The Holy Church has already drawn attention to the falseness of the accusations of the use of Christian blood by Jews. And while we have already met with many misfortunes, still another befell us when this occurred in Wojsławice, yet not through any fault of our own, but rather because we were used by others for their own ends.
Being eternally grateful to our generous protectors, i.e., Bishop Kajetan Sołtyk, as well as Andrzej Joseph Załuski, who have kindly taken us in under their roofs, and also Katarzyna Kossakowska, our great benefactress, we must defend ourselves against every insinuation that it was we who started the accusations against the Jews of letting Christian blood, and let it be known that the terrible slaughter that followed—which went against the teachings of the Holy Church—occurred without any intentional participation on our part, for we remain humble servants of the Catholic faith.
Of how the interregnum translates into the traffic patterns of the carriages on Krakowskie Przedmieście
As there suddenly aren’t enough lodgings for everyone in Warsaw, the traffic on Krakowskie Przedmieście becomes relentless. Every powerful personage has come here in his carriage, creating an instant jam and crush.
Agnieszka, having learned how, lets her mistress’s blood, but recently this hasn’t helped. By day, Kossakowska does all right, but at night she cannot sleep; she has hot flashes and heart palpitations. The doctor has already been called thrice. Maybe she should stay at home, in Busk or Krystynopol? Where is Katarzyna Kossakowska’s home, exactly?
As soon as the king died, she, too, raced to the capital and there wasted no time in plotting with Sołtyk to back Prince Frederick Christian as the new ruler. The bishop’s carriage, in which they are now going to Prince Branicki’s for more political plotting, is stuck on Krakowskie Przedmieście, right by Świętokrzyska. Kossakowska sits opposite the heavy, sweaty Sołtyk and speaks in her low, almost masculine voice:
“How can you not lose faith in the order of things in this country, looking at our beloved husbands, brothers, and fathers who hold our fate in their hands? Just take a closer look at them, Your Excellency. One busies himself with newfangled alchemy and seeks the philosopher’s stone, another is drawn to painting pictures, a third spends his nights in the capital and gambles away all the money from his estates in Podolia, and still another—just look at him!—is an equestrian who squanders his fortune on Arabian colts. I haven’t even mentioned those who write poems rather than bothering with our accounts. Those who pomade their wigs while their sabers rust . . .”
The bishop doesn’t seem to be listening to her. He looks through a crack in the window; they are now before the Church of the Holy Cross. He is worried because he is once again in arrears. Debts—they seem to be the painfully real, recurring concern in the bishop’s life.
“. . . it often seems to us that we are Poland,” Kossakowska continues stubbornly. “But they are Poland, too. For although this peasant who was just given a flogging does not even know that he, too, belongs to the Republic, nor does that Jew who handles your business dealings have any awareness of it, and perhaps he would not even wish to admit it, nonetheless we are all traveling in the same carriage, and we ought to care about each other—to take care of each other—not rip scraps from one another’s mouths like hostile dogs. Like right now. Do we want to let ourselves be ruled by Russia’s ambassadors? Let them impose their king on us?”
Kossakowska yammers on, all the way to Miodowa, and Sołtyk silently marvels at her inexhaustible energy, but the bishop does not know what Agnieszka knows: that because of the curse in Wojsławice, Kossakowska cannot sleep, and every night she flagellates herself. If Bishop Sołtyk had by some miracle the opportunity to undo her lace top and pull up the linen undershirt to reveal her back, he would see the effects of that insomnia—chaotically scattered bloody swathes, the components of some unrealized inscription.
Pinkas edits the Documenta Judaeos
Rabbi Rapaport is a tall, sturdily built man with a gray beard that splits in two and flows down over his chest as though in two icicles. He speaks in a quiet voice, and in this simple way, he subordinates people, since they must make an effort in order to understand his words, which forces them to pay attention. Wherever he appears, he always inspires respect. It will be the same again today, and Hayim haKohen Rapaport, head rabbi of Lwów, will soon be here; he will come in quietly, and yet all eyes will turn to him from around the tables, and everyone will fall silent. Then Pinkas will show him one of the first pamphlets, already put together and sewn, with perfectly evenly cut pages. Although he is slightly older than Rapaport, Pinkas often has the impression that the latter is his father, or even his grandfather. The truth is that holy people have no age; they are born old. Rapaport’s praise means more to Pinkas than any gold ingot. Every word the rabbi says Pinkas commits to memory, and in his mind he plays out any scenes of praise over and over. The rabbi never scolds. When he does not praise, he is silent, and his silence is heavy as a stone.
In the rabbi’s house now there is a kind of extended chancellery. Tables are arranged around the room, and stools, and writing stands, and at them the most important document in existence today is being copied out. His text has already gone to the printer’s, and the first proofs have been returned. Some of the men here are cutting them, others are folding the pages into the small brochure format and gluing onto each pamphlet a thicker cardboard cover that displays the long and complicated title that flows over half the page: Documenta Judaeos in Polonia concernentia ad Acta Metrices suscepta et ex iis fideliteriterum descripta et extradicta. Pinkas played a part in this, by organizing the office here, and, since he also speaks and reads Polish, aiding in the translation. He contributed a great deal to the cause of a certain Zelig, who escaped execution in Żytomierz and walked to Rome to demand justice of the Pope. For the Holy Office in Rome they had to translate into Polish and Hebrew what this Zelig had managed to obtain on his mission, and also to translate into Latin and Hebrew what King Zygmunt III had written in the records of the royal crown in 1592. As well as a letter on behalf of Zelig to the Warsaw nuncio issued by the prefect of the Holy Office, in which it is clearly stated that the Holy Office, after a thorough examination of the question of the accusations of the use of Christian blood in Żytomierz and the alleged ritual murder, asserts that the same are utterly without foundation. And that all further accusations of this kind are to be dismissed, as the letting of Christian blood has no basis in the Jewish religion, nor in the Jewish tradition. Finally, Rapaport, through the intercession of his friends, managed to get a letter from Visconti, the papal nuncio, to Baron Brühl, in which the nuncio confirms that the Jews turned for help to the highest office of the Church, to the Pope, and that the Pope took up their defense against this dire libel.
And it is almost exactly how Pinkas had earlier imagined it, although it rarely happens that imagination so corresponds to reality. (Pinkas is old enough to understand how it works: God only gives us situations we couldn’t have come up with ourselves.)
Rapaport comes in, and Pinkas hands him the newly bound pamphlet. The shadow of a smile passes over the rabbi’s face, though there is one thing Pinkas did not foresee: that the rabbi, out of habit, would open the book from the other side, in the Jewish manner, and that instead of the title page, he would see the very end of it first:
The Holy Office has recently considered all available testimonies that Jews use human blood to prepare their bread, called matzah, and that for this reason they murder children. We firmly state that there are no grounds for such accusations. If such accusations ever arise again, a decision must be made not on the basis of witness statements, but on convincing criminal evidence.
The rabbi looks over these words but doesn’t understand what he is reading. Pinkas, after waiting for a moment, approaches, leans toward him, and starts translating fluently, in a light, quiet, but victorious voice.
Who Pinkas runs into at the market in Lwów
Pinkas is looking at a c
ertain person at the market in Lwów. Dressed like a Christian, with shoulder-length hair that is thin, feathery. He has a white stock tie at his neck, his face is shaved, and aged. Two wrinkles cut vertically down his still-young forehead. Sensing that he is being observed, he gives up the purchase of woolen stockings and tries to disappear into the crowd. But Pinkas sets off after him, brushing aside the vendors. He bumps into a girl with a basket of nuts, but finally he manages to grab the man by the side of his coat.
“Yehuda? Is it you?”
The man turns around reluctantly and looks Pinkas up and down from head to toe.
“Yehuda?” asks Pinkas, with more doubt in his voice this time, and lets the kapota go.
“It is I, Uncle Pinkas,” the man says quietly.
Pinkas’s throat closes up at this. He covers his eyes with his hands.
“What has happened to you? Are you no longer a rabbi in Glinno? What are you wearing? What have you done?”
But his nephew seems dead set against this talk.
“I cannot speak with you, Uncle,” he says. “I have to go—”
“What do you mean, you can’t speak to me?”
The erstwhile rabbi of Glinno turns around and makes to leave, but his path is blocked by peasants leading cows. Pinkas says:
“I’m not letting you get away. You owe me an explanation.”
“There is nothing to explain. Don’t touch me, Uncle. I have nothing to do with you now.”
“No.” Pinkas suddenly understands, and staggers back in horror. “Do you know that you have condemned yourself for all eternity? You’re with them? Have you been baptized, or are you waiting your turn? If your mother had lived to see this, it would have broken her heart.”
Pinkas suddenly, in the middle of the market, begins to cry; his lips curl back into a horseshoe, and sobs shake his skinny body, and tears flow out of his eyes and flood his small, wrinkled face. People look on in curiosity and no doubt think this poor soul has been robbed—that now he’s weeping over some lost groszy. The erstwhile rabbi of Glinno, now Jacob Goliński, glances around uncertainly. He must feel sorry for his relative then, because he goes up to him and gently takes him by the shoulder.
“I know you cannot understand me. I am not a bad person.”
“Satan has laid claim to you, to all of you, you are all worse than Satan himself, never in all my days . . . You are no longer a Jew!”
“Uncle, let’s go over to the gate there . . .”
“And do you know that I lost Gitla, my only daughter, because of all of you? Do you realize?”
“I never saw her there.”
“She’s not there. She’s gone. And you will never find her.”
Then, suddenly, violently, he hits Goliński in the chest, with all his strength, and although he’s big, and strong, Goliński staggers on receiving such a blow.
Pinkas stands on his tiptoes and hisses straight into his face:
“Yehuda, you have plunged a knife into my heart today. But you will come back to us. One day you will come back.”
Then he turns and hurries off between the stalls.
A mirror and ordinary glass
Now Kossakowska manages to obtain, without much trouble at all, permission for husband and wife to meet in Częstochowa. Everyone is busy with politics, with the selection of the next king. The prior of the monastery agrees to improve the conditions of Jacob’s confinement. In the early autumn, with great relief, Hana and Avacha and a sizable group of true believers depart the much-loathed Wojsławice and set out for Częstochowa. Marianna Potocka is angry with both them and Katarzyna. As if it weren’t enough that the town was losing those other Jews, now these are abandoning the larch manor. They leave all the doors wide open, trash on the floor. Where they loaded up their carts there are still some muddy, trampled rags. The only real, lasting testaments to their presence here are the graves, slightly off to the side, under the big elm, marked only with a few haphazard birch crosses and a pile of stones. The grave of Rabbi Moshe of Podhajce, the great Kabbalist and maker of powerful amulets, is the only one that stands out from the rest, thanks to the white pebbles in which it was covered by his wife.
The party arrives in Częstochowa on the 8th of September, 1762. They walk past the walls of the monastery solemnly, beautifully attired, with bouquets of flowers, yellow and purple. The fortress’s crew and the monks are surprised to see them, looking as they do more like a wedding party than the exhausted pilgrims they normally receive. And on the 10th of September, Hana and her husband, whom she has not seen in nearly two years, have intercourse in broad daylight, with the knowledge of everyone in the retinue. This happens in the tower, in the officer’s room, the little windows of which have been carefully covered so that no one else is able to take part in this tikkun, this act that repairs the world. Yet they all feel their hearts fill with the hope that the worst has passed at last, and that now the time has come for them to move forward. A month later, there is an entry in Matuszewski’s hand in the chaotically kept chronicle that on the 8th of October (the Lord has had them definitively do away with the Jewish calendar), Hana and Jacob have conceived a son; this Matuszewski knows from the Lord Himself.
They have rented two homes on the Wieluńskie Przedmieście. The others squeeze into little rooms at inns, but they all stick together. Thus to the north of the monastery a kind of tiny settlement arises constituted solely of true believers, and now Jacob has fresh fruits and vegetables each day, and eggs and meat when he’s not fasting.
The little houses of the village come up almost to the fortress; there are even some of the youngsters, for instance clever Jan Wołowski, who are able to climb the wall and pass things to the prisoner, particularly once a little something has been slipped to the old soldiers. Then the veterans doze off, leaning on their spears, or, complaining of the cold, simply vanish up under the roof, where they play dice. The company even managed, under cover of night, to attach a ring to the wall, thanks to which it is possible to hoist up bags with provisions. They have to be careful that none of the brothers notices this fixture. Lately the Lord has been requesting onions: so much has he weakened from being confined that now his gums bleed, and his teeth hurt. He also complains that his ear has been hurting, and that he has dizzy spells. Hana, with the consent of the monastery, gets to visit her husband once a day, but she often lingers so long she ends up spending the night. Others come, too, little pilgrimages making their way to the Lord. All of the pilgrims are dressed neatly, in the Christian fashion, in the urban fashion, humbly, the female pilgrims differing completely from the gaudy Częstochowa Jewish women with the turbans on their heads. The true believer women wear the linen bonnets of Polish townswomen, and although some of them are also wearing through the soles of their shoes, and their bonnets hide a matted plait under the dull lace, their heads are still held high.
Since the rules have been relaxed, the Lord has sent to Warsaw for women. Since none took part in his betrayal, women will be his guards. He also needs naarot, or young maids, for his Avacha—serving girls and teachers. And he needs women to take care of him. Women, he needs women, lots of them—he needs them everywhere, as if their mild, vibrating presence might turn back the dark time of Częstochowa.
And here they are. First Wittel Matuszewska—she is the first, but then comes Henrykowa Wołowska, extremely young but serene, somewhat heavyset, with a wide, pretty face and a quiet, lilting voice. Her beautiful, shiny brown hair sneaks out of its pins. There is Eva Jezierzańska, who is slender, with a birthmark on her neck that has hair growing out of it of which she is ashamed, so that she wears a kerchief. But she has a nice face like a young ermine’s, dark, velvety eyes, a beautiful complexion, and a burst of hair held back by a tightly drawn ribbon. There is also Franciszkowa Wołowska, the eldest of them, strong and lovely, with a clear voice and musical talent to boot. And there are the same women the Lord liked having around in Ivanie—Pawłowska, Dembowska, and Czerniawska, his sister. There is also Lewiń
ska and Michałowa Wołowska. And there is Klara Lanckorońska, Hayah’s daughter, with her curves and her smiling eyes. All of them came to Warsaw without their husbands, in two carriages. They will look after the Lord.
Jacob has them stand before him in a row. He looks them over carefully (Piotrowski will later say: “Like a wolf”), unsmiling. He leers at them, so beautiful are they. He paces up and down in front of them as if they were soldiers, and he kisses each one on the cheek. Then he tells a startled Hana to join them.
As he looks at them like this, he says the same thing he once said in Ivanie—that they are to choose one from amongst themselves, but in unison, without any quarrelling, and that she will remain with him for some time, and he will take her seven times by night and six by day. That woman will then give birth to a daughter, and as soon as she is pregnant, everyone will know it, because she will trail behind her something like a red thread.
The women blush. The elder Wołowska, beautifully dressed, has twins who are one year old, whom she has left in the care of her sister in Warsaw; she would be happy to go back to them soon. She retreats one step, somewhat embarrassed. The virgins among them blush the most.
“I will be the woman who will stay with you,” says Hana suddenly.
Jacob is visibly angered by this. He sighs and looks down, and all the women keep perfectly silent, afraid. But the Lord says nothing, ignoring his wife’s little outburst—of course it won’t be her, Hana is already pregnant. She will soon give birth. Besides, she is his wife. At this sudden rejection, Hana’s eyes fill with tears, and she leaves him when the others do. The elder Wołowska puts her arm around her, but she doesn’t say anything.
On the way back down the hill from the monastery, back into town past the pilgrims, Zwierzchowska, who will not take part in this process of selection, since she is with the Lord every day, argues—loudly, almost casually—that in the first instance they must establish which of the women would actually like to stay with Jacob. Almost everyone volunteers, except for the two Wołowska women. There is an uproar, and in that moment of excitement, they switch to Yiddish; now they are speaking in their own language, in frenetic whispers.
The Books of Jacob Page 76
