Who followed her husband, the tailor, And Beilke, whose husband, a Gentile, Is at the Academy there, And Berele, the wheeler-dealer, Who seems to have been there forever; Oh yes—and the good old rabbi, He, too, has now traveled to Moscow And brought back all sorts of fine presents, And has carried on for a year About the wonders of Moscow, Where life is so good for the Jews. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And everyone’s eager to tell you How wonderful life is in Moscow. 18 Some of the immigrants engaged in traditional Mercurian trades. The near- total destruction of the prerevolutionary entrepreneurial class and the introduction of NEP in 1921 created extraordinary new opportunities for the four shopkeepers and Fat Doba’s husband the tailor, among others. In 1926, Jews constituted 1.8 percent of the Soviet population and 20 percent of all private traders (66 percent in Ukraine and 90 percent, in Belorussia). In Petrograd (in 1923), the share of private entrepreneurs employing hired labor was 5.8 times higher among Jews than in the rest of the population. In 1924 in Moscow, Jewish “Nepmen” owned 75.4 percent of all drugstores, 54.6 percent of all fabric stores, 48.6 percent of all jewelry stores, 39.4 percent of all dry goods stores, 36 percent of all lumber warehouses, 26.3 percent of all shoe stores, 19.4 percent of all furniture stores, 17.7 percent of all tobacco shops, and 14.5 percent of all clothing stores. The new “Soviet bourgeoisie” was Jewish to a very considerable extent. At the bottom of the “Nepman” category, Jews made up 40 percent of all Soviet artisans (35 percent of Leningrad tailors, for example); at the top, they constituted 33 percent of the wealthiest Moscow entrepreneurs (the holders of the two highest categories of trading and industrial licenses). Twenty-five percent of all Jewish entrepreneurs in Moscow belonged to this group (as compared to 8 percent for the city’s non-Jewish Nepmen). 19 The Jewish preeminence in the NEP economy was reflected in their prominence in NEP-era representations of “bourgeois danger.” Soviet literature