Author: feldmesterin
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There are few particularly religious women in town … who also measure the cemetery.
“Elul days” from Khaim Shoys, Dos Yontef Bukh (1933). Life goes on in the shtetl as usual. Yet, at the same time it is clear to anyone looking that people are trying to be more pious. They are careful not to commit transgressions which, at any other time of year, they don’t even think about.…
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‘The entire shtetl accompanied her to her eternal rest’ – reverence for the midwife
Quoted on the introduction page to midwives in Eastern Europe is the following question from the Jewish Ethnographic Program – a vast questionnaire created by S. Ans-ki’s ethnographic team in 1913, and a hugely important source on midwives. “Is there a custom that when the midwife dies, all of the children whom she brought…
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Children lament their mother in Brestetshke
‘Examples of laments by children’, collected by Moyshe Melman in Brestetshke (Beresteczko, Berestetchka, Brestetshke, ברסטצ’ק, Brestitski) in response to a 1928 survey by the YIVO ethnographic commission. Original Yiddish published in Itzik Gottesman, ‘Yidishe Klogenishn’, YIVO Bleter Vol.4 (2003), p. 137-155. Translated by Annabel Gottfried Cohen. I’m walking slowly along the footpath. Suddenly, I hear…
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A woman’s lament for her husband
This klogenish (lament) is one of several collected by the YIVO ethnographic commission in the 1920s and 30s. The full collection can be found in an article by Itzik Gottesman, ‘Yidishe Klogenishn’ (Yidish laments) published in YIVO Bleter in 2003. Over the next few weeks, I will be sharing a few of these klogenishn in…
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Cemetery and grave measuring
This is a translation of a 1906 German study of Feld (cemetery) and Keywer (grave – from the Hebrew and Yiddish קבֿר) measuring by Russian Jewish anthropologist S. Weissenberg. The original German article can be found here. It actually consists of two articles – the second half, in which the font changes, is an extract…
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Every day I brought her to her place in the old cemetery, where it was her custom to sit on a bit of straw and beg for donations singing a nign from lamentations…
In this extract from Mendele Moykher Sforim’s Fishke der krumer, Fishke describes his wife, a blind orphan who makes her living by singing lamentations in the cemetery. The passage describing the month of Elul, when people would flock to the cemetery to visit their relatives’ graves, turning it into something of a ‘fair’, includes a…
Pulling at Threads 