jewish

  • Men, women and paper

    Photo by Kelly Sikkema

    It is often said that history is written by the victors, the powerful – and that they are men. But have you ever considered what they were writing on? Paper has a history of its own, revealed to me by Madeleine Killacky in History Today (December 2022).

    Papermaking involved beating rags collected in the rag trade, before stretching, pulping, soaking, heating and drying them. Finished paper also had to be coated in a gelatin-based emulsion, made from boiled up animal parts, to prevent ink-blots. And most of this work was done by what Killacky repeated calls “low-status women”.

    Highbrow and low-status

    How many of history’s great historians, I wonder, wrote their histories on paper made by these “low-status women”? Almost all of them, we can assume. Which paints – or scribes – a rather different portrait of history.

    Every narrative of victory, every male-centred gaze upon the great moments that have defined great men, were all written upon pure white paper beaten into being by the sweat of “low-status women”.

    Hidden histories

    This is not a unique tale, of course. That paper was made from rags, not trees as I had always imagined, is revealing of other layers of unseen history: that of ethnic minorities. Jews thrived in the trade of schmatta (rags), while their history remained hidden to the wealthy and literate of London and New York.

    Paper pulp from trees wasn’t first achieved until 1800 in Germany. It wasn’t until the end of the 19th century that tree-based paper became the norm, allowing such limitless amounts to be made that we could even start wiping our bums with it.

    Before that, the laborious rag trade was the only route to a nice, bright white piece of paper, ready for the quill to hit it. I’ll never see a blank piece of paper the same again.

    And fast forward to today – what hidden stories lie behind the ice white screen on which this post is typed?

    Talking of words and letters, ever wondered where ‘Zed’ comes from?


  • History repeating in Russia and Ukraine

    On the day that Russia invaded Ukraine, I was halfway through In Memory of Memory by the Russian Jewish author Maria Stepanova.

    I was reading the letters that her relative Lyodik Gimmelfarb, a 19-year-old at the Siege of Leningrad, sent to his mother. They were matter-of-fact and uncomplaining. Shortly after his 20th birthday, he was killed.

    War. What’s it good for?

    The following chapters turn to another branch of her family, the Gurevichs, in particular Isaak Gurevich, a well-heeled businessman who opened an agricultural machinery factory in Kherson in the early 20th century.

    I had never heard of this southern Ukrainian city, and suddenly I was reading about it in the news, falling to Russian forces, as I simultaneously read about this successful Jewish family who built a fine mansion and owned the first English Vauxhall car in the region.

    In 1907, Isaak Gurevich had been there to welcome the railway to Kherson. He and his family had also witnessed the pogroms that swept across southern Ukraine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a reminder of the fact that the Nazis didn’t invent anti-Semitism.

    Brave new world

    With the Russian Revolution, Gurevich had his factory taken off him and given to the workers. Soon it wasn’t simply a case of losing your wealth, but losing any trace of ever having had wealth. ‘Social background’ had to be filled in on government forms, and a hint of bourgeois ancestry spelt trouble.

    At the conclusion of her family saga, Stepanova visits the Jewish New Cemetery on the outskirts of Kherson. It’s a desolate, windblown spot where the scrub is slowly reclaiming the gravestones. There are no Jews left to tend the cemetery.

    More serendipity? How about Afghanistan Then and Now