KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
century. One factor was the danger of conscription into the Czar’s army. A writer in the Ludvipol Yizkor book, a collection of remem- brance essays published in 1965 by the Jewish organization of sur- vivors from Ludvipol, recalled the time when a messenger arrived in town and put up notices ordering all men between sixteen and sixty to register for the czar’s army and fight the Bolshevik rev - olutionaries. Boys conscripted into the army served for as many as twenty-five years, losing touch with their families and Jewish traditions. Those who did not die were exposed to vicious anti- Semitic attacks. Because single sons were not required to join, some families gave each of their sons a different last name. Occa - sionally, a release was obtained by the boy sustaining injuries and paying a fee. A third way to avoid conscription was to leave every- thing behind and move to distant lands. For many middle- and lower-class people, the partition made little difference in daily life, but it fanned a smoldering Polish na - tionalism, one component of which was deep rancor against both czarist Russia and, later, Russian socialism. Though both Jews and Poles suffered under the Russian occupation, “common victimiza - tion does not necessarily make good bedfellows.” 7 Poles distrusted Jews, fearing that they might side with the Russian oppressors. On the other hand, Jews in Poland, caught in waves of anti-Semitism for over a hundred years there, had little reason to risk everything for the Polish national cause. The cyclical nature of anti-Semitism in nineteenth-century Polish society, which peaked during times of political instability and economic downturns, is referred to by a character from Boleslaw Prus’s classic Polish novel, The Doll (1890): “I began to notice that the people we formerly called ‘Poles of the Mosaic confession’ we now called ‘Jews.’” Eventually, ten- sions between Poles and Russians, whether Czarist or socialist, would be most deeply felt in eastern Poland, especially near the border. Nineteenth-century Ludvipol would have been a frontier town by the standards of Poles living to the west in Lublin, Krakow, or
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