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1 Family Background When I was growing up, none of my relatives from Europe ever discussed with me what their lives in the Old Country had been like, nor did they mention what had happened to the family members who remained there. Even in later years, when I discussed my family background with members of my parents’ generation , all born in the United States, they came up with remarkably little information about life in Europe or even about the immigrant experience. In retrospect, it is easy enough to understand why. During the late nineteenth century my great-grandparents on my mother ’s side, Joseph Tzvi Barnatsky and Dvorah Barnatsky, lived and worked in a rural region near Bialystok. Located about 105 miles northeast of Warsaw, Bialystok was a medium-sized city in Poland, a nation then under Russian rule. Both of these great-grandparents were Jewish. Joseph Tzvi, the son of Meyer Barnatsky, had a brother and a sister. Dvorah had three brothers—all of whom had adopted different last names as a means of staying out of the Russian army. Renting a water mill from a rich Polish landowner, Joseph Tzvi Barnatsky provided a good living for his family as a local grain miller. It was a successful business and, in fact, the Barnatsky family rented the mill for many generations. In addition to the mill, the site contained a kretchma (an inn, though perhaps just a saloon) and milk cows. For most people residing in nineteenth-century Russia, life was difficult and sometimes quite brutal. Politically, Russia was a czarist autocracy, with the population kept in line by secret police, Cossack cavalry, a powerful Orthodox Church, prisons, near slavery (for peasants), and forced labor in Siberia (for political dissidents). Economically, Russia lagged far behind its West European counterparts, and—although industrialization gathered momentum in a few 2 Family Background areas during the 1890s—the country remained largely characterized by a feudal agricultural system. Socially, Russia was also quite backward, with vast power in the hands of the tiny, wealthy nobility and the largest public constituency, the peasantry, bound to the land by serfdom. Even after the formal emancipation of the serfs in 1861, many Russian peasants endured lives of poverty, hunger, illiteracy, disease, and superstition. Russia’s Jewish population faced a particularly harsh existence. During the late eighteenth century, Russia annexed large portions of Poland and, thus, for the first time, acquired a substantial number of Jewish residents. Responding to this acquisition, the government of Czar Nicholas I (1825–1855) made antiSemitism official policy by putting into place a broad range of anti-Jewish decrees and laws. Almost all Jews were officially confined to the Pale of Settlement in western Russia and barred from exercising many rights available to Christians, such as owning land. Jews became subject to compulsory military service, with the drafting of boys as young as eight and a term of service of twenty-five years. Although the status of Jews improved considerably under the liberalizing influence of Czar Alexander II, who came to power in 1855, their situation deteriorated dramatically after his assassination in 1881. Numerous bloody pogroms—outbreaks of Christian mob violence against Jewish communities —swept the Pale, often without hindrance by local authorities. Indeed, the new czar, Alexander III, was a staunch reactionary who battled against political or social liberalization and worked at fostering widespread “folk antiSemitism ,” particularly the idea of the Jews as Christ-killers. His “May Laws” of 1882 banned Jews from all rural areas and towns of fewer than 10,000 people, even within the Pale, and set severe limits on the number of Jews allowed to enter secondary schools, higher educational institutions, and many professions. Bialystok, the urban center near the home of the Barnatskys, was located within the Pale and had a heavily Jewish population. After Russia’s incorporation of Poland, its new anti-Semitic laws brought about a marked deterioration in Bialystok’s economic situation. Expelled from neighboring villages, masses of Jews, many of them homeless or unemployed, crowded into the city. Even so, Bialystok’s economic conditions improved somewhat in the late nineteenth century, largely thanks to the development of the city’s textile industry. Many of the new textile mills and other small business enterprises were owned by Jews, and their growing workforce was also heavily Jewish. By 1895 the Jewish population of the city had reached 47,783, 76 percent of its residents. During the 1890s, Bialystok was a thriving center of the...

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