At word that Jacob Frank has secretly stationed himself for the duration of the Kamieniec disputation at her father’s house in Rohatyn, Hayah takes her youngest child, packs a trunk, and sets off from Lanckoroń to Rohatyn. It is hot, the harvest will begin soon; slowly, gently, waves make their way across the golden fields of crops that stretch out past the horizon, and it looks as though the whole earth, soft and gold, were sighing. Hayah is wearing a light-colored dress and a cerulean veil. Her baby daughter sits in her lap. Hayah sits up straight and calm in the carriage, breastfeeding the little one. A couple of dapple-gray horses draw a light coach covered in a linen tarpaulin. To all appearances, it is transporting a wealthy Jewish woman on her way somewhere. The peasant women stop and bring their hands up to their eyes in order to see the woman better. Hayah, as soon as she meets their gaze, gives a little smile. One of the women reflexively crosses herself; Hayah cannot tell if it is at the sight of a Jewish woman or of a woman with a child wearing a blue veil.
Hayah passes her daughter to a servant and runs straight to her father, who stands up from his accounts as soon as he sees her and starts to hem and haw with happiness. She leans into his beard and breathes in its familiar fragrance—coffee and tobacco, the safest smell in the world, or so it seems to Hayah. Soon the whole house has come running—her brother Yehuda and his wife, petite as a little girl, with pretty green eyes, and their children, and the servants, and Hryćko, who is now called Hayim and who lives next door, and also the neighbors. It gets noisy, and Hayah sets out her traveling baskets, takes out the gifts she’s brought. Only once she has fulfilled this pleasant duty and eaten the chicken broth that is daily fed to Jacob—chicken feathers float through the kitchen—can she look in on the guest.
Hayah goes up to Jacob and takes a good look at his sun-darkened face, where after a moment’s seriousness the ironic smile she knows so well appears.
“You’ve aged, but you’re still beautiful.”
“And you’ve gotten all the more handsome because you’ve lost weight. Your wife must not be giving you anything to eat.”
They embrace like brother and sister, but Jacob’s hand gently slides over Hayah’s lean back, as though caressing her.
“I had no choice,” says Jacob, and takes a step back. He fixes his shirt, which has slipped out from under his galligaskins.
“You did the right thing by running. Once we’ve made our deal with the bishops, you’ll return like a king,” says Hayah, taking his hands.
“They wanted to kill me in Salonika, and they want to kill me here.”
“Because they’re afraid of you. But that is your great strength.”
“I won’t come back here again. I have a house and a vineyard. I’ll study the Scriptures . . .”
Hayah bursts out laughing, and she laughs sincerely, joyfully, with her whole body.
“I can see it already . . . studying the Scriptures . . . ,” she says, catching her breath and unpacking the books and teraphim from her small trunk. Among the statuettes there is one that is special; it is ayelet ahuvim, the favorite doe—a deer figurine carved out of ivory. Jacob takes it in his hand and looks it over, rather inattentively, and then he reads the titles of the books Hayah has set out on the table.
“You figured it would be some techinot, some sort of women’s supplications, no?” Hayah says, flicking her skirt, setting the white feathers swirling across the floor.
Yente, who is never far, watches Hayah.
Who is Hayah? And are there two Hayahs? When she goes through the kitchen in the morning carrying a little bowl of onion, when she wipes the sweat from her brow with her hand, furrowing her forehead, where a vertical wrinkle appears—then she is a matriarch, an eldest daughter who has taken on the obligations of a mother. As she goes she stomps her boots, and you can hear her throughout the whole house, and then she is the daytime Hayah, sunny and bright. During prayers she becomes a zogerke, a reciter who helps women who can’t read, or can’t read well, to orient themselves during the service, to figure out which prayer to say when. She can be overbearing. The menace of her furrowed brow tamps down all disobedience. Everyone, even her father, fears her quick steps, her shouting when she disciplines the children, when she fights with the man with the cart who brought two sacks of flour from the mill with holes in them, or her rage when she throws plates, to the despair of the servants. How did it come about that Hayah was granted so much license?
It is said in the Zohar that all females on earth dwell within the mystery of the Shekhinah.
This is the only possible way to understand Hayah’s becoming this gloomy woman with disheveled hair, sloppy clothing, an absent gaze. Her face ages in the blink of an eye, as wrinkles break over her face, as she furrows her brow and tightens her lips. It is dusk already, and the house has fallen into splotches of light cast by the lamps and candles. Hayah’s face loses its features, those angry eyes are covered now by heavy lids, and her face swells and droops and becomes ugly, like the face of a sick old woman. Hayah is barefoot, and her steps are heavy as she makes her way through the hall to the room where they await her. She touches the walls with her fingers as though she were really the Virgin without Eyes. The assembled have filled the room with incense, burning sage and Turkish herbs; the air gets thick, and Hayah starts to speak. Whoever has seen this happen once will forever feel strange about seeing her again by day, shredding the cabbage.
Why did Shorr give his beloved daughter the name Hayah? And how did he know that this baby, born early in the morning in a stuffy room where water was steaming in huge pots on the stove, in an attempt to heat the house in the cold January winter, would become his beloved daughter, the most brilliant of children? Was it because she was conceived first, of his best seed, at the pinnacle of his strength? When their bodies were smooth, elastic and clean, unstained, and their minds were full of good faith, not yet broken by anything? And yet the girl had been born lifeless, not breathing, and the silence that followed the drama of labor was like that of the grave. He had been afraid the tiny thing would die. He was terrified of the death he had no doubt was already encircling their home. Only after the midwife had availed herself of some whispered spells did the child start to cough and then cry. And so the first word that had come to Elisha’s mind in connection with this child was hai—“to live.” Hayim is life, but not vegetable life, not mere physical life, but rather the kind that permits prayer, thought, and feeling.
“VaYitzer haShem Elohim et haAdam Afar min haAdama, vaYipah beApav Nishmat Hayim, baYehi haAdam leNefesh Hayah,” Elisha recited as he saw the child. Then God made man from the dust of the earth and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (nishmat hayim), making man a living being (nefesh hayah).
And then Shorr felt like God.
The shapes of the new letters
The leather in which the book is bound is new and of good quality—smooth, and fragrant. Jacob takes pleasure in touching its spine, and he realizes that it is rare to see a new book, as if it were only the older ones that could be trusted and consulted. He has such a book, with which he’s never parted—everyone should have one like that. But his is a manuscript, a much-read copy of And I Came this Day unto the Fountain, which he always has in his luggage. It is a little haggard now, if a stack of pages sewn together can be described like an old man. The title page has been damaged in several places, the paper yellowed from the sun when he left it out on a windowsill. What negligence! His father always hit him on the hands for such slips and negligence.
This new volume is a thick book. The bookbinder has pressed the pages in tight, so that when it’s opened, they crack like bones stretched too violently, resisting. Jacob opens it at random and holds it forcefully so that the strange book does not shut in his face while his eyes wander along the string of letters from right to left, but then he recollects that here you have to go in reverse, from left to right, and his eyes struggle to perform this circus trick. Before long—although he does not understand a word—
he is finding pleasure in this movement from left to right, as though against the current, in spite of the world. He thinks perhaps this other direction of movement is the fundamental thing, that this is what he ought to study and to practice: this gesture initiated by the left hand but completed by the right; a revolution in which the right arm retreats before the left, and day begins with sunrise, with light, in order to submerge itself at last in darkness.
He examines the shapes of the letters and worries he will not be able to remember them. There is one that looks a little bit like tzadi, and another that seems close to samech, and here is one that is kind of like qof, but not exactly—it’s close, but not quite, and maybe the meanings, too, are close but not quite, edging just near enough to those he knows to let him make out a blurry world.
“This is their collected Geschichte,” Shorr says to Jacob in his rumpled shirt. “Something like our ‘Jacob’s Eye,’ with a little bit about everything, about animals, places, it has different stories, some about spirits. It was written by a priest from right here in Rohatyn, can you believe that?”
Now Jacob takes a closer look at the book.
“I’ll hire a teacher for you,” Elisha Shorr says, and stuffs his pipe for him. “Now listen. We certainly didn’t go all the way to Smyrna to collect you just to let you go now. All those people over there in Kamieniec are going out to fight in your stead for what we want to accomplish. You are leading them, even though you can’t go there yourself. But you cannot pull out now.”
Every evening Hayah kneels before her father and rubs his legs with a mixture of foul-smelling onion juice and something else that fills the house with the smell of herbs all night. But that’s not all: Hayah passes her child off to the women and shuts herself in with the men in her father’s room, and there they confer. Jacob is surprised by this at first. It isn’t a sight he’s used to. In Turkey and Wallachia women know their place, and religious scholars keep their distance from them, for women’s inherent connection with the lowest world of matter introduces chaos into the world of the spirit. But it doesn’t work that way among true believers. Since they are always on the road, they all would perish were it not for their women.
“Ah,” says Elisha, as if reading Jacob’s mind, “if she were a man, she would be my wisest son.”
That first night, according to the old custom, Hayah comes to Jacob’s bed. Her body is delicate, if a little bony, with its long thighs and rough mound. Custom dictates they have sexual intercourse without any unnecessary caresses and without words. But Jacob rubs her slightly convex belly for a long time, each time running his hand over her navel, which seems very warm to him. She takes his member boldly in her hand and gently, almost inattentively, strokes it. Hayah wants to know how the acceptance of the Turkish religion occurs, what they do instead of baptism, if you have to prepare for it somehow, how much it cost them, whether Jacob’s wife also converted to Islam and whether women have it better there than here. Did his decision to convert really protect him? Did he think he was out of reach of the Polish authorities? And did he know that for Jews—and for her, too—such a conversion would be extremely difficult? And that she believes him, that all the Shorrs would follow him if he would like to lead them. And also: Has he heard all the stories people are telling about him and that she herself has been spreading among the women? Finally Jacob, tired of responding, lies down on top of her and enters her with force, then quickly slides off her, spent.
In the morning, Jacob smiles at her as they are eating. He notices that Hayah is always squinting, which has brought about a web of little wrinkles around her eyes. Elisha is planning to send her to Lwów, to Asher, who has moved there, and who is the best at matching eyes with reading glasses.
Hayah dresses modestly—only once has Jacob seen her in formal attire, on the first day of his studies here, when lots of people from the neighboring areas came to the Rohatyn beth midrash. For that she wore a light blue shawl over her gray dress and put earrings in her ears. She is serious and imperturbable.
Then he sees an unexpected scene of tenderness: her father raises his hand to stroke her face, and Hayah, in a calm, slow movement, lays her head against his chest, in the undulations of his lush, gray beard. Not even really knowing why, Jacob looks away in shame.
Of Krysa and his plans for the future
Krysa, son of Nussen, has a scar on his face. One cheek is sliced from top to bottom by a straight line, which gives the impression of some sort of hidden symmetry, an impression so disturbing that anyone who sees him for the first time finds himself unable to take his eyes off him, until, seeking but not finding any order, he turns away in a disgust of which he may not even be entirely aware. Yet Krysa is the most intelligent person in Podolia, highly educated and prescient. At first glance you can’t see that. And that is good for him.
He has learned that he cannot expect sympathy from others. He must specify exactly what he wants—ask, demand, negotiate. If it weren’t for that scar on his face, it would be him in Jacob’s place right now, this he knows for sure.
Krysa feels they ought to be independent within Christianity. That is his position now, before the disputation, and that is what he’s aiming for as he carries on his misunderstanding-filled conversations with Bishop Dembowski behind his brothers’ backs. Because Krysa is convinced he knows better.
“We have to keep our distance from everyone, be right on the edge and do our own thing,” he says.
Not too Jewish, not too Christian, that would be the place for them, where they would be free from the control and greed of priests and rabbis alike. And furthermore: he believes that despite being persecuted by their own kind, by Jews, they nonetheless do not cease to be Jewish, even as they draw closer to Christians. They appeal, Krysa and the Jewish heretics, for support, protection, and care; they reach out with the gesture of a child, putting out an innocent hand to bring about an accord. The Christians accept them sympathetically.
Yet the most important thing for Krysa is not this, for as is written in Yevamot 63—and even though he is against the Talmud, he cannot keep from reading it—“Any man who does not have his own land is not a man.” And so to receive from the lords a piece of land, to settle down and cultivate the land in relative tranquility—that would be the best thing for everyone. The Jews would no longer persecute them, the true believers would work their land every day, could engage peasants to work it, too. They wouldn’t even have to be baptized. This vision unfurls over the table in the smoke-filled room, for as the wind blows it forces the air back down the chimney. Its howling echoes their discussion.
“Never under any lord,” someone interjects, and Krysa recognizes Leyb Hershkowicz of Satanów in the darkness.
“Mrs. Kossakowska would take us in on her properties . . . ,” Moshe from Podhajce starts.
Krysa lunges forward, his face contorted in anger.
“You want to tie the nooses around your own necks? The nobility will do with us whatever they please, and no laws can touch them. Two generations, and we’ll be just like those peasants.”
Some voice their agreement.
“With the bishop, too, we’ll be like peasants,” says Moshe.
Then Shorr’s eldest son, Shlomo, who has until now sat motionless, staring at the tips of his boots, says:
“The only option is to go to the king, to take none but royal land, that’s what Jacob says, and I agree with him. Under the king we’ll be safe.”
Krysa’s face contorts again. He says:
“You’re so stupid. A person extends a hand to folks like you, and you would yank them right down, wanting everything all at once. You have to bargain slowly.”
“And create more problems than you bargained for,” somebody snarls.
“You’ll see, all of you. The bishop and I have an understanding.”
16.
Of the year 1757 and of the establishment of certain age-old truths over the summer at the Kamieniec Podolski disputation
In Moliw
da’s settlement, near Craiova in Wallachia, people believe that this year, 1757, is the year of the Last Judgment. The names of new angels are invoked daily so that they will appear as witnesses. It has not occurred to anyone that if they go on like this it may take many thousands of years—an eternity—since the number of angels is infinite. Those who pray believe the world can no longer be saved, that they must simply prepare for the end, which is imminent. The Last Judgment is like childbirth: once it’s under way, it can’t be called off or put on hold. But the brothers and sisters whom Moliwda has left behind for good also believe that this judgment isn’t as we might expect—it is not earthly, with angels’ trumpets, a great scale to weigh the deeds of men, and the archangel’s sword. Instead, it occurs almost unnoticeably, without extravagance. In a sense it happens behind our backs and in our absence. We have been judged in that strange year of 1757, in absentia and—this is certain—without any possibility of appeal. Our human ignorance is no excuse.
Evidently the world has become unbearable not only on the vast, open plains of Podolia, but here, too, in Wallachia, where it is warmer, where there is the possibility of vineyards. It needed some sort of ending, some resolution. Besides, war broke out last year. Yente, who sees everything, knows that this war will last for seven years and will tip the scales that measure human life. The shift is not yet noticeable, but the angels have begun their cleaning: they take the rug of the world in both hands and shake it out, letting the dust fly. Soon they’ll roll it up again.
The rabbis are losing the debate in Kamieniec, badly, and this is because no one wants to listen to their convoluted explanations when the accusations are so simple and precise. Reb Krysa of Nadwórna becomes a hero when he manages to make a laughingstock of the Talmud. He stands and lifts a finger in the air.
The Books of Jacob Page 37
