This week, Anne-Marie O’Connor, the author of The 
Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer blogs for The Postscript on editing her book and the descriptions of shtetl life that had to be cut. The Postscript series is a special peek “behind the scenes” of a book. It’s a juicy little extra something to add to a book club’s discussion and a reader’s understanding of how the book came together.
To “host” Anne-Marie at your next book club meeting, request her through JBC Live Chat.
I was very reluctant to cut this chapter because it detailed the rich history of small-town Jewish life in Eastern Europe, as well as the cycles of anti-Semitic violence that would culminate in the Holocaust. Rose Lessure was the grandmother of Pam Schoenberg, the wife of the attorney, Randol Schoenberg, who won the Klimt collection back from Austria. I discovered Rose Lessure’s Ellis Island interview on an oral history database, and Pam gave me a memoir that had been published by Rose’s neighbors in Stavisht, who had managed to flee to Israel before the shtetl was wiped out. One question that remained for me: was life in Stavisht really as idyllic as their accounts? Some people suggested these memories were softened by nostalgia. Perhaps. Yet the paintings of Chagall, and the stories of Sholom Aleichem, suggest that the collective lives shared in these lost shtetls had a truly lustrous, wonderful quality.
Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer blogs for The Postscript on editing her book and the descriptions of shtetl life that had to be cut. The Postscript series is a special peek “behind the scenes” of a book. It’s a juicy little extra something to add to a book club’s discussion and a reader’s understanding of how the book came together. To “host” Anne-Marie at your next book club meeting, request her through JBC Live Chat.
The chapter I most regret cutting from my book was the story of a girl named Rose Lessure, who grew up in one of the shtetls fictionalized by Sholom Aleichem that were popularized in “Fiddler on the Roof,” the musical on the precarious joys of life in the shtetls outside Kiev.
Rose grew up in the shtetl of Stavisht, which was cupped like a bowl in a ring of forested mountains; a place where yellow sunflowers stretched to the horizen in the summer like an endless sea of gold.
Here, klezmer musicians made people dance with joy at weddings, and when the daughter of one of the most prosperous men in the shtetl eloped with a klezmer player to America, they became a town legend.
“Itsikl the Meshugener,” the “crazy guy” of Stavisht, led the shtetl’s wedding toasts, and made everyone laugh by saying things everyone was thinking but never dared to speak.
In the prayer houses, intellectuals argued about world affairs, drank tea, talked of liberation in the land of Zion — anything but pray – while the pious Orthodox frowned on the Zionists.
The shtetls outside Kiev were a cradle of mysticism, where Hasidic scholars believed in the transforming power of words to enlighten and heal, and the divine mysteries of the Kabbala. These were the blessed magic realist shtetls of Chagall.
But life was precarious indeed. As Jewish families attained success, they drew the envy of pogromchiks, who sacked the undefended shtetls. The fear of pogrom violence was always in the backdrop of the collective psyche.
Rose, a grain merchant’s daughter with masses of wavy red hair, grew up wandering behind her adored big brother Herschel, 11 years older; a boy with a broad, kind smile, who looked up from his studies and lifted Rose to his knee, or picked her up and spun her like a bird.
Rose loved to lie in the straw and hug her pet calf, or curl up on the earthenware stove with the cats, drowsily listening to her mother and Herschel talk.
A scholar rented a room adjoining their house, and Rose watched the stream of people come to his door, asking him to write letters, or read letters from a son of Stavisht who was a professor at the Marie Curie Institute in Paris; or from family in America.
Rose’s father couldn’t persuade her mother to go to America. She couldn’t imagine leaving a place where one person’s trouble was everyone’s problem, and a widow could expect friendship societies to help her and her children.
Here, klezmer musicians made people dance with joy at weddings, and when the daughter of one of the most prosperous men in the shtetl eloped with a klezmer player to America, they became a town legend.
“Itsikl the Meshugener,” the “crazy guy” of Stavisht, led the shtetl’s wedding toasts, and made everyone laugh by saying things everyone was thinking but never dared to speak.
In the prayer houses, intellectuals argued about world affairs, drank tea, talked of liberation in the land of Zion — anything but pray – while the pious Orthodox frowned on the Zionists.
The shtetls outside Kiev were a cradle of mysticism, where Hasidic scholars believed in the transforming power of words to enlighten and heal, and the divine mysteries of the Kabbala. These were the blessed magic realist shtetls of Chagall.
But life was precarious indeed. As Jewish families attained success, they drew the envy of pogromchiks, who sacked the undefended shtetls. The fear of pogrom violence was always in the backdrop of the collective psyche.
Rose, a grain merchant’s daughter with masses of wavy red hair, grew up wandering behind her adored big brother Herschel, 11 years older; a boy with a broad, kind smile, who looked up from his studies and lifted Rose to his knee, or picked her up and spun her like a bird.
Rose loved to lie in the straw and hug her pet calf, or curl up on the earthenware stove with the cats, drowsily listening to her mother and Herschel talk.
A scholar rented a room adjoining their house, and Rose watched the stream of people come to his door, asking him to write letters, or read letters from a son of Stavisht who was a professor at the Marie Curie Institute in Paris; or from family in America. Rose’s father couldn’t persuade her mother to go to America. She couldn’t imagine leaving a place where one person’s trouble was everyone’s problem, and a widow could expect friendship societies to help her and her children.
Then came World War I.
One day the Germans marched through Stavisht. Itsikl the crazy guy made a satire of the soldiers, and they shot him. When the Russian Revolution broke out, horsemen rode through the town, demanding money to spare their lives, and killing townsmen to show they were serious.
During one pogrom, Rose’s family fled to a nearby town that was filled with crowds of frightened people from the shtetls. The crowd pressed around, Rose, 10, and she lost her family.
As dusk fell, someone called her name: Herschel, who had been looking for her all day, spotted Rose’s red hair. Herschel went back Stavisht to help their father salvage anything of value. On the way, he saw pogromchiks had seized a teenage girl from the shtetl. Herschl tried to rescue her, but the pogromchiks beat him to death.
Rose’s family pinned up her heavy red-gold hair, hiding money and jewelry in her fiery locks, for the long journey through Eastern Europe. The family was finally going to America.
One day the Germans marched through Stavisht. Itsikl the crazy guy made a satire of the soldiers, and they shot him. When the Russian Revolution broke out, horsemen rode through the town, demanding money to spare their lives, and killing townsmen to show they were serious.
During one pogrom, Rose’s family fled to a nearby town that was filled with crowds of frightened people from the shtetls. The crowd pressed around, Rose, 10, and she lost her family.
As dusk fell, someone called her name: Herschel, who had been looking for her all day, spotted Rose’s red hair. Herschel went back Stavisht to help their father salvage anything of value. On the way, he saw pogromchiks had seized a teenage girl from the shtetl. Herschl tried to rescue her, but the pogromchiks beat him to death.
Rose’s family pinned up her heavy red-gold hair, hiding money and jewelry in her fiery locks, for the long journey through Eastern Europe. The family was finally going to America.
I was very reluctant to cut this chapter because it detailed the rich history of small-town Jewish life in Eastern Europe, as well as the cycles of anti-Semitic violence that would culminate in the Holocaust. Rose Lessure was the grandmother of Pam Schoenberg, the wife of the attorney, Randol Schoenberg, who won the Klimt collection back from Austria. I discovered Rose Lessure’s Ellis Island interview on an oral history database, and Pam gave me a memoir that had been published by Rose’s neighbors in Stavisht, who had managed to flee to Israel before the shtetl was wiped out. One question that remained for me: was life in Stavisht really as idyllic as their accounts? Some people suggested these memories were softened by nostalgia. Perhaps. Yet the paintings of Chagall, and the stories of Sholom Aleichem, suggest that the collective lives shared in these lost shtetls had a truly lustrous, wonderful quality.
Anne-Marie O’Connor is a veteran foreign correspondent, war reporter and culture writer who has covered everything from post-Soviet Cuba to American artists and intellectuals. O’Connor attended Vassar and the San Francisco Art Institute and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, where she and fellow students co-created an award-winning documentary on the repression of mural artists after the 1973 military coup in Chile. She covered the wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala as a Reuters bureau chief in Central America; the Shining Path guerrillas in Peru, coups in Haiti and U.S. interventions in Haiti and Panama; and covered Cuba and Haiti for a newspaper chain. At the Los Angeles Times she chronicled the violence of Mexico’s Arellano-Felix drug cartel, U.S. political convention; and profiled such figures as Nelson Mandela, George Soros, Joan Didion, John McCain, and Maya Lin. Her story on Maria Altmann’s effort to recover the family Klimt collection appeared in the Los Angeles Times Magazine in 2001. She has written for Esquire, The Nation, and The Christian Science Monitor. She currently writes for The Washington Post from Jerusalem.
