For digital natives, studying classic English and American literature in college is about as attractive as mowing the lawn. When authorities require it, digital natives will do it as a chore: They find a command of humanistic knowledge irrelevant to their sense of self. They see no compelling reason to know the difference between George Eliot and T. S. Eliot. This has effectively sidelined college English departments—although it’s not much of a loss, since their relentless emphasis on body studies and white guilt left those departments hollow shells of what they were a half-century ago.
If the story of English departments is one of gradual and (at this point) irreversible decline, the story of Jewish studies departments is the opposite. Jewish studies has exploded and pulled vibrant young researchers and smart students into its orbit. This is, in large measure, due to the sharp increase in diverse secular subjects of inquiry in a field once largely devoted to the parsing of religious texts. While the obsessive pursuit of the latest “isms” hollowed out English departments, their cautious integration rejuvenated Jewish studies. It helps that, for energetic and deracinated fourth-generation Americans, post-Soviet Russia was, and continues to be, an enticing area of research and enterprise.
The opening of Russian archives and the introduction of superbly trained literary scholars from Russia to American Jewish studies departments have produced a slew of books that bring 18th- and 19th-century Eastern Europe to life, in all its madness and oppressive stink. The problematic but thrilling The Golden Age Shtetl and the unnerving and crucial collection of documents in Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia are part of this tidal wave. Earlier works by Benjamin Nathans, David Assaf, Immanuel Etkes, Gershon Hundert, Harriet Murav, Shaul Stampfer, and others have already exposed readers to the realities of Jewish life in Russian society, the fiery discontent of young Hasidim, the inner dynamics of Hasidic courts, the social infrastructure of Polish towns, the struggle of Jews in the lion’s den of Russian literature, and the intricacies of the Lithuanian Talmud academies that once trained the Jewish intellectual elite.
Before immersing oneself in the new scholarship about Jews in Russia and Poland, it is worth taking a quick look at the expanse of the intellectual graveyard of Eastern Europe—that is, at the hundreds of tightly argued 19th-century Hebrew works printed in places like Warsaw, Vilna, Lyck, Lemberg, Shklov, Dubno, Zholkiev, Slavuta, Zhitomir, Berdichev, and Odessa currently offered for a pittance on eBay, frequently by dealers linked to Hasidic communities. The Hebrew outpouring makes one’s head spin, and the great 19th-century centers of German intellect—Göttingen, Jena, Weimar, Leipzig, and Berlin—begin to look like sparsely populated sandboxes. These Hebrew books, from reprintings of Maimonides’ 12th-century Guide for the Perplexed to Nachman Krochmal’s Guide for the Perplexed of the Time (1851), used to dominate Jewish studies. With the help of the newly accessible Russian documents, and the cultural dispensation to study ordinary people, new scholarly works are resurrecting those Jews who once constituted the readership of these orphaned Hebrew books, many of them dumped by the libraries of venerable institutions, such as Boston’s Hebrew College, into the cardboard boxes of dealers. Like so many ghosts, the real Eastern-European Jews are stepping out from behind the Hebrew tomes, demanding recognition of the lives they led and killing (one would hope) Broadway’s fantasy of the singing Fiddler.
In Jewish studies, the Shtetl Reality Show is now playing, and nowhere more so than in the documents assembled in Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia. The collection is prefaced by a superb short history of Russia’s relationship to the Jews it acquired with the three partitions of Poland between 1772 and 1795. It also touches on the two major revisions in Russian-Jewish historiography: the reevaluation of Czar Nicholas I (1796-1855), long the Jew-hating villain in the story, as “pre-reform” and earnestly intent on integrating the Jews into the Russian empire (if only they agreed to give up the Talmud, their language, and their sidelocks) and the reassessment of his successor Alexander II (1818-1881), long cherished as a reform-minded liberator of serfs and Jews, but now outed as a “cautious conservative, driven only by military defeat [in the Crimean War] to admit the need for reform.”
The reforms implemented during the 1860s were slowly taken back during the 1870s. After the assassination of Alexander in 1881, his successor’s counter-reforms tightened the bureaucracy’s grip on the Jews, while sharp expressions of anti-Semitism ricocheted through all layers of Russian society. In hundreds of pogroms, an increasingly impoverished peasantry vented its frustration and anxiety.
Yet, within the narrow confines of the geographical and economic space that the Russian government had set aside for the Jews, a life of singular religious and social intensity developed. The documents compiled by ChaeRan Freeze and Jay Harris in Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia reveal it in all its painful details. In 1898, a female patient, raped by her doctor, goes to see her rabbi to inquire if she must do penance; the rabbi rules that “she was permitted to her husband and that she has the legal status of someone raped.” In 1888, a rabbi releases a woman from her fate as an aguna (an abandoned wife who cannot remarry), certifying that her insane husband was found dead. In 1910, a widowed mother appeals to the provincial administration to have the property she inherited, together with her son, placed under a trusteeship to prevent her dissolute son from squandering it.
In 1909, a man in a Moscow prison asks the state rabbi of Moscow to help arrange a divorce from his wife because he cannot take her to Siberia. In 1879, Sosha Lubshitz is accused of killing her child born only five months after her wedding. In 1897, the recently widowed Rivka Khaet is accused of infanticide. In 1888, a rabbi rules a ritual bath near a turpentine factory ritually fit, basing his decision on a section in the Yoreh Deah (a law compilation dating to 1300) and on Moses Maimonides. In 1901, the peasants of Stepashek load the property of the eight Jewish families in their village onto carts and dump it on the banks of the Bug River because a Jewish girl, who had converted to Christianity and married a peasant, has disappeared.
The lives contained in these 182 documents call for a novelist. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, born in Kiev in 1962 and awarded doctorates from both Moscow University and Brandeis, is certainly a narrator; but at times, one wishes he would let the document he unearthed do more of the talking. His book, The Golden Age Shtetl, is conceived on a principle of academic production—you take the most perverse point of view you can and prove it with three examples—and argues that the shtetl (mestechko in Russian) wasn’t always down-and-out, but had a golden age. Between the first partition of Poland in 1772, which brought a large number Jews under Russian domination, and 1835, when Russia promulgated its Statute on the Jews and began to pursue its policy of integration by destroying the traditional structures of Jewish society, the shtetl was a liminal, unregulated space. In its crevices, economic opportunities were found and exploited by Jews, causing the shtetl to attain, if not financial well-being, at least a modicum of economic stability.
It’s a strange thesis, because every example marshaled by the author documents the endangered status of the Jews. They thrived (if one can call it that) because they undercut competition by lowering their prices while still providing a better product, especially in the vodka industry. They operated on profit margins so thin that merchants not driven by a deep sense of existential threat wouldn’t touch the business. The Jews knew that, to Russians and Poles, their lives had monetary value: If they couldn’t pay the bribes, the taxes, and the fines, their lives were worth dirt. Does this constitute a golden age?
Nevertheless, Petrovsky-Shtern’s chapters on the vital economies of smuggling and alcohol production and distribution, and on the use of violence in shtetl society and Jewish crime and Russian justice, are full of mesmerizing stories and are gratifying to all who have long suspected that there was something not quite right with the conventional portrayal of the shtetl Jews as sheep. Where there are sheep there are wolves, and Petrovsky-Shtern shows that plenty of the wolves were Jewish.
At the end of his hugely entertaining, informative work, Petrovsky-Shtern opens a window into the 19th-century Hasidic book business. Books were precious. For five books, you’d get a young white cow; for three books, an old grey cow. Books were the central nervous system of the Jews, the live wires that kept them energized and together. Those days are over, and the books are now up for grabs. Their images are coursing through the Internet like so many lost souls. But who cares?
Susanne Klingenstein is a lecturer in the Harvard/MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.
