The Long Life and Swift Death of Jewish Rechitsa: A Community in Belarus, 1625–2000 by Albert Kaganovitch (review)

Albert Kaganovitch has written the definitive biography of Jewish Rechitsa, a typical town on the Dnieper River at the crossroads of Belorussia, Russia, and Ukraine, providing a meticulously researched analysis of the life and death of one “Jewish” mestechko in Eastern Europe. As in many shtetls, Rechitsa’s Jewish population grew and developed together with the region as a whole; as one minority among several ethnic groups, Rechitsa’s Jews experienced economic development, geographic partition, political revolutions, war, state persecution, the decline of autonomy, and more. Rechitsa counted 134 Jews in 1789 (13.3 percent of the population) and 7,499 Jews in 1917 (59.1 percent). By 1947 the Jewish population stood at 3,800 (18.8 percent), and in 2000 at only 294 (0.4 percent).

Kaganovitch traces almost every aspect of Rechitsa’s Jewish history, from early settlement, economic development under the tsars, Stalinism, flight or murder during World War II—and progressive disappearance up to the present. There was nothing extraordinary about the town: the only major religious figure to emerge from Rechitsa was Sholom Dov-Ber Shneerson (1840[?]–1908), who by the end of the nineteenth century had made the town into one of the major centers of Chabad. No major literary or historical figures ever came from Rechitsa (Chaim Weizmann was from nearby Motol). As Kaganovitch writes,

Despite its favorable location on the bank of the Dnieper, due to historical circumstances Rechitsa did not develop into a major city, for many Belorussian towns and shtetls were situated on rivers. From the perspective of Jewish history, Rechitsa is distinguished in that in 1941 it was almost the last place in Belorussia to be occupied by the Germans, which thus allowed many Jewish residents to flee to the East. After the war they returned and managed to influence the preservation of the town’s prewar Jewish landscape, especially in its old urban districts, despite the fact that the proportion of Jews in Rechitsa had decreased during the war from a quarter of the population to one fifth (p. 7).

So why study the history of this non-descript place in the middle of the Pale of Settlement? Kaganovitch argues that doing so documents how Jewish life developed over the centuries, as well as how tensions between Jews and Christians evolved. Kaganovitch’s focus on the continuities and discontinuities creates “a comprehensive picture” and traces “the dynamics of change” (p. 10). It is precisely in nuanced ordinariness that Kaganovitch seeks the nature of Jewish life in Eastern Europe under Poland-Lithuania, the Russian Empire, and the USSR. He thus contributes to wider debates on the nature of central power, local authorities, Jewish institutions, and family life. Following John Klier, Kaganovitch argues that Jewish history cannot be presented as “an infinite sequence of confrontations with non-Jews”; contrary to the Russian administrative view (and that of neo-nationalists today) blaming the Jews for the difficult economic circumstances of the peasants, Kaganovitch demonstrates that “with the exception of a few aggravations, inter-ethnic relations in Rechitsa were marked by tolerance” (p. 11).

Kaganovitch musters four main categories of documentation: Jewish sources, including newspapers, memoirs, letters, oral histories, and family histories; general printed sources, including Russian periodicals, travelers’ accounts, memoirs, statistical reports, and the like; archival material in Belarus, Russia, and Israel (generally administrative); and interviews with immigrants from Rechitsa in Israel, the U.S., Germany, and Canada. Organized both chronologically and thematically, the book covers most relevant features of Jewish history in Eastern Europe: the Khmielnitsky campaigns and Muscovite invasion; the decline of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth with the hard times that process entailed in the eighteenth century; nineteenth-century Russian rule, the spread of Hasidism, the abolition of the kehilla system of self-government, and official Russification; secularization, the attraction of some Jewish youth to the revolutionary movement, emigration to America...