Voices From a Vanished World

Photographs by Lesha Berezovskiy I.

2,087 Questions The Pale of Settlement is teeming with ghosts, and why shouldn’t it be? At the turn of the 20th century, some 5 million Jews lived in this region between the Baltic and Black Seas, and by 1945, almost all of them had been murdered.

If they slouch now like scarecrows over the tilled black earth, or float between wooden shacks, or even peer over the shoulders of the babushkas selling neat piles of used clothes in front of the bus station in Rivne, this is to be expected.

What I hadn’t quite anticipated was just how many questions they had left unanswered—2,087 to be exact.

A long list of queries covering nearly every particular of how they lived their lives, from circumcision to shiva, sat on my lap as I stared out the window on a 10-hour car ride from Warsaw to Kyiv, through the heartland of what was once the Pale.

31.

Is there a belief that if a pregnant woman steps on the spot where a mare has rolled around, she will carry her child for 12 months? 269.

With what do people frighten a child so that he will go to sleep more quickly? 1,280.

Is it a custom to drink red liquor if the bride turns out to be a virgin? 1,281.

Is it a custom to eat hard cheese if she is a virgin? What does this signify? 1,714.

Do people ask for forgiveness from a dead child? I was on my way to visit the archives, once thought lost, of the early-20th-century Jewish writer Shloyme-Zanvl Rapoport, better known by his nom de plume, S.

An‑sky.

He was the author of this insanely granular questionnaire.

I could have spent my car ride reading any number of other works by An‑sky, who, among his many eccentricities, had a touch of graphomania.