Excerpt from Chone Gottesfeld’s travelogue ‘My Trip to Galicia’, dedicated to Ternopil (1937)

In Ternopil

The train stopped in Ternopil for three hours. I decided to walk into the city. I had never been to Ternopil before, though the name was familiar to me. I wandered through its streets. Groups of Jews stood around, as if they had time to spare. They were all watching me. They knew everyone who passed through these streets, so they instantly recognized me as a stranger. I approached one of them and asked,

“Where is the restaurant?”
“I’ll take you to one,” the young man replied, and came with me.

The others remained standing, stunned that one of them had seized the opportunity to guide me. It seemed they had all hoped to show me around the city.

As we walked, he said:
“I could tell right away you’re an American.”
“How did you know?”
“Your shoes. How long are you staying in Ternopil?”
“Three hours.”
“Good. I’ll take you through the whole of Ternopil. I’ll show you the city,” he said.

…

In the afternoon, he took me around.
“Here,” he pointed, “a rich Jew used to live. Now a Pole lives here.”
“A very rich Jew lived here too. He still does — but now he’s very poor.”
“Here’s where the pogrom took place.”
“And here, when the Russians entered the city during the war, they slaughtered Jews.”
“Do you see that group of Jews over there? They stand like that for hours, talking.”
“What do they talk about?”
“Everything.”
“Such as?”

“Politics. The next war.”
“What do they say about the next war?”
“They believe,” he told me, “that after the next war, the situation of the Jews will improve.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because it can’t get any worse. It must get better. When you arrived, we were just talking about how Poland doesn’t know who to ally with in the next war — France or Germany. See those groups of Jews? All they talk about is politics. And America.”
“What do they say about America?”
“Various things. Mostly good, I think. Like how New York has a Jewish governor. What could be better? How is Governor Lehman doing over there?”
“What does it matter to you that the governor of New York is Jewish?” I asked.
“It means a lot to us. We’re proud of it.”
As he was talking, a man passed by and greeted us.
“You see that man?” he said. “He’s doing well. He has a good old age.”
“And why is he doing so well?” I asked.
“He has two sons. One in America and one in Palestine.”
“And?”

“What could be better? The one in America sends him money. The one in Palestine sends him money. When there was a big crisis in America, the son in Palestine sent money instead. He’s a wealthy man.”

He walked me around the city for several hours. We saw sad places and unhappy Jews.

There was a pogrom here. A formerly rich man lives here. Here there was grief. Here there was trouble.

When it was time to part ways, he asked:
“So, how did you like our city?”

I needed a moment to respond. He didn’t wait — he answered for me:
“What is there to like? It’s a Galician city. It’s not Paris. It’s not London. You won’t see anything grand here — no antiquities, no palaces. Only unhappy Jews.”

This fragment of the travelogue vividly captures several collective experiences and local contexts. 

• It juxtaposes life in the Austrian and Polish periods and illuminates the hardships experienced by provincial Jewry—hardships compounded by the heavy losses of World War I—and lays bare the economic decline of Ternopil during the interwar period. The passage offers a detailed description of the shrinking local economy and the desperate conditions faced by the city’s inhabitants.
• Furthermore, the excerpt exemplifies the mental representation of emigration held by Galician Jews—a theme common from the late nineteenth century onward—with aspirations directed toward both America and Palestine. In numerous dialogues throughout the travelogue, Galician Jews, upon realizing that the author was American, recounted personal experiences involving one or more family members who had emigrated to America. The prevalence of these conversations suggests that, by the end of the interwar period, there was a widely shared cultural phenomenon celebrating successful emigration among Galician Jews.
• Although the events described in the travelogue occur in 1936, the memory of the Russian occupation and the 1915 pogrom perpetrated by the Russian army remains deeply embedded in the collective consciousness of Ternopil’s Jewish community. As such, this source offers an excellent illustration of how the principal features of collective memory were formed among Galician Jews during the interwar period.
• Additionally, the text depicts a typical everyday scenario for local Jews. Faced with a lack of work and pervasive uncertainty, the Jews of Ternopil regularly engaged in small-group discussions on the streets—conversations centered on politics and current events. These meetings unfolded against a backdrop of socio-political tension fueled by the reactionary policies of the Polish government and an increasingly precarious geopolitical situation. Consequently, the mood among the Ternopil Jews was extremely pessimistic, yet it is evident that, in this remote Galician city, Nazi Germany had not yet been perceived as an enemy.

In summary, this source significantly enhances our understanding of the social history of eastern Galicia and documents cultural phenomena characteristic of the local population during the interwar period.