The threads of Jewish integration and segregation in Kiev were closely interwoven and are difficult to pull apart; hard and fast conclusions are difficult to draw. Nonetheless, the underlying trend seems to be that residential, cultural, and social isolation in the earlier decades began to give way around the turn of the century to a greater degree of acculturation and integration, which in turn prompted hostility on the part of non-Jews and a turn toward Jewish nationalism by Jews. (Interactions between Jews and the other nationalities in Kiev, Ukrainians and Russians, are discussed in more detail in chapter 5.) The years 1874-81 and 1905 provide good representative poles by which to contrast the two periods. In 1874, most Jews lived in Podol and Lybed, with scattered settlements in other parts of the city. The vast majority of the Jewish population cited Yiddish as its language of household use. According to journalist A. E. Kaufman, whose evaluation may have been influenced by his pro-integration convictions, Jews were almost totally isolated linguistically and culturally from those around them.65 His ideology dictated that this isolation stemmed from the restrictions placed on Jews, but there is no reason not to think that some Jews were content to continue living in a Jewish context in which they were not required to adapt wholesale to the surrounding, foreign culture. That Jewish life in Kiev was centered in Podol is evident from the fact that the 1881 pogrom started in that neighborhood and only later moved to other areas of the city, according to the official investigation by Count Kutaisov.66
By contrast, in 1905 the pogrom started not in Podol but in central Kiev. To be sure, it was a demonstration in front of the city council building on Kreshchatik that sparked the violence, but this was also a symbol of the fact that the Jewish presence was now spread throughout the city, including its central neighborhoods. There were now sizable Jewish populations in such areas as Bul’varnaia and Lukianovskaia with 5,000 Jews in the former and almost 1,200 in the latter in 1908; these were official figures, with true numbers probably a good deal higher.67 In the traditionally Jewish neighborhoods of Podol and Lybed, Jewish concentration was dense but by no means exclusively or even majority Jewish. Many of Kiev's physicians and lawyers, especially its most visible ones, were Jews; a reader of Kievskie otkliki (Kiev Echoes) would have found that ten of the sixteen doctors' advertisements on the front page had been placed by Jews.68 In the 1897 census, 6 percent of Kiev's Jews claimed Russian as their mother tongue, but far more must have been functionally bilingual, speaking it as their language of everyday use in a city where over half of the population was Russian-speaking.69 Even for Jewish market women, tailors, and brokers who had never had any formal Russian education, some knowledge of the language—or perhaps surzhik— must have been essential for everyday interactions. Perhaps these were the types of students at the Saturday adult literacy school of the OPE to whom the 1907 annual report referred as "unacquainted with Russian speech" and to whom Jewish history should be taught in Yiddish.70 Among the student population, which was more prone to acculturation than older or less educated Jews, linguistic acculturation had made much further inroads: by 1910 almost 70 percent of Kiev students either never spoke Yiddish or spoke it rarely, while more than 80 percent reported that they thought in Russian.71 The extent of Russian's influence on even the most traditional Jews is betrayed by the use of the Russian word chlen ("member") in the Yiddish regulations found in the pinkas (record book) of Kiev's Hevra magidei tehilim, a traditional association with religious, social, and mutual-aid functions.72
Among Kiev's Jewish youth, Russian, not Yiddish, was the lingua franca.73 In Sholem Aleichem's fictional account of a blood libel in Kiev, The Bloody Hoax (Der blutiger shpas), gymnasium student Syomke, excited about the upcoming holiday of Passover, exclaims to his mother in Yiddish, "Passover? Matzos? Matzo balls?" Then, switching to Russian, he adds, "I can ask the Four Questions, I can get a grade of five-plus [A+] in that!"74 The irony here is thick: the four questions of the Passover seder are traditionally asked by the youngest child in a singsong Hebrew, but Syomke is announcing in Russian that he will ask them, and placing them in the context not of the religious ritual of the seder but of the Russian gymnasium with its one-through-five grading system. His mother Sara answers, "All right, all right. Tomorrow tell me stories in Russian, not today. The child can only speak to me in Russian, may a curse fall on my enemies!" The fact that Syomke speaks to her in Russian is a source of both pride and disappointment: while she is proud of his academic achievements, she is ambivalent about the russification that accompanies his gymnasium education. The complexity of these cultural transmutations is pointed up by Sara's appellations for her son, which are Yiddish diminutive versions of his everyday name, Syomke, which is in turn a Russian rendition of his official (Yiddish) name, Shlyomke: "Syomke! Syomkenyu! Syomketchke!"
Personal names were indeed a good gauge of acculturation. Many of the wealthy and middle-class Jews used European—though not necessarily ethnic Russian—names. Examples of such names were Ernestina (Zaks), Klara (Gintsburg), Sofiia (Gal’perin), Pavla (Gal’perin), Vera (Levin), Avgustina (Brodskaia), and Luiza (Ettinger). Men's names tended to be either Russian calques of Hebrew/Yiddish names or generic European names: Moisei, Solomon, Lazar’, Mark, David.75 A list of patients at the Free Jewish Sanatorium from 1908 suggests that the Jewish working class continued to use traditional names such as Kalman, Pinkhus, Gersh [Hirsh], Izrail’ [Israel], Mordko [a version of Mordkhe or Mordecai], Shulim. among women's names we find Rukhlia, Ester, Sarra, Tsipa, Masha, Feiga, Khaia, Malka, Mania, and Berta.76
While most Kiev Jews may have spoken yiddish, it was a yiddish increasingly inflected by Russian, of which we find examples in one of Kiev's yiddish newspapers, Yudishe naye leben. One article exclaims, “Shteh oyf dugoles-yid! Du eyved, du rab, shteh oyf!" (Stand up, you diaspora Jew! You slave, stand up!) Here, the author used two words for slave, the first of Hebrew origin and the second a Russian import not usually utilized in Yiddish. Another example is the use of the Russianism priznayen to mean classify or categorize in an official manner (as by the state), or the adjective strashne (frightening, from the Russian strashnyi).77 While Yiddish as a language is known for its openness to foreign vocabulary, the extent to which Russian influenced the tongue as it was spoken in Kiev is noteworthy.78 On the other hand, Jews also felt free to “translate" their city, as in for example the appellation “Groys-Vasilkover gas," a literal translation of Bol’shaia Vasil’kovskaia ulitsa, one of Kiev's main thoroughfares. The influence was mutual.
According to the 1897 census, more than 6 percent of Kiev Jews claimed Russian as their mother tongue, fewer than the 11 percent in Kiev but far more than the proportions in the provinces—for example, 0.83 percent for Kiev province and as low as 0.35 percent for Volhyn.79 An article in the Russian-language Evreiskaia zhizn’ (Jewish Life) in 1905 claimed that Kiev, thanks to its many educational institutions, was “an even bigger center of russification for the southwest region than Vilna is for the northwest."80 Russian was the language of the new generation of Jews, and was heard more and more frequently at communal events; for example, at an 1891 memorial service for the Hebrew writer and Palestinophile Samuel Joseph Fuenn, Crown Rabbi Tsukkerman and Aaron Tseitlin, the latter of whom held the official government position of “expert Jew," spoke in Russian, while the rabbi of the Lithuanian community in Kiev, Aaron Zeev Weil, addressed the assembled in Yiddish. The service was held at the merchant's prayer house, the predecessor to the Choral Synagogue, where some parishioners may already have felt more at home in Russian than in Yiddish; notices for the events were placed in Kiev's Russian newspapers.81 At a comparable community event ten years later, Yiddish was apparently no longer being used, and many more speakers chose Russian (or even German) over Hebrew for their addresses— and this at an event celebrating the life and work of a Hebrew writer.82 The choice of language may, however, have been compelled by administrative regulations operative in Kiev banning the use of most languages other than Russian at public events.
According to Eliezer Friedmann, Jews in government service such as the Crown rabbis and learned Jews even wore their facial hair in the same style as the tsar—a shaved chin with a strip of beard on either side.83 In The Bloody Hoax,, Sholem aleichem portrays his fictional Kiev rabbi as a mixture of traditional and acculturated: he sported sidecurls, but they were "short and straight"; he wore a long black kaftan and spoke with his bewigged wife in Yiddish, yet he could speak Russian perfectly.84
World History
