This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. If you‘re ever looking for descriptions of life in the shtetl, the most informative source is the work of B. Gorin (1868-1925). Though he was best known as the author of the first history of the Yiddish theater, Gorin was also a great writer with a special…
When Bubbe, my plump, good-natured, maternal grandmother came to my parent’s house for Passover, she never ate with us in the dining room. Instead, Mom served her in the kitchen before we sat down. I sensed that this arrangement was somehow for my grandmother’s comfort, but I never fully understood. Was it because Bubbe came…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Thanks to the hard work of his literary admirers, an English translation of Grigory Kanovich’s autobiographical novel “Shtetl Love Song” has finally appeared. The novel was released by a boutique British publishing house, Noir Press, that specializes in modern Lithuanian literature. It’s remarkable that one of the…
There’s a certain quality of sound particular to a waltz pattern picked out on a viola that never fails to inspire, in me, at least, some strange sense of longing for a shtetl life that I’ve not only never known, but intrinsically know to be undesirable. My ancestors left the shtetl, after all. It’s a…
BERSHAD, Ukraine (JTA) — At first glance, this drab town 160 miles south of Kiev seems nearly identical to the settlements that dot the poverty-stricken district of Vinnitsa. Shrouded in a seemingly permanent cloud of smoke from wood fires — still the standard means of heating here — Bershad, population 13,000, features two rickety bridges over…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The Jews of Uchanie, my father’s shtetl in Lublin province, used to say about the Jews of Wojslawice just down the road, that they were meshumodim. Turncoats. What worse epithet could you hurl at a fellow Jew? Slawek Nowodworski, the translator/genealogist my son and I hired in…
The abandoned 428-year-old synagogue in Sharhorod, Ukraine stands as a powerful reminder of why millions of Jews in the world now call themselves Americans. I traveled there last week from my home in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, to better understand where my family comes from. Six of my eight great-grandparents fled villages like Sharhorod – places…
KIEV — No Jewish visitor to Ukraine’s National Art Museum can pass this painting without stopping to look. A Jewish woman is being assaulted, not by anti-Semites but by a crowd of angry Jews. Pressed to the fence by the mob, her hair is undone, her blouse is ripped, her eyes horrified. The rabbi is…
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