Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia: Select Documents, 1772–1914

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments It is our pleasure to acknowledge the many institutions and people to whom we owe a debt of gratitude for the completion of this project . This book was published with the generous Collaborative Research Grant provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. This grant made it possible to hire researchers and assistants in the archives and libraries of the former Soviet Union, as well as translators in Israel and the United States. We would especially like to thank our research partners: Leonid Vaintraub (Moscow), Sarunas Liekis (Vilnius), and Agnessa Muktan (St. Petersburg ). We are also grateful to the dedicated translators of Hebrew and Yiddish: Saadya Sternberg and Yuri Vedenyapen respectively. Grants from the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry and the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies Department at Brandeis University helped us to obtain critical documents to fill in the gaps at the end and to defray the cost of indexing. A remarkably generous subsidy from the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford helped to underwrite the production costs. We are also sincerely grateful to the production team at the University Press of New England; to our editor Phyllis D. Deutsch for her sage advice, patience, and constructive suggestions; and to Jeanne Ferris for her remarkable , meticulous copyediting of a book that quoted three languages. We are deeply indebted to Sylvia Fuks Fried, executive director of the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry, for her numerous readings of the book and unwavering support. Sincere gratitude also goes to Jehuda Reinharz, the general editor of the Tauber Institute Series, for his belief in this massive project. I (ChaeRan Freeze) want to thank my colleagues : Paula Hyman of blessed memory, Lois Dubin, Shaul Stampfer, Immanuel Etkes, Eugene Sheppard, Jonathan Decter, and Ilana Szobel; Tauber staff members Miriam Hoffman for administrative support, Eva Gurevich for meticulous reading of page proofs, and Golan Moskowitz for spending hours typing edits, tracking down footnotes, and assisting with the bibliography; my graduate students Patrick Brown, Yana Drozdovski, April French, and Ira Sammuth Krakhman; Yeshaya Metal of yivo; Rena Olshansky and Bernard Olshansky of blessed memory; and my uncle Shin Woong Kim and Grandmother Wi Jun Lee of blessed memory. Olga Litvak’s steadfast friendship, intellectual companionship, and careful reading of the introduction will always be remembered with gratitude. Special thanks to my dear friend Rabbi Ben Zion Gold who read Ita Kalish’s memoirs with me every week to ensure that the translations were correct. I especially appreciated the opportunity to work with my co-author, Jay Harris, whose knowledge of traditional Jewish sources and history made this project immensely richer. Despite his heavy workload, he always came through and was a source of great strength and encouragement . My deepest debt of gratitude goes to my family: my husband, Gregory Freeze, for his profound love, kindness, and patience with my infinite questions about Russian translations ; my darling Sebastian and Natalia for their joyful distractions and reminders to stop working; Katie and Christopher for their kind letters of encouragement; and last but not least my devoted parents, Min Chul and Suk Za Yoo, and brother, Theodore Jun, for my childhood adventures in Ethiopia, a remarkable education , and belief in my choice of Jewish history as my life-time love. My gratitude also goes [xxvi]   Acknowledgments to my sister-in-law Juyeon for her love and friendship. I (Jay Harris) wish to also acknowledge Immanuel Etkes, Michael Silber, and Shaul Stampfer for their interest in this project and the many discussions (many years ago) about it. Olga Litvak’s generous help represents a kindness difficult to repay. My colleagues Shaye Cohen, Rachel Greenblatt, Bernard Septimus, and Ruth Wisse each contributed in different ways to helping bring this project to fruition. My wife, Cheryl, and my kids (to whom this book is dedicated) were an everpresent source of encouragement. Most of all, I want to acknowledge the greatest collaborator anyone could hope for: ChaeRan Freeze. She cheerfully pushed this project forward— taking on more than she bargained for—even as my administrative tasks increasingly pulled me away from it. I hope she can forgive me for all the delays. While a work such as this is never really finished—it could easily be one hundred times longer—it is a pleasure le-varekh ’al ha-mugmar with her. Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia ...