The Lost World of Russia's Jews

Abraham Rechtman, Noah Barrera, Nathaniel Deutsch

Description

In 1913, Abraham Rechtman journeyed through the Russian Pale of Settlement on a mission to record its Jewish folk traditions before they disappeared forever. The Lost World of Russia's Jews is the first English translation of his extraordinary experiences, originally published in Yiddish, documenting a culture best known until now through romanticized works like Life Is with People and Fiddler on the Roof. 

In the last years of the Russian Empire, Abraham Rechtman joined S. An-sky's Jewish Ethnographic Expedition to explore and document daily life in the centuries old Jewish communities of the Pale of Settlement. Rechtman described the key places where Jewish life and death were experienced and connected these sites to local folklore and customary practices. Among the many unique contributions of his memoir are riveting descriptions of traditional Jewish healers and exorcists—many of them women—and their methods and incantations.

Rather than a nostalgic portrait of an imagined shtetl, Rechtman succeeded in producing an intimate account of Jewish life and death that is highly nuanced and richly detailed. The Lost World of Russia's Jews powerfully illuminates traditional Jewish life in Eastern Europe on the eve of its transformation and, ultimately, destruction. 

Acknowledgments
A Note on Transliteration
Introduction
1. Sh. An-sky and the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition: The Participants in the Expedition
2. Synagogues and Prayerhouses
3. Headstones, Graves, and Tombs
4. Communal Pinkesim
5. Tales About Nigunim [Melodies] and Prayers
6. Exorcisms, Charms, and Remedies
7. Scribes and Scribal Writing
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Jewish Studies
• Former Soviet Union
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Folclore
• URSS
• History of the Jews in Russia
• General officer
• Russia
• General
• Folklore
• Russie

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253056917
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 7 Mo

Extrait

JEWS IN EASTERN EUROPE
Jeffrey Veidlinger
Mikhail Krutikov
Genevi ve Zubrzycki
Editors

Originally published in Yiddish as Yidishe etnografye un folklor by Fundaci n IWO in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The license to publish this translation is granted by Fundaci n IWO, Buenos Aires.
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.org
2021 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2021
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-05694-8 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-253-05693-1 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-05691-7 (ebook)
In Memory of Shloyme Zanvil, son of Reb Aaron HaCohen Rapoport
Sh. An-sky, of blessed memory
The ninth of November 1920-the twenty-second of Marcheshvan [in the Jewish year] 5681
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
A Note on Transliteration
Introduction
1. Sh. An-sky and the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition: The Participants in the Expedition
2. Synagogues and Prayerhouses
3. Headstones, Graves, and Tombs
4. Communal Pinkesim
5. Tales about Nigunim [Melodies] and Prayers
6. Exorcisms, Charms, and Remedies
7. Scribes and Scribal Writing
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE AUTHORS WOULD ESPECIALLY LIKE to thank Hannah Storch, Abraham Rechtman s granddaughter, and Ren e Gladstone, his daughter, for so generously sharing their memories and for all of their encouragement with this project. Sadly, Ren e passed away before this book could be published. As a longtime resident of the buildings, Esther Nelson Sokolsky provided valuable insights about the Sholem Aleichem Houses in the Bronx, where Abraham Rechtman lived for many years. We would also like to thank Gabriella Safran for her expert knowledge of An-sky s life and work and for her illuminating comments on the manuscript. Polly Zavadivker provided helpful observations, as did an anonymous reader. Abraham Lichtenbaum helped with matters connected to IWO in Buenos Aires. Nathaniel Deutsch would like to thank Miriam, Simi, Tamar, and Shirin for providing inspiration during the many hours devoted to the task of translation. Noah Barrera is particularly indebted to Chava Lapin and Dovid Braun, who both possess invaluable knowledge of Yiddish language and culture, and to all those who participated in a translation workshop he led at the 2015 Yiddish-Vokh, including but not limited to Simon Neuberg and Itzik Blieman. He would also like to thank Serena, Nathan, Baruch, Jessie, and Rickie for their continual support. Finally, this book could not have seen the light of day without the expert work of our editors at Indiana University Press, Dee Mortensen, Ashante Thomas, and Darja Malcolm-Clarke. Thank you.
A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
WE HAVE GENERALLY TRANSLITERATED YIDDISH words according to the system of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, though we have made exceptions for words that commonly appear in English. For Hebrew, Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish transliterations, we have followed the Library of Congress guidelines with some exceptions, and have also eliminated some diacritical marks. The numerous towns and cities mentioned in the volume are generally identified by their Yiddish names rather than their names in Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Lithuanian, or other languages, for example, Vilna instead of Vilnius. We have employed standard English transliterations for certain Yiddish town names rather than their YIVO forms, for instance, Mezeritch rather than Mezeritsh, as in Dov Ber, the Maggid of Mezeritch.

INTRODUCTION
Nathaniel Deutsch
My Sun Is Already Setting in the West : Abraham Rechtman and the Publication of Jewish Ethnography and Folklore
In 1914, Russian police in the city of Zhitomir arrested two young Jews on suspicion of spying. Abraham Rechtman and Solomon Yudovin were native sons of the Pale of Settlement, the western reaches of the Russian Empire to which a vast majority of its Jews were restricted prior to the Revolution of 1917. 1 With a thick dark beard and sharp avian gaze, Rechtman still resembled the brilliant yeshiva student he had once been. Physically slighter and sensitive looking, Yudovin had a Chaplinesque quality that matched his artistic temperament. 2 Nearly half a century after their arrest, Rechtman, then living a world away in the Sholem Aleichem Houses in the Bronx, published a first-person account of what had transpired that day in Zhitomir: At the end of 1914, while the First World War raged, the artist S. Yudovin and I were arrested in Zhitomir, under the suspicion that we were spies. This was a reasonable assumption since, on account of our work, we were carrying around a camera and taking photos out in the open. We were both put under arrest and the police confiscated the materials we had collected including all the photographic plates that we had in our possession. 3
Rather than spies, however, Rechtman and Yudovin were members of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition in Honor of Baron Naftali Hertz Gintsburg, the most ambitious-some might say quixotic-attempt ever undertaken to document Jewish life in the Russian Pale of Settlement, where more than 40 percent of the world s Jews still lived at the turn of the twentieth century. 4 Simon Dubnow, the great Russian Jewish historian, had described the Pale as a Dark Continent . . . that lies ahead to be explored and illuminated. 5 Between 1912 and 1914, the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition set out to explore and document this vast territory, visiting approximately seventy towns or shtetlekh in the traditional Jewish heartland of Podolia, Volhynia (where Zhitomir was located), and Kiev provinces. Led by the socialist revolutionary, playwright, and ethnographer, Shlomo Zanvil Rapoport or, as he was better known, An-sky, the expedition took thousands of photographs; collected five hundred manuscripts, including numerous pinkesim (communal record books); transcribed eighteen hundred folktales, legends, and proverbs, fifteen hundred folk songs, and one thousand melodies; made five hundred recordings with an Edison wax cylinder phonograph; and purchased or acquired seven hundred objects. 6 The expedition also produced a massive life cycle questionnaire, Dos yidishe etnografishe program ( The Jewish Ethnographic Program ) and established a Jewish museum in Saint Petersburg where religious artifacts and other realia could be displayed. 7
None of this mattered, of course, to the Russian police who had been trailing members of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition for some time before they arrested Rechtman and Yudovin in Zhitomir. In their eyes, the activities of the expedition-traveling from town to town in the western borderlands of the empire, taking photographs, collecting documents, interviewing locals-must have looked like a good cover for something nefarious, especially as war clouds gathered. As Shmuel Shrayer (later Sherira), another member of the expedition, recalled: In every town the local police monitored each new visitor with seven eyes and all the more so when several strangers showed up taking photographs, buying old artifacts, and collecting songs. On more than one occasion we had confrontations with small jackals from the provincial authority, who took an interest in us and our work and inquired after us. This was especially the case in towns near the border. 8 After being arrested, Rechtman and Yudovin sent a telegram to An-sky, who contacted Lev Shternberg, then the head of the Russian Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography and one of the collaborators on the Jewish Ethnographic Program . Shternberg, in turn, sent an official document vouching for the two fieldworkers. As soon as the Zhitomir police received this document, Rechtman later wrote, we were freed and the confiscated materials and objects were returned to us. We then packed everything that we were taking along with us and returned to Petrograd. The work of the expedition was now officially put on hiatus. 9
Although the expedition was over, An-sky spent the next few years traveling the war-torn hinterlands of Poland, Galicia, and Bukovina on behalf of the Jewish Committee for the Relief of War Victims, distributing aid and informally continuing his ethnographic work, a period he would memorialize in his monumental Yiddish travelogue Khurbn Galitsye (The Destruction of Galicia). Because of his failing health (he had diabetes among other ailments), and peripatetic existence following the Russian Revolution, An-sky never published a book on the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition before his premature death, in 1920, on the outskirts of Warsaw. Instead, that task would fall to Abraham Rechtman, who finally succeeded in publishing his extraordinary account of the expedition and its findings, Yidishe etnografye un folklor (Jewish Ethnography and Folklore), in 1958, more than four decades after he and Solomon Yudovin were arrested in Zhitomir for the crime of conducting ethnography in the Pale of Settlement. 10 During the intervening years, the territory that the expedition had sought to explore was transformed into what the historian Timothy Snyder has called Bloodlands -rav