The Shochet (Vol. 1): A Memoir of Jewish Life in Ukraine and Crimea

by Pinkhes-Dov Goldenshteyn, Michoel Rotenfeld (translator)

Set in Ukraine and Crimea, this unique autobiography offers a fascinating, detailed picture of life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Tsarist Russia. Goldenshteyn (1848-1930), a traditional Jew who was orphaned as a young boy, is a master storyteller. Folksy, funny, streetwise, and self-confident, he is a keen observer of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, both Jewish and non-Jewish. His accounts are vivid and readable, sometimes stunning in their intensity.  The memoir is brimming with information; his adventures shed light on communal life, persecution, family relationships, religious practices and beliefs, social classes, local politics, interactions between Jews and other religious communities (including Muslims, who formed the majority of Crimea’s populace), epidemics, poverty, competition for resources, migration, war, modernity and secularization, holy men and charlatans, acts of kindness and acts of treachery. In chronicling his own life, Goldenshteyn inadvertently tells a bigger story—the story of how a small, oppressed people, among other minority groups, struggled for survival in the massive Russian Empire. Until now, only a small circle of Yiddish-speaking scholars had access to this extremely significant primary source. This translation is a game-changer, making this treasure trove of information accessible to academics and ordinary readers alike. Informed by research in Ukrainian, Israeli, and American archives and personal interviews with the few surviving individuals who knew Goldenshteyn personally,  The Shochet  is a magnificent new contribution to Jewish and Eastern European history.

Genres: Jewish

566 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 20, 2024

Reviews

[Matal “The Mischling Princess” Baker]

After having already read (and loved!) Glückel of Hameln’s translated memoirs, I was thrilled to discover that a similar autobiography was written that detailed Jewish life in Eastern Europe during the 19th century.

At 566 pages, “The Shochet (Vol. 1): A Memoir of Jewish Life in Ukraine and Crimea” by Pinkhes-Dov Goldenshteyn and translated by Michoel Rotenfeld is a hefty book compared to Glückel’s, but it offers so many rich details.

What I particularly love about this translation is that 25% of the book is comprised of Rotenfeld’s marvelous introduction. Even more critical was Rotenfeld’s inclusion of endnote citations. Without these citations—which explained details so thoroughly—I wouldn’t have been able to understand the minutiae because unlike Goldenshteyn, I wasn’t raised as a Hasid.

This book’s translation is really thoughtful, and I appreciate how, throughout the text, Rotenfeld explained not just Jewish and Hasidic Jewish customs, but also ensured that readers understood the Hebrew dating system by providing Gregorian dates for events in Goldenshteyn’s life. In doing so, Rotenfeld ensures that gentiles will be able to appreciate this autobiography.

Goldenshteyn was an orphan and lived in an era long before social safety programs (i.e., child services, food stamps, and etc.) and details how he survived—on next to nothing but his own wits and religion.

Even though I’ve only read the first of two volumes, I am completely fascinated with Goldenshteyn’s life and I simply cannot wait to read the second volume! I absolutely recommend this book to anyone interested in Ukrainian, Moldavian, and European Jewish history.

[Martin]

The Shochet is an innocuously titled travelogue memoir of a righteous, forward-moving, determined individual, who recorded his difficult life in the later years of the 19th century and the early parts of the 20th. In this masterpiece of detail, much peril and danger is presented and discussed, including the fright of border crossings, the terror of poverty and oppression, the nastiness of underhanded charlatans, and the inhumane snootery of class warfare. The subtitle - A Memoir of Jewish Life in Ukraine and Crimea - is also plain and unassuming, with slight hints to the peripatetic nature of the story, but barely a hint of the cauldron of difficulties this gentleman had to pass through.

Pinkhes-Dov Goldenshteyen's unimaginable suffering, jump-started by orphanhood, is so thematically similar to Charles Dickens' David Copperfield, that this chronicle of terrible human agony might as well have started with the famous "I am born."

That's how much of a steel-trap memory the author displays in telling his life story of wretchedness and affliction. What's noteworthy about this gift of memory is that everything he tells is backed up by historical research, save for one little thing: he never knows what year it is, and can't figure out how old anyone is, including himself! What is up with that? Well, the introduction - fully 1/4ths of the entire book - tries to explain this phenomenon, but the book is still wonder-worthy. You can look all of this up, and everything lines up. The translator takes very good care to plot all events properly and linearly, lending credibility to the narrative despite this quirk on the original author's part. The details of the story do seem to hold up to history's microscope.

The introduction - by the capable hand of the talented translator, who spends lots of time in footnotes filling gaps, explaining ritual, uncovering historical information, and showcasing his extensive research - expends much ink in explaining how rare a telling this story is, and compares it with other valuable and notable works of literature that mine the same territory. This too, seems to be so. The story is sui generis, especially for the era, and the personality, and the location, but we now have to talk about all this terrible anguish.

The entire narrative urges the astute reader to ask why he suffers so much. The author has unimaginable faith, and undaunted drive, but it doesn't seem to get him anywhere. His life is like an accounting bank-o-meter that keeps track of his wealth as it goes up and down from 0 to 30 rubles, or thereabouts. He's a jack of all trades, master of some, and can't make a sustained living. Why?

Those are just economic concerns. As for the story itself, and the physical torments the author is forced to undergo, I could steal every word in the thesaurus under "suffering," and it still wouldn't explain a) just how much suffering he's made to endure, and b) why he seems to suffer so much. Did the Satan of the Job story pick Pinye-Ber as his next project? Did the author leave something unrevealed about his miserable luck? Did the fact of his undying faith in God mean that he farmed out too much responsibility to fate itself? Could no one advise him on prudent paths to a decent livelihood? Was he too headstrong? What is it exactly? Why did the Shochet not know, or say?

The details of what the author endures are mind-blowing, and the author and the translator guide the reader to why our hero perpetually finds himself in certain situations that can be explained by changes in law, and jurisdiction, and historical context, but does not discuss these at all. The introduction also spends a lot of time explaining why this lack makes this a more pure telling of a personal history. I surmise the possibility that the author wished for his heirs to discover these higher-power reasons for themselves. Why does he find himself in certain situations? Why does he not find himself in better situations? Why? What is happening around him? Pinkhes-Dov, we can't stand to see you suffer so!

Finally, one more question is prompted. It is clear from the author himself, and expounded on in the introduction, that the purpose of recording this life history is to inspire his children to remain fast to the path of faith. If so, I must ask what the author himself asks early on in his autobiography, quoting Moses our Teacher: "This is Torah, and this is its reward?"

Maybe part 2 will answer this question, and all of the above."

[Ben Rothke]

You will be hard-pressed to find a book with a more uninteresting title than The Shochet: A Memoir of Jewish Life in Ukraine and Crimea (Touro University Press). While the title may be boring, this is, in fact, an extremely fascinating book that details the life of an unassuming Jewish man in late 19th-century Ukraine.
The book, brilliantly translated from the original Yiddish by Michoel Rotenfeld, librarian at Touro University, is the story of Rabbi Pinkhes Dov Goldenshteyn, who was a shochet and wrote his autobiography for his children so they could understand the trials and tribulations he went through. While Goldenshteyn’s intent was for his children, he has also bequeathed a great gift to us all.
By the end of chapter 2, it’s eminently clear that there is nothing nice to say about Jewish life in 19th-century Ukraine. Disease, poverty, discrimination, and malnutrition were just some of the many problems Jews had to live through.
Yet with all of those problems and more, Goldenshteyn is a man who never lost his faith. He recounts countless stories of where he had felt he had no luck, but never once blames God. He interacts with countless scoundrels and rogues, but always emerges with his faith intact. This includes no less than his future in-laws who promised him the world, but ultimately delivered nothing, except for their destitute and mute-like daughter. And to all this, Goldenshteyn takes it all in stride.
In many ways, Goldenshteyn is like Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian who was a witness to history. The times Goldenshteyn lived in were certainly not as calamitous as when the Second Temple fell. Yet he witnessed kings, and wars, and had a number of face-to-face meetings with Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, known as the Tzemach Tzedek, who was the third Chabad rebbe, and much more.
While Goldenshteyn lived through many historical events, his autobiography lacks any and all historical context. He solely concentrates on his own experiences in order to convey a spiritual message to his descendants. So that they maintain the traditional Jewish mode of life and remain true to God and his Torah.
He knew that some of his children were straying from the ways of their forefathers, and he was determined to influence them to return to traditional Judaism. He felt so strongly that his life story was the best means to achieve this goal that he chose autobiography over the traditional Jewish method of writing an ethical will.
Goldenshteyn, with all of the many tzures he went through felt that he was a beneficiary of significant divine providence, and wanted his descendants to know that it was all worth it. And that they should go along on the right path and believe in God, as their father did.
Goldenshteyn was an ordinary person, who like his contemporaries, was simply struggling to survive. He never intended to write a historical account, but in his ordinariness, he has left the world with a captivating historical narrative about Jewish life in the Ukraine. He certainly was not an academic, but his book gives the reader much more details and insights about Ukrainian Jewish life than academics who attempted the same task.
What makes the book unique is that while he may have been a shochet, he was also a fantastic storyteller, which makes this such an interesting read. The book uses significant Ukrainian terms and Yiddishisms, to which Rotenfeld does a superb job of elucidating the reader and filling in the many blanks.
People like to reminisce about the European Jewish world that was. They recount stories of Jewish life in the old country, its richness, and the endless numbers of Talmudic scholars and Hasidic holy men. It takes the reader back to a largely fictional world where everyone was poor, but they were happy. They had their richly religious but monetarily poor lives, but their bellies were nourished by mitzvot.
In The Shochet, the world that was for Goldenshteyn was one that is better described as a living hell. The world around him and all the Jews of Ukraine was filled with poverty and oppression, and that was on a good day.
Born in 1848, the book is the first of a two-volume which takes the reader from Goldenshteyn’s birth to his starting as a shochet in 1873. In the annals of Jewish and Eastern European history, The Shochet is a remarkably unique and fascinating work.

[Rachel]

It’s rare to find an autobiography written by someone in the 19th century who remained traditionally observant. According to Michael Rotenfeld, who translated and wrote the introduction to Pinkhes-Dov Goldenshteyn’s “The Shochet: A Memoir of Jewish Life in Ukraine and Crimea” (Touro University Press), most memoirs/autobiographies from that time period were written by those who’d left traditional Jewish life. That means “The Shochet” offers a rare view of what it was like to live as a Torah observant Jew in that time and place. However, readers may interpret Goldenshteyn’s thought and actions differently from Rotenfeld.
See the rest of my review at https://www.thereportergroup.org/book...

[Perlie]

This was a very personal and touching memoir about growing up in Ukraine in the late 1800s. The author experienced devastating loss at a young age, and endured extreme situations. From his wild childhood days to his early marriage years, he is an honest and vulnerable narrator, who does not sugar-coat his life or his responses. The translator's notes were helpful. I am ready for volume 2!

[Meilech]

Very interesting, gripping, funny sad and inspiring all at the same time! Highly recommend this!

[Jackie]

This work is certainly valuable as a primary source. It is not a super compelling read as a memoir.

Poverty in nineteenth-century Ukraine sounds as miserable as you can possibly imagine.