Tag #106684 - Interview #88491 (Emanuel Elbinger)

The center of Nowe Brzesko was where the Jews lived. Lots of the Jews had beards and sidelocks. Different caps, overcoats and tzitzit underneath, though not all of them. Broadly speaking, some were merchants and some craftsmen. All trades, and artisan production. And there was even a factory, I mean a shirt producer – it belonged to the Ickowicz family, a factory making trousers, clothes. I remember the tinkers – one of them, who had a workshop on Lubelska Street, used to make me whistles. That tinker made various things, including bowls, and I used to go round to see him because I was interested in how he did things with that metal – cut it, and then soldered it with zinc. Well, and there were a lot who made shoes. Some made uppers, others the bottoms. There was a division: the ones who made uppers separately, and the cobblers separately again, and they mended them afterwards – because you wore shoes until they wore out. You had them patched, re-heeled, and it was all expensive. You had your shoes made by the cobbler. He fitted you – what leather? Better, worse? You agreed a price. The same with clothes. There were Jewish tailors, a lot of them.

Just a small town, and yet it was full of craftsmen, all the craftwork really was done by Jews. They made things to sell to the farmers from the villages round about at the markets. Some of the Jews traded in crops. The people who acted as agents in the sale of crops from the manors were Jews. There were horse traders, cow traders. And shops too. There were butchers, bakeries – two super bakeries that didn’t supply just the Jews, but everyone. I used to take the chulent to the bakery on Krakowska Street. I remember watching them make matzah for the holidays [Pesach] – they only baked it in that one bakery. They used to cut out these big thin circles and run this cutter wheel over them, and then toss them into the oven with a wooden paddle. And then they took it right out of the oven, because it was so thin. There wasn’t a Polish bakery. All Jews.