Tag Archives: Hasidic Judaism

Galicia Mon Amour: A Conversation

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I just finished watching a video called “Galicia Mon Amour.”  It is a recording of a conversation between Daniel Mendelsohn and Leon Wieseltier.  Mendelsohn’s book, The Lost, which I read a number of years ago, is one of the most moving books I’ve read; in it he recounts his journey to find out what happened to members of his family who had not left Galicia before the Holocaust.  It is beautifully written, well-researched, and deeply tragic.  I read it long before I started doing my own genealogical research, but it likely was one of the sources of inspiration for my journey.[1]

Leon Wieseltier’s book Kaddish is also excellent, but I have to admit much of it was a bit too scholarly and dry for my taste, except for the parts where he reflects on his own family and experiences.  I admit to skimming a lot of the more academic parts of the book.

At any rate, when I saw a recommendation for the video on the digest I receive daily from Gesher Galicia, I decided to try and make the time to watch the video.  (It’s about two hours long.)  You can find a link to the video here.

In the video Mendelsohn interviews Wieseltier about his recent trip to Galicia.  (The interview takes place in January, 2007; Wieseltier’s trip was in 2006.)  Both Mendelsohn and Wieseltier had family that came from eastern Galicia in what is now Ukraine from towns near the city of Lviv, known by the Jews as Lemberg.  Both had taken trips back to the region to research and visit the places where their relatives had lived.  Although Mendelsohn’s direct ancestors had immigrated to the United States before the Holocaust like ours did, he had many relatives who remained behind about whom he had known very little.[2]  Wieseltier’s parents, on the other hand, were Holocaust survivors and came to the United States after World War II.  All the rest of his family was killed in the Holocaust.

One audience member asked at the end of the interview whether there were differences between those who were grandchildren of immigrants and those who were children of Holocaust survivors.  Were the survivors from the wealthier families who saw no reason to leave in the 19th century and the earlier immigrants from the poorer families who had no reason to stay?  Although Wieseltier dismissed this as an overgeneralization, which I am sure it is, it nevertheless is an interesting sociological question.  Remembering Margoshes’ memoirs and the fact that there were so many wealthy Jews, I thought that it made some sense that only those who had nothing to lose would have taken the risk of leaving the world they knew.  This may suggest that Joseph and Bessie were not among the wealthier segments of the Galician Jewish community.

Wieseltier described his own family as being among the more prosperous, educated and aristocratic clans in their area and confirmed the impression left by Margoshes that the Jewish world in Galicia was very diverse and that there were many who were wealthy, well-educated, and sophisticated.  He described Cracow as the “Jerusalem of the North” and the Galitzianers as the princes of the Jewish world.  Mendelsohn concurred, saying that although there was also a lot of poverty, there was a large bourgeoisie and a large wealthy class.  He said that Emperor Franz Joseph, who was the head of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1848 until 1916, was admired and even loved by the Jews for his enlightened leadership and treatment of the Jewish citizens, also described in Margoshes’ memoirs.

One observation that I found particularly interesting was Mendelsohn’s comment that he always thought of Jews as living in tenements until he went to Galicia.   He believed that Jews, wherever they lived, lived urban lives, and he was surprised by how wrong he was when he saw the rural areas where they had lived in Galicia.  He described the countryside as beautiful—with mountain, streams, rivers.  Wieseltier used the word “paradise” to describe it.

A lot of their conversation focused on the reasons to make a trip to Galicia.  Both said quite emphatically that this is not a place to go for typical tourist reasons; for Mendelsohn it was partly to find out what happened there and to visit the places where his family had lived. Wieseltier said he went not only out of grief, but also out of pride. He talked movingly of standing where his mother had once stood and leaving a copy of his book in the empty field as a symbol of Jewish survival.  Both talked about the absence of Jewish life there now and how the Polish people themselves realize how much has been lost by the destruction of the Jews and their culture.  Wieseltier said that you won’t find Jewish life there so you must bring your Judaism with you if you go.

There is also discussion of the Holocaust, of the camps, of anti-Semitism, but overall the theme was more about remembering the world that was there in a realistic and accurate way and cherishing that culture and the people.  Wieseltier himself is quite skeptical of genealogy (“It’s amazing how much you can’t learn from genealogy.”).  Although Mendelsohn obviously values genealogical research highly, he did not really push Wieseltier to elaborate on this point.  I think, however, that Wieseltier was expressing some doubts about all those who, like me, are trying to trace some names and dates to make a connection, perhaps without any purpose or perspective.  He said that our parents and grandparents were ours “by luck,” just as the fact that we have two legs or brown eyes, and that what is more important is who we are ourselves and what we do with our lives.  I think that that is an important perspective for me to remember as I continue to look for our family in Galicia.

[1] We were fortunate enough to hear Mendelsohn read from and talk about the book many years back when it was first published.  That made his story even that much more personal.

[2][2][2] I am sure that that is true for the Brotman family as well, although I do not know specifically of any family members who died in the Holocaust.

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A World Apart, part 3: Marriage in Galicia

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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!

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A World Apart, Part 2: Life in Galicia

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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.

A World Apart, Part 1: Life in Galicia in the late 19th Century

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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….

 

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