Russian Empire. The Rubinsteins settled in Berdichev, a town then located nearthe borders of three provinces—Volhynia, Podolia, and Little Russia (Ukraine).For almost three hundred years Berdichev had been a part of the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth, and the town’s historical ties to Poland were strong. Anactive Jewish community sprang up around 1721, and, as a major center of Ha-sidism, Berdichev became known as the “Jerusalem of Volhynia” and the “Jew-ish capital.” From the mid-eighteenth century Berdichev grew steadily in size,especially after 1765 when King Stanislaw Augustus issued a decree allowing afair to be held in the town. Most of the commerce centered on agriculturalsupplies, but the textile industry also played an important part in Berdichev’seconomy, and in 1795 Prince Radziwill granted seven Jewish cloth merchantsthe monopoly on the cloth trade in the town. After 1798 trade in the town beganto decline, but owing to food shortages and the high cost of bread in Odessa,the merchants of Berdichev grew very wealthy in the period after 1812.

By the early years of the new century Roman Ivanovich had evidently becomean in®uential ¤gure in and around Berdichev. According to Barenboym, “he or-ganized the ¤rst settlement of Jewish ploughmen—the village of Romanovka.”Beyond these bare facts, little is known about Roman Ivanovich’s biography ex-cept that he married twice. From the ¤rst marriage there were three sons.6 Thetwo older sons—Abram and Grigory (future father of the composer, who wasborn in 1807)—followed the family tradition and engaged in farming. As the¤rstborn, they were spared the rigors of army life, but the third son, Yakov, wasconscripted into the army under the terms of the imperial decree of 1827, whichstated: “Every Jewish male boy of twelve years, to the proportion of seven inevery hundred of population, [is] to be conscripted for the Imperial Army andto proceed immediately to the cantonment school, to remain in the ImperialArmy 25 years.”7 Yakov was later appointed to a hussars’ regiment and attainedthe rank of ¤eld captain (he died in 1853). Two sons were born in the secondmarriage: Emmanuil and Konstantin, both later trained as doctors at the medi-cal school of Moscow University.

Abram, his wife’s brother, and Grigory hired a plot of land near Dubossarï(now Dubbsari in Moldova) on the river Dnestr, which formed the natural bor-der between Russia and Bessarabia. The land rented by Abram and Grigory be-longed to powerful landowners, the Radziwills, who were ancestors of the an-cient Polish-Lithuanian family that had played such a prominent role in thehistory of their country during the ¤fteenth and sixteenth centuries. Becauseof the double tax law and various restrictions imposed on Jews living in the Pale,their lives were often precarious. The landowners took full advantage of theirprivileges, using them to exercise almost unlimited control over their Jewishtenants. Roman Ivanovich suffered much the same fate. As Barenboym tells us:“Persecuted by the Radziwills and local of¤cials, he was ¤nally thrown into theprison at Zhitomir, and only by sacri¤cing the remnants of his fortune was heable to regain his freedom. The enormous family of Roman Rubinstein, consist-ing at that time of more than thirty persons, was left with absolutely no meansof subsistence.”8 The plight of families like the Rubinsteins was exacerbated by

4 Anton Rubinstein