Tag #145817 - Interview #94680 (Israel Shlifer )

My parents came from the town of Rzhishchev on the Dnieper in 70 km from Kiev. It’s a picturesque town on the Dnieper where the Legvich River flows into it. The population of Rzhishchev at the beginning of XX century was about 20 thousand people and over 12 thousand of them were Jews. Most of Jewish families resided in the central part of the town. There was a church in the central square and there was a market place open on weekends. Farmers from neighboring villages sold their products: meat, dairies, vegetables, potatoes and honey. Jews had small shops selling tools, hardware and haberdashery. Jews also had professions of tailors, shoemakers, joiners and glasscutters. There was a synagogue in the town. It was a one-storied wooden building located at the spot where the Legvich flows into the Dnieper. In general Rzhishchev was no different from dozens other Jewish towns within the Pale of Settlement [1] in the south of Russia. Nicknames were so common that often people forgot each other’s names given at birth. I liked one man’s nickname. He was Yania Papadoma. When he was returning home after his service in the tsarist army he asked some people that he met on his way, ‘Papa doma?’ (Russian: ‘Is Father at home?’) in Russian since he forgot his Yiddish a little. From then on he was called Yania Papadoma and his children and grandchildren adopted this nickname as their last name. There was Jewish, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and German population in Rzhishchev. Germans lived in their colony and there was even an enterprise with only German employees in the town.