I can think of no better
way to introduce you to Jewish Telechan than to tell you about Shtetl life.
Telechan, in most ways, was a typical shtetl.
Leo Rosten in The Joys
of Yiddish and Hooray of Yiddish gives an excellent description of the shtetl.
It sets the context of Eastern European Jewish life that was Telechan.
"Shtetl - Little city,
small town, village-in particular, the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe,
where the remarkable culture of the Ashkenazim flourished before World War
II.
In many a shtetl, most
of the inhabitants were Jews; in others, all were Jews. And it was in the
shtetlach-that certain Jewish traditions and values were preserved and embellished
until they achieved a character distinctly their own.
The shtetl was the incubator
and fortress of Ashkenazi culture .... the residents were poor folk, fundamentalist
in faith, earthy, superstitious, stubbornly resisting secularism or change.
They wrote in Hebrew or Yiddish, shunning foreign tongues among themselves.
They were dairymen, draymen, cobblers, tailors, butchers, fishmongers, shopkeepers,
peddlers. They considered their exile temporary and dreamed of the Messianic
miracle that would --any day- return them, and their brethren around the world,
to the shining glory of a restored Israel in the Holy Land.
...The Tsars had confined
the Jews to the "Pale of Settlement," twenty-five provinces of the Russian
empire. To live outside, a Jew needed special permission from the authorities-and
some skilled workers, professional men and businessmen did receive (or purchase,
via bribery) such permission. But the vast majority of the Jews in the tsarist
empire lived within a restricted area. They could not move without approval
from the police. Entire local populations could be abruptly "resettled," forced
out of their homes, with no more legality then the arbitrary impulse of an
often besotted governor.
Jews were forbidden to
own land. They were barred (with exceptions) from colleges and universities
and from the humblest government jobs. They were not allowed to practice certain
crafts, skills, and trades.
Living in the shtetl
was very hard. (... some years, thousands literally starved to death.) Jews
were spat upon, beaten, killed, their synagogues and cemeteries desecrated
- either in "minor incidents" shrugged off by the authorities, or in full-scale
pogroms instigated by successive regimes. The hooliganism of drunken thugs,
and the ghastly bloodbaths by pious Cossacks, were alike tolerated by government
officials, witnessed by unprotesting Eastern Orthodox priests, openly abetted
by the notoriously anti-Semitic police.
In the shtetlach, the
Jews produced their own people's culture, an independent style of life and
thought, an original gallery of human types, fresh and rueful modes of humor,
irony, lyricism, paradox-all unlike anything, I think, in history. There Yiddishkeit
entered a golden age.
They apologized to no
one, neither to philosophers nor theologians, ... They felt no need to compare
themselves with anyone else, and they wasted no energy in refuting hostile
opinions. There, in Eastern Europe, the Jewish people came into its own.........
The world of the Jews
in Germany, France, England, Holland, Italy, Austria, was vastly different
from the world of shtetl Jews in Eastern Europe. The world of the first was
contemporary; the world of the second only contemporaneous. City Jews in Eastern,
as in Western, Europe were caught up in political and libertarian movements;
they were both workers and bourgeoisie; they became trade unionists, social
democrats, socialists, revolutionaries. But the shtetl was another world...
The "Pale," established
by Catherine II in 1791, ended, under severe economic and political pressures,
during the first World War. The shtetl exists no more. Thousands of Jews left
it for the factories of Odessa, Kiev, Warsaw, Lodz, Moscow, Petrograd-and
from there went on, out of unholy Russia, anywhere; to Germany, England, South
America, the United States.
History will surely record
the shtetl as a phenomenon worthy of remembrance. It was a world isolated
from time, medieval in texture, living on the daily edge of fear. And it was
a triumph of human endurance, a crucible from which flamed a brilliant and
unexpected efflorescence of scholarship and literature”.
The attitude of American
Jews to the shtetl is torn by ambivalence.
