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Tsimbalist Book Club: Velvet, Fur, Female Dominance, and Klezmer Music

2/28/2014

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This blog is called The Tsimbalist. So I should probably explain what a tsimbalist is: 

A tsimbalist is somebody who plays the tsimbl. 

And what is a tsimbl? A tsimbl is a musical instrument, also known as a hammered dulcimer or cimbalom, which was at one time a basic element of a klezmer band.

One of these days soon I'll be interviewing a real live tsimbalist, who I expect will tell us more about the instrument. Today I want to concentrate on a different tsimbalist, one who played his instrument not in the real world but in the world of literature.


This is a world, it turns out, well-populated by great depictions of klezmer musicians, written by authors both Jewish and non-Jewish. Their depictions have a lot to tell us: about the extraordinary emotional effect klezmer players had on their listeners, about situations in which one might have heard these musicians playing, about klezmer players' lifestyles and the lengths to which they had to go to scrape together a living. Each of these three elements figures in the story "My Tailor Abrahamek," by Leopold Sacher-Masoch. The story also features some wonderful writing (as translated by Michael T. O'Pecko) and introduces us to several of Sacher-Masoch's obsessions: namely, velvet, fur, and female dominance.


PictureLeopold von Sacher-Masoch
"Who was he, actually?" the story's narrator, a Pole, begins by asking. "I still don't know, but this much is sure: he came to me as a tailor, and I can't deny that he really did make clothes for me ... When he walked in and greeted me, he didn't impress me as a person whom it would be worth my while to get to know better. He was small, gaunt, and unattractive, had a narrow face and a crooked nose, a pair of carrot-colored sidelocks sticking out from under his black velvet yarmulke …"

Soon after, our Pole goes to a tobacconist's. There, to his surprise, he sees Abrahamek, "sitting in his shirtsleeves, without his caftan, on a low stool by the door ... painting a picture … What was he painting? A Turkish woman with large, dark eyes, in a green turban and a red ermine caftan, sitting cross-legged on a blue cushion and smoking a long Turkish pipe." A sign for the tobacconist.



At a Jewish wedding, Abrahamek reveals another side: he is functioning in the traditional role of jester, making fun of the wedding guests. "The magnificently decorated room shook with laughter every time he set off one of his hilarious rockets, which flew around the room like little devils, whizzing and teasing without hurting anyone." When it comes time to address the bride, the jester lists all the terrible faults which people ascribe to women, but finishes:

"Woman was made from Adam's rib,
I tell no lies, that's not a fib.
If just one rib can be so bad,
How much worse must be the lad!"

Next, Abrahamek is seen as a coachman, driving around some noblewomen. "It was truly admirable to see how the little man controlled the rattling coach with his weak hands, driving around a deep pothole or a little abyss here and squeezing between two puddles there; it was like dancing on eggs."


Finally, "I found another Abrahamek just outside town one Sunday, at a tavern where the peasants danced. There was nothing of the painter's quiet earnestness, the wedding jester's joviality, or the coachman's skill about him. Not a single nerve twitched in his stony face, and his little eyelashes were completely immobile, even though his tears flowed unobstructedly, but not down his colorless cheeks. They arose, rich and sorrowful, from the tsimbl sitting in front of him, which he was beating with two small sticks wound in soft, dirty leather, his tone at one moment soft and flattering, as if he were playing with a beloved child, at another wild and forceful, as if he was trying to tame an angry woman by beating her.

"All around him the other instruments screamed, wailed and growled like a zoo at feeding time, and the peasants were stamping around in their big boots, and the girls let their skirts and braids fly around wildly, all this in a cloud of dust that smelled of garlic, brandy, and sheepskins.

"None of that moved him in the least; he seemed to have been transformed into a single big ear with a closed mouth and glowing eyes, listening to the sounds that flowed forth from the moaning tsimbl, which, in turn, was the sound of his own soul. He was an artist at this moment, and God knows what celestial harmonies were revealed to him for the first time in human history."

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Gentiles dancing and drinking in a Jewish tavern, lithograph by Gustav Pillati

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch is remembered today mainly as the author of Venus in Furs, and as eponym of the word masochism (although it was not a word he liked.) He was born in 1836 in the Polish province of Galicia, then under Austrian rule. Though a Gentile, he published both a volume of Jewish Tales and a volume of Jewish Tales from Galicia. He was editor, in Germany, of a progressive magazine advocating tolerance and integration for Jews, and also women's suffrage and education. 

On the masochism front: according to Wikipedia, "On 9 December 1869, Sacher-Masoch and his mistress Baroness Fanny Pistor signed a contract making him her slave for a period of six months, with the stipulation that the Baroness wear furs as often as possible, especially when she was in a cruel mood."

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Fanny Pistor (in furs, with whip) and Sacher-Masoch
Sacher-Masoch’s varied interests get mixed up together in the most fascinating way in his Jewish stories.

For example, in "My Tailor Abrahamek," once we catch our breath from that dazzling bit about the tsimbl, the narrator continues: "But while my Abrahamek was painting signs, driving coaches, forging funny rhymes, and playing the tsimbl, my clothes weren’t getting done. I had no other choice but to seek him out."

The narrator arrives at Abrahamek's house, where he meets the tailor's wife, Veigele, whom he finds most attractive: "a full-figured brunette of medium height" wearing "a fiery coat of red velvet that was lined and trimmed with rabbit fur." In the course of conversation with her husband and his client, Veigele gets angry and puts "her hands on her warm, round hips underneath her fur jacket." 

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Titian's Venus With A Mirror, which inspired the idea of Venus in Furs

After she leaves the room, the tailor explains, "… if you’re going to let yourself be tormented by a woman, she has to be so inclined--and this one is so inclined … Count Starbek always kisses her hands. Why shouldn't he kiss them? After all, it’s as if that little pair of hands were made of velvet, and they're as white as an ermine pelt."

"Abrahamek" is far from the only Sacher-Masoch story featuring velvet, fur and Jewish female dominance--indeed, in others, the element of female dominance is far more prominent. For those who are interested, I'm going to summarize three others of his stories. Why? Because, first, I think it’s nice to pay attention to neglected authors who still have a lot to offer. And second, although I have nothing concrete to say about this, I think it's worth considering how personal predilections and public positions are related in odd ways, how history can be generated by complex personalities in a manner that may not lend itself to neat and clean storylines. I can't think of a better example of this than Sacher-Masoch.

Plus, they're really fun stories:

In one, a pretty Jewish widow known as Madame Leopard (which is also the name of the story) sets out to humiliate the town's worst anti-semite, Agenor Koscieloski, who in spite of his hatred of her race has been courting her. After promising to marry him and be baptized, she carries out her plan: she gets Koscieloski to dress up in the clothes of a Jewish tailor, complete with false beard and peyos, and contrives, while he is in this costume, to have him beaten by a mob of the tailor's creditors. Madame Leopard, wearing a velvet-and-ermine cloak, "her lips wreathed with a smile of cruel satisfaction," "encouraged the crowd from time to time with cries of, 'Don’t spare him! On with your work! No pity, no mercy!'"

In another story, Count Gorewski has been trying to seduce the beautiful Jewess Zobadia. She's actually tempted--her Jewish husband is not too attractive, unlike the count. Nonetheless, in the dark of night, the "pretty Jewess, in her soft furs," and also a red velvet kazabaika, locks the unseeing count into a giant cage intended to hold a vulture. In the morning, "Gorewski stepped awkwardly out of the cage, stretched his stiffened limbs, and left the room without a word; while his charming hostess followed him to the door, stood with her hands on her hips, and laughed aloud till the tears rolled down her face."


In a third story, a different sort of adversary presents himself. In a certain Polish town, the whole community "bent in submission beneath the authority, or rather despotism, of the zadick, surnamed 'the Pious and Just,' whom the Chassidim idolized as their chief … The rabbi … a man of intelligence and irreproachable character, was powerless in the face of this pope of the fanatical Jews, and was forced to content himself with a little body of followers who not alone represented Judaism in its purity and truth, but defended it as well." 

The heroine, Volgele, having been singled out as an enemy by the zadick, proceeds to put him in his place. Following an earlier argument about whether women are evil or not, which Volgele has won, the zadick goes out “to hold his discourse under the open sky." Volgele appears in "her blue-velvet cloak trimmed with silver-gray fur" and challenges him to perform a miracle, which he fails to do.

"Come hither," she then says, "that I may crush you with my heel, for you are the seed of the serpent.” The zadick strides toward her, but trips and falls. "With a burst of cruel laughter, and in her eyes a look of triumph that would have fitted an avenging angel, she placed her little foot on her enemy's neck."


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Matchbreaker, matchbreaker

2/22/2014

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In previous episodes of The Tsimbalist Blog, I've mentioned how scholars were prized as bridegrooms, and how matters of business were often left to the brides. Yaffa Eliach relates one amusing example of how that could work out, involving a bride named Malke:

"A widow with seven children, Malke married a fine young scholar from the yeshivah whom the saintly Rabbi Yossef Zundl Hutner and his flamboyant wife had found for her. Malke had been supporting her family on the income from her store, which ... had its biggest earnings on market day. On the first market day after their wedding, Malke’s husband left the beth midrash to assist his wife for a few hours at the store. It was the first time in his life he had ever faced a real scale, and though he knew all the halakhic and ethical regulations pertaining to scales, he did not in fact know how to use one, as his wife discovered when she gave him a kilogram of salt and he carefully placed both the salt and the weights on one side of the scale. 

"Malke was outraged. In an unprecedented move, she closed the store at the height of market day, grabbed her husband by the sleeve, and marched him through the market square to the home of Reb Zundl. When she arrived at the rabbi’s house, she said, 'Rebbe, you gave him to me, you take him back. I am a hardworking widow who is trying to provide for her orphans so that they will grow up to be proper human beings. I do not have the time to raise yet another child.'"

Other brides were expected to be more patient than poor Malke. In fact, according to Hayyim Schauss, pre-nuptial examinations were administered to gauge just this virtue:

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 "… the girl was tested for patience and skill by the women of the groom’s family. She was given a tangled skein of thread which she was expected to unravel, or told to prepare a large sheet of dough and to cut it patiently into fine, thin noodles."

That patience would have been required to deal with more than just a groom's impracticality. There were all kinds of reasons to be unhappy with a match. For example, after my great-grandmother Kayla, who I've already mentioned in connection with a priest, married my great-grandfather Schlomo Zalman, she ran right back home. Why? Because he was more than twenty years older than she was, and even had children about her age. (But don't worry. She went back to him after a while.)

There were plenty of reasons to be unhappy with a match. But divorce, while far from uncommon, was obviously something to be avoided if possible. The best thing, it would seem, would be to break off the engagement before the wedding-day arrived. 

In fact, though, breaking an engagement wasn't considered any great shakes either (unlike breaking a bunch of crockery, which is how an engagement was sealed at the time.) Possible consequences and deterrents included:


PictureRashi
Corporal punishment, if the engagement-breaker were a groom. Or at least, that's what medieval sage Rashi suggested. (Cited by Nathaniel Deutsch in The Jewish Dark Continent.)

Threats to be force-recruited into the army, in the case of grooms protesting matches their parents had arranged. One groom faced with this threat tried to get around it by sending an anonymous letter to the bride's parents: "No good will come of this marriage!" he wrote. But to no avail. (Cited in ChaeRan Freeze's Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia.)

There was the prospect of getting taken to court by your parents, if you defied their wishes in marriage. Which, believe it or not, really happened sometimes. One case cited by Freeze resulted in a sentence of 3-6 months in jail for the errant bridegroom, followed by exile. (This particular threat pretty much fizzled out in 1861, when some Russian judicial reforms were made.)


And last but not least, a dybbuk might enter "the body of a person because of a sin they committed, especially breaking a vow or canceling an engagement." (Ethnographer Shmuel Shrayer, quoted by Deutsch.)

However … never underestimate the determination and ingenuity of the young. Here are some of the ways they still found to wiggle out of engagements:

Running away to a yeshiva or state rabbinical school (for wouldn't-be grooms)
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Dybbuk, by Ephraim Moses Lilien

Running away to a "special school" (for young women.) These might include "schools for midwives in Mogilev" and "schools of dentistry in Kharkov," according to Freeze.

Joining one of the latest political movements, "like nihilism, populism, or socialism: these close-knit conspiratorial circles functioned as ersatz families and helped single women contract the fictitious marriages that conferred internal passports and the right to reside outside the parental home." (Freeze)

The ever-popular Converting to Christianity. Rachel Elior notes, in Dybbuks and Jewish Women, that "between the years 1737 and 1820 more than two thousand Jewish women converted to Christianity in Lithuania ... From folktales and dybbuk stories we know that this phenomenon was connected at least partially to the fact that apostasy was perceived as a refuge from coerced sexual relations and arranged marriages." 

Conversion had a bonus feature, too: it made the authorities more inclined to help you get your parents off your back.

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And finally, if all else failed, that same dybbuk that threatened to enter you if you broke an engagement could be employed to help get you out of one. According to Elior, "it was not uncommon for women who did not know how to speak about themselves and their psychological anguish, and who were not heard in public, to express themselves through physical ailments, mental afflictions, and associated madness. The body possessed by a dybbuk is represented as being under the control of the chaotic world of the dead, which imposes higher claims on it than does the patriarchal world of real life, and the person possessed is thereby liberated from the latter. By superseding the usual circle of social expectations and proper conduct, the dybbuk could offer, to those unwilling or unable to accept the social dictates associated with matchmaking, marriage, enforced sexual relations, and family, a justification for conduct that deviated from religious, sexual, or social norms."

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More On Matchmakers

2/21/2014

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Since I've posted videos of the song "Matchmaker, Matchmaker" not once but twice, I wanted to share another "Matchmaker, matchmaker" song that I just came across. 

You might remember that last time, I talked about how matchmakers weren't always completely honest with their clients. Well, this song illustrates just how some brides felt about the subject, once their weddings were over:

Shadkhan, shadkhan
a klog tsu dir
Vos hostu gehat tsu mir!
Tsugenumen di shadkhones
Opegekoylet on rakhmones
A klog tsu dir, a klog tsu dir!

Matchmaker, matchmaker
woe to you!
Oh, what did you want with me?
You took my dowry,
And slaughtered me without pity,
A curse on you, a curse on you!
from Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia by ChaeRan Freeze
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Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue … All Right, He's Sixty-Two (Updated)

2/14/2014

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Yesterday, Rabbi Joe Black, to whom I have the honor of being related, posted a really cute video which reminds us of something worth noting:


I doubt whether this timely reminder stopped many Jews who saw it from participating in various Valentine’s Day rituals. Those forces of convention and commercialism are awfully hard to resist. 

But his video did make me think: Hey, maybe I should take this opportunity to talk a little bit about love and courtship back in shtetl days--and specifically to ask, was there any love involved in courtship? 
That is, exactly how antithetical is Valentine’s Day to Eastern European Jewish tradition?

As usual, the test case for shtetl image vs. shtetl reality is Fiddler On The Roof. That's particularly so in this instance: the question of how young people manage to pass from single to married, and what that means for society, is a running theme in Fiddler ... just as it is in Sholem Aleikhem's Tevye stories, the basis for the musical … and just as it is in the works of Jane Austen ... which I only mention because some people have actually put about the delightful theory that Aleikhem based his stories on Austen's novels, or have at least noted the similarities between the two. 


Somebody even did this: 


Jane Austen aside … and to make a long musical short: In Fiddler On The Roof, the power of "tradition" keeps getting weaker as the power of new-fangled, Western-style love (Valentine's-Day-style love) grows stronger. If tradition finally makes a stand in refusing to accommodate intermarriage ... still, you have to say that, overall, the West has won.

So: Is the picture of tradition that Fiddler paints accurate?

Here's what Hayyim Schauss says, in The Lifetime Of A Jew: "Falling in love was considered an extraordinary and abnormal phenomenon, a sort of mental disease occurring once in a great while among the very wealthy or the very poor, the only groups who dared to flout the conventions of social decency."

Well, well, well. Score one for Fiddler On The Roof: Marriage really didn't have much to do with love.

Rather, it was in part a business arrangement, and in part a way of perpetuating a culture that prized, above all else, learning. The most sought-after grooms were scholars. The better the scholar, the bigger the dowry.  Not only that: dowry arrangements included provisions for the support of the newlyweds, room, board, and more, sometimes for years, in order to enable the scholarly young bridegroom to continue to do nothing but study (and perhaps also make little scholars.)

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Do you remember the ethnographic survey I mentioned last time, the one carried out from 1912-1914 by S. Ansky? If you're in any doubt about the massive importance of the dowry in Eastern European Jewish life, check out these questions the survey asks:

"Do feuds often break out on account of dowries?"

"Do you know of any cases in which the groom did not go through with the marriage until the entire dowry was delivered to him?"

"What living expenses are generally included in this?" 
"Are clothes included?"

"What kind of guarantee do people give for this? Is a Jewish contract enough, or do people require a legal promissory note or notarized document?"


 Not exactly the stuff of Valentine's Day dreams. 

Something else that left little chance for romance: in many cases, bride and groom came from different towns, and were barely acquainted before the wedding. This is where matchmakers came into the picture. 

But here, those points we awarded to Fiddler On The Roof are going have to come off the board. If I'm not mistaken, in most people’s minds the archetypal matchmaker is Yente (as played by Molly Picon, who was last seen pretending to be both a man and a violinist in Yidl Mitn Fidl.) 

But the truth is, most matchmakers were men. What sort of men? According to Hayyim Schauss: "Matchmaking required a special aptitude. A professional shadchon had to have an air of importance and dignity in order to arouse confidence. He usually wore good clothes and carried a cane. He led up to the subject very cautiously and made every proposal in a tortuous and indirect manner. He was skilled in hiding and distorting facts, especially when the bride and groom were from two different localities."

This skill was made fun of in one of Sigmund Freud’s favorite Jewish jokes: "The young man was most disagreeably surprised when the proposed bride was introduced to him, and drew aside the shadkhen—the marriage broker—to whisper his objections: 'Why have you brought me here?' he asked reproachfully. 'She's ugly and old, she squints, and has bad teeth …' 'You needn't lower your voice,' interrupted the broker, 'she's deaf as well.'      (Quoted in Ruth Wisse's No Joke)

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There was one respect in which shtetl romances did resemble today’s. After the engagement, bride and groom sent each other love notes. As Schauss relates, "They also wrote letters to one another. These letters were distinctive in character, consisting of high-sounding, stereotyped phrases. In most cases, the betrothed couple did not write their own letters, but delegated the task to a man in the town who had a beautiful handwriting and the ability to use pompous language. He used the same phraseology and the identical expressions in most of the letters which he wrote ..."

The Cyranos of the shtetl … or maybe just the Hallmarks.


***

Update: I meant to include a fun tidbit illustrating the very false impressions these letter-writers could sometimes create, just the way that Cyrano did. 


A story by nineteenth-century writer A. S. Friedberg includes two such characters "who penned letters in very elegant German in the names of a bride and a groom. Each betrothed was convinced that the other was fluent in German, while the truth was that both the groom and bride-to-be were entirely ignorant of that language."

(Described by David Assaf in Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl: The Memoirs of Yehezkel Kotik.)
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Magicians, Mohels, and Mosques … or, Moslems in the Shtetl

2/12/2014

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Tatar mosque in Nemėžis, Lithuania

If you didn't think there were Christians living in the shtetl, then you probably really didn't think there were Moslems.  

But guess what? There were: members of a people known as the Lipka Tatars, whose lives intersected with those of their Jewish neighbors in some totally fascinating ways, involving magic spells, magic amulets ... and maybe even marriage. 

But before we get into that, let's just go over a little history, so we're clear on who we're talking about. The Tatars in general are a Turkic people originating in Mongolia, of whom there are a number of branches, the most prominent of which is named for the Volga, as in Volga Tatars. (Altogether, there are about 5.5 million Tatars living in the territory of the Russian Federation these days.)

Zeroing in on the Pale of Settlement: if you look into the histories of various shtetlekh, you're likely to find sentences like 'this or that building was constructed as a defense against the Tatars.' Generally, this is not a reference to the Lipka, but to the Crimean Tatars, who for hundreds of years terrified everybody in the Ukraine: from their Black Sea base, they would make raids to capture as many slaves as possible, then hand over their captives in trade to the Ottoman Turks. The Crimeans also didn't mind teaming up with Cossacks now and then. 
(Among the fortifications built to repel Crimeans and Cossacks were stone "fortress synagogues," according to Jeffrey Veidlinger's In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine.)

The Lipka, though related to the Crimeans, had a very different history. Their arrival in what is now Poland, Lithuania and Belarus dates back to 1397, just after they lost a power struggle with the notorious Mongol leader Timur, or Tamerlane, of pyramid-of-skulls fame.

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 The soon-to-be-Lipka (the name means "Lithuanian") were given refuge by Vytautas the Great, Grand Duke of Lithuania (who was also very welcoming to Jews, and generally had a glowing reputation among Lithuanians of all faiths.)
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Lithuanian Tatars in the Napoleonic Army, by Jan Chełmiński
For most of the next several hundred years, Lipka fought as cavalrymen alongside the army of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (or as part of that army), enjoyed privileges as Polish noblemen, and built more than a hundred mosques in  Commonwealth lands. (These mosques were usually wooden and painted green, like the one pictured above, and included women's galleries.) 

The Lipkas' complex history--Mongol descent, Moslem faith, centuries of residence in Eastern Europe--is reflected in their language, literature and religious practice. In Lithuania-Poland, they quickly adopted local languages, but wrote them in Arabic script. Their literary output was variously in Polish, for religious commentary (written between lines of Arabic in the Qur'an); and Belarusian, for kitabs, that is, "religious literary anthologies … containing Muslim legends, ritual prescriptions, stories and moral precepts, apocrypha and other narratives, but also texts in Arabic (and rarely in Turkish) such as fragments from the Qur’an, prayers."

In their religious practice, the Lipka Tatars differ from some other Moslems in significant ways: they do not engage in polygamy, their women are not veiled, they drink alcohol. In addition, at least formerly, they shared many of their neighbors' folk beliefs--for example, "they did not feed the cows on the Midsummer Day, fearing that they might lose their milk"--and they sometimes mingled the Islamic with the shamanistic. And this, my friends, is where things really get interesting.

According to Marek Dziekan, in History and culture of Polish Tatars, "Polish people often considered Tatars to be sorcerers." More specifically, Tatars had a reputation as extraordinary healers--a reputation in which their Jewish neighbors firmly believed.

We learn from various authors that, in a milieu rife with folk healers of various stripes, Jews particularly favored the Tatars*; and that the "acknowledged experts in the use of spells as well as herbs were the Tatars, and when an illness was so serious that it could not be cured by the exorcism of a dybbuk or the use of conventional medicine, the Tatars were called upon for help."**


* Deutsch, The Jewish Dark Continent
** Eliach, There Once Was A World
What kind of magic did these Tatar healers practice? This very question was asked by the great ethnographer S. Ansky, author of the play The Dybbuk, in the questionnaire that he and his associates took around to Jews of the Pale between 1912-1914:  "Are there  Tatars in your community, old male and female gentiles, who heal? What provisions and remedies do they offer?"

Here are some answers: 

One technique involved "reading Muslim prayers and blowing on the patient. Such technique was supposed to cleanse the body by 'blowing away' the sickness that came from the air. The second most popular method was fumigation. A page from a prayer book or a specially written amulet was supposed to be burned on coals and the sick one was expected to inhale the smoke while listening to specially chosen prayers. This was a way of dispelling 'charms'. Another use for cards with writing was to wash away the text and drink the used water." This last was said to be "a good cure for epilepsy and giddiness."***

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The Dybbuk





*** According to Shirin Akiner, in Religious Language of a Belarusian Tatar Kitab
Also, says Dziekan, "Many amulets and charms were sup­posed to guard a man from evil powers. These were … usually worn under clothes." And in addition, says Akiner, "Muslim cemeteries were regarded as holy places, with magical properties. Tatars (as well as local Christians and Jews) would make communal visits to them to pray for good health, help with conceiving, and other blessings."
***
How else did Jews and Tatars interact?

Yaffa Eliach tells us that, in the shtetl of Eishyshok, Jews and Tatars were friends, and that during World War II, Tatars (and Christians) aided their Jewish friends there. In some shtetlekh, for example Lyakhovichi, Jews and Tatars were close neighbors: "The street Tatarskaya was named for the primary street of their residence and that of their mosque, but it was not exclusive to them, Jews lived on Tatarskaya also." 

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One descendant of Lipka Tatars: Charles Bronson
The same source tells us that "These Sunni Moslems were a small group that reportedly found it difficult to find suitable marriage partners for their children without some intermarriage. It was illegal for a Christian to convert to Judaism, but there are a number of documented cases ... of Lipka Tatars converting from Islam to Judaism to marry." 

I haven't been able to find documentation of these documented cases (though it's true that Tatars were a very small minority in some towns.) But I did learn of one way in which Jews were definitely able to help their Tatar neighbors out:

"Circumcision is called siunniet (from Arab. sunna, Tur. sünnet – ‘tradition’), by Tatars ... It was formerly done by spe­cialised ritualists called siunnietdży, who were often Jews."
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Peasants, Priests, and Other Neighbors

2/8/2014

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PictureA Shy Peasant, by Ilya Repin
So far in these posts, I've talked about schmaltz and slenderness, paleness in the Pale, whistling ... and I've used the word shtetl a lot. But I haven't asked: Aside from being a place where schmaltz-eating gals gazed admiringly at slender and pale guys, and vice-versa ... what was a shtetl, exactly?

It's not the easiest question to answer quickly … unless you're Professor Jeffrey Shandler of Rutgers University, who just published a book called Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History. Earlier this week, Tablet Magazine put up a fantastic podcast interview with Shandler, and it takes the professor only a few short minutes to iron out most of this issue's many wrinkles. I don't want to misrepresent what Shandler says, because he actually allows for various definitions (and you should listen to the whole podcast), but here's the heart of the matter:


"… what might be thought of as an archetypal shtetl is a community that’s centered around a marketplace ... peasants from surrounding farm communities would bring whatever they had raised … and sell it to both people who lived in the town, and then to brokers who would buy all this produce and ship it off to various locations actually all over Europe … and at least originally, the core activity of Jews in these towns was that they were there to facilitate this economy … either overseeing production ... or they were the brokers who were buying and selling and moving things, or they ran stores that lined the marketplace that sold to the peasant farmers the things that they needed that they couldn't make for themselves."

PictureTwo Ukrainian Peasants, by Repin
Asked by host Sara Ivry to name some misperceptions about shtetlekh, Shandler answers: "One I think might be that these are Jewish towns. These are towns that always have a non-Jewish population."

There's no doubt that Shandler is right: this is a big misperception. Take our attitudes about Fiddler On The Roof. We might all generally know, yeah, it's Broadway, it's not history … but maybe we've also thought: but shtetls were sort of like that, right? Close-knit Jewish communities rooted in piety and … um, tradition … where, when Gentiles did appear, they were associated strictly with calamities (or perceived calamities) like intermarriage, eviction, pogroms?

Well ... if we thought that, then we thought wrong. Because if the marketplace involves a lot of interacting between Jews and Gentiles, then Gentiles must be something other than just outsiders and bringers of calamities in the lives of Jews. True? 

True. 


PictureUkrainian Peasant, by Repin
For example, in There Once Was A World, historian Yaffa Eliach describes the development of special, one-on-one marketplace relationships--and how they could sometimes grow into something more. Farmers "would often go to the homes of their preferred Jewish customers prior to taking their goods to market, offering them first pick, perhaps bartering for things they needed. Occasionally such transactions would conclude with a glass of vodka or tea or some special Jewish dish favored by the gentile peasants. Some of these cordial business relationships ripened into real friendships, with the gentile being asked to spend the night before market day in his Jewish friends' home, and parking his wagon in the backyard of his host."

An interesting wrinkle:

"… until World War I the market was largely in the hands of the grandmothers, mothers, and daughters of the shtetl. Perhaps that was why so many of the usual social barriers, between classes and between Jew and gentile, broke down on market day. The women of Eishyshok were more proficient than their men in the languages spoken by the gentile peasants. Many could manage conversations in Polish, Russian, and Byelorussian, and some knew the essential trade words in Lithuanian and Tataric as well. They were familiar with the religion and customs of their clients, took an interest in their families, assisted them with their practical needs, and even knew their tastes well enough to take them into account when ordering stock. Malke Roche’s Schneider, for example, was considered not just a merchant but an adviser and friend to many gentiles. She knew all their woes and sorrows, and would sympathize with them when a pregnant swine was accidentally slaughtered or the crops failed."

Surprising, right? It was to me, anyway. If I'm not alone, then I think it's worth asking, why do so many of us not know about this stuff? 

One brilliant explanation has been offered by literary critic Dan Miron. In The Literary Image of the Shtetl, Miron shows how the idea of a Gentile-free shtetl was created by the first generations of Yiddish authors. 
Focusing on Sholem Aleikhem (whose Tevye stories, of course, are the basis for Fiddler On The Roof), Miron compares the real-life shtetl the author grew up in with his principal fictional one. 


PicturePortrait of a Peasant, by Repin
In real-life Voronke, "Every Sunday he would see Ukrainian men and women flocking to the church, crossing themselves, genuflecting and praying before the statue of the Holy Virgin and then dropping their coins into her charity box. He witnessed processions with colorful banners and icons, funerals on their way from church to the nearby tsvinter (Christian cemetery). He heard the deep intonations of the priests' singing. All this must have been a very real part of life in the historical Voronke of the writer's childhood, and yet one would not find even a trace of Christian culture or religion in the manifold projections of Kasrilevke throughout his oeuvre."

What's Miron's explanation? It has something to do with the ambivalent cultural position of these early Yiddish writers, who had one foot in the shtetl world and one foot very much out:

"… there actually existed in Jewish literature ... a potent norm, which demanded the radical Judaization of the image of the eastern European shtetl; it had to be presented as purely Jewish. Only then could it be satirized, exposed as benighted and reactionary, soporific, resistant to initiative and innovation, or, alternatively, portrayed nostalgically and romantically as the quintessence of spirituality and communal intimacy, the nucleus of a besieged civilization that nevertheless enjoyed internal harmony and perfect internal communication. Either rendering demanded an unhistorical Judaization of the shtetl …"


PictureRussian Priest, 1919
If it's true that our image of the shtetl was shaped by nineteenth-century writers, it's probably also true that the process has not stopped. Shandler, in that Tablet podcast, has a lot to say about contemporary authors with no feet in the shtetl who continue to re-imagine things--and their place in a larger movement of re-investigation and reclamation:

"… if you think about world Jewry, so many people, if they go back in their family a few generations, they lived in one of these towns … so there is a sense of origin tied to these places that's very powerful … you can go and do genealogical research, and you can read the yizkor book, the memorial book from your family’s particular town and you can find photographs, you can do all kinds of stuff that’s very specific but … they’re fragments, and you need to fill them in. And that exercise of filling in which leaves a lot of open spaces provides great opportunities for people to think into their Jewish past."

Which brings me at last to … priests. My first aim with The Tsimbalist was simply to write a really good mystery novel that took place in a shtetl … but along the way I also wanted to explore some aspects of my own family history. One of our family stories involves a priest, maybe in the very year of 1919 when that character to the left was photographed.

My great-grandmother, Kayla Rubinchik, living in what is now Belarus, had a cow named Masha, who was (as my grandmother said) a very important member of the family. As any cow would, Masha had to be grazed. But Masha was picky about her food. The grass close at hand (or hoof) wasn't good enough for her. And so for a long time, Kayla had to take the cow quite a long away to feed, which required a lot of time and energy from a very busy woman with twelve kids and no husband. This situation persisted until, one day, the local priest took pity on her. He let her graze Masha on his much closer piece of land.

In The Tsimbalist, I wanted to explore the character of an Orthodox priest who would do this kindness for a Jewish family, at a time not long after Tsar Alexander III, pondering the easing of some anti-Jewish regulations, had written: "We must never forget that it was the Jews who crucified our Lord and spilled his precious blood." Was there any tension for this priest, between the personal and the official? Between a specific act and a deeply held belief? Or had the Revolution already happened, and had that changed everything? Or was this priest just a nice guy, and that was all there was to it?

Of course, I have no idea. But it's the kind of thing that makes you remember an obvious but easily-forgotten truth: people are complicated. And also, the kind of thing that makes writing and thinking about this period so rewarding.

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Whistling, And Other Things Jews Don't Do

2/4/2014

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Picture
Whistling Boy, by Frank Duveneck
Not long ago, I stumbled across a very important piece of information concerning a very serious topic.

Before I tell you what it was, let me preface it by saying that I'm someone who loves to whistle. For that reason, I found the information that I stumbled across not only surprising, but also rather distressing. The topic was Jews and Whistling, and what I learned was this: Jews are not supposed to whistle.

Surprising … distressing … but the information comes from an absolutely unimpeachable source: a song, by the name of "Reyzele." If you don't know it, here it is, as sung by Moshe Leiser:

As you can see if you follow along with the lyrics on the video, "Reyzele" is a funny sort of a love song. A certain David is courting a certain Reyzele … he keeps going by her house, humming and whistling to get her attention … and after he's been at it for a while, Reyzele tells him they need to talk: 

"Davey," she says, "you gotta cut out the whistling. Every time you come around doing that, my mom says, 'Listen, there he goes again with the whistling.' She's strict, Davey. She doesn't like it. 'Whistling,' she says, 'isn't Jewish. It's for those other people.'"

Naturally, since this is a love song, this is David's response: 

"For you, Rosie, I'll stop with the whistling. And that's not all. I'm even gonna start going to shul every Shabbes and become pious ... just like your mom."


Now, "Reyzele" is a song I've played and loved since I was a kid.*  Until recently, I had never paid attention to the words.** I didn't know about the whistling element. And I hadn't heard anywhere else that Jews and whistling don't mix.

 But I meant it when I said the source was unimpeachable. "Reyzele" was written by Mordecai Gebirtig, a composer whose compositions felt so authentic to the Jewish public of his time that they attained the status of folksong. Given Gebirtig's stature, we can take it as true, at least for some places and times, that this no-whistling thing is a real thing.

*Not only that. My band, Big Galut(e), just recorded it for our first album. (Coming Soon) We decided, just to be wise guys (and gal), to include a little whistling section in the song.
Picture
Okay, it's a real thing. So what are we to make of that? 

On the one hand, whistling, love it or hate it, is not profound or important, is barely worthy of mention, when you compare it with such matters as, for example, the female and male beauty ideals. 

On the other hand ... a really vivid picture of the nineteenth-century Jewish world ought to include some of life's smaller and sillier details. And it turns out, when we start adding up those silly details--yes, there are some others--we end up actually touching on profundities. We get an idea of how even minor differences between people are crucial in forming their identities … and an idea of the power of conformity in some of those communities, as it extends even to silly details.

What other silly details do I have in mind? Here's historian Yaffa Eliach, telling one of the countless wonderful stories that fill There Once Was A World, her monumental portrait of the shtetl Eishyshok, in what is now Lithuania:

"Though vegetable gardens were common, flower gardens were very rare. People might grow sunflowers and poppies for their seeds, but except for Hayya Sonenson and the Tzimbalist family, Jews in Eishyshok did not grow flowers. In fact, until after World War I, growing flowers was considered "un-Jewish," in the same way that owning a dog was.


"One family who briefly deviated from the general pattern soon reverted to tradition–to the distress of their children, as Meir Wilkanski recounted in his memoir. Sometime in the 1880s the Wilkanski children planted the seeds of sweet peas and other flowers that had been sent to them by a relative in the countryside. The flower garden in their front yard was very successful. All the seeds blossomed, and sweet pea vines climbed the house, covering it with a dazzling array of flowers which delighted the children. Their parents, too, were proud, until the day Reb Layzer overheard a Jewish beggar standing before his house debating in a loud monologue whether to enter it and ask for alms. Deciding on the basis of its flowers that it must be the house of a gentile, he passed it by. Reb Layzer promptly went out to the garden and uprooted all his children's beautiful flowers, whereupon the children, fighting back their tears, vowed to have a beautiful flower garden as soon as the family emigrated to the Land of Israel, where, they felt sure, it would be proper for a Jew to grow flowers."
Picture



Me, I would probably have been okay with letting the beggar go on by, whatever the reason. But, as I said … I love to whistle, too.
**I included Moshe Leiser's version of Reyzele for a reason. It wasn't until I heard it that I ever paid attention to the words. I think it was the great surprise of finding his recording that made me pay attention, as if I were hearing a song I hadn't heard before. Who's Moshe Leiser? Let me answer with a story of how two of my worlds collided:

When I was twenty-one, I got very lucky. I traveled to Italy, to the town of Spoleto, for the first of several stints playing violin at the big arts festival there, the Festival dei Due Mondi--the Spoleto Festival, for short. It was a summer spent drinking in the many pleasures of Italy (and  eating some of them) with nighttime visits to Spoleto's Roman aqueduct (where we stayed out till all hours) ... morning dashes to the cafe to guzzle a cappuccino minutes before rehearsal … longer-distance dashes to Rome and Florence on days off ... nap-time attempts at avoiding Signora Luna, our terrifying old landlady … and all through the day, and through the summer, a lot of opera playing. 
PictureSalome, by Gustave Moreau




















The big opera at the festival that summer was Richard Strauss' Salome, and playing it required wresting concentration from all of Italy's delights and wonders, and keeping it squarely in the opera pit. In the first place, if you've never had the pleasure of playing a Strauss opera … Strauss gives the orchestra musicians a lot of notes to play, and not a lot of time in which to play them. Our conductor, the late Spiros Argiris, was impossibly intense, constantly demanding (and also, totally inspiring and truly beloved by his troops.) Then there were those incredible sounds drifting down into the pit from the stage, which you needed to listen to, without forgetting about that impossible run of notes coming up on the page in front of you …

With attention on these other things, I was only vaguely aware of the pair of Frenchmen who, all through the rehearsal process, could be seen patrolling the aisles of the theater. These were the directors of the production, Moshe and Patrice. I remember that they seemed young, slim I think, and very French. I knew for some reason that they did a lot of directing as a team. As will happen with these things, their names got stuck in my brain in the general compartment labelled "Opera World."

For years afterward, I probably didn't give them a single thought. It was thus with nothing less than astonishment that, one day not so long ago, I stumbled across an album of Yiddish songs, really beautiful renditions, some of the warmest and most intimate I'd heard, in fact, recorded by none other than Moshe. He made this recording just a few years before that production of Salome. I never would have guessed.


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    Author

    Sasha Margolis is author of The Tsimbalist (the novel and the blog) and violinist, singer, and storyteller for the band Big Galut(e)
    He can be found on twitter as @SashaMargolis

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