An extract from A Litvin’s “Yudishe Neshomes” (Jewish souls), a collection of remembered characters and images from the Jewish past in various parts of the world. Here he describes Dvoyre, the cemetery prayer leader in Mohilve, Belarus.

In other places, this kind of woman who worked in the cemetery might have been called a “ma’avar-yaboknitse” or “the Jewess with the mayne-loshn.”  She was one of several characters among the living who made their living from the dead. In Mohilev, she was called the koolishe ruferke – the community caller. And Dvoyre, the Mohilev caller, was the most original such figure in the whole Pale of Settlement.

Mohilev Jews remember her well. She was built like an oak tree. She always wore a jacket, but only on one arm, and carried in one hand the mayne-loshn or the ma’avar-yabok prayer book and in the other a dirty red kerchief and a box of tobacco. In the cemetery she was lord and mistress. She was on the friendliest of terms with the dead and knew each of their life stories by heart. Thanks to her conversations with them, she was also familiar with the biographies of even their most distant relatives. To deceased men, she always used the formal “you” and spoke with great respect, especially to the scholars and the very devout among them. With the dead women, however, she spoke plainly and without ceremony, as if talking to old friends.

When, for example, a woman came to cry out her bitter heart at her mother’s grave over her sick child, there was no need to go into details with Dvoyre. She already knew exactly what the sickness was and what to say to the deceased to get her to pray on her daughter’s behalf. In other words, she handled the women – both the living and the dead – with authority.

First of all, she would rap three times on the headstone, speaking to the dead like so:

“Asne, wake up! Don’t you hear? It’s Dvoyre here. I’m informing you that your daughter Khashe has come! Her little Feygele is sick, an infection in her little throat … You must go straight away to the lord of the universe to advocate for them!  

Then, she would list all the virtues of the dead woman’s grandchild, Feygele and all the suffering of her daughter Khashe, and order her to go, for God’s sake, right away, without wasting a minute.

Dvoyre was a great speaker of what we called “mayne-loshn language” – cemetery language. At the same time, the length and the warmth of her petitions depended on the size of the fee she was paid for her mediation. With rich customers, she was most courteous and amicable, and used to list all the virtues of both the living and the dead. With the poor she was a little shorter, ordering rather than entreating them to act on behalf of the living.

“Dvoyre the ruferin” was also enjoyed a drink. However, she was careful to avoid immodesty in her penchant for a “bitter drop.” After a long day’s mediating and advocating with the dead, she would stop by the inn that stood just on the corner outside the cemetery and buy herself a small glass of vodka and a piece of sponge cake for two kopikes. She didn’t drink it, however – it was, in those days, not appropriate for a woman to just sit and sip vodka. Rather, she dipped the cake in the vodka, repeating this until the glass was empty.

One day a group of young Mohilevers played a trick on her. They told the bartender to give her a double – a glass that should have cost four kopikes. She dipped the cake in the vodka until her fingers slumped in the glass and she could no longer stand up on her feet. She had to be taken home.

A. Litvin, Yudishe Neshomes, (New York, 1916). Trans. Annabel Gottfried Cohen