The Long Life and Swift Death of Jewish Rechitsa: A Community in Belarus, 1625–2000

Transliteration Notes and Territorial Definitions

To make it easier for the reader, I have used familiar Anglicizations of the names of well-known figures like Khmelnitsky, Nicholas II, Trotsky, and Gorky. Given names like Maria and Iulia are rendered without the extra “i” that a strict transliteration requires. Given names such as Alexander and Eugenie have been left in their familiar Anglicized forms. For other proper names, as well as for place names, with the exception of those already in common use in the West, I have followed the standard transliteration model set by the Library of Congress, except that in the text I have not used diacritical marks. In my text, for the biggest territorial units, województwo, in the PolishLithuanian period, and guberniia, in the Russian period, I use “voivodship” and “province,” respectively. For medium-sized territorial units I use their original names—Polish-Lithuanian powiat, Russian uezd, Soviet okrug until 1926, and then raion. For the smallest territorial units I use the Polish-Lithuanian starostwo and the Russian volost’. The names “oblast” and “krai,” on the other hand, are retained unchanged in the text. Together they designate some of the principal territorial administrative units in the Soviet system and survive at least in name in the post-Soviet Russian Federation. Oblasts, for instance, are in many cases the administrative replacements of former guberniias and outwardly resemble US states or German Länder. A “krai” is one of six thinly populated territorialadministrative -political subdivisions of Russia, often a border region such as the Maritime Krai in the Far East. xiii Transliteration Notes and Territorial Definitions The Long Life and Swift Death of Jewish Rechitsa ...