As a fellow Slav (and a teetotaller personally) you should get used to this with us

it's far superior to Irish drinking habits I gotta say

I'm very Used to It as a matter of historical memory... It's a touchy subject, you see. We are blamed for it, and it's not entirely baseless...

It's been like 140 years since we last plied you with government-mandated booze, though, I think at this point we can conclude that you like the stuff :)

My family had that history, and also a really absurd number of their descendants became booze distributors and speakeasy owners in Prohibition-era New Jersey.

Like, I was looking at some court records for one of them a few days ago, and noticed a familiar name on the next page -- someone else related to me, very distantly related to the first guy, also being charged with illegal distribution of alcohol.

Look up "propination" if you have no idea what I'm talking about

learned something new today!

Me too. Thank you pymund

You're welcome:) (The propination and related arendator system are practically the stock of both Jewish folklore and all of Jewish records from Eastern Europe - so while only a few nerds know the terms, the vague situation is as familiar to your typical Hasidic kid as Cinderella is in the West)

Everyone's great-n-grandpa was an ‘arender’ whom the local ‘puritz’ (szlachta landowner) threw into his dungeon for falling behind in rent payments... and the math says that these stories are an *underestimate* of how many arendators there were

I was actually surprised, when I started getting into the documents for my professional reasons, how authentic this part of the storytelling was - I always thought the tavern-keeping village Jew was a Hasidic folktale trope exaggerating a relatively rare profession.

But no. In the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, even a century after it was dissolved, the ratio of taverns to people was about 1:~200 (give or take a factor of 2) and the tavern-keepers were disproportionately Jewish - for centuries