Lilian Nattel - The River Midnight

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Research:

I read about a hundred books in the course of researching The River Midnight, looked at a number of collections of photographs, and watched Yiddish films that predated the war. I used contemporary sources primarily, that is fiction and memoirs and essays written between 1881 and 1905. Because the war colors everything, I avoided post-WWII sources with a few exceptions.

Memorial books were quite useful (post-war collections of survivors' memories of daily life in their hometwons), and so was a scholarly journal, Polin (Poland), published by the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies in Oxford over the last fifteen years or so.

The challenge was in finding specific reliable detail, especially about women's lives. Memoirs were a great source of information. The first time I read that a woman cried cried on the day she was married I thought it might have been because she didn't like the arranged marriage. But after seeing the same thing a number of times in different memoirs, I discovered that girls were expected to cry and be very sad that their childhoods were over. There was social acknowledgement for the fact that marriage was a dangerous business for women. There was no knowing how their husbands would treat them and a woman would have a good chance of dying in childbirth.

Women's liturgy

I was fascinated by the discovery of women's prayers, called tekhinas. Women prayed in Yiddish from books and pamphlets-some written by men, many by women. There were quite old prayers that remained favourites, but as new prayers were being written all the time, women's liturgy stayed current. The book peddler would come to a village and, along with the more "serious" Hebrew books and the Yiddish romances, he would have tekhinas collected in books and more informally disseminated in numerous pamphlets. Women would look through the books and pamphlets for the prayers that were relevant to them and they would use these prayers both at home and in the synagogue.

It was the men's liturgy that was official religion: fixed, regulated. Women's liturgy, though very serious for the women, didn't matter to the male religious authority. Women's prayers were therfore more fluid, changing with changing circumstances and expressing their deepest feelings. Women talked to their God in such an intimate way, so different from the Hebrew prayers, their daily concerns evident. For example, there's a prayer for a husband who has to travel for business, perhaps peddling. The woman prays that he won't lose himself gambling and drinking or taking up with other women.

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