In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine

Introduction

xiii k I N T R O D U C T I O N When I first started searching for Jewish life in the small towns of Eastern Europe, the shtetls of Yiddish lore, I thought I would find only cemeteries and dilapidated homes, lifeless remnants of a vanished community . Instead, over the last decade, in dozens of shtetls throughout Eastern Europe, I have taken part in oral history interviews with nearly four hundred Yiddish-speakers, who have shared their memories of Jewish life in the prewar shtetl, their stories of survival during the Holocaust , and their experiences of living as Jews under communism. This book recounts some of their stories. The story of how the Holocaust decimated Jewish life in the small towns, the shtetls, of Eastern Europe is well known. But it is a story that has been told exclusively by those who left—for America, Israel, or the major cities of the Russian interior—during or immediately after the war. These writers long assumed that nothing remained of the shtetls they abandoned; they variously portray their hometowns as “lost,” “vanished ” or “erased.”1 The shtetl has always been presented as an erstwhile space, an ur-homeland from which the Jewish people emerged. Sometimes this emergence is presented as a physical migration, as in “from the shtetl to the suburbs,” and sometimes as an ideological awakening, as in “from the shtetl to socialism,” and often as both.2 It is a tragic reality that the Nazis destroyed most of small-town Jewish life in Eastern Europe, murdering millions of Jews in the process, and leaving only vestigial remnants of what had once been vibrant market towns. Yet xiv IntroductIon tens of thousands of small-town Jews survived the war—in hiding, in evacuation, or in ghettos and camps—and then returned to rebuild their hometowns. Living in the shadows of the shtetl, they rebuilt their lives, reconstructed their communities, and refashioned their memories . These small-town communities, which survived mostly in Soviet Ukraine, were completely unknown to the outside world until the fall of the Iron Curtain.3 Their continued existence, and the way their residents remember the last century, complicates the traditional narrative of twentieth-century Jewish history. The assimilated Soviet Jewish intelligentsia based primarily in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and occasionally in Odessa or Kiev, has come to define Soviet Jewry for the world.4 Memoirs and biographies of Soviet Jewish refusniks, dissidents, scientists, engineers, teachers, and commissars give the impression that they represented the extent of the Soviet Jewish community, and help perpetuate the image of the Soviet Jew as a dissident intellectual.5 Scholarly writings on the Jewish experience in the twentieth-century Soviet Union also focus overwhelmingly on big-city life in general and on the elite in particular.6 This trend culminated with Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century, an influential and provocative text that frames the twentieth-century Jewish experience as one of movement from the peripheral shtetls to the very center of cultural, economic, and political life.7 Historians have privileged upwardly mobile Jews who reached the pinnacles of power; those who remained in their ancestral lands, often languishing in poverty, have been left out of the historical record.8 Jewish collective memory has imagined the shtetl as a foil, or simply a wellspring from which Jewish modernity emerged. The Jewish cobblers, market-stall proprietors, barbers, and collective farmers who remained in the small towns and rural areas of Eastern Europe until the dawn of the twenty-first century were conveniently forgotten; they did not conform to the nostalgic image of “the shtetl” with its “simple and pious way of life” that inspired numerous works of literary fiction, Broadway plays, Hollywood films, and academic scholarship. This study follows the lives of a cohort of individuals, all of whom were reared in the shtetls during the early years of the Soviet Union and were just starting out their adult lives when the world as they knew it was shaken and eventually destroyed with the Nazi invasion. The oldest were born in the midst of the First World War and the violence of the IntroductIon xv Russian Revolution and Civil War. Many lived with traumatic memories of those early childhood moments their entire lives. Once the fighting subsided in 1921, they witnessed a period of intense change and material shortage as a new communist government overturned the social fabric of...