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 great list of ritualists and religious functionaries who worked in the cemetery, many of whom were women.

Oh, what a lovely wife! After the wedding, we lived quite well, like a Jewish couple ought to live. It seems to me I did my duty satisfactorily. Hear me out and let my mouth dry up if I tell a lie! Every day in the morning I brought her, as is proper, 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, which moved the hearts of all who heard it.  Several times a day I would bring her things – a cup of soup, a hot babke, a pickled cucumber, a sour stewed apple. Here you go, enjoy! She just sat there the whole time in one place, deeply preoccupied with making her living.

Many times I came just to see how she was, and to give her some help with her revenue collection – by giving someone their change from a three or a six-er,  or reminding her of the old debts of certain gentlefolk who, passing her by, had found they didn’t have any cash and promised to come back later, or driving a way a cow or a goat who, going by on their stroll through the streets, couldn’t resist grabbing a mouthful of straw from under her.

In the month of Elul I brought her to the big fair in the cemetery outside the town. She didn’t do any worse than the rest of the pack of religious functionaries: shamosim and shamestes [male and female beadles], khazonim [cantors], zogerins [female preachers], mekablim [people who lived on charity], psalm-sayers, gabetes [female community functionaries], kneytlekh leygerins [women who made soul candles], feldmesterins [cemetery measuring women], veynerins [wailers] and klogerins [professional mourning women]. And the community was there for the milking, children of Israel! It was not a bad way to make a living. But when it’s good, you start to want better, and when you have bread, you want challah …

Extract from Mendele Moykher Sforim, ‘Fishke der krumer’, Geklibene Verk, Vol. 3 (1946), p. 78, trans. Annabel Gottfried Cohen