Category: Ansky

Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child?

3/6/2014

This blog post is in honor of my nephew, who in only two days is going to be having his Bar Mitzvah. He is reportedly all set to do a great job. I'm happy for this; I'm also happy that he didn't have to prepare for his Bar Mitzvah the old fashioned way.

What's the old-fashioned way?

We can learn about it from the song Moyshele, by Mordecai Gebirtig. Gebirtig is the same guy who wrote Reyzele, that song with the whole thing about whistling.

Here's Moyshele:

And here's the story of Moyshele: Two old friends meet. One of them says, " How are you, Moyshele? I knew you in an instant. You were my friend many years ago in Hebrew School. The rabbi still stands before me, his cane in his hand. Oh where have those years gone? … My heart yearns for that angry rabbi … How are you, tell me, my friend? Your smile now reminds me of your stubbornness when you were a child. The rabbi thrashes you, you're upset and pale, but you smile anyway. The rabbi jumps with rage … Oh, my heart yearns for those lashes from the rabbi …"

Lest you think that Gebirtig was embellishing the truth, I have here a long list of questions* posed by Ansky's ethnographic team, which I've mentioned before:

440. List all the punishments, whether corporeal or psychological, that occur in the kheyder.

441. Does the beating of students occur in all kheyders or just some of them?

442. Do you notice the beating of students gradually disappearing from kheyders?

443. At what age are students usually no longer beaten?

444. For what does one most often strike the students: for mischief, for poor comprehension, or for bad habits?

445. With what are they beaten? (a whip, a rod, or a yarmulke, how many tails in the whip, how many rods in the bundle)?

446. Are there still melamdim who always keep a rod stuck in the door so that the students can see it? Are there still melamdim who soak the rods in salt water?

This goes on for a while till we get to …

452. Does the teacher ever command one child to beat another?

and

454. Does the teacher ever command the children to taunt the beaten child?

and

456. What derisive jokes and songs are there about a beaten child?

And my personal favorite:

457. Do you know of a phenomenon from the past in which every Thursday the entire kheyder was beaten, guilty and innocent alike?

So Isaac my friend: I don't care how you do on Saturday. Just for not having to go through all that, you're already a winner in my book.

* from Deutsch, the Jewish Dark Continent

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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.)

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)

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.

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.)

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."***

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."

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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Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child?

Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue … All Right, He's Sixty-Two (Updated)

Magicians, Mohels, and Mosques … or, Moslems in the Shtetl

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