person
Berka Shvakher
also: Берка Швахер
A Jewish dentist named as the former employer for whom both Pyotr Ilyich and Osip Frantsych once worked before striking out on their own; mentioned only in passing and referred to with the period ethnic slur 'жида' ("Yid") by the narrating dentist -- translated unsoftened per house policy, with the slur's use and context addressed in the glossary.
Reading notes
- General Education §2 that Yid Berka Shvakher
The Russian reads "у жида Берки Швахера" -- "жид" (zhid) was, by the 1880s, a demeaning ethnic slur for a Jew (the neutral term was "еврей"/yevrey), used here by the narrating dentist as a matter-of-fact aside rather than a flashpoint in the story. It is translated as "Yid" -- the closest period-accurate English slur -- unsoftened, per house policy: Chekhov's own casual antisemitism (common among his class and era, and present elsewhere in his early comic sketches) is part of the historical record his fiction preserves, not something to launder in translation. Berka Shvakher himself is otherwise unremarked: a Jewish dentist for whom both Russian and German colleagues apparently apprenticed before setting up their own practices, illustrating that Jewish practitioners were an ordinary, if socially disdained, presence in the period's unlicensed dental trade.