A Jewish Drunk Is Hard to Find’’: Jewish Drinking Practices and the Sobriety Stereotype in Eastern Europe GLENN DYNNER Sarah Lawrence College
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T HE J EWISH Q UARTERLY R EVIEW, Vol. 104, No. 1 (Winter 2014) 9–23 ‘‘A Jewish Drunk Is Hard to Find’’: Jewish Drinking Practices and the Sobriety Stereotype in Eastern Europe GLENN DYNNER Sarah Lawrence College Indeed, one frequently observes in life how great and even monumental conse- quences are the product of minute causes. A peasant sows wheat; a miller mills some of it into flour; the rest finds its way to a distillery where it is made into vodka; a portion of both is delivered to Gittel the tavernkeeper; she adds a bit of yeast and water to the flour, kneads it, and rolls it into knishes; in her pantry, thanks to the Phoenicians, who invented the art of glassmaking thousands of years ago, are some glasses; and when the vodka is poured into them, and the hot knishes are put on platters, and these are set before a band of hungry and thirsty Jews, there is no telling what may happen . S.Y. Abramowitsh, The Brief Travels of Benjamin the Third THE JEWS, according to the Polish noble and social reformer Antoni Ostrowski, ‘‘are always sober, and this virtue should be conceded: drunks are rare among Jews.’’1 This seemed to be the consensus among Polish elites during the nineteenth century, the era of the partitions. Only Jews, it was believed, were immune from the current epidemic of drunkenness that had depleted the Polish nation’s strength at a time when strength was most desperately needed. Even prominent Catholic clergy admonished parishioners to learn from the temperance of the country’s Jews. ‘‘Although he supports himself by dealing in drinks,’’ Father Karol 1. Antoni Ostrowski, Pomysły o potrzebie reformy towarzyskie´y w ogo´lnos´ci, a mia- nowicie´y, co do Izraelito´w w Polszcze przez załoz.yciela miasta Tomaszowa Mazowieckiego (Paris, 1834), 101–2. A peasant memoirist declared that Jews ‘‘never drank themselves, and it was the greatest rarity to see a Jew drunk.’’ Jan Slomka, From Serfdom to Self-Government: Memoirs of a Polish Village Mayor, 1842–1927, trans. W. J. Rose (London, 1941), 91–94. The Jewish Quarterly Review (Winter 2014) Copyright ᭧ 2014 Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. ................. 18483$ $CH2 01-24-14 14:42:57 PS PAGE 9 10 JQR 104.1 (2014) Mikoszewski observed, referring to the Kingdom of Poland’s thousands of Jewish tavern keepers, ‘‘a Jewish drunk is hard to find.’’2 It was not always meant as a compliment. According to many Polish social reformers, Jewish tavern keepers only stayed sober in order to more effectively exploit their naive peasant customers, seeing to it that they ran up their tabs and became drunk enough to swindle.3 A peasant memoirist named Jan Slomka similarly described his neighbors spending hours in taverns ‘‘making themselves at home, taking their drink: while the [Jews] got more out of them, exploiting their weaknesses.’’4 A peas- ant proverb warned ominously that ‘‘the peasant drinks at the inn and the Jew does him in.’’5 Government officials used these suspicions about Jewish sobriety to justify their efforts to penalize, restrict, and ban Jew- ish participation in the lucrative liquor trade.6 But the positive side to the stereotype probably outweighed the nega- tive. The Polish nobles who actually owned the majority of taverns and distilleries were so convinced of Jewish sobriety that they all but refused to lease them to anyone else. Only Jews, they were conditioned to believe, could restrain themselves from drinking up the product. As a result, when the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian regimes that ruled the formerly Polish lands tried, in turn, to drive Jews out of the liquor trade, most nobles instructed their Jewish tavern keepers to prop up Christian bartenders as ‘‘fronts’’ and carry on business as usual. Over the course of the nineteenth century, officials and social reformers alike grumbled rather helplessly that ‘‘Jews everywhere’’ continually evaded Jewish- specific concessions and bans by hiring Christians to sell their liquor.7 2. Karol Mikoszewski, Sermons on Drunkenness (Kazania o pijan´ stwie,1862), 63, 88–89. 3. For a sampling, see N. M. Gelber ‘‘She’elat ha-yehudim be-polin bi-shnat 1815–30,’’ Zion 13/14 (1949): 106–43. 4. Slomka, From Serfdom to Self-Government, 91–94. 5. Alina Cala, The Image of the Jew in Polish Folk Culture (Jerusalem, 1995), 178. 6. See my monograph, Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, and Life in the Kingdom of Poland (New York, forthcoming). 7. Ostrowski, Pomysły o potzrebie reformy, 102; Archiwum Gło´wne Akt Daw- nych (AGAD), Komisji Rzadowej Spraw Wewnetrznych (KRSW) 6637, fol. 1; Władze Centralne Powstanie Listopadego 1830–31 (WCPL) 1830–31, 339, 26– 28. This was also the explanation provided by the St. Petersburg Jewish Commit- tee in 1858. AGAD, KRSW 6632, p. 57. According to the governor of Suwałki Province, the ban on the rural Jewish liquor trade that remained in place after 1862 should be lifted, since ‘‘Jews everywhere simply ignored it.’’ See Michael ................. 18483$ $CH2 01-24-14 14:42:58 PS PAGE 10 A JEWISH DRUNK IS HARD TO FIND—DYNNER 11 From the Jewish perspective, maintaining an image of sobriety was thus critical for the continual awarding of tavern leases.8 In addition to this obvious economic advantage, however, the sobriety stereotype helped East European Jews sustain an internal sense of cultural superior- ity. No matter how marginalized or excluded, Jews could still compare themselves favorably to the daily spectacle of drunken gentile clientele presented in their taverns. Who can forget the pungent descriptions in some of the classics of Hebrew and Yiddish literature—H. N. Bialik’s father’s customers, who ‘‘sated themselves amid vomit, monstrous faces corrupted and tongues flowing with invectives’’ as Bialik imbibed whis- pered words of Torah from his father’s lips; or S. Y. Abramovitch’s ‘‘whole groups of country folk, some of them tottering on their legs, or already fallen; others keeping their feet, though by now on their fourth or fifth round,’’ in contrast to the ‘‘lively Jewish matron’’ seated behind the bar keeping track of everyone’s accounts.9 The popular song ‘‘Shiker iz der goy’’ (The gentile [goy] is drunk) provides the starkest formulation: ‘‘The goy goes to the tavern/ he drinks a glass of wine/ oy, the goy is drunk, drunk is he/ drink he must, because a goy is he,’’ the first verse proclaims. The next verse presents his mirror opposite: ‘‘The Jew goes to the studyhouse/ he looks at a book/ oy, the Jew is sober, sober is he/ learn he must, because a Jew is he.’’10 East European Jews thus countered Jerry Ochs, ‘‘St. Petersburg and the Jews of Russian Poland, 1862–1905’’ (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1986), 76. 8. While it is difficult to gauge the extent of Jewish tavern keeping, the avail- able data suggest that at the beginning of the partition era (1772–1918) Jews leased approximately 85 percent of all taverns. There were, for example, 19,749 registered taverns in the Duchy of Warsaw in 1808 (the majority of which, 13,157, were in villages), while the official figure for Jewish tavern keeping clos- est to that date is 17,561 families. For the 1808 figures, see Henryk Grossman, ‘‘Struktura społeczna i zawodowa Ks. Warszawskiego,’’ Kwartalnik statystyczny (Warsaw, 1924), 35, table 12. For the 1814 figures, see AGAD, KRSW 1849, fol. 152–9. For Jewish population figures in 1810, see Bohdan Wasiutyn´ ski, Ludnos´c´ . zydowska w Polsce w wiekach XIX i XX (Warsaw, 1930), 8. 9. H. N. Bialik, ‘‘Avi’’ (1932); S. Y. Abramowitch, The Tales of Mendele the Bookpeddler: Fishke the Lame, ed. D. Miron and K. Frieden (New York, 1996), 96–97. 10. For the original Yiddish, and an alternate translation, see Mark Slobin, Tenement Songs: The Popular Music of the Jewish Immigrants (Champaign, Ill., 1996), 193. Alternate lyrics, in a version sung by Cantor Berel Chagy, are available WX0OKFwLOQU (last consulted onסat http://www.youtube.com/watch?v August 8, 2012). Bob Rothstein refutes this message by drawing attention to numerous Jewish drinking songs. See ‘‘Geyt a yid in shenkl arayn: Yiddish Songs ................. 18483$ $CH2 01-24-14 14:42:58 PS PAGE 11 12 JQR 104.1 (2014) accusations of sinister sobriety with a demeaning stereotype of drunken gentile profligacy. Certain internal Jewish observers questioned the Jewish part of this equation, drawing attention to members of Jewish society who had indeed succumbed to alcohol addiction. Tzevi Hirsch Kaidanover’s enor- mously popular mystical-ethical tract Kav ha-yashar, for example, com- plains of Jews drinking even during the earliest hours of the day: ‘‘I have noticed that many people in this region are so enslaved to their appetites that immediately upon awakening, hours before dawn, they believe they will die if they do not drink hard liquor.’’ When the time of morning prayer arrived their prayers were garbled, ‘‘a terrible sin . which many luminaries have committed.’’11 Yet such rebukes appear but rarely in Jewish ethical literature in comparison to the manifold rebukes in Chris- tian sermons, and Jewish clergy did not feel the need to form temperance societies as did their Christian counterparts. Alcoholism was clearly not a Jewish societal problem.12 That being said, East European Jews did drink, and some drank in excess. Improvements in distilling, thanks to the importation of the Pist- orius liquor still in the 1820s and the cultivation of potatoes, elevated the potency of drink fourfold while lowering the price of a drink dramati- cally.13 Levels of Jewish drinking, while remaining low relative to the societal norm, rose along with it over the course of the nineteenth cen- tury.14 This relative increase can be seen both in the emergence of what may have been Judaism’s most robust drinking culture in history, Hasid- ism, as well as in the individual cases of Jewish drunkenness appearing of Drunkenness,’’ in The Field of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Folklore, and Literature, Fifth Collection, ed.