A (0:01)

Welcome to the New Books Network.

B (0:04)

I'm Jonathan Brent, CEO and Executive Director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Many of you know Sam Kassow from the many classes that he has taught at the YIVO Institute over the years, from his participation in both the summer and the winter programs here at yivo. He is a long standing colleague, advisor and spiritual impetus, I might say, to this organization. Sam is a historian of great personal integrity and intellectual accomplishment as well, and has taught regularly in both the summer, the winter program and even in many other ways here, lecturing and participating in numerous programs. It is a privilege now to be able to say that Sam is the visiting research historian of the YIVO Institute, which has been made possible by the generous support of YIVO board members Irene Pletka and Ruth Levine. Sam Castow is the or was the Charles H. Northam professor of History at Trinity College, holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish research. From 2006 until 2013, he was the lead historian for two galleries of the Pauline Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which opened in 2014. Professor Kassow is the author of who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum and the Secret Ghetto, Indiana University Press, 2007, which received the Orbis Prize, the AAA s. And it's too painful to say what all of those letters mean. In any case, this book was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and has been translated into eight languages. Who Will Write Our History? Was also adapted into a documentary film of the same title, directed by Robert Grossman and produced by Nancy Spielberg in 2018. White Goat Press recently published his translation of Warsaw Testament by Ruhl Auerbach, which received the National Jewish Book Award. A child of Holocaust survivors, Professor Kassow was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany, and it is really our great privilege now to have Sam lecture on the shtetl.

A (3:01)

Sam well, I really want to thank you, Jonathan. I want to thank the YIVO for its hospitality this year and Alex and Julia for helping to make this lecture possible. I'm giving this one hour lecture on the shtetl with a certain sense of trepidation since I just taught six classes on the same subject, only got through half of the material, but anyway, I hope I'll be able to cover some of the main points. I often ask myself, why does the shtetl still loom so large in our collective memory now? The Jews weren't unique in tying their collective memory to a place, a certain kind of place, as Russia experienced the political and social turmoil of the 19th and 20th centuries, Russian writers and poets like Fyodor Dostoevsky or Sergei Yesenin looked to the Russian village, the village as their ancestral turf, the true Russian home. As the counterpoint to the alleged corruption of the big cities in France, one used to hear the term La France parfond, the real France, deep France. Yeah, Paris is okay. It's glissy, it's glitzy. But if you're looking for the real France, go to the small towns of the Auvergne. And for us, the shtetl played that same role, even though, in fact, by the interwar years, the city, and not the shtetl, had become the center of Jewish life. Lodz had a couple hundred Jews in 1800. By 1914, it had close to 200,000. Warsaw went from 40,000 Jews in 1862 to almost 400,000 by 1914. The Jewish writers and the community activists lived in the cities. The cities had been the center of the became the center of the newspapers, the political parties. Jews were leaving the shtetl in huge numbers. By 1914, the biggest and the most concentrated Jewish community in the world was on the Lower east side. But still, the shtetl was ours in a way that the big cities were not. It was where we came from, or so many of us thought. Jewish writers look to it for lessons to help us define our sense of peoplehood through periods of rapid change, dislocation and trauma. Many trashed it, others praised it, but it was ours. And after the Holocaust, the shtetl, often reviled and forgotten before the war, came to represent a lost world that had been brutally destroyed. Now, since the shtetl is a subject that's always sparked mixed emotions, I thought it'd be a good idea to start this talk with a song, nostalgic pro shtetl, and then a poem, very critical anti shtetl. First, the song. It's an old war horse. Bells, mein shtettelle Bells. I'll just sing a couple lines of the Yiddish. Bels mein stet ele Bells mein heim ele vu icho meinechinder scheharn fau brach zeitira molgewen in Bells meinstet alle Bells, Bells, my little town Bells, My little home where I spent my childhood years in that poor little house Where I laughed with all the children and every Shabbos I'd run to read by the river bells My little home where I had so many beautiful dreams and now for a Very different take on the shtetl. One of the greatest Yiddish poets, Moshe Lab Halperin, wrote this poem, Zh of mein Haim Zh of my home. And I'll just read you a verse or two and you'll get the drift. So it starts like this. Oh, L of my home, my city, with your church steeple and synagogue and bath, and with your women at the market and your unleashed little Jews, like dogs who go after a peasant coming down with a small basket of eggs from the sass of mountain life in spring awakens in my poor scrap of longing for you, My home, my zlocha. But when I remember with longing that wealthy Rappaport and how he walks with his fat stomach into the synagogue, and PI Yashai Hillel, who could sell even the sun in its shine like a pig in a sack, that's enough to blow out my longing for you within me, just like a light, my home, my zlochev. And then a few verses later, he concludes, but wondrous is our world. A horse in a cart over the field can take a person to the train, which flies like a demon over the fields away, until it brings them to a ship with steerage which takes them off to New York downtown. And this is truly my one consolation that I will not be buried in you, my home, my zlochev. Quite a difference. Now here's another touchy feely song about our old shtetl home. I'm sure all of you have heard it. There's a cozy cheder. The Rebbe, the teacher, is learning little kids, and he's teaching them the Aleph bei's the Alphabet. The kids are gathered around the fireplace as their gentle, caring mulamid is a symbol of Jewish tradition and Jewish continuity. But compare that to Sholem Aleichem's Ich vilnit gein in cheder de Rebbe Shmais. I don't want to go to cheder because the Rebbe always beats us. I don't want to go to Hayter. Or if you've read Yecheskel Kotick's amazing memoir of his 19th century shtetl, which has just been translated into English, he's writing about malamits who beat the kids black and blue in the cheder. So what's going on here? Is our shtetl bel's wonderful Homie? Or is it Zolochev, where Moshe Leib Halpert counts his lucky stars that he made it out of there and landed in New York? So who's right? Well, you remember, maybe the Old Jewish story. Two neighbors were having a fight. They couldn't reach an agreement. They go to the rabbi. The rabbi hears the first neighbor and says, you're right. The second neighbor then states his case. The rabbi hears him and says, you're also right. At this point, the rabbi's attendant, who'd been standing by the whole time, was justifiably confused. But, Rebbe, how can they both be right? And the rabbi thinks about this for a minute before responding, you know what? You're right too. So, yes, obviously, let's be careful of too much shtetl nostalgia, that yearning for an anatefka, poor but proud, a harmonious community steeped in tradition. The literary critic Irving Howe famously called Anna Tefka from Fiddler on the Roof, the Swedish shtetl we never had. Now the reality was quite different. Social division, snobbery, the contempt meted out to those on the bottom of the ichis scale, of the status scale, the tailors, the shoemakers, the poor girls unable to scrape together enough money for a dowry, the people that the poet Itzik Manger said he was writing for. And of course, imagine the aromas of a shtetl on a hot summer day, after a hundred horses did their business in the marketplace, or the periodic fires that swept through the ra ramshackle wooden houses of many shtetls. Little wonder, then, that in the 19th and 20th century, a whole array of critics Jewish enlighteners, so called moskilib, Zionists, Bundes, Soviet Jewish scholars they wrote off the shtetl as a dying community, riven by hypocrisy, by stultifying tradition, by bitter class conflict. But that wasn't the whole story. There was also another side. The reality was much more complex. Yes, the critics certainly had a point. But what they failed to see was that for all of its many problems, the Jewish shtetl in Eastern Europe nonetheless showed a remarkable ability to adapt to changing times, even as the shtetls continued to nurture a deeply rooted Jewish folk culture. A leading Yiddish journalist published a study of his native shtetl that contained many pointed criticisms, but nevertheless, he stressed that shtetl Jews still gave a higher proportion of their disposable income to charity than did Jews in the big cities. If a Jew suffered a major illness, the shtetl would often chip in to send him or her to a larger city for treatment. Other sources attest to this sense of social responsibility. A weekly newspaper of a shtetl near Vilna, where we came from, by the way, ran a not Atypical story about a widow with six children, children who lost her house and who had nowhere to live. The leading householders of the shtetl led a campaign to help her and publicly challenged friends to donate a given sum. Small shtetls gave surprisingly large amounts of money to help the German Jewish refugees who had been kicked out of Poland after Kristallnacht in late 1938. So the shtetl was not all bad. There were positive elements to it right up until the beginning of the war. Now essential to an understanding of how the shtetl work was not just an awareness of the social gradations, but we also have to remember the many safety valves that, you might say counterbalance class tensions. Now again, this was especially true of the shtetl in interwar Poland. A Jew who had a grievance against the community could do a mock of Kriya on Shabbos during the reading of the Torah. He could interrupt the reading of the Torah, get up and demand a public hearing about his particular grievances. If a rich man showed too little social responsibility, if a rich man gave too little to charity, if, if, if he was known as a skinflint, the burial society, the Chevre Kadisha, could even the score by hitting the family with an enormous burial bill. Lowly tailors could assuage the pain of humiliation in the main synagogue, where they got very little respect by starting their own minion, where they could feel honored and respected. Lowly artisans could also become, and did become more assertive, pushing back against their lowly status in shtetl affairs. An important organization in interwar Poland were the so called artisans unions, the Hanferker Fereinen. And one of their songs went like this. Hanferke von alle fachen gleichti ruchen zuiste leibnis mer vonach zolachen geit stolz mutig run faruis Artisans of all trades stand tall don't let them laugh at you anymore Go proudly forward and forget the bad times. Changing values in the interwar shtetl also led to new attention to the role of women in communal life. New women's organizations, for example, called for an end to gender discrimination. In short, when thinking about the shtetl, we should try to avoid sweeping generalizations, either negative or positive. And even though the center of Jewish life shifted elsewhere, on the eve of the war in 1939, they were still home to about 40% of Polish Jewry. And you would have the same proportion in Lithuania and perhaps the same in Soviet Ukraine. And in Belarus, perhaps even a little bit more. So there's an obvious issue right off the bat. How do you define e shtetl? Now, this problem of definition bothers us historians much more than it does literary scholars. For them, a shtetl is what sholem aleichem or Mendele moychar seforim or sholem as happened to say it was. If mendele moychar seforim Sholem Abramovitch preferred to call his shtetls tuniadevk or do nothing, burg kapt or beggar town or glupsk idiotville, that's perfectly okay. But historians understand that Mendele's tunya devka or sholem aleichem's kasrilivka are not real shtetls. While the gentiles are largely absent in the shtetls of our classical Yiddish writers, the economic interdependence of Jews and non Jews, especially in the weekly markets, was the lifeblood of the shtetl economy. The late John Clear compared the task facing the historian in defining ustedl to Hamlet's discussion with Polonius on the shape of a cloud in the sky. Now, a camel, maybe a weasel, maybe it looks like a whale. And to make matters more complicated, there was no such thing as a shtetl in Russian or Polish or Austrian law. What the Jews called the shtetl might be classified as a city, a town, a settlement, or a village. Now, in 1875, the Russian Senate established the legal category of a mestiechka, a small town. Such legal definitions became extremely important in the Pale of Settlement after the Russian government passed the May laws of 1882, which forbade Jews to live in villages. If you lived in a mestechka, you were okay. If you lived in a derevnya or a village, you had to leave. And you remember that from Fiddler on the Roof. So the Jews right to stay in the shtetl, where they'd lived for generations, depended on whether their locale was classified as a town or a village. And as you could imagine, a lot of money changed hands. So Russian bureaucrats could be persuaded to call a shtetl a mystiecko and not a derevna. Now, in Yiddish, we have certain words that we could play with. A darf or a village, a yishev or a rural settlement, a sht or a city, A shtetl, a small city. But the questions that we have to ask ourselves when does a dwarf become a shtetl? When does a village become a shtetl? When does a shtetl become a shtut or a city? I was reading the memoirs of a former partisan, Sholem Holavsky, who grew up in what I would call a shtetl. He grew up in Nezhwez, but he writes that when he became a teacher and he settled in Rock of, he writes, for the first time in my life, I lived in a shtetl. So that shows you that even people who lived in shtetl thought they were living in cities. So I had to come up with my own definition when I was asked to write the article on the shtetl for the Yivo Encyclopedia. And here's the definition that I came up with in defining a shtetl. The following clumsy rule probably holds true. A shtetl is big enough to support the basic network of institutions that's essential to Jewish communal life. At least one synagogue, a mikveh, a cemetery, schools, A framework of voluntary associations or hevras, that perform basic religious and communal functions. The shtetl would also have a weekly market in the market square in the center of town. Usually there was a church on one side of the market built by the local Polish prince to show ownership. So there's a key difference, therefore, between a shtetl and a yishov or a dorf, which did not have that web of institutions. On the other hand, what made the shtetl different from a provincial city, and this is very important, at least I think so, is that the shtetl was what you might call a face to face community. It was small enough for almost everyone to be known by name and nickname. Nicknames could be very brutal, and they perpetuated a system that one observer called the power of the shtetl, to assign everyone a role and a place in the communal universe. So one woman recalled that in her shtetl in the 1930s, there was Ellie Bigbelly, there was Yankel the Hunchback, there was Yussel Latrine, because he always had body odor. A woman who had a child six months after the wedding was called the Beria, or the Wonder Woman. Entire shtetls had nicknames like the Ponnevesz Turkey Gobblers or the Rasein Gluttons. Now, in the shtetl where my parents came from, my grandfather and I'm named after him, had a nickname. His nickname was Shmuel de Americana, Sam the American, because he lived in New York City. But he wanted to go back to the old country. He didn't like it here. He lived in New York before the war. And someone in Israel back in the 60s, during my first visit, told me he remembered how my grandfather would hold court and tell these shtetl Jews about life in America during those long summer Shabbos afternoons when there was little to do. And he said, yeah, I lived in New York. I lived near the El, Nishkentan, Shlofen, Vernon, Val, Dibalen, Flegan, Dikishkes. I lived near the El. But you couldn't follow asleep because the trains would shake your guts. And the bread had no taste. It tasted like cotton. You couldn't take it into your mouth. So let's not feel bad that we're not living in America. This is our home now. The shtetl, as a specific kind of Jewish settlement, begins in the Polish Commonwealth. Now, Julie, here's the picture that's up. And this is a picture of the Polish Commonwealth. And as you see, what was called the Polish Commonwealth, or the is much bigger than Poland is today. The Commonwealth includes Poland. It includes Lithuania. It includes what is today Belarus. It includes much of Ukraine. In 1569, there was a formal union between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the Commonwealth became the biggest country in Europe. Now, here are some statistics that are really amazing. In 1500, on the lands that were going to become the commonwealth, there were about 30,000 Jews. In 1600, there were about 200,000 Jews. The census of 1767 counted close to 750,000 Jews. And then Poland disappeared in the partitions between 1772 and 1795. But on the territories that had been the Commonwealth in 1900, which were now the Russian Empire and the Habsburg Empire and eastern Germany, there were 8 to 9 million Jews. And that doesn't count the Hungarian Jews who were descended largely from Jews migrating south from Galicia. It doesn't count the Romanian Jews in Bessarabia. It doesn't count the Jews who'd gone to the United States. So if you're an Ashkenazi Jew, the chances are 95% that your ancestor comes from the lands of the old Polish Commonwealth. In 1650, only 50% of the Jews in the world were Ashkenazim. By 1939, 90% of the Jews in the world were Ashkenazim. Historians are not clear what accounted for this amazing rise in population. Many say lower infant mortality, better hygienic conditions than the peasantry, Jewish charitable institutions. But there you have it. Now, when we think of Poland today, so often Jews see Poland as a big cemetery. But it's hard to grasp the Fact that for many centuries, Poland played a key role in Jewish life. Poland was home. The great Israeli writer Shai Agnon writes about this story that when the first Jews entered the Polish forests, they saw Hebrew letters on the bark of the trees. And the Hebrew letters spelled out the word polim. Here you shall rest, which is also the Hebrew word for Poland. And in this picture of the origins of the shtetl, as Jews are on their way to Jerusalem, but they stop in the Polish forest, they see the letters on the trees. It's a sign from God you could stay here. This is a safe place, place. And the Polish nobles agreed to protect them. You see this interplay of the temporary and the permanent in this picture of the shtetl, which you also see in Mendela and in Sholem Aleichem. The Jew has one foot in Eastern Europe, but another foot in Jerusalem, where the space and time of the shtetl is again divided between the weekly markets and. And Shabbos, where Jews felt at home. And at the same time, they also felt this bond with the land of Israel. Now I'm talking about the traditional shtetl. Obviously, things changed for many. Not all, but things changed for many in the 20th century. So again, it's hard to convey that sense that Poland was. Was our country. There was a Jewish poet, Arya Shemri, who wrote a very beautiful poem in Yiddishlingen Fundikosis. On the banks of the Vistula, the Bug and the Narev, the Polish rivers. In the sparkle of the morning dew, you could see the words of the Shacher. It's the morning prayer. And as the sighs cut the wheat in the afternoon, you could hear the echoes of Mincha, the afternoon prayer. So the rise of Poland coincides with the major turning point in Jewish history. The expulsion from Spain, the expulsions from Central Europe. Jews going to the Ottoman Empire, to Poland. The Polish kings invite them. There's a legend about the king Kazimierz the Great, who reigned in the 14th century. Can we have the next image, please? And this legend concerns this Polish king who welcomed the Jews. And he was head over heels in love with a beautiful Jewish girl named Esterke, who was the daughter of a Jewish tailor. He couldn't live without her. He built a secret passageway so she could come to the castle and spend time with him. They had four kids. The two sons were raised as Catholics. The two daughters were raised as Jews. So here's a picture of Kazimish and. And Ester. And the Jews like to say that because of Esther, Kazimierz was very good to us. Now, there's a very interesting twist in that legend, which is that Polish chroniclers also recognize that legend. But in the Polish version, Esterka was a wily, cunning, crafty Zudowka, a Jewess who had been put up by the Jewish Kochleffels, by the Jewish bosses to win the heart of this naive, good hearted, trusting Christian king, so that he would turn over Poland lock, stock and barrel to the ids. But in understanding that process whereby Poland became our home, the real game changer was the Polish nobility and especially the big noble families. In no other country did the nobles have more power. And I'm talking really about the noble families at the very top of the pecking order. The Rogervilles, the Potockys, the Zamoyskis, the Lubomirskis, the Chinnavskys, the czartoryskis in the 1770s. I'll just give you one example. The Zamoysky estates included 10 towns, 220 villages and a population of over 100,000. The public revenue of some of these families equal the public revenue of the entire Polish Commonwealth. So let's see the next pictures, please. So this is a picture of Prince Rajavil Panya Kahanku at a reception of which many took place. Next. Next picture. This is a picture of the Potocky palace in Rajin. And Potocky had many such palaces. Now the Polish nobility owned huge tracts of land. And in the aftermath of the Mongol invasions, a lot of this land was empty and desolate. And they wanted to monetize that land, they wanted to turn it into money because Europe was a tempting market. It don't forget that this was the age of discovery. Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, England had discovered the New World, the East Indies, they were building gigantic navies. They needed wood to build those ships. There was a rapid growth in population. They needed grain to feed the cities. They needed salt, which Poland had in abundance to preserve food. Now let's go back to the picture of the Polish Commonwealth. Let's go back to that first picture. And if you look at that map, you see that Poland was blessed with an amazing system of interstate highways. I'm talking about the rivers. Central and northern Poland is largely flat. It's only when you get into the south that it becomes mountainous. So the big rivers of Poland, the Vistula and the Dvina and the tributaries like the Narev and the Bug and then the tributaries below them. It makes it possible to navigate from the middle of nowhere right up to the Ports on the Baltic, like Donzing. So it made it possible to ship lumber and grain and salt to Europe. But who's going to make that happen? The princes? The Polish nobles invited in the Jews because the Jews were safe. Unlike Christians, who could get uppity and get big ideas. The Jews were pariahs. They could never be competitors. So what the nobles did is that they gave the Jews leases. Leasing, or in Polish, the arenda A r e n D A Leasing became this nexus, this. This meeting place of noble self interest and Jewish self interest. A Jew, for example, might lease a Forest for 10 years, and he would then sublease it to other Jews, who would sublease it to other Jews. And they would hire gangs of peasants to cut down the trees. And in the wintertime, they would schlep the trees to the banks of a frozen river on large sleighs, and they build big rafts. And then in the spring, when the river, when the ice melted, they moved the rafts upstream from river to river until they got to Danzig or Konigsberg or Riga. And the nobles would give their Jewish agents shopping lists, the wines, the nice clothes, the jewelry that they would buy ndanzig to bring back to the estate. Now, to attract the Jews, the nobility built company towns. Company towns which we Jews called shtetls. The nobles were the boss. The nobles owned these company towns. And as a sign of that ownership, on one side of the marketplace, they would build their own Catholic church. Now, because the nobility was so strong in Poland, they owned the town. They had jurisdiction, not the Polish state. And over time, in many ways, the shtetls were much better for the Jews than the towns that were not owned by the nobility, which were mainly in western and central Poland. In those towns, Christian merchants were constantly agitating to expel Jews to curb their economic opportunities. And the Catholic Church also had more room to make mischief. But in the noble towns, the noble was the boss. And over time, there were two megatrends. Megatrend number one. More and more Jews moved into the private towns of the nobility. And megatrend number two. The shift was eastward on, over time, eastward into the lands that are today the Ukraine, in Belarus. Now, in all of Jewish history, there's nothing like the shtetl. For all their diversity, the shtetlach in Eastern Europe were different from previous kinds of Jewish diaspora settlement in Babylonia or France or Spain or Italy. In those countries, Jews had been scattered among the general population or they lived on a particular Jewish street. They were rarely a majority, but this was not true of the shtetl, where Jews sometimes comprise 80% or more of the population. And in the shtetls where my parents lived, even in 1939, the Jews were a majority in most Jews occupied most of the town, but they were especially concentrated around the central marketplace. This Jewish life in compact settlements, where Jews often formed a large majority numbers that you didn't see elsewhere. This had an enormous psychological impact on the development of East European jewelry, as did the language of the shtetliddish. While Jews in Germany or France or Spain were not set off from their neighbors by major linguistic differences, the Yiddish speech of the shtetl was markedly different from the languages used by their mostly Slavic neighbors. And while it would be a great mistake to see the shtetl as an entirely Jewish world without gentiles, it's nonetheless true that Yiddish reinforced a profound sense of psychological and religious difference from non Jews. Yiddish was suffused with allusions to Jewish tradition and to religious texts. Yiddish developed a rich reservoir of idioms and folk sayings that reflected a vibrant folk culture, but you couldn't separate it from the religion. So if you want to say, somebody's pretty dumb, the elevator isn't going to the top floor. You might say, he has as many brains as there are mezuzahs in a church. If you want to say he was too late, you could say, el zgekumen noch alenu. He came after the Elenu prayer. If you want to say, a dangerous situation has developed. The gentiles want to run internal Jewish affairs. You might say, spania vilblazen, schuyfer, fonja, Pejorative term for the Russians. They want to blow chauffeur. And then, of course, the Yiddish curses, which we all know, May all your teeth fall out, but may one tooth remain as a toothache. But one of my favorite curses is, of course, you look at someone and you say, you look like a million dollars. And then you wait a couple seconds, and then you add in small change. Now, the shtetl was also marked by occupational diversity. Whereas in Germany or in Babylonia or in Spain, Jews were often found in a small number of occupations in the shtetl, Jewish occupations ran the gamut from wealthy contractors and entrepreneurs to shopkeepers, carpenters, shoemakers, tailors, down to water carriers. And this striking occupational diversity, this contributed to the vitality of shtetl society and to the development of a rich folk culture. This experience of being a majority culture on the local level, the numbers, language, and occupational diversity, it all underscores the particular place of the shtetl as a form of Jewish Diaspora settlement. Now the Jews in Poland enjoyed a large degree of autonomy. Legal disputes between two Jews were largely settled in Jewish courts. The supreme body in Polish Jewry was the so called Council of the Four Lands, the Wad Arba Aretsot, a kind of a Jewish parliament established in 1580. From the Polish point of view, its major obligation was to pay a yearly lump sum to the Polish treasury. But from the Jewish point of view, the council passed rules about business and about personal conduct. The supreme Jewish authority in the shtetl was the Kahal, or the community board. It was not a democracy. It was elected by a clique of the wealthy and the learned. And the kahal supervised the various institutions of the shtetl. It maintained the mikveh, the cemeteries, the educational institutions. The Kahal enforced discipline. That discipline could include corporal punishment. It could include the so called kuna, or the pillory, where you were locked in a pillory in front of the synagogue and Jews might spit on you as they entered. Less frequent, much worse penalty was excommunication, where you were expelled from the Jewish community. And in very, very rare cases, and usually very much in secret, so that the Poles never learned about this. Informers, people who were dangerous to the Jewish community, were actually killed. A fundamental feature of the shtetl was the weekly market. Could we go to the picture of the market? There? There. This is a picture of the interwar market in Kolbushova. The weekly market not just energized the shtetl economy, but it energized the whole surrounding. The economy of the whole surrounding countryside. And this, of course, was an important source of income, not just to the Jews, but to the peasants and to the Polish noblemen. So the market was like a battery. Peasants from 15 to 20 miles around would get up in the middle of the night on market day. They'd hitch their horses, they'd go into the shtetl, they would go to the Jews that they knew. They would sell their products, mainly food and agricultural goods. Once they had money in their pockets, they would then go to Jewish stores and buy what they needed. They then go into the taverns and they would drink. Please show the next picture of the market too. Now, it was in the market that the Jews and the non Jews really came together, and they really knew each other. And as I said, there were kind of two Poles of shtetl time. One was the market. And that's where many Jews made most of their Income for the week, and the other was shabbos. Now, the societies in the shtetl were very, very important. The most important society in terms of its power was the Chevre kadisha, the burial society, because they could decide how much the family had to pay for a burial, and they could enforce social sanctions. But the other societies kind of implemented the commandments of the Jewish religion. Beaker cholim to visit the sick, hakhnosis, orchim, hospitality, hakhnos kala, helping poor girls put together a dowry and a trousseau so they could get married. My grandmother was in the Hafnasis kala. Education was a major determinant of social status. All Jewish boys were expected to learn to read Hebrew and to know enough to participate in the service. But unless a boy came from a Balabatisha family, that is, from a respectable family, or was intellectually gifted, his education stopped short of being able to study Talmud on his own. And this was the real boundary. To continue into a yeshiva was a mark of privilege, and most Jewish kids didn't cross that mark, although adults in the shtetl studied in particular groups, depending on their level of education. Ain Yaakov for the less educated, Vehevra Mishonias for those who had a little bit more education, and then those who could study Talmud. Now, for women, a real game changer was the advent of printing. Books like the Senna Rena, first published in the early 17th century, has gone through 250 editions. It's read now, and it became very popular, and it facilitated women's religious involvement and religious imagination. And by the later 17th century, we see synagogues being built with a larger woman's section. Now, the shtetls were in constant crisis. I'm not telling you anything that you probably don't already know. For example, in the mid 17th century, the Polish Commonwealth was hit by a perfect storm of violence. The Poles call it the putup. You might translate putup as the flood or the tsunami. Between 1648 and 1660, Poland was deluged with the Khmelnytsky Uprising, with the Swedish invasion and with the Russian invasion, the Khmelnytsky Uprising, where a disaffected officer, Bogdan Khmelnytsky, who the Ukrainians see as their George Washington, organized the Greek Orthodox peasants, who today we might call, call Ukrainians and Tartars. And they rose up against the hated Polish landlords and against the Jews, who were the agents of the landlords and who were also hated for many other reasons by the Orthodox peasants, because the Jews distilled the vodka, the Jews ran the taverns. The Jews, of course, found themselves between a rock and a hard place. They had really no choice but to do what the Polish princes told them to do. But during the Chmolnytsky uprising, 20,000 Jews were killed. Entire shtetls were massacred. Meanwhile, the Swedes were rampaging through Poland, killing Jews along the way as well as Poles, while the Russians burned their way into eastern Poland, sacking Vilna. So Poland was absolutely devastated, Absolutely devastated. But then, amazingly, amazingly, the shtetls bounce back stronger than ever. And the fastest growth of shtetls happens in the 18th century. The Polish nobles counted on the Jews to help them rebuild. And this expansion of shtetls, as I said before, takes place mainly in the east, into the Ukraine and Belarus. So let's see the next pictures, please. This is a picture of the Gvozjec synagogue, built in the early 18th century. And look at these beautiful wooden synagogues and ask yourselves, would Jews who were depressed and demoralized by the trauma that they had suffered in the Khmelnytsky massacres, would they be building such structures? Or did this show a sense of optimism and a sense of real rootedness? Okay, next picture. I had the privilege of working in the Poland Museum, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which is now in Warsaw. And one of the most beautiful parts of the exhibit is a reconstruction of the synagogue roof in that 18th century synagogue that you just saw. I mean, the story of the reconstruction is amazing. There's a whole movie about it called Raise the roof. I don't have time to get into that, but again, I asked that question. This is being built in the middle of the Ukrainian steppes, then of course, part of the Polish commonwealth after the trauma of the Cholnitsky massacres. But again, it shows us that the Jews bounced back and that there was a real sense of optimism in the 18th century when exporting grain to Europe was no longer profitable. The Polish nobility used vodka as an excellent hedge against falling grain prices. Instead of shipping wheat to Europe, you sell vodka. You put the Jews in charge of the taverns. The Jews are not going to drink up the product. You keep a sharp eye on how much is being sold. You make sure that Jewish agents police the villages to keep the peasants from distilling their own moonshine, and you make a ton of money. And by the late 18th century century, the sale of vodka became a major Jewish occupation. All, of course, for the ultimate profit of the Polish nobility. Okay, next picture, please. This is a Picture of a Jewish tavern. The Jewish taverns became a staple of rural life in the Commonwealth. The taverns were again another place like the market where Jews and non Jews met, where they exchanged stories. In Poland's great national epic, Pantadeus by the poet Adam Mickiewicz, one of the great characters is the Jewish tavern keeper Yankel, who's also a Polish patriot, who also plays the dulcimer. Now Poland disappears in the late 18th century and the shtetl comes under the sway of new rulers. Russia, the Habsburgs, Prussia. Most Jews end up in Russia. Now, before the 18th century, Russia did not allow Jews in. So the Russians didn't know from Jews. And so you might say the Jews didn't come to Russia. Russia came to the Jews when she took over a big chunk of Poland. And all of a sudden the Russians, who had not seen Jews, had never seen a shtetl, now found themselves stuck with 600,000 Jews. And they didn't know what to do with them. They were horrified when they saw the shtetls. What they saw was these crafty Jews getting the peasants drunk in the taverns and exploiting them and ripping them off. And Russians petitioned the Empress Catherine the Great. Oh my God, Emp. Let the Jews go into Central Russia because they'll eat the peasants alive. And in 1791, Catherine decreed that the Jews would not be able to leave the original Polish provinces. In 1835, Tsar Nicholas I institutionalized this in the so called Pale of Settlement. Okay, the next picture please. This is the Pale of Settlement. It was only abolished in 1917. Now 95% of the Jews, even up to World War I, would be living in the Pale of Settlement. And this had far reaching consequences because the Jews were unable to move. It meant that so many towns and cities in the Pale had overwhelming Jewish majority. Spinsk was 80% Jewish. Legally, Congress Poland or Central Poland was not formally in the Pale of Settlement. But that's another story. One of the worst periods in shtetl history happened during the reign of Nicholas I, when he decided that he would make Jews useful by conscripting them into the Russian army. Kids as young as eight were taken into the army, a total of 70,000. And communities were given quotas. And the communal leaders, faced with a quota, decided that they would take the children of the poor, the Jews who had no power. And as poor people tried to protect their kids by running away and going into slums, Jewish communal leaders hired kidnappers or hoppers to track these kids down. And you could imagine the trauma, the traumatic Memories that you could trace in Jewish folk songs and Jewish folklore. And this was a terrible blow to Jewish social solidarity. The shtetl economy was upended by political and economic changes. Demography, a sevenfold increase of Jewish population in the 19th century, the Old shtetl safety net that could not handle this increased population. So you had mass migration to the cities and overseas. The emancipation of the serfs in the 1860s and the crushing of the Polish uprising of 1863 impoverished the the Polish nobility. The railroads were a game changer. They upended markets, they changed the way the economy worked. Shtetls on a railroad quickly turned into cities. Shtetls that were bypassed by the railroads often languished. We see the beginning of mass migration to the United States. We see the transformation of the Jewish cultural universe. The rise of Hasidism, which changes the social topography of the shtetl. New places of worship, new Hasidic networks parallel to the old shtetl networks. We see the rise of the Jewish Enlightenment with Yiddish and Hebrew literature, newspapers, the theater. All this creates new role models. By 1914, there are daily Yiddish newspapers with a circulation of a hundred thousand each. Like Heint and Moment, the shtetls were also confronting escalating violence. We go from the pogroms of 1881 to the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, to the hundreds of pogroms that swept through southern Russia in 1905, and we see a steadily escalating death toll. But this was nothing compared to the horrors of World War I and the Russian Civil War, where the worst fight took place in the areas of the heaviest Jewish settlement, 1 million Jewish refugees. Hundreds of shtetls burned to the ground. Up to 100,000 Jews murdered, mainly by the Ukrainian armies and the anti Bolshevik Russians, but also in some cases by Poles and even by the Red Army. The reason that the killers often gave was that Jews were pro Bolshevik, but sometimes the Bolsheviks shot Jews because they were capitalists. In East Galicia, Poles rampaged against the Jews because they were helping the Ukrainians, while Ukrainians rampaged against the Jews because they were helping the Poles. As Jeffrey Weidlinger points out in his study of the pogroms of the Russian Civil War, there was a very short segue between the massacres of 1914 and the massacres of 1941, where in the aftermath of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, neighbors killed Jews that they'd known their entire lives. The excuse was Bolshevism, but often the real motivator was sheer greed. By 1922, the violence had abated. The old empires had collapsed. And now Jews found themselves again under new rulers. Poland, Soviet Russia, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Latvia. The interwar shtetl was a very different place from the pre war shtetl. In Poland, as an example, large regional differences. The Litvak Skalitsyaaners and Jews who'd lived under different rulers, now found themselves together. They were divided by language. They spoke a different Yiddish. They were divided by food. There was a so called gefilte fish line. The Jews of Poland like their gefilte fish sweet, the litvox ate it with with pepper. In central Poland and Galicia, shtetl were heavily influenced by Hasidism. In Lithuania the Hasidic influence was much weaker. And therefore the Litvak shtetls were more open to modern political movements such as Zionism. They address differently. The Yiddish poet Jacob Gladstein wrote that for us Polish Jews, Lithuanian Jews were an absolute polar opposite it the sharp edges, their way of speaking, their laconic silence, their reserve. It's as if God had sent out to create a Jew, totally unlike us. On paper, the Jews in Poland had equal rights. But although the poles were only 60% of the population, they saw Poland as an ethnic nation state. And given the devastation of the war and the impact of the Great Depression, there wasn't enough to go around. And what there was went to the polls. The Jews were increasingly seen as an unwanted minority and the government used economic pressure to encourage them to emigrate. And the Jews were also shortchanged with social services. Now, I think at this point, because we're running out of time, I just want to comment on the rest of the picture. So why don't we, why don't we show the rest? This is a poster of Trotsky. A poster disseminated by the anti Bolshevik white army. This trope of the Jews being behind communism also helps give rise to the Nazi movement and is a really important connection between the violence of the Civil war and the violence of the Holocaust. Had it not been for the Holocaust, the civil war would have been remembered as the worst murder of Jews in Jewish history. Next picture. This is a picture from one of the victims. From one of the pogroms, again up to 100,000 victims. Next picture. In interwar Poland you have the influence of world popular culture. There were beauty contests in the shtetl where we came from, there was a Ms. Glebok. And on the COVID of a widely read Jewish newspaper in the Polish language you see the winner of the Miss Judea contest. Next picture. This is a picture from a YIVO film in the YIVO archives. An American from New York goes back to a shtetl and he. And he makes a video. And these are pictures of young women in the shtetl with makeup up, dressed in the latest western fashions and looking very chic. The shtetls became part of this international cultural world. My grandmother ran a movie theater. They showed King Kong. The ads were Kumsentat zwanzigmeto diege malpe. Come see a 20 meter high ape. My mother remembers that in 39 they were told that the next year they would get a Vekmiten Vint, Gone with the Wind and the wizard of Oz. But that never happened. Okay, next. Next picture. This is a poster of the Taws. There was a Jewish public health society that tried to get Jews to eat better, you know, to. To. To stop eating fat and. And to eat their broccoli. And the. And the poster shows a healthy Jewish leading a poor sickly Jew up a staircase. And the caption is Jew, protect your health. Next picture. This is a pogrom in Poland in 1936, in Minsk, Mazowiec. The Polish Jews fought back against the pogroms with the joint distribution committee, with microcredit and with help from the landsmanshaften. The smaller the shtetl, the more help from America and Argentina and other sources counted in the smallest shtetls. By the late 30s, over 70% of the revenue of shtetl institutions were coming from abroad. Next picture. The youth movements were one of the most important developments in the interwar shtetl. These kids sought out their peers Very often they were alienated from their parents, but they set up their own clubs, they hiked, they had amateur theater, they discussed books. Next picture. These are all pictures of the youth movements. This is from the Bund. And this last picture. Last picture. Oh, this is from the Soviet shtetl, but I think I'll stop it here. Oh, okay. So we didn't get through everything, but I hope I gave you a introduction to a very complicated subject.