RABBI ELIJAH GORDON
HIS LIFE AND WORKS
By
Hirsch Loeb Gordon

copyright

1926

by Rabbi Elijah Gordon

Part I:

Region of Calm and Dreaming Lakes

Part II: 

How Myadsiol Adopted Family Names

Part III:

Jews and Lithuanians

 pp. 3-6;19-20

The Myadel Region

The Myadel Landscape

Site Map

REGION OF CALM AND DREAMING LAKES

part I

The northeastern part of the government of Vilna, (formerly) Russia, is covered by vast and impenetrable forests, impassable marshes and thickets, numerous lakes and swampy meadows, with cleared and dry spaces occupied here and there by manors, villages and small towns. The moisture of the soil feeds the four rivers Disna, Dvina, Vilyia and Nieman and forms many larger lakes like those of Svir, Vishniev, Shvacksenta, Miastra, Narotah and Myadsiol. The country people consist mainly of White Russians Byelorussia, whose Russian vernacular has been greatly Polonized, and in whose veins flows much of Lithuanian blood. These peasants are uncouth, ignorant and superstitious rustics but, like the average Russian Mouzhik simple, god-fearing and amiable. While some of them are engaged in agriculture, their main occupation is fishing, for the swarming lakes provide them with abundant supplies, which they carry to the cities of Vilna and Minsk for further distribution.

ENTENTE CORDIAL

The villages are grouped around the small towns or Myestetchkos, populated mostly by Jews, whom cruel Czarist laws forbade to own land in the open country, even within the few governments, where their sojourn was tolerated. The peasants flocked to the Myestetchko on Sundays to attend the services at the Tserkov (church) and to the weekly Rynock(Fair) held on Wednesdays, when they could sell the products of their net, stable and plough and in turn buy imported  wares and implements in the Jewish stores. The Myestetchko, or more exactly, its Jewish inhabitants, were on a higher plane of civilization. Peasants visited it daily. One ordered a holiday suit from the Jewish tailor, another-a pair of fancy sapogi (high boots) of the Jewish shoe-maker, and a third had his horse shoed or his cartwheels rimmed in the ever-busy Jewish smithy. It was from the Jewish traveling merchant or newspaper reader that the peasants learned of what was going on in their country and in the wide world. The Jewish tsirulnick (barber. surgeon) or feldsher (quack) relieved him of his pain by letting his blood, extracting his aching teeth or pacifying his colic with vials of cubeb and licorice. It is a region of calm, the calm of dreaming lakes never disturbed by marked changes. Life flows unruffled, still. The marshes and extensive forests did not encourage much rambling and journeying, and peasants, living villages a dozen miles apart, saw each other only on the Yarmarki. (Annual fairs). Tolerance towards alien creeds peacefulness of mind, resignation to fate and to allotted position, typify their character and life.