Lisa explores the pressures on Jewish breadwinners in Max
NARRATOR: Lisa, backgrounding/commenting. (Quoting Sachar p214) "The typical [Jewish] breadwinner [in the Pale of Settlement], driven fanatic in his efforts to provide for a family, undertook any kind of exhausting and degrading work; he bore, if necessary, the insults and browbeatings of the peasant or local magnate as long as his work led at least to a minimal degree of independence." /17/
Relations beween the Polish nobility (magnates) and Eastern European Jews are far beyond our scope. Suffice for our purposes to note their influence still existed but was seriously diminished in this time and place.
As for peasants, there is no available evidence that they abused Wysokie Jews.
NARRATOR: Even with ongoing political and religious oppression, many Jews consciously sought financial independence. The economic relationship between Jew and Gentile was not, as the above statement suggests, necessarily a self-deprecating or humiliating one. The writer [Sachar] is referring specifically to the Jews of the mid-nineteenth century – in fact, conditions of poverty and persecution had worsened considerably by the time of Max's generation. In Max's objective description of a typical business transaction between Jews and Gentiles, much pride and confidence is displayed. The fact that the success of such a venture was more dependent upon the turns of fate rather than the intelligence of man was merely an acknowledgment of the unremitting realities of existence.
We are left with a seeming paradox: During Max's time in Wysokie, anti-Semitism was described as rampant in the Pale of Settlement, pumped up by the May Laws of 1882. Yet "typical" transactions are described in terms of notable mutual- and self-respect. One possibility is that rabid anti-Semitism did not actually reach Wysokie. Another: anti-Semitism was prevalent everywhere, but could be set aside in dealings between Jews and Gentiles who were neighbors in Wysokie and depended on each other.