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Editor’s Note: The below Introduction
first appeared (with the article that
follows) in “Hadassah Magazine,” March,
1972 and is reprinted with written
permission of “Hadassah Magazine.”
The following article is an excerpt from
The Samurai of Vishogord, by Jacob
Marateck, Jewish Publication Society of
America, 1976. This excerpt is reprinted
with permission of Shimon and Anita
Wincelberg. Mr. Wincelberg has recently
completed the manuscript of The Siberian
Bachelor, a sequel to The Samurai of
Vishogrod.
Author: (click) |
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Introduction
One of the most dreaded aspects of Jewish life in Tzarist Russia was conscription into
the army. For a Jew, service in the army of Batyushka Tzar (our little father the Tzar)
was a four-year nightmare of endless abuse, beatings and attempts at forced
conversion.
In the mid-nineteenth century, when Tzarist agents took to kidnapping young Jewish
boys for forced military service, Jews began to refer to the Russian Government as
Fonye Gonif (Fonye is the friendly diminutive for Ivan), a relatively mild description
for a heartless oppressor.
Many who returned after their long hitch were pathetic figures – stripped of all memory
of things Jewish, coarse, more like Russian peasants than Jews, they were at home
neither among Jews nor Russians. To avoid the fate of these “Cantonists,” as they
were called, Jews often took desperate measures.
The desperation with which Russian Jews faced conscription is described by Jacob
Marateck in the diary he kept of his experiences in and out of the Tzarist Army during
the first decades of the 20th century. The Yiddish manuscript, from which the following
article is taken, was translated and edited by screenwriter-novelist Shimon Wincelberg
and his wife, Anita (daughter of Jacob Marateck). It offers a colorful panorama of Jewish
life in Eastern Europe seventy years ago.
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THE CONSCRIPT
by Jacob Marateck
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