1. Origins
When at the age of four weeks, in
the summer of 1903, 1 was being carried by my mother through the market place
for the first time (of course I was carried-- who ever heard of baby
carriages?), she was accosted by Feivl
Zelde's, the town buffoon.
"Mazel Tov, ESTHER LIEBE, Mazel Tov to you! Nu, let's see
what Shleime produced? !"
Though taken aback by the coarse
expression, mother unfolded the blanket in which I was wrapped and, with a
bashful smile, presented her first-born. Feivl took
one look, spat three times, and yelled out at the top of his lungs:
“Oy, what an ugly creature!
Everybody come and look! Tfu, tfu, tfu!"
Mother,
in telling this, never failed to add:
"Of course, YANKELE always was a beautiful child,
but what could one expect from that paskudniak,
good-for-nothing FEIVL?!"
I have heard this story repeated so
many times that I can visualize it in every detail. Here is the buxom young
woman, herself only nineteen years old, in a print cotton dress buttoned up to
the neck and reaching down to her ankles, picking her way gingerly over the
cobblestones of the wide square, full of concern for the precious little bundle
cuddled in her arms, returning after an absence of several weeks to the store
which her husband had been tending by himself all this time, and inwardly
relishing his expression of pleasure at seeing her and the baby. And here is
this rowdy with his mean jokes, trying to embarrass her in front of all these
people who joined in the merriment. No wonder the incident figured so often in
her reminiscences about my childhood.
I imagine that my mother must have
been accompanied on that occasion by her mother-in-law, my grandmother FREIDE
LEIE--I cannot conceive that this dainty little woman, always impeccably
dressed in black satin, with her mania of over protectiveness for her
offspring, would have permitted her first grandchild to be carried through the
streets without her supervision. I am also convinced that FEIVL must have
received a good talking-to for his impudence.
This then was my public introduction
to the little town which, tucked in between the dense pine forests on the edge
of the vast Pripet marshes, seemed to me as I was
growing up to have been cut off from the rest of the world. The life of its
inhabitants seemed to flow in an unvarying pattern, established a long time ago
and passed on from one generation to the next. The Russians called it Shereshevo, to the Poles it was Szereszow,
and to the Jews Shershev. It was a typical small town
in the so-called Pale of Settlement of Tsarist Russia, celebrated in literature
and legend under the Yiddish name shtetl.
The region in which the town is
located has been fought over for centuries by the nations surrounding it. Up to
the end of the thirteenth century there was no established suzerainty over the
land. The Mongol KIPCHAK Empire which dominated
With the increased power of the
Tsars both
2.
Vestiges
Each of the dominant powers
left its mark on the native population. While the majority professed the
Orthodox faith, there was a sizable segment of Catholics and a small number of
Protestants, reflecting respectively the Russian, Polish and Lithuanian
influence. Intermarriage between these races and miscegenation during the
Mongol occupation was evident in the physical traits of the people--fair and
dark complexions; blue, grey and brown eyes; Caucasian and Mongoloid facial
features. The expression "Scratch a Russian and you will find a
Tartar" is not just an empty phrase. There were even some small colonies
of Germans and wandering bands of Gypsies in the area. All this had a marked
effect on the language of the local population, especially the peasantry.
Through a bizarre mixture of words and phrases from Russian, Polish, Ukrainian
and other tongues they evolved a unique dialect of their own, dubbed "Goyish" by Jews for want of a better term. Even the
Mongols, who disappeared from the area five hundred years earlier, left some
vestiges of their speech, as in these counting-out rhymes still current at the
time of my childhood:
Aing'ee,
baing'ee, goopee, daing'ee;
Akhchi, bakhchi, gammi, dakhchi;
Beyek, beyek, izbadan;
Sigany, sigany, kutbaian;
Kuty, pekuty, kutbalasty;
Yashi, bashi, bubikhan.
While
the opening syllables of the first rhyme are obviously based on the first
letters of the Hebrew alphabet (aleph, beth, gimel), there is no mistaking the Mongolian or Tartar
flavour of the other sounds. The first rhyme, incidentally, was a curious
mixture of seemingly meaningless words, superstition, and revolutionary
content. The two given lines were continued in Yiddish rhymes, which translate
as follows:
On the roof a red rooster stands,
Flaps his wings, in loud voice portends,
Not one, not two, not three, not four, Not five,
not six, not seven, not eight not nine,
No man in vassalage should bend his spine.
"Red rooster" was a
well-known euphemism for the flames shooting up from the landowners' manors set
afire by peasants during uprisings. As for the negative count out, it was a
stratagem for warding off an evil eye and for confusing Satan, the Evil One.,
since he might become unduly interested on hearing of so many children. A
similar remedy was in the word "Kinanoreh",
a contraction meaning "Let no evil eye see it" used by rote whenever
a favourable circumstance was mentioned : "They are, kinanoreh,
in good health; they have three children, kinanoreh;"
etcetera.
Educated persons spoke Russian or
Polish, but even they interspersed their speech with catchwords and expressions
from each other and from "Goyish". Words
from all three idioms were also absorbed into and became part of the Yiddish
language.
Rise and Decline
Jews have been living in Shershev and in neighbouring towns at least since the early
1400s, and were already of sufficient importance in 1433 to be mentioned by a
local notable in a report to the Polish-Lithuanian king JAGIELLO. By the middle
of the nineteenth century they constituted a majority of the
town's 10,000 population. It was a thriving community then, containing
some small textile factories, flour mills, a tannery, and a brewery. An
outstanding industry was the production of wooden shingles for roofing, which
were sold to other communities in the region where the forests did not have the
straight-grained and knot-free pines, perfect for shingles, which grew in
abundance in our vicinity. All these industries were operated by the wealthier
Jews and provided employment for many workers, Jews and gentiles. A lively
trade in grain and livestock was carried on by itinerant merchants with the
peasants of the villages scattered in the area. The large number of
storekeepers and independent artisans also shared in the well-being of the
community.
This rather prosperous period
received a jolt in the 1880s which set off the decline in the town's good
fortune. Up to that time all roads in the area connecting the small towns and
villages were nothing but rutted wagon trails which turned to mud after a good
downpour. They were practically impassable during the fall rainy season and the
spring thaw. It was not uncommon for travellers, driver and passengers alike,
to have to dismount and even help by pushing the heavy wagon whenever the
usually scraggy horse, despite the generous use of the whip and shouted
imprecations of the driver, was unable to pull the wagon out of the mire. As
long as this condition prevailed in the entire area no town had an advantage
in this respect. About 1880 the government began building a crushed-stone
highway through the region, primarily for military purposes, using its
multitude of recruits as a workforce. This highway or chaussee,
was originally projected to go through Shershev, but
bypassed it in favour of another town twelve miles away, allegedly because the
army surveyors were bribed to change the original plans. The resulting
diversion of traffic from our town brought about a gradual transfer of most of
its industry and commerce to other localities, with the consequent
impoverishment of its residents, many of whom moved elsewhere in the province
or emigrated to seek their fortune in other countries, primarily in
From about 1725 to the late 1800s,
for over a hundred and fifty years, Shershev was
noted as the seat of several learned rabbis, whose renowned spread far and wide
through the land. Some of them published commentaries on the Talmud and carried
on a correspondence with rabbis in other communities who sought their opinion
on abstruse points of Jewish law and its application. This succession of great
rabbis coincided with the period of the town's prosperity, and must have
contributed to its development. But men of fame and distinction are all too
often lured away by prosperous communities and institutions from poorer ones,
and so it was that with the decline of our town's fortune came also the loss of
its preeminence as a seat of rabbinical learning.
The fame of its rabbis did not save Shershev from acquiring in earlier times the dubious
reputation of harbouring a den of smugglers. The smuggling was not of merchandise,
but of men. During certain periods of the last century conscripts were required
to serve in the Russian army for as long as twenty-five years, which for a Jew
meant the end of his identity. Even after the term was reduced, the known
brutalization of barrack life, anti-Semitic discrimination and abuse, and the
impossibility of following religious precepts in the army led to efforts to
avoid conscription by all means. It became a common practice for young men to
starve themselves for months before they were due for medical examination, in
the hope of being rejected because of their emaciated condition. Many went so
far as to maim themselves by cutting off the right index (trigger) finger, by
inducing lameness, or by ruining the sight of an eye. There was of course also
bribery of the examining military doctor and other members of the recruiting
commission. However, the surest escape was to go abroad, but men of military
age were not given passports for foreign travel. That is where the smugglers
came in.
These men had a widespread network
throughout Russia's western provinces, their connections running from officials
who issued passports in false names or with incorrect ages, to border guards
who could be relied upon not to be too inquisitive, to guides who knew the
pathways and river fords along the border through which one could get across
undetected. They worked in league with confreres on the other side, in
One person involved in this
underground traffic was a distant relative of ours from a neighboring
town, Kamenets. I learned this from overheard
whispered remarks about his being an "agent." Late one evening in
1910 he suddenly appeared at our house in a state of frenzy. He had been tipped
off by no less than the Kamenets Pristav
(Chief of Police) himself, with whom he had been doing "business,"
that he had been denounced by one of his own collaborators and that an order
for his arrest was imminent. The fugitive asked to be hidden for a few days
until his associates could get him across the border.
To let the man stay at our house was
out of the question--a stranger was a novelty in the shtetl
and word would soon get around. We had at that time a half-interest in a cow,
the other half belonging to my grandmother's brother. Since neither partner had
a barn, the cow was housed in a small shed rented from a gentile. So into the
shed the terrified man want, and spent two days and
two nights with the cow, until a "friend" took him away in the middle
of the third night.
I met this relative in the