“only JEWS LIVED HERE”

The Jewish Sections of the Communist Party embarked upon a massive campaign in the mid-1920s in order to restructure Jewish life, turning Jewish petty traders into factory workers and farmers.²³ Tulchyn, as a district capital, was one of the towns most heavily targeted by the Jew­ish Section and its “face to the shtetl” movement?⁴ In 1925, Tulchyn was chosen as one of two sites—the other was Mohyliv-Podilskyy—for the establishment of Yiddish-language judicial courts in the region?⁵ Mendl Osherowitch wrote of Tulchyn during his visit:

Tulchyn is one of the shtetls where one sees signs not only of destruc­tion but also of new construction.

But, he noted, most factory workers weren't actually working. The fac­tories he visited lay half empty, lacking supplies of raw materials with which to produce. He was appalled at how much time workers wasted waiting in line for basic necessities like bread and eggs?⁶

Many of those we interviewed identify handicrafts with the very es­sence of the shtetl itself, drawing a sharp distinction between the Chris­tian peasants who lived in the countryside and the Jews who lived in the urban centers. In this sense, the shtetl is defined as the place where Jews lived; and Jewish men, in turn, are equated with artisans. Arkadii Bur- shtein, a matter-of-fact fellow with a pleasant smile, spoke of Sobolivka, where he was born in 1928, in these terms: “Sobolivka was a beautiful shtetl.

This impression of two starkly demographically distinct regions is supported by census data. According to the 1926 census, only 11 percent of all Ukrainians—Jews and non-Jews—lived in urban centers. However, 91.4 percent of Ukrainian Jews were urban.²⁷ Thanks to a series of cam­paigns that settled urban Jews in rural farmland, by 1939 the number of urban Jews in Ukraine had decreased a little; but still 85.5 percent of Jews lived in urban centers on the eve of the Second World War?⁸ These figures were replicated in Vinnytsya Province, where the shtetl remained the central locale of Jewish life until the war.

The census data lend credence to the common perception of the shtetl as a largely Jewish town. The Jewish population of several towns, in­cluding Khmilnyk, Nemyriv, Sharhorod, Bershad, Kryzhopil, and To- mashpil, totaled more than 50 percent of the residents. By contrast, the countryside surrounding these urban centers was largely absent

Table 1. Jewish Populations of Select Shtetls in 1926

Source: Vsesoiuznaia perepis naseleniia 1926goda, Vol.

of Jews. Even the rural villages in the immediate vicinity of the most heavily concentrated Jewish towns, among them Sharhorod, Bershad, Vapnyarka and Lypovets, had only a handful of Jewish residents. Thus, for instance, in Sharhorod, where the urban population was 61 percent Jewish, the surrounding rural population was only 1 percent Jewish. Similarly, 7,016 Jews were living in the city of Bershad, according to the 1926 census, constituting 60 percent of the urban population, whereas only 190 Jews lived in the surrounding countryside, where they made up less than half a percent of the population.²⁹ The common picture of Jews living in the urban center and peasants living on the periphery is therefore verifiable through the census data.

Table 2. Rural Areas of Town Districts

Even though we lack census data about precisely where Jews lived within the city, oral histories and architecture indicate that Jews were over­whelmingly concentrated in the center around the market square, where the population around the main streets was nearly 100 percent Jewish.

The major cities within Vinnytsya Province and its immediate en­virons also had significant Jewish populations, informing the identity of the cities and their relationships with surrounding satellite shtetls. Uman was 49 percent Jewish, Berdichev was 56 percent Jewish, and Vinnytsya was 41 percent Jewish. Each of the cities became a focus of attention for the Jews in the shtetl, and often was a target of migration. Throughout the twentieth century, the general demographic trend was to migrate to larger locales: Jews from Bershad migrated to Vinnytsya; Jews from Vinnytsya to Kiev; and Jews from Kiev to Moscow.

Elizaveta Bershadskaia was among the few Jews born in the rural vil­lages around Bershad. She was born in the village of Chernyatka, 30 kilo­meters across the Southern Bug River, in 1927. Her father, Kalmen, was a barber, and her mother, Khave, a seamstress. Elizaveta, too, recalled how few Jews lived outside the town. She explained that her father's clients were predominantly non-Jews: “The goyim would go to him.... He had a store there in the village.” But even in the village, Jews, she told us, tended not to engage in agrarian work, but rather worked as artisans: “There were very few Jews there [in Chernyatka]. One was a tinsmith, one was a barber, one did something else—sewed, and a cobbler. Those types of occupations.” Bershadskaia believed that the Jews of the village were valued for their skills: “They [the Christians] liked having Jews there. They liked having the Jews there because they did—they worked the types of jobs that a non-Jew can't do—work that only a Jew can do.” For Bershadskaia, artisanal work was the very essence of Jewishness, indivisible from Jewish ethnic identity; it was a skill set inaccessible to her gentile counterparts.

Occupational prestige was part of a complex and ambiguous social hierarchy in the Soviet shtetl. Whereas many aspired toward higher education and professional lives, the practical value of possessing a set of artisanal skills was obvious. This occupational opacity was most evident in occupations that possessed both professional and trade characteris­tics. Donia Presler's father was a professional musician. Like many other trades, musicians learned their skills in the family: “They would go out and sing and play in the theater and that's how they made a living. It's not a profession; it’s a trade. One doesn't learn in institutions. It's self­taught. His father could play the fiddle and taught the children music. They were musical; the daughter could sing well. It's not the type of thing you can learn in institutes,” she mused.

My father's father's name was Itzik... and his mother's name was Esther. They were descended from musicians. His father played the fiddle, he did. Itzik played the fiddle, and so did their older son; he also played the fiddle. And my father also knew how to play the fiddle, but he learned to play the flute. They said it was a more difficult instrument to play. They also had a daughter named Khone. They would drive around. They had their own production. They would drive out to the shtetls and put on shows. My father would play the flute, and his brother Utler—that was his name—played the fiddle. My grandfather also played the fiddle, and Khone, the daughter, would sing. So many Jews came out to see them.

She explained that her father was living in Odessa at the time, about 1920. He even played with famed Jewish Jazz musician Leonid Utesov, she boasted, a fact confirmed in Utesov's own memoirs. When her father moved to Tulchyn, he also played in a band:

There was Simcha, the clarinetist. There was Shmuel-Chaim—he played the fiddle. And my father played the flute. There was Pinia, a drum­mer. On Purim they would go to the wealthy people, stand outside, and play. They were doing it up until the war. They would go around and, in Tulchyn, there were such wealthy people, too. And they would go from house to house and put on a Purim play for each one: one person would give them a couple of bucks, another would give them some cake. They would give to the paupers, to the klezmers. They were paupers. They would go around to the houses on holidays, they would take the two or three children who could play music, and people would throw something into the basket. Some would throw in baked goods and others would give money. That was their livelihood.

Since gigs were hard to come by, Presler's father had to supplement his income with artisanal work: “Once every three months there would be a wedding, or once every half-year. It was a small city,” explained Presler. Presler's maternal grandfather had been a glazier and taught her mother the skills of the trade. As Presler went on:

My mother's father, Avrum-Yosl, was a glazier. He had six girls and two boys. And he just made windows.... Their mother died and left behind eight children, some of them were small. My mother learned how to [do the work] and she would work right beside him cutting panels. He would cut them. They would bring the windows and put the glass in, and my mother worked with him.... My mother taught my father how to be a glazier. They would take these cartons and put pieces of glass in them. At night they would go to the villages in order to meet the non-Jews very early because they went into the fields. This one needs a panel and that one needs a panel. They would leave at night and very early they would be in the village. They would start up with: “Windowpanes, windowpanes. Who needs windowpanes?” This one would need. That one would need them to do their glasswork. And afterwards they would return by foot.

Jewish traders and artisans wandered through the dark fields of Ukraine and along the village roads in search of customers. The situation in Ukraine was undoubtedly similar to that described by Bogoraz from his 1924 expedition to Sirotina, a village near Vitebsk in Belarus: “During the day everybody sleeps. At night, in the darkness, everybody wakes up. People get bread from the village. At night, they grind in the mill. At night, the coachmen go to Vitebsk with their goods, and the next night return. At night, they slaughter the animals. At night, they make deals with the poor peasants. They won't admit that vodka production takes place in the darkness of night. Even the artisans go about work at night, in order to avoid registration and requisitions.”³⁰

Women were kept busy at home caring for the children and keep­ing the house, but many women also had responsibilities for earning income, particularly through helping out or managing the family store or market stall. Skoblitsky described his mother's world:

The women in those days didn't study. It was a village, a little town, Chernove, where my grandfather lived. And so they learned to become merchants. They had stores. They would sell various things.... They used to come to Berdichev to purchase herring, fish, various materials, pelts, various types of clothing. They would sell it here and there and that's how they made a living.

In Tulchyn district, most working women helped out in the family busi­ness, with the largest group (505 women) identifying themselves as trad­ers. Another 146 Jewish women helped out with the family hat-making business and 119 with the family tailor business. Many women also man­aged their own businesses: 498 Jewish women identified themselves as sole-proprietor traders, 32 were sole-proprietor bakers, and 323 were sole-proprietor tailors. There were also 72 Jewish women working as maids or household servants, 80 as teachers or teacher assistants, and 54 as office workers in doctors', dentists' and surgical clinics. Many Jewish women also worked in the region's textile factories: 828 classified them­selves as textile workers and artisans.³¹

In part because of their work duties, Jewish women tended to marry later than their non-Jewish neighbors. According to the 1926 census, Jewish men were getting married in their mid-twenties and Jewish women in their early twenties. In Right Bank Ukraine, most Jewish men were married by the age of twenty-five and women by age twenty-two. Non-Jewish women, by contrast, were marrying at an even younger age; they were four times more likely to be married at the age of nineteen, and more than twice as likely to be married by age twenty?² Often the only respite from one's family was marriage. Asya Barshteyn of Sharhorod told us:

Our house was very small. It was one room. There were three children, all girls, me—Asya—Fanya, and Sore. And all the girls had to be brought up and we had to be married. My father worked as a turner. We had a small room. We didn't live richly, just comfortably. My father was handy. He would prepare everything for winter. He would buy a little sugar. We didn't, thank God, experience hunger.... But we had such a small room. There were two beds. But we lived, and made it through, and got married.

Yet, for many women, marriage was not so easy. As a result of the vio­lence that plagued the region—76 percent of the victims of the pogroms were men—there were 1,140 Jewish women for every 1,000 Jewish men in 1926, and 1,160 Jewish women for every 1,000 Jewish men in 1939/Ç Although women outnumbered men in the general population as well, the figures were starker for the Jewish population. The marriage market was a competitive one, and many women never married.

“and a goat on a chain”

Between 1928 and 1933, the period of the First Five-Year Plan, the Soviet Union underwent a radical transformation from a mixed economy to a planned one: the state outlawed all private capital and launched a mas­sive campaign to promote heavy industry and collectivized farming. The increased intrusion of the Soviet state into the Podolian shtetl was so transformative that people often indicate this break by referring to the post-1933 era as “the Soviet regime” in contrast to the earlier decade, during which the Soviet government had not yet fully infiltrated the shtetl. This popular periodization reflects the real difficulties the Soviet central government had in establishing full control over the small towns in Ukraine. Prior to what many people refer to as “the Soviet regime” the impact of Soviet institutions and policies was limited. Certainly for those who paid attention to politics, the communist government was instituting numerous changes, but for ordinary folk who struggled on a day-to-day basis to make ends meet, the period before the early 1930s was characterized only by economic insecurity, and at least in the initial revolutionary years, a dizzying array of governments that came and left. For about fifteen years following the Bolshevik Revolution in faraway Petrograd, the struggle for food security, shelter, and survival continued unabated in small-town Ukraine.

It was only during the 1930s that the region began to pull its way out of poverty and slowly transform itself into a modern industrialized re­gion, just in time for a new devastation, whose terrors would completely surpass the Civil War and pogroms of that earlier era. In Ukraine, col­lectivization and dekulakization were the most invasive effects of the First Five-Year Plan, radically transforming the Ukrainian countryside. In addition to the subjugation of the peasantry, though, collectivization unleashed a wave of repression against individuals the state believed facilitated the peasant economy: priests, village elites, private traders, and the petty intelligentsia.³⁴ Repressive policies were replicated in ur­ban centers, where religious functionaries, including rabbis and Jewish elites, were persecuted together with merchants and small shop-owners, who were accused of aiding the kulaks and preventing grain distribu­tion. In short, those who had managed to sustain the economy during the first decade of the Revolution were rewarded for their efforts with arrests and expulsion.

The First Five-Year Plan was also finally able to disrupt traditional Jewish artisanal life. By 1929, a survey of occupational distribution in select cities demonstrated that Jewish involvement in trade and handi­crafts was declining. Jewish workers started to join the industrial work­ing-class, but still at a lower rate than their non-Jewish counterparts?⁵ Binyomin Geller told us about how in 1930 the artisans in Pyatka were forced into collectives: “In 1930 they gathered all the artisans into col­lectives: the carpenters had a collective, the cobblers together, the tailors together. It was really bad. People began to flee to Kiev, to Zhytomyr, to Odessa.”

One target of the Teplyk collectivization drive was Maria Yakuta's uncle, Khotskl. She remembered that Khotskl had a goat, and thus was able to get milk whenever he wanted. This was a luxury in Teplyk during the 1920s, and reason enough for the children to visit Khotskl as often as possible: “He would welcome us with dumplings and milk. It was so delicious.” Khotskls goat and the “luxurious” lifestyle he enjoyed with his dumplings and milk attracted the attention of the authorities, who were hunting “kulaks.” Most of Khotskks meager wealth came from his small shop: “My mother's brother had a small shop. There were pencils there and notebooks and herring, kerosene, candles. It was a poor little shop, a little canteen. And he was a pauper with a big family.” But since he personally owned his shop, he was regarded as a speculator, an enemy of the people. As Yakuta explained, “The president of the Jewish govern­ment, Stratievski, was given the task of collecting gold from the Jews. He searched my uncle, Khotskl—his name was Khotskl Vitniatski. And he was arrested. He didn't have any money. He was thrown in prison. He was left there for an entire winter; his beard was overtaken by lice. He barely made it out of there alive. It wasn't just his money they were after but also that of his brothers. They wanted him to sell out his family.” Yakuta was indignant that Khotskl was targeted as one of the moneyed elite, when he had so little with which to feed his family: “They were all very poor people. Who were the Jews with money?! Those who had a business with large stores, or large businesses of course. But he just had buckwheat dumplings boiled in milk. And a goat on a chain.”

The Palatnikov family of Teplyk was also targeted for expulsion. Tatiana Marinina (nde Palatnikova) was born in 1921. She completed three grades in the Yiddish school and was doing well in her studies when suddenly, in 1930, her family was forcibly uprooted and sent to the Lunacharskii collective farm in Crimea, named after Anatolii Lunachar- skii, the first Soviet People's Commissar of Enlightenment. Tatiana's sister, Sofia, told us that in his youth her father was so poor that all the children in his family shared two pairs of shoes between them; in the winter, only two children could leave the house at a time, while the rest remained at home barefoot. When she was thirteen, her father was ap­prenticed to a butcher; he eventually managed to open his own butcher shop and earn a good living. He bought a large house in Teplyk and a Primus stove, one of the first in the town. He “had a butcher shop. He had a permit for the butcher shop. But he was already considered to be part of the unreliable element. So they sent us to Crimea. At that time I was nine years old. My sister was two years old. There was nowhere to live there. They led us in to a barn.”

In Crimea, the Palatnikov family had access to an orchard with ap­ples, pears, peaches, and apricots; fields of cantaloupes and watermel­ons; and thousands of sheep. Both sisters attended a Russian-language school in a Tatar village about 1.5 kilometers away from the collective farm. They remembered that the school had Jewish, Tatar, and German students, as well as a group of converts to Judaism, and they recalled relations as being friendly: “We all played together. Nobody knew who was a Jew or Tatar or German there. We were all just children... we were happy,” she told the Shoah Foundation during her 1997 interview. In the late 1930s, the Palatnikovs returned to Teplyk, now poor and “rehabili­tated” as agrarian workers. Her father, though, returned to his previous line of work, selling meat and produce. The Palatnikovs' brief venture from shop-owners to collective farmers and back is a typical mark of the vicissitudes of the era and of the ineffectiveness of Soviet power in the shtetl. Many disenfranchised Jews in the shtetls migrated to collective farms in the late 1920s and early 1930s only to return to the shtetl when it became possible to do so.³⁶

The roundups of the late 1920s severely disrupted shtetl life, but when the dust settled a decade later, many of those who had been forced to flee to the collective farms and the big cities found themselves return­ing to their hometowns. When we interviewed ninety-five-year-old Naum Gaiviker, he recalled: “In '30, when I finished my apprenticeship, I wanted to live in a big city. Only in a big city. And my father had a li­cense, and they gathered up all the barbers together with the tailors, the cobblers, and the tinsmiths. I didn't go. I was a courageous lad. I went to the station and got a ticket to Moscow.” Yet, ultimately, three-quarters of a century later, he was still in Khmelnytskyy, the city in which he had been born.

- ¹V-

The “Great Terror” that Stalin unleashed in 1937 had less of an impact in the out-of-the-way shtetls of Podolia than in major urban centers. The relative paucity of Party members and intellectuals, the primary targets of the violence of 1937-1938, shielded the craftsmen and workers of the region from the worst excesses of the violence. In Ukraine, the primary ethnic targets of the terror were Poles. Those Jews who were targeted left no heirs in the shtetl. As a result, those with whom we spoke rarely had much to say about this tragic episode.³⁷ Those who were affected by the Terror tended to come from more intellectual backgrounds. Fania Braverman, for instance, revealed that when she joined the Komsomol in 1937, the local newspaper exposed her grandfather as a shop-owner and publicly chastised her for concealing this inconvenient fact.

Still, on the eve of the Second World War, the Jewish character of the shtetls of Vinnytsya Province remained largely intact. Some towns saw slight declines in the Jewish proportion of residents: Jews constituted 44 percent of the population of Tulchyn in 1926 and 42 percent in 1939, for instance, and 34 percent of the population of Haysyn in 1926 and 28 percent in 1939. And in several other towns of the province, the Jewish proportion of the population actually increased, from 61 percent to 74 percent in Sharhorod, and from 54 percent to 62 percent in Tomashpil. Most towns retained their Jewish character, but in almost all cases, there were fewer Jews in town on the eve of the Second World War than had been there a decade before?⁸

In contrast to the situation in Vinnytsya Province, in Ukraine as a whole rapid industrialization was well underway and the Jewish popu­lation was being transformed. By 1939, about six million ethnic Ukrai­nians had moved from the countryside to the city, so that on the eve of the war, many cities and towns throughout Ukraine that had been largely Jewish were becoming Ukrainian?⁹ Whereas Jews constituted 23 percent of the urban population of Ukraine in 1926, the influx of Ukrainians into the cities and shtetls had dropped that percentage to 12 percent by 1939.⁴⁰ Jews were on the move as well, with many leaving the shtetl for Moscow and Leningrad. Although we do not have figures on Jewish departures from the towns of Ukraine, the growth of the Jewish population of Moscow from about 131,000 in 1926 to 400,000 in 1940 is indicative that Jews were coming from elsewhere, mostly from Ukraine and Belarus.⁴¹

While the Soviet state was making some progress in turning Jews into factory workers and farmers, the process was slow. In a survey of twelve Ukrainian shtetls conducted in 1935, only 26 percent of the Jewish in­habitants were identified as workers, 33 percent as white-collar workers, 30 percent as artisans, and a mere 3 percent as collective farmers?² The results of this survey were analyzed by Soviet historian Lev Zinger in his work, The Renewed People, published on the eve of the Second World War. Zinger, writing during the height of Stalinist euphoria following the completion of the Second Five-Year Plan, expressed great enthusiasm for Soviet progress in the shtetl: “The great socialist October Revolution that freed the downtrodden people and nations and radically solved the national question in the spirit of Leninism-Stalinism, also created the broadest possibilities for Jewish workers to join socialist construction,” he wrote.4³ He also noted the following:

Jewish shtetl workers are occupied in various undertakings like the lum­ber factory in Letichev, the sugar factory in Tomashpil, the cloth factory and the state mechanical factory in Dunaevets, the porcelain factory in Slavuta, the furniture factory in Ovruch, the flax factory in Drise, the paper factory in Tshashnik, etc. Jewish shtetl workers are employed in the local electric stations, the distilleries, the mills and the printing presses, in the nearby state farms and Machine Tractor Stations.... The old shtetl with its heder, with the besmedresh as the ‘communal center' of the Jewish population has been left in the past. Today's shtetl is truly an advanced cultural-economic settlement^

This euphoric portrait of socialist construction in the shtetls was part of the vast Soviet propaganda campaign to discredit the old way of life and celebrate the new. However, despite the radical process of industrialization and collectivization that had taken place in the decade preceding the war, the oral histories we have collected suggest that Jews in the Podolian shtetls continued to lag behind the general population in joining the urban factory working class, and agricultural sector?⁵ Jewish occupational patterns as a whole remained remarkably stable despite the radical transformations taking place around them?⁶