#kinohora

In an unusual acknowledgment of women healers’ varied experiences, The Shtetl Book—published forty years after the Second World War and contemporary with the achievements of the Women’s Movement—begrudgingly gives readers a keyhole peep into yet another type of women healer in the Pale. A short section entitled “Women at Work” mentions a few healing practitioners who stand out against a random list of feminine occupations: the “herb vendor,” a syrup maker, a “medic who healed with leeches and other folk remedies” (whom we can now safely identify as a feldsher, and possibly also a midwife), and an “opshprekherin,” a woman who gave advice and remedies to people convinced they had been cursed by the evil eye, an affliction cited in the Talmud that had to be cured before it caused further illness. Such a spare litany of occupations would seem to suggest that “Women at Work” did nothing worth elaborating; but with a little extra digging, we discover something much more intriguing.

In addition to their previously noted revelations, the An-Sky expeditions confirmed that the opshprekherin had survived into the twentieth century. The practice of the opshprekherin was rooted in the ancient belief in the evil eye. Mostly women, these healers were present in almost every town in the Pale and were sought for their expertise in times of crisis, during pregnancy, for toothache, a bad foot, an abscess, a “rose” (… skin infection…), the bite of a mad dog, epilepsy, or any other maladies believed to be caused by this curse. The opshprekherin never referred to written sources for her cures; hers was an oral tradition deeply shrouded in secrecy:

Pregnant women—especially when carrying their first child—often asked these older women for protection [for their baby from the evil eye]. People believed not only that the opshprekherin had the power to predict an unborn baby’s gender but that they could in fact influence whether it would be a boy or a girl. Those old ladies had a supply of “proven” charms and spells for each occasion. They performed magic with knives, socks and combs; they poured wax and poached eggs and knew hundreds of ways to cure a patient.