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Jewish Spaces 167‘Nye, Nye [No, No],’ interrupted Benjamin impatiently from where he sat. ‘He thinksyou’re asking about a person named Israel, not about the land.’ . . . The peasant spat, toldthem both to go to the Devil, and drove away muttering: ‘Eres-Srul, Eres-Srul!’ 5Peretz, particularly in his socialist period, had more sympathy with the peasantry.In the short story Dos shtrayml (The Fur Hat, 1893) the narrator, a tailor,remarks that he enjoys making peasant coats, since ‘the peasant gives us bread, hedoes hard and bitter work in the summer and I cannot protect him from the sun,so he should at least be protected from the cold, during the winter, when herests’. 6Non-Jewish servants working in Jewish households also appear in many stories.Shalom Aleichem describes Hapke, a Ukrainian maid in a Jewish household:‘Hapke spoke Yiddish like a Jew and used in her speech a mass of phrases in loshnkoydesh[literally “holy language”: Jewish religious terms, usually derived fromHebrew or Aramaic]. When she spoke of Hveydor [another servant], she referredto him as a kapoernik [a derogatory term for a non-Jew]’. 7The treatment of Christianity, whether in its Roman Catholic or its RussianOrthodox version, is for the most part negative, although some distinctions aredrawn. Thus, one does sometimes find sympathetic portraits of enlightenedhigher Catholic clergy, particularly in the period before 1881.Peretz sharply contrasted the pre-modern period, when religious coexistencehad been a feature of shtetl life and the modern period, when antisemitismbecame the stock-in-trade of the parish priest. He describes the change in hisstory ‘Der drong’ (The Pole):Previously there had been a good priest, roly-poly, smiling, with red cheeks and laughinggrey eyes . . . He was friendly with the Jews . . . He used to lend a rouble from time to timeagainst some pawn and without high interest . . . Before the sabbath and holidays he was aredeemer and saviour . . .While the old priest had maintained good economic relations with the Jews, the new onewas an antisemite who promoted the anti-Jewish boycott in his sermons.He often referred to that story, the old tale of the hanged man [i.e. Jesus] . . . ‘Be careful,’he says, ‘you should not deal with any Jew, neither buy nor sell.’ If they don’t listen, herefuses confession, won’t grant absolution. ‘Let their souls burn in hell for ever,’ he says. 8We also have non-Jewish (predominantly Polish) descriptions of the shtetl,both positive and negative. In the Polish literature of the Enlightenment, discussionsof the shtetl are primarily used to explain the backwardness and destitutionof Polish towns, for which the Jews are frequently held responsible. Such is thetreatment of the shtetl in Ignacy Krasicki’s Pan Podstoli (Mr Pantler; 3 pts, 1778,1784, 1803) and Micha≥ Krajewski’s Podolanka w stanie natury wychowana (A Girl5Abramowitsch, The Brief Travels of Benjamin the Third, 334.6Peretz, Complete Works (Yid.), vi: For Great and Small [Far kleyn un groys], 130.7Shalom Aleichem, Works (Yid.), xvi. 92.8Peretz, Works (Yid.), vii: Pictures and Sketches [Bilder un skitsn], 210–11.
168 Jewish Spacesfrom Podolia Raised in a State of Nature, 1784). This view of the shtetl persistedin the literature of the early nineteenth century, permeated as it was by the principlesof the Enlightenment. Thus, in the novel Podróż do Ciemnogrodu (A Trip toBackwoodsville, 1820), by Stanis≥aw Kostka Potocki, chairman of the Council ofState and of the Council of Ministers during the Duchy of Warsaw and ministerof education in the Kingdom of Poland between 1815 and his death in 1821, thetraveller passes through ‘muddy unpaved streets, covered with boards here andthere, low houses, only a tenth of them made of brick, Jews and beggars everywhere. . . ill-built muddy towns, full of monasteries and Jews’. 9There were also more positive Polish versions. The romantic novelist JózefIgnacy Kraszewski, in his Latarnia czarnoksięska (The Magic Lantern, 1844),focuses on the attractive features of the shtetl: ‘And do you know what makesevery town Polish? The Jews. When there are no more Jews, we enter an aliencountry and feel, accustomed as we are to their good sense and services, as ifsomething were not quite right.’ 10It is the interwar writer Ksawery Pruszyński who in 1937 gave the classic sentimentaldescription of the Polish noble town in his account of Krzemieniec(Kremenets):Here it stands before me, Krzemieniec the jewel, the most beautiful of Polish towns andhow Polish it is. In the depths of the ravine, former nobleman’s houses, bulging and white,with columns and with dark eyes for windows, in the crush of streets converge the Jewishhouses with fringed porches around them, like the inn in Pan Tadeusz. There are two typesof Polish towns, those from the Piast period and those from the Jagiellonian period, thewestern and the eastern towns. The former were built by Germans and Italians, the latterby the nobleman and the Jew. Krzemieniec is the purest example of the latter. 11George Orwell has observed that a cliché is the easiest way to convey complexinformation in a condensed manner. In this sense, all these descriptions, howeverclichéd, do have an element of reality. But they hardly begin to describe the complexityof social interactions both within the small town and between it and theoutside world.What was the shtetl like in the nineteenth century? There are a number ofvaluable sources. 12 The memoirs of Yehezkel Kotik are particularly useful. Onenew development in the shtetl which he highlights is the impact of hasidism, towhich Aksenfeld also alluded. Even in his home town of Kamenets in the provinceof Grodno, hasidism found many followers, including his own father, who brokewith his family to become a follower of the tsadik of Kobrin. As Kotik pointsout, in traditional rabbinic Judaism prestige was measured by ‘lineage of wealthand lineage of learning’. Hence, ‘the penniless and the illiterate felt degraded9Potocki, Podróż do Ciemnogrodu, i. 29, 146.10Kraszewski, Latarnia czarnoksięska, 271.11Pruszyński, Podróż po Polsce.12Kotik, Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl. Also very useful is Lukin and Khaimovich (eds.), 100evreiskikh mestechek Ukrainy, i and ii: Podolia.
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