"The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord."
Proverbs 20:27. The verse behind every candle in this book, and behind the ones on your table tonight.
A book for your seventieth birthday
Seventy years. A hundred generations. The story of a name, a family, and the Jews of Lithuania.
For Mom, with all our love
Prologue · Before Lithuania
Lithuania is where the paper trail finds your family. But the family is far older than the paper.
Before anyone was a Litvak, before anyone was a Goldman, there was a road, and it can still be traced. It begins two thousand years ago, several thousand kilometres south, and every step of it was walked by people whose faces you carry.
The story begins where all Jewish stories begin, in the land of Israel. Jewish communities were already scattered around the Mediterranean in ancient times. Rome had one by the second century BCE. But the great dispersal came by force. In the year 70, Rome burned Jerusalem and the Temple, and in 135 it crushed the last revolt and emptied Judea of most of its people. Those who were carried away took almost nothing with them, except a homeland made of books, which turned out to be the only kind of homeland that cannot be burned down. Every branch of your family tree, however far it wandered, is rooted there.
"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept."
Psalm 137, the oldest words of Jewish exile. Written after an earlier destruction, and sung at every one since.
Italy became the front hallway of European Jewish life. The Jews of Rome are the oldest continuous Jewish community in Europe, older than the papacy, and from Italy and southern France, families drifted slowly north over the centuries. They followed the trade routes up the rivers, a generation at a time, the way water finds its path.
In the towns along the Rhine, in Mainz and Worms and Speyer, something new came into the world: Ashkenaz. Bishops and princes wanted Jewish merchants, and they said so plainly. We still have the invitations. In 1084 the bishop of Speyer put his motives in writing when he welcomed Jewish families fleeing a fire in Mainz, and a Jewish chronicler of Speyer recorded in turn that the bishop "pitied us as a man pities his son."
"…the glory of our town would be augmented a thousandfold if I brought Jews."
Charter of Bishop Rüdiger of Speyer, September 13, 1084
The communities that grew here were so learned that their customs and prayers still shape Ashkenazi life today. Here a German street language began soaking up Hebrew and became the infant Yiddish. A thousand years later, your ancestors in Lithuania were still speaking a language born on that river. It was in these towns that young Rashi studied, the commentator whose words would one day wrap around every page of the Talmud printed in Vilna, and whose daughters were famous for learning of their own. And it was here that a custom took root that would follow the family east for eight hundred years. On a child's first day of school, the teacher spread honey over the letters of the alphabet, and the child licked it off. The first thing anyone ever learned about learning was that it tastes sweet.
Then the road turned east, and not by choice. The First Crusade of 1096 opened with massacres of the very communities that had built Ashkenaz. England expelled its Jews in 1290, France in 1306. In the plague years of 1348 and 1349, Jews across the German lands were blamed for the Black Death and slaughtered by mobs. In town after town the same scene repeated itself: a family at the table late at night, deciding by candlelight what fits on one cart, and which direction means life. Western Europe was closing its doors.
At exactly that moment, the East opened its gates. The Statute of Kalisz gave Jews legal protection in Poland in 1264, and King Casimir the Great, a king so fondly remembered that Jewish legend gave him a Jewish beloved named Esterka, widened those rights in the 1330s and welcomed the very people the West had thrown out. There is a beloved legend about the arrival. The exhausted exiles, it says, heard the country's name as Hebrew. Po-lin. "Rest here for the night." The night lasted six hundred years.
From Poland, families kept moving northeast into the vast Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and once again the invitation survives on paper. In 1323 Grand Duke Gediminas sent open letters to the great cities of Europe, the same letters that happen to mention Vilnius for the first time in history. He called for knights, merchants, smiths, wheelwrights, cobblers, furriers and millers. He promised newcomers land, the freedom to live by their own laws, and ten tax-free years for farmers.
"…we open our land, dominion and kingdom to every person of good will."
Letter of Grand Duke Gediminas, January 25, 1323
They were met there by a thinner, older stream from the east. Jews had lived in Kyiv and the Black Sea lands for centuries. A Hebrew letter from Kyiv's Jewish community, written around the year 930, is the oldest surviving document to mention that city at all, and it is touchingly ordinary: a letter of introduction for a neighbor who had fallen into debt, signed by the men of his community, asking strangers far away to be kind to him. Some of those eastern Jews drifted north after the Mongols shattered Rus. Vytautas even settled Turkic-speaking Karaite Jews from Crimea in Trakai in 1397, where a tiny community remains to this day. But it was the western, Yiddish-speaking stream that prevailed, and made Lithuania into Lita.
So when this book opens in Lithuania in the 1320s, the family has already been walking for twelve centuries. Jerusalem to Rome. Rome to the Rhine. The Rhine to Poland, and Poland to Lita. The road has one more stop ahead of it: a birthday table, tomorrow.
Chapter One
Goldman is a name that says exactly what it means. Gold man. But how a Lithuanian Jewish family came to carry it is a story about a whole world.
For most of their history, the Jews of Eastern Europe had no family names at all. People were known the old way, Chaim son of Mordechai, Rivka daughter of Golde, each generation tied by name to the one before it. That changed between 1787 and 1844, when the empires of Europe, wanting to tax and count and conscript their Jewish subjects, ordered them to take permanent surnames. Lithuania by then belonged to the Russian Empire, and the Tsar's sentence still exists. This is the actual line of law that created the name Goldman, along with most of the Jewish surnames on earth.
"…every Jew shall have or accept a known inherited family name or surname."
Statute Concerning the Organization of Jews, Article 32, decreed by Tsar Alexander I, December 9, 1804
Picture the moment, because it truly happened, in some district office of the Kovno or Vilna province, most likely in the 1830s or 40s. A clerk with an inkstand and a heavy ledger. A family standing before him in their market-day best, asked in Russian, a language that was not theirs, for one word that would belong to their children, and their children's children, forever. Some families gave their trade. Some were handed a name by a bored or spiteful clerk and made do. And someone in your family, no one will ever know who, said, or wrote, or chose it. Goldman. The ledger closed, and the name began. There are three ways that choice may have gone, and all three are worth telling.
The plainest reading is an occupational name. A Goldman was a man who worked in gold: a goldsmith, a jeweler, a dealer in precious metal, a changer of coins. Jewish craftsmen and traders in the Grand Duchy were known for exactly these trades, and many families took their surname straight from the workbench. If so, somewhere up your line stands a man with a loupe and steady hands, whose work shone brightly enough to become his family's flag.
Many Jewish surnames from this era are what scholars call ornamental. They were chosen simply because they shone. Gold, silver, roses, diamonds, valleys of roses and mountains of gold: Goldberg, Silverman, Rosenthal, Goldman. A family forced to pick a name by an empire's clerk could still pick a lovely one, which was a small act of defiance in its own quiet way. You may make us register, but you cannot make us drab. If so, an ancestor of yours looked at a list of possible futures and chose gold.
And then there is the tenderest possibility. Golde, meaning gold, was one of the most beloved Yiddish women's names. In some families, "Goldman" began as the man of Golde: her husband, her son, her household. Whole families were sometimes known by a formidable woman, the way ships are known by their captains. It is entirely possible that your family carries, to this day, the name of a woman. A mother so present that her children were known by her. Given who this book is for, our money is on Golde.
Chapter Two
Your people are Litvaks, the Jews of the old Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a community famous across the Jewish world for its scholars, its skeptics, and its stubborn brilliance.
Before the dates, hold one ordinary day in your mind, because history is mostly made of ordinary days. It is a Friday afternoon in a market town near Vilna, sometime around 1890. By three o'clock the market is emptying like a tide going out. Geese sold or unsold, herring barrels sealed, the water carrier hurrying his last buckets. The shulklaper goes street to street rapping on the shutters. Close up, close up, Shabbes is coming. Steam rises from the bathhouse. In every kitchen a fish is being peppered, never sugared, and a pot of cholent goes to sleep in the baker's cooling oven until tomorrow. At dusk, two candles appear in every window at once, as if the whole town shared a single switch. A stranger passing through will not eat alone tonight. Someone will bring him home from shul without being asked. For twenty-five hours, a town that is poor all week becomes the richest place on earth. That is the world these dates happened to.
Grand Duke Vytautas grants the Jews of Brest, and soon Grodno and Trakai, a charter protecting their persons, their property and their worship. The parchment gets remarkably specific. The Jews were declared free people, answerable to the Grand Duke himself like his nobles. Harming a Jew was punished like harming a nobleman. A Jew's oath counted in court. Disputes among Jews went to their own judges. Even disturbing a Jewish grave cost the offender his property. Seven centuries later, that last clause still reads like tenderness. For its time this was among the most tolerant law anywhere in Europe, and Jewish life in Lithuania begins on the strength of it.
Grand Duke Alexander expels the Jews from Lithuania. Eight years later he changes his mind, invites them home, and restores much of their property. It was an early lesson in a pattern the family would come to know well: leaving, enduring, returning.
The Va'ad Medinat Lita, the Council of the Land of Lithuania, holds its first session. It was an elected Jewish parliament that ran the community's schools, courts, taxes and charity for nearly a century and a half. Its ledgers survive, and they are full of the dull, lovely business of self-rule: dowries for poor brides, salaries for teachers, quarrels between towns settled with citations. Litvaks were governing themselves in Yiddish long before most of Europe voted for anything.
Vilna's Jews win formal privileges and raise their Great Synagogue. Church law said no synagogue could stand taller than the churches, so the builders dug down instead, sinking the floor well below the street. You entered by descending, and then the room opened above you like a canyon. Four great columns, a bronze-crowned bimah, chandeliers, galleries. A building that obeyed the law outside and soared inside, which tells you nearly everything about how these communities survived. Around it grew the shulhoyf, a courtyard maze of prayer rooms and study halls and the great Strashun Library, where the benches were still full at midnight.
Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, the Vilna Gaon, the Genius of Vilna, becomes the towering mind of European Jewry. His students told stories the whole Jewish world repeated. That he slept two hours a night, in half-hour portions. That he studied in an unheated room with his feet in a basin of cold water, so that drowsiness never stood a chance. That he mastered mathematics and astronomy because, he insisted, you cannot fully understand Torah while ignorant of how the world works. He refused every official post. Vilna's greatest rabbi never once held the job. And we can still hear his voice. Setting out on a hoped-for journey to the Holy Land, he wrote a farewell letter to his family that Litvaks have treasured ever since, in which he mourns, in a single breath, leaving behind his children and his books. Which may be the most Litvak sentence ever written.
"…my children, for whom my heart moans, and all my precious books."
The Vilna Gaon, letter to his family (Iggeret HaGra), c. 1780s
The Gaon's student Rabbi Chaim founds the yeshiva of Volozhin, and a whole constellation follows: Mir, Telz, Slabodka, Ponevezh. For a century, when the Jewish world sent its brightest anywhere, it sent them to Lithuania. Boys of thirteen walked for weeks to get there and ate "days," Monday at this family's table, Tuesday at that one, because an entire society had agreed that feeding a student was a privilege. The Musar movement of Rabbi Yisrael Salanter added a Litvak twist of its own: ethics practiced as strictly as law, your character examined nightly like a ledger.
The Romm press of Vilna, run by the formidable widow Devorah Romm, completes the Vilna Shas. Open one of its pages and you see a conversation across ten centuries, printed as architecture. The ancient text stands at the center like a courtyard. Rashi's medieval commentary runs down the inner margin, the arguments of his grandchildren down the outer, and later voices fill the bottom of the page. It was all set so beautifully and so exactly that virtually every Talmud printed since, anywhere on earth, is a copy of it. The title pages carried the imprint of "the Widow and Brothers Romm." A woman's name, on the most authoritative Jewish books ever made. A Litvak woman set the visual standard of Jewish learning for the whole world.
The dread had long had a face. Under Tsar Nicholas I, the khappers, the "snatchers," had seized Jewish boys, some as young as eight, for twenty-five-year terms in the army, and mothers hid their sons in cellars at the rumor of a wagon. Now came pogroms, poverty and the May Laws, and some two million Jews poured out of the Russian Empire. The journey itself became family legend everywhere it happened. A cart to the border. A bribed guide across at night. A train to the port at Libau or Hamburg, then ten days in steerage. In the trunk: brass candlesticks, a featherbed, a photograph of the ones staying behind. Then a lifetime of letters home. The era's most famous tearjerker of a song was called, simply, "A Little Letter to Mama." Litvaks scattered to New York, London, Montreal and Johannesburg, and to this day South African Jewry is overwhelmingly Litvak. They carried little but names, recipes, and an unreasonable faith in education. Most Goldman families outside Lithuania trace back to these boats.
"I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over."
Mary Antin, a girl from the Litvak town of Polotsk, opening her memoir of this exact journey (The Promised Land, 1912)
YIVO, the great scholarly institute of the Yiddish language, is founded in Vilna. Where else. Einstein and Freud join its honorary board. Its genius was intimacy. It deputized the whole nation as researchers, and ordinary people, the zamlers, the collectors, mailed in proverbs, lullabies, recipes, children's rhymes and jokes from a thousand towns, so that the voices of the grandmothers entered the archive alongside the scholars. On the eve of catastrophe, Jewish Lithuania stood at full height. A quarter of a million people. Hundreds of schools, newspapers, libraries, theatres.
Under German occupation, the Jews of Lithuania are murdered. At Ponary outside Vilna, at the Ninth Fort of Kaunas, in pits beside almost every town. More than nine of every ten Lithuanian Jews, some two hundred thousand people, are killed. It is among the most complete destructions of any Jewish community in Europe. The seven-hundred-year world of the Litvaks ends in three.
And yet even then, the Litvak character held. In the Vilna ghetto the library stayed open, and in December 1942 it lent its hundred-thousandth book. The ghetto held a celebration in the theatre to mark it. Reading, as defiance. A fifteen-year-old named Yitskhok Rudashevski was there that day and wrote about it in his diary that night. He did not survive. His diary did, found after the war by his cousin, and his sentence about that celebration has outlived the men who killed him. There were also prisoners forced to sort YIVO's collections for pulping. They called themselves the Paper Brigade, and they smuggled manuscripts out under their clothes and buried them in the ground, saving books when they could not save people, so certain were they that someone would come back one day to dig.
"The book unites us with the future, the book unites us with the world."
Yitskhok Rudashevski, age 15, Diary of the Vilna Ghetto, December 13, 1942
The thread frays here. It does not break. The proof is the woman reading this page.
The old Mishnah teaches that whoever saves a single life has saved an entire world. Every Litvak family that came through, by steamship in 1904 or by miracle in 1945, is such a world, and the worlds multiplied. The great yeshivas were rebuilt in Israel and America under their old Lithuanian names. The buried manuscripts were dug up, exactly as promised, and sit in libraries today. The wit, the melodies and the peppered gefilte fish resurfaced at dinner tables on five continents. A small community keeps the lights on in Vilnius still. And every family named Goldman that lights candles, tells stories, and gathers for a seventieth birthday is Lithuania's answer to history.
Chapter Three
"Litvak" is not just geography. In Yiddish it is a personality. If some of what follows sounds familiar, go look in a mirror.
Litvaks were the rationalists of the Jewish world, famous for cool analysis where others favored ecstasy and mysticism. The old joke says a Litvak believes nothing until he has taken it apart, checked the sources, and put it back together his own way. The other old joke is sharper. A Litvak is so rational, he repents before he sins. To save time.
In Litvak towns, the finest match a family could make was a scholar, not a merchant. Mothers rocked their cradles to a proverb set to melody, Toyre iz di beste skhoyre, "Torah is the best merchandise," so a Litvak child absorbed the family values before absorbing solid food. Education was the one inheritance no border guard could ever confiscate, which turned out to be exactly the point.
Litvak humor is famously understated. Precise, skeptical, delivered deadpan. It is so central to the character, and so good, that it refuses to share a chapter with anything else. It gets its own, and it begins the moment you finish this page.
You can map the Litvak border in a bowl of gefilte fish. Litvaks season it with pepper. Polish and Galician Jews sweeten it with sugar. Scholars genuinely call it the gefilte fish line. The family recipe is a passport. Check it.
Chapter Four
Before the jokes, the soul. Your people did not come from the grand stone houses of Vilna. They came from the small towns, the poor ones, where the streets were mud in spring and wealth was measured in Sabbath candles. And it is exactly there, among the water carriers and the market women, that Litvak spirituality did its finest work.
The poor of Lita could not always study the great books, so they built a religious life out of what they had: psalms known by heart, blessings said over small things, a seventh day that arrived every single week like an inheritance that could not be spent. The learned climbed toward God through argument. The poor walked over on foot, and by most accounts arrived just as often.
Here is a second museum, then, alongside the museum of jokes. Twenty-four cases of the Litvak soul: verses, prayers, sayings of the rabbis, stories of the saints of the poor, and the poets who came out of these same towns. Scroll sideways as before, at your own pace, and continue down whenever you are ready.
"The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord."
Proverbs 20:27. The verse behind every candle in this book, and behind the ones on your table tonight.
"Who is rich? The one who rejoices in what he has."
The Mishnah, Ethics of the Fathers. In the poor towns of Lita, this was not philosophy. It was the household budget.
"If I am not for myself, who will be? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?"
Hillel, two thousand years ago. Still the shortest complete guide to being a person.
"It is not yours to finish the work. But neither are you free to abandon it."
Rabbi Tarfon, in the Ethics of the Fathers. The sentence that kept a thousand poor towns going.
"The world stands on three things: on Torah, on prayer, and on deeds of kindness."
Ethics of the Fathers. Notice the third pillar. Learning belonged to the scholars and prayer to everyone, but kindness was the pillar the poor could always supply, and did.
"In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man."
Hillel again. In a shtetl of three hundred souls, this was less a teaching than a rotation.
"I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills."
Psalm 121, the psalm of watchmen and travelers, murmured at bedsides, at borders, and on the decks of the emigrant boats. If any words crossed the ocean with your family, it was these.
Every town had its chevra tehillim, its psalm society: porters, wagon drivers, and market men who met in the cold before dawn to recite the Psalms together before work. They could not study the Talmud of the scholars. They had something older. The scholars had arguments; the psalm-sayers had King David, by heart, in the dark.
The poor were not left out of learning. They organized. Tailors and shoemakers formed evening societies to study Ein Yaakov, the legends of the Talmud, and the Chayei Adam, a code of Jewish law written in Vilna precisely so that a working householder could master it without years in a yeshiva. A lecture after evening prayers, in every poorhouse in Lita. Night school is a Litvak invention of long standing.
The women had a literature of their own: the tkhines, supplications in plain Yiddish, many written by women, the most famous by Sore bas Toyvim. They are prayers that speak to God like a trusted neighbor, about the actual contents of a life: children, bread, illness, candle lighting, the dead. The men prayed in Hebrew, at fixed hours. The grandmothers prayed in their own language, whenever it was needed, which was often.
On Saturday evening, as the Sabbath drained away and three stars came out, the women recited Got fun Avrom, the old Yiddish prayer that begins by calling on the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob to protect His people in the week ahead. It was said at the window, watching the sky, by women who could not have told you the word "liturgy" and who were performing it perfectly.
Every Friday at sundown, the tradition says, the Sabbath arrives as a queen, and the songs go out to greet her as a bride. Consider what this meant in a poor town. Royalty visited weekly. The tin candlesticks became a court, the herring became a banquet, the exhausted peddler at the head of the table became a king, and no one in Lita was poor until Saturday night.
"More than Israel has kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept Israel."
Ahad Ha'am, the great Hebrew essayist. Ask any family that crossed an ocean with candlesticks in the trunk.
Rabbi Yisrael Salanter of the Musar movement, Lithuania's school of ethical self-examination, compressed his entire teaching into one redirection of worry:
"Worry about your own soul, and about your neighbor's body."
Most people, he observed, do it exactly the other way around.
Students noticed that Rabbi Salanter used only the smallest trickle of water for the ritual washing of hands, where the pious made a show of abundance. He explained: the water is carried to this house in buckets, on the shoulders of the servant girl.
"I do not wish to be pious at her expense."
The whole Musar movement, in one bucket.
The Chofetz Chaim, the saint of the Lithuanian town of Radin, supported himself with a tiny shop and became the most beloved rabbi of his age. A visitor once looked around his bare room, one table, one bench, and asked: Rabbi, where is your furniture? The rabbi asked the visitor where his was. But I am only passing through, the man said.
"So am I."
Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin, the Vilna Gaon's greatest student and founder of the mother of yeshivas, set one sentence at the gate of his life's work, a teaching he carried from his master:
"Man was created not for himself, but to help others with whatever is in his power."
From the introduction to his book Nefesh HaChaim, as recorded by his son.
The Maggid of Dubno, the great parable-teller of Lita, a man so wise the Vilna Gaon himself asked him for words of rebuke, was once asked how he always found the perfect parable for any question. He answered, naturally, with a parable: a traveler sees a fence covered in chalk targets, an arrow dead center in every one, and asks the marksman his secret.
"Simple. First I shoot the arrow. Then I draw the target."
From the Hasidic side of the great family feud comes a line so good that even the Litvak rationalists repeated it. The Kotzker Rebbe was asked: where is God?
"Wherever you let Him in."
And a story told everywhere Yiddish was spoken. The aged Reb Zusha lay weeping on his deathbed. His students were baffled: Rebbe, you were nearly as wise as Moses, nearly as kind as Abraham, what can you fear? Zusha answered: when I arrive in the world to come, they will not ask me why I was not Moses. They will ask:
"Zusha, why were you not Zusha?"
These towns did not only produce rabbis. Eliakum Zunser of Vilna began as a wedding jester and became the folk poet of a generation, his songs sung in kitchens from Kovno to New York. And in 1926 the young poet Moyshe Kulbak published a love poem to Vilna itself, in which he addresses the city as a psalm, a psalm written in clay and iron. Poets from Lita did not write about their cities. They prayed to them.
The greatest Hebrew poet of the modern age, Chaim Nachman Bialik, was forged in the study hall of Volozhin, and out of it he wrote his famous portrait of the matmid, the boy who never leaves the bench, burning his youth over the books. And a girl raised in Kovno, Leah Goldberg, grew up to become one of the most beloved Hebrew poets who ever lived, her lines now taught to every schoolchild in Israel. The small towns kept exporting light.
Avrom Sutzkever of Vilna wrote poems in the ghetto, buried manuscripts with the Paper Brigade, escaped to the partisans in the forest, and survived. In February 1946 he was called to testify at the Nuremberg trials. He asked to speak in Yiddish, the language of the murdered; the court required Russian. But he refused the chair. He gave his testimony standing, he later said, as one stands for a prayer for the dead.
And underneath it all, the daily practice of the poor: the brokhe, the blessing. There was a blessing for bread and one for fruit, a blessing for thunder, for lightning, for the first blossom of spring, for new clothes, for seeing the ocean, for surviving danger, and, hardest of all, one to be said on hearing the worst news. Your ancestors owned very little. They blessed everything. It is a technology for noticing your own life, and it costs nothing, and it still works.
There is an old legend, beloved in the poor towns for obvious reasons, that in every generation the world rests on thirty-six hidden righteous people, the lamed-vovniks, and that for their sake alone God sustains creation. The legend is very particular about who they are. They are never famous. They are never rich. They do not know they are among the thirty-six, and if you told one, he would laugh at you and go back to work. They are water carriers, shoemakers, market women, the quiet ones in the back row of the shul.
Notice what this legend does. It means that in a town too poor for scholars, any neighbor might secretly be holding up the world. It means the woman haggling over herring may be a pillar of creation. And it means that a family from the small shtetls of Lita, a family exactly like yours, is statistically far better placed for this honor than the bankers of Vilna ever were.
Litvaks being Litvaks, they kept this mystery and their skepticism in the same drawer, side by side, and saw no contradiction. Which is why the very next chapter of this book is full of jokes.
Chapter Five
Now we come to the family silver. Litvak humor is famously understated. Precise, skeptical, delivered deadpan. The national banquet was black bread, a herring, strong tea, and a difficult page of Talmud, with wealth measured in ideas. When a Litvak says "not bad," write it down. It is the highest praise ever given.
The humor was not decoration. It was equipment. A people that could not control what happened to it could still control the wording, and so the joke became the Litvak's answer to almost everything: to poverty, to tsars, to God when necessary, and above all to anyone in the room who was being too certain about anything. Other communities laughed with their whole bodies. Litvaks raised one eyebrow, and the eyebrow was funnier.
What follows is a proper museum of the wit, in thirty cases. Scroll sideways through them at your own pace, using the arrows or a swipe of your finger. Stay as long as you like. And whenever you have had enough, simply continue down the page. The book will be waiting.
"Start worrying. Details to follow."
The complete text of the Jewish telegram, as defined by the classic joke. In a hundred years, nobody has improved on it.
"Why does a Jew always answer a question with a question?" "Why shouldn't a Jew answer a question with a question?"
Two lines, and somehow an entire philosophy of life.
Two men bring a quarrel to the rabbi. The rabbi hears the first man out, strokes his beard, and says, you are right. He hears the second man out and says, you are also right. His wife calls from the kitchen: they cannot both be right. The rabbi considers this very carefully.
"You are also right."
Two merchants meet on the train platform. Where are you traveling, asks the first. To Minsk, says the second. The first one explodes.
"You tell me you are going to Minsk so I will think you are going to Pinsk. But I happen to know you really are going to Minsk. So why are you lying to me?"
A joke so good that Sigmund Freud collected a version of it for his 1905 book on jokes. He could analyze it. He could not improve it.
A poor melamed, a school teacher, is asked what he would do if he were Rothschild.
"If I were Rothschild, I would be richer than Rothschild. I would do a little teaching on the side."
Only in Lita does a fantasy of infinite wealth end this way.
The schnorrer, the professional beggar, calls on his regular donor and receives half the usual amount. The donor apologizes: heavy expenses this month, my daughter's wedding. The schnorrer draws himself up to his full height.
"With my money he makes weddings?"
A schnorrer borrows money from a wealthy man, pleading utter destitution. The same afternoon, the benefactor finds him in a restaurant eating salmon with mayonnaise, the most expensive dish on the menu. He is outraged. The schnorrer spreads his hands.
"When I have no money, I cannot eat salmon with mayonnaise. When I have money, I must not. So tell me, when shall I eat salmon with mayonnaise?"
Another one Freud kept. The logic is genuinely unanswerable.
One day two beggars knock instead of one. The householder is confused. The old schnorrer introduces his companion with quiet pride.
"My new son-in-law. I gave him your street as a dowry."
Begging was a profession, with routes, territories, and estates to pass on. The joke barely exaggerates.
Two beggars work the steps of a church, one holding a cross, one holding a Star of David. The priest, taking pity, advises the crowd to give to the man with the cross, and the coins pour in accordingly. When the priest leaves, the beggar with the cross leans over to the beggar with the star.
"Look who's teaching us business."
A customer calls the waiter and insists that he taste the soup. The waiter protests, apologizes, offers a fresh bowl, offers the manager. The customer only repeats: taste the soup. Finally the waiter surrenders. Where is the spoon, he asks. The customer beams.
"Aha!"
A complete argument, delivered perfectly, with no soup involved at all.
A man on the overnight train groans, every few minutes, into the darkness: oy, am I thirsty. Oy, am I thirsty. A fellow passenger, driven to despair, fights his way to the end of the carriage and brings him a cup of water. Blessed silence. Then, out of the dark:
"Oy, was I thirsty."
Two old friends over tea. The pessimist sighs from the bottom of his soul: things cannot possibly get any worse. The optimist pats his hand and reassures him.
"Of course they can."
In Yiddish humor, this is what optimism looks like.
A man runs to the rabbi: his hut is unbearable, a wife, six children, one room, no air. The rabbi tells him to bring his goat inside. A week later, worse. Bring in the chickens, says the rabbi. Worse still. The cow, says the rabbi. When the man returns half dead, the rabbi tells him: now put them all out again. The next day the man is radiant.
"Rabbi, the house is a palace!"
The oldest lesson in perspective ever taught, and it was taught with livestock.
On the eve of the Day of Atonement, the rabbi throws himself before the ark, beating his breast: Lord, I am nothing, I am nothing. The cantor, moved, does the same: I am nothing, I am nothing. In the back, the poor shammes, the caretaker, falls to his knees: I am nothing, I am nothing. The rabbi nudges the cantor.
"Look who thinks he's nothing."
A student asks to be taught Talmudic reasoning. The teacher poses a problem: two men fall down a chimney. One comes out dirty, one comes out clean. Which one washes? The dirty one, says the student. Wrong: the dirty one looks at the clean one and thinks he too is clean; the clean one looks at the dirty one and washes. Ah, says the student, now I understand. No, says the teacher.
"Tell me: how do two men fall down one chimney, and one comes out clean?"
First doubt the question. The whole Litvak method, in one chimney.
A Hasid boasts to a Litvak: our rebbe, in the middle of prayers, saw a fire burning in a city fifty miles away, a vision, a miracle! The Litvak checks, as a Litvak does, and reports back: the telegraph office confirms there was no fire in that city at all. The Hasid is unshaken.
"Even so. To see fifty miles!"
A joke the misnagdim, the Litvak rationalists, told with particular pleasure.
Hershele Ostropoler, the legendary trickster, arrives penniless at an inn and is refused supper. Fine, he says darkly, then I will have to do what my father did. The innkeeper's wife, terrified, feeds him like a king. Afterward she asks, trembling: what did your father do?
"He went to bed hungry."
The shadchan, the professional matchmaker, praises a bride to a doubtful young man, who counters every virtue with a flaw, and the shadchan parries every flaw, until the young man plays his final card: but she limps!
"Only when she walks."
A shadchan brings his assistant along to help praise the bride's family. The family is honorable, says the shadchan. Highly honorable, says the assistant. They are wealthy, says the shadchan. Rich as kings, says the assistant. But one must admit, says the shadchan, the girl has a small hump. The assistant, carried away:
"And what a hump!"
Also preserved by Freud, who filed it under enthusiasm exceeding its instructions.
A pious man prays, year after year: Lord, let me win the lottery. Just once. Have I not served you? Decades of this. Finally the heavens tear open, and a great weary voice booms down:
"Meet me halfway. Buy a ticket."
Litvak humor did not stop at the sickroom door. Nothing was too serious to joke about, which was precisely the point. The dying merchant asks: is my wife here? She is. My sons? They are. My daughters? All here. He sits bolt upright.
"Then who is minding the store?"
And the other one: the dying man smells his wife's strudel baking, and begs, as a last wish, for one piece. She leans down tenderly.
"The strudel is for after."
Chelm, the storied town whose inhabitants were all fools of genius, once convened its elders to settle which matters more, the sun or the moon. The ruling:
"The moon, obviously. It shines at night, when light is needed. The sun shines by day, when it is light anyway."
The men of Chelm carried logs down the mountain on their shoulders, one by one, sweating for days. A visitor pointed out that logs can be rolled downhill. The Chelmites were deeply impressed. So they carried all the logs back up the mountain, in order to roll them down properly.
Fresh snow fell on Chelm, beautiful and unbroken, and the town could not bear for the shammes to spoil it with his footprints on his dawn rounds. The solution was found at once, and everyone agreed it was brilliant: four men would carry the shammes through the town on a table.
One clear night the men of Chelm saw the moon floating in a barrel of rainwater, and understood their opportunity. They sealed the barrel tight, to save the moon for cloudy nights. When they opened it weeks later, in the town's hour of need, the moon was gone. The lid was blamed.
This was a culture that took its comedy seriously enough to license it. No proper wedding happened without a badkhen, a professional jester, who stood on a chair and roasted the bride, the groom, the in-laws and the rabbi in improvised rhyme, and whose job, in essence, was to make the guests cry and laugh within the same hour.
And Vilna, being Vilna, had the most famous jester of all: Motke Chabad, whose pranks and one-liners traveled the Jewish world the way other cities exported cloth. The Jerusalem of the North apparently required a court fool. He was very good.
The Yiddish curse was baroque, unhurried, and delivered with a smile. Three classics of the genre:
The Yiddish phrase for this whole tradition is lakhn durkh trern, laughter through tears. Its patron saint was the great humorist Sholem Aleichem, who died in 1916 mid-sentence, beloved on three continents, and who wrote his own epitaph: it says, in playful Yiddish rhyme, that here lies a plain Jew who wrote for plain folk, and that precisely when his audience was laughing hardest, he was secretly weeping.
That is the last thing to understand about the jokes in this museum. They were not told instead of crying. They were told so that crying would not get the last word. Now scroll down, because the best Litvak story of all is waiting below.
In 1900 the great Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz published a short story called "If Not Higher," and its hero, naturally, is a Litvak. Every year, during the days of the Penitential Prayers, the beloved Rebbe of Nemirov vanishes at dawn, and his followers say what followers say: he ascends to heaven to plead for his people. A Litvak turns up in town and laughs at this. Ascends to heaven. Really. Moses himself did not ascend to heaven. So the Litvak does what a Litvak does: he checks. He hides under the rebbe's bed and lies there all night, and at dawn he follows him. And he watches the holy man dress in peasant clothes, take an axe into the forest, chop a bundle of firewood, carry it to the hovel of a sick old widow, and, while lighting her stove with his own hands, quietly recite the morning prayers.
The Litvak stays in Nemirov and becomes the rebbe's most devoted follower. And ever after, whenever the townspeople say that during the Penitential Prayers the rebbe ascends to heaven, the Litvak does not argue. He only adds, softly: if not higher.
That is the whole Litvak character in one story. Check everything. Believe carefully. And when the facts turn out to be kindness, say so, but not one word more than necessary.
Chapter Six
Half of Lita is missing from most of the history books, so let this book do better. The men filled the study houses. The women, meanwhile, ran the world.
In the Lithuania of your ancestors, a remarkable bargain was in force. The highest honor a family could hold was a learned man, and a learned man earned nothing. So it was the wife, in home after home, who kept the shop, worked the market stall, fed the children, managed the money, and made the whole arrangement possible. She prayed in Yiddish, her own language, on her own schedule. She was the guardian of the calendar, the keeper of bread and candlelight, the one who decided what the family actually was. History wrote down the rabbis. The rabbis, to their credit, wrote down the women, and some of what they wrote is in the cases below.
A third museum, then, and in some ways the most important one: twenty-four cases on the lives of the women of Lita, from the Talmud's tributes to the market queens, the memoirists, the poets, and the partisan girls. Scroll sideways as before, and come down when you are ready. The last chapter of this book is waiting for a woman.
"For the merit of the righteous women, Israel was redeemed from Egypt."
The Talmud, tractate Sotah. The rabbis' official position on how redemption works. Lita operated on the same principle.
"A woman of valor, who can find? Her worth is far beyond rubies."
Proverbs 31, the Eshes Khayil. Sung by husbands to their wives at every Sabbath table in Lita, every week, for centuries. In most households it was not flattery. It was an accurate job review.
Here is the Litvak arrangement in one sentence: the ideal husband studied, and the ideal wife made that possible. She kept the shop, ran the stall, extended the credit and collected it. The Yiddish word for such a woman was a beryeh, a person of formidable competence, and there was no higher compliment in the language. When a Litvak family got to choose what to be proud of, it chose a wife who could do everything.
A promising young scholar came with a price, and the bride's family paid it gladly: the custom called kest, in which the young couple lived and ate at her parents' table for years so the groom could study. Which means the entire tower of Litvak learning, the yeshivas, the geniuses, the famous books, rested on a foundation of mothers-in-law. This is rarely mentioned in the famous books. It is mentioned here.
Walk into any shtetl market at dawn and the commanding voices were women's: the herring sellers, the geese wives, the bread women at their stalls in every weather, conducting the loudest economics faculty in Europe. Travelers wrote home amazed at them. Their husbands may have ruled the study house. The town square had a government of its own, and everyone knew who sat in it.
The Talmud tells that Rachel married the shepherd Akiva against her rich father's will, lived in poverty, and sent her husband away to study for years on end, until he returned as the great Rabbi Akiva with thousands of students. When the students tried to hold back the poorly dressed woman pushing toward him, he stopped them with an accounting the tradition never forgot:
"What is mine and what is yours is hers."
"Love your wife as yourself. Honor her more than yourself."
The Talmud, tractate Yevamot. Not a suggestion; recorded as the standard of a proper man. Worth engraving somewhere, then and now.
Two of the holiest moments in the Jewish week belonged legally and entirely to her: separating the challah dough, and lighting the Sabbath candles. The men could build all the synagogues they liked. The actual arrival of holiness into the house, every single Friday, traveled through a woman's hands and a match. This entire book is lit by that fact.
The best-selling Yiddish book of all time was written for women: the Tsene-rene, the "women's Bible," the Torah retold in Yiddish with legends and morals woven in. Printed in hundreds of editions over four centuries. On Sabbath afternoons across Lita, a grandmother read it aloud, granddaughters at her elbows, and that reading circle was the most reliably attended institution of learning in the Jewish world.
Proof, set in metal, of who was actually reading: Yiddish printers used a special typeface for popular books, and its name was vaybertaytsh, "women's Yiddish." An entire branch of European printing was named for its best customers. The scholars had their square Hebrew letters. The women had a font of their own, and kept the presses of Lita in business.
The tkhines were not only read by women; many were written by them, most famously by Sore bas Toyvim, whose "Three Gates" was treasured for two centuries. These are prayers from inside a woman's life: for the candles, for children, for safe childbirth, at the graves of parents. In the tkhines, God is addressed from the kitchen and the birthing bed, directly, in plain Yiddish, without an appointment. It is a whole literature of women's authority, hiding in plain sight.
In the women's gallery of the synagogue sat an official the rabbinic books barely mention: the zogerke, the sayer, a learned woman who read the prayers aloud, line by line, for the women who could not, translating and explaining as she went, and who, the memoirs record, would weep at the right passages so the others knew when to weep. She was clergy in everything but title. Every town had one.
The community record books preserve the women's societies, the noshim tsidkoniyes, with their dues, elections and minutes: societies that dowered poor brides so no girl went unmarried for money, sat with the sick through the night, and sewed shrouds for the dead. It was the welfare state of the shtetl, and it was run, funded and staffed by women, in writing, for centuries.
The oldest primary sources of all are the stones. Across the Jewish cemeteries of Lita, the women's gravestones repeat one verse from the Woman of Valor more than any other:
"She stretched out her hand to the poor."
Proverbs 31:20. Carved thousands of times, for thousands of women. When a town summarized a woman's whole life in five words, these were the five words it chose.
The first great memoir of an Ashkenazi woman was written in the 1690s by Glückel of Hameln: merchant, widow, mother of fourteen, who traded across Europe and wrote at night, in grief after her husband's death, so that her children would know where they came from. Her book survives, brisk, shrewd, funny and devout, and it proves the voice was always there, whenever anyone thought to write it down.
From the Litvak world itself: Pauline Wengeroff, born in 1833, published her "Memoirs of a Grandmother" in her seventies, an eyewitness record of the whole century. She describes the Sabbaths of her childhood in loving detail, and then the heartbreak of watching modern times arrive: the husbands and sons discarding tradition, and demanding the women, who had guarded it all along, give it up too. She wrote it down so it would not vanish. It has not.
Mary Antin, whose voice appears earlier in this book, remembered the old arithmetic of her town exactly: a boy was born for the study house, and a girl was born for the marriage canopy, and that was to be the whole of it. Then she crossed the ocean, walked into a public school, and wrote a book in her new language that all of America read. The girls of Lita were not short of ability. They were short of doors.
The emigration had a women's ledger too. When husbands went ahead to America, wives held families together alone for years, and some men went silent. The Yiddish press filled with their letters, and the famous advice column of the New York Forward, the Bintel Brief, became a courtroom of last resort where abandoned wives argued their cases before a million readers. Their letters survive: exhausted, precise, and unbroken. Primary sources, every one.
You have already met her once, but she belongs in this museum by right: Devorah Romm, widowed young, who took over the greatest Hebrew press on earth and ran it, over a hundred workers, scholars, proofreaders and typesetters, through its finest hour, the Vilna Shas. For generations, on the most authoritative page in the Jewish world, the imprint read "the Widow and Brothers Romm." Her name first.
When Yiddish poetry became modern, women from these towns were standing in the front rank. Anna Margolin of Vilna wrote verse so fierce and polished that critics assumed a man was hiding behind the woman's name; she outwrote them all, and composed her own unsparing epitaph. Kadya Molodowsky, from the Grodno country, wrote her famous "Women's Songs," in which the grandmothers of exactly this world come to the poet in dreams and ask to be carried forward. Consider them carried.
Emma Goldman of Kovno, the most notorious woman of her age, recalled in her autobiography being scolded by a young comrade: her dancing was undignified for the revolution. She kept dancing, and wrote that she wanted no part of any beautiful ideal that demanded she give it up. A century later, half the world quotes some version of that sentence. It began with a Litvak girl who refused to sit down.
In the darkest chapter, the women of Vilna wrote one of the brightest pages. Vitka Kempner, a young woman of the ghetto underground, smuggled a homemade bomb past the gates and blew up a German troop train in the summer of 1942, one of the first acts of armed Jewish resistance in occupied Europe. She and Ruzhka Korczak led fighters out of the ghetto to the forests and kept fighting until liberation. Both lived. Both told the story themselves, so that the record would be theirs.
And remember Chapter One. Of the three ways your family may have gotten its name, the tenderest is that "Goldman" began as the household of a woman called Golde: a family so plainly hers that the empire's ledger simply wrote it down. If that reading is true, then everything in this museum is not general history. It is a job description, handed down. And the book you are holding is, among other things, her receipt.
Here is the oldest institution your family possesses, older than the surname, older than Lita itself. No one ordained these women. Almost none of their names survive in any archive. But every Friday at dusk, for something like a thousand years, from the Rhine to Poland to the small towns of Lithuania to wherever the boats and the decades carried them, a woman of this family lit candles because her mother lit candles, because her mother lit candles. Call it forty generations, mother to daughter, holding the same small office. Not one of them dropped it.
Empires took the censuses, and the empires are gone. The office of candle-lighter is still occupied. As of tomorrow, its current holder turns seventy, and the whole chain of them, the market queens and the zogerkes and the memoirists and the one possibly named Golde, would look at her and say what a Litvak says when the praise is highest. Not bad. Not bad at all.
Which brings this book, at last, to its final chapter.
Chapter Seven · Where the family went
After the First World War, the family did what all of Lita was doing: it looked at a map of the world and split itself across it, so the name would live in more places than one. Some went to Canada. Some went to New York. Some went home, the long way, to the land of Israel. Three roads out of one small town, and this book now follows all three.
The Canadian branch sailed for Halifax and rode the long trains inland, to Montreal, to Toronto, to Ottawa: cities with hard winters, which did not frighten anyone from Lita, and open doors, which after 1924 America no longer had. Twelve cases from their new world.
The crossing ended at the piers of Halifax, where an officer stamped papers written in a fourth or fifth language, and then came the part no one in Lita had imagined: Canada itself, day after day of it through a train window, forests and lakes with no end. The old country could fit in a corner of it. Families rode the colonist cars west to Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa with their bundles in the racks and their candlesticks in the trunks below.
In Montreal the Yiddish world ran up one long street: Boulevard Saint-Laurent, which nobody ever called anything but the Main. Butchers, bakers, presses, union halls, wedding halls, all of it in Yiddish, block after block, with the factory floors above the shops and the families above the factories. A greenhorn could arrive on the Main on a Tuesday and by Friday have a job, a boarding room, an argument, and an opinion about everyone else's herring.
What Lita's children did in the new cities, mostly, was sew. Montreal's lofts and Toronto's Spadina Avenue were the garment districts, and the work was hard, paid little, and bred fighters: the unions organized in Yiddish, and Spadina was nicknamed Red Spadina for the politics of its sewing floors, a street built wide enough, it turned out, for very satisfying labor marches. The Litvak habit of arguing from sources transferred smoothly to contract negotiations.
Montreal became one of the great Yiddish cities of the world. It had its own Yiddish daily from 1907, the Keneder Adler, the Canadian Eagle, read on every stoop of the Main; a Jewish Public Library founded in 1914; Yiddish schools where children learned Sholem Aleichem alongside long division; and enough poets to feud properly. The language of Lita did not merely survive the crossing. It bought real estate.
Remember the gefilte fish line that divided the old country? The new country drew a new one: the bagel line. The Montreal bagel, rolled thinner, boiled in honey water, and baked in a wood-fired oven, versus the New York bagel, fat and glossy. Families with branches in both cities have argued this at every reunion since, with citations, which is how you know they are still Litvaks. This book takes no position, in writing.
Among the Litvaks who came to Montreal was a distinguished Talmud scholar and grammarian, Rabbi Solomon Klonitzki-Kline, whose daughter Masha raised her son on the songs and prayers of that world. The boy's name was Leonard Cohen. When the most famous baritone blessing ever to come out of Canada filled the world's arenas, a thread in it ran straight back to Lithuania.
In Toronto the family world was Kensington, plainly called the Jewish Market: pushcarts bolted down in front of the houses, live chickens on Kensington Avenue, herring in four-foot barrels, kosher cheese made on site, and some sixty thousand Jews living around it in the 1920s and 30s with more than thirty synagogues. One of them, on St. Andrew Street, was named Anshei Minsk, the Men of Minsk. They rebuilt the shtetl, in brick, in the snow, and made it sing.
Canada was kinder than the old empire, but it was not innocent. In August 1933, months after Hitler took power, a local gang unfurled a swastika banner at a baseball game at Toronto's Christie Pits park to taunt the largely Jewish team. The Jewish and Italian youth of the neighborhood answered with their fists, in a battle that lasted half the night and entered city legend. The message, delivered in the Litvak style, was concise: not here.
The Ottawa branch of the story is smaller and steeper. Jewish peddlers settled Lowertown around the ByWard Market, walked the valley farms with packs on their backs, then pushed carts, then opened shops, then sent their children to the university, the whole ladder in a generation or two. It is the classic arc of Lita abroad, performed within sight of Parliament, which mostly did not notice, which suited everyone.
And Ottawa produced one of the great women of Canadian Jewish history: Lillian Freiman, who in 1920, with the old country in ruins after the war, organized the rescue of some hundred and fifty Jewish war orphans from Eastern Europe and placed them in Canadian homes, meeting the children at the dock herself. A woman of Lita's world, doing exactly what the women of Lita's world had always done, at national scale.
Timing was destiny. Through the 1920s Canada let the family in; in the 1930s, when the need became desperate, it shut the gates almost completely. When an official was later asked how many Jewish refugees Canada should take, the answer given has never been forgotten: none is too many. In 1939 the ship St. Louis, crowded with refugees, was turned away from these shores too. The branches of your family that crossed in time carried a luck they never knew they had, and this book pauses here to know it for them.
After the war the family story moved north up Bathurst Street and outward into the suburbs, from pushcarts to shops to offices and clinics, exactly as the grandparents had planned it over the herring barrels. Toronto and Montreal grew into two of the great Jewish communities of the world, and in the old cemeteries the gravestones still speak Yiddish with a Litvak accent. Somewhere in that story, one branch of it, is the table this book was written for.
That was the northern road. Meanwhile, other envelopes in the family mail carried New York postmarks.
Chapter Eight · Where the family went
The second road led to the harbor every shtetl had heard of, the one with the statue. New York took in more of Lita than any city on earth, and for a generation the Lower East Side of Manhattan was, by head count, one of the largest Jewish cities in history. Some of your family walked down a gangplank into the middle of it.
The first thing they saw was her, and it meant more than the postcards let on: the sonnet fixed to her base, welcoming the tired and the poor and the huddled longing to breathe free, had been written by a Jewish poet, Emma Lazarus. The famous American front door had a mezuzah on it, in a manner of speaking, and the steerage decks knew it.
A myth-clearing case: no clerk at Ellis Island changed anyone's name. The inspectors copied names straight from the ship manifests, written at the port of departure. If a Goldman became a Golden or a Gould, it happened later, voluntarily, at a courthouse, chasing a job or a fashion. Which means the name your family carries was carried through that hall intact, on purpose, by people who had decided to keep it.
The Lower East Side around 1900 packed more people per block than almost anywhere ever measured: Hester, Orchard, Rivington, Delancey, streets so dense with pushcarts that traffic simply surrendered. It was loud, poor, smoky and unstoppable, a whole civilization compressed into a few hundred acres, running on herring, credit, gossip and ambition. To a family from a muddy shtetl it was terrifying, and it was Oz.
Home was three rooms on an airshaft: parents, children, a boarder or two paying for a fold-out cot, piecework bundles by the window, the fire escape as a summer bedroom. The tenement was hard, and it had one great virtue: it was temporary, and everyone in it knew it. The whole apartment was organized around the one child doing homework at the kitchen table.
The branch that arrived after the war walked into a world earlier girls had already fought for. In 1909 a young garment worker named Clara Lemlich rose at a packed union meeting, demanded the floor in Yiddish, and moved the vote that made history:
"I move that we go on a general strike."
Twenty thousand shirtwaist makers, most of them Jewish girls, walked out the next day. The fire at the Triangle factory in 1911 seared the lesson in. By the 1920s, the sweatshops of New York answered to unions that argued in Yiddish.
The neighborhood had a ten-story Yiddish skyscraper: the Forverts, the Jewish Daily Forward, a quarter-million copies a day, whose editor Abraham Cahan appointed himself professor of America to the greenhorns. Its Bintel Brief column answered their letters: about faithless husbands, unions, English, love, and whether it was a sin to play baseball. The verdict on baseball, famously, was to let the boys play, so they should not grow up strangers in their own country.
Second Avenue blazed with Yiddish theater marquees, a full rival Broadway where the great tragedians and comedians of the immigrant world played kings, peddlers and mothers-in-law to packed houses six nights a week, never on Friday. For a quarter, a seamstress could weep at a five-act tragedy and be home by eleven, restored. The stars were mobbed in the street like royalty, because that is what they were.
The old country's kitchen conquered the new one: Katz's slicing since 1888, knisheries on Houston Street, appetizing counters stacked with herring in seven styles, seltzer for two cents plain, and the egg cream, a drink containing neither egg nor cream, which is very Litvak of it. Food was how the neighborhood remembered, and also how it showed off: nobody in America was going to out-feed a Jewish grandmother who had known hunger.
The old faith in education hit the new world's one free door: City College of New York, tuition free, admission by merit, and in the 1920s and 30s overwhelmingly filled with the children of these tenements, arguing in the alcoves like their grandfathers in the study houses. Out of those classrooms came scientists, writers and more future Nobel laureates than any free city college had business producing. Toyre iz di beste skhoyre, in translation.
Every shtetl of Lita reconvened in Manhattan as a landsmanshaft, a hometown society, with a president, dues, a sick fund, a cemetery plot and an annual banquet: thousands of these societies, one per town. Whatever town your family came from, its society almost certainly met in a rented hall in New York, argued over minutes, and sent money home. The shtetl did not dissolve in America. It incorporated.
Then, in 1924, America ended it. The Johnson-Reed Act cut immigration from Eastern Europe to a trickle by design, and the harbor that had taken two million Jews took almost none. This is the hinge of your family's whole geography: after 1924, the ones still in Lita could no longer follow to New York, and so the family fanned out, to Canada while it stayed open, and to the land of Israel. One law in Washington, and your family tree grew branches on three continents.
And a closing flourish: through the 1920s, the most famous entertainer in the United States, the star of the first talking picture in 1927, was Al Jolson, born Asa Yoelson in the Lithuanian shtetl of Seredžius, son of a cantor of Lita. When America's movies learned to speak, the first voice they spoke with had learned its trade in a Litvak synagogue. The small towns kept exporting light, and now it was electric.
That was the second road. The third one pointed somewhere much older.
Chapter Nine · Where the family went
This book opened with a road leading out of Judea, two thousand years ago. After the First World War, part of your family turned around and walked it back. They did not call it emigrating. They called it aliyah, going up.
The returns came in numbered waves, like visits from relatives: the Third Aliyah after the war, young pioneers with calluses and ideology; the Fourth in the mid-1920s, shopkeeper families rerouted when America slammed shut; the Fifth in the 1930s, as Europe darkened. Between the wars, tens of thousands came from Lithuania and its world. The oldest road in the book, running in reverse.
The strangest sight in interwar Lithuania: Jewish teenagers on training farms, hakhsharot, learning to plow, milk and hoe, on purpose, to the horror of their shopkeeper parents. The youth movements, HeHalutz, Hashomer Hatzair, ran these rehearsal farms across the old country so that the children of peddlers would arrive in the Land as farmers. Lita's last export was pioneers, pre-trained.
The era opened with a legend. In March 1920, defending the tiny northern settlement of Tel Hai, the one-armed veteran Joseph Trumpeldor fell, and tradition gives him last words that every child of that generation could recite:
"It is good to die for our country."
Historians debate what he really said, as historians should. The generation did not debate. It named streets, kibbutzim and youth movements for him, and kept building.
The pioneers' own slogan said they had come to build the land and to be rebuilt by it, and both halves were true. They drained swamps, took malaria and gave back orchards, lived in tents, ate little, argued about everything in the Litvak manner, and sang half the night, because singing was free. Letters home from the kvutzot read like reports from another planet: dear Mama, my hands are ruined and I have never been happier.
In 1909, sixty-six families stood on empty dunes north of Jaffa and distributed building plots by lottery, using seashells with numbers on them. That seashell raffle became Tel Aviv. By the 1930s it was a white city of Bauhaus apartment houses, the first all-Hebrew city in two thousand years, its cafes full of new arrivals ordering coffee in careful Hebrew and gossiping in fluent Yiddish. Allenby Street, in the photograph behind these words, is what a two-decade-old miracle looks like at street level.
The man most responsible for the fact that Hebrew is again spoken by children in playgrounds was a boy from the Litvak world: Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, yeshiva-trained in the old country, who moved to Jerusalem, compiled the great dictionary of modern Hebrew, and raised his son as the first native Hebrew speaker in some two thousand years, to prove on one child that it could be done. It could. Say boker tov to your grandchildren and you are quoting his stubbornness.
Lita's other great export followed: the yeshivas themselves. Slabodka, the famous academy across the river from Kovno, moved a branch to the Land in 1924, the same year America closed. Ponevezh was rebuilt in Bnei Brak and grew mighty. And the yeshiva of Mir survived the war by one of history's strangest escapes, its hundreds of students crossing Siberia to Kobe and Shanghai on transit visas, then re-assembling afterward in Jerusalem and New York. The study benches of Lita never emptied. They moved.
The Fourth Aliyah of the mid-1920s was the least romantic and the most familiar: middle-class families, many rerouted by America's new quotas, arriving with sewing machines, ledgers and stock, and opening shops. The pioneers on the kibbutzim grumbled that these newcomers were building a Włocławek on the Mediterranean. The newcomers, busy building Tel Aviv's entire commercial life, did not look up from the counter. Every family needs both kinds.
The new country's calling card was the Jaffa orange, shipped in wooden crates to the whole world, each crate wearing a bright printed label: suns, camels, palms, ships, bold Hebrew letters. In the grocers' windows of Toronto and New York, a crate of Jaffas from the cousins was a letter you could eat. The crate labels are collected as art now, which the growers, had they known, would have priced in.
When the state came, it reached back into exactly the world this book comes from. Its first president, Chaim Weizmann, was raised in the shtetl of Motal in the Litvak marshes, one of fifteen children of a timber merchant. A later president, Shimon Peres, left the shtetl of Vishneva in 1934 as an eleven-year-old named Persky, a boy of the same small-town Lita as your family. From towns like theirs to heads of state in one lifetime. The shtetl did not think small. It just lived small, temporarily.
And so by the 1930s one family from one small town wrote itself letters across three continents: snow on College Street in one envelope, a sprig of orange blossom pressed flat in another, photographs of children who would meet their cousins decades later or never. The family did not scatter, exactly. It stretched, and the letters were the tendons. Some of those envelopes may still be in somebody's drawer, and if they are, they are holy objects. Ask around.
In 1948, when the state was declared, Jews everywhere reached for the same ancient blessing, the one said on firsts, on reunions, on having made it:
"…who has given us life, and sustained us, and brought us to this day."
The Shehecheyanu. It is also, as it happens, the traditional blessing for a birthday. Someone at your table can say it tomorrow, and mean every clause.
Three roads, three countries, one family, one name. And every one of those threads, the Canadian one first among them, runs forward through the decades to a particular chair at the head of a particular birthday table. The last chapter is about who is sitting in it.
Chapter Ten
Every history in this book was heading somewhere. It was heading to you, Mom.
Somewhere in Lithuania, in a market town whose name the family may still say differently than the maps do, people named Goldman lit Shabbos candles, argued about everything, prized the clever child, and kept going through empires and expulsions and worse. They stood in that clerk's office and chose the shining name. They peppered the fish. They hid the boys from the snatchers, packed the candlesticks, wrote the letters home. They could not have imagined this page. But everything on it belongs to them, and everything they were is still walking around in you. The sharp mind. The strong opinions, held with excellent sourcing. The love that runs deeper than it announces itself.
You are what seven centuries of stubborn Litvak survival looks like at seventy, and honestly, it looks wonderful on you.
Litvak families are unusually traceable, because the Russian Empire counted everyone. The census "revision lists" of Lithuania begin in 1795, and some community records reach back into the 1760s. That means most Litvak families, Goldmans included, can be documented to an ancestor born around 1780 to 1820, and often named further back through town records. The places to look:
You were born in 1956, eleven years after the darkest chapter in this book, into a world that was not at all sure Jewish stories would keep being written. Your seventy years are the answer.
And the tradition has been waiting for this birthday. It arrives bearing compliments. The Psalmist measured a full human life at seventy, so as of tomorrow you have officially completed the course, and everything after is extra credit, which is a very Litvak way to live. Better still, the Mishnah assigns a gift to every age. At seventy, seivah: wisdom worn like a crown of silver. And at eighty, gevurah: strength. According to two thousand years of tradition, the next decade is the strong one. Every candle tonight is a small, stubborn Litvak light, and there have never been more of them on your cake.
"The days of our years are threescore years and ten."
Psalm 90. This book opened with a psalm of weeping by the rivers of Babylon. It closes with the psalm of a completed life. That is the whole journey.
Ad meah v'esrim. May you live to a hundred and twenty.
(Seventy down. The best fifty to go.)
13 July 2026 · With love from your family