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NOTES One: To Freedom 1. Shte/Is were small Jewish towns or villages within the "Pale of Settlement." From the Latin pal1l5 meaning stake, the "Pale" describes an area in czarist (Imperial) Russia in which Jews were allowed to establish permanent residency. An area of approximately 386,000 square miles (about the size of Texas and New Mexico combined ), its boundaries and population of Jews shifted over time. By 1835, the Jews of Russia had been forced to live in the twenty-five provinces of the so-called "Pale of Settlement": Lithuania, Byelorussia, the southwestern provinces (the Ukraine), and parts of Poland-an area extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea. According to Yiddish poet Moishe Glaser, shtells were distinguished by four essential characteristics : "( 1) me5techk~legal permission to be a community; (2) three minyans (literal translation 'count,' is a traditionally mandated quorum of ten Jewish men-thirteen years of age or older-required for public worship) to support a rabbi and a prayer house; (3) a cheder-Jewish elementary school; (4) a men:hatz-public bath." All records were destroyed after Nazis invaded the village in 1942, murdered the remaining Jewish residents, and buried them in a mass grave. (Barry Antler, "Ladyshinka, Ukraine," The Wandering Jew [blog), www.mywanderingjew.blogspot.com.) 2. Revizskaya Skazka (Revision List), June 26, 1818, Kiev Province, town of Uman, translated by Alex Dunai, 2012. 3. Irving Howe, World ofOur Fathers: The Journey of the Eastern European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), 10; Chester G. Cohen, Shtetl Finder Gazetteer: Jewish Communities in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries in ti,e Pale ofSettlement ofRussia and Poland, and in Lithuania, Latvia, Galicia, and Bukovina, with Names of Residents (Westminster, MD: Heritage Books, 2007), 37. 4. Khazars were semi-nomadic, culturally distinct Turkic people who established a stronghold in Eurasia from the latter part of the sixth century through the beginning of the eleventh century. Their medieval Khazar Empire occupied portions of present-day Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Georgia, Crimea, Turkey,and the northern part of the Caucasus Region, which is located between the Black and Caspian Seas. Also known as Khazaria, it was a link to the Silk Road and a major trade route between the Middle East and Northern Europe. s. Weakened by local feuds and Mongol invasions, Ukraine subsequently was ,8, THE HARNESS MAKER'S DREAM taken over by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and then by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the mid-seventeenth century after an uprising against the Poles, a new Ukrainian state was established. 6. Uman revisions lists from 1818, 1850, and 1858. Places of registration noted in revision lists-official documents which updated Russian tax and military rollswere often different from place of residence. 7. Leaders in the American South used a similar technique to keep poor whites under control by touting their superiority to African Americans. 8. Howe, World ofour Fathers, 11. 9. After Czar Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible) conquered the town ofPolotsk in 1563, he was asked what to do with the Polotsk Jews. "Those who consent to baptism are to be baptized," he replied. "Those who refuse are to be drowned in the Polot River." During his seventeenth century invasion of Poland, Czar Alexei ordered the massacre of Polish Jews. A century later, Czarina Elizabeth (1741-1762) expelled all Jews from Russia, allowing them to return in the future only if they adopted the Russian Orthodox religion. Evan R. Chesler, The Russian Jewry Reader (New York: Behrman House, 1974), 15-21; Jacob Frumpkin, ed., Russian Jewry (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1966),87. 10. Chesler, The Russian Jewry Reader, 20. 11. Howe cites My Past and Thoughts author Alexander Herren who further describes the fate of those boys as"... one of the most awful sights I have ever seen ... boys of twelve or thirteen might have survived it, but little fellows of eight and ten ... were going to their graves." Howe, World ofOur Fathers, 6-7. 12. Ibid. 13. Revizskaya Sknzkn (Revision List), May 22,1858, Kiev Province, town of Uman; Revizskaya Skazka (Revision List), October 30,1850, Kiev Province, town of Uman, translated by Alex Dunai, 2012. 14. Howe, World ofOur Fathers, 7-8. 15. A bomb tossed by Ignacy Hryniewiecki, an impoverished Pole from a privileged class, killed Czar Alexander II. Hryniewiecki, who was killed in the attack, was a member of the Narodnaya Volya (The People's WiIl)-an ethnically and socially diverse...

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