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[Pages 445-446]
[Pages 447-448]
by Noach Mishkowski[1]
Translated by Anton Avdeev
Although I was born in the town of Kopyl, I still consider myself a Mirrer, since my parents moved with me from Kopyl when I was one and a half years old. Although Kopyl remained completely unknown to me from those years, I spent my entire childhood in Mir until I was seventeen years old.
I remember well the main streets Vilenskaya, Zhukhovichskaya and Mirskaya. I also remember the synagogue courtyard with the cold synagogue, the Beit Midrash[2] and other small schools and colleges, and all the alleys leading from the synagogue courtyard and a little further to the new city, where our urban poor lived in indescribable hardships. I also remember parts of the city of Padal and Yurzdike, as well as the streets where the city's townspeople and Tatars lived, whom we called, according to the expression from the Pentateuch, Kedarim[3]. In particular, I remember well our fortress, which in the old days protected our city from attacks by foreign troops. Napoleon destroyed everything around this military castle during his campaign against Moscow, and since then only ruins have remained from it. But from time to time, counts and nobles lived in it, to whom our town belonged. The castle was a real fortress, adapted for the wars of the Middle Ages. A large fortress wall with very thick walls, three or four meters high, with towers on all sides, built with a broad hand and a strategic head.
Below, as they said, there is an underground road along which you can take a carriage drawn by four horses to Nesvizh, which lies twenty-eight miles from our city. Shady hills stretched around the fortress, and a little further our river, Miranka, flowed. We children came to the castle every Saturday after dinner for fun. We went inside, walked through huge ruined halls, climbed floors, walked along wide long corridors, climbed the “dizzying staircase”, and then climbed up the destroyed walls, although this was very risky. About the slums, the children told each other different stories about the “bad guys” who spend their orgies there every night, about beautiful witches, about how they seduce innocent men there and about the grief that falls to those who fall into their clutches. They play with him, kiss him and hold him until he dies in their arms. And with great fear, the children told how they had recently caught a guard and that same night he died in the arms of beautiful girls from the castle. We never went there alone, but always in groups, so that the witches would not have any power over us.
About half a mile from the city was the “court” of the princes to whom the city belonged. In my time the town priest was the old Pole Fusiato. He lived there with his large household and his servants. Then this courtyard passed to the new owner of the city – Prince Svyatopolk Mirsky. This courtyard
[Pages 467-468]
was a very strange and even hostile kingdom for us children. We were afraid to go there because, firstly, we were afraid of his caretaker (guard), who liked us to take off our hats, and secondly, we were afraid of his big dogs. There were rumors in the city that at the entrance to the yard there was a terrible wolf with bared teeth and, as soon as he saw someone entering the yard, he attacked him and tore him to pieces…
At the other end of the village, on the road to the “Kedarimovskie graves” (Tatar cemetery), there was another princely courtyard. There, in the second courtyard, he administered “justice.”
When I was sixteen years old, I had the “privilege” of working as his unofficial secretary because, as a Jew, I was not eligible to hold such a high government position. The town, as we called it, belonged to the Minsk province. Not far from us was our district town Novogrudok, and fifteen miles from the city was the Gorodzey railway station, or Horodziej, as we called it. Five thousand people lived in the city, most of whom were Jews. Jews mainly occupied the city center with the market, but were also distributed in other parts of the city, although not in such dense numbers as in the center. The population of five thousand was divided into three races: Semitic – Jews, Caucasoid – Belarusians and Mongolian – Tatars. But not everyone had equal rights. According to religion, the population was also divided into three separate groups: the Tatars were Mohammedans, the Belarusians were Orthodox, and the Jews naturally believed in the Mosaic Torah. At that time, there were three separate worlds that had almost nothing in common, except that they maintained trade relations with each other. The busiest part of the city was the market square. There were the most beautiful buildings here, there were two churches, the richest Jews lived here, all the shops and stores were here, and at night the market was illuminated with kerosene lanterns.
In Jewish areas the streets were paved. However, this did not prevent the fact that in spring and autumn there were so many leaves that it was impossible to walk along the streets.
Among the most beautiful buildings in the city were two churches and a cold synagogue, in which they did not pray in winter because it was not heated. Also the Beit Midrash in the courtyard of the synagogue, the building of the Russian elementary school and the Catholic sixth-grade school, as well as the house of the Kamenetskys and Lewins.
Not far from the synagogue courtyard was the world famous Mir Yeshiva[4], founded in 1815. In my time, the head of the yeshiva was Rabbi Chaim Leib[5]. I still remember Rabbi Chaim Leib very well. He was the most respected and prominent Jew in the city. I instinctively feared him, since my parents were not pious, did not have a kosher kitchen, and I was always afraid that, God forbid, he would curse us as a “saint.” Both in the city and in the surrounding area they paid much more attention to him than to our Rabbi Lipele, who also had a reputation in what was then Belarus. Rabbi Chaim Leib did not interfere in the affairs of the shtetl, and devoted himself entirely to running the yeshiva. He was a Jew not of this world, but of a completely different world, a higher, noble and moral world. He soared in the skies and moved only
[Pages 469-470]
in the world of the highest Jewish morality. He did not withdraw into himself, and spent most of his time with the yeshiva boys, of whom he always had 400–500 people.
In our city there were already Jewish teachers, doctors, a pharmacist, and two lawyers. Some of our youth have devoted themselves to reading secular books. From those times I remember the Zeldovich brothers, who independently studied not only Russian and German, but also English. I remember the Jewish students Jacob Halfern, Solomon and Thaddeus Levin, Shmuel Leder, professor of mnemonics Feinstein and the most learned Vera Levina, a friend of A. Lesin[6] in his Minsk period. Advanced Russian intellectuals such as teachers, judges and priests received more pleasure from communicating with intelligent Jews than with their coreligionists.
We already had a library in the shtetl, consisting of a large selection of books in Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew, first in the house of Shai Rozovsky, and then in the house of Isaac Schwartz. In addition to the library, there was a girl in our town named Miss Feder who wrote Jewish books, novels, and story booklets and lent them to her regular customers. Then, when Jewish literary collections began to appear, she bought them and rented them out. So she spread light and knowledge in our town.
Russian newspapers and magazines also came to our home; my father had an excellent library of Russian classics and translations of European literature.
However, I must add that there were few readers of books in Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew in my shtetl at that time, about forty to fifty people. Mostly women read, and their favorite books were the “most interesting” novels of Shomer[7]. In general, the Jewish life we were in at that time was glorified. The vast majority of the Jewish population was very devout and all lived according to the old Jewish tradition.
In our shtetl, Jews were valued not for their wealth, but for their learning. The “wealth” of the individual took second place.
The economic situation of the shtetl Jews was terrible. Almost eighty percent of the Jewish population did not have enough bread. The Christians forced them to engage in agriculture, but the Jews did not agree to this. The government took away all sources of income for the Jews, and I still cannot understand how the poor Jews did not simply starve to death. We only had bartenders, a few rich shopkeepers, a few moneylenders, forest merchants, forest officials, etc. Farmers, peasants and Jews with similar “means of subsistence” had to feed themselves all their lives and never received proper food. Fortunately, the tsarist government did not interfere with market days, which were held every Sunday, and fairs were held in the city twice a year. The Jews considered them manna from heaven. Thousands of farmers came from surrounding villages. They sold their products and used the proceeds to buy tobacco, kerosene lamps, linen, various materials, agricultural implements and gifts for women and children. After every purchase and sale, farmers went to bars. The Jews prepared for the fair several weeks before it began. And everyone became merchants. They borrowed a few rubles and traded. We bought and sold eggs,
[Pages 471-472]
hay, grain, a bushel of apples, and there was something left in our pocket. Richer people bought sheep, calves, and horses and had income from this trade for six months. The Jews also looked forward to the whole year for the time when “strangers” would come to the city from all the surrounding areas, because then the bartenders and shopkeepers were doing very well. True, very often the appearance of visitors ended in fights among themselves or between Christians and Jews. In such cases, strong Jewish guys and butchers came and drove away the drunken attackers.
The Jews of my shtetl differed from all the neighboring Jewish towns in their nobility and learning. And the Jews always boasted of this when the inhabitants of Kletsk, Stolbtsy, Nesvizh or Lyakhovichy came to the Mir. And we were all really proud that we were Mirrers.
My father, being a former yeshiva student, was able to study well and was very fond of secular education.
He was, in the full sense of the word, a modern man with a warm Jewish heart. As a lawyer, as a matter of principle he never defended a criminal and never recognized the trial of a Christian over a Jew. My father spoke and read several languages and was a great lover of fine literature. He also wrote extensively in Yiddish. Great work: “Palestinian Emigrant” remains forever in my memory. As far as I remember, it was a literary work with a strong patriotic content, in which he put forward the ideas of the “Lovers of Zion.”
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He also wrote dramas, comedies and short stories. Very often he read something from his works to his mother, to us children, and to guests at home. However, at that time there were no Yiddish periodicals and publishers, so he could not print them. Only after his death did my mother, who at that time was already eighty years old, being left alone and not wanting all the works to end up in someone else's hands,
[Pages 473-474]
destroyed everything herself.[b]
From that time, I also have almost no memory of the first era of the “Lovers of Zion” movement in the eighties. I remember my father fiddling with the “campaign.” He was the chairman and secretary of the organization in Mir. There were often meetings in our house at which my father spoke. I remember how on my birthday, the “loving one” who lived in our house left our city and went to the Land of Israel with his family. Because of this, there was a buzz in our house, everyone was talking, and the next morning all the “loving” people saw him off from the city. Then I lost my roommate. He was a strange boy who went with his father to the Land of Israel and in my childhood fantasies I imagined how my friend would become a shepherd on the mountains of Zion, and I was very jealous of him…
When I was five years old, my mother took me to my first teacher, Kiva Kugel. I also studied with two other teachers. I went to them for almost four years. During this time I learned about Joshua, the Judges, Samuel, and with this my old Jewish education was almost complete.
At that time we lived with Dodgen (David), a Jew who wrote petitions to Russian officials. He was a widower and loved bitter drinks. He always came home very late. His son Berl, a thirteen-year-old boy who was already attending a Russian district school, became my first Russian language teacher. Soon my parents sent me to a Russian elementary school. While attending public school, I studied with two private teachers. I studied Hebrew with teacher Weiner and went so far as to translate the story of Robinson Crusoe[8] from Russian into Hebrew. I also studied German from a German woman, Fraulein Tetz.
Most of all I loved the evenings when my father read his stories or we listened to a novel about life in the Mir, written at that time by the watchmaker Mendel Tsirinsky. As far as I remember, it was written with great talent. His coming and reading was a real holiday for me. My parents had to be upset about this affair. In the middle of writing the novel, he left for America and what's more: we never heard anything more about him…
At that time my father was very busy creating educational courses for our poor youth. He argued in one of his speeches that the whole problem of the Jews is that we are engaged only in unproductive labor, and we have more shopkeepers, innkeepers, bartenders and peddlers than we need. One competes with the other and snatches the last piece from his mouth. Anti-Semitism, he argued, also stems from the fact that we derive our happiness from the smell of the market, from the wind. We must open a vocational school in our city, where our youth should be taught to cultivate the land or train to become good tailors, shoemakers, and mechanics. Let our vocational school, he concluded his frequent sermons, serve as an example for neighboring cities and towns of how to move from air pollution to productive work. But he not only campaigned, but also stepped forward with iron determination to realize his dream. Through the Jewish Society[9] of Craft Labor, then located in St. Petersburg, he obtained money for this purpose and also, after long negotiations in high government spheres, agreed to build a house
[Pages 475-476]
for such an institution.
However, when everything was almost finished, a major economic crisis occurred, due to which all work was stopped.
I remember a guest who stayed in our house for a very long time. He was my cousin on my mother's side, Shmuel Shmurak, and at the same time he was the nephew of our classic Mendel Moyher-Sforim[10]. At first, Shmuel lived in the house of his uncle R. Mendel in Odessa and came to visit us directly from his house as a 21-year-old youth. Mendel wanted to make him a useful Jew and enrolled him in the Trud vocational school[11], where he was the director. Shmuel always loved to brag about his great-uncle and always told stories about his uncle's house. But personally he was not interested in any questions; he spoke only Russian, dressed like a Tyrol's German. For some time he was a teacher in our city. And then he taught in Baranovichi, from there he left for Warsaw.
Original footnotes:
Translator's footnotes:
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