In the last decades of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, Podol/Ploskaia and Lybed continued to be the primary Jewish neighborhoods in Kiev. One aizenberg, an engineer living in Kiev, wrote to the St. Petersburg-based Russian-language Jewish newspaper Nedel’naia khronika Voskhoda in 1901 that life in these neighborhoods was inexpensive, and that there were many cheap apartments. Jews were motivated to live there by the significant degree to which commerce was developed and, perhaps more meaningfully, by "a general gravitation towards one's one people" [obshchee tiagotenie ksvoim]:
The result of such a concentration of Jews is that Kiev has streets and even whole parts of the city where not one Jew lives and it's difficult to even meet one on the street, and on the other hand there are entire quarters where the entire population is Jewish, without exception. In other words, a real ghetto. Everywhere Jewish faces, Jewish speech. We can find here the heightened competition, poverty, density of population, and unsanitary conditions that are characteristic of all kinds of other centers that are densely populated by Jews.96
But Aizenberg also noted that conditions were improving, and that even the poor now had access to some amenities—both physical and cultural—that had previously been the province of the wealthy. Indeed, Jews in Kiev were materially better off than their coreligionists in other cities of the Pale. Where they could not be envied, however, was in their constant persecution by the police.
We lack data for residential patterns at the turn of the century, as the 1897 census did not break down population by neighborhood. By 1908, however, almost 10 percent of Kiev's Jews now lived in the Starokievskaia district, suggesting that a new professional class of Jewish doctors, lawyers, and engineers was taking up residence in this desirable area (municipal almanacs confirm this supposition).97 Also of interest was the shift in the center of Jewish population from Ploskaia, in the north of the city, to Lybed in the south; Ploskaia held 43 percent of Kiev's Jews in 1874, while in 1908 Lybed claimed almost exactly the same proportion, 42 percent (up from 13 percent in 1874). In that year, more than 20,000 Jews lived in this one neighborhood alone, a number that would have constituted a small city almost anywhere else in the Pale of Settlement. Yet Jews still made up only a fifth of the total population of Lybed. Indeed, in this respect little had changed since 1874: in no neighborhood did Jews constitute more than a third of the population. There were clear concentrations of Jews in particular parts of the city, but no district could be called exclusively Jewish. This does not mean, however, that particular streets were not heavily or even almost entirely Jewish, which may well have been the case. Moreover, percentages of 20-35 percent Jews in a given area were similar to the substantial proportion of Jews in many of the shtetlekh, market towns, of the Pale. Indeed, one guidebook to Kiev noted that "nowadays, Podol is a heavily populated and commercial district of Kiev, making up, as it were, a separate city (sostavliaiushchaia kak by otdel’nyi gorod )."98
Living conditions in some of the neighborhoods were just as bad as, or even worse than, they had been several decades earlier. Descriptions of Ploskaia from 1900, for example, speak of the unhealthy living caused by the swampy ground and frequent flooding, with many poor families living in damp, airless basement apartments, sometimes two or three families to a one-room apartment.99 Of 158 children assisted by a Jewish philanthropic society in 1910, 65 percent lived in one room or even less—a kitchen or part of a room.100
Although most detractors of the Jewish population in Kiev were resigned to Ploskaia and Lybed being Jewish neighborhoods, there was active opposition to the "judaization" of the more genteel areas of the city, especially the central avenue of the upper city, Kreshchatik, and its financial and commercial institutions. There was an ongoing legal question about whether Jews were even allowed to conduct business outside of the two Jewish neighborhoods.101 A report from the southwest region in the St. Petersburg newspaper Novoe vremia in 1890 warned readers in the capital about the transformation that the main avenue of Russia's ancient mother of cities had undergone; a stroll down Kreshchatik, wrote the author, will have one saying about Kiev, formally off-limits to Jews, that "this is a Jewish city." The article continued: "Look in the shops—190 Jewish first-guild merchants and only 20 Russians; stop into the banks—Jewish faces there; get to know the artisan folk—their leaders are Jewish and there's a special Jewish guild."102 According to the article, tens of thousands of Jewish residents held trade and industry in their hands, and each one was an "exception" to the rules regulating Jewish activity in Kiev.
That there was a good deal more Jewish communal and religious activity in Kiev than met the eye of officials is made clear by a list of prayer houses compiled by bureaucrats in the early 1890s.103 Most of these had had their permits issued in the 1880s or in 1890, testifying to the surge in Jewish population in that decade and official recognition of the religious and communal needs of Kiev's Jews. The list includes seventeen authorized—and one unauthorized—prayer houses: nine in Ploskaia, two in Podol, four in Ly-bed, and three in Bul’varnaia (which included the Solomenka and Shuliavka neighborhoods). Assuming there was an absolute minimum of 25,000 Jews in Kiev in 1890—and there were likely many more—then each prayer house would have had to accommodate an average of anywhere between 200 and 250 adult males, which seems unlikely given that most of these were probably housed in small converted apartments. If the authorities knew of the existence of one unauthorized prayer house, then surely there were many more underground synagogues.
Any discussion of the residential patterns of Kiev's Jews must also include the dacha suburbs such as Boiarka and Pushcha-Voditsa that were so popular among the Jewish bourgeoisie. These were village-like settlements on the outskirts of Kiev, easily accessible (sometimes even by streetcar), yet distant from the dirt and noise of the city.104 In a letter to Y. H. Ravnitsky in 1895 from his dacha in Boiarka, Sholem Aleichem waxed poetic about the garden with sour cherries, raspberries, apples, and pears; the free plays and concerts on offer; and the delicious roast chicken and duckling that one could eat. "Believe me, it's really a slice of paradise here."105 Even the poor Jews of Kiev could experience the wonders of the dacha suburbs if they were lucky enough to be granted a stay at one of the sanatoria operated by Jewish institutions such as the Society of Summer Colonies for Sick Children of the Poor Jewish Population of Kiev. By the last years of Romanov rule, however, permission to rent a dacha for the summer was not a foregone conclusion: Jews had to apply individually for such permission, and many did not receive it.106 Even this simple pleasure was now subject to administrative restriction, one in a seemingly endless list applicable to Kiev's Jews.
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