In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine

3. Social Structure of the Soviet Shtetl

57 S 3 “there were sUch great taIlors” In 1924, the Soviet ethnographer Vladimir Bogoraz, better known by his pseudonym V. G. Tan, led an ethnographic expedition to some of the shtetls of Ukraine. Bogoraz’s report on the expedition, published in 1926 as The Jewish Shtetl in Revolution, jubilantly celebrated the victory of socialism during the first decade of the Revolution: “Socialist construction has taken off completely among the Jews,” who, he continued, were working as “stonemasons, coachmen, carpenters, bathhouse attendants, street beggars, ex-convicts, prostitutes, pimps, an entire mass of petty and even pettier traders and, as if to make up for it, two or three wealthy people.” Bogoraz contrasted this situation with the prerevolutionary shtetl, where there lived “Jewish holy people, prophets, and soothsayers; women walked around in wigs; men in long caftans. Elderly people spent the last years of their lives in synagogues in prayer and Bible reading.”1 Bogoraz was, in many ways, returning home—he had left his hometown of Ovruch, where he was born the son of a Jewish schoolteacher in 1865, k Social Structure of the Soviet Shtetl 58 in the shadow of the shtetl in order to attend a gymnasium in Taganrog. There, he had become a revolutionary activist in the People’s Will Party, a crime for which he was imprisoned and exiled to Siberia. In Siberia, he became interested in the Chukchi peoples, studying their folklore and anthropology, and eventually emerging as one of the most prominent ethnographers of his era—beginning in 1897 he collaborated with Franz Boas on the Jesup North Pacific Expedition across the Bering Strait, for five years. After the Revolution, Bogoraz returned to St. Petersburg, where he became a professor of ethnology at the Leningrad Geographical Institute. It was in this capacity that he led his 1924 expedition to the region in which he was born. His optimistic impressions of the pace of revolutionary change, though, were tempered by ambivalence about the social costs of change, as he observed stonemasons and carpenters coexisting with pimps and beggars. Indeed, despite the impetus to celebrate the achievements wrought by a decade of communist rule, Bogoraz and his team could not but note the sorry economic state of the contemporary Soviet shtetl. Few of the people we interviewed were old enough to have been working before the war—most had just finished their schooling when the Germans invaded—but the picture they paint of their parents’ livelihoods demonstrates that the factory jobs the Revolution had promised had yet to materialize. Traditional Jewish occupations continued to dominate the Podolian shtetls and surrounding cities. The evidence suggests that at least in the small towns, few adults had managed to fulfill the educational dreams of their youth. Whereas prior to the Revolution and Civil War the shtetls had been full of young people eager to engage with the world, become educated and cultured, and live better lives as members of the “free professions”—doctors, lawyers, dentists, or even writers or actors—by the first decade of Soviet rule, many of those with ambitious dreams had either left the shtetl or abandoned those dreams in the face of a stark reality.2 Although education and the pursuit of a professional life remained an ideal in the Soviet shtetl, the vast majority continued to work in traditional handicrafts and trade.3 According to the 1926 census, Jews constituted 74 percent of all artisans in Tulchyn and 69 percent of all artisans in Vinnytsya district.4 Put differently, 29 percent of all Jews in Tulchyn and 34 percent in Vinnytsya were artisans.5 Jews also dominated the trade and credit industries—ac- Social Structure of the Soviet Shtetl 59 cording to census figures, Jews constituted 64 percent of the trade and credit industry in Tulchyn and 60 percent in Vinnytsya. In Tulchyn as well, 59 percent of coachmen and porters were Jewish, and 37 percent of those in the free professions were Jewish. On the other hand, only 5 percent of Jewish workers were engaged in agriculture, and only 3 percent of railroad workers were Jewish. Jews also comprised only 20 percent Berdichev Ivanopil Kozyatyn Khmilnyk Kalynivka Lityn Vinnytsya Zhmerynka Bar Derazhnya Miedzyboz Pogrebishche Lypovets Ilnytsya Nemyriv Raygorod Haysyn Teplyk Sobolivka Bershad Chechelnyk Trostyanets Pishchanka Kryzhopil Vapnyarka Tomashpil Yampil Mohyliv-Podilskyy Sharhorod Shpykiv Pechera Bratslav Tulchyn Chernivtsi BERDICHEV DISTRICT PROSKUROV DISTRICT VINNYTSYA DISTRICT UMAN DISTRICT TULCHYN DISTRICT MOGILEV DISTRICT BILA TSERKVA...