In his memoirs, Meir Pisiuk describes his mother, a religious teacher for girls and cemetery prayer leader in Lyubitsh, Lithuania (today Lyubcha, Belarus). This translation combines excerpts from Volumes 1 and 2 of his memoirs, Bleter Zikhroynes.

And now I was back in Lyubitsh, where I sat myself down in the besmedresh and threw myself with great zeal into the study of gemore.   I don’t know where this great desire to study came from. I drank in the gemore like a thirsty person gulps down fresh spring water. My mother, who had also returned to Lyubitsh, welcomed me warmly. Observing my passion for learning made her the happiest mother in the world. She provided me with everything I needed, and didn’t know what to do with me.  

My mother came from a good family. Her father was a grain merchant, a wealthy, middle-class man who lived generously. His beautiful house was also a house of charity. Quite remarkable things were also said about my grandmother, Khane, who was an exceptionally good woman with warm, charitable hands. I was told that, on Friday afternoons, it would always be chaos in Bobe Khane’s kitchen, as all the poor in town would come to put their cholent for shabes in her oven. Before letting the pots slide into the oven, Bobe Khane would open each one and give it a stir. If the contents of a pot looked meagre, Bobe Khane would quickly fatten it up with her generous hand. To one pot she added a bit of fat, to another some meat, to another some kishkes and so on. The following day, when the penniless women opened their cholent pots at the shabes table, their hearts simply soared when they saw the treasure that now laid inside.  

Yet despite this, my mother had a hard life. Widowed at a young age by the death of her first husband, my father, she had had to bring up her young children completely on her own. My mother was not at all the sort of person to seek help from others, even from relatives or friends. She relied entirely on herself – on her own two hands and, above all, on her knowledge. She worked tirelessly.

She married a second time, with a book seller from Nesvizh, but it was not a good match. She divorced her husband and went back to Lyubitsh, where she became a religious teacher for girls, a profession that was known Lithuania as “a women’s rebetsn.” She opened a kheyder ­– a religious school, where she taught girls to pray and to read holy texts in Yiddish translation – the tsene-rene, the sheyvet-muser, the menoyres-hamoyer and other holy books. She also made her living from another small business – a cemetery enterprise, which was always most lucrative in the month of Elul.  During Elul, the month of the famous “cemetery bazaar”, my mother went to the graveyard every day, to help the women recite Hebrew and Yiddish prayers from the famous mayne-loshn[1] prayerbook.

During the month of Elul, the women of Lyubitsh besieged the cemetery, spending days on end among the gravestones, all of which resounded with sobs and screams. They went to visit their mothers and fathers, to children, brothers, sisters, to relatives and good friends, wailing and crying out their bitter hearts by their graves. They begged the dead to make efforts for them and to persuade God to send the living here on earth a better fortune and an easier life. Every grave was inundated by women, and the sound of women’s voices were carried wide across the cemetery, like the waves of a river during a flood.

My mother walked among them, going from headstone to headstone with a copy of the mayne-loshn prayer book in one hand, and a knotted red kerchief in the other. This was her bazaar, her world. As well as reciting prayers with the women in Hebrew and Yiddish, she also helped motivate and energize them in their lamentations. She was like the conductor of an orchestra, directing the wailing of the women in the cemetery.

Each of my mother’s clients paid her a fee – sometimes twopence, sometimes three, sometimes even a heavy pre-war copper Russian tenner. However many prayers she said with however many women – that’s how many coins fell into her red kerchief. Walking home in the evening, dead-tired, she could barely carry her earnings. The weight was too much for her, and yet she carried it readily. Arriving home, she would spread out the kerchief and the coins on the table. The big sixpences and even bigger tenners danced in her eyes.  

“Well, I worked hard enough,” she said, blowing her nose and wiping the sweat from her brow. “The whole shtetl was there in the holy grounds…”

She looked at me with kind, loving eyes. She knew that I was studying and that, more importantly, I wanted to study. At that time, I could have gotten anything I wanted from her. She even made me a new coat and a suit, always repeating “Study, study, and you will want for nothing…”

This is how my mother lived. She was, by nature, a very solitary person. Later – probably when the loneliness began to weigh too heavily on her bones – she married a third time, this time to an old Jew from Smorgon, the owner of a tannery. She didn’t live long with him, as he died soon after they were married. An exhausted, nervous and irritable old woman, my mother went to live with my brother in Kena. Later, she left Kena and came to live with me in Rovne.

If she had been a little younger, healthier and less nervous, she may have lived very happily with me. My material circumstances and my position in the community might have made her very proud. But my mother was, by then, too old and too weak to be able to feel any nakhes.And this was now making life unbearable for her. Ascetic in her religious observance and deep in old age, the whole world had become a burden to her.  She spent her time mostly thinking about God and death.

At the end of her life, she lived in a small apartment in Kena, where I supported her financially. She spent her days whispering prayers and reciting psalms. She had been transformed into a frail little bag of bones, which might fall apart at any moment. Every day, at sundown, she would appear like a shadow outside her solitary little apartment, and feebly make her way to the nearby stores to pay off her small debts.

The shopkeepers were astonished, asking, “why are you in such a hurry to make these payments, may you be well! You can pay another time, it’s not urgent!” To this my mother replied, “No no, my dear, one must hurry. What if I die – God forbid – during the night? Then who will pay the bill? To die in debt is a huge sin…” And being a melumedes – a scholar and educator – she quickly added “One must arrive pure in the next world, clear of debt. There, it is quite insisted upon. Even death does not absolve you theft…”

My mother carefully avoided taking any money that wasn’t hers. To her, failing to pay a debt was an act of theft. She was always thinking of death and of God, before whom she would have to answer for all of her deeds. She often said “it’s good to die in the month of Nisn. Tsadikim, the righteous, with pure souls, die in Nisn.” Her wish was answered. My mother died in Nisn, during the night of the last day of peysekh. She went quite suddenly, without suffering. During the day, she still prepared her candles and her makhzer – her prayerbook – for haskores-neshomes – the prayer for the dead.

Since there was no cemetery in Kena, she was buried in Vilna. More than thirty grandchildren attended her funeral. Into her grave we dropped not a body, but a heap of bones, wrapped in shrowds. My brother, the poor sixty year old orphan, cried and sobbed profoundly while saying the mourner’s kadish.

We put up a handsome gravestone engraved with beautiful lettering. In the text, however, there was a small mistake. She was referred to as “Bas haRov” – daughter of the Rabbi.

My brother lost it.

“What daughter of what rabbi?! What do you have against my grandfather?! For years he’s been sitting in great tranquility and honour in heaven, and now he’s going to be dragged to take part in the holy courts with all the rabbis … Good grief, we need to correct this mistake right away!”

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[1] A seventeenth century Hebrew-Yiddish prayer book of prayers to be recited at gravesites.

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Cite this: Excerpts from Meir Pisiuk, Bleter Zikhroynes (Pages of memoirs), Warsaw, c. 1930s. Trans. Annabel Gottfried Cohen.