by Omer Bartov
The fact that in 1900 only 20,000 Ukrainians, compared to 280,000 Jews, were employed (or dependents of those employed) in commerce certainly played into the argument that, as one correspondent wrote, “in our land Jews have taken over commerce to such an extent that it seems no one else can have a store or state concession, only a Jew.” Rare reports of Ruthenian-owned businesses were a source of national pride; one peasant wrote gleefully that when a Jew entered a shop “and saw images of the saints on the walls, he became so frightened that he immediately fled.”
But the starkest symbol of alleged Jewish venality was the village tavern, perceived by Polish and Ukrainian nationalists as the cause of the peasants’ chronic alcoholism, indebtedness, and transfer of property to the Jews. Temperance movements often incorporated anti-Semitic rhetoric, and peasants learned to blame their own drunkenness on the Jews. One correspondent wrote, “You go into the tavern for tobacco, and the Jew . . . begins to praise his liquor and make fun of sobriety. . . . Before you know it, you’ve had one drink, then another.” Finally, the peasant “sells his boots for his liquor and pays double for whatever he drinks,” while “Iudka just puts his hands in his pockets, jingles his money, laughs and makes fun of the drunk.”
Traditional peasant perceptions of Jews were more ambivalent. Jews could be seen as the embodiment of the alien precisely because they were so omnipresent. And since they provided the link between the agricultural producers and the marketplace, Jews were also perceived as mediators between the insular rural environment and the treacherous external sphere beyond it, the realm of death and the devil, with whom Jews were often associated: both were believed to be essential if malign presences in the cycle of life. Since the peasants were also deeply religious, they simultaneously internalized the Christian view of the Jews as damned for having murdered Christ and blessed as the sole witnesses of the Passion. Similarly, while Galician peasants might share popular Jewish faith in the magical healing powers of wonder-rabbis and tzaddiks, they also feared the menacing aspect that such powers could allegedly assume.15
This complexity of the Jewish presence in the Galician peasant imagination was radically transformed under the impact of nationalism. As the very first issue of Batkivshchyna succinctly put it, Ruthenians in Galicia faced “two terrible enemies: one of them is the clever Jew, who sucks our blood and gnaws our flesh; the other is the haughty Pole, who is after both our body and soul.” Subsequent issues of the newspaper repeatedly resorted to anti-Semitic tropes, describing Jewish taverns as “a festering wound, which poisons and destroys our body; they corrupt the . . . soul of our village people . . . take away their property and drive them to criminality.” The solution was not pogroms, but a boycott of Jewish businesses: “Then we will not have to drive out the Jews, they will leave us of their own volition.” Similar sentiments were expressed by other newspapers; the Russophile Russkaya Rada warned that the influx of Jews would continue until “they have wrapped their spider’s web around the entire village” and using “vodka and money push the peasants off their ancestral land. . . . Once we were masters of our land, but today the Jew says: I am master here, this is my land!”16
Emancipation was replete with ironies. With serfdom abolished, the peasants could sell their property, but their farms were small to begin with, and as they kept dividing them among their heirs, they could no longer live from the land. In contrast, once emancipated, the Jews sought economic opportunities outside the crowded and wretchedly poor ghettos, and those who made good could now buy land from peasants whose only option was to sell their plot and seek other occupations. By 1902 some fifteen thousand Jews owned farms or estates in Galicia, not a high figure for a Jewish population of close to a million but much higher than ever before and especially jarring to Ruthenian nationalists, who saw this as amounting to a Jewish takeover of the province. On the eve of World War I Jews owned over 10 percent of the estates, constituted 20 percent of the landowners, and made up more than 50 percent of the property leaseholders in Galicia.17
As estate owners and agricultural managers, Jews conformed neither to the stereotype of shtetl dwellers nor to that of rootless revolutionaries or Zionist separatists; they often identified with Poland, a sentiment that was not fully or consistently reciprocated. Unfamiliar to most urban Jews, the universe of Jewish landowners resembled in some ways that of the Polish landlords. But there were striking differences as well. Jewish estates also provided ample opportunities for contacts with gentile farmworkers and villagers.
This forgotten way of life prior to World War I was recalled decades later by Oskar Kofler, born in 1897 on his family estate of Petlikowce (Ukrainian: Petlykivtsi), some ten miles north of Buczacz. Kofler’s great-grandfather had obtained the right to own land as early as 1837 in recognition of his services as a court Jew (Hofjude); his grandfather already owned a mansion in nearby Mogielnica (Ukrainian: Mohylnytsia), and his father, Salomon, bought the estate and manor house of Petlikowce. An efficient manager, Salomon also had good relations with the estate’s laborers and the Polish and Ukrainian villagers. But the staff on the estate “was almost exclusively” Jewish, and many other agricultural occupations, such as cattle and horse trading, as well as the grain market, were also “a near Jewish monopoly.” Kofler recalled spending his childhood playing with farm animals and reading German classics; he attended Polish-language public schools in Drohobycz (Ukrainian: Drohobych), while at home the family spoke Yiddish and Polish and communicated with villagers in Ruthenian. He described his father as both “areligious” and “fluent in Hebrew and thoroughly conversant with Jewish scriptures and rituals”; his mother kept a kosher kitchen, lit candles on the Sabbath and the holidays, and said all the blessings. On Passover his father “headed the prescribed Seder,” and on Yom Kippur he wore a white prayer shawl and yarmulke.18
Kofler took after his father and became similarly “areligious.” And while politically his family “had no doubt as to their ‘Polishness,’ ” he had fond memories of Ruthenian farmworkers. Generally his memoir depicts an ethnically mixed but quite harmonious social environment before 1914, not least “because the entire population spoke Ukrainian, mixed marriages were abundant, and no attention was paid whether one went to the Catholic or Greek Catholic church,” the custom being that “male children from mixed marriages were educated in the father’s denomination, the daughters in the mother’s.” To be sure, in retrospect Kofler was aware that “the animosity between the Poles and Ruthenians, which smoldered already since the end of the nineteenth century, became even more pronounced some years before the war.” But open conflict “erupted mainly in the larger cities, particularly in Lwów,” and “barely intruded into the more distant villages.”
Kofler also disagreed that all manor laborers lived “in wretchedness and degradation,” insisting that this “depended on the personality of the employer and his attitude toward people.” On Polish estates he did see a fair amount of hostility between farm laborers and landowners, not least because the latter did not maintain “permanent and direct contact with the people,” preferring to spend their time away in cities and spas. Conversely, his father’s relationship with the peasants was “exceptionally friendly” thanks to “his consideration, equanimity, fair treatment of anyone irrespective of his position, and his profound sense of justice.” With hindsight Kofler wondered how this “was really possible,” considering that “all these people knew very well that father was a Jew”; they must have been influenced by “prejudices picked up in church on the harmful role of Jewish leaseholders, which was supposedly the cause of all the peasantry’s calamities.” In part, perhaps, this had to do with his father’s “unusual personal qualities” as well as his “general outward appearance,” which was not “regarded as ‘typically Jewish.’ ” But Kofler also remembered that villagers helped a fellow Jewish farmer who looked like “a prototype of the conservative Jew” simply because they saw him as “a decent man.” Ultimately Kofler ascribed this behavior to th
e “incomparably higher moral standard of the people at the time” and to the fact that “generally there did not exist such deep-seated anti-Semitism” in prewar Eastern Galicia.
All this was wiped out in World War I, as Kofler was drafted and his parents were compelled to abandon the estate and move to Vienna. Anti-Jewish Polish land reform policies made sure they never got the estate back; his father died in 1927, wrote Kofler, “suffering and enduring the ruin of his life’s work.” In 1939 Kofler was called up again, this time to the Polish Army, and was soon taken prisoner by the Germans. His granddaughter, Ewa Koźmińska-Frejlak, who edited and introduced his memoir, comments acerbically, “The years he spent in captivity,” partly in the so-called Judenbarak (Jewish compound), “would require a separate discussion.” Kofler’s first wife and son as well as his mother and sister were murdered in 1942; his nephew died during deportation by the Soviets in 1941. After the war Kofler changed his name to the Polish-sounding Koźmiński and worked for two decades at the Polish Ministry of Shipping and Foreign Trade. There were always those, observes his granddaughter, who liked to “remind him of, and reproach him for, both his ‘Jewish’ and ‘class’ origins.”19
The three decades that followed the destruction and erasure of pre-1914 Galician society belonged to the nationalists and ideologues, fanatics and zealots of a new breed, more willing to shed blood than to seek compromise, more determined to assert their hegemony than to preserve coexistence: impatient men with guns and bombs, often led by the half-educated and thirsting for a fight. But things did not start that way; before nationalism began to hate, it was also about education and enlightenment, material improvement, collective responsibility, and group identity. The path toward violence was neither foreseen nor inevitable.
Enlightenment meant different things to different people. The attempt to establish a Hebrew school in 1906–07 foundered when hostility from conservative religious circles compelled its director, Baruch Berkovich, to leave Buczacz after merely five years there. Jewish youths seeking public secondary education also faced many hurdles. Naftali Menatseach (originally Naftale Hertz Siegman) described being compelled to take the entrance examination for the gymnasium on the Jewish Sabbath, when Jews are not allowed to write, and, once accepted, having “to put on the ‘gentile’ uniform of the gymnasium and to cut off my short sidelocks”; he was also “fated to struggle with anti-Semitic teachers.” Raised in an isolated village with only a handful of Jewish families, Menatseach recalled his father reading to him a newspaper article about the First Zionist Congress of 1897, as well as the great impression a booklet from Odessa titled Chovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) had made on him. He devoured many of the popular Zionist historical novels of the time and avidly followed the literary magazine Sifrei Sha’ashuim (Books of Delight), edited in Buczacz by Yitzhak Fernhof. Initially homeschooled by his father, Menatseach subsequently attended the modern elementary Jewish Baron Hirsch School before being admitted to the gymnasium.20
The percentage of Jewish students at the gymnasium rose from one-fifth in 1900 to one-third of the five hundred students in 1914. Over the same time, the number of Greek Catholics declined from one-third to one-fourth, and the Roman Catholic student body was only marginally larger than that of the Jews. The gymnasium’s pre-1914 annual reports contain many names of youths who sat side by side in the same classroom or passed each other in the school’s corridors before setting out on radically different, at times antagonistic paths: the historian and chronicler of the Warsaw Ghetto, Emanuel Ringelblum, denounced and murdered with his son in 1943; members of the “Nazi hunter” Simon Wiesenthal’s family; future Judenrat (Jewish council) member Bernhard Seifer, and future physician Max Anderman. There is something unsettling about seeing the normality of a school report composed three or four decades before so many of these families were murdered, deported, or dispersed. Yet this list of names hardly reflects the Polish and Roman Catholic gymnasium leadership’s perception of its pedagogical and political mission.21
Established and supported by the Austro-Hungarian regime in what turned out to have been its waning years, the school boasted a curriculum that exemplified the ideals of a classical humanistic education. Yet from its very inception, and despite the glaring fact that a growing proportion of the students were Jews and Ruthenians, this public institution viewed itself as a bastion of Polish nationalism. The vast majority of the teaching staff was Polish. In 1901, out of seventeen teachers only one was Ruthenian and one Jewish. Even in 1914, with a total faculty of twenty-eight, there were perhaps five Jewish and even fewer Ukrainian teachers, all the rest being Roman Catholic ethnic Poles.
The tone was already set during the consecration of the new public gymnasium in 1899. Numerous dignitaries attended the event, including the Polish governor of Galicia, the local landowner Count Emil Potocki, the Roman Catholic prelate Stanisław Gromnicki, the Greek Catholic parish priest Telakowski, and the town’s Jewish mayor, Bernard Stern. However, there was no Jewish religious representative. Following a service led by Gromnicki and a call by the governor for the gymnasium to “always produce brave people, who will act for the benefit of society and nation,” the gymnasium’s newly appointed director, Franciszek Zych, took the podium. Zych admonished his young audience “to repay the country” for their privileged education, resist “the world’s enticing amusements and entertainments,” and reject the “destructive doctrines of the era of materialism and the wild theories of revolution.” The students’ task was to bring “pride to your homeland,” which must be able to “count on more brave members and citizens ready to make sacrifices.” This homeland was made up of “our fraternal Polish and Ruthenian nations,” and the students had to remember that they were “sons of the same land” and not to “pay heed to false counselors who try to plant the venom of hatred into your young hearts.”
The Buczacz gymnasium with the Basilian monastery and the ruins of the castle in the background during World War I. Source: AT-OeStA/KA BS I WK Fronten Galizien, 5534.
Zych’s idea of the homeland, then, was “historic” Poland, and the fraternity he advocated implied the submission of Galician Ruthenians to Polish rule; it was a vision that left no room for a separate Ukrainian state. As for the seventy-five Jewish students present in the audience, they merited not a single mention in the director’s speech and were not expected to share in the fraternity of nations he invoked.22
Not all Polish teachers bought into this hypernationalism. In an essay he wrote for the school’s annual report of 1906, the teacher Leon Kieroński forcefully argued that students should be taught to be open minded and clear eyed; the goal of education was to encourage curiosity, tolerance, rationality, and objectivity. The popular social Darwinist view of life as “a ruthless struggle for survival” should have “no place in a school that educates people in the spirit of humanitarianism.” The choice was stark: “Either we assume that society is right to be humanitarian,” or we “devise means of exterminating one another in the easiest possible way.” For that reason the greatest threat to the humanitarian ideal was the concept of a “national education” precisely because it transformed “this noble term” into “empty platitudes or chauvinism,” which merely “exacerbates national differences and causes strife and conflict.” Only education “in the spirit of humanitarianism” would allow patriotism to “blossom and yield noble, not wild, fruits.” Ultimately teachers should strive to educate their students in a spirit of “pure harmony” that eventually “leads to the same objective as the Christian idea.”23
The harmony Kieroński strove for was hardly reflected on the ground. Teofil Ostapowicz, who spent most of the first decade of the twentieth century as a student at the gymnasium, recalled that all five dormitories set up for poor students coming from the countryside were determined by denomination: Polish students were accommodated at the Głowacki and Mickiewicz dormitories; Ruthenians could apply for support from the “peasants’ stipend” or the “Ruthenian (Russophile) stipend�
��; and Jewish students were eligible for a “Jewish stipend” that paid full board and provided academic assistance to those struggling in class.24 For each of these groups, the school did serve as an incubator of future national elites, but its own orientation was exclusively Polish.
Most Jewish children still received only rudimentary schooling. Absenteeism and dropout rates remained very high, not least because of economic distress. While Jews were relatively better off than the peasants, and notwithstanding anti-Jewish claims to the contrary, apart from a thin crust of relatively affluent families, the vast majority of the Jews in Buczacz, as in the rest of Galicia, were poor; many of them left during those years in search of a better living across the Atlantic. Soon after arriving, the new immigrants set up self-help associations. The First Buczacz Benevolent Association, incorporated in 1892 in New York City, was established “to afford substantial assistance” to its members “and their families in cases of sickness and distress,” as well as to promote their “social, mental and moral welfare.” Seven years later this association was replaced by the Independent Buczaczer Congregation and Benevolent Association of the City of New York, two-thirds of whose principal members were already U.S. citizens. Two more associations of immigrants from Buczacz were founded in 1901 and 1904, both dedicated to helping the sick and the needy.
It took until 1911 for these immigrants to feel sufficiently secure economically to begin helping the community back in Buczacz. That year the Buczacz Relief Society of America was formed with the explicit “purpose of doing charity and relieving the distresses of the natives of the City of Buczacz” and helping “the students of the native schools whether in the City of Buczacz, Kingdom of Austria or any other place or country.” Helping others was a sign not just of growing economic security but also of integration into American society. In October 1918, eighteen months after the United States entered World War I, the new American Buczaczer Relief Society would announce proudly that all signatories of its application for registration were U.S. citizens and pledged that it would be “rendering financial aid and assistance to American citizens of Austrian birth who are now in the Naval or Military service of the United States Government.”25 The old Buczaczers had become patriotic Americans.