This is part of a joint review for The Shochet (Vol. 2): A Memoir of Jewish Life in Ukraine and Crimea.
By telling our life stories to our children, we help them understand the choices we have made and foster values such as honesty, respect, kindness, and resilience. For Jewish parents, such stories may also be a way to convey faithfulness to tradition, even in times of adversity. This was the goal of Pinkhes-Dov Goldenshteyn (1848 – 1930), a shochet (ritual slaughterer) whose autobiography spans almost eight decades and various regions, including Ukraine, Crimea, Lubavitch (the town the Chabad movement originated in), and pre-state Israel.
Truth be told, Goldenshteyn’s life was ordinary. He was never famous. Nor was he chiefly involved in any major event in Eastern European history or the history of the Yishuv. Goldenshteyn did not even witness most of these historical events; they happened elsewhere, not in the small shtetl in present-day Moldova where he grew up, nor in the little towns in Crimea where he served as a shochet.
His memoir, first published in Yiddish in 1929, recounts a childhood fraught with poverty and the loss of his parents. It also catalogs his struggles to be allowed to learn Torah, his growing affinity for Chabad Hasidism, the difficulty of being an honest shochet in Crimea, his eventual life in the land of Israel, and the challenges he needed to overcome in order to complete the writing of a Torah scroll in his later years.
Rediscovered and translated by Michoel Rotenfeld, The Shochet does not take readers back into the nostalgic world of the old shtetl or, in maskilic fashion, leave the shtetl behind for assimilation and modernity. Instead, over the course of hundreds of pages, Goldenshteyn gives us — perhaps unwittingly — valuable insights about the local, social, and religious history of the Jewish communities that he was part of, worked for, and visited.
Writing about his life, which was shaped by death, poverty, financial difficulties, and struggles against corruption, Goldenshteyn does not present readers with easy topics. Yet his vivid, readable prose is full of resilience, nuance, and humor. It invites us into the world of a critical thinker, a pious Jew, and a thoughtful observer of Jewish life.
Rotenfeld has been working on The Shochet for more than twenty years. A lot of effort, he notes, went into conducting linguistic research and locating the towns and villages mentioned in the two volumes. The tracking of contradictory biographical data was another hurdle, but one that Rotenfeld manages exceedingly well. Archival material from Ukraine, Israel, and America, as well as interviews with some of his descendants, add valuable context. Photos, a detailed appendix (including translated correspondence), and helpful footnotes also contribute greatly to this in-depth study. Particularly illuminating are Rotenfeld’s analyses of day-to-day Hasidic religious life in nineteenth-century Ukraine and his exploration of Goldensteyn’s growing relationship with the Chabad movement.
In writing this autobiography, Pinkhes-Dov Goldensteyn wanted his children to see God in his life and theirs. Readers in the twenty-first century will be inspired by his captivating historical account and moved by his devotion and resilience.
Katharina Hadassah Wendl (Klein) is a researcher in rabbinic literature at Freie Universität Berlin.
