My father, Sam Briss, always spoke of working on the farm. During the summer, after a very hot day, he would ride a horse bareback into the pond and let the horse swim through the water, dragging him behind as he held onto the horse's tail. This gave me the impression my father's family had a large piece of property they managed or owned.
My father described the home he and his family lived in as having a big fireplace in the center of the building, and it had large shelves like stairs going up the sides of it, which were large enough to use as sleeping area during the very frigid winters in that part of Europe. I also got the impression that his father, Notte, was a cattle dealer and had the animals slaughtered and distributed to the town or village, the kosher parts to the Jewish people and the others to the gentiles.
My father told me of one bitterly cold day on which his father got him all dressed up with his heaviest clothing and took him on one of his cattle-buying trips to an adjoining town. They were travelling by horse and open sleigh, taking along some dried herring and schnapps to snack on. It was so cold that my father was slowly getting numb and sleepy. All of a sudden, his father gave him a big push off the sleigh, into a snow bank, and kept driving. The fall shook my father awake and he had to run after the sleigh. By the time he caught up with it, he was wide awake and ready to continue the trip.
One night, as my father was about to retire, he overheard his parents talking about their son, Lazar, who was being called up to serve in the Russian army. It seems this son was attending Yeshiva and studying to be a rabbi, which, in the mind of his father, was the highest ideal. He didn't want to pull Lazar out of school so he thought maybe they should send Sam in his stead. (The Russian army accepted substitutions as long as they filled their quota.) My father felt angry and disappointed that he had to go replace a brother who sits on his tuchus all day reading books while my father sweats in the fields. The next morning, when his father left the house, he approached his mother, stated that he will replace no one, and packed his clothes. His mother was tearful but gave him monies from her hidden hoard, and he left the house, never to return. He worked his way to the shore and boarded the ship to come to America.