On Saturday night, a lot of revelers walked up and down our street. Some seemed too happy (or too inebriated) to realize that they were slipping and sliding on icy sidewalks, as snow softly fell on their heads and shoulders. A few guys were in track suits and sneakers, and taxis were making regular stops, a sure sign that a party’s on somewhere.
But the noise didn’t require a call to the police, and all seemed to be well on Sunday morning. We don’t often have vandalism on our street, but It has happened.
And then I saw this, and I wondered whose idea of fun it is to break off a poor defenseless little tree on a winter’s night. I wondered if the person would remember on Sunday morning that they’d broken a baby tree in two on a Saturday night. Or if they’d walk by on their way to school thinking what an a-hole move that was. It got me thinking about regret and remembrance.
The loss of a new little tree seemed particularly hard as we’ve recently had a purge of our big old trees in the South End, supposedly necessitated by frequent power outages (that are for sure annoying, but not totally blameable on our senior citizen trees).
I’m no tree expert, in fact, I couldn’t even tell you the species of most of the trees around me, except for the few that I’ve planted in my own yard, which include a rescued pear from the Superstore Garden Centre greenbin. I’m very proud of that tree, given up for compost until I asked if I could take it home. Even without a mate to breed with, somehow this summer it bore one solitary pear. Sweet!
No, I don’t know the names of the tree around me, but I love them. I love the leafy canopy they produce every summer on our streets. I love that early palest green that they pop out in every spring. I’ve even come to not mind so much raking their leaves, every year for the 25 years we’ve lived in our house. It seems like the least I can do for them, after all they do for me.
Our city trees took a huge beating in Hurricane Juan in 2003. Our daughter, who was around nine years old at the time, covered her eyes with her hands as we drove on the streets looking at the devastation, and said “it’s enough! Let’s go home!” She really couldn’t bear to look at the pitiful sight of destroyed trees. And it was a pitiful sight again when Hurricane Dorian (a mere puff of wind compared to Juan) hurt some of the same trees all over again. Huge swaths of sidewalk pulled up, with massive tree trunks overturned and uprooted all around us, blocking streets, pulling out power lines and chainsaws whining all over the city.
Being spoiled city folk we don’t like our power going out, and there are about 750 of us in what I’ve come to refer to as the “South End Bermuda Triangle of Doom,” who have been losing power regularly over the last six months or so. Snow fog? Our power’s out. Wind? Power out. Someone hits a pole? Power’s out again. It’s become a running joke with those who never lose power, but the unpredictability and annoyance of a lost day of work, scrambling for a place to find coffee or a hot meal, wondering if concerts are cancelled or not, throwing out food from the fridge, is getting kind of old with us SEBTD dwellers. Why us?
So when our Councillor announced that he was going to do something about this, and he did, meeting with the power company and informing us that not only would we be getting a new power grid, but that massive tree-trimming would be happening in an effort to stop trees branches from coming down on power lines during weather “events, ” we all high-fived each other on social media.
But I don’t think anyone was quite prepared for the results. On our block a couple of weeks ago, there were three or four huge Asplundh trucks and workers brought in from New Brunswick, all day for an entire day, blocking driveways and alternating between rising in the cherry pickers and tossing branches into the chipper truck on the ground. It felt like mass destruction of our dear trees. The scene was hard to watch, with chainsaws 100, trees 0. Next door to me, what I’ve come to think of as my “favourite” old tree was marked with a pink ribbon round it – not a good sign, I feared – as branch after branch fell away – the top ones first, and then the middle section.
This tree had suffered greatly in Hurricane Juan. A huge section of it came down in my neighbour’s driveway, pulling power lines out with it, and making us all wait just a bit longer for the longed-for power to return at the time. We’d stepped over the wires on our front steps and sidewalk, and marvelled that we’d decided against an offer to park in our neighbour’s driveway on that fateful night.
After, through three sets of neighbours who had bought and sold the property, people have speculated about that tree. Either it was half dead, split in two, and just waiting to kill someone, or, it had persevered, survived, and what was left was just fine. The city must have thought so too, as neighbours had definitely had it in for the tree and called for inspections every couple of years since Juan. But no-one came to mark it with a pink ribbon until a couple of weeks ago.
I couldn’t bear to watch, and yet I had to. I felt like I owed this tree something, like its sudden demise needed to be witnessed and recorded. As I’d written elsewhere, I’d watched that tree while nursing my little one, and it had been my barometer of the changing seasons for 25 years. I’d raked its leaves, marvelled at its toughness, and daydreamed at it from my bedroom, which I sometimes think of as a treehouse. I was shocked and dismayed to see it actually going, going, gone, and still I wasn’t prepared for the visceral gut-stabbing response its destruction evoked in me. When finally, all that remained of that 60+-year old bruiser was a short but thick stump, and the guys struggled to saw it through and push it over with an amazingly big thud, the dishes clattered in my house. Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but, there was a very loud noise, and I really couldn’t believe that just like that, “my” tree was gone. “Well, maybe it was dead,” one of the guys said, who had kindly sawed me off a few chunks as a remembrance. “But maybe not,” said the other guy. They worked hard in the cold and snow and bizarrely, through tears I gave them chocolate bars for giving me a piece of my tree to remember it by.
That night, I pulled back the curtain by my bed a bit, and, as I’ve done for years without even realizing, I looked out at the night sky. But the view had changed – usually I see power lines, the streetlight and whatever weather was happening outside my window – snow, wind, or calm - made manifest by the branches of that tree. Even without leaves, the branches showed me immediately what was happening outside, and this was somehow reassuring right before sleep. I burst into tears all over again, telling my husband “everything’s changed!” and thinking I’d never want to look out my window again.
The absence of that tree is still startling weeks later. When I open my curtains or exit my car, I’m reminded all over again that something that was present for so many years is not any longer. I scold myself for my reaction – it’s just a tree, after all – but I’m amazed how something that has been so present in my view can cause such a feeling of loss. And the now even shorter remaining stump and piles of snow-clumped sawdust, bark and bits that linger everywhere in our driveways, sidewalks and front lawn, are constant reminders of that chainsaw-filled day, when the trees were being broken.
I watched the guys doing it, not easy work. Sometimes I questioned their choices – why that branch and not the one below it, the branch almost hanging on the wires? And I wondered, how does it feel when your job is to destroy things? I can almost imagine that sometimes using a chainsaw could be fun, but eventually, you must feel like you’ve worked really really hard with nothing to show for it but sore, aching muscles, and you’ve destroyed, not built. I don’t know. I tell myself that probably no-one would actually think like that. They are just doing their job, as one worker told me.
The absence of the tree kept reminding me of a line in a poem by the great Elizabeth Bishop – “the little we get for free, the little of our earthly trust.” How much we take for granted, like “our” trees, not really ours at all.
This tree pain is nothing, of course, compared to the pain that can’t really be conceived of with monumental human losses: the pain of loved ones dying suddenly, of losing one’s arm or leg or a breast.
This has been on my mind too since synagogue this week, when I talked with a fellow congregant at Kiddush about his family “roots” trip to Lithuania a few years ago. Despite making that long journey, visiting archives, and paying someone to translate and drive him to the old family town (Darbenai), he’d found very little that he didn’t know before he left Canada. No-one remembered his family, no records existed for the time period he was looking for, and although he didn’t regret going, I sensed that his trip had not really provided any answers either about what happened to those who remained, or why those who had immigrated had left during a period of relative calm. It gave me pause for thought, in these corona-virus-filled days of imagining our trip to Vilna.
Darbenai is in the northeast of Lithuania, eight kilometres from the Baltic Sea. The town is surrounded by forests on three sides, and the Darba stream flows through it. Jews lived there since they were kicked out of the nearby town of Laukzemis in the 19th century, and mostly made their living from commerce and labour, with small farms next to their houses.
According to a chapter in Pinkas Hakehillot Lita by Dov Levin, in 1931 Darbenai had 25 shops, all of them owned by Jews. The businesses ranged from leather and shoe stores to groceries and eggs. Plus, Jews owned sawmills, a flour mill, a bakery, a welding workshop, a wool carder and a factory for beverages. There were also Jewish artisans – photographers, a hat maker, knitters and a tailor. There was a Jewish doctor in the town. Prominent Zionist leaders came from there, including a David Wolfson, who travelled with Theodore Herzl and became President of the Zionist Federation after Herzl’s death.
Predictably, all of that changed in 1940 when Lithuania was annexed by the Soviet Union, becoming a Soviet Republic. All businesses were nationalized. All Zionist parties and youth organizations were disbanded. The lives of the formerly middle-class Jews deteriorated.
In 1941 the German entered Darbenai with no resistance. Lithuanians began harassing and beating Jews and the cruelty and lawlessness increased quickly. Jews were forced to sweep the streets, to pluck weeds, to clean toilets with their bare hands. The Rabbi’s beard was cut off along with skin on his face, before he was murdered. Jewish women were assembled in the synagogue, where Lithuanian guards would storm inside at night “and do with the women as they saw fit.” Then, there’s this: “The murder of the woman and children of Darbenai was on the 15-16 of August, and it was done with extreme brutality. The Lithuanian guards used axes and iron rods, sticks and so on. The last group of Darbeanai’s women were murdered on Rosh Hashanah, 5703. This is how a Jewish settlement that existed for generations came to an end.”
Another account that I read said: “The majority of the killings were done with agricultural implements and not firearms. The murderers even refused the offer of bullets by a priest who thought this to shorten the suffering.” One does wonder where a priest would get enough bullets to kill hundreds of people.
May their memories be for a blessing.
After reading these sickening accounts, I thought a lot this weekend about how this town, minus its Jews, carried on. Did the absence of shops, skilled workers, photographers and farmers, affect those left behind? Yes, I know the stories of those who simply moved into abandoned houses, wore the clothing and jewelry of those who had died, sat at their tables and ate their food. But did they ever regret what had happened to their neighbours and business owners? Did they miss them?
Darbenai today has a population of 1,461 souls. There’s a post office, a library, hospital, “home of culture “ and restaurants. But the town’s more than 500 Jewish inhabitants are no more. Some, who got out before the Shoah, like the Zaide (grandfather) of my fellow congregant went to the New World, arriving in the 1920’s to places like Glace Bay, Cape Breton. Trip Advisor can tell me which restaurants are reviewed, where to swim and so on. But I wonder, do people there visit the woods, where the Darbenai Jewish men were massacred in three separate execution sites?
Did they notice their Jews were gone? Did they miss their neighbours? How does someone murder a child with an axe or a farm tool? It’s all beyond my comprehension. How lucky for my friend that his grandfather got out, but how sad also, when they found out what had happened there. And then to go there, and find no trace left of what was a flourishing Jewish town.
The absence of what was so familiar…”the little that we get for free,” as Bishop eloquently said.
I can’t compare a tree to these lives lost, no matter how much I loved that broken but stubborn old woody neighbour. I can only think about loss, about what gets remembered and retold, and read the great poets who try to make sense of such things.
From Poem – by Elizbeth Bishop
…art "copying from life" and life itself, life and the memory of it so compressed they've turned into each other. Which is which? Life and the memory of it cramped, dim, on a piece of Bristol board, dim, but how live, how touching in detail -the little that we get for free, the little of our earthly trust. Not much. About the size of our abidance along with theirs: the munching cows, the iris, crisp and shivering, the water still standing from spring freshets, the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese.