Anna's Shtetl

7. The Marketplace

Anna’s eclipse of the sun occurred on August 21, 1914, twenty days after Germany had declared war on Russia. Eclipses in those days, as for hundreds of years before, were often regarded as predictors of dire events. If anyone in Korsun regarded the blotting out of the sun as an omen, though, it was not mentioned on that August day so soon after the beginning of war. In Korsun, far from the battle¤elds, it was easy to ignore the possibility of dire events. Even though men were being taken into the Russian army, everyday life was little changed. One center of everyday life in Korsun was the marketplace, where farm met town and Christian met Jew. The farmers in the hamlets and villages in the countryside surrounding Korsun were Christian peasants. Half of the townspeople were Jewish, most of them poor. At the marketplace, the Jews bought farm produce from the Christian peasants, who then had money to spend in town. The peasants spent the money in the shops and stores along the main street and the palace road, almost all of them Jewish-owned. Thus, the money spent by the Jewish women to buy farm produce came back to them and their husbands, at least in part. Of course, this did not change the fact that most of the Jews were poor. The farmers depended upon the town-dwelling Jews to sell them the goods they did not grow or make for themselves—the processed foods, such as sugar, salt, and tea; the manufactured goods, such as cloth and soap; and the re¤ned products, such as kerosene.1 The marketplace sat in Korsun’s southwest quadrant, nestling close to the crossroads of the main street and the palace road. It consisted of a row of three parallel, long rectangular areas, their long sides running north to south. The ¤rst area, closest to the crossroads, made up the eastern edge of the marketplace and was occupied by a wooden building containing both booths and stores. The next rectangle to the west was not a building, but 7 The Marketplace open ground. Finally, next to the open ground was a rectangular area containing a dozen individual wooden stands. The wooden building, a long rectangle, consisted of a row of small, open-fronted booths facing east, sharing a long, common back wall with a row of large stores whose doorways faced west. In the booths, vendors sold pickled or dried ¤sh. Each earthen-®oored booth was only about three feet wide and four feet deep. Its open front was closed at night by pulling down a corrugated metal wall and locking it at the bottom. Anna passed these booths every morning on her way south to the high school. Their open fronts were only a step from the dirt section of the palace road, which ran past the school, and she would sometimes buy the sardine-sized dried smelt, which she would take to school to eat for lunch, together with a piece of bread from home. At these ¤sh booths, the peasants bought nonkosher ¤sh, such as cat¤sh, while the Jews bought kosher ¤sh, such as herring and the smelt that Anna liked. The Jews also bought kaptshonkes—the white¤sh given an arti¤cial gold color and dried until they were as stiff as the winter wash hanging on clotheslines in the attic. A white¤sh was safe to keep unrefrigerated for a week, and most people overcame its rigidity by cooking it to softness with potatoes. Hanging from nails in the booth were strings, each holding ¤ve or six dried ¤sh pierced through the eye sockets. Many of the ¤sh were imported from the Volga River delta, where a factory processed lox, herring , and dried white¤sh for sale all over Russia. Several Korsuners worked in this factory, coming home a few times a year for the holidays. Each of these half-dozen ¤sh booths sold the same kinds of ¤sh. The vendors made a small pro¤t each week, but only because the booths were so small that the rent was minimal. Back to back with the booths were the large stores. All of the stores opened onto a wooden walkway that ran the length of the building and was protected from the rain by an overhang. To reach the walkway, customers walked up from ground level on two wooden steps that also ran the length of the building. The princess’s retainers and...