TEPLYK

In his book, Teplyk, My Shtetl: Chapters from Fifty Years of Life, pub­lished in Buenos Aires in 1946, Velvl Tshernovetski, who was born in Teplyk in 1898 and emigrated to Argentina in 1922 after a brief stint in Odessa, situates the geography of his hometown:

If you look on a map of Europe or even just of Russia, you will not find Teplyk.

Teplyk remains off the beaten track to this day; it is located 44 kilome­ters north of Bershad, and 63 kilometers from Uman by road. Highway M12, which connects Nemyriv to Uman, traverses about 20 kilometers north of Teplyk, leaving Teplyk accessible only by smaller roads. When we first entered the city in 2002, a horse and wagon with a family of five was trotting down the main thoroughfare, mingling with the faded green and brown Ladas spewing exhaust as they chugged around town. Our white Mercedes van with Lithuanian license plates was clearly out of place. We parked in the town square. As we opened the door of the van, we were greeted by Boris Chechelnitskii, who had noticed the strange car coming into town and, automatically assuming that we were Hasidic pilgrims—who else visits Teplyk from abroad?—wanted to introduce himself as the mayor of Teplyk.

The Jewish community of Teplyk dates to the seventeenth century, when the town was incorporated into the vast holdings of the Polish noble Potocki family. The residents of Teplyk made a living mostly in trade and as artisans, working as cobblers, tailors, and smiths. The town is perhaps best recognized in Hasidic lore as the hometown of Rabbi Moshe Yehoshua Bezhilianski, better known by his pseudonym Alter of Teplyk. Bezhilianski, a follower of Breslov Hasidism, made his mark in neighboring Uman, where he was known for his writings on the im­portance of prayer and meditation. It is little wonder that Teplyk's most famous son achieved his reputation glorifying isolation and inwardness.

Another story tells of how the Breslov Hasidim, who formed the town majority in the early nineteenth century but were countered by a strong freethinking minority, invited a disciple of Natan Sternhartz, Yitzhak Ber Meir Trhovitse, to reside in the town. According to Breslov sources, Yitzhak arrived and convinced the freethinkers to abandon their hereti­cal ways. The town also comes up in one of Sholem Aleichems stories. In “The Convoy,” the wealthy miser Sholem-Ber Tepliker of Teplyk is ar­rested for chucking his household slop onto the street, and is led to court with two other prisoners to nearby Haysyn. When their drunken guard takes a nap, Sholem-Ber Tepliker of Teplyk is forced to listen to the life stories of his two pitiable fellow prisoners, and comes to repent for his past sins, resolving to treat the poor with greater respect in the future.

By the turn of the century, Teplyk was still a small, largely Jewish town that figured in literature and memory mostly as one of several backwater towns deep in Podolia. Sholem Aleichem dubbed the railroad that ran by Teplyk “the Slowpoke Express.” “What did Teplyk, Golta, or Haysyn need a railroad for?” he has the locals ask in a 1909 entry of his Railroad Stories.

According to Tshernovetski, the Jews of Teplyk were engaged pre­dominantly in trade and handicrafts. Most Jews had no stable source of income, but earned what they could buying and selling in the Sunday afternoon market or at the small local fair that Teplyk hosted every second Monday. Those with anything left over to sell could travel to one of the other fairs hosted by neighboring towns on different days. Tshernovetski describes how “Sunday in the morning the gentiles would begin to gather in the shtetl and the Jews and Jewesses would already be in the street and the market prodding the gentile's wagon and asking ‘what do you have there?' And the gentile who comes by foot on a market day carrying a chicken, has a hundred hands prodding and haggling.”⁴² He portrays the Jewish traders as swindlers, trying to outsmart the peas­ants who come to town on market day. Despite painting a generally idyllic portrait of Jewish life in the town, Tshernovetski does not shy away from praising Christians and chastising Jews. He describes, for instance, a gentile doctor who would visit Jewish homes and “sit by the bed of the patient, and with love begin to speak in such a way that the patient would start to feel better. For a visit he would take a half dollar. But if somebody put 20 kopeks in his hand, he would also say ‘thanks' and if somebody had nothing to give he would also not be angry.” The Jewish doctor, on the other hand, would quickly write a prescription and “stretch out his hand for money. And if someone gave him 20 kopeks, he would throw it in their face!"4³

The 1897 census listed the town's Jewish population at 3,725. Accord­ing to Tshernovetski, the town had seven prayer houses at the turn of the century, including a great synagogue where the wealthy prayed, a study hall, and several prayer houses (kloyzn), preferred by the Hasidim. The town remained predominantly Hasidic, but it had a noticeable Zionist inclination. Tshernovetski writes of one melamed (teacher), who taught his students to begin their prayers with “Barukh” rather than “Burikh,” thereby utilizing the Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew preferred by the Zionists rather than the Ashkenazic pronunciation that had been traditionally used in Eastern Europe and continued as the Orthodox mode of prayer.