THE GOLDEN AGE SHTETL
A New History of Jewish Life in Eastern Europe
by Yohanan Petrovsky- Shtern
Princeton University Press C 2014 and is the Publisher
BOOK REVIEW by ANCESTRY WORSHIP GENEALOGY
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern did a great job of bringing the long gone Eastern European shtetl to vibrant life in this new and popular book. It's valuable to genealogy researchers in that knowing what sort of life your ancestors lived realistically may move you to the right places to look for information or go on tour. You may also consider things like that they traveled for work from town to town or along trade routes, may have been the result of a mixed marriage or conversion to another religion, or that they became more liberal about such things as they moved to a larger town.
80% of the Jews of Eastern Europe in the 1790-1840 period that is this book's focus, lived in the three provinces covered. (That area does not include Austrian run Galicia, but it's likely the lifestyle revealed also occurred in predominately Jewish small towns there too.) The term shtetl is Yiddish for such a town, but as Jews moved to larger cities, the term sometimes was used with condensation. This book reveals that when Russia took over the government, the area had a kind of Russian-Polish-Jewish, or make that Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, and Jewish, atmosphere in which much had to be negotiated. Over time Russia began to see patriotism as membership in the Eastern Orthodox Church, and both Catholics and Jews were expected to convert or were considered suspicious.
At the same time this area was known for the magnate owned town, the magnate being a Polish aristocrat who owned the town long before Russians took over, as if it were a business but who also ran it as nobility might, with an eye to patronage. This was a kind of town unknown to Western Europe (I know such towns existed in Slovakia and Hungary) and Russia tried to buy them out or outright take the towns from their owners. (After the 1830 rebellion, the Russian government confiscated the Potocki estate including the whole town and 44,000 gallons of vodka.)
There is a huge portion of this book devoted to the issue of trade in this political era, when Jews were considered to be rightfully employed in trade, and that included Jewish women, and the way that a Jewish house in a shtetl often became also a place of trade, smuggling when taxations occurred, the popularity of the Tavern as a place where people from all religious backgrounds - male people - could actually unwind, the vital and lively markets that drew both sellers and buyers, and the diverse number of goods available including things like Chinese Pekoe tea, tobacco and pipes, silk, apricots, and tons of other produce.
Perhaps more interesting to me, especially as a woman and feminist, was the issue of family life and the harmonious and conflicting relationships between Jews and Catholics in these towns. The author is Jewish and his goal was to bust through mythologies about shtetl life that have been promoted by the literary fiction called Fiddler's Roof. He emphasized how important the preservation of family was for the individual as well as the community, the emphasis on preserving family, even if that meant not reporting rape and sexual harassment or getting justice. How did the rabbi handle it when a woman who traveled for business came home pregnant? He states that an accusation of sexual offense was enough to destroy a competitor. And yet, he also states that (and this is where I thought "wrong, now you're peddling the Jewish version of the situation) that Jews didn't think sex was sinful and wrong LIKE THE CATHOLICS.
This is where the author lost me. He presents all these things a Jewish woman had to do, like be "ritually pure", to have sex with her husband, and for sex to be spiritual. She had to go soak in a mikvah bath after her period. She actually had to go ask a Rabbi if she wasn't sure, like if she had cramps but no bleeding. Her privates and private life were open to inspection by these authorities. (By my standards, all of this is cringeworthy!)
First I heard that for Catholics sex in marriage was considered sinful and wrong. (It's funny I think to hear some people tell it, though not this author, that Catholics are supposed to be overpopulating the word and yet married sex is sinful and wrong!) What about the dangers of childbirth that these women faced, not having access to modern, western, standards of medical care we take for granted today? Here he says the Jewish women had more children than Catholics, less death from childbirth, and so on, taking the hygiene rather than genetic or economic factors into consideration.
He also presents a scenario where a poor Catholic servant girl is involved in lying against someone for pay, and to do that she goes by the ritual bath and claims she is pregnant by a Jewish man. In the end she tells the truth. The author says that this is "no surprise" and that even the girl's mother would think that two cows would be good compensation for an illegitimate birth. Maybe that mother, but this is NOT representing Catholic values correctly.
Not then. Not now.
Some day I will trip upon my notes from years ago so that I can say where I read this, but there came a time when the Catholic Church's influence in parts of what was Poland but now taken over by Austria or Russia was such that no Catholic girl who went to be a servant in a Jewish home could stay there more than a year. The reason for this was that so many servant girls were turning up at the church unmarried and pregnant by their employers and there were no social services to help them. Of course the year's time is arbitrary.
Perhaps I should just back off and state that the author chose a few real life scenarios to present things that did happen but mention that news is the exceptional not the common.
I took lots of notes before returning this book to the library, and hope to read it again in the future.
