Many of the Jewish artisans who arrived in the city under false premises, wrote the memoirist Starozhil, went immediately into brokerage at the Kiev Exchange or other shady pursuits such as money lending. Before 1886, Kiev's commodities exchange, a national center for the sugar trade, did not have a building of its own, and business took place in the open air on the sidewalks of Kreshchatik, where "from morning till night hundreds of wheeler-dealers [gesheftmakhery], mostly Jews, darted to and fro."85 Kievlianin complained that many of them did not even bother to put up a pretense of working as craftsmen, and that regular folk could not even walk on Kreshchatik because of the "masses of Jews jamming the sidewalk and wangling their affairs in the open air."86 It is possible that some artisans, as well as clerks, servants, and others with residence rights, worked as brokers, agents, and realtors on the side.87 The exchange certainly was enticing for anyone who thought he could persuade 10 rubles to become 20 or even 50, as Sholem Aleichem described so well in his fictional letters between Menakhem-Mendl and his wife Sheyne-Sheyndl: after the former failed to make his fortune in Odessa, he went on to Yehupets (a. k.a. Kiev) to buy and sell "little pieces of paper" — that is, stocks—on the exchange.88
But the construction in 1886 of a building to house the exchange, which was by then the third-largest in the empire, did not solve the problem of brokers gathering on the street.89 By 1900, the chief of police was giving orders that crowds of Jewish brokers from the exchange not be allowed to gather on the sidewalks of Kreshchatik, and after the 1905 pogrom a group of brokers even banded together to form a mutual-aid association.90 On the eve of the First World War, a Jewish school listing parents' occupations revealed that 46 (12 percent) gave their profession as "brokers and ‘voyageurs'" and an anecdotal report in the Yiddish newspaper Haynt gave a figure of three thousand brokers living in Kiev.91 Although women apparently did not take part in the business of the exchange, some did play a role in the financial sector: for example, one recipient of aid from a Jewish philanthropic society was listed in its 1910 annual report as a "female moneylender" (faktorsha).92
An 1895 feuilleton in Kievskoeslovo entitled "Pictures of Stock Exchange Manners" painted an unflattering portrait of two of the city's many Jewish speculators and brokers, who filled the bank offices on Kreshchatik to such capacity that that "you might think that you had arrived in a provincial town near Vilna or Minsk on market day."93 The author made his subjects out to be boorish Jews who had made their money by cheating innocent people, and then posed as educated and cultured members of the middle class who moved comfortably in the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. Eliezer Friedmann, also writing of 1890s Kiev, noted in his memoirs that the speculators, brokers, and traders who did business at the Kiev commodities exchange were among those Jews most likely to cease traditional religious observance; no doubt some observers associated this behavior with the immorality that was said to reign among them.94 A report in Haynt in 1910 remarked that most of the brokers did not live too badly—"some even perhaps a little too well, too liberally, and too boisterously." No one in Kiev thought particularly highly of the brokers, but they were such a unique and picaresque phenomenon that Sholem aleichem even wrote a satirical drama on their social-climbing ways entitled Yakneh"oz (the Russian title was An Exchange Epic), portraying them as philistines who attempted, with little success, to take on the manners and mores of the Russian bourgeoisie (for more on the play, see Chapter 4).95 Not everyone appreciated his humor: apparently, some brokers denounced the piece to the authorities (ostensibly because it used biblical quotes in a derogatory manner), and it was censored.
World History
