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Part One: The Foundations of the Volftsun Family 17 Shlomo and Hava lived better than many people in Gorodok, but we should not forget how difficult and dangerous living conditions still were, even for relatively well-off people. Their big house did not have running water or inside bathrooms. On rainy or snowy days, it was not a pleasant journey to the outhouse. People did not bathe as oen as they do nowadays; the children generally had one bath per week. There were communal washhouses by the river where everyone went to bathe. Iosif remembers his mother going to the mikva (Jewish ritual bath). In the summertime, Shlomo took Iosif to the river on Fridays to wash up. What made the situation dangerous was the lack of clean water. Drinking water came om wells, which were oen contaminated om untreated sewage leaking om the outhouses. Most people suffered om constant stomach aches and intestinal disorders. This was true for the Volsun family, Iosif recalls. He visibly shudders when he recalls the lice and parasitic worms that troubled every member of the family om time to time. The may seem strange that they waited so long to marry, in Jewish families it was the custom that the younger sisters wait for the older sisters to be married first. Hava had to wait for her sisters Riva and Faiga to find husbands. Shlomo and Hava's wedding was a grand, multi-day affair that people still spoke of many years later. Inna remembers the stories of how the wedding dress had been ordered om Paris. Many guests were invited om Gorodok and all over the countryside, as well as cities throughout Ukraine. Remember, both the Volsun and Brandes families were well known: the Volsuns for their successful businesses, and the Brandeses for the devotion of their rabbis. Dancing and enjoying plentiful food, everyone celebrated the union of the Volsun and Brandes families. Living Conditions in Gorodok Living Conditions in Gorodok Facing page: Mura (Iosif 's first cousin) and Mariam (Iosif 's grandmother) in Shtetl Graiding, Ukraine, 1916. One person who didn't drink was the groom. Unlike many Russian men, Shlomo didn't smoke or drink alcohol—not even vodka, the national drink of Russia. Even when a toast was called for at the wedding, he took only a tablespoon of wine, no more. In Russia at the time, aer a woman married she traditionally lived with her husband and his family. Sometimes this required a woman to live far om her own family and the house she grew up in. Not so for Hava. All she had to do was move two houses down to the Volsun house. At the time of his marriage and for the 15 years since his father's death in 1896, Shlomo did what was necessary to keep his family's business running. He would have succeeded in building the business to heights that his father couldn't dream of, but the Russian Revolution swept the land and changed everything. The system lice were bad, especially for girls when their hair got infected. In the worst cases, they had to have their hair shampooed with kerosene. The smell was unbearable. In many cases, the girls cut their hair close to the scalp. If you look at photographs of Russian girls at that time, many had very short hair because of the lice. The Volsun girls, however, hardly had a problem with lice because Hava kept the house particularly clean. But if the lice were bad, the parasitic worms were worse. These worms got into the intestinal tract through contaminated drinking water. Once in the body they would stay there and grow, robbing precious nutrients om the body. At a time when few Russians received adequate nutrition, an untreated parasitic infection was equently lethal. The death of one of the Volsun sons, little Shmuel, was almost certainly related to a parasitic worm infection. There was a medicine that would force the worms out of the body, but the taste was so terrible it was almost better to live with the worms.

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