THE SHOCHET VOL. 1

Rotenfeld offers an English translation, with commentary, of a Hasidic memoir from the early 20th century.

Pinkhes-Dov Goldenshteyn (1848-1930) is not a household name, even within the most devout Jewish circles. Yet his unedited memoir of more than 500 pages offers a rare glimpse into the history of the Jewish diaspora in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The work was originally written in Yiddish. Rotenfeld offers readers more than just an English translation in this volume, also providing an abundance of historical context and commentary on the life and times of Goldenshteyn. The memoir, writes the translator in an impressively thorough introduction, contains a “rare description of Jewish life” from a traditionalist, Hasidic perspective in an era of Jewish autobiographies dominated, per Rotenfeld, by an elitist “secularization narrative.” The first part of an anticipated two-volume translation of Goldenshteyn’s memoir, this book covers his Ukrainian upbringing in a time of Russian tsarist control and his early, deeply impoverished life as a young married man starting his family. Orphaned as a boy, Goldenshteyn later surveyed the plights of poverty and antisemitism that confronted Jews not only in the Crimea but throughout his travels in Romania, Belarus, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. In his memoir, Goldenshteyn, a pious Jew throughout his life, takes a detailed look at the faith from the perspective of a highly trained shochet who performs the ritual slaughtering required of Kosher meat. Volume 2 covers his move in 1879 to the Crimea and his eventual 1913 relocation to British Mandatory Palestine, where he died in 1930.

While Goldenshteyn acknowledged his reverence for the sacredness of the Hebrew language, his decision to write the memoir in Yiddish also allowed him, per Rotenfeld, to “best express the nuances of his emotions and experiences,” from observations about government and society to intimate portraits of his family life. As the director of the Touro University Library’s Project Zikaron (a collection of Jewish archival historical material collected from across the globe), Rotenfeld is especially adept at both offering an accurate translation of Goldenshteyn’s memoir and providing context, giving readers a well-researched 75-page introduction to the manuscript that describes the shochet’s life in the history of antisemitic Ukraine under tsarist domination. This fascinating, but occasionally arcane, memoir, which requires a solid understanding of both Hasidic Judaism as well as European history, is accompanied by Rotenfeld’s editorial footnotes, which appear on nearly every page to provide clarifications, commentary, and other insights. This presentation, combined with the inclusion of maps, photographs, drawings, and other images, will make the book relatively accessible to scholars and general readers alike. The book’s abundant ancillary materials include a foreword by Dr. Rabbi Israel Singer (former secretary general and chair of the World Jewish Congress), a discussion of Rotenfeld’s translation methodology, and an impressive bibliography. Most important is the book’s emphasis on the lives and beliefs of common Jews within a genre that typically highlights a more secular, middle-class, and elite perspective.

An impressively researched and surprisingly accessible portrait of Jewish life in the mid-19th century.