Hana is a trusting person. Trustingly she recites every night before she goes to bed the Kriat Shema al haMita, to protect herself from ill presentiments, nightmares, and the evil spirits that might threaten her and her children, particularly weak as she’s been since giving birth. She addresses the four angels as she would friendly neighbors, requesting that they watch over the house while she is sleeping. Her thoughts get away from her, however, and the summoned angels take shape though she tries her hardest not to picture them. Their figures lengthen, tremble like candle flames, and just before she falls into a deep sleep, Hana sees with astonishment that they resemble knives, forks, and spoons, the kind Jacob has told her of, silver and plated in gold. They hover over her, neither guarding her nor ready to slice her into little pieces and consume her.
18.
Of how Ivanie, a little village on the Dniester, becomes a republic
Ivanie is not far from the fault that is the bed of the Dniester River. The village is arrayed along the Transnistrian plateau in such a way that it looks like dishes set out on a table, too close to the table’s edge. It could all come clattering down with a single careless movement.
Through the middle of the village runs a river, siphoned off every few yards by primitive valves that produce little ponds and pools. Ducks and geese were once kept here. All that’s left of them now are a few white feathers: the village was abandoned after the last plague. The true believers have resided here since August, with the Shorrs’ financial support and the benevolent bishop’s blessing, since the village lies on his landholdings. As soon as the safe conduct was issued by the king, people began to make their way to Ivanie in carts and on foot—from the south, from Turkey, from the north, from the towns of Podolia. They are, by and large, the same people who’d camped out on the border after being expelled from Poland, people who discovered, on finally being permitted to return home, that they no longer had homes. Their jobs had been given to others, and their houses had been looted and occupied, and if they wanted them back, they’d have to come up with some way of asserting their property rights, by law or by force. Some lost everything, especially those who made their living by trade and had left behind market stalls and stock. Those people have nothing now. Shlomo of Nadwórna and his wife, Wittel, belong to this group. Shlomo and Wittel owned workshops in Nadwórna and Kopczyńce that made duvets. All winter, women would come and pluck feathers, overseen by Wittel, who is clever and deft. Then they would sew the warm quilts, the down light and fragrant, the coverings of Turkish damask ornately patterned in pink, all of such high quality that they’d get all kinds of commissions from palaces and estates. But all this was lost in the tumult. Feathers were strewn across Podolia by the wind, the damask trampled or thieved. The roof of the house caught fire. Now it’s uninhabitable.
Peeking out from the black and white winter landscape, the little dwellings of Ivanie are overgrown with river reeds. A road winds between them, traveling down the pocked, uneven yards that are strewn with the remnants of abandoned plows and rakes, shards of pots.
The village is run by Osman of Czernowitz, who posts guards at its entrance, to prevent undesirables from straying in. Sometimes the entrance is blocked by carts. The horses stomp cavities into the frozen ground.
Newcomers to the village must first go to Osman and leave all their money and valuables with him. Osman is Ivanie’s steward, and he has an iron lockbox where he keeps the common holdings. His wife, Hava, Jacob’s sister, manages the donations that come from true believers across Podolia and the Turkish lands—among these are clothing, shoes, tools, pots, glass, and even children’s toys. It is Hava who assigns the morning’s work to the men of the village. These men will take the cart to get potatoes from a farmer; those will go for cabbage.
The community has its own cows and a hundred chickens. The chickens are a new acquisition—the sounds of coop-building still fill the air, the pounding of the perches being hammered in. Past the little houses lie community gardens. The gardens are pretty, though there isn’t much in them yet: the community arrived in August, too late to plant. Vines cover the roofs of the houses, untended, bearing sweet little grapes. There were some pumpkins to harvest. There was an abundance of plums as well—small, dark, and sweet—and trees that bulged with apples. Now that the cold has set in, everything’s turned gray, and the winter theater of putrefaction has commenced.
People arrived every day throughout the autumn, mainly from Wallachia and the Turkish lands, but also from Czernowitz, Jassy, even Bucharest. All thanks to Osman—it is he who brings in their co-religionists, especially those subjects of the sultan who have already converted to Islam. These differ only slightly from the local Podolian Jews: they’re a bit more tanned, more vibrant, readier to dance. Their songs are a little livelier. Languages, clothing, and headdress mix. Some wear turbans, like Osman and his plentiful family, others fur shtreimels. Some sport Turkish fezzes, and the northerners don four-pointed caps. The children embrace their new playmates, those from Podolia and those from the east all chasing each other merrily around the ponds. When winter comes, they chase each other around the ice. Their quarters are tight. For now, they crowd inside their little dwellings with their children and all their possessions, and even so they’re very cold, because the one thing they do not have in Ivanie is wood to burn. In the mornings the little panes of glass in the windows are covered in frost in patterns that innocently imitate the advancements of spring—leaves, buds, ferns.
Hayim of Kopczyńce and Osman allocate housing to newcomers. Hava, who’s in charge of provisions, distributes blankets and pots, shows them where they can cook, where they can wash up—there is even a mikvah at the end of town. She explains that here everyone eats together and cooks together. All work is communal: the women take care of the sewing, the men tend to the buildings and go in search of fuel. Only children and the elderly are entitled to milk.
And so the women launder, cook, sew, feed. There has already been one birth here, of a boy they named Jacob. Meanwhile the men head out in the mornings on business, seeking trade—earning money. In the evenings they convene. A couple of adolescents make up Ivanie’s postal service, delivering packages on horseback, going all the way to Kamieniec if need be, sneaking across the border to Turkey, to Czernowitz. From there the post goes on.
Yesterday the other Hayim, the one from Busk, Nahman’s brother, brought Ivanie a herd of goats, dispensing them evenly around the various households—there is much rejoicing over this, for there had not been enough milk for the children. The younger women assigned to the kitchen leave their offspring in care of the older women, who have assembled in one of the cottages what they call “kindergarten.”
It is the end of November, and everyone in Ivanie is eager for Jacob’s arrival. Lookouts have been sent over to the Turkish side. The younger boys stake out the river’s high banks, monitor the fords. A solemn silence has descended upon the village, everything ready since yesterday. Jacob’s abode glistens. Over the miserable floor of tamped-down clay they’ve unfurled kilims. Snow-white curtains hang in the windows.
Finally there are whistles and whoops from along the riverbank. He is here.
At the entrance to the village, Osman of Czernowitz awaits, suffused with solemn joy. On seeing them, he starts to sing in a strong and beautiful voice: “Dio mio, Baruchiah . . .” and the melody is taken up by the excited crowd that is there to greet him. The procession that comes around the bend looks like a Turkish formation. In its center is a carriage, and excited eyes seek out Jacob—but Jacob is the man riding ahead on the gray horse, dressed like a Turk in a turban and a fur-lined light blue coat with broad sleeves. His beard is long and black, which ages him. When Jacob dismounts, he touches his forehead to Osman’s, and then Hayim’s, and finally he lays his hands on their wives’ heads. Osman leads him to his house, which is the largest in Ivanie; the yard has been cleared, the entrance lined with spruce. But Jacob points at a little hut nearby, an old shed slapped together out of clay. He says
he wants to live alone, anywhere, it doesn’t matter where, that hut in the yard there would work fine.
“But you are a hakham,” says Hayim. “How could you possibly live alone in a hut?”
Jacob insists.
“I’m a simple man,” he says.
Osman doesn’t really get it, but he rushes to arrange for the shed to be tidied up for Jacob all the same.
Of the sleeves of Sabbatai Tzvi’s holy shirt
Wittel has thick curls the color of the grass in autumn. She is tall, with a good build. She holds her head high. She has appointed herself to Jacob’s service. She glides between Ivanie’s houses, graceful, jocular, flushed. She is witty. Since Jacob’s hut is in their yard, she has taken on the role of protector, at least until the arrival of his rightful wife, Hana, and their children. For now, Wittel has a monopoly on Jacob. Everybody is always wanting something from him, always pestering him, and Wittel is the one who shoos them away. Sometimes people come down just to look at where the Lord lives, and then Wittel goes and beats carpets on the fence and blocks the entrance with her body.
“The Lord is resting. The Lord is praying. The Lord is delivering his blessing to our people.”
By day everyone works, and Jacob can often be seen amongst them, with his shirt unbuttoned—for Jacob never gets cold—as he chops wood in a frenzy or unloads carts and carries bags of flour. Only when the sun sets do they all gather for the teachings. It used to be that the men and women heard the teachings separately, but the Lord has introduced a different custom into Ivanie. Now the teachings are for all adults.
The elders sit on benches while the youth squeeze in along the bundles of grain. The best part of the lessons is the start of them, because Jacob always tells funny stories that make them all burst out laughing. Jacob likes dirty jokes.
“In my youth,” he begins, “I went to one village where they had never seen a Jew before. I drove up to the inn where all the farmhands and wenches went. The wenches were weaving, and the farmhands were filling their heads with all sorts of stories. One of them spotted me and launched into insults, and kept on mocking me. He started telling a story about the Jewish God and the Christian God, how the Christian hit the Jew smack-dab in the kisser. This seemed to really crack them up, because they belly-laughed like the guy was a first-class wit. So I told them one about Muhammad and Saint Peter. Muhammad says to Peter, ‘I got a good idea to rut you, good and Greek.’ Peter didn’t want to, but Muhammad was strong, and he tied Peter to a tree and did his thing, Peter howling how his backside was burning, how he’d take him as his saint if he’d only just stop. Well, that little story didn’t go over so well, and the farmhands and the wenches cast their eyes down to the ground, but then the more aggressive one said to me, as if to make peace, ‘Let’s call a truce. We won’t say nothing on your God, and you don’t say nothing on ours. And let Saint Peter alone.’”
The men chuckle, and the women cast their eyes to the ground, but in fact they all like it that Jacob, a saint and a scholar, is down-to-earth and doesn’t put on airs and graces. They like that he lives on his own in that little hut, and that he wears regular clothes. They love him for it. Especially the women. The women of the true faith are confident and gregarious. They like to flirt, and what Jacob teaches pleases them: that they can forget the Turkish customs dictating that they should be shut up inside their homes. He says Ivanie needs women as much as men—for different things, but it needs them all the same.
Jacob also teaches that from now on there is nothing that belongs to just one person; no one has things of his or her own. If anybody needs something, he is to request it of the person who had it last, and his request shall inevitably be granted. Alternatively those in want can go to the steward Osman or to Hava, and whatever their lacks—if their shoes fall apart, or their shirt comes unraveled, or the like—they will be attended to.
“Even without any money?” shouts one of the women, and the other women are quick to respond: “In return for those pretty eyes . . .”
And everyone laughs.
Not everyone is on board with the rule that they must give up their belongings. Yeruhim and Hayim from Warsaw keep saying that it can’t last, that people are greedy by nature and will just want more and more and try to turn a profit off the things that they receive. But others, like Nahman and Moshe, say they’ve seen this kind of community work before, and they stick up for Jacob. Nahman in particular is a big supporter of the idea. He can often be found holding forth on the subject in the households of the village:
“This was exactly how it used to be in the world before there were laws. Everything was held in common, everything belonged to everyone, and everyone had enough, and the commandments ‘Thou shalt not steal’ and ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ didn’t exist because if anybody had said them, nobody else would have understood. ‘What is stealing?’ they would have asked. ‘What is adultery?’ We should live in the same way, because the old law no longer applies to us. There have been three: Sabbatai, Baruchiah, and now Jacob. He is the greatest of them, and he is our salvation. We must rejoice that our time is the time of salvation, that the old orders no longer apply.”
During Hanukkah, Jacob distributes pieces of Sabbatai Tzvi’s shirt as relics. This is a great event for the entire community. It is the shirt that the First One threw to Halabi’s son; Shorr recently purchased both its sleeves from Halabi’s son’s granddaughter—he paid a pretty price for them, too. Now bits of the material—each of them smaller than a fingernail—make their way into amulets, little cherrywood boxes, pockets, and leather pouches worn around the neck. The rest of the shirt is placed in the box at Osman’s. It will be given to those who have yet to arrive.
Of the working of Jacob’s touch
Moshe from Podhajce, who knows everything, sits in the warmest spot, among the women weaving. Clouds of fragrant smoke rise toward the wooden ceiling.
“You all know,” he says, “the prayer that talks about Eloha encountering the demon of illness, who used to set up shop in people’s extremities and so make them sick. But Eloha says to the demon, ‘Just as you can’t drink down the whole sea, so you will not do any further harm to mankind.’ Just like that. And Jacob, our Lord, is like Eloha: he, too, can converse with the demon of illnesses. And all he has to do is give him a dirty look, and off the demon goes.”
This makes sense to them. For there is an endless procession of people standing at the door to Jacob’s shed, and if Wittel permits them inside, into the presence of the Lord, Jacob will lay his hands on the heads of the suffering, moving his thumb back and forth over their foreheads. Sometimes he blows in their faces. It almost always helps. They say that he has hot hands that can melt away all maladies, any variety of pain.
Jacob’s fame quickly spreads through the vicinity, and even local peasants end up coming to Ivanie (to “call on the ne’er-do-wells,” as they put it). They’re suspicious of these oddballs who are neither Jews nor Gypsies. But Jacob rests his hands on their heads, too. In exchange they leave eggs, chickens, apples, grain. Hava tucks everything away in her chamber and distributes it evenly later on. Every child receives an egg for Shabbat. Hava says “for Shabbat,” although Jacob has told them not to keep the Shabbat. All the same, unable to get used to this new edict, they still mark the passage of time from Shabbat to Shabbat.
In February something strange occurs, a real miracle, but of this Moshe knows next to nothing. Jacob has forbidden talk of it. Hayim, on the other hand, witnessed it. A Podolian girl grew very ill—she was dying by the time she was brought in. Her father let out a terrible howl, tearing out his beard in despair: she’d always been his most beloved child. They sent for Jacob. When he arrived, he shouted at them to be quiet. Then he holed up with the girl for a while. When he left, she was cured. He ordered her to be dressed in white.
“What did you do to her?” asked Shlomo, Wittel’s husband.
“I had my dealings with her, and she got better,” said Jacob. And he refu
sed to say any more on the matter.
Shlomo, a polite and serious man, did not at first understand what he had just been told. He couldn’t quite recover from it after. That evening Jacob smiled at him as though perceiving Shlomo’s torment, and he reached out and tugged him gently by the nape of the neck, like a girl might do to a boy. He blew into his eyes and told him not to tell anyone. Then he went off and paid him no more mind.
But Shlomo did tell his wife, swearing her to secrecy. And somehow—no one knew how—within a few days all of Ivanie had heard the secret. Words are like lizards, able to elude all containment.
Of the women’s talk while plucking chickens
First, that the face of the biblical Jacob served as the model when God was creating the angels’ human faces.
Second, that the moon has Jacob’s face.
Third, that you can engage another man to give you children if you can’t get pregnant by your husband.
They recall the story of Issachar, son of Jacob and Leah: Leah engaged Jacob to sleep with her and then bore him a son. She compensated Jacob with a mandrake found by Reuben in the desert, much desired by the infertile Rachel. (Then Rachel ate that mandrake and bore Jacob his son Joseph.) All this is in the Scriptures.
Fourth, that you can get pregnant by Jacob without him even brushing up against your pinkie finger.
Fifth, that when God created the angels, right away they opened up their mouths and praised Him. And, too, when God created Adam, the angels piped right up: “Is this the man we are to worship?” “No,” replied God. “This is a thief. He will steal fruit from my tree.” So when Noah was born, the angels asked excitedly, “Is this the man we are to praise to high heaven?” And God replied in consternation, “No, this is just an ordinary drunk.” When Abraham was born, they asked again, but God, who had grown dejected, replied, “No, this one was not born circumcised and will only later convert to my faith.” When Isaac was born, the angels asked, still hopeful, “Is it this one?” “No,” replied God, terribly displeased. “This one loves his elder son, who hates me.” But when Jacob was born, they asked their question once more, and this time, the response was, “Yes, this is he.”
The Books of Jacob Page 48
