p. 1 “between Father’s and Mother’s beds”: Jewish law proscribes men and women from sharing the same bed.
p. 11 “A small glass … stood on the window sill”: a yortsayt candle lit in Moyshe’s memory.
p. 14 “A real officer in the Tsar’s army!”: a naive comment. There were no Jewish officers in the tsarist army at the time.
p. 21 “Dobrele, who had just returned from Buenos Aires”: the center of the white-slave trade.
p. 24 “In the plowshare lies a blessing”: one of the earliest Yiddish songs of Zion, written in 1888 by the Yiddish folk bard Elyokum Zunser (1836–1913) in praise of doing agricultural work in Palestine.
p. 24 “My beauty, my life, pure as gold”: a standard Yiddish love song.
p. 25 “Tsar Alexander III”: (1845–1894) ascended to the throne following the assassination of his father in 1881.
p. 39 “she now had on a new wig”: married women were required to cover their hair.
p. 56 “Let’s be friends again”: from a folk song performed at weddings.
p. 57 “the feast day of Saint John, coinciding with … the Sabbath of Consolation”: Both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Church mark the beheading of John the Baptist on August 29 with a feast day. The Sabbath following the fast of the Ninth of Av is called the Sabbath of Consolation, so named because the haftarah (supplementary reading) begins with the words from Isa. 40:1, “Comfort, oh comfort My people.”
p. 57 “Tuesday—considered a lucky day”: Because on that day of creation, the Lord twice “saw that it was good” (Gen. 1:10, 12).
p. 69 “yellow sand, sprinkled on the floor”: this was routinely done on Friday afternoons, in honor of the Sabbath.
p. 69 “Old Pavlova”: a Christian peasant, here performing one of the several domestic chores forbidden to Jews on the Sabbath.
p. 101 “to pray at our usual place, that is, the besmedresh”: Jewish prayer in eastern Europe was decentralized. In Mendl’s town, the more well-to-do citizens prayed in the main synagogue, while the simple folk congregated in the study house.
p. 135 “they had come all the way out on foot”: because it is forbidden to travel on the Sabbath by carriage.
p. 136 “dating back to the days of King Sobieski”: meant both literally, as the reign of King Jan Sobieski III (1629–1696), and idiomatically, “from olden times.”
p. 140 “she had picked especially for me”: it is forbidden to pick flowers on the Sabbath.
p. 179 “Reb Jew”: An idiomatic honorific.
p. 187 “A Son of Two Mothers”: Eyn zohn fun tsvey mames (Vilna, 1890), a species of pulp fiction by Shomer [Nokhem-Meyer Shaykevitsh] (1846–1905). This particular novelette does not, however, feature the adventures of Rudolph and Carolina. Both in Everyday Jews and its sequel, Perle lavishes attention on the reading habits of Jewish women, a predilection for trashy novels that he himself had done much to cultivate.
p. 201 “The Sale of Joseph”: On Purim day, in and around the celebratory feast, Ashkenazic Jews instituted a one-day-of-the-year theater season. Young boys and men went house to house performing a Purim-shpil, a rhymed and chanted burlesque, initially of local events, then of the Purim story itself, of other biblical sagas, and, finally, of any popular plot. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Mekhires Yoysef, The Sale of Joseph, was performed more widely even than the Ahasuerus Play. Young Joseph’s aria in the snake pit and Mother Rachel’s lament were among the most popular set pieces.
p. 201 “She would be in the play, too, as Mother Rachel”: all roles in the Purim-shpil were traditionally played by men and boys. Perhaps the fact that the audience is required to pay admission and that the play is performed in a makeshift auditorium signals a first step toward modernization.
p. 201 “the Brody Singers”: the first professional troupe of Yiddish actors and performers in eastern Europe, founded by Berl Broder-Margulies in 1854.
p. 209 “a rose that fell by the wayside”: From “The Flower,” an allegorical song by the folk bard Elyokum Zunser, written in 1867.
p. 243 “the holy pictures on the wall”: For an observant Jewish household, “holy pictures” glaringly transgress the commandment against graven images.
p. 245 “By the sweat of your brow, shall ye eat bread”: Gen. 3:19.
p. 270 “overcoat thrown over his white, linen wedding robe”: the solemn white linen robe reminds the groom of his mortality. The overcoat thrown over the robe is a Hasidic custom.
p. 290 “an opera called The Jewess”: La Juive, a grand opera in five acts, the libretto by Eugène Scribe and music by Jacques Halévy, was first produced at the Académie in Paris on February 23, 1835.
p. 290 “Battistine”: Mattia Battistine.
p. 290 “Davidov”: tenor Alexander Davidov (1872–1944).
p. 296 “Hatsefirah”: (“The Dawn”), a Hebrew daily published in Warsaw and edited, at the time, by Nahum Sokolow.
p. 296 “Moses Montefiore”: Sir Moses Haim Montefiore (1784–1885) was one of the most famous British Jews in the nineteenth century. A financier, stockbroker, and philanthropist, he used his power and prestige to intervene on behalf of world Jewry. Montefiore visited Russia in 1846 and 1872.
p. 297 “Baron Hirsch”: Maurice de Hirsch (1831–1896), who founded the Jewish Colonization Association to settle Jews on the land. The center for this activity was Argentina.
p. 302 “the days of Poniatowski”: Stanislas Poniatowski, King of Poland between 1764 and 1795.
p. 308 “Justice goes before Him”: Psalm 85:14.
p. 316 “the kohen—priestly—class of Jews, ill-tempered”: a folk belief, based on Babylonian Talmud Kiddushin 70b, that considers all descendants of Aaron the Priest to be prone to anger.
p. 323 “Oleg the seer readies himself”: the opening lines of “The Song of Oleg the Seer,” by Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837). These lines and the ones that follow are cited in the original Russian.
p. 324 “Not for nothing was Moscow set ablaze”: patriotic lines from “On the Anniversary of Borodino,” by the poet and novelist Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841), which all Russian schoolchildren committed to memory.