Yiddish song and the Jewish experience

¶ … lyrics evoke the challenges of the period, and specific challenges that they allude to: gender expectations, poverty, and emigration

Poverty

Support: Description Tsarist Russia's treatment to Jews. Support: poem(s)

Emigration

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Gender expectations / Torah scholarship / cheder treatment

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The poems feature authors concerns, wishes, preoccupations.

These lyrics represent a period in Jewish history most typically of life in the Pale during the 18th and 19th centuries when Eastern European Jews were constricted by the Ghetto poverty. The lyrics also indicate other factors. They talk about the Cheder conditions: the rabbi beating the students, for instance; indicate the fervor for Torah and piety; infer the separate destines that were expected of girls, and those that were expected for boys (the former to become conventional housewives; the latter to grow into scholars); and also hint to a growing drift to other shores -- America in particular.

Ghetto poverty and oppression

It is most likely that these poems were authored in Tsarist Russia since piety grew alongside poverty, and it was there that ill treatment of the Jews was most systematic and embittering. Bigotry, intolerance, and restriction of living as well as intellectual conditions were real and sharp. As much as it drew Jews leftwards, it also draws them rightwards and to extreme inner conditions.

The tsarist regime, from the start, viewed Jews with inexplicable hostility. Their conquest of large tracts of Poland and with it large Jewish populations, caused them to view these Jewish inhabitants as the 'Jewish problem' to be 'solved' either by assimilation or by expulsion. And so they treated Jews as those who could be shoveled around, dislocated at their whim, and confined to the poorest, most restrictive of neighborhoods -- to what was called the Pale of Settlement. These consisted of twenty-five western provinces stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea 1. Jews could not live outside this Pale without government permission, neither could they travel without special legal authority. A series of statues, beginning in 1804, then determined the precise locations that Jews could live in within the Pale and the occupations that they could assume.

One of the factors most conducive to extreme and stultifying poverty was that Jews could not live or work in villages, or sell alcohol to peasants thus effectively eliminating the livelihood of a third of the Jews who held village leases or ran village inns 2. Theoretically, the Tsar's aim was to push Jews into 'productive labor' on the land ' however little or no land was available. But the real aim was to compel Jews to leave, or to drive them into baptism. What it effectively did, however, was to augment Jewish poverty into unprecedented heights. Indications of this can be seen in the lullaby where the parent (most likely the mother) sings her child to sleep with visions of the palaces created by the poor man for the wealthy.

In the last half-century of imperialist Russia, some 95% of the Jews were confined to the Pale, 3 and here many of them constituted the towns or the shtetl 4. The authors of the lyrics could easily have lived in the towns, although more than one of the lyrics is more reminiscent of shtetl conditions. Even in the Pale, most areas were banned to Jews, but even those 'legal' parts were constantly being reduced.

Jews were banned from any kind of state service. They were, during a great period of time excluded from universities and the educational system in general; they were forbidden to buy or manage land; government oppression was intense, unremitting, and expensive. There were night raids and pogroms, with the police often taking part and inciting Christian mobs to attack. Poverty and oppression caused a panic flight of Jews from Russia westwards, and the country that most of them immigrated to was America.

The Flight to America

One of the lyrics describes the father who is in America and left $20 and his picture for the wife. The woman hopes that "he will take us, long life to him, there together.." If this occurred, the woman was lucky. Sometimes husband lefts their wives in droves, never to return; the woman left an agunah (i.e. A person unable to remarry in Jewish law until she received a divorce from her husband, or knew her husband was dead). Children (most times adolescents, although sometimes younger) left their families to seek their fortune in America. America became famous (and notorious to the pious) as the 'goldeneh medinah' 5 where it was literally believed that the streets were paved with gold (and where one lost one's religion). Russian emigration created the first massive influx of Jews to America. Once there, Jewish life as implicated in the lyrics took on a different turn, and became almost obsolete.

The Shtetl Way of life; Cheder; and Jewish scholarship.

Restricted from turning outward, the Jews turned inwards and focus sharpened on Jewish scholarliness exclusively for the males. It was the elite who became a Talmid Chocham 6, and the Jewish housewife, often, supported her spouse so that he could continue to learn 7. Jewish scholarship defined the yichus (i.e., pedigree) (or lack of it) of the family, and Jewish orthodoxy was heavily bent on yichus. Not indicated in the poems was the conflict between Haskala 8 and Jewish tradition. We receive a glimpse of that in Cahan (1969) where his parents were angered by his acquisition of a Russian primer, and where the melamed 9 beat students randomly on the slightest suspecting of their acquiring 'external' knowledge. Shtetl life brusquely squelched anything that was secular, and the more oppressed the Jew the more he squelched external influence. Shtetl life was inwards and forbidding of questions. Teachers, to a great extent compelled by their poverty, were rigid and often uneducated. Stories of rabbis sleeping whilst teaching and unaware of their students were common. More common still were the beatings.

Daily life in the shtetl was conducted in Yiddish; Yiddish was the chattering tongue of the tribe. Johnson 10 describes it as "the language of street wisdom, of the clever underdog; of the pathos, resignation, suffering, which it palliated by humor, intense irony and superstition."

Whilst the German maskils equated it with backwardness and superstition, the rabbis saw it as the language of the women, who were illiterate in Hebrew (the language of scholarship). Yiddish was the local language of everyday life, and the language, too, used for cheder education 10. It was not, as we see in Cahan 12 the language of prayer.

It was the boy, with enough funds, who could proceed to higher Jewish education -- the yeshiva, and sometimes the yeshiva in other parts of the Pale or in neighboring Orthodox countries, and, if he was an accomplished enough student was often able to marry into the wealthy Jewish families. The Talmid Chocham was the elite of the crop, and wealthy Jews vied for his hand in marriage. The girl, on the other hand, was brought up at her 'mother's knee' receiving her education from the mother and this education, in turn, consisted of domestic wisdom. Girls were, for the most part, illiterate.