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Vida Castaline’s Oral History
by CAROL SICHERMAN
When I donated my aunt Vida Castaline’s oral history to YIVO, I wasn’t aware of its rarity as a testimony of impoverished and obscure Ukrainian Jews. I know now that memoirs of Jewish life in Ukraine were produced by middle-class, literate people who retain photographic evidence. Vida’s mother, Annie Poltorak Frager, was illiterate; the family had no photographs or any documentation of their life in the Russian Empire. Vida talked in remarkable detail of her childhood in the tiny village of Dolgosel’ye, where she was born in 1908, from which she fled in 1919. Later, when filling out immigration papers, her father, Oscar, listed Olevsk as their birthplace even though it was eight miles away, because Dolgosel’ye (Ukrainian for Long Village) had no municipal existence. Consisting of a couple of streets with houses on either side, it had no shops, no church, no synagogue, and before long no existence when it was absorbed into the nearby shtetl of Kam’yanka.
For seven years, Annie Frager coped on her own with poverty, war, disease, and displacement. Vida, the oldest of her three surviving children, recalled minute details of daily life: cobwebs serving as band-aids; siblings reduced to skeletons while dying of treatable conditions; frozen bread lasting longer because it was so hard to shave off slices; gentile neighbors loaning children’s clothing when Cossacks came, so that Jewish children wouldn’t be identifiable.
During the civil war of 1919, marauding soldiers tore up their feather bed and killed their cow, whose milk was their sole source of income. To save their lives, the family fled muddily through the night into Poland. They found help in Rivne (then Rovno), where a hundred years later other Ukrainians also fled another war. From Rivne they went to Radyvyliv, where a revived Jewish community had organized social services, and settled there until making contact with Oscar.
“These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” says T.S. Eliot’s narrator in “The Waste Land.” YIVO, the resting place of so many fragments of Jewish life, is a fitting home for Vida and her family.