Category: Fiddler On The Roof

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

2/14/2014

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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Peasants, Priests, and Other Neighbors

2/8/2014

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A 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."

Two 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.

Ukrainian 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.

Portrait 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 …"

Russian 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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Handsome Is As Handsome Does, Part 1: Slender and Pale?

1/28/2014

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In The Schmaltz Diet Part 1, I wrote that, by shtetl standards, my novel’s heroine is too thin. The good news for her is that her betrothed has the same problem--only in reverse. Towards the end of Chapter 1, when he walks onto the scene, we learn that "physically, he looked altogether too robust …"

Wait a minute. Too robust? If shtetl women are supposed to be robust, why not shtetl men?

Here's a short answer: in the words of Estelle Roith (in The Riddle of Freud: Jewish Influences On His Theory Of Female Sexuality),

"… the shtetl ideal of male beauty was one that emphasized ... physically passive preoccupations: pale complexion, weary half-closed eyes, long beard, and pale delicate hands."

… in other words, "You bring the groom, slender and pale."* Take it away Tzeitel, Hodel, and Chava:

* Fiddler On The Roof gets a lot wrong, if you're interested in historical accuracy, but here Harnick, Bock and Stein are right on the money. In fact, Daniel Boyarin, in his Unheroic Conduct, has a section called "'Give Me A Bridegroom Slender and Pale': The 'Effeminate' Talmudist as Erotic Object for Women"

Now, here's a longer answer: It's actually way more complicated than that. They may have called it the Pale of Settlement, but the fact is, pale was already on its way out. At the end of the nineteenth century in Jewish society, there were several competing ideals of male beauty.

Without going into what they were yet, let's just agree, this was undoubtedly confusing for all concerned. But it's probably not a coincidence that the situation arose when it did. Let's scratch the surface of what was going on at the time. Leaving aside the shtetl world for a second, Russia in the 1860s, '70s, and '80s saw …

Dostoevsky

Kropotkin

Bakunin

S. Degayev, secret police

Tolstoy and Dostoevsky writing a half-dozen masterpieces (maybe not strictly relevant, but … how do you not mention it?)

Chekhov, Turgenev and Leskov close behind

The serfs liberated (good) and mired in poverty and alcoholism (bad), the merchant class rising up, and the noble class sliding downward

Anarchists and communists like Bakunin and Kropotkin and Alexander Herzen forming new political movements every other minute

A war with Turkey that left Russians feeling first triumphant, and then humiliated

Tolstoy

Chekhov

Herzen

Turgenev

Leskov

G. Sudeykin, secret police

Attempts on the life of the tsar (the last of them successful)

And the formation of a terrifying secret police corps (which, by the way, plays a role in The Tsimbalist.)

Tsar Alexander II. You might think he's only wearing a mustache. Evidence to the contrary comes from one of Youtube's most unusual offerings, a Circassian Chanted Curse called "Fork-bearded Tsar"

A smart aleck might be tempted to suggest that, amidst all this flux and ferment, there was only one force for stability and unity in the whole Russian empire, only one thing bringing all men together.

That's right. They all wore beards.

Sort of like in Brooklyn …

Joking aside … for the Jewish subset of beard-wearers, things were no less rich and chaotic than they were for other Russians:

There were reformers running rampant, some who wanted Jews to assimilate--maybe even wear shorter beards!

Yiddish literature, Hebrew literature, Yiddish Theater, with heavy doses of European influence, budded and blossomed.

A class of wealthy industrialists emerged.

There were pogroms.

Meanwhile, young Jews were hot for the same ideas that were lighting a fire under other young Russians. But that didn't keep some of them from subscribing to other new beliefs: that maybe Jews should defend themselves, that Russia's Jewry should abandon its centuries-old passivity, that Jews needed their own homeland.

Is it any surprise that all this had an effect on ideals of masculine identity?(And did I mention other considerations, like what role gay men may have played in shaping the male beauty ideal in the shtetl, or why there were so many stories about young shtetl women masquerading as boys?)

There's a lot to talk about there. In the next one or two or three installments of Handsome Is As Handsome Does, let's talk about it.

Changing beard styles: Israel Brodsky, famous Kiev millionaire, sugar king, and philanthropist ...

and his son Lev

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

Peasants, Priests, and Other Neighbors

Handsome Is As Handsome Does, Part 1: Slender and Pale?

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