Off to a Bad Start

Let us begin with the setting: 1870s in a small Russian village, or as Mr. Morris so usefully misspells, "shtetel."(Compare.) Sounds good, my family's from Russia (Ukraine, actually, since Jews actually weren't allowed outside the Pale without a special permit, not that Morris bothers to differentiate), so I'll have a lot of chances to test my background knowledge against his.

To start off, Mr. Morris has a really hard time with names. Apparently he cannot tell the difference between Jewish and non-Jewish Russian names. This does not bode well for later chapters.

The main character's name is Reisa Dimitri. Reisa, of course, is a fairly standard Yiddish name. Dimitri, however, seems far more Slavic than most shtetl Jews would have had in the 1870s. Also, for some reason Morris refuses to capitalize the word "Cossack," despite it clearly being a proper noun.

Further along, we have more name misheggos. Reisa's grandfather is named Jacob, but her father, for no apparent reason, is Ivan. Again, Morris does not seem to know that Russian Jews were a lot more Jewish in this period than they were Russian. Maybe in the 1900s and World War periods you would have had Jews in the cities named Ivan, but not right now.

But wait, this explains everything! (Or should I say, nothing.)

[Reisa] whispered, "Got tsu danken."

She spoke the words in Yiddish, for that had been her mother's native language. Gretchen Moltman had been of German descent, and had spoken Yiddish so much that the rest of the family had learned it along with their native Russian. Her grandfather Jacob had taught Reisa Hebrew. While not fluent in this language as he was, Reisa could read it and even speak it haltingly.

Here we have it. The answer is that Morris has no idea what he's talking about, so he's stretching what little knowledge he does have waaay too far. Let's check out this thought process:

Fact: Yiddish is derived from German. Therefore only German-descended Jews would have spoken it.

Fact: Russian Jews lived in Russia. Therefore, they spoke Russian as their native language and gave their kids Russian Christian names, like Ivan.

Had Morris deigned to, say, open a book, he would know that the primary language of most Ashkenazi Jews tended to be Yiddish (Hell, even Sephardim in Poland spoke Yiddish), and the quality of their Russian tended to be widely variable depending on things like education, class, and location. It makes no sense whatsoever to have this family's native language be Russian and have them only "happen" to learn Yiddish due to a German in-law. That would be like assuming that my next-door neighbor, Mrs. Lee, speaks fluent Spanish by living in a largely Hispanic neighborhood, and only "happened" to learn Mandarin when her daughter married a Chinese guy. Just one problem- Mrs. Lee's whole family is Chinese and Mandarin is their first language! (Incidentally, I haven't heard her speak any Spanish yet, but who knows.)

So far what this really speaks to is Morris' total ignorance about how socially isolated Jews tended to be from Russian culture in this period (and to an extent, still today). He imagines that being a Jew in Russia meant you were a Russian who happened to be Jewish, which was not at all the case in the 1870s.

Incidentally, Mr. Morris, if Reisa's mother was a Yiddish speaker, she probably didn't have a name like Gretchen.

Wait, there's more. For no apparent reason, Reisa has decided to take a bath. Let's watch gratuitously:

She bolted the door and drew the curtain over the window. The yellow light of the lamp illuminated the room as she stripped off all of her clothes and stuck her toe into the water. "Ooh, that's good!" she whispered... She lay there soaking up the delicious heat for a time, then finally straightened up and pulled the pins from her hair so that it cascaded down her back. She had beautiful black hair that came down to her waist, but no one ever saw it. She kept it done up and covered by a scarf, as all respectable Jewish women did.

Except she's not married, so unless this is that special part of Russia called Yemen, she wouldn't be covering her hair. Apparently your research consisted of watching Fiddler on the Roof.

The chapter concludes by having us meet yet more Jews with non-Jewish names: Yelena Petrov, Yuri Pavlov... apparently no one in this village has a Kohen-derived surname, despite it being the most common Jewish surname, accounting for, IIRC, about 2/3rds of all last names among Jews. And there's also no one with a ski or sky suffix. How odd.

It turns out that the one character with the most plausibly Jewish last name is, of course, the Christian mayor, Vassily Trecovitch, who at least has a Slavic patronymic. We aren't told much about the mayor except that he's "a good friend" to the Jews and likes playing with his long muttonchops. I've got a good feeling about this guy. Maybe he'll convert?