Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [70]
An era of wars and conquest was launched by a successor, Catherine the Great, with the result that Poland was repartitioned a number of times and Russia reinherited the Jews who had been previously evicted.
Thus started a never-ending series of laws banning Jews from trades and ownership of land, and excluding them from Moscow and St. Petersburg where they were considered to be in competition with Christian professionals.
It all evolved into the establishment of a huge reservation in which the Jews had to live and beyond which the Jews were forbidden to go. The Pale of Settlement consisted of a million square miles from the Baltic to the Black Sea, one monstrous ghetto where they were trapped, divorced from the mainstream of Russian life, and reduced to basic survival.
This was the birth of the shtetl, a string of towns and small cities open to Jews. Although the law of the Czar was all-powerful, the shtetl towns themselves gained a certain autonomy. The Jews ran their own social and health programs and religious courts, spoke the unique Yiddish language, operated their own schools and printing presses, and mainly kept each other alive through a magnificent system of charity.
With Jews restricted to a few basic crafts and trades, boycotted from higher education, facing a constant barrage of suppressive laws, and subjected to the outrages of pogroms, shtetl life was a birth-to-death privation.
A few Jews were able to slip through the net and were given dispensation to live in the great cities, but they were the rare cases. Such permission was granted to a handful of the wealthy or talented or cunning whose value to the Czar made them the exceptions.
Despite the shabbiness of dress and humbleness of home, life in the shtetl had a magnificent and vital heartbeat. Much of the shtetl was in the grip of the tyrannical rabbis and cults, but otherwise there was harbored a smoldering genius of immeasurable magnitude. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a new rhythm overtook the shtetl and it was relentlessly probing to liberate itself.
The pogroms of the 1880s became the flashpoint. Feeling neither love for “mother” Russia, nor loyalty to the Czars, the Jews bolted out of the country in massive numbers after the latest series of state-approved blood baths.
AFTER HIS FEARSOME beating during the Kiev pogrom, Yehuda Zadok seriously considered emigrating. His older brother, Samuel, had fled Russia for the questionable alternative of becoming a pushcart peddler in Chicago.
Samuel Zadok pushed his cart well—right out of the seething cauldron of Chicago into a small, mobile mercantile business that followed the silver strikes in Colorado. This resulted in a small general store in the frontier town of Denver. His oldest son had been accepted into a university to study medicine and two other sons were going to follow to college. America! America! What a wondrous place. Even Samuel’s daughter was earmarked for higher education. Can you imagine?
For a time Samuel urged Yehuda and his other close kin to emigrate, but Yehuda was a child mired in the shtetl without the necessary ambition or courage to wrest himself loose from the grasp of his narrow, tortured life. After all, what could a shohet with a growing family do in America? That shtetl was a pitiful and marginal way to go through life, but at least it was familiar. America was a wild and frightening place. Here in Wolkowysk, Yehuda knew he could always scrape through and he did have that seat on the Eastern Wall.
His brother Samuel left an abundance of needy relatives in Russia