Catastroika. Charles Rammelkamp

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      May Laws

      Talk about a tyrant.

      Alexander III really had it in for the Jews,

      blaming us for his father’s death,

      all because a single Jew, Gesya Gelfman,

      knew the “People’s Will” assassins.

      No sooner was Alexander III installed

      than his minister of internal affairs,

      Nikolai Ignatyev, enacted the May Laws,

      restrictions on the freedom of Jews.

      We were forbidden from settling

      outside the Pale of Settlement,

      denied the right to own mortgages,

      restricted from having powers of attorney

      to manage real property: crippled financially.

      Of course, we could not conduct business on Sundays.

      Quotas limited the number of Jewish children

      admitted to high school or university,

      ten percent within the Pale, five outside,

      only three percent in Moscow and St. Petersburg,

      and then in 1891 all Jews deported from Moscow anyway.

      And then there were the pogroms,

      more than two hundred

      the first two years of the bastard’s reign.

      The Kiev pogrom of 1881 went on

      for three days, my father told me,

      leaflets from the workers union stirring them up:

      “Do not beat the Jew because he is a Jew

      but because he is robbing the people,

      sucking the blood of the working man.”