To my wife, Yocheved
I am grateful to my children and grandchildren, whose eagerness to learn about their family's roots in the Old Country encouraged me to bring this little book to completion. I am especially grateful to Julia Ludmer, who gave me the idea for the book, and who worked with me as editor from the first draft to the final manuscript.
It was a life carried on in the same way for century after century, transmitted by one generation to the next -- the same everyday behavior practiced, the same customs observed, without any change whatsoever.
It is my hope that this portrait of my shtetl will stay with my children and grandchildren, will become part of what they have learned.
I hope that they will transmit it to those who follow them, so that the life that is recorded here, though it has vanished from the earth, will not vanish from memory.
Town Life
This is the biography of not just one single, isolated place bearing certain characteristics, but is, rather, an example of thousands of shtetlach in the Ukraine, in Tzarist Russia, resembling one another in style of life, in customs and habits. I think it is worth while to present it to those who are willing to learn about the heritage of their people, about those who came to the United States in the first years of the mass immigration and who were looked down upon by the "real Americans" -- those who had already been naturalized -- and dubbed "die Greeneh" (greenhorns).
I will start with some facts about the shtetl. The name of my shtetl is -- or rather, was -- Rarid, a name shortened from the official name, Rye-Gorod, Rye meaning Paradise and Gorod, city or town. And what a Paradise-town it was for me! Neither one, in fact, nor the other!
As for the size of the Paradise town -- I will illustrate it by telling a joke circulated among the town's kibbitzers: When a peasant from a nearby farm or village rode into our town, his horses were already on the outskirts when the rear of his wagon was still at the entrance.
The average shtetl consisted usually of two streets, one serving as a market place where the peasants of a few surrounding villages gathered once a week or semi-monthly, bringing their produce for sale or to trade it for groceries and other goods -- household items, fabrics, linens, leather, sandals, high boots (called in Yiddish shteevel), and fur hats. These goods were sold by small manufacturers whom we called boss laborers and who came to the market from a nearby shtetl, spreading out their merchandise either on the ground or on improvised tables constructed from wooden crates and paper boxes, holding each item high in the air and calling out in loud voices the special qualities of the stuff, calling attention to its durability, its promise of long wear.
The other street was a combination of living and business quarter, the businesses usually groceries or general stores where one could purchase, in addition to food, a quart of kerosene, a glass for a kerosene lamp, all kinds of paints sold in powdered or in liquid form, a package of tobacco or of buttons, needles, thread and fancy ribbons with which the peasant girls, the shikses, used to dress up their hair, the ribbons hanging down to their waists. A customer could also get some items of attire such as shoes, galoshes, cravats with a hard, starched, board-like half-shirt -- just to cover the chest -- which was worn at weddings. But all these fancy articles were available only twice a year, at Christmas and Passover; and they had to be ordered weeks in advance from the manufacturers or wholesale houses in one of the big cities of Russia.
Each of the two streets could hardly measure as much as a small city block in the United States. Needless to say, they were not paved. When the rainy season came along, the streets were so muddy that we could never walk in them or cross them without using the high shteevel. The most unhappy, the most unfortunate were the children of the poor, and even some of the middle class, who had to walk to cheder in the deep, sometimes knee-high mud, with open-soled shoes, since their parents could not afford the cost of repair; they had to wait until Pesach, when the muddy season was over, for new shoes.
And if anyone should make an attempt to locate this shtetl, Rarid, or any other like it, on the map, he sill be wasting his time. It was never shown there, nor did anyone ever hear of it or know of its existence. The shtetl had a population of about seven hundred souls. There were no schools; or, even if there were, no Jewish child could attend them. For Russian schooling was forbidden to Jews by the Russian anti-Semitic laws, except for some single, isolated cases: then, some lucky, rich parents in a big city could buy entrance to a gymnazia (high school) or university for a boy or a girl (but mostly boys) -- the education of girls ended with learning how to write a letter in Yiddish and an address in Russian, for that was all their parents wanted them to know. And that kind of education they usually acquired from a private local tutor for a minimal fee. So where entrance was gained, it was by bribing some of the teachers or administrators. Remember Sholem Aleichem's "Gymnazia"?
There were no hospitals, no doctors, and no means of first aid except a drug store run by a pharmacist (not a graduate) who helped the sick with medicines he prepared himself; he treated colds, headaches and stomach troubles in this way. He also used cupping -- putting heated cups all aver the back and sides. This was done in most cases, however, by the local barber. As for emergency cases, when the patient was already critically ill -- and this occurred very often -- due to the lack of experience of the pharmacist, it was necessary to bring in a doctor from a nearby town, a distance of twenty to twenty-five versts, a verst being a little less than a mile. The doctor came by horse and wagon, driven by a peasant. But the hour-long trip was, most of the time, in vain. The patient was too "impatient" to wait for him.
Thus the number of needless deaths due to the lack of speedy emergency help was not a rare phenomenon, but was common. However, these deaths could never be established as needless since the people, especially the most Orthodox -- and were there any other kinds of Jews in those days? -- looked at it as an act of fate, as God's will, accepting the deed with the saying, "God giveth and God taketh away."
There was no post office in the village. The mail was brought to town by a hired messenger from a nearby town twice or three time a week. Of course, the messenger got paid for his services.
As for keeping order in the town, there was one militiaman, a straznik, or policeman. His job was to break up fights between drunken peasants on market day and to beat up any peasant, male or female, who was caught stealing a herring or a pack of tobacco in a store when the storekeeper wasn't looking. Also, his job was to look into one store or another to see whether something illegal was going on, a service that was always rewarded by a small baksheesh -- half a ruble, a pack of tobacco or some other small item.
The town had no fire department. When a fire broke out, the loud, continuous outcry, "Fire! Fire!" by the person who had noticed it brought out the whole population. Into the street they came, carrying buckets of water, which they poured onto the poorly-constructed house, in most cases not successfully. The poor owner was left with only the shirt on his back, if he had any. Insurance? That was only for the rich, the property owners of the big cities.
Livelihood
As I have already pointed out, the chief way of making a living -- in fact, the only way -- for the middle class as well as for the artisans, was the market day which took place every other Thursday. There peasants gathered from many nearby villages, as well as from nearby farms, to offer their various wares for sale -- grain, produce and livestock: chickens, ducks, geese, pigs, cows and horses.
On these days the pockets of the peasants here bulging with cash, as were the bosoms of their womenfolk; the village merchants took a good part of it in exchange for their merchandise, unless the peasants had already squandered their money in several visits to local saloons. Besides buying and selling there was also a good deal at trading, especially of horses.
As for the other times, the days between market days, the storekeepers and the workers made a living off one another. And a poor living it was! But the middle class did somehow manage to get by, leading a more comfortable life, enjoying better food -- not perhaps sufficiently nutritious but certainly richer than that of the working class. While the peasants were practically starving, the middle class were stuffing themselves with dark, coarse bread, potatoes, beans, kasha and other such delicacies. Red meat and poultry were a rarity, and appeared on the table only on holidays, and then in very limited amounts. They were distributed among the members of a family -- on the average, eight to ten people -- in equal portions only after the father served himself what was considered a substantial helping. So the serving allotted each of the other members of the family was no bigger than a spoonful. It was called "oiffen shpitz messer," on the tip of the knife, not enough to bite on.
And though the self-employed laborers had put in a good day's work, sixteen to eighteen hours, six days a seek, when the end of the week came they had no prospect of a Sabbath meal, neither chicken nor even the customary gefilte fish; not luckshen soup or challah or wine for kiddush, none of the traditional Sabbath fare.
A phrase based on that life circulated among the middle-class people of the community, often in song: "A tailor sews and sews all week long and earns a gulden with a hole in it." In Yiddish it rhymes!
A schneider neyt und neyt a ganze vuch
Und fardiendt a gulden mit a luch.
An example of the hardships of that life is the shoemaker. Mottel der Shuster, whose nose was was all perforated at the tip from being jabbed by the point of his needle every time he pulled it out of the sole of the shoe he was repairing or making. The reason this happened is that he worked in very dim light in order to save kerosene.
The poverty of the working class caused some hardship for the storekeepers, too, since they had to depend on the laborers for a good deal of their business. And, since the laborers often hadn't a ruble in their pockets, the storekeepers had to extend long-term credit. To collect the money due them, they had to make many visits to the laborers' houses, often coming home empty-handed.
A few of the middle-class townspeople had what were considered big businesses, such as the lease of a forest from a Polish landowner with the right to ship lumber to some far-away places in the Ukraine and to northern Russia, or the purchase of the grain crop before harvest time and its shipment to the mills for grinding into flour. But there are very few of those big-scale occupations, and very few lucky, prosperous Jews.
A few words about the Polish landowners are necessary: In various places in the Ukraine there were enormous estates belonging to members of the Polish royalty. In a few cases, some Jews had managed, by means of pull or manipulation, to make some connection with such landowners. These Jews were considered lucky because they wade a good living. They were considered aristocrats, rich men who had been given a chance to "ooplecken a feten behn," to lick up a fat bone.
The noble landholder was called a pooritz; the term became synonymous with refinement, associated with a person who distinguished himself by being refined in behavior, meticulous in dress and good-looking. People said, "Er hat a pritzen ponim" or "Zie is a pritzeh." And if a person was a show-off, was conceited, people said, "Look at him! A gantzer pooritz bei zich."
And a word here about education! There were no schools in our village, neither secular not religious, not even Talmud Torahs (afternoon Hebrew schools). In a few of the big cities in Lithuania, in Polish Galicia, and in other parts of Russia, there were some yeshivahs. But these were for adolescent boys who had been educated by their town's rabbi (and the word rabbi, like the word melamed, means teacher; but here we are speaking of the rabbi as the leader of the congregation). The aim of these boys was to get a higher education and to become proper rabbis, leaders and scholars, not the sort of melamdim who taught children and younger boys (and who themselves had no schooling beyond cheder). To become a leader a boy had to be a yeshivah graduate and become ordained. To earn the diploma, years and years of learning were required, years and years of studying for long hours every day, often far into the night, years of sleeping on a hard bench and starving. For these boys came from all parts of the country to the yeshivah and their families were too poor to support them. So they had to fend for themselves. Every day they had one good free meal at the home of one or another rich man. The custom of taking turns to provide a meal for the scholars was called essen tag, with emphasis on the day. It happened very often that, for some reason, the student found himself not invited for a day. Then he lived on potatoes, which he baked, in the freezing winter days and evenings, on hot coals, which also served to keep him warm.
After years of struggle, these graduates wandered the length and breadth of the country -- in some cases, even the neighboring foreign countries -- to find a position. It wasn't easy to obtain one because every little town had its own rabbi, who served for his lifetime. And that position was usually inherited by his son, his son's son, and so on for generations. But it also happened occasionally that a congregation was divided on certain matters pertaining to religious rules and regulations, that one group disagreed with the rabbi's stand. Then a quarrel broke out and another rabbi was recruited. Woe to both of them! They both starved!
The yeshivoth produced a number of famous learned men and scholars, leaders who played important roles in Jewish community life, as well as men highly skilled in other fields, poets and writers. Bialik was one of them. From advanced study of the Gemorrah, and the wisdom gained thereby, comes the phrase "a Gemorrah kup." ( English: Gemara )
Ironically enough, some of the Jews who turned away from the religious life, who became followers of the political left and even of the communist movement, who claimed to despise all they had been taught in the best years of their lives, never lost the spiritual wealth they had stored up in those early years.
As for general education, that was provided by the three kinds of melamdim, also known as rabbis. The first kind, the melamed dardake, taught beginners: and dardake means beginner, child, simple. This melamed's knowledge was minimal, since his pupils, age three to six, required little. He taught them the alef-bes and a bit of reading. The custom was, odd as it sounds, that when a child -- a boy, of course -- reached the age of three, his father wrapped a talis (prayer shawl) around him and brought him to the cheder. From that time on the tot was picked up every morning, all year round, by the melamed's assistant, the behelfer. Each child was carried to the cheder, where he spent the whole day.
The tuition fee, schar limud, the price of learning, was anywhere from one to two rubles a term, depending on the financial standing of the parents. If for some reason a parent was not satisfied with the melamed (finding, perhaps, that his teaching was bad or that his behavior was brutal), the child was transferred to another cheder even before the end of the term.
The classroom was a part of the melamed's small, crowded shanty, generally the combination kitchen-dining room. There also were the goat and the garbage pail.
The helper's job also included all kinds of errands and chores, including taking care of the melamed's baby; there always was one. We used to tell a story about the helper: It happened that a melamed was caught teaching illegally, without permission of the local authorities. He was brought to court, where he was questioned through an interpreter, since he did not speak or understand Russian.
Judge: How many children do you have? Interpreter: He says fifty, Your Honor. Judge: How old are you? Interpreter: He says sixty, Your Honor. Judge: How come? At his age? Interpreter: He says he has a helper, Your Honor.
The second kind of melamed was a more highly qualified teacher, a "Chumash und Rashi"* rebbe, who also taught davenen (praying). Some of these rebbes were infamous for their brutal conduct towards their pupils, for beating them with anything that came to hand -- a rolling pin, a luckshen board**, other household objects. This "disciplinary" action aroused the anger of parents from time to time. As in the case of the beginner, the boy was transferred to another rebbe. Unfortunately, the new rebbe was generally not much milder in his behavior than the old.
*Rashi is the acronym for Rabenu Shlomo Yitzchuki, the commentator on the Bible and the Talmud, who lived in Worms in the eleventh century.
**A luckshen board was a big, flat, heavy wooden board used for rolling sheets of dough and cutting them into luckshen (noodles).
The tuition for this higher teaching was slightly higher than that for the beginners. But none of the melamdim were able to make ends meet with their earnings.
The third kind of melamed was the Gemorrah melamed, who taught at a still higher level, and who also prepared boys for their Bar Mitzvah. This so-called higher education was considered the last step of learning. It usually ended at Bar Mitzvah age and was accessible only to the boys of the shopkeepers, the "respectable" class, since, for one reason, the teachers in this case were qualified rebbes and, for another, because the boy's parents could not -- or, rather, they would not -- have their boys learning a trade, becoming ordinary laborers. God forbid! The laboring classes could not afford the extra fees, anyway. Moreover, they needed the help of their sons to increase their production; and, at the some time as the boys were working, they were learning their father's trade. So, when they grew up, they could start on their own, could follow in the footsteps of their fathers.
As a result, the laborers' sons remained poorly schooled, many of them illiterate or nearly so, able only to go through the three daily prayers and some of the Sabbath and holiday prayers with some difficulty. The better-situated boys, in contrast, were able to absorb a good deal of higher learning with the help of a qualified teacher, thus becoming learned men, as they came to be called. Some of them even attended a yeshivah, in some cases not even with the purpose of becoming a rov but just for the sake of the education itself, and so that they could be called yeshivah boys, and thus have a chance for a better marriage than otherwise, a chance to enjoy all the fringe benefits a rich father-in-law could offer. These favored boys were called zavdeneh bochurim, silk young men, a term which indicated their delicacy and the high value placed upon them.
Marriage
Most of these yeshivah graduates served as helpers in their parents' store until they reached marriage age. This was usually about sixteen or seventsen. Then matchmakers, both local and from nearby towns, who always kept a list of people growing up in their own and neighboring towns, started to bang on the parents' doors, offering a good match, a girl of respectable family, or a girl whose father was offering unlimited support for the couple and their offspring. And, needless to say, a substantial nadn, a dowry.
That was the main reason that not-so-well-off parents had trouble marrying off their daughters. There was a joke circulating that the mother of a learned son, when offered a match, spread out her apron as she started to bargain with the shadchen (marriage broker) or the mechuton (in-law) to-be and said, "Go ahead; start pouring the money in. If it meets my price we will make a shiduch (match)."
The price was usually between three to five hundred rubles, depending on the financial circumstances of the "customer" or on the appraisal of the "merchandise" by the parents who were selling. This dowry was in addition to the promise of support. Needless to say, the couple involved had no voice in the arrangement. They were simply greeted by their parents with a "Mazel tov!" and the information that they were engaged, that their wedding would take place on such and such a day, usually shortly after the engagement. But many such deals were cancelled just a few days before the wedding was to take place, for the reason that the father of the bride was unable to deliver the promised dowry (or the balance for which he had given a promissory note).
After the match was made both fathers (not the mothers!) sat down to write the tnoyim, the preliminary draft of the wedding contract, enumerating the commitments to be fulfilled before the wedding day, mostly by the bride's parents. The writing of the tnoyim and the celebration accompanying it, a kind of engagement party given by the bride's parents, was called a knossen mool. At this time the day of the wedding was set, usually for one year ahead.
Years back, perhaps a century ago, the match was made when the couple were very young, when they were still "playing in the sand," as the Yiddish saying goes. In fact, unbelievable as it may sound now, they were thought to have been matched in heaven forty days before they were born. In this life, the match was made by the fathers, if they were good friends, when their wives were pregnant. Their agreement, called tekeeyat kaf (a handshake), provided that if one of the children were a boy and the other a girl, they would be married. The tekeeyat kaf carried the weight of an oath. If it were not fulfilled, then, in accordance with religious belief, the violators would suffer severe punishment, possibly death.
But this kind of agreement caused a number of marriages to break up. Sometimes the young, forcibly married husband abandoned his wife and children after a time, simply ran away from home and never appeared again. In this case the wife was granted a rabbinical court's divorce -- after seven years, if her husband did not return.
The day chosen for the wedding was usually Tuesday, a day considered lucky, betokening a long-lasting marriage bond. The choice was based on the fact that when the Lord created the world, He looked upon the object he had created each day, and said with approval, "Kee tov." -- It is good.
He said this on six days, but not on Tuesday, when He created the earth by separating it from all the waters which covered it and when He created the grass and fruit trees of all kinds. On that day, when He looked at His creation, He twice said, "Kee tov."
The custom that the bride and groom not see each other until the wedding was changed in recent years; a limited number of rendezvous were permitted. It was generally he who visited her, especially on Passover, when he came to the seder. Of course they were never left alone. Even if they went for a walk, one of her girlfriends accompanied them, acting as chaperone.
It was also customary that the future bride and groom exchange gifts at Purim. She gave him a gold watch and chain, and he gave her a long, heavy neck chain and a bracelet. But the initiative always came from the bride. If the groom lived in another town, the bride's gift was delivered by a foot messenger, a man who had served in this capacity for years and years. This messenger also brought back the groom's gift to the bride.
As well, gifts of food were exchanged -- special home-made Purim pastries which depicted figures from Megilah, fancy chocolates, rare delicacies such as citrus fruits.
The Purim gift exchange was called shalakh monoth, and it was also practiced by relatives and close friends, though only locally. Its real purpose was to remember the poor folk, to help them celebrate the Purim festival. This is according to the Megilas Esther, where it is written "ooleeshloach mawnos eesh l'rayayhu oola-aneeyeem" -- to send gifts to each other and to the poor.
Ironically enough, this exchange of gifts was, in many cases, one of the causes of the break-up of the shiduch: One of the parties, generally the groom's side, took offense, judging the gift they received not equal in value to the gift they sent. In that case, the offending gift was returned, accompanied by the tnoyim. The deal was off!
But if nothing interfered with the wedding plans, the procedure was as follows: If the match were a local one -- between townsfolk -- then, on the Saturday before the Tuesday of the wedding, the groom, accompanied by the parents and relatives of both families as well as by their closest friends, went to shul. There all but the groom were called to the reading of the Torah. The groom was called to the reading of the Haftorah (a selection from the Prophets). If he were well-schooled or a yeshiva bocher, he also made a speech on matters of the Torah or on Talmudic law or custom. Thus he exhibited his wide knowledge, and swelled the pride of parents and guests alike. This ceremony was called das ofroofens, the calling to the Torah.
From the shul they all went to the house of the groom's parents for kiddush (sanctification) over wine. There they enjoyed home-made gefilte fish and a variety of delicacies such as chopped liver, chopped herring, chopped onion dipped in heavy chicken fat -- all home-made. No catering! And of course there was wine and shnops and a variety of home-made cakes.
If, however, the groom was from another town, the ofroofens took place there. The bride's parents attended the ceremony and the party only if they were wealthy enough to afford the travel expenses, a few rubles. They used the railroad train or horse and wagon driven by a peasant from a nearby village.
The groom's party (if they did not live in the bride's town) arrived there early in the morning of the wedding day. The bride's father, accompanied by his closest (male) relatives and some of the town's oldest and most esteemed citizens, went to the outskirts of town -- this procession led by the town's rabbi -- to greet them. Then they were settled either in the house of the richest and most respected townsman (for the town had no hotels) or in a private house which had quarters for rent on such occasions. This was a kind of inn which also rented rooms for the night or for short stays, to travelers. It was called an akhsanya (which in Hebrew means to be housed). There, after a short rest, the men retired to a room apart, where they sat praying and reciting chapters of the Psalms until the moment came to march to the synagogue for the wedding ceremony.
The bride's house on this day became a Grand Central Station, full of commotion and noisy with the loud voices of women, neighbors and relatives who wanted to have a share in the mitzvah by helping with the cooking, baking and setting of the table -- only one big round table for all the guests and mechutonim, not separate, numbered tables. Add to this the banging of pots and pans, of doors opening and closing while chairs, borrowed from neighbors and friends, were brought in. And then there was the mouth-watering aroma of fried chickens, ducks and geese, and of the baked sweets, sniffed throughout the town.
Only one corner or the house was isolated from this activity, one door kept closed so tight that no one could hear or see a thing of what was going on there. That was the bride's chamber, to which she had just returned from the mikvah, the ritual bath.* ( English: mikveh )
*Women went to the mikvah seven days after the end of every menstrual period (which made them traif, unclean). The bath purified them and made them fit to have sexual relations with their husbands. When the bride came to the mikvah, the attendant, a pious woman, saw that she immersed herself completely, and declared her cleansed.
In that chamber, in complete silence a group of girls, childhood friends of the bride, were dressing her in her best, so that she might look like a kalah, a bride. The final touch of her costume was a veil, draped over her head so that her face should not be visible to the groom until the proper moment in the ceremony. The atmosphere in this room was solemn, reverent. Indeed. the wedding day was considered a Yom Kippur for both bride and groom, who had to fast until after the ceremony in order that they be free of sin.
During the morning or early afternoon, the musicians came. These were three or four men, gentiles who lived on the outskirts of the shtetl. They performed mainly at the weddings of peasants of the nearby villages but, having close association with neighboring Jews, they learned Jewish customs and Jewish music. So they were often hired to play at Jewish weddings, especially of the not-quite-so-well-off (but remember that the weddings of the poor were cheaper and less elaborate than any I describe here; even those families that hired town musicians were middle-class). The more well-to-do people acquired the services of a famous Jewish quartet from the nearby town of Nemirov** (Ma's town). It sometimes happened, though, that the out-of-town mechutonim brought their own town's musicians.*
**(Ukrainian: Nemyriv)
*A band of musicians -- any band -- was called klezmer, from the Hebrew kley zemer, which means musical instruments. The phrase came to mean musicians.
In any case, these musicians arrived on the wedding day and did not leave until the next morning. With their arrival and with all of the household preparations completed, the groom's party was summoned and the procession to the synagogue began. In the first row of marchers were the klezmer, playing Yiddish and Hebrew melodies, most of them taken from Biblical songs, often those sung in the shul at Sabbath and holiday services. The Yiddish songs were familiar to practically everyone who lived in any Yiddish shtetl.
Following the klezmer were the menfolk, led by the town's rabbi. Behind them marched the womenfolk, followed by a large number of onlookers, who gladly participated in the happy event.
The chupa (wedding canopy: chuppa) was erected in front of the shul, outside. There the cantor performed the ceremony, a ceremony in no respect different from that practiced nowadays except that it was in Hebrew (and no Russian translation was provided). During the ceremony, it was the custom that the bride circle the groom, who stood in the center of the chupa. She circled him seven times, a part of the ritual based on a passage in Jeremiah 31:22, which declares that "a women ahall court a man" and on the phrase, "when a man takes a wife," which is stated in the Bible seven times. Another part of the ceremony, then as now, was the rabbi's reading of the ketubah, the marriage contract, which listed the obligations of bride and groom to each other. Under the chupa, it was signed by two witnesses. This was followed by the breaking of the glass from which the groom and the bride, in turn, had drunk the sanctified wine -- signifying continuing grief over the destruction of the Temple in ancient times. Then came the traditional "Mazel tov!" from all sides. People kissed the bride and wished her a long future as a kosher, righteous Yiddish daughter, an observer of all the laws or the Torah, and a devoted wife to her husband, the master of the house, the baal habays.
And the procession started back home in the same order as it had marched to the chupa. But this time the two mothers danced the broigez tanz, the dance of anger. Who was angry, and why, is a mystery. Perhaps it was the mother of the groom, since she had lost her tachshit, her jewel of a son, to a strange woman.
At home, to the mellow tunes of Yiddish music, dinner was served by both mothers and by other women relatives. After that, the "public dancing" took place, mostly the traditional, merry folk dance called freylachs and the sher, which resembles a square dance. First the women danced. Then it was the turn of the men who, all this time, were sitting apart from the women. They formed a circle, pushing the other people, especially the womenfolk, way back; God forbid that one of them should accidentally touch so much as the finger of a woman! The groom was in the center of this circle. and they danced silently, piously, without music. Sometimes the rov, joining the groom in the center, murmured Chassidic (English: Hasidic) nigunim.
After a while, the dancers stopped; they cleared the center of the room so that the parents of the bride and groom could perform their mitzvah dance. In this dance, husband and wife, each holding the point of a handkerchief, dance at some distance from one another (the distance being the length of the handkerchief and their extended arms).
It was also customary for the father of the groom to dance with the shnoor (his new daughter-in-law, in this case), and in the same manner as the husbands and wives had danced, holding opposite points of a kerchief.
It is important to mention the one specific person who was considered a "must" at a Jewish wedding. That was the bodchen, whose role it was to amuse and entertain the audience with satirical jokes. These were mainly addressed to the shveeger, the groom's mother, and the shnoor; they concerned their relations in the years to come (Ah! There's nothing new under the sun!); just as many jokes do nowadays, and will continue to eternity, these centered on envy, jealousy and fault-finding.
The bodchen also had another mission to fulfill. That was to call for the drosho gishank, the wedding presents. It is difficult to explain the connection between the Hebrew word drosho, which stands for speech, sermon er oration and the German word gishank, which means gift or donation, unless the explanation lies in the fact that the bodchen, in calling for the gifts, elaborated at length on their value. If the gift were cash, he could note the generous sum and the very, very fine baal aboos (and baal aboos in this case suggests an important figure in the community or a close relative or friend of either family). So each announcement of a gift was accompanied by a long speech.
And what were the gifts? They were mostly cash, the amount based on what the giver had received from either of the mechutonim on some previous occasion. And if the amount did not measure up, woe to the donor! The result might be -- and it sometimes was -- the break-up of a long friendship, or even the beginning of a life-long enmity.
There were also some non-cash gifts, generally of religious items such as a menorah for the young wife's Sabbath candles, a silver tray on which to place the Sabbath challah, and the standard -- the essential -- gift, a goblet gilded inside and silver-plated outside, for kiddush.
When the dancing and music were over, the wedding meal was ended with the recital at the Seven Benedictions, the fathers of the newly married couple, the town's rabbi, and some of the town's esteemed baalay bateem participating. These shevah brochos were recited at the end of each evening meal for seven consecutive nights, in the presence of the newlyweds. At the end of the seventh day, the party came to an end, and the groom's family departed. The groom stayed on with the bride in her parents' house (as the marriage contract provided) until he could find some independent source of income.
Birth and Death
With the first signals of birth pains, the mother-to-be was put into bed, a curtain shielding her from the Evil Eye. Nobody was allowed into the room but her mother and the town's midwife, who kept a close watch on her. The midwife, usually an elderly women who claimed credit for helping to bring into the world most of the town's populace, was constantly at the new mother's bedside, listening to her frequent outcries, petting her, pacifying her with kind words and the promise of a fine, healthy baby, about to come any minute.
With the arrival of the new-born, the mother started to receive the treatment of a sickly person who is entitled to special privileges such as a sponge bath every morning, special delicacies at mealtimes and, of course, chicken soup three time a day (which is supposed to help the body even when it is not weak). Another special treat was a certain type of cake closely resembling sponge cake -- not as soft and fluffy but, rather, crisp and crunchy, and with butter on top. It made the mouth water. And it was baked just for the mother. The only time anyone else was allowed to taste it was at a later time, perhaps after the brith (the circumcision) -- if anything was left over. This cake was called a kuchen.
Milk was a luxury then. Only a sick person got it. It had to be bought from a peasant woman who came into the village every morning, or from one of the townspeople who owned a cow. (There were one or two such wealthy families in the village; needless to say, only some of the middle-class people, the shopkeepers, could afford such a luxury. The poor had to be satisfied with a glass of tea.)
As for the customs surrounding the happy event, the first and most urgent was to purchase a number of leaflets called sheer hamaaloth; on these was printed an excerpt from the Book of Psalms, a song of praise to the Almighty by King David. These leaflets were placed in all parts of the room, and especially over the bed where the mother and child were lying. Their purpose was to protect the mother and child from Satan, who might be aiming to harm them, or even to snatch the infant from the mother.
Another custom was to have the town's rabbi gather his beginners' flock and bring them to the bedside of the mother and new-born child, to recite the Kreeyath-Shma, which starts with the words "Shma Israel...The Lord is our God, the Lord is but One." The reading of the Shma was a second means of fighting the evil of Satan. When the recital was over, the children were rewarded with delicious home-made cookies and the rabbi drank "Lechaim!" to mother and child.
If the child were male, eight days after he was born the brith was performed. Why on the eighth day is not clear. Perhaps to allow the infant to gain some strength, to withstand the pain of the cutting.
The operation was performed by the mohel (ritual surgeon), and it was an honor to hold the baby while the mohel operated. This privilege, called the sandeck, was usually bestowed upon the oldest male member of the family, the grandpa or an uncle. There were a lot of quarrels over who should be given this honor.
On the seventh day, the day before the brith, a little party, called ben zachar, was held by the family. Chick peas (naheet) were served. On the thirteenth day after the birth the pidyan haben was held. This was a party which marked the redemption of the child -- and that is what the words mean -- from the kohen, the "high priest," to whom every first-born male child belonged until he was redeemed, usually with a silver or gold coin. This custom is based on the Biblical law that every first crop, human beings included, had to be brought to the beth hamikdash (the house of worship) and given to the high priest.
When a person was critically ill, and the signs of approaching death were clear, the family rushed to the town rabbi, so that he could say the vhidoo (the "confession") with the dying person. This was important since, without it, his chance of getting into Gan Eyden, the Garden of Eden, and of escaping Gay He'enom, Hell, would be very slim.
The vhidoo was of the character of man-to-God talk, the dying person listing before Him all his sins, all his wrongdoing throughout the years of his visit on earth, and asking His forgiveness. No sooner was this done than the dying man, his eyes closed, fully content, assured of having secured for his soul a place in Heaven among the righteous and pious, went to meet his Creator.
The corpse was placed on the floor, feet facing the door, and covered with a sheet. A candle was lit and placed at the back of his covered head. There the shamos (shammash - the beadle, or shomayr - watcher, shomrim - watchers) sat on a low stool, reciting prayers. Not long after, the burial group, the khevrah-kadeesha (chevra kadisha), came, carrying a long, flat board, a meetah, on which the corpse was placed. On it he was carried to the purifying house, the taharah shteeble, at the very end of town. There he was washed and clothed in a shroud, in takrekeem, in accordance with ritual law. Then he was carried on the same meetah to the cemetery on the outskirts of the village, his shrouded corpse followed by his family, by friends, and by as many other males as would make up the mynyan -- the ten men required for recital of the Kadish (Kaddish), the prayer for the dead, at the grave.
The grave was covered over and the meetah taken away. Poor fellow; nothing but the damp, wet earth under his back, nothing to protect him from catching cold.
Home from the cemetery, the family, male and female, all except young children, took off their shoes and placed themselves on low stools to sit shivah, to mourn. A candle called a nayr tamid, an eternal light, was kept burning day and night for the period of shivah, seven days, excluding the Sabbath. Every mirror in the house was covered with a sheet or any other white cloth; the sound of music was forbidden. Grown males were forbidden to shave or have their hair cut for a period of thirty days, called the shloysheem (shloshim). During the shloysheem, the mourners ware also forbidden to attend any happy events such as weddings or Bar Mitzvahs, especially events where music or dancing were performed.
Also during the period of shivah, a mynyan was assembled three times a day to recite the three daily prayers, Shakrith, Mincha and Maariv. This was done according to religious law, in the house of the deceased, so that male mourners over Bar Mitzvah age could say the kadish. The recital of the kadish was continued in the synagogue for one year, after which it was recited on the yourzeit (yahrtzeit), the anniversary of the death.
At the end of the shivah week, it was customary for the members of the family to circle the house a few times to say farewell to the soul of the deceased, for it was their belief that it had remained with them that week. Now it had to leave them to make its last trip on earth toward eternity.
After shloysheem, the covers were taken off the mirrors. The other restrictions were no longer in force, but some people observed them for a full year.
The Home
In the shtetl, the home was looked upon as a sacred institution, deeply respected, held in awe. It was the means of keeping the family together; it bred deep feelings of closeness, of love and devotion, especially toward the parents. Needless to say, the head of this institution -- I should any the ruler -- was none other than the father, the breadwinner. And a ruler he was!
He had the first and the last word in every matter which concerned the family, whether they were matters of minor importance, such as the seating arrangements for family members at the dinner table, or matters of high importance, such as negotiations with the matchmaker for a marriage contract for a son or a daughter. The mother, his partner and life's companion, played the role of a second fiddle in all affairs except housekeeping and training the female members of the household to keep the house in good order and to take care of themselves. The sons were the "sole property" of their father, who was their master as well as the master of the establishment. Any mischievous behavior in the house, in the street, or in the cheder, was reported to him. "Wait until I tell your father!" was a familiar warning, a foretaste of sentencing and punishment of the "criminal."
There were instances, though, when "the woman" -- and that is how she was addressed directly as well as spoken about -- was elevated in rank, when she became business associate as well as full-time housekeeper. These instances were frequent, since most of the men, the chosen sex, were not qualified for any practical work except shopkeeping. These men, fine and silky, with all their silkiness and fanciness, were given a special name -- toygenichts, do-nothings, good-for-nothings (though they were good at making children). They were always busy meeting with their friends, men like them, either in the synagogue where they discussed the Torah and the Midrash (the commentaries on the Scriptures), or out in the street, forming circles to discuss politics and current events.
So the woman was left to run the store (if that was the family business). The past-Bar Mitzvah boys also helped in the store, as did the grown-up girls, who also had the job of supervising the younger children in housekeeping, cooking, and taking care of themselves.
This was a traditional process, observed for generation after generation. The children contributed to the household in this way until they were ready to leave their parents. And they left not by running away, and not by settling in an apartment by themselves, as young people do nowadays, but by getting married, establishing their own home, starting a family of their own.
And even then, the family tie, the bond that kept them together in their formative years, did not loosen. On the contrary, it added more knots, what with the constant flow of grandchildren who opened up a new horizon of light and delight to the lonely old folks, who found their seclusion, the quietness of the house, hard to bear after the hustle and bustle, the tumult, of children around them.
Another word about the "woman slave": There were occasional rebellious outbreaks. A woman -- not a group of women's liberationists, but a single rebel -- would employ a simple, sharp weapon -- silence. She would speak not a word to the master for days, perhaps for weeks. What a weapon that was! And still is. Picture a woman shoving a plate of soup in her husband's direction, as if to say, "Go ahead, eat, choke yourself. Who cares!" Or going to bed with her face to the wall. Or imagine her saying, on a Friday afternoon, "Sarah, tell your father his change of underwear is on his bed. He can go to the bath-house now and get cleaned up." What a way to welcome the Queen of the Sabbath, a mitzvah required by law, a tradition strictly observed by Orthodox Jews.
But these rebellions led nowhere, achieved nothing, and ended as they started, without warning. The woman submitted. After all, the intention of the Lord, when He took a rib from Adam to create Eve, was to provide Adam a helping hand (What a help!); so she, the helping hand in the image of woman, was indebted to her Master Adam, and had some obligations to fulfill.
If a stranger from another planet, or even someone from a large city with modern buildings were to accidentally drop into one of these villages and take a glance at the row of buildings on either side of the two streets, he would be puzzled by them. How, he would ask himself, could these buildings have come into existence? Surely they were not man-made structures; they must, rather, have been a part of the Lord's six-day creation, just dropped off by Him for His children, so that they might have a place to settle down. And some of them looked as old as that.
In fact, in all the twenty-five years that I lived in my village, I never witnessed any structure being erected -- not for living quarters, not for a place of business, not for a public institution. But I do know that these archaic structures came to their inhabitants by way of inheritance from their ancestors, who had probably inherited them from their ancestors. And that is how every family had its own house; poor or rich, there were no landlords and no tenants.
The houses of the "elite," the store-owners (there were no large shops, no factories, no large-scale industry in the village) were bigger and more strongly built than those of the poor. They had thicker walls and a metal roof, which was of great help during the long, severely harsh winter months, which lasted from September to April, when temperatures were always below zero. The blizzards blinded our eyes, the snow reached our waists, and it was never removed until the lukewarm April sun melted it.
In each room were double windows padded at the bottom with a thick layer of cotton sprinkled over with scraps of some colored materials for decoration. Not a window was opened throughout the winter months. However, all that did not help much to keep the frost away; the panes were covered with beautiful designs, the artistic workmanship of Jack Frost, which could easily compete with the work of such famous artists as Rembrandt and Chagall.
As for fresh air: Each window had one pane on hinges, and it had a hook for opening and closing. That served the purpose of refreshing the room -- in the summer only, of course.
An average well-to-do family's house had about six rooms, including the kitchen. It consisted of three bedrooms, a dining room, and one other room -- the business room, the store, which had an opening to the street. Some houses of the more wealthy merchants also had a guest room. It was called the zahl or zaleh (German for parlor?). It was well furnished, and decorated with drapes or curtains; it even had a rug on the floor. It was practically secluded from all of the other rooms, and was used only on certain special occasions -- a visit by out-of-town relatives, perhaps; but mostly it was used for meetings with matchmakers who came every so often from various towns to offer a nice shiduch. At these meetings only the parents were present (not the main characters involved: the prospective bride or groom was allowed to enter the room only briefly, so that the matchmaker might look over the "merchandise" and record his observations in his notebook, which contained the addresses of hundreds of families in various towns who had sons and daughters of marriage age). And when negotiations were going on for a shiduch, none of a girl's sisters were allowed to show themselves before the matchmaker, especially not younger or better-looking ones; this was to avoid spoiling the plans for the daughter who had to go first, the oldest one.
There was one other occasion when the zaleh was used. That was when the bridegroom-to-be paid a visit to his ln-laws, usually once or twice a year, generally at the Passover holiday. In that case the betrothed couple were never left alone, neither to sit in the parlor nor to go for a stroll on the outskirts of the shtetl. For it was the custom that on a Saturday afternoon, the whole town turned into a ghost town, all the older people taking their Sabbath rest in their bedrooms behind locked doors, and the youngsters going strolling in the near-by forest or the grain and vegetable fields or the neighborhood of the railroad station, where they could watch trains arriving and departing.
Though all the houses were similar in shape and style, those of the working class stood in sharp contrast to those of the wealthier people. Workers' houses were usually poorly constructed, the walls made of mud mixed with straw, the roofs also of straw. Here and there were bare spots, where the straw had been blown away by strong winds or worn away by rain or snow. These thin roofs and the weakness of the mud walls gave free entry to the winds and the cold, and made living difficult and miserable, especially in the rough winter months. From time to time, some of these houses had to be supported by heavy beams of wood, for fear that they would crumble under the heavy burden of age.
These houses were smaller, and their rooms much smaller and more crowded than those of the wealthy. They were poorly furnished, and their earthen floors were not covered. Walking on these floors was difficult and uncomfortable, especially with bare feet.
About the inner part of the house: An average house consisted of three or four bedrooms, a dining room, a kitchen and, in some of the wealthier homes, a parlor. The parlor was rarely used; it was reserved for special occasions such as a wedding. And the dining room was seldom used; it was reserved for Sabbath and holiday meals, and for an occasional celebration. But the kitchen was used every day, for the three daily meals and for various other purposes.
The rooms, at least those in the homes of wealthier people, were pretty well furnished. The beds were large enough to hold two or even three children. Papa and Mama had a bedroom for themselves.
In the cold winter months the house was heated by what was called a hollow oven along one of the walls of a room. It supplied enough heat for the adjoining room as well. Along the wall, on either side of the oven, was a long wooden bench. Everyone in the family, young and old, was always on the alert to catch an empty place on the bench. That was very often the cause of fights and skirmishes, mainly among the young folk. The unlucky ones who were not quick enough to grab a vacant place had to walk around dressed in a heavy garment; they either paced the room or sat on something in front of the little open iron door of the oven, maneuvering hands and face so as to get the heat of the flame and not to get burned.
The oven was heated by coal or wood. Another way of heating it was with bundles of straw purchased from the peasants at the end of harvest time and stored in the attic. Since the straw did not supply enough heat, and since it burned out fast -- not leaving any burning coals to provide warmth, as wooden logs did -- and since it was less costly than wood, it was used mostly by the poor.
The wall ovens were also used for cooking light meals, sometimes a sizable pot of potatoes for the family's breakfast and supper, sometimes fried herring and baked potatoes. Herring and potatoes, with a sour pickle and a glass of tea, were the customary evening meal. The main meal, dinner, was usually served at noon. The menu practically never changed; the meal consisted of a few strings of red meat, distributed in a soup spoon, and divided equally among the mother and the children -- the father, as breadwinner, received the biggest portion; with the meat came a big bowl of kasha mixed with red beans. Everybody helped himself, using his own spoon. As for dessert.... It was a glass of hot tea, summer and winter, right from the samovar which always stood on the table, ready for use, except on Saturday. Sugar was used sparingly. It came in little bricks about the size of domino blocks, and thrifty people managed to drink as many as eight glasses of tea with one block of sugar by breaking it into eight equal pieces. Lemon was a rarity, used only on holidays (Passover and Rosh-Hashonah (Rosh Hashanah), for instance), and in case of sickness. For a cold, for instance, a glass of hot tea with honey and a few drops of lemon squeezed from a slice of lemon was a guaranteed cure.
The daily work routine was as follows: The mother and the father, if they had a business, got up early in the morning and opened the store to serve early customers. After the morning rush was over, the father went to shul to dahven shachres (say the morning prayer); or he might come home to pray with the boys who had been Bar-Mitzvahd. Then breakfast was prepared by one of the older teen-agers, who also had the job of sending the youngsters to cheder, and who cleaned the house, helped Mother with the cooking, and contributed a few free hours to help in the business.
At the close of the business day, usually at a late evening hour (and store owners generally worked till about ten at night, sometimes to midnight), the whole family settled down to rest after a hard day's work. On cold winter nights they sat on the benches alongside the wall ovens, the teenage girls reading novels or mystery books with tragic endings (over which they shed lots of tears), or knitting and crocheting. Mother was busy preparing tomorrow's meals and Father, with the older boys around him, was studying the weekly chapter of the Chumash which was to be read the following Saturday. Reading and close work were done by the light of a kerosene lamp, kept at less than its brightest, at least until a late hour, in order to save kerosene.
That was the routine for the week, except for Friday and Saturday. On Friday, everything took on another face. Mother got up at a very early hour, heated the brick oven in the kitchen, and started preparing the baking of the challah, the cooking of the cholent (a stew of beans, kasha and meat served, still warm from the brick oven, the next day). Another Sabbath delicacy prepared on this day was a flat, round pie, perfectly plain; this, when it had a layer of chicken fat on top, was a treat fit for a king. Mother also made a batch of latkes with buckwheat flour. They were nice and crisp, and did not need any trimmings. We ate them straight from the oven, a few pancakes to each person, no second helpings. The Sabbath cooking also included gefilte fish and two tsimmeses (tzimmeses), one of kidney beans and the other of prunes (both served as dessert); the five or more beautifully browned challahs were brushed with egg yolk -- from just one egg, as much as we could afford.
When this cooking and baking was done, Mother ordered all the children out of bed, regardless of the early hour. After a quick breakfast, the cheder boys and the girls started to clean the house for the Sabbath: Windows were washed, halls and ceiling dusted, floors swept and polished.
And, as it was customary for the men to go to the public bath house -- the steam bath, the schvitz-buhd -- so it was customary for the mother and all the children to wash their hair every Friday. They used kerosene for cleaning and for delousing. It was mainly the young children who required delousing, since hygienic conditions were poor and the children resisted hair washing. They sometimes developed boils all over their heads. (Boils -- the sixth plague, the Hagadah says; in Yiddish we called it park, and we applied it to a person: paskudnyak.)
The preparations to welcome Queen Shabbath started shortly after noon on Friday. Business, labor, and every other activity stopped completely, and the village took on a holiday face. So did the house -- fresh, clean as gold, an expression used to signify the purest, cleanest condition. Everybody put on his or her Sabbath attire, father his silk capote (a long coat), which he used only on the Sabbath, on holidays, and on happy occasions. Mother changed into her best dress, probably the only one she had for such occasions, and her new wig, which was probably as old as the time of her wedding, but was very carefully preserved.* The children also changed their clothes for others, not exactly new, not very elegant, but at least different.
*When she married, a girl had her head shaved, and she put on a sheitel, a wig. This was a symbolic statement that, belonging now to her husband, she was unattractive to other men.
A light snack was served, usually the kidney beans, and some home-made cookies -- pletzelach -- covered with a nice layer of sugar and cinnamon. Then the menfolk went off to shul and the womenfolk set to work preparing the Shabbasdikke table. They placed on it a clean, pure white, cotton cloth, in front of which, right at the father's seat, was a mat embroidered with the words Lichbod Shabbas or Shabbas Kodesh (In Honor of Sabbath; Holy Sabbath); this mat covered two challahs. Right next to it was placed a beautifully polished silver menorah holding two candles. These were lit by Mother before sundown, her face half-covered by a kerchief, her eyes closed, her hands moving back and forth around the candles as she recited the blessing. This was accompanied by the happy, jolly faces of her husband and children, who called out a loud "Amen and Good Shabbat" when the blessing was over.
Then the traditional erev Shabbat dinner was served. First was a dish called petcha, lamb shank, served hot. Then came the traditional luckshen soup -- and the thicker the layer of fat on top, the better. Following the soup came the delicious home-made gefilte fish, dipped in home-made, hand-ground horse radish. Then, of course, came the main dish, the chicken. True, the portions were meager, but the mitzvah of having chicken on the Sabbath was lawfully fulfilled. The final course of the meal was the prune tsimmes with a glass of tea, both kept warm on the well-heated brick oven throughout the day, the night, and all of the next day.
The rest of the evening was spent in recreation: father, accompanied by the menfolk. chanted the Shabbat zmeeroth (songs) and went over the weekly portion of the Chumash which was to be read in shul the next day. Mother and the womenfolk settled themselves comfortably, after the table was cleaned up and the dishes washed and put away, on the brick banister at the side of the oven (the preephetshik; remember "affen preephetshik brent a faerel"?). There they sat, cracking and eating sunflower seeds, sometimes sorting goose feathers to make mattresses for the cold winter nights: these were called pehrenes (featherbeds). As they did this, Mother entertained them with Yiddish songs and Bible stories.
The day of the Sabbath was spent in the way the Word says it must be, in complete rest. After a light morning snack -- cold, of course, and only by the women and children, since the older boys were not allowed to have any food until they had returned from shul -- Father, the older boys and Mother went to services. Upon their return from the synagogue, they found the table already set, in the same way as the night before, but without the menorah and candles. After the kiddush (the blessing over wine), the washing of hands, and the blessing over the challah, they started on the multi-course dinner. They ate chopped liver with onions and plenty of chicken fat, radish with chicken fat, the crisp chicken skin fried in rendered chicken fat (gribenes); every dish was tasty and delightful, a mechaiyah! Then, of course, the cholent was served, crisp and crunchy, browned in the oven for twenty-four hours. For dessert there was the chilled petcha with garlic and pepper, the prune tsimmes, and a glass of tea.
After such a healthy, not very easily digested meal, an afternoon nap was necessary. So off to bed they went -- that is, Mother and Father, who left the cleaning up and the dish washing to the teenage girls.
The children settled themselves quietly in the house, or went outside to meet friends, perhaps to take a stroll (shpatzir) to the outskirts of the shtetl or to the nearby fields and forest, until sunset. Then the sleepy village livened up again. Stores re-opened and business was again conducted throughout the evening.
As I have said, hygienic conditions were poor: no toilets, no baths, no showers, not even a sink to wash up in or to wash dishes. Water for cooking and for washing was provided by the town's water carrier, who brought it twice a week from the only well on the outskirts of the shtetl. There he filled a huge barrel, which he loaded onto a rickety wagon pulled by a skinny horse hardly capable of pulling it. The water was distributed by the pailful to the villages for a small fee, perhaps a few kopeks a pail. At times, when the wagon broke down, or when the horse died -- usually of starvation -- the water-carrier had to use a yoke across his own shoulders, a pail on each side.. (This method of carrying water was also employed by the women servants who worked for the wealthiest families; they were paid almost nothing.)
The water-carrier's job was hard and his earnings small. So, when a horse or wagon needed to be replaced, the people got together, each family chipping in what it could afford. They bought him a horse from a peasant who couldn't use it anymore. Imagine its condition!
Payment for water delivery was made once a week, on Fridays; and the housewives, aware of the poverty or the carrier and his family, added a bonus to the money, a few pieces of freshly baked challah or a few chunks of chicken. That added to the poor man's Sabbath meals, which were usually meager. He added to his living by carrying, loading and unloading heavy bundles of merchandise for local merchants. He was also used as an errand boy, delivering packages or messages, on foot, to nearby towns.
Each house had a large water barrel, kept on a stand in the kitchen. Near it was a basin, used for washing in the morning and before meals, for the Law required that male members of the household wash their hands before meals.
One big towel of cotton or linen hung next to the basin, everybody's property, everybody's privilege to wipe hands and face with it. Nor was it changed very often, since the linen treasure of the home was small.
In the summer, clothes were washed in the lake which ran down the hill on the outskirts of the shtetl. It was called the Boog*, and it flowed for the entire length of the Ukraine, as far as Kiev, the Ukranian capital, where it merged with the Dnieper. The women soaked, scrubbed and rinsed the laundry in the Boog. Then they spread it out on the rocks or on the grass to dry. In the winter months the laundry was done at home, and the clean wash was strung up on ropes tied to the knobs of two doors.
*Ukrainian: Piivdennij Bug, Pivdennyi Buh; Southern Bug River, does not flow to Kiev, but to the Bug estuary, which joins with the Dnieper estuary at the Black Sea. Ukraine has another (Western) Bug River, which flows north. The smaller Bucha River flows to the Dnieper at Kiev.
As for bathing -- the Boog was used for that, too. In the summer its cool, flowing water was delightfully clean and refreshing. Men and boys bathed in complete nudity. The womenfolk bathed in their long undershirts, the very undershirts they wore all week long, day and night. Like the men, they changed their underwear once a week, on Friday, in honor of the Sabbath. When they bathed, men and boys, women and girls were separated by a natural partition formed by two rocks. When some of the playful boys wanted some fun with the girls they swam under water to the forbidden place. They were quickly driven away by the loud screams of the mothers protecting their teen-age girls.
Sometimes people and vehicles needed to be transported from one side of the lake to the other. For this an open ferry, a kind of raft, was used. It had, tied to each end, a long, heavy rope whose other end was secured on shore. A peasant was employed by the municipality to pull the ferry across the lake, which was about as wide as a long city block. He did this by tugging the rope toward the opposite shore. That took about twenty minutes.
But the peasant was often drunk and did not go to work, though his living quarters were near the lake. So a peasant who had to cross the lake with a lead on his horse and wagon, or a pedestrian, did the pulling.
The Boog was frozen from September to the end of April, so the ferry was out of commission for that time. The only means of transportation then was by sleigh, and sleighs were built specifically for commercial purposes. But they were also used for pleasure. And, for brave boys, the thick cover of ice provided an excellent opportunity for skating -- without skates, since that invention hadn't reached the shtetlach. Sometimes a skater hit a soft spot and fell into a hole; either he saved himself from drowning by lifting himself up to the surface, or was saved by a person near by who heard his screams.
To return to cleanliness: Household garbage and dishwater were thrown into the alley between houses. They provided nourishment to stray animals, mostly pigs, who also cleaned up the waste of the privies which some of the wealthier families had built at the backs of their houses. The back of the privy faced the street; in it was an opening through which the pigs reached their "food." The Jews were not disturbed by the presence of pigs in their neighborhood, since these animals kept the streets and alleys clean, getting rid of one day's garbage and coming back for the next.
We heard, years after we had left the shtetl, of the removal of the contents of privies in the big cities by trucks employed by fertilizer companies or by rich landowners. Households, we were told, were even paid for their waste.
Social Life
There were no bookstores, libraries, newspapers or magazines in the shtetl. Only the big cities had them. To obtain a book or a newspaper one had to send away to one of the centers of culture -- to Warsaw, Odessa or Kiev for Hebrew and Yiddish literature and to Petersburg, Moscow or, again, Kiev for Russian literature. And, of course, whatever news did reach the shtetl was not exactly right off the press. Nevertheless, to these provincial people it was valuable news, fresh to them. It was from the newspapers to which they subscribed that they found out about Yiddish and Hebrew authors. Also, it happened from time to time that the government had to put up some public structure -- a post office, a church, a school (not for Jews) -- or had to improve or extend a railroad line. Then, in addition to the architect or engineer, someone came to supervise the work. That someone, in some cases, was, surprisingly enough, not a gentile but a Jew from one of the big cities, to us an aristocrat who mingled with gentile high society and had pull with a number of government officials. As soon as the villagers found out that the pooritz was not a goy but one of their own brethren, though he showed no sign of a Jewish face (he was shaven and beardless, as did not become a provincial Jew in those days), still a Jew is a Jew. It did not take long for them to get acquainted with him and to find out all they wanted to Know about their brothers "on the other side of the road." He, the Yiddisher pooritz, seemed to enjoy meeting others of his kind who were quite different from him in looks, behavior and speech. Regardless of the language barrier -- both parties had to use a mixture of Yiddish and Russian -- they talked. So this was another source of news, to which the villagers listened attentively, with great interest.
To get a book or even a newspaper three or four of the educated boys -- not girls -- got together, each of them paying part of the cost. When their book or newspaper arrived, each read it in turn. News was also read before a large gathering of townspeople, young and old, by one of the learned young men, sometimes in the synagogue after prayers, sometimes in the marketplace, where the crowd formed a circle around the reader.
It was typical of these eager listeners that, regardless of the subject, they always responded to news with the same question: Was it good for the Jews? They had good reason to ask, for they lived in constant fear of persecution by the cruelly anti-Semitic Tsarist government and of the Tsar's frequent decrees restricting all aspects of their lives, political, economic, educational and residential.
Social life was surely limited. There were no movies, no theaters or concert halls. For recreation, men occasionally gathered in someone's house on the Sabbath or on a holiday. More often, the elderly men gathered in the synagogue to recite, individually or in groups, chapters of the Psalms until the approach of evening and the evening prayer (Mincha). The younger men, too, went there, to study or discuss chapters of the Talmud, often arguing, each insisting on his interpretation of one passage or another; or they talked politics. The women gathered in the house of a neighbor. There one at them, the most learned, read Biblical stories from the Tsheano Hooreheno, a religious book. The stories were often sad, and the women shed tears throughout the reading. And I wouldn't be surprised if, for a happy ending, they finished the session with some gossip.
Or people took walks to the outskirts of the shtetl where there were green fields and forests. There they picked strawberries or raspberries (even on the Sabbath, for this was recreation). The segregation of the sexes did not prevent some of the youngsters from engaging in romance of a kind (but not affairs, nothing sexual) and sometimes these secret meetings eventually resulted in marriage. Sometimes husbands and wives took a stroll. Some of the men preferred that their spouses walk behind them. The women did not object.
In my whole shtetl there was a single device for playing music, a gramaphone* owned by the tailor of fancy ladies' garments. It was a square box with a handle; when the handle was wound it operated the mechanism inside the box (this machine did not use records). The music came out through a loud speaker resembling the pipe of a trombone. The tunes were loud, easily heard all over the town. Large crowds gathered around the house where the music box was playing. When it was brought outside to the marketplace in the summer evenings, crowds came there.
*(Yiddish: gramofon; English: gramophone; the trademark "Gramophone" was applied by its inventor to the phonograph which played disc records instead of cylinders.)
The music consisted mostly of folk songs and liturgical pieces sung by such famous cantors as David Roitman, Seerota, Belzer and many others. The names of these cantorial geniuses and their work were very familiar to the people of the shtetl, for they sang selections from daily, Sabbath and holiday prayers which everyone knew by heart. In leisure moments, and when they were in the right spiritual mood, men amused themselves by imitating various cantorial styles. And they could listen to the music machine even on Friday evenings and Saturdays, since the bit of winding it required was not considered work.
Another kind of entertainment in which the whole family took part was the traditional spinning of the dreidel (the top) every Chanukah evening (except Friday) after the lighting of the candles, while Mother was busy in the kitchen making the traditional latkes. Sometimes, also, the family played a game like cards with kveytlach, which looked like cards but were colored pieces of cardboard decorated by the father or the older boys with brightly painted letters of the aleph-beth; these were fine pieces of work.
Sometimes the young men did manage to sneak out of the house to have a real game of cards with friends. They used someone's house or even, if they bribed the beadle, the synagogue. There they played until very late at night or, rather, early in the morning. Though they played for money, the stakes were so small it could hardly be called gambling. To lose just a single ruble -- one hundred kopeks -- would have been too much.
Another traditional entertainment took place on Purim. The children dressed up in masks and costumes impersonating the heroes of the Megilah. As Achashvarous* (Xerxes), Haman, Esther, Mordechai and attendants, they performed scenes from a Purim play. Then they went from door to door, collecting coins and sweets and singing a Purim song:
Heirt iz purim Today is Purim Morgen iz ois Tomorrow no more Gib mir a groshen Give me a groshen (a half-kopek) Und varf mir arois. And toss me out.
*Ahasuerus, Achashverosh
There was a special thrill in store for the villagers once a year, when a man appeared from nowhere, set up a large tent in the center of the market place and began to present a show that included a miniature circus. He had puppets, small animal acts and magic tricks. It was something never experienced by the villagers except on these yearly occasions. The "house" was full to capacity at every performance, practically everyone in the shtetl attending. This great treat did not make much of a hole in their pockets, since the entrance fee was just a few kopeks, and children were admitted free. The people were so impressed by these performances that the sweet feeling remained with them throughout the year of waiting for the next one.
Worship
Surprisingly enough in a place which people spoke of as not more than "the size of a yawn," our village had three or four prayer houses to serve the religious needs of the people. All of them were Orthodox, of course. The terms "conservative" and "reform" were totally unknown to the villagers except by way of rumors which came from various sources -- newspapers, infrequent big-town visitors, "half-Jews." We heard of big, fancy synagogues, with cantors like opera singers, dressed in long, black capotes and top hats (tsylinder), wearing a little talis (prayer shawl) the size of a scarf draped just over the shoulders; no yarmolke (yarmulke, kippah, skull cap), of course. In these great places the chanting of the prayers was accompanied by an organ and by a choir of girls, some of whom were not even Jewish. What Yiddishkeit!
As for the congregation, Save us, Oh Lord! No talis, no yarmolke or hat, and -- wonder of wonders -- smoking during intermission on the Sabbath and Yom Kippur. A visit to such a synagogue was made only on the eve of the Sabbath, for just a few hours the next day, and on the High Holidays. What is worse, they came to the holy place not on foot, not by horse and wagon, but in a phaeton driven by a fancily dressed coachman, in Russian called a yam-sheek.
What of the women folk? Yes, they too want to services dressed in their best, ornamented in furs and jewels as if they were going to a wedding. And they were not separated from the men by a partition, as is the Orthodox custom, but each one occupied a seat next to her husband and from time to time chanted the prayers along with the rabbi and the men folk.
To get back to the village shullen: The reason for several prayer houses was simply class discrimination. For a member of an elite group, it was below his dignity to mix with a member of the lower class -- laborers, perhaps, who were considered, and who really were, completely illiterate except for what they took in during the earliest years of childhood at the cheder. That amounted to the most elementary weekday and Sabbath prayers and the Kadish. By the time, as children, they had learned that much, they had to be trained in the trade of their fathers -- as helpers or, in an emergency, to replace their fathers, often becoming the support of their families. Thus the necessity of a separate shul for the working class.
And that is not all. There was even a class division within the working class between, on the one hand, the tailors and shoemakers who together constituted the majority of workers and, on the other hand, the tradesmen, carpenters, glaziers and tin smiths who were in the minority. Men in each of these two groups had to join one of the two main arbeiter groups. So two more shuls were put up -- poorly built, poorly equipped, much below the standard of the wealthy. And these shuls were referred to as, for example, the "tailors' shul" or the "shoemakers' shul." Still, with all these classifications and all this segregation, no one belonging to his particular group was forbidden to attend services at any of the other synagogues, including that of the elite.
Ironically, there existed also a division among the members of the "chosen" class, the elite white-collar class. The reason in this case was that the worshippers followed a different Grand Rabbi.
Now it should be made clear that a Grand Rabbi must not be mistaken for a rov. A rov was literally a teacher. But when a congregation chose a rov, it was with the purpose of having him serve the community in religious matters such as solving problems of kashruth, trying to straighten out family disagreements which might otherwise result in the breakup of a marriage, performing weddings and issuing divorces. In other words, he was the leader of the community, employed by the congregation for an unlimited time, alloted a certain salary per year. And that salary was so small that he and his (usually large) family lived close to starvation. Further, since he had no written contract, he was at the mercy of his employers, the baalay bateem who could fire him for any reason or none.
A Grand Rabbi, however, was the leader of a sect, with a large following of chassidim (Lubavicher, for instance). That sort of rabbi did not live among his chassidic following since they were numerous and spread far and wide, over a large area in many shtetlach.
A Grand Rabbi's residence was usually located in a large city, and was called a court. It resembled some of the great mansions of the gentile nobility, and had a great staff of servants. They attended to the hundreds -- sometimes thousands -- of followers who came from all parts of the Rabbi's region of influence, to hear his recitation, analysis and comment on chapters of the Torah and Talmud.
The Grand Rabbi's followers looked upon him as one appointed by God to lead his "chosen" children in the path of righteousness ln accordance with the Law of Moses and Israel. The "Holy One" was also consulted on various family problems, such as the inability or a woman to bear children, unmarried daughters (sons did not have this problem), a youngster's being called to military service, aging, and the most common problem -- lack of parnoso, of a means of livelihood.
The Grand Rabbi's response to all these problems was, "Don't worry. Go home. God will help." A promise of that sort from a holy man so close to God was sufficient. The follower would return home fully satisfied, relieved of his worries. There he waited for the miracle to happen.
Some of the chassidim here so devoted to their idol, the Rebbe, that they left their homes, left their wives and children without support. Generally the wives became bread-winners in place of the deserting husbands; They took care of the little, poorly-stocked stores, struggling and living close to starvation. That did not seem to have any effect on the deserters, who stayed around the court for as long as a year or more, sleeping on benches, being fed by the kitchen help, who looked upon them not as worthy men but as shnorrers, beggars.
How did the Grand Rabbi behave toward his disciples? They hardly saw his face, except at rare intervals. But his appearance before a gathering of chassidim was the occasion of a feast and a discussion of the Torah. And the joyous event had its bad side, because it started not with the meal but with talk, with an explanation of a section of the Torah that lasted a long time. Needless to say, no one dared touch the food before the Rabbi completed his reading and explanation. When he finally did, he faced the tables full of delicious food and the hungry faces of the ohassidim, and he said the blessing over a tiny piece of challah, took a bite "on the point of the knife" of one thing and another and, without a goodbye, left for his own room. Whereupon the chassidim fell upon the cold, stale food, grabbing from each other's hands. That was known as "catching sheerayim." Sheerayim actually means leftovers; to catch them was a great mitzvah.
The Rebbe also had women followers. They came to him with their special feminine problems, such as failure to bear children, being forsaken by their husbands (and asking of the Rebbe that he help to have them returned home). The Rebbe's solution, in these cases also, was prayer.
But these women followers were never allowed to come face to face with the representative of God, and their business with him was conducted through an arbitrator, a gabay, to whom they presented their appeal in writing (and this was called a kvitel in Yiddish). With this petition the gabay went to the Rebbe's room. After a short time he returned with the usual reply: "Go home, woman. God will help."
There was a fee for that service, usually a ruble, though it was not set. (The common people called it a kherbl.) The fee, in many cases if not always, was pocketed by his gabay and not by the Rabbi.
In addition to the time the Rabbi spent at his court, with its constant stream of chassidim and petitioners, it was the custom that he pay a visit to one shtetl or another -- one of those with a large number of disciples -- once a year. In the shtetl, the advance notice of his arrival caused a great sensation. Preparation for his welcome (chabolat ponim) started immediately. The shul which was named after the Rebbe -- more of this later -- mas thoroughly cleaned and put into order, so that it took on a brand new look. The mikvah was freshened up; all the holes in the roof were repaired, the walls and the ceiling were cleaned, the benches were planed, the floor was polished, and the not-so-pleasant odorous contents of the mikvah were poured out (how is a mystery) and replaced with clear, fresh water.
There was the question of where the Rebbe would be lodged. This was soon arranged: at the house of the most important follower, the Holy One's favorite, his most generous contributor, his greatest financial supporter.
The day of the Rebbe's arrival in town was declared a holiday. Most businesses were closed in order to give the townspeople, even those who were not the Rebbe's followers (and even if they were followers of another Rebbe), a chance to join the procession of the welcoming committee -- ten of the elite, of the finest baalay bateem, in the lead with the Rebbe. The meeting took place a short distance from the town, on its outskirts. The Rebbe, accompanied by his gabay, his steady companion and bodyguard, arrived in a fine coach driven by two pure-bred horses and their elegantly dressed driver. Their style was royal.
As the coach approached the town the driver signalled its arrival by whipping the horses hard to urge them on, and by his own loud outcry. Upon nearing the group of townspeople, the driver stopped the coach and the Rebbe stepped out. He was helped out not by the driver, a goy, but by his gabay. After a round of handshakes and greetings -- "Shalom aleichem!" -- the Rebbe set out on the short walk to the town surrounded by the committee, the driver and the coach following.
When they reached the house where the Rebbe was to be lodged, the gabay went in first, to make sure that the room in which the Rebbe was to be "secluded" was in order and -- what was most important -- to see that all the women-folk were out of sight; that was to avoid any sinful thoughts and temptations.
No sooner did the Rebbe cross the threshold than he retired to his room, locked himself in, washed his hands, and began to pray.
The house in which he stayed became an open house, public property. A constant stream of chassidim, his followers and those who followed another Tsadik (Tzadik) as well, filled the house day and night, trying to catch a glimpse of the holy face on which could be seen the shining presence of Divinity itself, and to be on hand during his recitals of the Torah and the Talmud, to be there when the pearls poured from his holy mouth.
The climax of this sensational visit came on the eve of the Sabbath and the following day. Friday was a day of great preparation for the hostess, who set to work very early in the morning, cooking the special Sabbath meals, making the gefilte fish, grinding the horseradish, salting the chicken freshly killed by the shochet (the ritual slaughterer), slicing luckshen for the chicken soup, mixing the cholent (a bean dish) and storing it in the oven, whose door was sealed to preserve its heat for the next twenty-four hours; and baking the challahs with their braided tops brushed with egg yolk, baking the sponge cakes, cooking the prune tsimmes. And all of that had to be done before noon, before the time of the arrival of Queen Sabbath. For Shabbat means rest; everything came to a stop for the next twenty-four hours.
The menfolk, however, had their own duties to fulfill : The Rebbe, accompanied by a few chassidim of his choosing, spent most of the morning in tveelah -- "dipping" in the mikvah, a term used to describe bathing not only for reasons of cleanliness but especially for sacred reasons, for the purification of the soul that is encased in the mortal body, so that it will be worthy to meet with the heavenly presences (invisible, only imagined) of the Queen Sabbath and the Angels of Peace, her ambassadors.
Upon returning from the mikvah, the Rebbe immediately went into seclusion in his locked room, praying, chanting, and rehearsing the Torah lecture (for the most part based on the parshat hashovuah, the chapter of that week, the sehdra) which was to be read the next day in shul.
When the Rebbe finally came out of seclusion he met with a group of his followers, who had been waiting to accompany him to the shul. It was a very impressive procession they made, resembling the appearance of a royal personage before his subjects. The Rebbe and all of the men accompanying him were dressed in rather large fur-trimmed hats (shtrymel), long black silk capotes, and long white socks. They walked slowly and silently, followed by the watchful eyes of a great number of townsfolk eager to catch a glimpse of the heavenly image. In shul the Rebbe was welcomed by the congregation with the traditional, millennium-old greeting of "Shalom aleichem!" and handshakes. No one took his seat until the Rebbe, seated at the eastern wall for a moment, stood up to face the Holy Ark. This was the signal for the chazin (the cantor) to start chanting the Sabbath prayers.
At the end of prayers, the shammas (the beadle) handed the Rebbe a bottle of home-made sacred wine, which the Rebbe poured into a silver goblet and over which he pronounced the traditional Kiddush. Now the Rebbe, accompanied by all the congregants, started for home. But only a small number of them came into the house with him. These few had the honor of being seated at the Rebbe's table, of listening to his recital of the Torah before the Sabbath meal. It was a recital which usually lasted a long time. The chassidim become impatient for the meal.
The same procedure was repeated the next day, Saturday. But it took on a more lively character, the congregation in the shul chanting and praying loudly, following the Rebbe's movements with their own. After the kiddush, after the challah was cut and the hamotseh (blessing over bread) was said by the Rebbe, the men formed a large circle in the center of the shul. Holding hands, the chassidim danced, jumping up and down, tapping on the floor. In the center of the circle was the Rebbe, looking up from half-closed eyes, murmuring a melody (a nigun).
Upon their return from the shul, the exalted guest was honored by his host -- and honored him -- by making the kiddush, this time for the host and his family. The womenfolk, not being allowed in the presence of the men, listened through a narrow crack of the door to the adjoining room, quietly responding with the traditional "Amen."
Dinner was served by the hostess or by a maid if they had one (Jewish, of course: only these were allowed to be present among the men). Again, as a prelude to the bodily food, more spiritual food was offered by the Rebbe. Again, it lasted quite a long time, again causing the food to become cold and tasteless. After this dinner and a short rest, another meal was served, the sholosh sehudoth, the last of the three obligatory Sabbath meals (or festival meals). Then came the leave-taking of the Sabbath, the havdalah, and the blessing over wine. If, for the first time that month, a full moon was to appear that evening, the whole group of men went outside to welcome it with singing, chanting, jumping up and down -- all this while they looked straight up at its face. This ritual ceremony was called Kiddush Levono.
Then the men went inside again for more "spiritual nourishment"; that lasted until the early hours of the next day. By then, most of the chassidim were half asleep, both arms and head on the table; they mumbled their niguns.
After spending a few more days in the shtetl, the Rebbe left for his "palace" or for another visit to a nearby shtetl. He gave his followers, and those also who were not his followers, a royal farewell in which he expressed his hope for a visit the next year (as was customary).
When the Rabbi left, the shtetl's life went back to normal except for the discussion, the expression of opinion, the comment on the Rabbi's visit and on his spiritual contribution to the congregation.
To return to the description of the shullen: Each shul was named after a particular grand rabbi's place of residence; in that shul his followers worshipped. Our shtetl, for example, had two main shullen (besides its few working class shullen, which served a minority of the population). One was the Talner Shul and the other was the Monasterishter Shul, after the places where these rabbis lived and had their courts. Other ahullen in Ukranian shtetlach were named in the same way, after the town and court of their rabbi.
As to the manner of worship: It was the same among Ukranian Jews and Jews of western Russia -- Poland, Galicia and Lithuania. All of them were Ashkenazim, descendants of German Jews (unlike Sephardim, descendants of Moorish, Spanish and Portuguese Jews, whose speech was different from Ashkenazi and whose prayer books shortened or omitted many prayers). But even among the Ashkenazim there were differences, conflicts about how certain prayers should be read: Should some single word, perhaps, he read as it was in the book? Should it be changed? Should it be omitted? This concern with trifles, silly as it might seem to other people, was taken seriously by the contending groups. In some instances it was just one stubborn member of the congregation who insisted on having the reading his way. That provoked opposition, brought on quarrels. Loud and insulting words were exchanged. Sometimes they caused the services to be interrupted; the reading of the Torah would be brought to a halt, and would not be resumed until some hours later.
Enmity
There were even cases in which, after such quarrels, a congregant might seek revenge for the insult he had suffered by informing on his enemy -- reporting to the government some improper or illegal activity in business or in public affairs. And in Tsarist Russia a Jew had a very slim chance of escaping punishment: he was not given an opportunity to prove his innocence, assuming he was innocent. So he would be arrested and imprisoned for a few years.
As for the informer, his method of getting rid of an enemy did not make him popular. And it was not exactly a credit to the shtetl. No; it was a mark on the community, and it gave the gentiles in the surrounding area something to talk about: "Jews, you know: that's how they treat one another." The Jews themselves were not so happy about this business, either. And the quarrels and arguments did not settle anything. Everything went on as before.
The informer's victim was usually someone who held a government job by appointment, who handled such affairs of the Jewish community as collecting taxes, registering births, issuing death certificates. and issuing passports. For it was mandatory that every Russian citizen carry a passport. It wasn't for travel abroad -- what shtetl Jew could even dream of such an adventure? -- but for travelling from one town to another. If someone were caught away from home without his passport he was arrested, kept in a local jail for a time, and then sent back, on foot and guarded by a militiaman, regardless of the distance. In most cases he made the journey in the company of a number of criminals of all sorts, including murderers.
This method of returning people to their homes was also practiced in the case of a person caught living, or even staying for more than three days, in one of the big cities of Russia; in St. Petersburg or Moscow or perhaps even Kiev in the Ukraine. It was forbidden to Jews other than owners of big businesses or manufacturers or highly skilled laborers to live in those cities. The forbidden area was called Cherta Ocedlosty in Russian; Jews had to live within the borders of a settlement, a ghetto. We say in English "living within the Pale of Settlement."
To clarify the matter of informing: The informing was not exactly a result of quarrels about the Torah. My uncle's conviction was the only case I can remember (and only vaguely, since I was a very young boy then). This is how it came about.
I mentioned that, in addition to the single militiaman assigned to the shtetl, whose job was to see that in general the law was enforced, the government allowed the Jewish community to elect a leader with full rights to handle whatever affairs concerned the government. These were mainly registering births and deaths and meeting other requirements of the bureaucracy.
Registration was of the utmost importance, especially for males, since they would, when the time came, be called to military service (at the age of twenty-one, to serve for four years). The Jews were not keen on serving in the military -- as everyone knew, including the government. To evade service, the help of the elected official in charge of Jewish affairs was needed in one way or another, and not always in legal ways.
Now the Jewish official, whose term was only one year, was elected by the Jewish community; the election was entirely without government interference. Quite a few candidates ran for office, since it was (I assume) a paid job, and brought with it the prospect of other benefits for favors extended, illegal no doubt. At election time there was a lot of commotion and politicking going on: name-calling, even fist fights, and the buying of votes. It is probable that the loser or losers were looking for a chance to get revenge on the victorious candidate. Naturally, his job presented an opportunity for that. My uncle seems to have held that job at one time and that is how he wound up in jail.
By the way, the office was called Starosta in Russian. Starost means old. As far as I can remember, that office was never held by a young or even a middle-aged man. It seems to have been reserved for community elders.
The End of the Shtetl
So life went on. And it would have gone on in the same way, with no significant change, if not for the outbreak of the first World War and the Russian Revolution which followed.
The Jews were determined that they would not be drafted into the anti-Semitic army of the Tsarist government. Jewish boys found many ways to evade army service. For one thing, they hid. That was possible only because the local police cooperated; they were bribed, of course. The families of draft evaders were even notified in advance of a visit by the state police (to whom the evasion was no secret, either). Sometimes, the boys hid with relatives in towns where they were not known, and where the police were not likely to come after them. But they were sometimes caught in a roundup of that town's boys. (As I was; my brother had to make the trip and bribe officials to get me out of the jail where I had spent the night.)
It was difficult to bribe members of the draft board -- military doctors and officers; they were unapproachable. Their wives, however, could be bribed, and very effectively; the boy to be drafted had no trouble being rejected.
The most effective way to avoid service was for the potential draftee to maim himself. The boy might drink acidy liquids -- vinegar, or the juice of lemons -- several times a day and several times a night. After some days of this drinking and staying up all night, he lost weight and grew week. So he became unfit for the army. Another trick was to have a local man damage a boy's foot by bending some toes very far back and bandaging them
so tight that it was painful and difficult for the boy to walk. This caused some permanent deformity. Most frequently someone, a "specialist," was hired to injure the boy. He was no doctor but a rough, husky fellow brought from a distant big town on the recommendation of someone in the shtetl. In my little shtetl, the man worked on ten or fifteen boys. His work was to tug very hard near the boy's thigh to cause a hernia; sometimes he used a group of local boys to help him. Or he would put his fist to the groin, pressing and punching so hard that it would hurt. After this "operation," the boy had to continue working on his hernia to make sure that it developed. He would lift and pull heavy objects. He would blow very hard into a bottle or a jar for as long as he could, again and again, until a big round lump showed at the place. He also jumped and ran every day, many times a day, until he was out of breath. After some three to six months, the hernia was well developed and the boy was ready to be examined by the draft board.
And some of the specialist-bully's methods were quite drastic: He would use a hammer to break a bone in a boy's arm or leg; that damage might last a lifetime.
During the revolution, there were two fighting forces -- the remnants of the defeated Tsarist armies, who were trying to regain control of the government, and loose bands of outcasts and outlaws who had been freed from the prisons, by order of Lenin, to join the revolutionary armies. But these groups had plans of their own. Instead of fighting, they spread out over a large part of the Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania and Galicia. They invaded the small, unprotected shtetlach, looted, killed, destroyed everything they could put their hands on. They caused people to desert their homes and their businesses, to abandon their belongings and run for their very lives, to hide in fields and forests. Sometimes the Jews took refuge in the attics of friendly peasants who promised not to give them into the hands of the bloodthirsty bandits. And often these good neighbors, after relieving their old friends of all the cash, jewelry and clothing they had rescued from the looters -- often they forgot their promises and turned their backs on the Jews. The result was that the Jews were discovered, pulled out of their shelters and, of course, put to death -- men, women and children alike.
After a while, when things quieted down and the hooligans left the now ghostly shtetl, some of those who were lucky enough not to have been discovered came out from their hiding places. They tried to return to their homes but Woe! they found only skeleton structures with practically nothing inside them. The survivors could do nothing but leave the blood-covered Motherland to look for another place where they might settle and start life anew. But wherever they went they found the same conditions -- ruin, devastation, little bands of people who looked like skeletons wandering, searching. What was the solution? To emigrate. Where to?
To America, the "Goldeneh Medinah," the Golden Land of which they had heard so much, the free country, free for everyone regardless of race, color or religion, the country with so many possibilities, so many opportunities to make a nice living, to reach a high position in society; the place where a tailor, a shoemaker, a baker, an ordinary man might become President.
Thus a mass of emigrants streamed toward the borders of neighboring countries. People from our shtetl, with some from nearby shtetlach, set out for the Romanian border, since it was closest to the Ukraine, separated from Russia by the narrow stream of the Dneyster ( Dniester ) River, which ran quietly and smoothly. We had to overcome many obstacles, many difficulties. it was in our favor that guards on both sides were ready and willing to take money to let us cross in the dark night. The crossings were not always successful, because the negotiators, whom we called contrabandists, forgot to make payment to one group of guards or another -- usually the foreign guards, the Rumanians. So the negotiators risked the lives of the refugees, putting the fees they were supposed to use to bribe the guards into their own pockets. The result was shooting, panic; men, women, children, whole families were drowned.
For those of us who got safely across, who became refugees in Romania, it was not comfortable, not pleasant. We were not "licking honey": unwanted in an anti-Semitic country whose government tried to get rid of us by issuing order after order restricting us and threatening deportation. As for support: Some of the refugees were skilled -- tailors, carpenters, shoemakers, seamstresses -- and they managed to provide meager support for their families. But most hed to depend on "relief" -- the money and clothing which came from their relatives and landsmen in the United States who had been fortunate enough to emigrate before the war and were already well established.
Finally, after a few years of struggle, of living in fear and under threat of deportation to Russia, the refugees got the necessary papers from a relative or a close friend in the United States who took upon himself responsibility for the new immigrants (sometimes a whole family) until they could support themselves. For the government had to have assurance they they would not become a public burden.
So the shtetl Jew finally found a place to start a new life. He tried to keep up the traditions and customs of the shtetl and he did, to some degree, for as long as the first generation of immigrants were alive. But the young people, those who were growing up in America, wanted to become Americanized. They wanted to throw off the old-fashioned ways, the manners of their parents and grandparents. They wanted to speak English, not Yiddish; and they wanted to change their names to American-sounding names. They wanted to become part of the melting pot.
And so a world which had existed for hundreds of years, a unique world, was lost. It was a world full of hardship, economic, social and political. But it provided deep satisfactions -- a sense of tranquility despite what people had or did not have, and close personal ties, strong family feeling transmitted from one generation to the next. That was the essence of life for us. And that is the world that has disappeared into oblivion.
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