The Pale As It Was

...The repressive governmental decrees of the 1880s and 1890s did not drive him away either...

...An autobiography as good as The Journals of David Toback is of special value, given the chasm that has separated the grandchildren and great grandchildren of the author's generation from their not-too-distant past...

...Youth is often recalled as replete with premonitions of impending disaster...

...On the first anniversary of her death, Toback, already retired, began to write an account of his youth, filling five notebooks in Yiddish and completing the work sometime between 1941-1943...

...This fosters a cloying nostalgia, pathetic because it is so often accompanied by a profound sense of guilt...

...In my mind it was a place of deliverance, a place where Jews could build a new and free life...

...In fact, that once-thriving commercial center became the prototype for Glupsk, the Yiddish writers' symbol of Jewish urban decay, economic listlessness and cultural isolation...

...The past was transformed into a litany of misery...

...Toback might have well chosen to go to the new, relatively more prosperous cities of the southern Pale...

...His mother has become a vindictive, plaintive shadow of her once indomitable self...

...In America it found expression in the immigrants' and their childrens' promulgation of the ideology of "cultural pluralism," which dramatically highlighted the profound difference between their old and new homes...

...Although valuable, their approach places undue stress on political organizations, notably the Jewish Socialist and Zionist movements, while minimizing what were at the time unquestionably more important features of Jewish life in Eastern Europe...

...Your beloved...

...He continues to study with intense devotion (although, interestingly, the book reflects none of the author's reputedly celebrated scholarly abilities...

...Emigration to America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries coincided wit h a large internal Jewish migration within the borders of Russia itself...

...In an autobiography, unlike life, one knows where one is headed, and To-back is naturally conscious throughout the work that he is bound for America...

...This deterioration was only tangentially connected with the government's policies...

...In 1932, his eldest and apparently his favorite daughter, by then a mother herself, jumped to her death from a roof...

...One reason is the Holocaust, for even if the author himself escaped that catastrophe, it tends to skew memories of daily existence...

...After a very brief account of his first 13 years, Toback's story really gets underway with an incident that marks him out of the ordinary...

...A scrape he gets into results in his fleeing to the Bessara-bian steppes where, without telling his parents, he spends nearly two years working as a foreman on a tobacco plantation...

...And autobiographies of late 19th-and early 20th-century Eastern European Jews are especially hobbled by overpowering presuppositions and biases...

...A wealthy, learned Hasid who unexpectedly appears at the young man's Bar Mitzvah celebration assures him, "Now that you have worn [the te-fillin] your whole life will change...

...The success of Toback's engaging, colorful, suprisingly believable autobiography-despite our not knowing ho w much we owe to him and how much to his granddaughter-stems from the fact that for the most part it avoids the usual pitfalls...

...Finally, having finished writing just before he learned the full dimensions of the Holocaust, he recalls scenes with a freshness and a naivete inconceivable two or three years later...

...Life in the remote shtetl where his parents live seems oppressive beyond belief...

...Toback set out to recapture his past not to preserve his public record (he had none), or to compose an elegy to a vanished world, but for various private reasons barely articulated in the text: his daughter's suicide, his largely unrealized youthful potential, his abiding wish for an unachieved domestic tranquility...

...He thus is better equipped in some respects than other, far better known, more worldly Russian-born memoirists to of fer a portrait of the world of his youth -a world so often misrepresented and refurbished that Eastern European Jews can only be popularly imagined today as alternating between states of pious abandon and self-pity, laughter and tears...

...David leaves for the United States, eventually bringing over his siblings and his wife and children...

...Nearly all autobiography, as George Gusdorf reminds us, is an attempt to "win back what has been lost," to produce "an apologetics or theodicy of the individual being...

...His wife, Chaya, asks him bitterly, "What is America, your sweetheart...

...Yet he seems aware that there was nothing inevitable about his choice...

...Russia's staggering Jewish population explosion was its primary cause-the number of Jews having doubled, emigration notwithstanding, between 1850-1900...

...I had to have some object upon which to place all my hopes and dreams...

...Toback knew the Russian peasants' potential for anti-Jewish brutality (despite his depicting everyday relations between Jews and non-Jews, especially in the rural settings, as often congenial) but he never experienced a pogrom himself...

...And soit does...

...It should be noted, too, that the pogroms were not what prompted him to depart...

...In the beginning," he writes, "I wanted to leave because I hated my life here, but now 1 started to fall in love with this America, this unknown land...

...This crystallized into the so-called "Negation of the Diaspora" that was so much a part of the fabric of classical Zionist thought...

...but there were almost overwhelming social and psychological restraints against abandoning his village...

...Without a trace of irony, bitterness or melancholy, for example, Toback describes the thick walls, high windows and seemingly impregnable doors of the home of his wealthy relatives in Pro-skurov and comments: "Such a house looked as if it could stand forever...

...Simultaneously, traditional Jewish occupations like arti-sanry were losing out to Russia's industrialization drive, while the advent of the railroad and the concommitant rise of large cities supplanted the trade role of even middle-sized cities like Berdichev...

...At the same time, however, David is drawn to simple, rowdy Jews living in Kishinev's flop houses...

...They will surely agree that Carole Mal-kin is to bethanked for having rescued a work that helps to demystify the "old world," to strip away the layers of lachrymose ornamentation-thereby permitting its heirs and others to study it, flaws and all, without the intrusion of anything resembling that ubiquitous, burlesque fiddler...

...Similarly, having invested little hope in revolution during his years in Russia, he is able to look back at events before 1917 without any feelings of indignation over a revolution "unfinished" or gone astray...

...It would not have been untruthful had Toback answered Yes...

...Reviewed by Steve Zipperstein Scholar in Residence, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research David Toback was a kosher butcher on New York's Lower East Side, an active member of a small synagogue he helped found soon after his arrival from Russia in 1898, and the father of four daughters and a son...

...The loss of a few woodlots he had managed to acquire to a forest fire, the prospect of his newborn son being caught in his own disgraceful conditions one day, and the growing allure of America finally tell on him and his reluctant wife...

...But the recent popular emphasis on authenticity, on the reclaiming of one's "roots," has been felt with uncommon force among many American Jews whose heritage had been allowed to degenerate into a mixture of stories half-told and customs barely recognizable...

...When he returns to the urban settings of the Russian Pale of Settlement (the 25 provinces containing the vast majority of Russian's Jews) even the big cities like Kishniev appear crowded, reeking of garbage, their Tal-mudic study halls stifling and emotionally barren...

...David is sent away by his parents to a nearby yeshiva, where he learns to delight in the camaraderie, the rigorous intellectual demands and the status of yeshiva students...

...Plagued by relentless economic worries and lacking emotional or intellectual sustenance, he turns to drink...

...Their immediate impact tends to be overemphasized in the major sources of Russian Jewish history-simon Dub-now's three-volume classic in particular-which were written by politically engage liberals and Jewish nationalists who freely introduced a stridently anti-Tsarist polemic into their writings...

...David blames their decline on his protracted absence...

...His granddaughter, Carole Malkin, had the notebooks translated and has edited and "retold" To-back's story...

...His father, after years of poverty as a miller, has been reduced to a feeble, pliant, near-beggar...

...He feels some guilt, yet unlike many others whose experience paralleled his, neither at this point nor later does his probing the secular world inspire disbelief or religious skepticism...

...Frequently, too, these books are the summing up of a public life, primarily focusing on the machinations of the author and his friends and foes, on debates, congresses and leaflets...

...Faced with such widespread, apparently unyielding wretchedness, Toback was moved to make his leap by a stray mention of America that he overheard at the market, by the memory of a conversation years earlier with a fellow yeshiva student, and by persistent rumors of unlimited employment and freedom...

...His father-a man subsequently described as taciturn and broken, but filled in this passage with a dignity born of familial pride-presents him with a pair of 1 32-year-old te-fillin that had belonged to David's deceased grandfather, still revered as a local holy man...

...Because of his parents' (primarily his mother's) desire that he better himself, David travels to the fairly large Pros-kurov and to the far larger city of Kishniev...

...The phenomenon cannot simply be laid at the door of an ostensibly unstoppable assimilation . It must be traced in part to the emigrants' resolve to turn their backs on what they were leaving behind with a finality almost unprecedented in Jewish history...

...Certainly leaving Russia was not unavoidable...

...Historians are no less susceptible to this temptation, as is plain from Celia Heller's ill-conceived recent portrait of interwar Polish Jewry sliding toward predestined doom, On the Edge of Destruction...

...The factors that ultimately persuaded Toback and more than 2 million other Jews to headfor America between 18811924 were the Pale's economic and social decay...

...His peripatetic life as a yeshiva student, his acquaintance with some of the Pale's larger, more cosmopolitan settings, and his bucolic stay in the Bessarabian country-side(where he first experiences the pleasures of freedom on the back of an Arabian stallion) all make him alive to the possibilities of moving...

...Having remained committed to the traditionalism of his youth, he has little reason to idealize shtetl religiosity...

...Indeed, the very imposition of a logical design should alert us to the distortions inherent in the genre...

...Another reason is that many such memoirs are written in old age by lifelong secularists who long ago vehemently rejected the piety of their younger years, yet who now thirst for those lost values...

...They encourage him to go in the face of intense pressures from the Jews in the shtetl where they now live for David to marry the sickly, orphaned daughter of the community's former butcher and inherit the position...

...He obliquely suggests that, as in the case of those who had begun leaving in the same period to rebuild Jewish life in Palestine, his decision was also the product of a set of ideals-a rejection of Eastern European Jewish servitude for the prospect of spiritual and political liberation...

...The wave of virulent anti-Semitic violence in 1881-83 was not followed by another widespread outbreak until 1905, long after Toback had already gone...

...While studying Talmud, David sur-reptiously teaches himself to write Russian (he can already speak it-or perhaps Ukrainian-because he grew up in a rural setting with a predominantly non- Jewish population), and then turns to mathematics and reading fiction...

...Toback's marriage into a family of browbeaten souls hardly lightens his spirits...