In 1913, Abraham Rechtman journeyed through the Russian Pale of Settlement on a mission to record its Jewish folk traditions before they disappeared forever. The Lost World of Russia's Jews is the first English translation of his extraordinary experiences, originally published in Yiddish, documenting a culture best known until now through romanticized works like Life Is with People and Fiddler on the Roof.
In the last years of the Russian Empire, Abraham Rechtman joined S. An-sky's Jewish Ethnographic Expedition to explore and document daily life in the centuries old Jewish communities of the Pale of Settlement. Rechtman described the key places where Jewish life and death were experienced and connected these sites to local folklore and customary practices. Among the many unique contributions of his memoir are riveting descriptions of traditional Jewish healers and exorcists--many of them women--and their methods and incantations.
Rather than a nostalgic portrait of an imagined shtetl, Rechtman succeeded in producing an intimate account of Jewish life and death that is highly nuanced and richly detailed. The Lost World of Russia's Jews powerfully illuminates traditional Jewish life in Eastern Europe on the eve of its transformation and, ultimately, destruction.
About the Author: Abraham Rechtman was a folklorist, writer, and printer. A member of the S. An-Sky's Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, he was born in Proskurov, Ukraine in 1890. In 1958, he published Yidishe etnografye un folklor; zikhroynes vegn der etnografisher ekspeditsye, ongefirt fun Sh. An-ski in Argentina. He died in 1972.
Nathaniel Deutsch is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he holds the Baumgarten Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies. He is the author of The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement and the co-author (with Michael Casper) of A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg.
Noah Barrera, known by his students as Reb Noyekh, is a Yiddish educator and writer. He studied and subsequently taught Yiddish at the YIVO Institute's Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in New York. He coordinated and taught Yiddish language classes at the Workers Circle. He has published numerous Yiddish articles in the Yiddish Daily Forward and Afn Shvel. Visit him here: www.yiddishwithnoyekh.com.
