Here’s a map that shows where Joseph Margoshes lived from birth through the early years of his marriage. You may have to zoom out once to see the three locations: Lviv, Tarnow and Radomishla.
I am continuing to read Joseph Margoshes’ A World Apart in order to learn about life in Galicia in the late 19th century. Last night I learned something about arranged marriages in Galicia. When Margoshes was only fourteen years old, his mother began to look for a prospective bride for her son. Since Margoshes’ father had died, Margoshes was a candidate for an early marriage in order to relieve his mother of the burden of supporting him and caring for him. Margoshes also said that early marriage was a way “to avoid moral lassitude, or strange and sinful thoughts, God forbid.” (p. 58)
Margoshes then described how shadken, or matchmakers, would come to his school to observe and evaluate the young boys in his class as potential grooms. Margoshes was considered a very attractive candidate: he was tall, good-looking, well-educated and from a well-regarded family. His mother was presented with many different potential matches. Margoshes reported that parents never spoke to their children about these potential matches; it was all out of their hands and determined by the parents. His mother rejected a number of potential brides because they were “unrefined upstarts of a very low social status…[who] would bring shame to his father’s grave…” (p. 60)
Eventually his mother agreed to an appropriate match, the daughter of a very successful man, Mordecai Stiglitz, who lived in Zgursk, a village near Radomisha, a town not too far from Tarnow where Margoshes and mother and brother were then living. As described by Margoshes, Stiglitz had a big estate that he had acquired through successful leasing arrangements with the descendant of a Polish count who had owned several thousand acres in the area. Stiglitz’s estate was itself thousands of acres, and he had many head of cattle, 40 horses, 40 oxen, 70-80 milk cows, and about 30 peasants who lived and worked on the estate. They grew grain and grass on the estate and needed workers to tend to the livestock and to cut and care for the grain and grass, which they baled and sold in the market.
The Stiglitz family met Margoshes’ mother’s standards, and Margoshes was subjected to an evaluation of his knowledge of Gemara, Talmud and Jewish law in general. He passed the test and was approved as a groom for Stiglitz’s daughter (whose name is never mentioned by Margoshes in his telling of this story). Margoshes was only sixteen years old at that point.
After a lavish wedding with three feasts, including one for the poor Jews and beggars who lived in the area, Margoshes moved to Zgursk to live with his new bride on her father’s estate. As Margoshes wrote, “Initially I did not really know my bride; we had only seen each other and talked very little during the engagement ceremony, and then not even exchanged a letter. However, as soon as we got to know each other better after the wedding, we became as intimiate and loving as if we had known one another for many years. This heart felt love has continued to this day, thank God, for over fifty years and will remain until the end of our lives.” (p. 65) Two teenagers whose marriage was arranged by their parents and who did not know each other at all somehow managed to fall in love and create a long and happy life together.
I have heard and read about arranged marriages before, not only in Jewish families, but in many other cultures as well. We recently watched an excellent movie, “Fill the Void,” about contemporary Israel and arranged marriages among the Hasidim today. I know that often these marriages did not end up so happily, but it does seem that more often they worked—that two people who did not know each other somehow fell in love or at least developed a strong enough bond to create a lasting relationship. It is so foreign to my own experience—I cannot imagine letting my parents select a life partner for me or marrying someone I’d only met once. Yet I also cannot pass judgment on the practice since it does seem that often parents do know what is best for their children.
I have to assume that Joseph’s marriage to Bessie was itself an arranged marriage. Joseph was a widow (or so we assume; perhaps his first wife had left him) with at least two young sons, Abraham, who would have been about nine, and Max, who would have been about three. Bessie was his cousin and at least ten years younger than Abraham and about 24 when she married him. Based on the customs of the day and the circumstances, most likely a matchmaker put together these two cousins so that Bessie would have a husband and so Joseph would have a wife and a mother for his children. Did they grow to love each other? Or was it purely a convenient arrangement? The inscription on Joseph’s footstone certainly suggests that he was a good husband and father, so I’d like to think that, like Margoshes and his bride, Joseph and Bessie developed a loving marriage. But then I am a hopeless romantic!
In the segment of the book I read last night, Margoshes described his childhood and in particular two aspects of it: his education and the role of the synagogue in his life. One thing that had not been clear to me in the first part of the book is that Margoshes and his family dressed in traditional Hasidic clothing. That is, even though they considered themselves maskilim and not Hasidic, they dressed like Hasidim and not in modern clothing.
Here is what Margoshes has to say about his teachers in Lemberg, where he lived until he was fourteen: “I don’t have much to recount about the [teachers] I had in my youth. One thing I realize now is that they knew very little themselves and were therefore incapable of accomplishing anything substantial with their students, even though their pupils included boys with good heads on their shoulders.” (p. 39) Some of his teachers were worse than incompetent—they were psychologically and physically abusive, though no one would have thought of it that way back then. Margoshes reports that there was an understanding among the boys at the school that they would not report what the teachers were doing to them. Only when a servant noticed a huge bruise on Margoshes’ leg from a teacher’s painful pinching did his parents learn of the abuse and have him change schools (though not have the teacher removed or disciplined). Although Margoshes did have one teacher whom he found effective and knowledgeable, overall his experience in school was not a positive force in his life.
The school was for boys only; there is no discussion of what girls his age would be doing while he was in school. Margoshes did have two girls who became his friends when he would visit their house to pick up papers for his father. He would sit and play cards with them while he waited, but he never told his family about the friendships because apparently playing cards and being friends with girls would not have been considered acceptable behavior.
Other than these two girls, Margoshes only discusses male friends—boys he would read and discuss books with in an area where they would gather in front of the synagogue, books that he describes as Haskalah books. He does not explain what that means, but from what I can infer, these were books written in Hebrew that went beyond traditional prayer or holy books and discussed broader issues and views of the world. There were 15-20 boys who would gather every night to do this. Margoshes wrote, ”Above everything, we would talk a lot and wonder at the young people of Lemberg who had thrust themselves into the wide world several years earlier. … [This] was our ideal, and we all aspired to reach those heights.” (p. 47) Interestingly, although these boys knew Yiddish, Hebrew, and some German, they did not know Polish, the language of their country, and had no desire to learn it. “Our spirits were focused on ideals and we had no interest in practical life.” (p. 48)
The institution that played a huge part in the daily life of Margoshes and his community was the synagogue or “kloyz,” as they called it. Men attended the kloyz twice a day every day and drew people from across the region. Poor people as well as wealthy people prayed at the Lemberg Kloyz. There were many wealthy men in the community, and the kloyz was also where they made business connections. Overall, however, it was more a place for religious and social gathering and played a central role in the lives of these people. Margoshes wrote, “I loved the Kloyz with all of my heart and always felt at home there; after all, I was there twice a day over several years for prayers.” (p. 51) He considers it the place where the best times of his childhood took place.
When he was fourteen and after his father had died, Margoshes and his family moved to Tarnow, a city where there were over 15,000 Jews (somewhat smaller than Lemberg). Sadly for Margoshes, he did not find a similar community of boys in Tarnow who were interested in reading Haskalah books. His traditional education continued with one of the most respected rabbis in Tarnow, but his intellectual life and interest in more worldly matters seems to have been limited after the move away from Lemberg.
Although the descriptions of his education and religious life were interesting, I found this whole section of the book somewhat frustrating. Margoshes grew up in a relatively wealthy home (they had servants, after all) and a home where he was encouraged to receive a traditional education. But the book nowhere reveals up to this point what life was like for those who were not so fortunate. What did the girls do while the boys were at school? What about children from poor families? Did they get any education? Margoshes is rightly proud of his accomplished family, but it would be more interesting to me (and I assume others) if he had revealed more about the rest of his society. Perhaps that will come now in the next section which describes his marriage and presumably a more adult perspective.
Maybe Joseph and Bessie were among the educated and wealthy Jews in their community, but it seems more likely that they were not. I am hoping that Margoshes at some point talks about the lives of people from different social and economic backgrounds.
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I ordered a book on what life was like in Galicia in the late 19th century. The book is A World Apart: A Memoir of Jewish Life in Nineteenth Century Galicia by Joseph Margoshes. (The book was written in Yiddish in 1936, but translated into English in 2010 by Rebecca Margolis and Ira Robinson.) Margoshes was born in 1866 in Lemberg (Lvov/Lviv), which is now part of Ukraine. According to the introduction to the book, he was born into a family with a “distinguished rabbinical ancestry” and “received a traditional Jewish education in Bible and Talmud, as well as grounding in the German language and European culture.” (p.vii) As an adult, he spent several years administering agricultural estates in western Galicia, the region where our family most likely lived. He emigrated to America at the turn of the century and became a well-known writer for the Yiddish press in New York City.
He wrote A World Apart as a memoir not only of his life, but of the culture and world he left behind. The book is considered to be an important documentation of what life was like in Galicia during that time period. As Margoshes himself wrote in his forward to the book, “I have lived in a different generation and under completely different circumstances from my own children and many of my friends and acquaintances. I thus hope that it might interest them to read the memoirs of my past.” (p.3)
Since the author lived in Galicia and left Galicia during the years that Joseph and Bessie, Abraham, Max, Hyman and Tillie lived in and left Galicia, I hope to be able to get a better picture of what their world was like. I’ve only read the first thirty-five pages or so, but can already report some sense of that world. What struck me most about the first segment of the book was its portrayal of a diverse Jewish society. In my mind I had an image of Fiddler on the Roof where everyone was relatively indifferent to secular education and the secular world and completely immersed in Jewish life. Margoshes immediately breaks down that image.
In fact, Jewish society in Galicia was not unlike Jewish society in Israel or the US today with a wide range of subgroups with varying degrees of religious observance— from the Hasidim to what we might now call Modern Orthodox to very assimilated or what Margoshes refers to as “German” Jews. By that he does not mean that they were from Germany, but rather that they had abandoned traditional Hasidic garb, wore modern clothes, did not keep kosher, and spoke German more than Yiddish. Margoshes family itself had representatives across the spectrum. His father was descended from a long line of scholarly rabbis and considered themselves “maskils” or members of the Haskalah or Enlightenment Movement, which promoted not only Jewish education but also secular education, much as the Modern Orthodox movement does today in the US. They were deeply observant, but not cut off from the outside world, unlike the Hasidim who lived much more insular lives and were not interested at all in secular education. On the other hand, Margoshes’ maternal grandfather was a highly educated cloth merchant who traveled to Vienna for business and raised thirteen children, only two of whom were religious. His sons were all “Germans,” and his daughters were well-educated and read the German classics.
Margoshes’ mother, however, was one of the two children who were religious, although she was well-educated. Her first marriage ended when her husband began to dress and act “German-style.” She then married Margoshes’ father, who was himself a maskil —religious, but not Hasidic. (Interestingly, Margoshes’ father was a widower whose first wife was his niece, an indication of how liberally families allowed marriage among close relatives, as Joseph and Bessie reputedly were.)
After providing this family background, Margoshes describes events surrounding a major rift in the Galician Jewish society. His father had originally belonged to an association of educated but religious Jews (maskilim) called the Shomer Yisrael Society. In the late 1860s, however, his father left the Shomer Yisrael Society because it had become far too assimilationist. For example, the Society submitted a proposal to the Imperial Ministry in Vienna that would restrict who could be a rabbi recognized by the state to those with more “German” tendencies and that would also impose reforms to the education provided in the Jewish schools, such as requiring German language classes and limiting Talmud classes to those twelve or older. The Ministry was in favor of these proposals, as it favored modernization of the Jewish society. Margoshes’ father and others were vehemently opposed and aligned themselves with the Hasidim to fight the proposal. They formed an opposition group called Machzikei Hadas to organize their opposition to the Shomer Yisrael Society.
Margoshes wrote in detail about the long political battle between these two groups and how the maskilim and Hasidim worked together to fight the assimilationist Shomer Yisrael Society. He also describes the overall status of Jewish society in the Galician world: “In that era, the leaders of the province of Galicia were adopting a more liberal outlook. Jews were granted full rights as citizens and they were allowed to vote as well as to be elected to the Galician Landtag and the Austrian Reichsrat.” (p. 18) The battle between the two groups became therefore also a battle for political representation of the Jewish citizens in the secular governments, not just a battle over religious practice and education.
In order for Machzikei Hadas to function as a legitimate association and publish newsletters legally, it had to obtain state permission. The Shomer Yisrael Society engaged in political maneuvering to prevent this, but ultimately Machzikei Hadas was able to obtain approval and publish a newspaper after some political maneuvering of its own. Their ultimate coup was in 1879 when they were able to elect the Krakow Rabbi, a Hasid, to the Austrian Reichsrat, the first rabbi to be elected to such a position. As Margoshes wrote, “The election of the Krakow Rabbi to the Austrian Reichsrat made a tremendous impression on the entire Jewish world, and Galician Jews anticipated salvation. It gave them enormous pleasure to see even a single Rabbi achieve the major honor of sitting among so many great personages.” (p. 24)
As I read these pages, it raised several questions and thoughts for me. First, I was struck by the fact that Jews even then (and before then) fought among themselves over issues of observance versus assimilation, rather than trying to unite against the non-Jewish majority who controlled the laws and the government. I thought of that old joke about the Jew found after being stranded on a deserted island for several years. His rescuers noticed he had built two structures and asked him what they were. His response: “This one is my shul, and that is the “other” shul.” We always need some group of other Jews with whom to disagree and debate, don’t we?
Second, I was surprised by the fact that at least at that time, Jews were not necessarily poor or poorly treated by the Austrian people or government. Perhaps more will be revealed as I read further, or perhaps Margoshes’ family were more elite and comfortable than most others.
Finally, his description of the various segments of the Jewish society made me wonder where on the spectrum our great-grandparents lived. Were they Hasidic, maskilim, or “German” in the way they lived their lives? Were they educated in worldly matters? Did Joseph wear payes and a streimel or did he dress in modern clothes? My guess is that they were not Hasidic, not even very observant, but only because I know that my grandmother was not religious (though she did have a kosher home), but I really don’t know. She was born here, and perhaps Joseph and Bessie changed and assimilated once they settled in America.
To be continued, as I continue to read….
I am once again in a holding pattern, waiting for a few more documents to arrive: Max’s naturalization papers (which take 90 days for USCIS to process, so another 75 days to wait for those), Max’s death certificate, Abraham’s death certificate, and a few others from the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. My principal research goal right now is to find out where our family came from in Galicia.
I’ve been trying to search for European records, but that is much more complicated than searching for US documents. JewishGen.com offers a course online that provides instruction on how to do that, and I plan to take that course when it is next offered in May, 2014. That’s a long way off for someone who is as impatient a researcher as I am. I am meanwhile making inquiries of other researchers who are researching Galicia and searching several genealogy websites, but so far, I’ve still come up empty.
So I figured that while I was waiting, I would learn what I can about life in Galicia in the 19th century and life on the Lower East Side in the late 19th, early 20th centuries. I’ve ordered some books and will provide whatever information or reviews I find interesting and helpful once I have read them. If anyone has any recommendations on books on either of those topics, please provide them in the comment box below.
Meanwhile, I would still love some pictures (hint, hint!) from other members of the family.
Hope you all are well, and I will report back when I get some new documents or have anything else to report.
Brotmanblog: A Family Journey 