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The Shochet

JL;DR SUMMARY "The Shochet" by Lane Igoudin offers a rare glimpse into the life of Pinye-Ber Goldenshteyn, an ordinary Jewish figure from the 19th-century Russian Pale of Settlement. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude. Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.

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Tags

Cultural AssimilationCrimeaPale Of SettlementKosher SlaughterShochetTsarist RussiaTradition Vs. ModernityYiddish AutobiographyJewish Community LifePinye Ber Goldenshteyn

Places mentioned

Bakhchisaray, Karelia, Russian Federation
"Whatever the answer, Pinye-Ber ultimately settles in Bakhchisaray, in the southern part of the Crimean Peninsula, where he works as the towns shochet from 1879 until departing for Palestine in 1913."
Tiraspol, Strășeni, Moldova
"Born in 1848 in Tiraspol in Bessarabia (present-day Moldova) to poor parents surrounded by naked, barefoot siblings, large and small, Pinye-Ber, the youngest, loses both parents by age 6."
Odessa, Mykolayivschyna, Ukraine
"Pinye-Bers wanderings grow more far-flung as he progresses into his teenage years, covering thousands of miles from Yassy in Romania to Lubavitch in Belarus and then south to Odessa and the Crimean Peninsula."
Israel
"Originally published privately in Petah Tikva, Israel, in 1929 in Yiddish and now translated for the first time in its entirety into English, Goldenshteyns 800-page book is one of the first surviving Yiddish-language autobiographies."
Iași, Romania
"Pinye-Bers wanderings grow more far-flung as he progresses into his teenage years, covering thousands of miles from Yassy in Romania to Lubavitch in Belarus and then south to Odessa and the Crimean Peninsula."
Lubavitch, Vitebsk, Belarus
"Pinye-Bers wanderings grow more far-flung as he progresses into his teenage years, covering thousands of miles from Yassy in Romania to Lubavitch in Belarus and then south to Odessa and the Crimean Peninsula."

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This item was indexed and curated by Cairo, JL;DR's web crawler.
Cairo Item ID 79316
Cairo Source ID 10
Retrieved 2026-04-07 05:31:07 UTC
Curated 2026-04-07 08:30:30 UTC