Россия и США: познавая друг друга. Сборник памяти академика Александра Александровича Фурсенко / Russia and the United States: perceiving each other. In Memory of the Academician Alexander A. Fursenko - стр. 69

Petrovsky surveys Right-Bank Ukraine from the viewpoint of ordinary Jews and Jewish pursuits in the period before Russia’s 1860s reforms, before the Haskalah‘s greatest influence, and before the 1881 pogroms redirected Russian Jewry toward an accelerated and socially disruptive modernization. He recreates a lost world of small town Jews and their assertive and enterprising pursuits as a foil to the standing stereotype of the shtetl attributed to Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman (or Fiddler on the Roof) as a rundown, poverty-stricken place where Jews were little more – outside their private lives – than victims of the Judeophobes and a predatory Tsarist government. Petrovsky’s shtetl, by contrast, was a lively place, where Jews controlled their lives, defied the law, competed and fought with each other and with gentiles, alongside whom they lived. If Jews suffered from being set outside Russian law, Petrovsky shows, many of them also profited from various outlaw roles. It is a world in which Jews held their own, apologized to no one, and mocked and ridiculed gentiles as much as gentiles did Jews.

The shtetl portrayed here stresses Jewish activities that pushed against bourgeois Jews’ self-image as well as against the limits of the Russian law: smuggling; liquor production, marketing, and monopoly; counterfeiting; even verbal and physical violence against gentiles and each other. The result is a kind of counter-stereotype with a tendency to essentialize Jewish life similar to that of the shtetl stereotype it is meant to correct. The gain, however, is a sharpening of the contrast with post-1860 Russian Jewry and a refreshing truth-telling about the reality behind some of the beliefs and practices of Jews fostered by antisemites. Negative stereotypes are transformed into signs of the vital energy and realistic adaptation to the restrictions and disabilities the government placed upon Jews. Each of the chapters on smuggling, liquor production and marketing, trade dominance, violence, etc. is copiously documented by a bewildering wealth of specific case studies drawn principally from archival sources in Ukraine, Russia, and Israel. The appeal of Petrovsky’s rich and locale-specific narrative all but conceals its hyperbole, lending it a kind of poetic truth about life in the shtetl.

Paradoxically, the one element that remains largely un-specific is the shtetl itself. Petrovsky is deliberately vague about defining the focus of his study except as a settlement of Jews and gentiles ranging in size between a small village and what otherwise have usually been considered towns and cities such as Berdichev, Uman, and Zhitomir.[207] Petrovsky’s shtetl is in fact not a particular place at all, but a way of life in which Jewish energy and acquisitiveness expressed itself in many forms and in which a greater ease and freedom existed among the shtetl’s mixed ethnicities and between Jews and the government. The survival of the power of Polish landowners in the region provided an ongoing buffer against the gradual encroachment of the Russian government in taxing and controlling the Jewish population. Jewish privileges thus waned along with those of the Polish grandees, who had functioned as indolent and unwitting protectors of some Jewish rights, such as trading in liquor.