The Lost World of ‘The Shochet’

This spring, my son Nachum gave me a “new” book called The Shochet—a memoir set in the 1860s and originally written in Yiddish a century ago, now ably and painstakingly translated into English by Michoel Rotenfeld and published last fall by Touro University Press.

“You have to read this book,” Nachum said. “It’s not like anything you read before. It’s written by a guy from 150 years ago who tells it the way it was. Did you know that the melamdim, the Torah teachers, would hit the kids?”

“Do I know,” I asked him. “I was hit by my own father on occasion and he had told me this was standard practice in Eastern Europe to hit the kids when teaching them. Nothing to be proud of, but it was a fact.”

Nachum persisted: “A lot of people are reading it now. It’s a sad book and it’s about the places we come from: Trisk, Chernobyl, Tiraspol …” Nachum was referring to my maternal grandfather, from the Twersky line—rabbinic and Hasidic denizens of the villages and towns of eastern Ukraine.

In the meantime, a few of the men in my bes medresh were reading the book, too. “This guy really writes the truth,” said one of the men in the bes medresh. “He was not a maskil, a heretic. He was a frumme yid, a pious Jew, a God-fearing shochet—but what he wrote about, you don’t want to read.”

Set in Ukraine and Crimea during the last gasp of the czarist Russian Empire, Der Shochet—as it was originally known in Yiddish—is a memoir by Pinkhes-Dov Goldenshteyn, an orphan born in the Ukrainian city of Tiraspol in 1848 who had to make his way in the world with no help, no welfare, no food stamps, no love, no money, and certainly no Sholem Aleichem sunrise-sunset sentimental schmaltz to buoy him through bitter and long nights of the betrayal, abandonment, and starvation that were typical of his time.

Goldenshteyn wrote the story of his life during his dotage in the 1920s, motivated by a sense that he had failed with his own children—three of whom had immigrated in 1905 to Portland, Oregon, where they cast off the old ways and no longer observed the Sabbath, and at least one of them married out of the faith. He had intended his autobiography as a letter to his progeny, “that they may see the divine hand in their father’s life” and return to the religious orthodoxy of old.

Unsurprisingly, this did not happen. The old way of life had already begun to deteriorate by the start of the 1900s: first in Ukraine and then throughout Eastern Europe. Tradition and piety all but succumbed to the forces of modernity, extreme poverty, epidemics, pogroms, and persecution.

In the 20th century, the romanticized, dewy-misty-sturdy-tearful-stalwart faith to a God who alternately punished and loved us could no longer be sustained by the younger generation. The misery was too great, and they had found other gods: socialism, Marxism, modern medicine, psychoanalysis. In some sense, in their eyes, they found something better than an unreliable Jewish God; they found themselves.

Goldenshteyn begins his story in a sanctified, but tragic vein. His parents are righteous people, children and grandchildren of the righteous, reaching back generations. They are busy doing God’s work; his father, a melamed, a devout teacher of Torah, ekes out a living, but is overworked and underfed. Yet they keep having children. When his parents die in their 30s—ages that would be appalling by modern standards—they leave a brood of orphans.

Their children are left to fend for themselves—including the youngest of them: the author, known by his nickname Pinye-Ber, just 5 years old. Sooner or later in the book, nearly everyone gets sick and dies, except for Pinye-Ber, who survives only to live among tightfisted relatives in a cauldron of cold deprivation, a Russian-Ukrainian winter-world of iron, steel, and bleakness. Between the heavy blows of the melamed and his swindling, mean-spirited relatives, the author grows up a wild weed.

A wild weed, except in religion, where Pinye-Ber experiences God as close at hand, present to his sufferings and sometimes offering a miracle in the service of rescue—sometimes in a sudden, spectacular way, other times a gradual miracle as God “shows” him to his eventual professional calling of ritual slaughterer, or shochet.

Every town he sojourns to in search of work or love—no matter how tiny—has a bes medresh where he can get a scrap of food, a few kopecks, a place to pray and doze and study a little Torah. Here he begins to appreciate his aptitude for the holy word and begins a lifelong conversation with the Almighty.

The author relates that at the age of 5 he was a student of Shmiel, the blind melamed—renowned for his fearful punishments. (“The melamed was blind in one eye and saw too much with the other,” the author writes.) One day, Pinye-Ber is about to be thrashed by the teacher when God Himself intervenes in a strange way: A young girl comes into the classroom with the news that Pinye-Ber’s mother had died. The “compassionate” melamed excuses Pinye-Ber and sends him home to grieve and cry with his siblings. In this way, he is saved from a good beating.

I suppose it is normal to think of God in those terms when you’re young: God as a rescuer from adults who are crazy. When I was growing up in the 1970s in Queens, my life was not in danger, yet I remember wanting God to protect me from my father, who gave me a good thrashing for going into his desk without permission. He used to keep his staples and paper clips in an old Sucrets tin and somehow, by opening it up, I destabilized his world.

Interestingly, God was on my mind for other things, too, when I was a kid. I wanted things. Wanted things so badly it scared me. The wanting probably scared me, too. I wanted it to snow. I wanted to hit a home run (still yet to happen), and to be noticed by my sister’s friends. I prayed to God for those things. God “lived” in our household. He was an authority in our household: feared, sometimes evaded, and never blamed.

In reading The Shochet, I kept wondering why, in these backwater Ukrainian shtetls where they were persecuted and oppressed, they gave God such authority. The obvious answer is that they were in need of God’s rescue and the story of the long Jewish exile gave their lives a coherence, if not immediate salvation. Then I thought: Why did I give God such authority both then and still now, under vastly different circumstances? I needed not rescue, but connection. Yet the word of God was authority itself. Was this a tribal holdover from those shtetl times—a linguistic/emotional zone inhabited still by Jews all over the world?

My maternal grandfather, Rabbi Abraham Twersky, whose father was the Trisker rebbe near Chernobyl, knew firsthand of God’s sovereignty over the Jews of eastern Ukraine. A scion of the Twersky line, he was a great-grandson of the Me’or Enayim, Reb Nochem of Chernobyl, a disciple of the Baal Shem Tov himself. According to my grandfather and popular lore, God worked through the regional rebbes of Chernobyl, Trisk, Mekarev, and Tolne and wrought miracles that gave the ordinary Jew hope and sustenance.

Pinye-Ber did not meet up with my great-grandfather, the rebbe of Trisk, but he became acquainted with the Twersky brothers and uncles and the Hasidim of the area. The rebbes themselves were not his cup of tea (until he met the rebbe of Lubavitch) but they do not fare too badly in his book. They ministered to their people in good faith and were accepted by most. (The Trisker rebbe of Lublin was a standout among rebbes when he and his family refused to be rescued from the ghetto in 1942 by my grandfather and chose instead to be murdered together with his people in Maidanek.)

I wish I could say the same for how the Hasidim fare in the book: Some of them come across in The Shochet as ignoramuses, petty and bigoted, mean-spirited, and stingy. They do not withhold their tempers nor on rare occasions, their fists, but often withhold payment to the shochet and the melamed in grievous contravention of Jewish law.

Worse yet, they were khapped by government agents and a system of both Jewish and non-Jewish informers to be forcibly conscripted into the czar’s army for a ruinous 20- to 30-year stint—beginning at the age of 8! The rebbes knew full well that God as a redeemer did not have a perfect record in Ukraine.

Miraculously, the author describes being saved from conscription by hiding under his sister’s voluminous skirt and narrowly escaping a dozen or more times, helped by rabbis, rebbes, and common folk alike. He recognizes in them God’s special kindness for him—the Jewish God of orphans and widows—and he steals into the local bes medresh wherever he is, to learn and drink from the waters of the Torah.

I heard stories like this when I was a kid. Stories from “over there.” Miracle stories. Supposedly, the rebbe of Chernobyl, our ancestor Reb Motl, divided up the territory in eastern Ukraine among his children and gave my great-grandfather, the Trisker magid, “turf”—territory from Trisk in the east, and as far west as Luboml—but also, by tradition, he gave to him a “Hasidic” portfolio, to minister to the souls of the next world who were in torment.

My grandfather told me that the rebbe never slept and was up late at night helping the dead—those who had already gone over to the other side. Stories abound of souls of the next world who were none too good—stingy to a fault who were tortured in the next world, hoping for respite from purgatory. The Trisker rebbe would intercede on their behalf with various clevernesses and litigation with angels and powers that be. One time the soul of a known and nasty crook was in agony and had interfered in the lives of his living kin. The rebbe instructed someone to go on his behalf to the local cemetery, “second grave, first row,” and knock with a stick on the tombstone and say, “The rebbe gives charity for your soul so you can rest in the next world in peace.” The family prospered after that. In the Trisker-Twersky universe, no one was unworthy of being saved in this world or the next world.

Though my grandfather himself was not known as a tzadik, he carried something of this sensibility. When he was 96, he went into a trance. For three days I could hear him shouting and arguing with a “committee.” Let’s be reasonable, he said, let’s negotiate. At the end of three days, he emerged from the trance. I asked him who he was talking to. He said, “the malach hamaves—the angel of death. I got six more months.” And he did.

Somehow, with his tenacious insistence on the veracity of his family’s righteousness and miracles, my grandfather made me both a skeptic and a profound believer at the same time. At the very least, he possessed a charismatic endowment passed down the Twersky line from the Baal Shem Tov himself.

Reading The Shochet, I kept "company” with Pinye-Ber: his narrow escapes, his disappointments, his walking on foot between villages, his hunger—for food, for love, for learning, for company. I was absorbed by the story of his life, how he found a way to love and be loved even as he was tested.

Still, despite my feeling of religious kinship and tribal identification with the author, I found myself getting irritated at his incessant references to God. It’s all good and wonderful to be pious, but a little self-responsibility or self-reflection might not be a bad thing.

For example, he endangers his life to get to the Rebbe Maharash of Chabad-Lubavitch, who then performs a miracle by telling him to go home immediately. Inexplicably, a childish impulse overtakes him and he ignores what the rebbe said, thereby missing out on his son’s bris and a lifesaving opportunity for a proper job in his profession that would have saved him and his young family from poverty.

Though he reflects, it seems insufficient. In the author’s world there was little idea that the self could be examined outside of God or religious perspective. This was a world without any the humanism, feminism, psychology, or culture of the self. In a way, this memoir is a relic—a narrative that existed prior to Freud, prior to the birth of the self.

For instance, family planning might have helped avoid horrible tragedies. But to be fair, that is in a sense like asking a minuteman of the Revolutionary War to fire a machine gun at the British at Bunker Hill or asking Walt Whitman to treat the Civil War wounded with antibiotics. There weren’t any.

Is it any wonder that Pinye-Ber’s children did not follow in his footsteps? The rebbes, for all their miracles, did not pass child-labor laws, abolish poverty, reform education, free the serfs, provide welfare, or introduce free market capitalism. Secular, progressive humanism did what they could not do.

I read the memoir with deep curiosity coupled with trepidation, as though I had discovered a photo album with an accompanying diary of my parents and their parents. Fascinated, I shuddered when I realized that it is filled with the pettiness of real life. The author hates his in-laws—all of them—and is not shy about saying so. Nobody keeps their word. Everyone lies, withholds, bargains for advantage. I wondered: Did my parents ever love each other? Were we a holy people?

The crookedness depicted in the story gave me a sharp physical pain, but was no surprise. On the contrary, both my father and my grandfather told me that der haym, as they called it, was a place of plainspoken, honest folk, God-fearing at times, but they weren’t saints. There was plenty of riffraff, proste layt, and even among the shayne layt, the shabbesdige yidn, men of refinement, there were holy hustlers and pious swindlers, basically religious hypocrites who used their piety and noble lineage to make it warm for themselves and pad their wallets.

My father had a titanic dislike for my mother’s family back in Europe that I could never understand until I read The Shochet. To him, they, the rebbes of the Twersky line and their kin were privileged “sons” of the Baal Shem Tov who held opulent courts in the ramshackle, tumbledown villages snaked in the foothills of Carpathia, east of Kyiv, where winters were unbearable and clothes threadbare. Yet, some Hasidim would abandon their families and give their last kopecks to be at the rebbe’s tisch. My father’s people—salt of the earth—worked the ground and earned honest groschen. They had no yichus (pedigree) on which to trade, but in his eyes they were more real, more Jewish than the gutte Yidden, more Jewish than the rebbes themselves.

When I spoke of Hasidim, my father would throw his head back in mild disdain and then shrug in resignation as though the mass supernatural appeal, the fanaticism of it all could not be countered with conventional Jewish reason or rationality.

If we only knew how much history a family gesture can carry. A mocking motion or a shrug can go back—how many hundreds of years?

Yet my father and my grandfather assured me of the opposite as well. The culture of the shtetl was holy in the sense that it valued learning over acquiring. The book was holy. The bes medresh was open all the time. Rebbes did perform miracles. Mysteriously and miraculously, young and old, many held fast to the Torah. Men would get into scrapes over their daily bread but they went in the evening to the bes medresh to learn. They could have spent their lives drinking whiskey and slivovitz in gentile saloons, but instead they attached themselves to the Torah. Yes, in these one-horse towns in the frozen steppes, surrounded by hostile peasants and landowners, Jews clung to the grimy dusty floorboards and the bookshelves of the tumbledown bes medresh and her holy books. This was the miracle of the shtetl.

But it was more than a culture of learning. Life was lived in the company of the dispossessed and the sanctity of the insulted and ignored was often upheld. Indeed, God wasn’t the only one who watched over widows and orphans; people did as well, however imperfectly.

Many struggling common folk were endowed with a moral poise and a set of ethics that were like its own sovereign kingdom—a kingdom of kindness. Fluency in Yiddish and in the sacred tongue meant that the conversation with God would never be cut off.

I am not sure as to why this book affected me so much: Why did I care? Why could I not read in silence about a quaint and unfortunate world from long ago as though I were reading someone else’s “abstract” history? Why did I gasp at every wrongdoing and take pride in the triumph of righteousness? I was not impartial. I was rooting for the “J” team. I wanted “us” to look good. Not just my own family, but the Jewish people. I was hurt and embarrassed when Pinye-Ber was mistreated. Couldn’t “we,” shouldn’t “we” have done better?

I felt “glad” when Pinye-Ber was tender toward his wife (always kind, but also condescending and controlling). He writes of her refined character but that she was ignorant and that he “trained” her well. As a modern Jew, heir to both spiritual and religious and psychoanalytic sensibilities, it is easy for me to forget how feminism has improved traditional Jewish life for both men and women.

Mostly, I shared a bond with the author even as he was from another century—not because of similar genetics or even a shared sensibility (we would likely not agree on much in real life), but because I recognized that if we found each other in the bes medresh, we could energetically argue up and down about what God intended in this or that verse or how to interpret a line in the Talmud.

When Jews were expelled millennia ago from the Holy Land, they were able to remain a people apart because, unlike other nations, their sovereign ruler was movable. The Torah was carried with them into exile. And we both found God in the bes medresh where the Torah resides—whether in Ukraine or in Passaic, New Jersey, where I live.

This is this God with whom the Jewish people carry everywhere yet play hide-and-seek forever with. Our ability to be present with Him in the bes medresh meant that we couldn’t leave him in the shtetl. We had to keep coming back to Him both there and here. Perhaps in studying his lines as well as our own, we find something that we can’t explain—something that intrigues us, humbles us—and we pass it down, somehow.

Goldenshteyn’s “letter” to his children failed to bring them back to the faith. No doubt they needed a god more “certain” than what he and the shtetl could offer. One might imagine they went to Oregon in search of a rugged new world. The old God of the shtetl—of the books, felt in the austere melody of Jewish learning—was not useful.

Yet the authority Jews ascribe to God derives from failure: the authority and the moral instruction of failure. Our failure to understand and connect with Him, His “failure” at times to protect us. Our “unreliability” and His (in a manner of speaking) paradoxically strengthen our relationship. In the end, Goldenshteyn gives us a life, unreliable, unprovable, unsuccessful at times, but full of faith.