Profiles of a Lost World. Memoirs of East European Jewish Life before World War II (review)

THE JEWISH QUARTERLYREVIEW,XCII, Nos. 1-2 (July-October, 2001) 247-249 HIRSZ ABRAMOWICZ. Prof les of a Lost World.Memoirs of East European Jewish Life before World WarII, trans. Eva Zeitlin Dobkin, eds. Dina AbramowiczandJeffreyShandler.Detroit:WayneStateUniversityPress, 1999. Pp. 385. This aptly-namedbook was firstpublished in Yiddish in 1958 as Farshvundenegeshtaltn : zikhroynesun siluetn. Its authorwas a Jewish educator and journalist whose career began in Tsarist Russia, continued into the period of Polish independencebetween the wars, andended in America, to which he traveled, fortuitously,in 1939. The volume includes a very helpful introductionto his life and times by David Fishman, who claims that the book was writtenwith "emotionalrestraintandintellectuality,"as befits a trueLitvak(LithuanianJew). It is furtherenhancedby a moving memoir written by Abramowicz's daughter, Dina, the much-beloved librarianof Yivo in New YorkCity. Hirsz Abramowiczwas a splendidrepresentativeof the new nationalintelligentsia thatplayed such an importantrole in Russian Jewish life in the pre-WorldWar I era. He possessed a good Jewish and secular education, acquired at the Jewish Teachers Institute of Vilna and the University of Kharkov. Inevitably, he became involved in Jewish politics, first as a Bundist sympathizerandeventually as an advocateof the FreelandLeague, a small territorialistgroupactive in Polandand elsewhere in the 1930s. He reveals his political radicalism by referring,now and again, to the hypocrisy of the "Jewish bourgeoisie." But he was above all an educator, who devoted his considerable energies to the cause of Jewish vocational training in Vilna (Wilno, Vilnius) and elsewhere. Rather atypically, he had a great interest in and knowledge of Jewish agriculturallife in the old Russian Empire,andhis daughterremarksthathis "love of the landwas one of the majortraitsof Father'spersonality"(p. 20). The essays included in this volume were first published in various preand post-warjournals and collections, and inevitably they vary greatly in quality. Some are ratherslight biographicalsketches of various Jewish luminariesof the "lost world"of Jewish EasternEurope.Of these I foundthe essay on the great Jewish sculptor Mark Antokolsky particularlyinteresting , not because it adds very much to our knowledge of this importantartist butbecause of its apologetic tone andits effortsto claim Antokolsky for Jewish culture. Abramowicz notes, approvingly, that in 1902 the official rabbi of Vilna went so far as to compare Antokolsky to anothergreat LithuanianJew , the Gaon of Vilna, and described him as "a fervent Jew and fervent patriotof all that was best andmost beautiful in Russian literature, 248 THEJEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW art, and culture"(p. 256). Abramowicz also claims, although he offers no evidence, that "Antokolsky was religiously inclined. He did not work on the Sabbath"(p. 252). Along the same lines, in his very interestingaccount of a Jewish literary gathering in Odessa in 1904 the authortells us that Bialik detected Jewish qualities in the workof the Russian landscapeartist Isaac Levitan-he quotes the Hebrewpoet as saying that "his sadness and loneliness areJewish" (p. 167). Historians and other scholars of East European Jewish life will find Abramowicz'sethnographicstudies, and his account of the Germanoccupation of LithuaniaduringWorldWarII, particularlyvaluable. His article on ruralJewish occupationsin Lithuaniaremainsa very useful contribution to Jewish economic history, especially since most scholars have understandablyconcentratedon Jewish economic activities in the city. No less important are his essays on the Lithuanianshtetl and on "The Diet of LithuanianJews," which refers not to their parliamentbut to their eating habits. The authorwas not a trainedethnographer,of course, but he had a sharpeye andsucceeds in conveying in a most vivid fashion the patternsof Jewish life in the villages andsmall towns of the Pale. Particularlyinteresting is his emphasis on the relatively good relations between Jews and gentiles in the periodbefore war,revolution, andthe horrorsof modernnationalism and totalitarianismchanged the situation forever. This Jewish nationalist (but not Zionist) observerinsists that the Jews "lived amicably with theirneighbors,who found them indispensableto their own economic well-being" (p. 42), and even describes how Jews and non-Jews would sit together in the evenings and sharetheir songs, which explains how multilingual songs entered the Jewish repertory.In his study of a Lithuanian shtetl he blames the Lithuanianpriests and intellectuals for spreadingantisemitism , noting that "on the whole, the relationship between Jews and Christiansin the town was very peaceful" (p. 94). The most importantmaterialin this book deals with the period of World WarI, a cataclysmic event...