Shtetl Links: Lyakhovichi

1834 was not a quiet period for Russia or for the Polish territories it had acquired forty years earlier or for the huge numbers of Jews on those lands. It was the year of the November Uprising, in which Polish nationalism was moving from the creation of literature, art, and music, in support of a resurgent effort to free Poland, to actual battles with Russian armies. Russia was a ruthless suppressor of independence movements and estates of noblemen in the Lyakhovichi area were among those confiscated, young noblemen who had done business in Lyakhovichi’s town hall, were among those sentenced to hard labor in Siberia. Though many young Jews across the region found their aspirations coinciding with those who were trying to get rid of the Russian yoke, the older population still had fresh memories of Russian soldiers fighting battles all around Lyakhovichi in the Napoleonic wars just twenty years earlier. More, this was the period in which Nikolai I began setting up the machinery of his government in an effort to achieve even more far-reaching control of the lives of his subjects. He restricted the activities of the Catholic Church seeing its presence in the Northwestern provinces and Ukraina, only as an agency of Polish separatists. He closed the doors of all Uniate churces in Belarus, seeing these heirs to the old Orthodox consistories of Lithuania, as a religious abomination set up to serve the needs of the defunct Polish government. He persecuted Old Believers, Russian Orthodox faithful that did not go along with the agreements made by their church’s hierarchy with the Russian government. It is of little surpise then, that he also targeted the Jews acquired in the Polish partition for terrible mistreatment. He set up the secret police, he monitored all publications, set up a system to reward informers, and put in place a conscription program most often compared in its generation to Pharaoh’s plan to destroy all Jewish boy babies.

1834 was the year scheduled for an update of the Revision Lists, last taken systematically in 1819. The Revision Lists showed the head of the household, the names of all others in the household, and the head’s relationship to his wife, to his children, and to adult males in the household. This is especially important in 1834 because the depredations of Russian conscription changed the structure of Jewish families across the Russian Pale. According to ChaeRan Freeze’s book “Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia,” the average age at which Jewish bachelors married in Poland-Lithuania in the eighteenth century is generally thought to be between eighteen and twenty. Again after the Russian military reforms of 1874, the evidence again points to a male first-married age between eighteen and early twenties. But from the 1820s to the mid 1850s, the “Nikolai” conscription laws were in effect. Jewish communities fighting the forced conscription of their children (boys were conscriptable at 13 but in reality many were grabbed much younger) sought to use the wording of the law in their children’s defense. “Boys of thirteen,” it could be argued, did not include “young married men of thirteen.” One family trying desperately to save its sons has little effect on the information you find in national records. A whole people’s repeated efforts to save such children, can be documented. The Lyakhovichi Revision List of 1834 listed only four men, all in their 20s, who were actually recruited but it records very clearly the machinations undergone to protect the others. It was the custom in Jewish communities of the eighteenth century, for newly married children to spend three years after their marriage with the bride’s family and then to seek separate living quarters, usually in the locale of the groom’s parents but not in the same household. When the bride’s family had more resources, the eventual household formed by the young couple might adjoin that of her parents. But the Nikolai conscription laws forced this system to change. The three-year period of subsidized board provided by the bride’s parents, was now met and matched by the groom’s parents, as there was no way to imagine that a boy married at thirteen to sixteen would be able to provide for a family, any time soon. But even that six year cocoon was insufficient in many cases, as a boy who married at sixteen would be leaving that resource at 22, still unready to take on the necessities of providing housing and food for a family. Where as the 1819 Revision seems to show many young men, newly married, in households of their own, the 1834 Revision shows that one of the immediate effects of the new draft legislation was to force a large number of households to stay unified. The 1834 Revision shows a landscape where Jewish households are combined; where young men whose age and the ages of their children show that they have married since 1827 live in the households of their fathers and fathers-in-law, and often several married brothers live with their wives and children, under the same roof. You see Jewish boys married off so young in this time period that the head of family is not the groom’s father, but his grandfather! The new families created in this period did not necessarily thrive – ChaeRan Freeze’s book cited above, shows divorce much more common in the 1830s than it was in the 1890s, a fact often attributed in its own time period, to the interference of family. Certainly the views of more generations of the family would come into play in a household headed by grandparents and shared with numerous aunts, uncles, and older siblings!

The 1834 Revision List asks nothing about language, about occupations, or about previous residences.
Languages. The Jews of Lyakhovichi spoke Yiddish in the dialect most often called Litvish. It is one of the three main groupings of Eastern Yiddish. Litvish was spoken in what is today Belarus and Lithuania and other areas that made up the Russian Empire’s Northwest Provinces. The other two groupings, Poylish (Poland including Galicia) and Ukrainish (Ukraina, Moldova, Besserabia, Balkans) made up much the larger number of speakers but efforts at language standardization at the end of the nineteenth century brought more of the written speech in line with Litvish pronunciations. Poylish and Ukrainish, however, are used by more than three quarters of all Yiddish speakers. My great-great-grandfather, a rabbi born in Podolia guberniya (in Ukraina today) who could read a dozen languages, and was fluent in his Yiddish birth tongue, would turn to his wife “with her good ear for languages” to interpret what a Litvish speaker was saying. Whereas, my great-grandfather who was a shoemaker born in Lyakhovichi who settled in small communities in the United States, is reported to have said it was easier to live among and understand non-Jews than Yiddish speakers from Kiev. But if a government census taker had cared to ask, he would have found that as my Lyakhovichi great-grandfather found, there was easy communication between Jews and Poles and Belarussians. Jews used Polish to negotiate business dealings with the Catholic gentry who were much sought after clients for businessmen who had trades as diverse as tailoring, dry goods merchants, timber assayers, and coachmen. Jews used the language of the Russian Orthodox peasants to buy and sell produce, farm goods, products in the market place, and more.
Occupations. We have no census data on business and trade, and even later tax lists and property records, shed little light on what the Jews of Lyakhovichi did with their business properties and the ways in which they made their living. The page with the totals and the signatures of the community leaders, above, says that in 1834, in a population of 1,088 Jews over the age of five, there were three people represented with the high status of Guild Merchant, one of whom was a woman. But guild merchants did not have to provide info for many Revision Lists. You can see, for example, in the 1850 Revision List where the change in status of "became guild merchant" is used like "absent, recruited, or died," as reason for the non-listing of a resident previously recorded. Are there any other occuptional hints to be found, here? Only when an occupational surname is proven to have been taken after the early enumerations of 1816 and 1819. We find some families previously recorded with other surnames, now listed with occupational surnames and others whose occupational surnames were changed.
Previous Residences. A quirk of the Russian census system makes these Revision Lists much less informative than documents taken by the Russians back in 1805 for those applying for privileges like tavern operation or to be registered as a townsman of Lyakhovichi. The peculiarity is that the Russians only recorded Jews in the census district in which they were legally resident. If one was absent when the Revision List was drawn up, because he was living in another town, then he was noted as absent, and only in a couple of cases was it mentioned where he was living during that absence (see for example the Mandel living in Odessa). But the most critical thing is that the town where one was living during that census, effectively did not see that person at all. There are no notes of people who were legally resident elsewhere but recorded here. Contrast this with the 1805 Tavern list which gives each Jew's town, the name of his current landlord, and the location of the inn license that he wished to receive, also with a town and landlord. Later, the remnants of the 1897 All-Russia Census that survive for Grodno, show that men legally resident in Lyakhovichi are recorded in other towns with the notation of their Lyakhovichi status. No such luck in 1834 and 1850. Still, investigation of individual families finds that at least a half dozen men listed as absent, are eventually noted as resident in the town of Nesvizh, perhaps we will find other absentees so accounted for in other towns.

1834 is the year the great epic poem Pan Tadeusz was created by Adam Mickewiecz who was born just a few miles from Lyakhovichi. Pan Tadeusz was a triumph for literature and gave great hopes to the Jewish community who saw itself portrayed there very favorably. Their lives in pre-partition Poland were seen as part of the fabric of Polish life and one of the heroes of the tale is Yankiel the Jew, innkeeper, musician extraordinaire, and patriot. Polish continued to be a language of upward moblity in this period and the leaders of the Jewish community who had in 1819 signed their names to the Russian Revision List in Hebrew and Polish, were still using those language skills. Later, in 1851, Rabbi Szolom Skolnik who was past eighty would sign the 1850 Revision list, similarly. But 1834 was a precipice year for the Polish language and Jewish communications in it. Just as the Russian government would eventually outlaw the use of Lithuanian for a forty-year period after revolts in the 1860s, it began cracking down on Polish in the 1830s. Newspapers which educated Jews had read eagerly, like the Kurier Litewski, published in Grodno and then Vilna since 1796, were required to publish Russian editions, and slowly but insistently, the Russian government moved to replace Polish with Russian as the language of choice for businessmen, even in this old Polish-Lithuanian heartland. Why should a Jewish genealogist or historian care about the fate of the Polish language under Russian domination? We need to know what kind of sources were created and who created them and what languages they were in and where they may still exist. In 1834, the year in which legendary figures like Mickiewiecz and Chopin were creating masterpieces, Polish language newspapers and Polish diarists were creating much more pedestrian pieces of history in Vilna, and the guberniyas of Kovno, Grodno, and Minsk. But while we have a list of newspapers beginning with the Kurier Litewski published in Grodno in 1796 and moved to Vilna the following year, we have large holes in our knowledge of materials created in Yiddish and Hebrew. The earliest book for which can currently account, which had Lyakhovichi Jewish subscribers, was printed in 1873 but the late eighteenth century and early through middle nineteenth century, is almost unstudied for this material. We don’t yet have any probate inventories that would show what books were owned, we haven’t found a list of inspections by Russian authorities for censor seals and legal imprimaturs found in Lyakhovichi books. Nobody has made a study of the libraries and resources mentioned in Hebrew language books of the nineteenth century. Even Yiddish, Polish, Russian, and German, newspapers from this period are more reputation than reality and we have no hint what was actually being read by whom in our region.

So we begin our study of Lyakhovichi in 1834 with the study of this Revision List. The maps in this left-hand column are not "just for pretty." If you compare the 1835 map drawn in London with the dozens on our Map pages and on those of the Revision Lists of 1816 and 1819, you will see that for the first time in several hundred years, a general map of this area, does not include Lyakhovichi in any of its spelling variants. The 1835 map highlights Nova Mysh, it shows Medvedichi and Lipsk, and little towns that would soon be ignored in national maps and even in provincial maps. But Lyakhovichi which had been a crossroads of European history for centuries, disappears in this period! It is perhaps not coincidence, that this is the time period in which we hear of Lyakhovichi natives establishing new homes that would see their children born in Nova Mysh, Nesvizh, and Novogrodok, and Kletsk.

We have emigrants to the United States who were born during the period of this list, others are the parents and grandparents of the emigrants. Your knowledge and private family sources may give us a window into the business relationships and family relationships of Lyakhovichi in this time period, so please write with all information.


Click Contact to send us information and remember to put Lyakhovichi in the subject of the email.