A Tale of the Pale

Book review by Lane Igoudin

The Shochet: A Memoir of Jewish Life in Ukraine and Crimea by Pinkhes-Dov Goldenshteyn, translated by Michoel Rotenfeld Touro University Press, 918 pp., 2 volumes (2023; 2025)

Shochet, the kosher slaughterer, was once a central figure in the shtetl. Most shtetlach dotting the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire were too small or too poor to support a rabbi, so slaughtering aside, the shoykhet, in Yiddish terms, would also be a khazn leading services on Shobes and Yontef, a moyel for the boys as well as their melomed in Hebrew and Torah, and often the community’s shadkhan arranging suitable marriages.

The shochet’s very appearance in a full beard, peyes, and a kapote was the embodiment of the tradition. And yet despite communal importance, shochet’s was not an easy life. “Better be a manual laborer than to have one of these spiritual occupations,” Goldenshteyn laments as he recounts his life story.

Originally published privately in Petah Tikva in 1928-1929 and now translated for the first time in its entirety into English, Goldenshteyn’s book is one of the first surviving Yiddish-language autobiographies. It is also unique in being penned not by a famous and secularized Jew, the two categories usually going together, but by someone from the masses of the poor and traditional Jews who populated the Pale.

In his memoir, Pinye-Ber, as the author was commonly known, takes us chronologically from his childhood and young adulthood in Ukraine and Bessarabia, his 34 years as a shochet in Crimea, and his retirement in Palestine up until the book’s publication.

Born in 1848 in Tiraspol in Bessarabia (present-day Moldova) to “poor parents surrounded by naked, barefoot siblings, large and small,” Pinye-Ber, the youngest, loses both parents by age 6. His adult sisters are too poor to support him, and so the relatives keep searching for a family to take in the little boy – a childless couple in their hometown, grandparents in Groseles, an elderly aunt in Chechelnyk (incidentally, my grandparents’ birthplace), as an apprentice to an uncle, as a shtib-meshures, a house servant, to a well-off cousin in another shtetl, “moving from one uncle to the next, from one aunt to the next, until they packed me off and sent me back.”

Pinye-Ber’s wanderings grow more far-flung as he progresses into his teenage years, covering thousands of miles from Yassy in Romania to Lubavitch in Belarus and then south to Odessa and the Crimean Peninsula. What’s striking is that despite its vast geographic spread, the Jewish world of the 1850s-1870s’ Pale is uniform enough in its customs and language that a frum boy like Pinye-Ber can walk into an unfamiliar shtetl, pray mincha and maariv in the local beis-medresh, crash there for the night, and in the morning, shake up the minyan for a few kopeks to travel on.

In Pinye-Ber’s account, Jews and non-Jews still live peacefully side-by-side, each assigned a specific function within the Russian Empire. Jews are artisans and traders. Non-Jews are farmers, most of whom, especially in Ukraine, are serfs indentured to their estates. The Tsarist regime is oppressive, yet its iron hand instills the pacifying sense of order.

The main danger to the young Jew at that time, particularly to a poor orphan like Pinye-Ber, is the abiding fear of being caught by the khapers (‘grabbers’) – and conscripted into the Russian army for 25 years. The kidnapping, as Pinye-Ber witnesses, can happen in broad daylight or at the Shabbat service.

“And suddenly . . . a commotion broke out in the shul; a mortal fright overcame the entire congregation. As everyone pushed to look out the windows, they saw entire regiments of soldiers surrounding the synagogues – standing guard to prevent the children from escaping. The khapers entered, seized the boys, and handed them over to the soldiers. Mothers dashed about like poisoned wolves and their cries reached the seventh heaven.”

Pinye-Ber escapes the khapers’ clutches thanks to his sister Ite, who smuggles him under out of the synagogue and into in a neighbor’s attic.

A more secure way to avoid draft, Pinye-Ber discovers, is through marriage. At 14, he is offered the hand of the 13-year-old Freydele, whose father, as a Cantonist (a former soldier), will be able to provide Pinye-Ber with a much-needed draft exemption and financial support for his Torah study.

Pinye-Ber is reluctant to accept the proposal. The study of the Torah and the halakha, the lifeblood of the community, elevates the family’s social status, so wealthier families seek to marry off their daughters to the most promising young Torah scholars. Thus, an arranged marriage between Pinye-Ber, who is adept at Talmud Torah and comes from a family with Hasidic pedigree and the daughter of a wealthy Cantonist is viewed as a step down.

Pinye-Ber eventually consents to marriage, only to discover that during his absence, Freydele’s family lost its wealth, and that the hard labor, not the dowry-funded Torah study, await him. The promised draft exemption doesn’t materialize either.

“I had counted on falling into a pool of shmalts. Ultimately, the shmalts dried out and all that was left was an empty pit. All my plans were impeded, and I now awoke to what had thus far been a dream.”

Not all is so terrible though. The marriage itself is a success, as Pinye-Ber and Freydele truly fall in love and are blessed with 13 children, 7 of whom will live to adulthood.

Pinye-Ber ultimately settles in Bakhchisaray, in the southern part of the Crimean Peninsula, where he works as the town’s shochet from 1879 until departing for Palestine in 1913.

Crimea is within the Pale, and yet a world of its own. The diamond-shaped peninsula has been a cultural crossroads for millennia. For centuries, Jews have lived there among the Muslim Tatar majority and the sizeable Greek and Slavic minorities. In Bakhchisaray, the former capital of the Crimean Khanate, the primary language Pinye-Ber hears around him is the Tatar, a relative of Turkish.

Given Crimea’s strategical position between the Balkans, Ukraine, Caucasus, and Turkey, Russia maintains there a large military presence, its naval base in Sevastopol, near Bakhchisaray, controlling the empire’s main trade route via the Black Sea. (Crimea’s strategic importance has not diminished in recent years, as attested by Russia’s annexation of the peninsula in 2014).

In Bakhchisaray, Pinye-Ber comes into contact with all these communities. He receives his shochet certification papers from Rabbi Khayim Medini, the spiritual leader of the Krymchaks, the Tatar-speaking Jews, and the author of Sdei Khemed, an influential encyclopedia of rabbinical responsa.

To supplement his income, Pinye-Ber slaughters sheep for the Muslim Tatars, whose halal animal slaughtering practices are similar to those that render them kosher.

He also cuts and engraves tombstones for the Karaites, a Jewish sect that broke off from the mainstream Judaism in the eighth century over their rejection of the Oral Law. A minority throughout the Middle East and Europe, the Karaites were once so populous in Crimea that the town where Pinye-Ber moonlights at the cemetery, is called Chufut-Kale, ‘Jews’ fortress’ in Tatar.

In the mid-1880s, Russia passes laws expelling non-Russian citizens, a calamity that affected tens of thousands of Jews residing in the Pale. Born within the Russian Empire, Pinye-Ber has once obtained a Romanian passport to protect himself from conscription, but it has now become a liability. Denounced to the authorities, Pinye-Ber befriends a high-ranking Russian official who secures the papers to certify him as a Russian subject.

In the remote Crimea, Pinye-Ber witnesses with sadness the age-old Jewish traditions fading faster than in the rest of the Pale. Women forgo covering their heads. Men start shaving using razors. Jewish communities choose to spend their collective funds on opening Russian-language gymnasias (high schools) for their young, rather than yeshivot and mikvaot.

Crimea’s vibrant, multicultural world will also begin to fall apart within a few years after Goldenshteyn’s departure in 1913. The Soviet regime will methodically dismantle the remaining Jewish communal institutions and eradicate the traditional practices which Pinye-Ber’s had spent his entire life sustaining. Both the Ashkenazi and the Krymchak Jewish communities will perish in the Holocaust. In 1944, Stalin will deport the entire Crimean Tatar population to Central Asia, resettling the peninsula with Russians and Ukrainians and building vacation resorts in the shadow of its naval stronghold.

The Shochet’s primary value is in illuminating life in the Pale in rich and exquisite detail. We see “children carried like sacks on the kheyder assistants’ shoulders” home through the muddy streets of a shtetl, we taste the thick mamaliga, cornmeal porridge with milk, a Bessarabian staple; we smell the garlic and vinegar rubdown – a common treatment for any sickness, from cold to cholera; we crawl with the devout young Pinye-Ber under the table of a Hasidic Rebbe to hear him “speak the words of Torah, mundane matters, and clever remarks among his inner circle,” or watch in awe the benevolent King of Romania visiting his Jewish subjects, “descend from his carriage, go under the huppah, and kiss the Torah scroll.”

The translator Michoel Rotenfeld’s substantial introduction and notes add considerably to helping us understand the memoir’s many historical and linguistic nuances.

All these details add up to a riveting panorama of a vanished world. While most writing about life in the Pale usually criticizes or romanticizes it, Goldenshteyn simply bears witness to what he saw, his memoir’s unvarnished honesty being its most admirable feature.

Lane Igoudin, Ph.D., is the author of the memoir A Family, Maybe and professor of English and linguistics at Los Angeles City College.