ALAN KATKIN: THE LIFE THAT IS NO MORE
A hundred years ago, the majority of the world's Jews lived in Europe, in the Polish provinces of the Russian Empire, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and in the German Empire. To be sure, it was a world of poverty and hardship, of sacrifice and struggle, but it was also a world of scholars and poets, of impressionable matchmakers and philosophers. It was a world where each week men and women confronted new perils and hazards, and where each Sabbath they sat with their children around a table surrounded by song and joy.
It was a world of synagogues and houses of study where young and old crowded together by the candle wick to study late into the night; where mothers and grandmothers rocked their loved ones to sleep with lullabies of hope and faith; where a neighbor's joy was a shtetl's day of rejoicing, and where his pain was its day of sorrow. It was a world where the price for respect was good deeds, but where the right to friendship had no prerequisites.
Such a world were these 10,000 tiny dots on the map-... Belz, where the Hasid hurried to be at his rebbe's table; Vilna, where the ordinary cobbler conversed In the Talmud; Pinsk and Lodz, where vendors rose at the crack of dawn on Monday and Thursday to hurry their wares to the marketplace; there was Warsaw, where writers leisurely sipped tea, and interpreted the life of the times...Vienna, her parks and broad streets bustling with artists etching out moments of memory and violinists transforming cafes into symphonic halls...