The small Jewish intelligentsia of pre-1905 Kiev felt isolated and beleaguered—not so much because the city's Jews were so russified, but simply because they seemed indifferent to Jewish culture (or culture of any kind, for that matter). Scholars have pointed out the ironies of the turn of events wherein the maskilim, proponents of secular education and European culture, were victims of their own success when new generations of Jews became so thoroughly Russian that they could not even read the literature that the maskilim worked so hard to produce. A handful of Hebrew and Yiddish writers lived in the city, most of them making their living as secretaries, clerks, or teachers for the Jewish magnates. They gathered every Thursday at the Iudaika, the small library containing scholarly books on Jewish topics in Hebrew and European languages that had been established by "expert Jew" (uchenyi evrei) Aaron Tseitlin in 1885, to discuss the affairs of the day and the Jewish question. These maskilim, we are told, were joined by national-minded professionals such as Dr. Max Mandel’shtam, lawyer German Barats, and Crown Rabbi Tsukkerman.11 Such intellectual engagement could scarcely compete with the excitement and quick fortunes to be made at the Kiev Exchange, where young Hebrew poets "wasted their talents" (Rozenblat complained) by playing the market, or the entertainment offered by the city's theaters and billiard halls. Unlike Vilna, Eliezer Friedmann complained, few young Jews were involved in Jewish affairs of any kind.12
The most popular leisure activity among Kievans, whether Jewish or not, was not cultural discussion, but card-playing.13 On Friedmann's first evening in Kiev in 1893, people started gathering at his brother-in-law's house for what he assumed was a meeting—especially since one of the arrivals was Sholem Aleichem. Instead, they set up cardboard-covered tables and threw themselves into cards, the Yiddish writer as enthusiastically as everyone else, one hand holding his cards and the other a drink or a leg of goose. In the morning, Friedmann found Sholem Aleichem in the same place, asleep on some chairs.14
Luckily, Sholem Aleichem took time out from his card games to write, and revealed his familiarity with Kievans' love of cards when he had his fictional Menakhem-Mendl explain to Sheyne-Sheyndl:
[Yehupetz is] a lovely town, there's no comparing it to Odessa. You couldn't wish for nicer, more considerate people, men and women alike. Their only weakness is cards; they stay up calling "Deal!" until the wee hours. The older folk favor a game called Preference while the young ones play whist, rummy, and klabberjass.15
It should come as no surprise, then, that the chief source of income for the Kiev Literature and Art Society in 1903 was cards, apparently derived from the fee that members paid for each game they played.16
According to most accounts, Sholem Aleichem himself had first come to Kiev in 1887 because of its business and investment opportunities, not because of literary prospects. Nonetheless, in his third-person memoir From the Fair he tells a different story:
He was drawn to the big city, like a child attracted to the light of the moon.
For a great town contained great people—the bright stars that shone down on us here on earth with the clear light of vast and endless skies. I refer to the great writers and divinely graced poets of the Haskala whose names made such a great impression upon—what shall I call them?—well, the young maskilim, the naive, innocent youth.17
His first dabblings in business did not have a happy ending, and he left Kiev in 1890 after going bankrupt, returning three years later to support himself and his family with trading and brokering.18 He eventually secured a job at the Kiev Exchange and, according to anecdotal reports, lived a comfortable life in the city, summering in a dacha in the suburb of Boiarka (which he fictionalized as Boyberik in the "Tevye the Milkman" cycle).19 His presence in the city contributed greatly to the eclectic Jewish cultural scene; the Yiddish writer and critic Nakhmen Mayzel even claimed that Kiev only became a "Jewish city" thanks to Sholem Aleichem's activity.20 Yiddishist and political activist Nokhem Shtif, a student at the Polytechnical Institute at the time, later remembered, "I first heard about Yiddish in a serious vein when Sholem Aleichem read his stories at Zionist gatherings in Kiev in 1900-1902."21 In a letter to his brother in 1889, Sholem Aleichem himself wrote, "Any educated person will find it of use to visit me, as my house is a gathering place for the wise and enlightened {hakhamim u-maskilim) of Kiev, as all who enter the gates of my city know."22 In the late 1880s, for example, he produced the first Yiddish literary almanac, Di yudishe folks-bibliothek, which had a significant impact on the subsequent development of Yiddish letters (I. L. Peretz made his Yiddish-language debut in the 1888 volume). In 1894, he wrote "Yakneho"z (or the Great Exchange Comedy)," a send-up of the Jewish speculators at the Kiev Exchange, which was so offensive to some that it was denounced to the authorities (apparently by some of the brokers who were mocked in the piece) and confiscated.23
The "Yakneho"z" incident makes clear that to the extent that Jewish culture was alive in Kiev, its existence was bound up with the money around which life in the city revolved, dependent on the sugar industry on which so many Jews relied. There was no state Jewish school in Kiev to provide maskilim with a measure of independence and a base for influence in the community, as was the case in Odessa.24 Jacob Sheftel, a researcher of Talmudic and medieval literature and owner of a Jewish bookstore in Kiev, made his living by managing the affairs of the wealthy widow Rozenberg. The Hebrew poet Yehalel (Yehudah Leib Levin) worked as a tutor and secretary for the Brodsky family. Eliezer Schulman, one of the first historians of Yiddish language and literature, was the treasurer of one of the Brodsky enterprises.25 Throwing in one's lot with the Brodskys was potentially quite lucrative, but it also had its risks. According to Friedmann, Schulman married the daughter of a Brodsky underling in exchange for a position with the sugar magnate, thereby not only securing a job for himself but also enabling himself to leave the provincial town of Zlatopol for Kiev.26 yehalel's precarious and dependent relationship with the Brodskys is made clear by an 1872 letter in which he pleaded for a raise, showering praise upon his employer while describing his own insolvency and miserable existence in pitiful terms. "am I such a heavy burden that you cannot have mercy upon me? Do you consider my salary to be a great fortune?"27 The poet's final fate was a dramatic one: after he published a poem describing the inner workings of the family business, Brodsky banished him from bustling Kiev to the provincial hamlet of Tomashpol.28
Their proximity to plutocrats like Brodsky could at times help to secure support for causes dear to maskilim. For example, a collection was taken up for the family of the late Hebrew nationalist writer Peretz Smolenskin, whose greatest advocate in Kiev was Eliezer Schulman; contributions were secured from Lazar’ Brodsky and other Jewish notables in Kiev.29 The apparent commonality of interests between the literary intelligentsia and the merchantry was also revealed by memorial services for deceased writers and scholars dedicated to the national cause; these included Samuel Joseph Fuenn (Rashi Fin), Heinrich Graetz, and Y. L. Gordon and were held at the merchants' synagogue, also referred to as the "reformed" service (ha-min-yan ha-metukan) and the "quorum of the enlightened" (minyan ha-ne’orim).30
Clearly, not all those of the new generation were lacking in Jewish spirit and knowledge, as some claimed.31 Ha-melits reported that a group of young Jewish men from families of means had founded a society for the study of Hebrew language and literature in 1894, but its members evidently lost interest quickly, for the society had to be revived only two years later.32 Some observers alleged that Kiev's older maskilim cared little about the youthful Hebraists, and failed to offer assistance to the new society in its formative period. The established Hebrew writers, it was intimated, preferred organizations and events on a grand scale and could not be bothered with a piddling new society.33 At the same time, a call went out to revive the ludaika library, which had also dwindled in active membership and activities. Aharon Ha-Levi Iznor echoed earlier criticism of Kiev's maskilim, writing in Ha-melits that the institution should not be the exclusive province of the enlightened but must belong to all Jews. For that reason, he repeated his call of earlier in the year that it should be moved to Podol, where most Jews lived.34 Podol was, indeed, the site of meetings of the newly reactivated Hebrew society, which met at the new Rozenberg Synagogue; youths "from all walks of life" came to hear lectures in Bible, Jewish history, grammar, literature, and the like. Iznor exhorted Kiev's maskilim to support the fledgling organization and not to keep their distance.35 Hebraist and Zionist Moshe Rozenblat corroborates the existence of the society in his recollections of the Hebrew movement in Kiev: according to him, it was first called Sefat Tsiyon (The Language of Zion), and was later changed to Ivriya (the name is something akin to "He-braica") as a branch of the organization by the same name that already existed in Odessa.36 Exhibiting the social conscience characteristic of Russian youth, the young people active in the society resolved at one of their meetings to establish a Hebrew and Russian literacy school for young artisans' apprentices that would be held on Saturdays and Sundays.37
Yitshak Ya'akov Vaysberg, one of the older generation of maskilim, suggested that a Jewish library be established not in Podol but in the new Choral Synagogue.38 But others disagreed: wealthy Jews, busy with their own affairs, could not be expected to help support Jewish culture in Kiev; it was up to the middle class to act, one Elhanan Kalmansohn opined in Ha-melits.39 A description of a literary event to mark the jubilee of the Hebrew writer L. L. Shulman in 1901 is notable for its omission of the categories of "students" and "youth" from the long list of groups attending: the list mentioned "literati, authors, correspondents, poets, doctors, lawyers, Zionists, millionaires, maskilim, merchants, teachers." Such a large-scale event in support of Hebrew culture—with illustrious guests such as Zionist thinker Ahad Ha-am and teacher David Yellin, a leader of the yishuv in Palestine—was clearly rare in those years: "this Jewish celebration was a novelty, the likes of which has almost never been seen before here."40 Even then, when Kiev's Jewish population numbered in the tens of thousands, the author of this article betrayed a continuing insecurity, referring to his home as "our non-Jewish Kiev, where Jews hang [suspended] as in the air."
Indeed, Friedmann complained that "the new generation does not have a Jewish spirit" and knew nothing about Judaism or Jewish culture, a critique that others echoed. Some blamed the poor state of Jewish education in the city, since most Jewish schools were forced underground because of restrictions.41 In 1902, Sholem Aleichem wrote to S. Y. Abramovitsh (Mendele Mokher Sforim), "You have forgotten that Yehupets [Kiev] is not Odessa. In
Yehupets, even if someone bursts,42 he will die a cruel death trying to find a copy of ‘Fishke' or 'Susati' (My Horse)—they are not to be found! This hole which is Yehupets, may it go up in flames!"43 Several correspondents in Ha-melits, openly envious of Lithuania with its many yeshivas and teachers, lamented the sad state of Jewish education throughout Ukraine: boys were trained to make a living, while girls went to school to learn Russian well, and only sometimes learned Hebrew.44 Friedmann also referred to southern Jews as "am ha-arets” (boors).45 These critiques must, however, be taken with a grain of salt, since their authors were usually maskilim with open hostility toward Hasidism, the dominant religious mode in the Ukrainian provinces.
World History
