21st Century Bogatyr: Chickens, Jews Harps & Cronyism

by Zvi Baranoff

Der Zhurnal ( the Journal) is the oldest and probably the most respected publication on Planet Birobidzhan.

Before the 200th year of planetary settlement, Der Zhurnal asked a wide range of writers to address our history and culture. Planet-wide, the call was answered. From the shraybmashin (typewriters) the essays below - covering a broad range of topics arrived.

The original essays were all published anonymously in the newspaper, to give each contributor the widest possible range of free expression. The editors also published a large table top book which turned out to be a financial disaster.

The bicentennial of the First Landing on Planet Birobidzhan is certainly worth noting, even if we have serious reservations concerning the original logic of this planetary settlement and the obvious failures to achieve any of the original goals.

How should we mark the Bicentennial? There are no celebrations planned. No one is thrilled to be living here. There are not even any commemorations scheduled. Well, maybe some of the rabbis will be fasting and tearing their clothes and throwing ashes and dust about.

Nonetheless, there is reason for introspection and examination of our founding and development and two hundred years gives us a significant amount of history separate from the Home Planet. This is as good of a reason, and as good of a time as any, to examine the trajectory of our history.

Quite frankly, however, no one wanted to face a commemorative book on the subject of monumental failures while relaxing at home. Nonetheless, many of the essays are well worth reading in their entirety. Presented here are condensed highlights, with some minor editing for clarity and to reduce redundancy, with much thanks to the editorial board of Der Zhurnal.

The Tattered Connection

The First Landing was full of hope and possibilities. Two hundred years is certainly enough time for retrospective considerations.

Perhaps the foreshadowing of the soon broken contact should have been evident, but it wasn't. Even when the span between the arrivals of new ships full of immigrants began to widen, no one predicted that the flow of new arrivals would simply stop without a warning or another word from the Home Planet.

When our ancestors concluded that our new home had lost all contact with the Home Planet, the only possible assumption was that something had gone terribly wrong.

What that something was led to all sorts of groundless speculation. War and social upheaval? An unspeakable environmental disaster? No one could know but everyone had an opinion.

Some even suggested that the Moshiach had come to gather up the remnants of our people and fly them on the backs of eagles to the Promised Land. We were left out of the incoming, they suggested, because we had abandoned our trust in the Holy One, Blessed Be His Name, by leaving the Home Planet.

Economics: Cronyism & Nepotism

The two most commonly heard utterances in Yiddish are Vas? (what?) and Farvas? (why?). This perhaps reflects the Jewish traditional attitudes of questioning everything. On Planet Birobidzhan, the phrase Aun Vas? (and what?) became the most widely heard of all spoken words, reflecting the Planetary distrust of all aspects of what could roughly be labeled as economics on Planet Birobidzhan.

In the early days, everyone seemed to have lots of money. The money, however, was of limited value. There was so little that one could actually purchase. Manufacturing had just barely begun. Agricultural products were hardly available. Wood and minerals were nearly non-existent. Earth originated supplies were scarce. If one had something of value, exchanging it for currency of uncertain value seemed foolhardy.

A prevalent business practice arose that was commonly called "Aun Vas". When coming to an agreement on the price of merchandise, it would be the number of Shekels… "and what" (aun vas) to close the deal. Cash alone was seen as highly speculative and tenuous. Sellers preferred something more tangible.

There was no planned economy or single model for economic development. The economic structures of enterprise fell into roughly four somewhat distinct categories.

The rabbinic structures - this would include the yeshivas, the shuls, the moyels, the sochets - all operated based on family connections. There were the various sectarian dynasties combined with a certain degree of meritocracy.

The mining and lumber industries were essentially corporations.

The kibbutzim were, at least in theory, collective enterprises, as were some worker-owned and operated businesses. The brothels, for instance, were, and still are, all worker-owned and self-managed cooperatives.

In the shtetls, individualism and family enterprise were the norm.

Prevalent Background Sounds

The kukuriku of the roosters and the twang of the Jews Harp are pervasive on Planet Birobidzhan. Everywhere one goes, these sounds are heard. The story of Planet Birobidzhan and the Yidden that live here is also the historical birthright of flocks of chickens and the legacy of musical tsatskes.

The Jews Harp

Rather than the Yiddish der bromayzer or the German Maultrommel, we generally use the English name Jews Harp for that quaint instrument. This is exemplary of the way our language developed here on Planet Birobidzhan.

Whatever we choose to call those twangy music making objects, nearly every one of us owns at least one. Farvas (why) so many Jews Harps, you ask?

Agency policies that drastically limited space allotted for supplies, the lack of resources available on Planet Birobidzhan, the tedium of daily life, and the vast amounts of paper money were all factors. That, and the nature of two brothers, Moshe and Mendel, from Tennessee.

The brothers were amateur musicians. Because of the incredibly limited space allotted to each passenger for personal supplies, the brothers decided to each carry a Jews Harp, an instrument which fits comfortably in any pocket.

Upon arrival on Planet Birobidzhan, the boys had a lot of time on their hands. They spent a lot of that time "fiddling" on their Jews Harps. Bored settlers were attracted to the sound and pleased by any distraction. The boys, having the only ones on the planet, cultivated a following, of sorts.

One thing led to another and soon they were making, and selling the noisy tsatskes. They would sell them for a shekel or two. No one considered the money of any value and most people had plenty of cash with nothing to spend it on.

The teenagers sold Jews Harps like hotcakes. A bisl aun a bisl vert a ful shtisl. Those shekels began to add up. One day they were selling the tsatskes from a pushcart and then they opened a store with an impressive sign: Moshe & Mendel's Jew Harp, Tsatske aun Muzik Krom, complete with a picture of a harp - a real, historic, full size harp that had once been the logo of an Irish beer back on the Home Planet.

A Language of Our Own

Long ago, on Earth, Yiddish was often referred to as a jargon, or zhargon, rather than a real language. Some considered Yiddish to be a patois or a creole, a bastardized conglomerate and a crude construction.

Yiddishists, particularly writers and academics, worked diligently to dispel this belief that Yiddish was substandard. Dedicated Yiddish linguists attempted at every turn to prove the legitimacy of the Mamaloshen.

Yiddish speakers shrugged off any considerations of the intellectuals and continued to mangle grammar and pronunciation as well as introduce new words from other languages.

In the early days of planetary settlement, Yiddishists and the Hebraists argued passionately for language purity. Occasionally advocates for Ladino as well as other Judaeo-linguistic streams also pushed for representation in the establishment of an official and authentic planetary shprakh. The Yidden of Planet Birobidzhan generally ignored the debates and continued to communicate as our predecessors had back on Earth, just making it all up as they went along, with no embarrassment whatsoever.

The language we speak here, after two centuries without any contact with the Home Planet, is assuredly a form of Yiddish unique to Planet Birobidzhan. If contact with Earth is ever reestablished, and if Yidden can be found there, finding a common language might be seriously difficult.

Free Ranging Chickens

The prevalence of chickens on Planet Birobidzhan can be seen as a combination of successful planning and the sheer tenacity of chickens.

The Hatikvah, the first ship to land here and the only ship that passengers traveled in "real time" rather than cryogenic preservation, had free-range chickens aboard. Those passengers on board had a steady supply of nearly daily eggs and chicken for every Shabbos and Holy Days.

Upon landing, with the knowledge that new settlers would be arriving by the tens of thousands, a crash course in chicken breeding began.

One of the few opportunities offered to new arrivals was the chance to try one's hand at raising chickens. Settlers were offered a breeding pair and some received a rooster and two hens. The pairs were commonly called Adam and Eve and those sets with the extra hen were called Adam, Eve and Lilith.

Settlers were urged to refrain from culling eggs to begin with, to allow for a population growth. Hens, given the opportunity, can really be "fruitful and multiply" and bring forth a lot of descendants. At six months of age the next generation are mature and can start breeding.

On the Home Planet, chickens faced all sorts of threats. Their lives were tenuous. Those in captivity lived short, relatively protected lives that generally ended in slaughter. They were, nonetheless, subjected to a wide range of predators such as foxes and cougars and hawks as well as domestic dangers such as dogs. Those that lived "in the wild" also risked death by cars, trains and other industrial threats.

Chickens on Planet Birobidzhan live in a Gan Eden of sorts, a virtual Paradise. On Planet Birobidzhan, chickens have no natural predators other than man.

The chickens of Planet Birobidzhan have moderate weather, lots to eat and plenty of bramble to hide in when on the run and avoiding humans. There are a lot of chickens on the run. The Yidden that received birds for breeding had little experience with raising animals or, for that matter, construction of shelters. Chickens are fairly ingenious at escaping.

The result is that far more chickens are running wild than domesticated. At first, the Yidden spent an exuberant amount of effort trying to contain their birds. Then, they tried to mark or brand the chickens.

Rabbis were constantly being called into debates concerning the rightful ownership of wayward chickens. Eventually, they threw their hands up in the air and accepted fate.

Those on the loose were no longer considered as property, but more like wild fish. The Chicken Protocol is rooted in those early days. Anyone with a net is free to gather chickens. Anyone willing to crawl through the bramble where the chickens brood can freely gather eggs.

Hospitals & Meditsinish Gortns

Back on the Home Planet, there was a widely held belief among the Nations that Yidden dominated the medical profession. This was never actually the case. Jews did, however, have a significantly disproportionate representation as doctors.

When the relocation project began, many highly trained medical professionals signed up for transport and received preferential placement on the earliest ships.

The initial voyage of the Hatikvah included a top notch crew of doctors and nurses, entrusted to establish a state of the art, high end hospital upon arrival. That hospital, equal to the finest facilities of Earth, was built and staffed in the boomtown of First Landing. The First Landing Hospital also served as a training center and essentially a Medical University.

Quality medical facilities were also soon built in both of the major groys stadts, New Jerusalem and New New York. The kibbutzim, on the whole, developed state of the art clinics that served their membership as well as the outlying unaffiliated settlers. The lumbering and mining corporations maintained emergency clinics to deal with industrial accidents. Some of the larger shtetls soon had clinics as well.

The Magen David Adom is what the loose volunteer networks that tie together all of the medical facilities and emergency transportation is called. The name Red Shield of David derives from the Hebrew and an association of similar purpose that operated on Earth long ago.

Large swaths of our Planet Birobidzhan, however, have little or no clinics, emergency or other. Visiting doctors do make some rounds and offer somewhat impromptu services, particularly vaccinations and such. In the smallest shtetls, an actual doctor or nurse is as rare as hen teeth, even after two centuries of planetary settlement.

In even the tiniest of shtetls we have Yidden that have self-trained in emergency care and have an extensive familiarity with herbal remedies with an extensive Meditsinish Gortn (medical garden) to serve as a pharmacy of sorts.

Literacy and Education

Planet Birobidzhan has a literacy rate of nearly 100%. Certainly higher than any region of the Home Planet at the time that we lost contact. We have a Medical University that is spectacular and we have Yeshivas that are stellar.

Back on the Home Planet, some form of public education funded through taxation operated planet wide, was available to nearly every Earth-born child, and was largely compulsory.

On Planet Birobidzhan, of course, we have no such thing. We have no government to determine what is compulsory or to collect taxes and disperse funds therefore we have no public education or school system. Perhaps that makes our literary level all the more impressive.

Perhaps, if we hadn't been cut adrift from the umbilical connection to our Planet of Origin so soon after the First Landing and early settlement of Planet Birobidzhan had begun, our processes of education may have developed differently. Probably so.

The Agency back on the Home Planet determined the supplies and personnel for each shipment. It was assumed on Earth that early child education would not be a pressing matter for the first few years. Teachers and school supplies were not prioritized and then the flights stopped.

The birthrate on Planet Birobidzhan is still high compared to the historical rate on Planet Earth. In the first few years, before the use of herbal concoctions to alter breeding cycles had become widespread, the birthrate was extraordinarily high. There were a lot of babies born in the first precarious decades of settlement.

Fortunately, the earliest settlers were a highly educated lot so they were well placed for some level of homeschooling for their offspring.

The preponderance of rabbis with little to do also factored in. The rabbis envisioned it as their duty to educate the young. They reached back to a traditional form of schooling called the cheder. The cheders were one room schools.

Unemployed rabbis became melameds, that is, teachers. Children as young as three were given a rudimentary education, mostly consisting of learning the Aleph Beis, how to read, and some simplified religious studies. So, the children all learned to read. For a few shekels the young ones were out of their parents' hair for a few hours a day.

After around a half dozen years with a melamed, the parents and the students had decisions to make. Some children headed to yeshivas for more advanced religious studies. Most entered into some form of apprenticeship, to learn a useful trade.

This is not a Jewish story. It is, however, a story about Jews. One does not need to be Jewish to read this tale any more than one needs to be a Hobbit or an Elf to read Lord of the Rings.

This story is a work of fiction. The setting for this tale is in the distant future, on the far away Planet Birobidzhan. This planet was settled by Jewish exiles from Planet Earth.

The population of Planet Birobidzhan has been cut off from the Home Planet for a long time. They have developed their own unique culture, traditions and linguistics.

The language spoken on Planet Birobidzhan is primarily Yiddish. I have sprinkled a significant number of Yiddish words and phrases throughout the telling of the tale. I also refer to various Jewish religious and cultural touchstones.

To make this story more accessible, I have included a glossary of words and phrases in Yiddish and Hebrew that are used as well as some explanations of religious terms and holidays.

I hope that readers find this to be useful.

The link to the Glossary is here:

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2023/01/a-useful-guide-glossary-to-planet.html?m=1

פּלאַנעט ביראָבידזשאַן

Do you want to read more about Planet Birobidzhan? Here are all the posted installments so far, in the order that they were posted. Just click your way through the story!

1 On A Planet Safe for Yidden

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2022/02/on-planet-safe-for-yidden.html

2 Yenne Velt: A History of Planet Birobidzhan

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2022/02/yenne-velt-history-of-planet-birobidzhan.html

3 Another Globe, Perhaps?

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2022/02/another-globe-perhaps.html

4 Bereshis: The Transport & Transformation of the Founders

http://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2022/03/bereshis-transport-transformation-of.html

5 The Town of First Landing

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-town-of-first-landing.html

6 A Personal History of an Early Settler on Planet Birobidzhan

http://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2022/05/a-personal-history-of-early-settler-on.html