Preachers, coachmen and peddlers…

There is travel, and there is travel, and there are travels. There is travel from one’s armchair, the inner journey of readers, of intellectuals, of visionaries, of mystics — a journey one accomplishes while leaving the body at its home port, but which can carry the mind, the soul, or thought far, very far, into regions inaccessible to most mortals. Then there is virtual travel, the kind dreamed of by every Jewish fellow traveler of Sholem Aleichem, Peretz, Opatoshu, or Singer, which leads toward the mythical and yet quite real lands of America, in view of a hypothetical material fulfillment, or of Palestine, in view of an equally hypothetical spiritual fulfillment. There is, finally, that small travel without transcendence but quite real — those movements from market town to market town, from inn-relay to inn-relay, which belong to the routine of life. Little in common between them? No doubt; and yet! It is precisely between these great and these small journeys — between those whose very conception, as much as their accomplishment, is overwhelming, and those whose insignificance and banality form the very weave of life — that the little world of the shtetl built its art of living and its imaginary worlds.

Of the former, there will be no question here. Only the latter will hold our attention.

Mobility against the sedentary state: every society knows this opposition and this tension, and, for as long as it has existed, the Jewish diaspora has not departed from the rule. It is made of both: of locally established communities whose populations stabilized in the towns, the burghs, the market towns, the hamlets; and of itinerants whose repeated movements wove an invisible and tight web made of that multitude of comings and goings linking the communities to one another. Simultaneously urban and rural, the Jews invested and inhabited the rural space of pre-war Poland in a manner all their own, one that set them apart from the peasantry and the local feudal orders. They were organically integrated into the rural world, into its landscapes, its localities, its forests, its paths. At once sedentary and itinerant, they intimately took part in its life, but otherwise, by making themselves merchants, manufacturers, artisans, secondhand-clothes dealers, usurers, estate stewards, intermediaries of all kinds, innkeepers: “In the organic unity of the Polish village,” writes Gershon Bacon, “the Jews constituted a connective tissue, not only through their commercial activity between village and town, but also because they were the bearers of news of the outside world.”¹

The Jewish “itinerants” who crisscross Poland and who are known to us through the works of historians, through literature, through popular tales and stories, are tax collectors, coachmen, peddlers, traveling musicians, Talmudists, miracle-working rabbis, vagabonds, beggars… One comes across few or no seasonal agricultural workers, but one does encounter emissaries come from Palestine, as well as students and still-beardless apprentices: training in manual trades under a master was common practice, just as one left home young to go and study far away, in a yeshiva or with a teacher. All this is to say that, before the invention of tourism, the common folk did not travel for pleasure. Travel did not represent an end in itself. In this harsh world, where life is often a struggle for material and spiritual survival, traveling is costly, even dangerous; it is an undertaking full of risks and unforeseen events, for the roads are unsafe. One does not choose to travel; one travels out of necessity. For some, travel is merely an interstitial space, an enforced in-between separating an objective from its realization; for others it is a livelihood; for still others, the question does not even arise: one travels because that is how things are. For how is one to avoid traveling in this fragmented, multi-centered social space, where the least transaction, the least exchange — of goods, of persons, or of ideas — requires a journey demanding the mobilization of resources: whether it be a simple “hop” to the neighboring market town to conclude a piece of business or to seek the answer to a particularly thorny question of Talmud, a trip to the nearby market or to a more distant fair, a relation of customer to supplier, of master to disciples, of steward to landowner, of contacts between members of one and the same family?

It is striking to note the omnipresence of travel in Hasidic and/or popular literature and tales. One need only open a novel or a collection of stories. Everything, or almost, begins there with a journey. And this is no accident. In fact, only circulation is capable of guaranteeing the stability of the system, for if the shtetl gives the image of a closed and impenetrable world where promiscuity weighs heavily, even suffocatingly, one must not lose sight of the fact that it can claim to exist and perpetuate itself only on the condition of opening onto the outside — that is, of being a place of passage, of circulation. The social space of the shtetl exists and maintains itself in its state only by reason of the exchanges it sustains with the surrounding world. Now these can take place only through travel. By it and thanks to it, each Jew, each community is inserted into a larger whole and knows itself bound to the others by the many threads that this network-system weaves. This out-of-the-ordinary way of inhabiting a place and a territory can obviously only sustain the feeling of extraterritoriality that then dwells within every Jew.

One would be justified in believing that travel as such, thus demoted to the rank of necessity and means, is devoid of intrinsic value. Nothing of the kind. For if it takes part in the construction of the social bond and of its hierarchies, it also nourishes the imaginary. Integrated into the deeds and gestures of everyday life, it finds itself invested, like many another gesture of everyday life, with meanings that exceed its primary purpose. For example, for those who possess no assets other than their physical strength with which to prove their worth and have their social usefulness recognized, travel becomes the privileged theater for the demonstration of their competence, their endurance, their courage. Thus, for those who make a profession of transporting occasional or regular travelers, travel presents itself as an activity not only useful but indispensable and necessary — hence valued and value-conferring — once one knows that one must rely on them to arrive safe and sound, on time and in full security. In a system of social organization where there is much circulation, the coachman occupies a vital function that makes him a central figure.² So it is not surprising to see the mixed feelings he arouses: he is despised for his vulgarity and his ignorance, but feared because he is reputed to be impulsive and violent, and humored because one needs him; he is also admired because he is resourceful and knows how to extricate himself — and, still more, his team, his cart, his cargo, and his clients — from critical situations; one even goes so far as to feel affection for him, because, in the end, the coachman is, after all, a little part of the “family”: how many hours passed in his company, seated behind him or at his side, how many halts and nights spent in the same inns, how many storms and ordeals weathered together? So much so that one ends up regarding him as an intimate: one knows his life, his stories, his qualities and his faults, his joys, his sorrows, his misfortunes. To the point that he has become a quasi-mythical character, a figure of fiction. There is no shtetl story, no Hasidic tale, no sociological analysis of this so particular Judaism, that does not make mention of the coachman. He is present everywhere, actor and figure in his own right.

Before the railway and the automobile, travel was done on horseback, by carriage, on foot — hence the popularity of that other mythical figure, the peddler, who likewise imposes himself in the traditional imagery as a no less central character.

Like the hassid who goes regularly to the court of his rebbe, sometimes several days’ march or carriage-ride distant; like the shaliah [emissary], the envoy come from Palestine to collect funds for the Jewish institutions of the Holy Land, who hands out his little pouches of the earth of Israel in exchange for a bed and a meal; like, finally, the maggid, the itinerant preacher whose endless wandering is to be understood only in the light of the impassioned sermons he delivers from stage to stage — the peddler takes part in the perpetuation of this “eternal world”³ of tradition: by ensuring the supply, to sedentary Jews, of cult objects, prayer books, kosher wine, and candles for the Sabbath, of lulav (palm leaves) and etrog (citron) for the festival days, he perpetuates the ancestral ways of thinking, of acting, and of believing. He deposits a little eternity in the trace of his footsteps.

But he is not only that: the peddler is an agent of modernity, a ferryman of cultures, a sower of subversion, for it is this same character who, beyond the trinkets whose sale secures his family’s daily bread, disseminates profane books and who, in spreading the news of the world, introduces the world’s fury into the most remote corners. It is for all these reasons that his arrival is awaited with excitement, impatience, anxiety, and curiosity. The peddler takes the road in place of those who cannot take it themselves. He moves the world for those who cannot go out to meet it.

As for these last, when modernity reaches them at last by way of the railway tracks, it is with astonishment — doubled, for some, with dread, and for others with intense jubilation — that they will finally have the leisure to discover for themselves, and in their turn, from the window of their compartment, the changing world that sets itself in motion barely a few dozen kilometers from their village: “The reaction of stupefaction of a Jewish traveler during his railway journey to Warsaw is symptomatic of this change: during a stop at a station, he sees for the first time in his life Jews eating non-kosher food without concealing it.”⁴

Finally, it takes that sense of the supernatural and the marvelous, imbued with the pantheism proper to Hasidic thought⁵ — close in this to the spirit of the popular tales of the Gentiles — for the hostile milieu in which any traveler may find himself immersed to suddenly take on meaning and to people itself with animate elements and creatures, sometimes even friendly ones: the horse that falls, the axles of the cart that break along the way, are so many signs that one must know how to interpret, as one tale of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav suggests.⁶ In the deepest part of the forest in which he had lost his way, the traveler makes out at last, at the turn of a thicket, the saving glow of the inn he believed he would never find again; having recognized some old rabbi who had once saved them from the clutches of the police, the lawless brigands transform themselves into attentive, protective guides; or again, it is the road that contracts to spare the poor peddler from having to spend one more night beneath the icy, star-strewn vault; or it is the team of horses that, of its own accord, swallows the distances to allow their coachman-master to arrive in time to welcome the Sabbath surrounded by his wife and children. It takes the mystical poetry of Hasidism to make of the road and of the expanses it crosses — those non-places deserted by civilization and by men, given over to the savagery of the elements — spaces of meaning and of signs, spaces devoted to meditation, to introspection, to self-discovery: every Jew who ventures into them confronts them as a biblical ordeal, a regenerative crossing of the desert from which he may hope to emerge purified, prepared to face adversity, persuaded that he has been guided by an invisible hand.

A wretched and enchanted world: the dreams of marvelous journeys offered by these texts would remain, for several generations, the sole mode of escape accessible to the immense majority of Jews — the only door open onto a better elsewhere.

Notes