Features
Mud: Shtetl to Shoah
By DAVID TOPPER A Note to the reader: I will preface this story with a remark about me. I often write stories and poems using the pseudonym Dee Artea (pronounced D R T, my monogram) when writing in a female voice. But this is the first time I have put Dee into a story.
I’m trying to decide what to do with the document that you’re reading. You’ll see shortly, I’m sure, what I’m talking about – that is, if you read on.
I don’t know what to do. I’m stymied. And it’s all because of this new assistant I hired. Dee Artea, who refuses to tell me anything about her past. Not where she’s from, her family, nor even the origin of her name. Nothing. Beyond her being Jewish, I don’t know anything about her.
Well, to be precise, I didn’t hire her, and I guess calling her an assistant is not quite right either – since we’re living together. So, I can’t really fire her, can I?
Which is why – or, at least, one reason why – I’m stymied.
Plus, it just occurred to me that you may agree with her point of view – and then, so-to-speak, take her side on this matter. Well, so be it. Still, what to do?
Many readers will agree with me. My point-of-view, I’m sure. Yes. I am.
There you go. That’s my friend Dee, butting in and making her point. Forcefully, I would say. What should I do about her, short of putting a password on my computer?
In the meantime, I need to bring in some back-story.
It all started when Dee saw my heart-rending book of Roman Vishniac’s photographs of Jews living in the Pale of Settlement in the 1930s. … Wait, before that: I wanted to write something for the local Jewish paper about the pogroms of the late 19th & early 20th centuries as precursors to the Shoah. … No, that’s not it, either. … I need to go … further back. Yes, here goes.
I first met Dee, who was out of a job. I think she got fired for insubordination and th—
That’s what my boss called it. Actually, I was just correcting his mistakes. Proofreading and such.
Okay, anyway, we met one warm day this past spring when I was sitting on a bench in the English flower garden in Assiniboine Park, reading a book. As she walked by, she noticed that I was reading a book of stories by Sholem Aleichem, so she sat down beside me and started a conversation. She immediately told me that Sholem Aleichem (meaning “peace to you”) was the pseudonym of Solomon Rabinowitz, born in the Ukraine in 1859 and one of the most famous Yiddish writers of fictional stories of shtetl life; but, having witnessed a vicious pogrom in 1905, he emigrated, and eventually settled in New York City for the rest of his life – all of which I already knew (well, maybe not the exact dates).
It was quickly clear that Dee was bright, Jewish, and knew a lot about some of the same things that fascinate me in Jewish culture and history. We “hit it off” as they say. Indeed, it was uncanny how much we thought alike – well, at least, on most things. When we parted and decided to meet on this same bench the next day, I thought to myself: bashert.
That’s a very strong statement, I’d say. Don’t you think?
Yes, indeed.
Well, clearly, I liked her. But I must say that I wasn’t attracted to her. She was friendly and all, but not physically appealing. To be honest, she looks a lot like me – which isn’t a compliment, since I’m a man. We are moreover about the same height, complexion, and body weight. There’s nothing particularly feminine about her physique and manners. Nonetheless, over time (really the short time we’ve been together) I’ve moved beyond these external matters, as we’ve become closer, a lot closer, as intellectual – and I might even say, as spiritual – mates.
Despite looking alike, we have different personalities. I’m the rational, level-headed guy, calm (at least, externally so) under pressure. Whereas Dee is passionate, compulsive, and readily shows her emotions. Of course, there is nothing unusual about this classic male/female dichotomy. Cliché? Well, so be it.
You know, there’s a reason for all of this, eh?
In subsequent meetings – initially in the park, then later in my home – I showed her my writings and told her about my research and plans for an essay on the 19th & 20th century pogroms, as portending the Shoah. She was very knowledgeable on this topic, and diligently read over the draft of my essay, correcting my mistakes as she went along. Her proofreading I found very helpful and not at all intimidating. Her changes to my original draft made it a much better essay. And I’m thankful to her for it.
As you should be.
Once she moved in with me, she had access to all my books. Quickly she read all the stories I have by Sholem Aleichem, which was the catalyst of our relationship, as you know. Next came Roman Vishniac’s book, mentioned before. Specifically, it’s called A Vanished World, published in 1983, with 180 photographs of life in the shtetls in Eastern Europe between 1935 and 1938.
Either Dee found it, or I pointed it out to her – but, in either case, she read the book and devoured it. She could not stop speaking about it for days – yes, days. She was that obsessed with it.
Yes, and I’m still obsessed because these pictures are almost too painful to look at. They break my heart. They should break yours too.
Yes, I agree. And it occurs to me that this is a good time to bring in some more back-story. Here goes. Roman Vishniac (1897–1990) was born in Russia and grew up in Moscow. In 1918 the family moved to Berlin (ironically because of the rise of anti-Semitism in revolutionary Russia). Hence it was from Germany, although sponsored by – namely, paid for – by the JDC (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee), that Vishniac made several trips into Eastern Europe to photograph Jewish life. He frequently used a hidden camera to capture everyday life in the world of the shtetl (Yiddish, for “little town”), as immortalised, as was said, in the stories of Sholem Aleichem.
Since his trips took place in the years 1935-1938, the title of his book, A Vanished World, had a doubly tragic meaning: that the world of the shtetls was gone, but so were the lives of the people in the photographs, almost all of whom most likely perished by coldblooded murder. Vishniac himself narrowly avoided being another victim of the Shoah, but luckily ended up in 1940 as a refugee in the USA – alive, yet penniless, trying to make a living by taking pictures of people in and around New York City.
You know, he once took a series of pictures of Einstein.
I know.
Ah, of course, you would know that. Oh, and did you know that there is a crater on the planet Mercury named Sholem Aleichem?
Yes.
As I suspected.
As mentioned, many of Vishniac’s pictures were taken in the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe. This was a clearly marked area, roughly comprising Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of western Russia and eastern Poland (including Warsaw). It was the creation of Imperial Russia under Catherine the Great and was controlled by the Russian army. Recall, for example, that the Jews in 16th century Venice were segregated or quarantined into what was called for the first time a “ghetto.” Well, I would call the Pale of Settlement that began around the late 18th century, a ghetto writ large. Except for Jews with specific professions, businesses, or other situations (such as Vishniac’s father, when they lived in Moscow), all Jews were forbidden to live or even to just be anywhere outside the Pale (such as in Russia proper) – a rule that was strictly enforced until 1914, around the start of the First World War.
Since Vishniac grew up in Moscow, he had a childhood that was fundamentally isolated from Jewish culture.
Yes, that’s true. Thus, those years in the Pale were his first exposure to shtetl life. Incidentally, to be accurate, the area over which Vishniac roved in those years 1935-1938 encompassed more than the Pale. It also covered other parts of Eastern Europe, such as Austrian Galicia, the Kingdom of Romania, and the Kingdom of Hungary – for they too had shtetls scattered throughout their lands.
Nonetheless, having so many Jews concentrated in such small areas between the east and the west, made them (crudely put) sitting ducks. Or, switching metaphors, the Jewish shtetls were islands in a sea of Christianity, prone to occasional violent storms or even hurricanes of hostility, often resulting in the loss of life. This was true, first with the series of pogroms out of Imperial Russia in the 19th and early 20th centuries in the Pale of Settlement; then, later, as armies criss-crossed Eastern Europe during and between the two World Wars. Whether it was the German army moving east, or the Russian army moving west – it didn’t matter. With the breakdown of the rule of law, murder became ordinary: gentile neighbours just walked in and killed Jewish neighbours, confiscating their homes, belongings, and land. The lawlessness often led not only to brutality, where Jews could be slaughtered where they lived, but also to sadistic acts of humiliation, torture, and rape – before being butchered. Then there were the mass executions where men, women, and children were marched into nearby forests or open fields or over ravines or along riverbanks by German army units, often accompanied by local militia (collaborators), and shot point blank – the bodies then dumped into mass graves or allowed to float down rivers to a grave in the sea.
Do you know what happened in Latvia under German occupation?
Sadly, I do. In German-occupied Latvia, a blue bus of commandoes (Germans and locals) traveled the countryside for six months (July – December 1941) killing the Jews of the towns and villages, murdering over 22,000 innocent children, women, and men – one-third of the population of Jews in Latvia. They went on to assist in other killings, so that the entire Jewish population of Latvia – minus a few survivors – died in the Shoah. These Nazi mobile killing units, roaming throughout Eastern Europe, slaughtered more than one-million Jews – often wiping out entire communities. Such extreme, excessive, meaningless, malicious, senseless, and unprovoked cruelty – is unique in history.
Importantly, today sites of these past atrocities are being excavated in Eastern Europe, as this mass murder is finally, painstakingly, and painfully exposing its gruesome tale.
Yes, finally. Historian Timothy Snyder has called these the European “killing fields.” Let me put it in perspective this way. Probably the common mental image of the Shoah for most of us is that of emaciated prisoners in a concentration camp, such as Auschwitz. However – and this is not commonly known – in fact, more Jews died in these killing fields than in all the camps combined. It’s what has been called “the other Holocaust.”
As you know, I too have read Snyder’s book. I agree with him when he says that “the crime of the Holocaust was unprecedented in that it was the only such attempt to remove an entire people from the planet by way of mass murder.” Indeed, he calls it “the single most murderous outburst in human history.” You know, I sometimes have trouble sleeping at night, knowing so many died in vain, while I’m living peacefully in my bubble in Winnipeg.
Yes, Dee, me too, as you know.
But back to life in the shtetls throughout Europe because there’s more I want to say, starting with another topic that deeply haunts me.
Ah yes, the other Vishniac book.
This other book is titled Children of a Vanished World, published in 1999 (after Roman died) and it is edited by Mara Vishniac Kohn (Roman Vishniac’s daughter, who chose the pictures from her father’s massive oeuvre) and Miriam Hartman Flacks (a Yiddish scholar). The text is in Yiddish (with English translations), plus some poems and music. The main motivating force of the book (for me, at least) is the imagery: 70 black & white photographs, exclusively of children, making it another “Vishniac book” that tugs deeply at the reader’s emotions. So many child Shoah victims: 1.5 million, who perished in the madness of hate – epitomized in these 70 or so innocent faces.
So difficult to look at these pictures and not imagine how, in addition to their already hard lives in the shtetls, they were destined to experience a horrific fate.
To me, the photographs reveal how the life of many shtetl dwellers was, in itself, miserable.
Yes, life in the shtetl was much worse than most of us realize. Actually, it’s there in Sholem Aleichem’s stories, if you look closely.
True, although there were also wealthy Jews here and there. Rich merchants, for example, usually living in large cities, such as Warsaw, Cracow, or Lviv. Perhaps epitomized by the Rothschilds in Paris.
Remember Shalom Aleichem’s story “If I were Rothschild?” An amusing little story where he dreams about what he would do with all that money, starting with paying for his Sabbath meal, then further helping his family, friends, others, and then all the Jews of the world. In fact, with all that money he could end all wars. But then he realizes that the source of all this trouble is money itself, and so he eliminates money altogether.
And so, he ends by asking: How will I now provide for the Sabbath? – thus coming full circle. Which brings me back to the lowly life of most Jews, especially in the Pale and other shtetls, which was economically bleak, with many living in poverty. Women worked almost exclusively in the home, of course. Men were primarily tailors, artisans, shopkeepers, carpenters, cobblers, push-cart peddlers, and tax collectors – as such they often interacted with their non-Jewish neighbours in the village and sometime at weekly fairs. Few Jews farmed because (with some exceptions) Jews were not permitted to own land. When they did own land, what was allotted was often of poor quality for growing crops. Overall, therefore, they were forced to live in the shtetls, where the buildings were shabby wooden structures, and the streets were unpaved.
Yes, and unpaved roads turn to mud when it rains. Mud, mud, lots of mud. Allow me to quote from a landmark book on shtetl life: “In the summer the dust piles in thick layers, which the rain changes to mud so deep that wagon wheels stick fast and must be pried loose by the sweating driver, with the assistance of helpful bystanders. …When the mud gets too bad, boards are put down over the black slush so that people can cross the street.”
Yes Dee. And because of the extensive poverty, Jewish organizations within the shtetls set up a social welfare system, with free medical treatment for the poor. According to some historical statistics, no shtetl in the Pale had fewer than about 15% of Jews receiving tzedakah (charity or relief). Some sources say the number was even as high as over 30%.
There is nothing to romanticize about in such a life. Believe me. A life steeped in mud.
Agreed. Nonetheless, and against these grave odds, the Yiddish-speaking culture flourished. Valuing education and intellectual proclivity, most males were literate (unlike many of their gentile neighbours, such as the peasants).
Here’s a line from a story by Sholem Aleichem: “Earlier in the day the ice had begun to melt, and the snow had turned into waist-high mud.”
The modern Yeshiva system developed too; here students learned Hebrew under a melamed (teacher), of course Hebrew being the alphabet of Yiddish. Showing Jewish fortitude and resilience, they were able to make a life out of the bleak world of the shtetl.
“Joseph the Righteous took my hand and we leaped across the mud. Night was drawing closer and closer, and the mud became deep and deeper. I imagined I had wings, I was being wafted in the air.”
For them the “shtetl” was not the place: it was the people. And the “home” was not the house: it was the family.
“I was plodding through the mud alongside Methuselah, … who pulled his legs from the mud.”
Such dogged spirit produced Sholem Aleichem, whose most well-known creation was Tevye the Dairyman.
“Well, from all the good luck, nothing is left, but nothing, nothing but mud.”
From his stories of Tevye came the Broadway musical and film Fiddler on the Roof. One of the highlights of Fiddler is the scene showing a pogrom, which disrupts the otherwise joy of a wedding scene.
“They slogged through the clay mud and seated themselves on a log.”
As depicted in the play and film, however, this pogrom is mild as far as pogroms go; it’s more like a nasty act of vandalism.
No wonder Philip Roth called Fiddler “Shtetl Kitsch.” And Cynthia Ozick said it was an “emptied-out, prettified romantic vulgarization” of literary master Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish tales.
One of the first series of pogroms took place in Odessa in 1821, where 14 Jews were killed.
“Around here the mud is so deep that it took the wagon all night to pull through the town.”
But in the late 19th century and into the 20th century it got worse. A series of about 200 pogroms took place from 1881-1884 in the Pale. Thousands of Jewish homes were destroyed. At least 40 Jews were killed and there are reports of 100s of rapes. The next wave was 1903-1906 and much bloodier with over 2000 Jews killed.
“For a time, it even looked as if I might spend Passover axle-deep in mud.”
Thus, from the 1880s to about 1914, over 2 million Jews emigrated out of Russia ending up primarily in the UK, USA, & Canada. I’m sure many readers are where they are today because their forefathers and foremothers came over in one of those human waves.
“She admits that she’s a tinderbox. When a bad mood hits her, she’ll throw mud at anyone.”
Sounds like you, Dee. You, the passionate one.
“We greeted and shook hands, with me knee-deep in the mud.”
But this is enough, already. Stop it. Yes, Sholem Aleichem called attention to the role of mud in shtetl life. So Dee, you’ve made your point.
Time to end this tale. … Now!
And, Dee, you know what? Despite my original misgivings about your insufferable intrusions in my story – I’ve decided to keep them where they are, for they force me to acknowledge the hardship of the Jews in the shtetls. Considering that this culminated in the Shoah, I see them as appropriate for such a terrible tale that is often difficult even to fathom.
From mud in the shtetl to mud in the mass graves – mud has become for me both a reality and a metaphor for all the pain and sorrow of our people in Europe before the rebirth of Israel.
Albert Einstein was mentioned by Dee, and so I’ve added this, to give some levity to what is otherwise grim and depressing.
As mentioned before, when Vishniac was a new immigrant in New York he earned a living by photographing people. One day he traveled to Princeton, New Jersey, where Einstein lived. Vishniac falsely told the guard at the Institute where Einstein worked that they had known each other in Germany, and thus gained access to Einstein’s office. Einstein was sympathetic to a fellow Jew, a refugee too, and thus allowed Vishniac to take pictures of him while he was working in his office that day doing mainly mathematical calculations, either on paper at a desk or on several blackboards on the walls. Among the many famous portraits of Einstein is one by Vishniac, which you will find on the Wikipedia website for “Vishniac.” I must say, however, that I question the assertion there, that it was Albert’s favourite portrait of himself.
I also wish to point out that throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s, Einstein, using his celebrity status, worked tirelessly writing letters and such, to get Jews out of Nazi Europe – and was successful in many cases.
Since Fiddler on the Roof was mentioned above, here are a few comments on it, considering the theme of this story.
First, Fiddler was preceded by the Yiddish movie Tevya by Maurice Schwartz in 1939, a symbolic year, with the start of the Second World War. Although once thought to be lost, a print of the film was discovered in 1978, and it is now in the US National film Registry by the Library of Congress. In black & white, with English subtitles, Tevya is worth watching for historical reasons, but otherwise it also romanticizes the lives of the Russian Jews. Indeed, it ends, not with a pogrom, but a mere eviction of Tevya and his family from the village they were born into. Incidentally, there were also some earlier theatre productions based on the life of “Tevya the Dairyman.”
As for Fiddler – music by , by , and book by Jose – it was first a stage musical in 1964. The title comes from a painting by Marc Chagall (who made a harrowing escape from the Germans by being smuggled out of Nazi-occupied France in May 1941), and as such, the set and scenery of the stage productions mostly reflected the brightly coloured palette of his paintings. The 1971 film, in colour, was probably grittier and more realistic than most of the stage productions. Nonetheless, after watching it again, I must say that it lacks the necessary mud. There’s lots of dirt, well-packed dirt, and the occasional dust – but no mud. Not until the very end, when all the villagers are leaving Russia in the winter, with a layer of snow on the ground; and, at one point, a wagon gets temporarily stuck in a (muddy?) rut, but it’s immediately pushed out – a brief moment, a fraction of a second. That’s it.
Here’s a short, Annotated Bibliography.
- Sholom Aleichem, Favorite Tales of Sholom Aleichem, trans. by Julius & Frances Butwin (New York: Avenel Books, 1983). Note: most sources spell his first name as Sholem. This book contains 55 story stories. Of course, the quotes about mud are clearly Yiddish exaggerations – but, in having done so, they speak of the true misery of shtetl life.
- Wendy Lower, The Ravine: A Family, A Photograph, A Holocaust Massacre Revealed (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021). This is an extraordinary work of historical research. But it’s an extremely painful book to read, for it takes the reader through the details of a specific murder of a woman and a child in the Holocaust. Now, multiply that horror by millions. This book is in the Winnipeg Library system.
- Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015). This too is a painful-to-read chronicle of the “other Holocaust” in Eastern Europe, which at the time was the heartland of world Jewry. Multiple copies are in the Winnipeg Library system.
- Roman Vishniac, A Vanished World (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1983). Out of print. Many of the pictures are mesmerizing. I treasure my copy.
- Mara Vishniac Kohn and Miriam Hartman Flacks (editors), Children of a Vanished World (Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1999). There is a copy of this book in the Winnipeg Library system. As said: it’s heartbreaking to look at these pictures of children – and to contemplate their fate.
- The archives of Vishniac’s estate were deposited in 2018 in the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art & Life in the Library of the University of California, at Berkeley. For the scholars – or future scholars – out there.
- Mark Zborowski & Elizabeth Herzog, Life is with People: The Culture of the Shtetl (New York: Schocken, 1952). 1995 reprint. This is the “landmark” book mentioned in the story. The quotation is from page 61.
Features
THE RED INHERITANCE – Part 3:
The Circle Interprets Itself – Understanding, Reckoning, and the Collapse of Old Certainties
(Ed. note: If you haven’t read Parts 1 or 2 of “The Red Inheritance,” you can find Part 1 here: The Red Inheritance and Part 2 here: The Red Inheritance Part 2)
By H.C. Piloski
Foreword
Part Three is about understanding.
Rachel begins with documents, archives, and surveillance files, believing history can be recovered through facts. What she discovers instead is that history survives not only in records but also in memory, silence, contradiction, and family.
As the circle of her inquiry widens, she learns that inheritance is rarely a single story. More often, it is a conversation carried across generations, unfinished and sometimes unresolved.
Rachel had intended to read only a few pages before bed.
Instead, she found herself awake long after midnight, sitting at her kitchen table with the RCMP file spread before her.
A date caught her attention.
December 26, 1991.
The day the Soviet Union officially ceased to exist.
She imagined her grandfather reading the news.
For David, the collapse was not simply political. It was personal. An entire worldview had fractured before his eyes.
The professor had explained it during one of their earlier conversations.
“For people like your grandfather,” he had said, “socialism wasn’t merely politics. It was a moral framework. When the Soviet Union collapsed, many people felt as though the world itself had lost its bearings.”
Rachel understood that better now.
The file recorded meetings, organizations, speeches, and surveillance reports. It documented where David went and whom he spoke to.
It documented what he did.
It revealed almost nothing about who he was.
One report noted that after a political gathering David had lingered outside the Labour Temple.
The officer’s assessment was brief:
Subject appears contemplative.
Rachel laughed despite herself.
Contemplative.
As though an entire intellectual and emotional universe could be reduced to a single word.
Yet perhaps it was not entirely wrong.
The deeper she read, the more complicated her grandfather became.
He was neither hero nor villain. Not a symbol. Not a stereotype.
He was a man trying to understand history while living through it.
Rachel opened her notebook.
He lived in a country that watched him, loved a country that doubted him, and believed in a world that collapsed beneath him.
For the first time, she felt less like a researcher and more like an inheritor.
The next morning she called the professor.
“You’ve reached the collapse,” he said.
“It feels like an earthquake.”
“It was.”
They spoke about the aftermath of 1991.
Old friendships strained.
Organizations fractured.
Arguments that had once seemed theoretical became deeply personal.
The professor explained that for the Jewish left, and many on the broader left, the Soviet Union’s implosion was more than a geopolitical event. It was a profound ideological shock.
“And my grandfather?”
“He was right in the middle of it.”
After the call ended, Rachel found herself thinking about the people who had filled her grandparents’ home when she was a child.
The endless conversations.
The arguments.
The laughter.
The crowded rooms full of people whose names she barely remembered.
Most of them were gone now.
What she was uncovering was larger than a single life.
She was recovering fragments of an entire vanished community.
The surprise arrived in the file almost by accident.
Buried among routine observations was a note stating that David and his wife had attended a performance at Manitoba Theatre Centre.
The entry was insignificant as intelligence.
For Rachel, it opened an entirely different door.
Politics had dominated every family story about David.
His meetings.
His causes.
His convictions.
But what about her grandmother?
Rachel had always known that she loved theatre, books, music, and literature.
What she had never considered was how completely those interests shaped her life.
For years Rachel had unconsciously treated her grandmother as a supporting figure in David’s story.
Now she began seeing her differently.
As a person.
As someone with her own passions, friendships, and intellectual world.
The deeper Rachel looked, the more similarities emerged between them.
Both believed ideas mattered.
Both loved books.
Both loved theatre.
The difference lay only in where they searched for meaning.
David sought it in politics and public life.
Her grandmother often found it in art, culture, and relationships.
Rachel wrote:
She walked beside his convictions, but she carried a world of her own.
This time she left the sentence untouched.
A few days later Olga came to visit.
Instead of speaking about David, she spoke about her own family.
Her grandparents had survived the Holodomor.
They carried memories of hunger, fear, and state violence.
“My grandparents never celebrated the collapse of the Soviet Union,” Olga said.
Rachel looked surprised.
“They didn’t?”
“No.”
“What did they do?”
Olga smiled sadly.
“They stared.”
Rachel thought immediately of David.
“Like my grandfather.”
“Yes,” Olga said. “But from the other side.”
The words settled heavily between them.
For years Rachel had viewed history through the lens of her own family.
Now she understood something new.
Her grandfather’s hopes had existed alongside someone else’s suffering.
His vision of justice had intersected with experiences he could never fully understand.
Neither reality cancelled the other.
History was not a single inheritance.
It was a collision of inheritances.
Before leaving, Olga reached across the table.
“You aren’t responsible for your grandfather’s beliefs.”
Rachel nodded.
“But you are responsible for understanding them.”
After Olga left, Rachel wrote down those words.
They remained with her for days.
The professor helped her understand another contradiction.
David had been a passionate supporter of Israel’s existence.
At the same time, he had consistently defended Palestinian rights.
“Both?” Rachel asked.
“Both.”
The professor smiled.
“Your grandfather spent much of his life living with contradictions.”
To many people such positions appeared incompatible.
To David they represented a single principle.
Justice could not be divided.
Rachel left the meeting with another realization.
David had spent much of his life refusing easy answers.
Perhaps that was part of what she had inherited.
As she prepared to leave, the professor stopped her.
“This isn’t really about your grandfather anymore.”
Rachel looked up.
“It’s about what his children inherited.”
After a moment he added:
“And what you inherited.”
Rachel did not expect Daniel to become part of the story.
Her younger brother rarely discussed family history.
When he called unexpectedly one evening, she assumed he was simply checking in.
Instead, he surprised her.
“Mom says you’re digging into Grandpa’s past.”
Rachel laughed.
“Word travels fast.”
“It always does.”
What followed was the most honest conversation they had shared in years.
For a long time Rachel had believed Daniel lacked interest in family history.
Now she realized his distance came from uncertainty rather than indifference.
“I remember Grandpa differently,” he told her.
“How?”
“He laughed.”
The answer caught her off guard.
Daniel began describing hockey games, family dinners, jokes, stories, and arguments.
Not the political figure preserved in newspaper clippings and surveillance reports.
A grandfather.
A human being.
“He loved asking questions,” Daniel said.
“And he loved telling stories.”
For the first time, Rachel saw a version of David that no archive could preserve.
Before ending the call, Daniel added something else.
“Grandpa wasn’t nearly as certain as everyone thinks.”
Rachel remained silent.
“He believed things strongly,” Daniel continued. “But he never stopped questioning them.”
The observation changed everything.
The file preserved David’s convictions.
His family preserved his doubts.
Neither version was complete by itself.
Before hanging up, Daniel made a promise.
“When you’re ready, I’ll tell you everything I remember.”
Rachel thanked him.
For the first time, she no longer felt alone in the search.
The following weekend Rachel drove to her parents’ house.
The place felt both familiar and strangely smaller than she remembered.
Photographs lined shelves.
Books crowded every room.
Pieces of family history sat quietly in plain sight.
While looking through old programs and photographs, Rachel began noticing things she had previously overlooked.
Her grandparents had attended theatre performances together.
Commented on books together.
Shared interests she had unconsciously assigned to only one of them.
Their lives overlapped far more than family mythology suggested.
Then her father mentioned something almost casually.
“There might still be some of your grandparents’ papers downstairs.”
A few minutes later Rachel stood in the basement.
The box sat on a shelf.
Its label contained a single word:
DAVID
She lifted the lid.
Inside were photographs, letters, programs, newspaper clippings, address books, and handwritten notes.
Nothing dramatic.
Nothing obviously historical.
Simply the fragments of an ordinary life.
Exactly the sort of material institutional history often overlooked.
Her father watched quietly as she examined the contents.
“Did you know all this was here?”
“Mostly.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?”
He thought for a moment.
Then answered honestly.
“I never thought anyone would ask.”
The response hurt because it was true.
For years nobody had.
Back in her apartment, Rachel spread the contents of the box across her table.
One item stood out immediately.
A sealed envelope.
The handwriting was unmistakably David’s.
The envelope was addressed to Sarah.
Her aunt.
The daughter who had drifted away from the family.
Carefully Rachel opened it.
Inside she found an unsent letter.
At first it read like ordinary correspondence.
Then gradually it became more personal.
More vulnerable.
More uncertain.
One passage stopped her completely.
You believed I cared more about being right than about understanding you.
Perhaps there were times when that was true.
If so, I regret them.
Rachel read the lines again.
This was not the David preserved in family legend.
Nor the David described in surveillance files.
This was a father struggling to understand his own mistakes.
Further down she found another passage.
History can become a dangerous thing inside a family.
People begin arguing with symbols instead of people.
Before long, nobody remembers how to listen.
Rachel lowered the page.
The words felt painfully honest.
Not political.
Human.
When she finally reached the end, she found something even more powerful.
The final paragraph was unfinished.
It ended with a single incomplete sentence.
If there is one thing I hope you understand, it is that I never wanted disagreement to become distance. A family should be large enough to contain different truths. If I failed you, it was not because I loved my ideas more than my daughter. It was because…
Nothing followed.
No explanation.
No signature.
Only blank space.
Rachel stared at the unfinished sentence for a long time.
At first she felt disappointed.
Then she realized its incompleteness carried its own truth.
Life rarely supplied neat endings.
Letters remained unsent.
Conversations stopped.
Questions survived.
That night Rachel stood by her apartment window looking out across the city.
She thought about the RCMP file.
The professor.
Olga.
Daniel.
Her grandmother.
The box.
The letter.
Government archives had preserved David the activist.
Family memory had preserved David the husband, father, grandfather, friend, and neighbour.
Neither archive was complete.
Together they came closer to truth.
Rachel opened her notebook one final time.
She wrote:
Every archive contains missing pages. Every family does too.
Then she closed the notebook.
For months she had searched for her grandfather.
Now she understood something new.
The story no longer belonged solely to David.
It belonged to the people who inherited him.
Her father.
Daniel.
Sarah.
And perhaps herself.
The next answers would not be found in government files.
They would be found inside the family.
Rachel switched off the light.
The letter remained on the table.
Waiting.
So did the rest of the story.
To Be Concluded in Part Four: The Red Inheritance
About the Author
H.C. Piloski lives among unfinished sentences.
Features
Do we treat our Arabs better or worse than the Tsars treated us?
By MARTY GREEN I know many Jews will be outraged at the very notion of comparing the two. “The pogroms!”, I hear you cry. “The Naqba!”, the Arabs might just as well respond. We all have our own simplified narratives regarding the rights and wrongs of the past; but just as the true story of Arab life in Israel is much more complicated than the Naqba, so the story of Jewish life is Russia was, for better and for worse, much more nuanced than the mere fact of the pogroms.
There are some obvious parallels between our respective stories. We came to be the authority over several million Arabs as an unwelcome by-product of our great victory in 1967. Similarly, Russia inherited some half million Jewish subjects over the course of the three partitions of Poland (1772-1795). We were hardly more welcome to the Tsars than the Arabs were to us. We sometimes mock the “genocide” allegations by pointing out how 1.2 million Palestinian Arabs in 1945 now claim to number over 14 million. But we were no pikers by comparison: in the course of the 19th century, our numbers in Russia grew anywhere from ten- to twenty-fold.
We remember how the Russian government quickly instituted the Pale of Settlement, restricting our mobility. Can the Arabs under Israeli rule not complain of similar or worse restrictions? It is true that we have obvious security concerns regarding the mobility of a hostile population. The checkpoint system has almost certainly saved lives. But by the same token, can we be sure that the Russians had no valid reason to worry about the loyalty of their Jewish subjects?
There can be little doubt that in the First World War, many Jews hoped that the German invaders would liberate them from their Russian oppressors. And even before the German invasion, as a large minority group speaking their own language and having close connections with their co-religionists in foreign not-always-friendly countries, surely the Russians had as good reason to be concerned with our loyalty as we have with regard to our Arabs?
(Incidentally, it is said that the Jews of 1812 might have whole-heartedly thrown in their lot with the invading Grand Armee, if not for the unlucky resemblance of the French Emperor’s name with the Yiddish word mapole (meaning “defeat”). But that is a tale for an alternate version of history.)
Finally, we remember well how Jews in Russia were not allowed to own land; the truth is, we mis-remember that “fact” because we did indeed own land, and when challenged our title was upheld in the Russian courts. Similarly, in the Occupied Territories the validity of Arab land titles under Ottoman Law are rigorously protected by the Israeli courts. Nevertheless, some residents of the Jordan Valley may argue that it is less than “rigorously” enforced on the actual ground.
Which brings us to the subject at hand. Because back in Old Russia, in der alter heim, disputes between us and our Gentile neighbors over land ownership and usage were an ongoing feature of life for centuries. For a somewhat poetic description of the nature of these conflicts, I turn to the words of memoirist Falek Zolf (1898-1962), who recalls this about his youth in the shtetl of Zastavia, a village of several hundred on the outskirts of Kamenetz-Litovsk. To preserve a bit of the flavor of the original, I have transcribed Zolf’s narrative here in a mix of English and Yiddish.
“The village led a poor, quiet life. We lived from what God gave us; this one from a manual trade, this one from farming, another from buying and selling, and so forth. A few dozen families pulled in a meager livelihood from working in Asher Guterman’s brewery, which was known throughout the region for its beer. Outside of that, almost everyone had his own garden and his own cow – most likely one which he had raised himself from a calf. You could always rent a small patch from one of the landowners who lived in the Gentile quarter; the vegetables and produce could be sold in the neighboring towns and villages: in Brisk, Kobrin, Orleh, Bialovezh, etc.
“Quiet and peaceful was the flow of life in the stäedtele. It was truly mit’n schwéiss vun sein ponim (by the sweat of his brow) that each one earned his own piece of bread, along with the vegetables which the good Mother Earth provided to everyone in full measure.”
Of course we all know that Jewish life in Russia was not quite so idyllic as Zolf makes it out to be in the preceding passage. Let us see what comes next:
“The stäedtele of Zastavia was at one time, according to the stories of the old men, entirely a Jewish peasant-village. The whole surrounding area with its fields, gardens, and hills had once belonged to Jews, who were originally men of the soil. But little by little, for a number of reasons, the Yiddische erd had passed over into Gentile hands. If a Jewish peasant needed to make a shidukh for his daughter, he might be driven to sell a strip of farmland to a Gentile; and with the money, he could put on a proper khasseneh with all the sheva brokhos. If his son didn’t want to go serve the Russian Tsar and had to run off azh ken Amerikeh, the Jew would once again cut off a piece of land and sell it to a neighboring Goy (to pay the 300-rouble penalty). If his grown children went off to seek happiness somewhere in the far-away, and the elderly parents simply didn’t have the koyakhto go out and push the plow, then the last stückel feld would be sold to the local meshtchan, and with the money they could enjoy the few years remaining to them. And so with time, the Yiddische erdfell largely into Goyische händt.
“In the end, all that remained to us was a large vihon, a communal grazing-field, which according to legend had once belonged to a rich Jewish landowner, who had donated it to the stäedtel. In the end, the Yiddische beheymos had actually been forced to share this pasture with Goyische khazerim. It was painful for us to have to watch those khazerim turning our Jewish vihon into a pigsty, but there was little choice; one was, after all, living in golus.”
Perhaps we should pause here to consider that while the Jews seem to have sold much of their land to the Russians due to economic pressure, there are nowadays, for obvious reasons, only the rarest cases of Arabs selling their lands to Jews. Furthermore, I am not aware of any situations where the Bedouins of the Jordan Valley willingly share their grazing land with the Jews of the hilltop outposts. Whether these differences are to our credit or theirs is not for me to say here.
In any case, we will see further that it was not only economic or social pressures which came into play:
“Unfortunately, the more the Goyischer Gass (the Gentile Quarter) grew at the expense of the Yiddischer Gass, the more brash and the more khutzpah-digker they became. They started to look for any pretext or opportunity to snatch away this last remaining piece of Jewish grazing land, so that not a single Yiddische beheymah should have a place to roam. They would sometimes show up armed with sticks, hoes, and pitchforks, ready to start a milkhomah….”
Sound familiar?
“….but on such occasions, the ZastavierYidden, who were in those days no pushovers, would quickly arm themselves with the implements of ha-yadayim y’dei Eysav and go forth to meet the Gentile foe. Blood would flow from both sides. For the Jews, it was a matter of kidush ha-shem, a case of milkheymes mitzvah, to uphold their Yiddischen koved and also to save and protect the Yiddische beheymah-lach from Goyische händt…”
And of course, in such situations, the Russians would call in local gendarmeria or even the dreaded Cossacks, and the Jews would be quickly dispersed, arrested, or even beaten.
Or were they….?
Perhaps not. Let us see how Zolf describes it:
“Fortunately, these little milkhomos would not last for long. The storm would quickly die down, and the stäedtel would soon go back to its normal, peaceful life, as though nothing had happened.”
And with those words does Zolf conclude his fond reminiscences of his childhood years. But of course that is not the end of the story.
We all know the devastation brought by the Second World War. But in the wake of the Holocaust, we are liable to forget the enormous impact of the First World War on the Jewish world. The collapse of empires was followed by the emergence of new, ideologically-driven regimes which. It is hard to say whether Communist Russia or nationalist Poland was more hostile to the Jews. In any case, Zolf’s village found itself on the Polish side of the border. And the Jewish way of life quickly became economically untenable.
Among the first the measures adopted under the Polish national slogan of “swój do swego“…that the Gentile should only patronize “his own people”….was the establishment of Christian cooperatives, so that the Polish peasants would not see their hard-earned money fall into the hands of Jewish intermediaries. Then there was the nationalization of entire industries like wine, alcohol and tobacco…again, with the purpose not so much of the betterment of the working class as the impoverishment of the Jewish merchant class. Then the strict enforcement of the Sunday laws, so that the observant Jewish shop-keeper would have to close down for two days of the week. Finally, the imposition of a host of new taxes, of which Zolf reels off the names: gruntovi, dokhodovi, handelyovi, obratov… (ed. Note: would be nice to get the correct Polish spellins of these)
The bailiff’s wagon, which quickly made it’s appearance in one Jewish community after another to haul away confiscated goods in lieu of unpaid taxes, was given the nickname “Grabsky’s Aguleh (hearse)”, after the infamous finance minister Grabsky, a notorious anti-semite. And in Warsaw, it was said to have been followed all to often by another kind of aguleh, this one from the khesed shel emes, to collect the bodies of bankrupt Jewish merchants who had thrown themselves from a fifth-story window.
The precarious condition of the Jewish staedtel could hardly go un-noticed by the local peasantry, and before long they had renewed their ambition to take over the last remaining grazing-field, the communal vihon, and make it once and for all Juden-rein. In Old Russia, the Jews had been ready to defend themselves with clubs and pitchforks; and interestingly enough, Zolf records that they had even sought and obtained recourse from the Russian courts:
“Back then the städtel had engaged the services of berühmte advokaten (famous lawyers) who fought the case azh in der gubernieh un in Petersburg. The protzess dragged on for years, until the Jews were able to secure once and for all séier recht zu mägen paschen séiere beheymos auf’n kehill’schen vihon, inéinem mit die Goyische khazerim.
Yes, there was now and then justice available to the Jews from the Russian courts. We sometimes forget that Mendel Beyliss was aquitted by an all-Christian jury. In this regard, it is noteworthy that the Arab villagers in the Jordan Valley have also been able to obtain favorable judgments from the Israeli courts on occasion.
But in post-war Poland, things were not the same. The villagers knew that in the course of the war and the fires that had destroyed Zolf’s shtetl, the Jews had lost the papers which gave them the right to to an equal share of the communal lands. In addition, the shtetl had been seriously weakened by the war, the Spanish Flu, and emigration to America. The end was in sight to one and all.
And so one bright summer morning, the Catholic and Orthodox peasants (who otherwise had little affection for one another) herded their flocks into the communal vihon. Zolf describes what happened next. One doesn’t need to understand word for word to get the general picture. Sadly, the same story seems to be repeating itself today in the Jordan Valley: only the roles have been changed:
“Their field-hands let loose the dogs auf die Yiddische beheymos, and drove them weit in a sumpign winkel. The Jewish cattle had to spend the rest of that day versunken in der tiefer blotte, searching in vain for a green stalk mit wâs zu stillen séier hunger, un nischt gekönnt gefinnen. Late that afternoon, they were led home, tired, hungry, and covered with mud. Locked away in their barns, they gnawed at the walls. Séiere hungerige geschreien hâben sich weit getrâgen über’n stäedtel.
“And in the pitiful cries of their hungry animals, hâben die Yidden gehört a min trauerign shoyphar-blâsen, which announced the end, not only for their teuere, liebe beheymellach, from whom they had derived at least a stückel khayunah…but also the end vun séier alt-eingesessene Yiddischen stäedtel.”
Falik Zolf left Poland in 1926 and became a Yiddish teacher in Winnipeg’s I.L. Peretz Folks-Schule. He published his memoir in 1948 under the title “Auf Fremder Erd” (On Foreign Soil).
Features
Embracing your femininity in Cheshvan
By ELENA KNIGHT Rosh Chodesh Sameach! Though last month’s article (Embracing your femininity in Tishrei) had far more holidays, thus more material, the month of Cheshvan is not as empty as it appears. It may contain no holidays or mitzvot specific to the month, but I take issue with the idea that Cheshvan is “bitter”.
Some people refer to this month as MarCheshvan, Mar meaning bitter, but Mar can also refer to a drop of water; this month is the beginning of Israel’s rainy season! We began praying for rain with Shemini Atzeret last month, so by this time, G-d has usually heard Am Yisrael and started sending rain to the Holy Land. To connect this to womanhood, let’s revisit last month’s article, where I explained the connection of water to femininity.
In Tishrei, I spoke of the divine feminine, and how rain is associated with the womb of creation, fertility, and gentle, life-renewing power. In Cheshvan, however, I’d like to focus more on feminist reclamation of water metaphors; in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad , for example, when trying to protect herself from unwanted suitors, Penelope recalls her mother’s advice: “Behave like water… Don’t try to oppose them. When they try to grasp you, slip through their fingers. Flow around them.” We can take this literary advice and put it into practice in our lives this month. When in a position where we feel powerless, and in spaces where female assertion is unwelcome, we could do well to be like water. Nobody can hold water in the palms of their hands without losing control of it. Water is not easy to contain. Nor are we women.
Taking Mar of MarCheshvan to mean a drop of water, rather than bitterness, can be interpreted now as a call to action. This month can be the time when we refuse to be controlled, much like the prophetess Miriam. In Torah, Miriam’s connection with water is clear; in Exodus 15, she takes the Israelite women out from the community to sing a song of deliverance through the Red Sea. She is with her brother, our teacher, Moses, when he is sent down the Nile in a reed basket, and she is the one who ensures he is cared for at the Pharaoh’s palace in Exodus 4. In many Pesach seders, a cup of water is set out for Miriam, like the wine for Elijah, because she ensured that the Israelites had water while travelling through the wilderness during the Exodus journey.
Miriam is, clearly, a passionate leader, creating a specific space for Israelite women when they are so often overlooked in Torah stories. By establishing her place as a role model for the Israelites leading up to their freedom from Egypt, the Torah makes it clear that G-d accepts female leadership. This month, let us take a page from Miriam’s book, and lead when we are called to do so. Like I suggested in my last article, mentoring a young girl in your community may be the perfect way to lead.
Cheshvan is also said to be reserved for the time of Moshiach. To prepare for the Moshiach’s arrival, we can act in ways that will bring about Israel’s reformation, both in the land itself and in the diaspora. By supporting charities both in our home communities and in Israel, by acting with chesed, loving-kindness, even when we don’t really feel like it, and by studying–whether that be studying Torah, feminist theory, or any other subject that will improve the world–with fervent passion. By working on tikkun olam, repairing the world, as we have it now, we can bring about a better world for future generations. What better way to remove the bitter reputation of Cheshvan?
