. Hanka was her mother’s great friend and the woman Felice admired most because she read everything. As soon as she could read Mrs. Tetenbaum started lending her books. Out the front door of the house, down the street that ran toward the square from the house where her family lived were little shops, mostly owned by Jews—the candy store, the bicycle shop, the beauty shop, the dressmaker. Most families lived either behind their stores or on the second floor. Felice had a dreamy view of their little town. Just a few blocks in the opposite direction, the Wissa River had a wooden bridge over it where she and her friends used to gather as teenagers. There was a little beach for swimming. Past the river was a bog where workmen went to cut peat for stoves.
    Though the town was small in population, many of the buildings around Market Square were impressive two story edifices constructed from brick, stone, wood, and plaster. Their roofs sloped gently, sometimes broken by mansards, and often their exteriors were enhanced with vertical running pilasters and small ornamental balconies and canopies over tall windows framed by wooden shutters. In the southeast corner of the square was the modest New Synagogue. Behind it, the rabbi’s house had a rickety outdoor staircase leading upstairs to the classrooms of the school he ran. Behind that, at Moyshe Farberovicz’ grain mill, two horses plodded in a circle all day long turning the grindstone. Faberovicz was the second of the three licensed grain dealers in the Bialystock government district, and according to Felice’s father he was a goniff, a thief, a dishonorable man whose promises and contracts could be disingenuous or dishonest.
    Diagonally across the square in the northwest corner was the Old Synagogue, near a quarter where only Jews lived. Very large in scale and erected early in the 19th century in the familiar broad rectangular shtetyl style with a conical roof, the Old Synagogue was the second most imposing building in town after the church. Its sanctuary was spacious and airy with high windows. The ornate,