In the Pale of Settlement(犹太定居点), the writer S. An-Sky made an ecstatic(狂喜的), obsessive(执着的) attempt to wrap his arms around(拥抱，包容) an entire people just as it was disappearing.
在定居点时期，作家S.阿恩-斯基狂热而执着地试图拥抱一个正在消失的民族。
Updated at 5:24 p.m. ET(美国东部时间) on October 14, 2026
更新于2026年10月14日美国东部时间下午5:24
The Pale of Settlement is teeming(充满) with ghosts, and why shouldn’t it be? At the turn of the 20th century, some 5 million Jews lived in this region between the Baltic and Black Seas, and by 1945, almost all of them had been murdered. If they slouch now like scarecrows over the tilled black earth, or float between wooden shacks, or even peer over the shoulders of the babushkas selling neat piles of used clothes in front of the bus station in Rivne, this is to be expected.(如果他们的鬼魂如今像稻草人一样耷拉在翻耕过的黑土上，或在木棚之间飘荡，甚至从里夫内汽车站前卖旧衣服的俄罗斯老奶奶肩头探出头来，这都是意料之中的事。) What I hadn’t quite anticipate(预料)d was just how many questions they had left unanswered—2,087 to be exact. A long list of queries covering nearly every particular of how they lived their lives, from circumcision(割礼) to shiva(湿婆礼（犹太教哀悼期）), sat on my lap as I stared out the window on a 10-hour car ride from Warsaw to Kyiv, through the heartland of what was once the Pale.
定居点里鬼魂出没，这有什么好奇怪的呢？20世纪初，约有500万犹太人生活在这片位于波罗的海和黑海之间的地区，而到1945年，他们几乎全部被杀害。如果他们的鬼魂如今像稻草人一样耷拉在翻耕过的黑土上，或在木棚之间飘荡，甚至从里夫内汽车站前卖旧衣服的俄罗斯老奶奶肩头探出头来，这都是意料之中的事。我没想到的是，他们留下了那么多未解的问题——确切地说是2087个。我坐在从华沙到基辅的10小时车程里，望着窗外，穿过昔日定居点的腹地，腿上放着一长串问题清单，几乎涵盖了他们生活的每一个细节，从割礼到湿婆礼。
