Beyond the Pale

Merriam-Webster defines the idiom "beyond the pale" as something offensive or unacceptable, but to people who have Eastern European Jewish ancestry, the Pale was an actual boundary: an area of the Russian Empire where Jewish people were allowed to live legally, though they couldn't own land, and were restricted in the ways that they could earn money.

I have been thinking about the Pale quite a bit these days, since my ancestors on both sides of my family of origin lived in the Pale, which included much of Ukraine and Moldova (which was Basserabia when my maternal great grandfather emigrated to America).

I was pleased to find a Wikipedia article about the history of the Pale. The Jewish Virtual Library has an excellent entry, which attempts to untangle the various "partitions" and explain the rules and laws. The YIVO encyclopedia offers some more information, and this exhibit (called "Beyond the Pale) in the Internet Archive explains more about the restrictions of daily life.

The history of Jewish life in the Pale is not pretty. It is no wonder to me that so many of the people who came to America from the "old country" didn't want to tell stories about where they came from. People of my parents' generation (i.e. people in their 90s) are only learning about this history now, and even the smartest of the lot (like my father) are boggled and confused by the laws and restrictions that their grandparents had to endure.