Category: Yaffa Eliach

Matchbreaker, matchbreaker

2/22/2014

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:

"… 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:

Rashi

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)

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.

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."

0 Comments

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

2/12/2014

1 Comment

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."

1 Comment

Peasants, Priests, and Other Neighbors

2/8/2014

0 Comments

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.

0 Comments

Matchbreaker, matchbreaker

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

Peasants, Priests, and Other Neighbors

Author

Archives

Categories