The Lost World of Russia's Jews

Ethnography and Folklore in the Pale of Settlement

Abraham Rechtman, Nathaniel Deutsch, Noah Barrera, Nathaniel Deutsch, Noah Barrera

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780253056917
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Russische Geschichte

In 1913, Abraham Rechtman journeyed through the Russian Pale of Settlement on a mission to record its Jewish folk traditions before they disappeared forever. The Lost World of Russia's Jews is the first English translation of his extraordinary experiences, originally published in Yiddish, documenting a culture best known until now through romanticized works like Life Is with People and Fiddler on the Roof. 

In the last years of the Russian Empire, Abraham Rechtman joined S. An-sky's Jewish Ethnographic Expedition to explore and document daily life in the centuries old Jewish communities of the Pale of Settlement. Rechtman described the key places where Jewish life and death were experienced and connected these sites to local folklore and customary practices. Among the many unique contributions of his memoir are riveting descriptions of traditional Jewish healers and exorcists—many of them women—and their methods and incantations.

Rather than a nostalgic portrait of an imagined shtetl, Rechtman succeeded in producing an intimate account of Jewish life and death that is highly nuanced and richly detailed. The Lost World of Russia's Jews powerfully illuminates traditional Jewish life in Eastern Europe on the eve of its transformation and, ultimately, destruction. 

ONE

SH. AN-SKY AND THE JEWISH ETHNOGRAPHIC EXPEDITION

The Participants in the Expedition

At the beginning of the present century, Jewish ethnography with all of its branches was an almost entirely new phenomenon in our literature. Until then, very little attention was paid to Jewish folk creativity, and a dearth of researchers devoted themselves to it.

And it is entirely understandable why this was so: as our grandfathers and great-grandfathers lived out their characteristically patriarchal lives and even produced, unconsciously, genuine pearls of pure folk creativity, whose worth and splendor are inestimable, they received and transmitted from mouth to mouth, from generation to generation, legends and tales, full of spiritual content, poetic beauty, and rich imagination. However, they did not find it necessary to record on paper all of these creations, all of their lifeways and mores, their entire Oral Torah [Yiddish/Hebrew, Toyre shebalpe], so that it would be preserved in memory for subsequent generations.¹ For the essence of their life was rock solid, the forms, clear and fixed: a generation passed, a new one arrived, yet their ways of life stayed unchanged. The synagogues and study houses remained the sole centers from which they drew their spiritual sustenance, the customs received from previous generations were protected and preserved, and the tales and legends were transmitted with great respect and love from person to person, from grandfathers to fathers, and from fathers to children.²

At the beginning of this century, when Jewish life started to undergo a dramatic transformation, casting off the old and taking up the entirely new; when people ceased to be observant and adhere to the received old customs; when they only seldom told the beautiful old folktales, and the entire past started to be forgotten and little by little vanish—only then did some of our finest men of letters take up the work of Jewish ethnography.³ They comprehended that the greater part of our customs and traditions, which for our grandfathers and parents were the essential substance of their lives, had for us become merely memories of former times, which were becoming weaker and dimmer in our memory from generation to generation. They understood that if we did not act quickly to salvage what remained while there was still time, if we did not hasten to gather all of these traces, the memory of our past might, God forbid, be lost forever.

This, then, is what a few of our men of letters comprehended fifty years ago, and they devoted themselves to Jewish ethnography. They began collecting the surviving remnants of folktales, expressions, and customs, gathering all the “sparks” of the folk-soul and recording [the people’s] Oral Torah and adapting it. It was then that the first Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society was founded in Petersburg in honor of Baron Naftali Hertz Gintsburg and issues of the journal Perezhitoe [Experience] began to appear in print.

And one of the very first individuals to devote himself body and soul to the work of collecting the inheritance of the preceding generations was the beloved writer, poet, and collector Shloyme Zanvil Rapoport (Sh. An-sky), may his memory be a blessing.

With great love and dedication, he committed himself to this work. In 1912, with the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society, he organized, together with the support of Baron Vladimir Horacevich Gintsburg (a son of Naftali Hertz Gintsburg), the self-standing Jewish Ethnographic Expedition.

It did not take long for the personnel of the expedition to be assembled. Baron Vladimir Gintsburg from Kiev provided the necessary funds and the expedition set off on its journey.⁴ Besides An-sky, the following people participated in the expedition: Yoel Engel from Moscow, a well-known composer, and Y. [sic] Kiselgof from Petersburg, a researcher of Jewish folk music—both for only a short time; Shloyme Yudovin, a painter and an exceptional photographer [who was], by the way, a son of An-sky’s uncle; Y. Fikangur and Sh. Shrayer, students of the Jewish Academy in Petersburg, as well as my humble self.⁵

Over the course of three years, the expedition, under An-sky’s direction, traveled throughout the remotest corners of Ukraine, collecting the surviving treasures of our past everywhere it went: from both men and women we recorded stories, legends, historical events, exorcisms, sgules [protective charms, spells, or rituals], and trufes [traditional remedies], including stories about dibukkim [malevolent spirits that possess human beings] and demons and evil beings as well as songs, parables, aphorisms, and sayings. On phonograph discs, we recorded old nigunim [traditional melodies], tfiles [prayers], and folk songs; we photographed old synagogues, historical places, tombstones, shtiblekh [tombs] of zaddikim, typical characters, and ritual scenes; we collected and purchased with money: Jewish antiques, documents, pinkesim [communal record books], ritual objects, ornaments, clothing, and all kinds of Jewish antiquities for a Jewish museum.

At the end of 1914, while World War I raged, the artist S. Yudovin and I were arrested in Zhitomir, under the suspicion that we were spies. This was a reasonable assumption since, on account of our work, we were carrying around a camera and taking photos out in the open. We were both put under arrest, and the police confiscated the materials we had collected, including all the photographic plates that we had in our possession.

An-sky was then in Petrograd (during the war, the name Petersburg was changed to Petrograd).⁶ We informed him about our arrest via telegram. An-sky immediately got in touch with L. I. Shternberg, the manager and senior ethnographer of the Russian Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, and through him An-sky successfully acquired a document [stating] that we were sent on behalf of the Imperial Anthropological-Ethnographic Museum. As soon as the Zhitomir police received this document, we were freed, and the confiscated materials and objects were returned to us. We then packed everything that we were taking along with us and returned to Petrograd.⁷

The work of the expedition was now officially put on hiatus. An-sky, however, tirelessly forged ahead alone, in spite of everything, with the task of collecting. Even later, at the height of the war, when he was traveling around Galicia as a representative of the Relief Committee for the War-Victims—organized by the Gosudarstvennaya Duma (the Russian Parliament)—dressed in a military uniform, with a sword by his side, even then, An-sky did not neglect his folkloristic and ethnographic work. Literally crawling through fire, visiting destroyed synagogues and other holy places, speaking with rabbis and communal leaders, and, when he used to return from time to time, a weary soul, to Saint Petersburg for a brief reprieve, always bringing with him chests full of treasures, priceless historic-ethnographic materials, including printed ordinances regarding Jews, secret decrees, documents concerning terrifying defamations, torn seyfer toyres [Torah scrolls], bloodied yeries [parchment sheets sewn together to make a Torah scroll], poroykhes [curtains for the Torah Ark] and mentelekh [embroidered Torah covers] drenched in Jewish blood, mizrokhim [wall fixtures, usually a picture of the Land of Israel, indicating East for prayer], seals, and so forth.

Once, I recall, he also brought along with him, among the other objects, a kol-bo [Hebrew, All is in it] prayer book written on parchment, which he found while roaming through a half-ruined and abandoned study house, in a small shtetl on the front with Galicia, as well as a torn page from a Torah scroll from another shtetl located in the same territory.⁸ An-sky said that he had found the page from the Torah in a destroyed study house. The shtetl was utterly desolate and in ruins, with no trace of Jews. And when An-sky went inside the devastated study house, he encountered everything broken and ravaged, utterly ruined; on the earth, empty bottles and torn bits of women’s clothing lay sprawling—silent witnesses of all that had taken place there—and from under a heap of wood, glass, and rags, he noticed pieces of parchment sticking out from a torn Torah scroll. When he pulled out one page, he became petrified. This was the page containing the Ten Commandments, torn in two. On one half was “Murder,” “Adultery,” “Steal,” and, on the other half, the “Thou Shalt Nots.”

In his private life, An-sky was a good-natured person, very rarely refusing someone a request, but, when it came to matters concerning the honor of klal yisroel [the Jewish people], he was an implacable zealot and knew no compromi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Transliteration
• Introduction
• 1. Sh. An-sky and the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition: The Participants in the Expedition
• 2. Synagogues and Prayerhouses
• 3. Headstones, Graves, and Tombs
• 4. Communal Pinkesim
• 5. Tales about Nigunim [Melodies] and Prayers
• 6. Exorcisms, Charms, and Remedies
• 7. Scribes and Scribal Writing
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Authors