The Shochet, (Touro U. Press, 2023-2025), is a rare, complex, and important document of life in the Pale of Settlement in the late 19th – early 20th century. I came across the book by accident and felt a particular affinity for it when it mentioned the shtetl near the Ukrainian / Bessarabian border where my grandparents were born.

In The Shochet, Pinye-Ber Goldenshteyn recounts his tumultuous life journey as an orphan and later a working shochet (kosher slaughterer) in Podolia, Bessarabia, and Crimea. Through a myriad of rich details of his narrative and juicy stories, we get to observe the dramatic transformation of the Pale in the 1860s-1910s. The poor, oppressed, but generally stable Jewish way of life that Goldenshteyn is born into is within a few decades taken apart and ultimately destroyed by the rising nationalism, secularism, and revolutionary socialism. This historical drama also unfolds in Goldenshteyn’s own family as most of his children abandon strict religious observance in favor of modern lifestyles and relationships. 

Goldenshteyn’s memoir is one of the first surviving Yiddish-language autobiographies, but it had only appeared in English in short excerpts. The 2-volume edition which I am reviewing in Tablet is its first complete English translation. 

The Shochet is unique as well in being penned not by a famous and secularized Jew, the two categories usually going together, but by someone from the ranks of the poor and traditional mass of Jews who populated the Pale. His depictions are folksy and candid, and as such are often more effective, even devastating at times, exactly because of their unvarnished candidness. 

You can read my full review here or by following the link below.