PINKHES-DOVID GOLDENSHTEYN

PINKHES-DOVID GOLDENSHTEYN (b. 1843)

            He was born in Tiraspol, southern Russia.  His father was an elementary school teacher.  At age seven he became an orphan on both sides and was raised by strangers.  He studied in primary school, synagogue study hall, and in the yeshivas of Odessa, Shklov, and Lubavitsh.  He worked as a merchant and innkeeper in Romania and Russia.  From 1876 to 1914, he worked as a ritual slaughterer in Bakhtshisaray.  From 1914 he was living in Palestine.  He was the author of a three-volume work, Mayn lebens-geshikhte (My life history), “various adventures and episodes of an orphan”, part 1 (Petaḥ Tikva, 1928); parts 2 and 3 with the addition of a supplement concerning his life in Israel (Petaḥ Tikva, 1929), 550 pp.  In these memoirs, written in an antique but folky Yiddish, images and events go past of nearly a century of Jewish life in the small towns of Romania and Russia of the past, as well as of Jewish life in Palestine in the time of WWI.