This rich, varied collection of sources on Jewish life in the tsarist empire strives to “bridge the conventional divide between the discourse of intellectual elites and the social ideals and experiences that guided the behavior of ordinary people,” according to the introduction. To build this bridge, the editors have collected and translated rabbinic responsa in Hebrew, personal narratives in Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish, and unpublished police reports and judicial proceedings in Russian, all subsumed under the amorphous category of “everyday life.” Though ungainly, Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia is a monumental project that rewards the persistent reader with intimate glimpses of the tsar's diverse Jewish subjects at the tumultuous turn of the twentieth century.
The first section, entitled “The Diversity of Religious Experience,” highlights several of the volume's strengths. Sources in multiple languages provide varied perspectives on Jewish life, most notably on the empire's flourishing hasidic courts. The tzaddik Duvid Twersky of Tal'noe (Yiddish: Tolne) had a “delicate voice that filled the entire expanse of the hall, with each word burning like fire, amazing the audience. The content of the ‘Torah’ was beside the point,” according to the Tolne court cantor, Pinhas Minkovsky (69). Yet the next entry, a series of government reports about R. Duvid's activities found in the Ukrainian state archives, which eventually led to his house arrest, provides a sobering reminder of the real constraints on the charismatic leader's power. Another major strength of the volume highlighted in this section is its insights into the workings of gender in hasidic society. In the memoirs of Ita Kalish, daughter of the Vurke (Warka) tzaddik, hasidic women emerge as unexpectedly worldly: efficient court managers and breadwinners who are drawn to fashion and secular literature despite being marginalized in public religious ritual. How these testimonies can be said to reflect everyday life is a bit unclear; yet they shed much light on religious subcultures.
The next pages take us out into market squares, taverns, and brothels. Odessa money changers set up each day on street corners behind small green tables with wooden boxes filled with silver coins and ruble notes. Pogroms erupt in market squares and Jewish-run taverns with increasing, alarming frequency. A mob of Jews breaks into a courthouse and abducts a young female Jewish would-be apostate. State-appointed doctors inspect taverns, brothels, and the bodies of the prostitutes who work there, and cannot suppress their shock and disdain. In more rarefied settings, rabbinic ritual decisors (poskim) consider whether a man who feels he has been duped into marrying an insane woman, or another whose wife has stolen money and is now on the run, can be permitted to remarry.
A major identifiable theme of the anthology is the process of Jewish modernization, which might have served as a better organizing principle. Pediatricians confidently prescribe remedies for adolescent moodiness or masturbation that seem little more enlightened than those of the charm books of old. The proto-Zionist Moshe Leib Lilienblum candidly describes the ways in which sexual dysfunction and rationalist literature helped estrange him from the Jewish tradition. Several documents show how secular-oriented Jewish schools attempted to meet (and stimulate) demand for a more worldly curriculum. Some Jews beat the odds and found their way into Russian universities and, eventually, the liberal professions. But the specter of anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish violence was ever present. One begins to sympathize with the young men and women who joined the Jewish socialist party known as the Bund to battle “the shameful exceptional laws for Jews,” (561) and one gains a better understanding of Jewish socialist terrorists who, like Mariia (Mania) Shkol'nik, “firmly resolved to run away and join with weapons in hand to struggle for the freedom of my oppressed country” (579).
A running narrative consisting of brief editorial introductions to documents with references to the modernization process would have greatly eased the reader's effort and lent more coherence and structure to the volume. One might also lament certain lacunae, such as the felt absence of the famous Lubavitcher dynasty or the relative neglect of Jews living in the tsar's more urbanized and industrialized Kingdom of Poland. The latter shortcoming is given symbolic expression in the Russified spellings of Polish town names; even more so on a map of Jewish settlement in the introduction that erroneously lops off the whole Suwalki District of the Kingdom of Poland and posthumously awards it to the Russian Pale of Settlement. But Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia adds immediacy, depth, texture, and volume to a historiography that is often weakened by nostalgic and sensationalistic framings. Its rich and varied sources are a gift to be cherished by those interested in a fresh, unvarnished view of what was once the world's largest Jewish community.
