In Vilna about 1860, a Jewish wife took a position as a domestic servant in the home of a wealthy man, but disappeared after her master sent her to get change for a 200-ruble bill. Eventually the case of “a male agun” or abandoned husband came to the attention of Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin of Volzhin.
“She [the wife] has been searched for extensively in Vilna, but without success,” Rabbi Berlin noted in a responsa. “And her husband is bereft and grieving that the joy of offspring is denied to him. He seeks to marry another wife and to build himself a home.”
Seeking a remedy that would not result in the husband committing bigamy, Rabbi Berlin ultimately decided that the man need not continue his futile search for a wife who had deserted him. “In this case, where she has betrayed him and taken herself far from him to the point where he cannot divorce her, he is not obliged to go out and shout at the hills and the like. Rather one may be lenient, and allow him another wife.”
Many rabbinical items are among the assortment of translated documents that appear in Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia, a wide-ranging compendium culled from memoirs, rabbinical responsa, court records, police records and other official sources.
The documents were found in archives in Kiev, Odessa, Zhitomir, Moscow, St. Petersburg and Vilnia, reflecting the continuing discoveries that Judaic scholars are making in diverse archives across the former Soviet Union. They focus on a broad spectrum of activities of ordinary Jewish daily life in Russia from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries.
Topics include religious dilemmas, conversions to Christianity, family life, marriage and divorce, health and sexuality, mental illness, marital and extramarital sex, school and university life, commerce and trade, agricultural colonies and farms, factory work, military conscription, anti-Semitism and pogroms, revolutionary movements, Zionism and emigration.
Some of the documents presented, such as Shura Broun’s “Petition for a Separate Passport on Grounds of Spousal Abuse (1900)” are so personal and painful that the reader wants to cringe. There is also a report on an illegal abortion in Vilna, petitions to hospitalize various mentally ill patients, a report on attempts to close a Jewish brothel in Kiev, discussion of self-mutilation to avoid military conscription, and a description of a violent night in the tavern.
In 1887, “melamed” [teacher] Girsh Korobochko of Gorodok was accused of teaching children without a melamed’s certificate. Although Korobochko argued that he only taught the children at school to recite prayers orally and did not receive any monetary compensation, and that he was unaware he was committing a crime, he was found guilty and slapped with a ruinous fine of 25 rubles, a verdict that was upheld upon appeal.
As other incidents described in the book testify, such difficult bureaucratic struggles and unnecessarily harsh and cruel verdicts seemed all too common in Old Russia. Such episodes put one in mind of the old Yiddish saying, “You could live, if only they would let you.”
Everyday incidents are also captured in bedrooms, medical clinics, law offices, synagogues and factories. The editors have privileged us with many telling glimpses of the great frieze that was Jewish civilization in Russia over a period of about 150 years. However, we must remember that we are dealing with fragmented pieces out of context. We must take care that our impressions do not lead us to sweeping conclusions.
The editors deal with this and other interpretive problems in the preface and introduction, noting that “the focus on the individual, the local, and the singular inevitably raises the issue of typicality.” How unique or how typical are the events described in the documents? The editors cite historian Henri Lefebvre, who once noted that even the most mundane act, such as a woman buying sugar, represents “an infinitely complex social event.”
The editors also acknowledge that their approach is part of a modern shift away from grand narratives of political history to the everyday aspects of the lives of ordinary people, from making love to making a living.
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A good companion volume to read alongside Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia is Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern’s The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe, (Princeton) which received fuller treatment here last year.
Petrovsky-Shtern also uncovered a range of recently accessible archival documents in painting a revised portrait of the Russian shtetl. He argued that for much of its history the shtetl was not the semi-decrepit, decaying village as described in late-19th-century Yiddish literature, but rather a thriving economic centre focused around its market square.
While later travellers would often emphasize the dirt, stench and poverty of the shtetl, reports in the “golden age” often focused on the fertility and idyllic beauty of the countryside. After the Russians exerted a prohibitive set of tariffs, customs duties and protective regulations, bribes and the smuggling of contraband goods became routine and the shtetl began its downfall.
As in Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia, the author of The Golden Age Shtetl uncovers many police, court and other documents revealing unsavoury aspects of Jewish life. Again, one must be careful about drawing conclusions about the “typicality” of such activities and the relative proportion of Jewish rogues and criminals among the general population.
