Life in a Shtetl

Teibele and Her Demon by Isaac Bashevis Singer and Eve Friedman

Library Theatre Company, 1994

History of the Shtetls

Shtetl is a Yiddish word from the diminutive form of the German Stadt, meaning a small town. It is the term given to the Jewish settlements which began to grow up in Eastern Europe, and Poland in particular, from the middle of the 12th century, when Jews began emigrating en masse from Europe. Some were driven out by the Crusades, others fled the Black Death, others again were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the 15th century.

Poland welcomed the immigrants as a civilising force. Their arrival coincided with the Polish aristocracy’s desire to catch up with the commercial power of Western Europe, and the Jews were just the people to help them do this; they understood trade and finance and they were also used to living in cities. In addition, they brought with them valuable crafts and skills. In return for these, Polish kings and nobles offered protection and land for the newcomers to settle. In this way the induction of the Jews into the population was carried out smoothly and to everyone’s mutual benefit. For all that, though the Jews could own houses and land, brew alcohol, and enjoy equal rights with the indigenous population, they could not run for public office. In this way, they were denied full citizenship and lived their lives in their own communities.

Society

The shtetls themselves (more correctly shtetlach in the plural) were a rough and ready mix of Jews from many countries, but principally from Germany. The Hebrew word for Germany at the time was Ashkenaz, hence Eastern European Jews came to be called Ashkenazim. The other main group which gravitated towards Poland were the Sephardic Jews from the Mediterranean regions. Sephardim came originally from Spain and were often itinerant visitors, come to seek charity or sell dust from the Holy Land. Others were merchants laden with spices from Turkey or Baghdad.

Town plan

Most shtetls were built straddling a river, with the main concentration of Jewish dwellings in the centre. Many grew to a considerable size over the years with non-Jews taking up residence on the outskirts as they arrived looking for work or land of their own. The marketplace dominated the centre of the shtetl and became the living focus of life on market day once a week.

The shul or synagogue, the most important building in the shtetl, occupied a prominent position at the centre of the town. Nearby would be the bes-midrash, a place for study and prayer. The mikveh or bath house would stand close to the river, and was frequently too small for the numbers of citizen trying to use it. On Fridays it would become overcrowded with the faithful seeking their ritual bath. In summer most people preferred to use the river for their day-to-day ablutions.

Education

Study was the foundation of life in any Jewish community, and each shtetl was well equipped with numerous types and levels of schools and ‘colleges’. Learning was seen as a pathway to God; the most learned were the leaders of the community and were called sheyne yidden – beautiful Jews. The further down the social scale you went, the less education you were likely to find or afford.

The approach to God through holy wisdom was for men only, so it was considered unnecessary to educate a girl in the same way as her brother. The first duty of Jewish girls was to learn how to become good Jewish wives and mothers. Those who learnt the alphabet were encouraged to read the stories of the Torah related in the form of fables and homilies. The language they learnt was Yiddish, a kind of dialect form of High German made up with borrowings from Hebrew and the local Slav languages. For this reason, the first writers in Yiddish wrote for women because this was the language of the shtetl, shared by all the Jewish women who had little or no access to the sacred language of Hebrew.

Parnoseh

Parnoseh was the word given to our phrase ‘making a living’. Mostly this involved trading, which took place on market day, when temporary stalls were set up to accommodate the homemade goods brought in from cottages and the foodstuffs transported from outlying farms and smallholdings. As the assembled peasants rarely shared a common language, a kind of code grew up which required few words, and hands would be slapped to seal the deal.

Because of the many religious and social restrictions acting on how the devout Jew could make a living, most developed skills as artisans, craftsmen or labourers, but others provided services. Milkmen, for instance, provided the basis for the dishes which even the poorest in the shtetl could afford. Prosperous milchikers owned their own cows, but others bought their supplies from peasants and merely delivered it to customers within the shtetl. Of similar importance was the water carrier, who delivered water from the town pump or well in the marketplace to those rich enough to afford his services. Water was necessary, of course, not only for cooking and washing but also for religious purposes.

Yet, one skill alone sometimes failed to bring in enough to feed the family, and many found it best to become jacks of all trades. One old folk saying ran: “The best cobbler of all tailors is Yankel, the baker.”

Tzedokeh

In Yiddish there is no separate word for charity, as for Jews, charity is a duty. This concept is enshrined in the single word tzedokeh. Help for the poor was organised and administered by groups called chevros, easing the stigma for individuals who needed to ask for it. All the same, professional beggars called shnorers were regarded as an unpleasant but necessary blight. Although held in contempt, the shnorers invited giving, and in this way provided the citizenry with the opportunity for grace. The shnorer was most prominent in the cemetery, where he served as a constant reminder that tzedokeh could save you from death.

Yiddish curses

Jewish curses are funny, colourful and designed to combine the maximum display of irritation with the minimum of offence. Figurative rather than heartfelt, they acted as a much-needed safety valve in the often teeming streets of the average shtetl.

Those concerning poverty were particularly common:

“If it is holy to be poor, may you be a saint among saints!”

“Since poverty is no disgrace, may you never know shame!”

“May good fortune follow you wherever you go – begging from door to door!”

Other juicy curses, however, referred to matters somewhat less spiritual than tzedokeh:

“May you fall down the outhouse hole just as a regiment of Ukrainians finishes a prune stew washed down by a dozen barrels of beer!”

Decline of the shtetls

At the start of this century, the age-old way of life in the shtetls began to fall apart. Religious differences were exacerbated by the increasing prevalence of Western influences, and the rise of socialism began to crowd out the historical reliance on the teachings of the Torah. Meanwhile nationalism, once again, found a focus in anti-semitism. The assassination of Alexander II in March 1881 led the Russian government to shift the blame for anti-Tsarism onto the Jews, and this soon led to pogroms against the Jewish communities all over Eastern Europe. Once again, the people of these communities found themselves needing to move on to escape this latest scourge.

One by one, the Jewish communities of the shtetls began to break up, and as they did so, the greatest casualty of all was seen to be the very quality which had sustained them through so many centuries of struggle and hardship – tradition.

PS

Judging by the date, this must have been one of the earliest pieces I ever wrote for Proscenium, but there is plenty of internal evidence to suggest I had a lot to learn. Like, for instance, the name of the production I was meant to be writing for.

The only Jewish thing that had ever impinged on my life, as far as I know, was the musical Fiddler on the Roof; Topol’s star-making performance of ‘If I Were a Rich Man’ from the London production, which opened in early 1967, was so memorable that I distinctly remember regularly singing it on the ten-minute walk to and from my junior school that summer. By the time I came to write this piece I was also familiar with the film, where the Israeli actor reprised his most famous role to Golden Globe acclaim, so in the list of services provided within the shtetl, it is hardly surprising that the first one which came to mind – or which jumped out at me from the research – was that of milkman. By the time we get to the final paragraph I seem to have cast off all pretence and end the piece with the title of another hit from that same marvellous musical, ‘Tradition’. To be fair, this quality may have received a parting nod within the pages of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Teibele and Her Demon – you know, the show the Library Theatre Company were putting on and for whose programme I was writing this screed – but on the other hand, maybe it didn’t. I had no clue.

On the other other hand, of course, leave us not forget that Fiddler on the Roof was itself based on selected stories written by the same author, so perhaps it’s hardly surprising that a tyro programme writer, which is what I was at the time, may be forgiven for having inadvertently mixed up the sources of the production… except that won’t wash either because Fiddler on the Roof was emphatically not based on stories by Teibele and Her Demon author Isaac Bashevis Singer at all, but rather on the stories of Tevye the Milkman by that other tremendously prominent Russian-born Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem. Bang to rights, QED, game over, man.

Sorry, Mr Aleichem. Sorry, Mr Bashevis Singer. Sorry, Topol. Sorry, Library Theatre Company, Manchester. But it’s not as if anything I wrote was likely to make any difference to the success or otherwise of the show, was it? And that was the life-saving mantra which was to sustain me through many dark nights of the soul over the next couple of years in the job: “Who reads this crap anyway?”