{"id":37377,"date":"2026-05-20T14:30:28","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T18:30:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/?p=37377"},"modified":"2026-05-20T14:30:28","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T18:30:28","slug":"the-ukrainian-jewish-encounter-cultural-dimensions-part-5-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/the-ukrainian-jewish-encounter-cultural-dimensions-part-5-1\/","title":{"rendered":"\"The Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter: Cultural Dimensions\": Part 5.1"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Ukrainian Jewish Encounter was founded in 2008 with the goal of building stronger relations between Ukrainians and Jews, two peoples who, for centuries, lived side by side on the territory of what is modern-day Ukraine. Since then, in keeping with its motto, \"Our stories are incomplete without each other,\" UJE has sponsored conferences, round-table discussions and research, as well as translations and publication of works the organization anticipates will promote a deeper understanding between the two peoples and an appreciation of their respective cultures.<\/p>\n

We offer for the first time the book\u00a0The Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter: Cultural Dimensions\u00a0<\/em>in an eBook format.<\/p>\n

The book is a collection of essays that examine the interaction between the Ukrainian and Jewish cultures from the seventeenth century onwards. Written by leading experts from Ukraine, Israel, and other countries, the book presents a broad perspective on parallels and cross-cultural influences in various domains \u2014 including the visual arts, folklore, music, literature, and language. Several essays also focus on mutual representation \u2014 for example, perceptions of the \"Other\" as expressed in literary works or art history.<\/p>\n

The richly illustrated volume contains a wealth of new information on these little-explored topics. The book appears as volume 25 in the series\u00a0Jews and Slavs,<\/em>\u00a0published by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem since 1993. In several previous volumes, considerable attention is given to the defining role of the Old Testament in Ukrainian literature and art and to the depiction of Jewish life in Ukraine in the works of Nikolai Gogol, Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, Lesia Ukrainka, Vladimir Korolenko, and other writers.<\/p>\n

This collection of essays was co-edited by Wolf Moskovich, Professor Emeritus, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Alti Rodal, Co-Director of the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, who also wrote the introduction to the volume. It was published in 2016 by Hebrew University of Jerusalem.<\/p>\n

5.1<\/span><\/h1>\n

Click\u00a0here for a pdf\u00a0<\/a>of the entire book.<\/p>\n

Departure and Comeback: Ethnographic expeditions to Shtetls in Podolia and Volhynia in 1912\/1914, 1988\u201393, and 2004\u20132008<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Valerii Dymshits (Center Petersburg Judaica, St. Petersburg, Russia)<\/span>
\n<\/em><\/strong>A collection of articles entitled The History of Jews in Ukraine and Belorussia: Expeditions, Monuments, Finds <\/em>appeared in St. Petersburg in 1994. [1]<\/a> This small, low budget volume was nonetheless very important for its authors as it concluded five seasons of expeditionary work (1988\u201393) and introduced materials, which its authors justifiably considered unique. The book also presented the first attempts to analyze these materials. I had the honour to act as one of the editors of the volume and author of the introductory article, entitled \"Two Journeys along the Same Road.\" [2]<\/a> The title underlined the obvious parallels between the renowned expeditions of S. An-sky in 1912\u201314 and the expeditions that we, young residents of Petersburg, started to undertake in the late 1980s along the same route.<\/p>\n

The trips to Ukraine, which began as purely touristic adventures, gradually turned into a kind of experiment in cultivating the Jewish identity of the participants. With every passing year, these trips increasingly acquired the character of professional scholarly expeditions. As a matter of fact, the 1994 volume registered this transition. The seventeen years that have passed since the appearance of the volume offer an opportunity to review the expeditions of the early 1990s historically, as a distinct stage in the development of Jewish scholarship, as well as of the Jewish social movement in Russia at a particular historical juncture.<\/p>\n

The first aspect that draws our attention is the constant comparison between the contemporary expeditions and the An-sky expeditions. I wrote, for instance, \"It is known that the First World War prevented An-sky from realizing his plans. One can hope that our project will have better luck.\" [3]<\/a> The formal similarities between the two research projects are obvious. Both started in Petersburg. Both focused on the same region in southwestern Ukraine. Both undoubtedly pursued not only scholarly but also social objectives.<\/p>\n

The last-mentioned points are worth elaborating in greater detail. Ilya Dvorkin, the initiator and organizer of the first expeditions, conceived of the objectives of the expedition as restoring the cultural values and, more broadly, historical memory of the Jewish people. For example, he believed that the ornamental decor of Jewish gravestones would inspire Jewish artists to create a distinctly \"Jewish\" art. Subsequently, these thoughts motivated a series of educational tours of the regions of Ukraine where such interesting monuments of Jewish art could be found. Artists, students, schoolchildren, and others participated in these tours in different years. The educational value of such journeys cannot be doubted, but the idea that they would lead to the creation of a new \"national\" art sounds archaic, though completely in accord with the ideological constructs of the early twentieth century. An-sky formulated the objectives of his expeditions in the exact same terms \u2014 as an inspiration for the Jewish intelligentsia. One should note that already at that time such an instrumental approach with respect to the objectives of the expeditions raised scepticism on the part of professional ethnographers. Naturally, nowadays the scholarly and public agendas are even more difficult to reconcile. The naive attempts to explicitly adopt a position as the modern day supporters of An-sky's cause were typical of the early 1990s, a romantic epoch spent in quest for \"the Russia which we had lost.\" Having pronounced seventy years of Soviet rule as a mistake, if not a historical dead-end, the various social forces rushed to rebuild the institutions and restart the processes, which, in their view, had been interrupted. By announcing their expeditions as a continuation of An-sky's, these researchers from Petersburg acted with the same mindset as the rest of the country.<\/p>\n

At the same time, twenty years after the events, one can clearly see differences in the objectives and approaches of these two attempts to \"discover\" Jewish popular culture, separated by seventy-five years. The differences between the two ventures are more numerous than their similarities. From the very start, that is, even during the planning stage, An-sky conceived of his expeditions as primarily folkloristic. The ethnographic dimension was secondary. An-sky developed a keen interest in architectural monuments and decorative art much later \u2014 in the course of the expeditions. Moreover, architecture, synagogues, and cemeteries interested him primarily as the sites of concentrated folklore and historical memory. The notion of the \"historical monument\" in the thinking of An-sky prevailed over the notion of the \"artistic monument.\" Despite the beautiful \u2014 and at times unique \u2014 photographs of the interiors and exteriors of synagogues, and despite the tireless collecting of exhibits for the future Jewish Museum in Saint-Petersburg, the interest in material culture and popular arts was quite peripheral to An-sky's pursuits.<\/p>\n

An-sky was very interested in the life of contemporary Jewish communities, in the variety of their everyday experiences, and in their social structure and political affiliations. His \"Historico-Ethnographic Program\" discussed not only the problems of the Khmelnytsky era, but also the questions of Zionism and the 1905 revolution. There is no doubt that An-sky the collector was most interested in the contemporary life of the Jewish people.<\/p>\n

The participants of the expeditions organised by the Petersburg Jewish University, on the other hand, were pre-occupied with the glorious past rather than the miserable present of the shtetls <\/em>in which hardly any Jews remained. The past was embodied in the glamorous synagogues and the elaborately ornamented tombstones of the late eighteenth century. The participants of these expeditions could not undertake serious study of the folklore and ethnographic exhibits, since they lacked erudition, professional training, a knowledge of Yiddish, and a systemic interest in the recent past. The attempts to communicate with the native populations of the shtetls <\/em>consisted primarily in recording \"oral histories,\" but the results of this work, as is now obvious, were not satisfactory. The failure was mostly due to the lack of clearly formulated research problems. Such problems could not be formulated since the level of erudition of these amateur collectors was very low. Essentially, the most fruitful were questionnaires (one cannot really call them \"interviews\") dedicated to ethnographic problems. Some of these appeared in the two-volume guide One Hundred Jewish Shtetls in Ukraine<\/em>. One must note, however, that the 1994 volume already formulated as one of the priority tasks the study of folklore and ethnography by way of interviewing bearers of the tradition. These plans were realized ten years later in the course of expeditions organized by the Center Petersburg Judaica. The latter expeditions are described later in this article.<\/p>\n

A distinctive feature of the expeditions, which soon became known as the expeditions of the Petersburg Jewish University, consisted of conversations with the Ukrainian population. While the interviews with Ukrainians were not initially conceptualized as a separate and important aspect of the field work (that would happen much later), they nonetheless were a constant feature of our expeditions. This had to do with the more or less complete disappearance of Jews from the former shtetls<\/em>. Only long-standing Ukrainian residents could recall the pre- and postwar past of these townships and share memories they had retained of their numerous Jewish neighbours. I should add that in recent years the image of \"ethnic neighbours\" (from the perspective of both Jews and Ukrainians) and the image of the Jew in Ukrainian folklore have become central themes in our research.<\/p>\n

Now that the heritage of An-sky has been analyzed and, I hope, understood much better than in the 1990s, one can appreciate the full extent of his contributions as an ethnographer and writer. He was the first among the Jewish literati to \"notice\" the non-Jewish residents of shtetls <\/em>and neighbouring villages. Included in the long line of An-sky's pioneering initiatives are the systematic study of children's folklore and the use of the phonograph in field work; and exploration of the place of Ukrainians in Jewish folklore and the place of Jews in Ukrainian folklore. A good illustration of this research angle is a chapter dedicated specifically to the image of the Ba'al Shem Tov (the Besht), the founder of Hasidism, in Ukrainian folklore, as recorded in the collection of A. Rechtman, a participant in An-sky's expeditions. [4]<\/a> This chapter indicates that Ukrainian folklore was of great interest to An-sky and his collaborators. Moreover, the photographic archives of An-sky's expeditions contain photographs of (Orthodox) churches and (Catholic) kosciols <\/em>taken in the localities in which the expedition operated. The rationale for photographing monuments of other confessions is very obvious. On the photographs An-sky would write down brief summaries of Jewish legends in which any given monument appeared. An-sky understood that any ancient building, not only a synagogue, could be the site of \"thick\" Jewish folkloric memory.<\/p>\n

It is even more obvious that An-sky took an interest in Slavic folklore, in particular if it reflected Jewish plots and motifs. He believed that one could incorporate this folklore into the larger reservoir of historical memory of place \u2014 the memory that was a priori <\/em>a polyethnic mosaic \u2014 and in this manner contribute to the preservation of Jewish history. Thus the photographic archive of the expedition from 1912\u201314 contains a photograph of the glamorous Roman Catholic church in Olyk (Volhynia). An-sky wrote on the reverse: \"The Polish Roman Catholic church in Olyk. According to the Poles, a picture inside the Roman Catholic church portrays the Eternal Yid; and when their holiday comes, they climb to the top of the Roman Catholic church and whip him [the Eternal Yid].\" [5]<\/a> Even if selective and not systematic, this interest in the non-Jewish monuments in shtetls <\/em>undoubtedly became a turning point in the history of Jewish culture and literature.<\/p>\n

That An-sky's \"discovery\" was revolutionary can be properly judged in the context of contemporaneous Jewish culture. The ethnocentric \"Land und Boden\" [\"Land and Soil\"] character of Yiddish Jewish literature required the construction of the \"national territory,\" the non-existent \"Yiddishland.\" Jewish writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries approached this problem through the method of exclusion. As Dan Miron correctly pointed out, only Jews inhabit Sholem Aleichem's Kasrilivske. [6]<\/a> Sholem Aleichem's narratives lack references to the kosciol <\/em>spire and the cupola of the Orthodox church that would be indispensable attributes of any shtetl<\/em>. Similarly absent are the shtetls' <\/em>non-Jewish residents. Citing the memoirs of the writer's brother, Dan Miron writes that as a boy Sholem Aleichem resided on the Church Street and played at the gate of the church. But when, in the autobiographical story \"From the Market,\" Sholem Aleichem described his native town Voronka (the prototype of Kasrilivske), he made no mention of the church. Naturally, writers representing the earlier generations were prepared to \"admit\" into their works \"high-brow\" non-Jewish cultures. Thus Nikolai Gogol was a very important figure for Sholem Aleichem, who in his work would frequently make direct and indirect references to Gogol. But the everyday \"peasant\" culture and its bearers, as well as Christian symbols, hardly found any place in the Jewish literature of the nineteenth century. The appearance of such characters and symbols at the margin of the narrative was invariably a dangerous omen. It is sufficient to mention that the appearance of the Orthodox priest and the Russian bloke Fed'ka in the opening scenes was a foreboding of the eventual baptism and symbolic death of Chava, one of Tevye's daughters.<\/p>\n

Writers and artists representing modernist aesthetics chose the opposite approach. Unlike their realist predecessors, they did not \"cut out\" from the \"portrait\" of the shtetl <\/em>inconvenient non-Jewish details \u2014 they preferred to appropriate them. For the majority of modernists the religious Jewish tradition was of little importance. They viewed it as no more than a family legend. The task of creating the \"Yiddishland,\" on the other hand, was also important for them. But the \"Yiddishland\" in their understanding no longer centred on the Jewish street shown from a particular perspective in order to deliberately exclude the church. Now this notion encompassed the entire cultural space of the city and its suburbs. The shift of focus from the \"Jewish street\" to the city as a whole implied its cultural appropriation. Everything in the city was now \"Jewish.\" Hence the wealth of \"non-Jewish\" details, such as the church cupola in the engravings of Solomon Yudovin (The Old Vitebsk <\/em>series) and on the canvasses of Marc Chagall (The Stroll<\/em>, Over Vitebsk<\/em>). The most vivid example of such an appropriation is the depiction of Christ. The image of Jesus became a recurring feature of Jewish modernist literature. And here one did not speak exclusively of Jesus, conceptualized as the suffering Jew or, more broadly, as the suffering human. The intended meaning was instead linked to the recognizable details of the eastern European landscape \u2014 the crucifixion at the road-side. Such imagery suddenly surfaced in the works of the Jewish modernists Shalom Ash, Lamed Shapiro, Uri-Zvi Grinberg, Sh.Y. Agnon, and Itzik Manger.<\/p>\n

The transition from the \"realistic Yiddishland\" to the \"modernist Yiddishland\" can be discerned for the first time in An-sky's work. The photographs taken during his expeditions, as already noted, featured, in addition to numerous synagogues, also images of churches and kosciols<\/em>. By taking photographs of churches, An-sky acknowledged that the Jewish folklore easily appropriated not only synagogues, but also churches. The clear message is that \"simple\" Jews \u2014 the \"people\" \u2014 noticed, understood, and incorporated into their worldview the fact purposefully ignored by Jewish writers, namely that there were churches in the shtetls. <\/em>The next step consisted in not only allowing oneself to see the church and the peasant, but also to \"include\" them within the \"Jewish space.\" That step was most likely taken by Jewish artists and writers, and later by scholars, as evidenced by the numerous publications and conferences on the subject of Jewish-Slavic cultural interactions and inter-relationships.<\/p>\n

But let us return from the early twentieth century to the beginning of the present century. By the mid-1990s, young enthusiasts transformed themselves into a group of researchers who more or less professionally studied different aspects of Jewish history and culture. Those who collaborated with researchers from the Center of Jewish Art at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and focused their efforts on the traditional (mostly ritual) art and synagogue architecture, significantly departed from the ideas of An-sky. The same could be said about historians who began serious research in the archives. On the other hand, An-sky's main sphere of interest \u2014 folklore, ethnography and collective memory \u2014 remained under-researched.<\/p>\n

Such research began only in the mid-2000s, when it seemed that the temporal window of opportunity had already closed. By then the conditions of work had changed dramatically in comparison with the situation fifteen years earlier. People born in the 1910s were no longer around. That was the last generation that remembered community institutions as they existed in the pre-revolutionary era. Those people not only could speak, but also read and write in Yiddish. Moreover, they were cognizant of the basic religious practices. The mass emigration of the 1990s caused the Jewish population of Ukraine's shtetls <\/em>to decline at least tenfold. Many communities virtually disappeared. One cannot but note that one of An-sky's many predictions became a reality yet again. In 1908, in a programmatic article entitled \"Jewish Popular Art,\" An-sky warned that if one were to put off collecting testimonies and artifacts, very soon it would be too late to start such work.<\/p>\n

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Left:<\/em> Portrait of S. An-sky (Shloyme Zanvl Rapoport, 1863\u20131920). Right:<\/em> Valerii Dymshits and Boris Khaimovich, Satanov (Sataniv) in Podolia, Jewish cemetery, 1992. Photo: M. Kheifets<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Left:<\/em> Tombstone of Ber of Bolekh\u00f3w (Bolekhiv), Jewish wine merchant, scholar, and memoirist\/chronicler of the XVIII c. Right:<\/em> Jewish tombstone in Pechenezhin (Pechenizhyn) in Galicia, dated 1837. Photo: M. Kheifets<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Ordinary houses in former Podolian shtetls. Photos: Alla Sokolova<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Naturally, the \"too late\" that An-sky had in mind was not the same that we encountered in our research. These first trips convinced us that the main problem was not the shortage of informants, but the lack of qualified researchers who could collect and process the collected data. Our point of departure for research in the field of cultural anthropology of Ukraine's former shtetls <\/em>was An-sky's ethnographic program, \"Der Mensch.\" [7]<\/a> The Petersburg Judaica Center had this program translated into Russian just in time for the start of the 2004 expedition cycle. The program, which could be described as a veritable \"encyclopaedia of Jewish life,\" greatly expanded our erudition and for a time alleviated the problem of creating new questionnaires. The initial expeditions, which centred on interviews rather than the study of the material culture, delivered astounding results. Employing An-sky's program worked well and provided a basis for starting conversations that would lead far beyond the problems originally enunciated by An-sky. As the participants of the expeditions accumulated field work experience, An-sky's original questionnaire was modified. Moreover, individual scholars created questionnaires that reflected more accurately their research agenda.<\/p>\n

The expeditions functioned as schools of field work for students and young researchers from the Moscow and St. Petersburg universities. Between 2004 and 2008 the Petersburg Judaica Center in collaboration with the Sefer Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization in Moscow ran a series of expeditions in southwestern Ukraine dedicated to a range of topics, including Jewish popular culture, folklore, ethnography, cultural anthropology, and oral history. Similar ventures were later organized in Chernivtsi\/Czernowitz by the Center of Bible and Judaic Studies at the Russian State University for Humanities in Moscow. The region was chosen based on the fact that during the Second World War it was under Romanian occupation and the Jewish population mostly survived. Consequently, sizable Jewish communities still existed in the region well into the 1980s. Today, despite the mass emigration of the 1990s, small but functioning Jewish communities continue to exist in small towns of the region.<\/p>\n

Our expeditionary groups worked in Mohyliv Podilsky, Tulchyn, Bershad, Bratslav, Yampil, and Tomashpil (all in the Vinnytsia region), as well as in Balta (Odessa region). In the process, we compiled a significant audio-archive encompassing some three thousand hours of recorded interviews. The two-week stay of a sizable group (some twenty persons) in one town made it possible to not simply collect specific data, but also to describe social practices and ideological notions, and to understand the functioning of a Jewish community within a small Ukrainian town, and of the town as a whole.<\/p>\n

The participants in the expeditions were and continue to be interested in a wide range of subjects: folklore; ethnography (including traditional rituals), local traditions, and the transformation of traditional notions during the Soviet era; the life of religious communities; Jewish professions; the problems of collective memory; and socio-linguistic problems. The first results of the expeditions were reflected in the collection of articles, Shtetl, Twenty-First Century<\/em>. [8]<\/a> The comprehensive study of the former shtetl <\/em>as a unified cultural space produced good results. The Dictionary of the Local Text in Mogilev-Podol'skii<\/em>, prepared by M. Lurie and his collaborators, demonstrated further the importance of a comprehensive and multifaceted approach to the study of Jewish society and Jewish culture. [9]<\/a><\/p>\n

This comprehensive and multifaceted approach also thrust onto the central stage the subject of inter-ethnic relations. The researchers systematically recorded impressions of Ukrainian town dwellers, who for several generations lived side by side with their Jewish neighbours. Gradually, one came to appreciate the role and place of Jews in the everyday life, religious beliefs, and cultural notions of the Ukrainian population. But whereas this type of research (\"a minority in the cultural imagination of the majority\") was undertaken in the past, the subject of \"the image of Ukrainians in the folklore and traditional notions of the Jews\" appears to be at a pioneering stage.<\/p>\n

The mutual influences between the two peoples are most evident in the calendar traditions. Ukrainian calendar predictions centering on Jewish holidays are well known. A classic example relates to the \"Jewish kuchki<\/em>\" (Sukkot). According to the legend, the kuchki <\/em>are followed by a spell of rainy weather. Moreover, as the collected data suggest, the word \"kuchki\" has come to signify any kind of unfavorable weather conditions. There are also examples of elements of the two cultures being combined, such as syncretic calendar signs in some localities. Thus residents of the Podolian Dniester area describe the spring weather as \"Haman [from the biblical Book of Esther] playing with Yavdokha.\" In other words, the Purim character Haman \"interacts\" with St. Eudoxia, which the Slavic calendar traditionally associates with the change of weather. There is no doubt that many elements of the Jewish tradition made their way into the Ukrainian folklore and vice versa.<\/p>\n

Scholars know much less about the influence of the Christian calendar and predictions on the Jewish popular calendar. Such notions, however, are indispensable for understanding common images and plots of classical Jewish literature. A typical example is to be found in Sholem Aleichem's best known work, Tevye the Milkman<\/em>. Tevye \"writes\" to his author: \"I have two memorial days: one shortly before the Intercession, and the second one closer to the New Year.\" [10]<\/a> Tevye's calendar conflated the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah) and the Orthodox Intercession. For Tevye, the cow-keeper, the Intercession is an important date. Studies of Slavic ethnography reveal that it was after the Intercession that people put cattle into the winter stables. Our Jewish informants were likewise aware of the Slavic calendar signs. For example, in Russia and in Ukraine there exists a legend that before the holiday Spas (Transfiguration of the Lord), 6 to 19 August, according to Julian calendar, one should not eat apples. That is why this holiday is called Yabluchhy Spas (Apple Spas).<\/p>\n

The materials we collected during our expeditions suggest that the local Jews were quite familiar with this custom and were inclined to abide by it. One can also identify parallelisms between the Jewish and Christian calendar signs. Thus the Jewish custom that one should not swim before Lag ba-Omer is typologically kindred to the Christian notion that one should not swim before the Trinity.<\/p>\n

Generally speaking, one cannot properly analyze Jewish popular medicine, demonology, signs, and legends without comparing them with the corresponding Slavic tradition in the same region. The two traditions exhibit a large number of similar and at times outright identical notions. The number of questions one has to answer in the course of field work is larger than the number of known answers. It is our hope that new studies will expand the range of such answers.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Dymshits, Valerii, ed., Istoriia evreev na Ukraine i v Belorussii. Ekspeditsii. Pamiatniki. Nakhodki. <\/em>(St. Petersburg: Peterbugskii evreiskii universitet, Institut issledovanii evreiskoi diaspory, 1994).<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Ibid., 6\u201314.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Ibid., 14.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Rekhtman, A. Yiddishe etnografie un folklor <\/em>(Buenos Aires, 1958) (in Yiddish).<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Sokolova, A.V. Fotograficheskie snimki v \"Al'bom Evreiskoi khudozhestvennoi stariny\" <\/em>(St. Petersburg, 2007).<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Miron, Dan. The Image of the Shtetl <\/em>(Syracuse University Press. 2000), 2\u20134.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> The purpose of An-sky's Yidishe Etnografishe Programe <\/em>(Jewish Ethnographic Program) was to systematize the collection and handling of data, as well as to enable volunteers to conduct independent work in places not reached by the expedition. The first part of the program, Der Mentsh <\/em>(The Human Being), was edited by ethnographer Lev Shternberg and published in 1914; it asked 2,087 questions about the traditional lifecycle. Only the answers to the queries about death still exist. See Benyamin Lukin's entry \"An-ski Ethnographic Expedition and Museum\" in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe<\/em>.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> Dymshits, V., L'vov, A., Sokolova, A., eds., Shtetl, XXI vek: Polevye issledovaniia <\/em>(St. Petersburg: Izdatel'stvo EUSPb, 2008).<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> Ibid., 186\u2013219.<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a>\"Az nedostoinyi,\" translation from the Yiddish by M. Shambadal, in Sobranie sochinenii<\/em>, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1959), 469.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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