That same month, he arrived in revolutionary France, under the identity of Junius Brutus Frey, along with his sister Leopoldyna and his brother Immanuel. The siblings were carrying a number of letters that commended their services, and they managed to find themselves right at the center of events at once.
On August 10, 1792, Junius Frey and his brother Immanuel took part in the storming of the Tuileries Palace, for which they were decorated with orders; to commemorate the proclamation of the Republic a month later, Junius Frey adopted an orphan boy, took a blind widow on jointure, and began paying a pension to a man who was elderly and infirm.
In the summer of 1793, a text was published by Junius Frey by the title of Philosophie sociale, dediée au peuple français par un Citoyen de la Section de la République française, or Social Philosophy Dedicated to the French People by a Citizen of the Section of the French Republic, in which Frey, that is, Thomas von Schönfeld, that is, Moshe Dobrushka, maintained that every political system, similarly to every religion, has its own theology, and that the theological foundations of democracy needed to be investigated, too. He dedicated an entire chapter to a devastating critique of Mosaic law, Moses having deceived his people insofar as the laws invented by him—serving solely to oppress man and strip him of his freedom—were presented by him as divine. The number of misfortunes and plagues, acts of violence and wars suffered by the Jewish people, along with other peoples of the world, due to this deception was, to Frey’s mind, staggering. Jesus was better and more noble, in that he predicated his system upon reason. Unfortunately, his ideas got distorted, similarly to Muhammad’s. And yet the truth so effectively hidden by Moses could be reached by following the connections between seemingly disconnected domains—the hard sciences, the arts, alchemy, and Kabbalah—that in fact complement and comment upon each other. The book concluded in an elegy for Kant, who, for fear of an oppressive regime, had to cloak his true thoughts within an obscure metaphysics that served him as “talisman against hemlock and cross.”
In Paris, Junius Frey lived an intense and profligate life. He and François Chabot, who married Leopoldyna, were infamous for their debauchery and had many enemies. Thomas, i.e., Junius, had a vast quantity of money and was suspected of spying on behalf of Austria. Thanks to Chabot, he became a member of the commission that liquidated the assets and liabilities of the French East India Company—an unimaginable fortune. Soon denounced for falsifying documents, Chabot took Thomas down with him.
After a brief trial, on the 16th of Germinal, in the year II, that is, April 5, 1794, Junius Frey, and his younger brother, Immanuel, along with Danton, Chabot, Desmoulins, and others, were sentenced to death.
The pinnacle of the execution was the beheading of Danton; it was his head the mob had been eagerly awaiting. The whistling and applause lessened steadily as each of the other convicts had their turns. When it came time for Junius Frey, that is, Thomas von Schönfeld, that is, Moshe Dobrushka, who was last in line, the mob had already begun to disperse.
Junius saw all the heads before his be severed, saw them fall into the basket set under the guillotine, and as he tried to rein in the wild, animal fear that had come over him, he realized with a thrill that he would finally have the opportunity to learn how long a severed head continues living, a question that had inspired intense debate ever since the guillotine began its breakneck career. He decided with the same excitement that he would try to convey this information across the empty fields of death before he was reborn.
To the French he wrote: “I am a foreigner among you, my native skies are far from here, but my heart was warmed by the word Freedom, the most beautiful word of our century. It is this word that lights my every deed, for I have pressed my lips to Freedom’s nipples, and it is the milk of Freedom that sustains me. My fatherland: the world. My profession: performing acts of goodness. My mission: kindling souls of feeling.”
For a long time on the streets of Paris, a song was sung whose origins were obscure. Yet we know with certainty that it was just a simplified translation into French of a poem by Junius Frey, which was of course his French translation of the German version of Nahman’s prayer. It went like this:
Nowadays my soul is over
All that loses your composure.
Throne and coat of arms, crown, scepter,
My soul’s scot-free from every captor.
Nowadays my soul goes dancing,
From its stage it’s always glancing.
Good and evil, niceties and beauty—
My soul’s the soldier, they’re the booty.
It sees no borders and no walls,
Haunts the soapbox with a smile,
Blows through the grain and all the chaff,
Casts pearls in the pigsties with a laugh.
O tell me, O Holy Paternity,
Great citizen of all eternity,
Since my soul’s dance is nearly through—
Are there others just like you?
For if you are the only one,
In order to protect my sons,
Give me the right words and the language,
That they and their sons can all manage.
The children
Yente is the one soul capable of seeing from above, and of following the tracks of all these restless beings.
And so she sees that old Yeruhim Jędrzej Dembowski was right when he talked about how his sons would be dressed when they visited him. It also makes sense to Yente why they ended up never visiting him at all. Jan Dembowski became Ignacy Potocki’s secretary, while Joachim was aidede-camp to Prince Joseph Poniatowski, nephew of the king. Jan later fought as a captain in the Kościuszko Uprising and was reportedly the most energetic of all the conspirators. He was subsequently seen leading the mob as they went to hang the traitors. When the uprising was quelled, he—like many—joined the Legions and went on fighting in Italy. During the battle in 1813, he fought the Austrians and became, for some time, the governor of Ferrara. He married one Miss Visconti and lived out the remainder of his days in Italy.
His brother Joachim fought at his prince’s side until the very end and shared his tragic fate.
Antoni, the grandson of Moshe of Podhajce, and the only son of Joseph Bonaventura Łabęcki from his marriage to Barbara Piotrowska, daughter of Moshko Kotlarz, after graduating from his Piarist boarding school took a position at the age of fifteen in the chancellery of the Four-Year Sejm, and even at such a young age published several smaller works in defense of planned reforms. In the time of Congress Poland, he worked as a lawyer and often defended minorities. His defense style was widely known: he would lean far over the railing and lower his voice almost to a whisper, then suddenly, in the places he considered especially important, roar and bang his fist on the railing, so that the judges, who had been lulled by the monotony of his tone, nervously twitched in their seats. Whenever he saw that his arguments were not gaining traction and that he was losing, he would raise both hands and clench his fists, his whole body would visibly struggle, and sounds of desperation would issue from his chest, compelling the judges to come to his aid.
Married to Eva Wołowska, he had four children, among whom his eldest son, Hieronim, particularly distinguished himself as organizer and historian of Congress Poland’s mining industry.
The children of Hayim Jacob Kapliński scattered across Europe. Some of them remained in Nikopol and Giurgiu, some went to Lithuania, where, having purchased noble titles, they were able to own their own land.
Yente is also able to espy a strange and significant thing: both branches of the family, having lost every trace of the memory of one another’s existence, produced poets. One of their youngest descendants is a Hungarian poet who just recently received a prestigious national award. Another was a bard in one of the Baltic countries.
Salomea Łabęcka, one of the two surviving daughters of the Mayorkowicz family, adopted by the Łabęcki family, married the administrator of the Łabęckis’ estate and became the mother of eight ch
ildren and the grandmother of thirty-four grandchildren. One of her grandsons was a well-known nationalist and a staunchly anti-Semitic politician in interwar Poland.
Her father’s brother, Falk Mayorkowicz, or Walentyn Krzyżanowski after baptism, moved his whole family to Warsaw. One of his sons, Wiktor Krzyżanowski, joined a Basilian monastery. His other son, an officer during the November Uprising, protected the Jewish shops being looted in the upheaval. Alongside other officers, he worked hard to scatter that havoc-wreaking mob, as was beautifully described by one Maurycy Mochnacki.
Hryćko, Hayim Rohatyński, remained in Lwów; under the influence of his wife’s family, he gave up his heresies and became an ordinary Jew employed in the vodka trade. One of his granddaughters became a muchlauded translator of Yiddish literature. The runaway, meanwhile, was baptized as Jan Okno and became a coal miner in Lwów. After about a year, he married a widow, with whom he had one child.
Of the Wołowski family there is the most to say, for it grew until it attained gargantuan proportions. Nearly all its branches became ennobled, some under the Bawół coat of arms, others under Na Kaskach. A fabulous career was made by Franciszek, son of Isaac Wołowski, the boy whom Father Chmielowski had once called Jeremiah. Franciszek, born in 1786 in Brünn and raised in Offenbach, became one of the best lawyers and scholars of law of his era. Interestingly, when a proposal came before the Sejm to grant Polish citizenship to Jews, Franciszek, as a member of parliament, vehemently argued that it was not yet time to take such a step. First the Polish nation had to win its independence; only then they would be able to turn to such social reforms.
When the November Uprising was put down, the grandson of another of the Wołowski sons, Ludwik, emigrated to France, where he, too, earned renown as a brilliant legal scholar, for which he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur.
A lovely little girl plays the spinet
There are concerts in Warsaw, in the home of Franciszek and Barbara Wołowski, newly built of brick on the corner of Grzybowski and Waliców Streets. Friends of the family often come and stay in the guest rooms. Franciszek, serene and composed, seats the guests in the living room. This is where the concerts are normally held, though today the spinet is in the other room, since the young performer has terrible stage fright and cannot possibly play before such a sizable crowd. The music that flows from under her fingertips thus reaches the living room through the opened doors. Her listeners sit quietly—in fact they are afraid to so much as take a deep breath, so gorgeous is this music. It is Haydn, brought in from Offenbach, from the shop of Herr André. Little Marynia has practiced a whole month for this performance. Her music teacher, a middle-aged man of a slightly frenetic disposition, is as nervous as his youthful pupil. Before the concert, he informed her that he had nothing further to teach her. In the audience are the Szymanowskis, the Majewskis, the Dembowskis, and the Łabęckis. There is Elsner, who has also been instructing her, and a guest from France, Ferdinando Paër, who is doing his best to convince her parents to polish this extraordinary talent as assiduously as they can. In the corner sits an older woman in black; she is looked after by her granddaughters. This is Marianna Lanckorońska, or perhaps Rudnicka, Aunt Hayah, as the members of this household refer to her amongst themselves. The name Marianna somehow never quite stuck to Hayah. She is very old now, and—why be shy about it—deaf, so she cannot hear the melodious sounds that flow from the fingertips of Marynia Wołowska; pretty soon her head drops to her chest, and she is sleeping.
Of a certain manuscript
The first book on their voyages across time, places, languages, and borders was completed in 1825. It was written by one Aleksander Bronikowski, under the pen name of Julian Brinken, as the fee owed to the lawyer Jan Kanty Wołowski, who argued—and won—a case over the fortune of Mrs. Bronikowska, as is stated clearly in the preface.
Jan Kanty was a descendant of Yehuda Shorr, or Jan Wołowski, or the Cossack, as he was called, and he was universally acknowledged to be an excellent lawyer, a learned man, and an immaculately honest person. For many years he was a dean at the university and the head of the public prosecutor’s office. He is remembered for not having taken a salary while he was dean of the faculty of law and administration, instead allocating the amount in its entirety to scholarships for six students without means. The Russian government offered him a ministry position, but he turned it down. He always spoke about his Frankist, Jewish background, so that when it turned out that his client Aleksander Bronikowski had no money to pay for his trial, he asked to receive the fee in the form of a novel.
“The kind anyone can read, that will tell things as they were,” he said.
To which Brinken replied:
“But how were things? Is there anybody still around who could tell me?”
So Wołowski invited him into his library, and there, over some liqueur, he told him the story of his family, although it was a story with many gaps in it, riddled with holes, since even Wołowski knew relatively little.
“You’re a writer, just make up whatever’s missing,” he said to Brinken when it came time for them to part.
At the close of that evening, the writer returned along the streets of Warsaw, somewhat stupefied by the sweet liqueur but with the novel already unfurling in his mind.
“Is all this true?” the lovely and talented Maria Szymanowska, née Wołowska, the pianist, asked him many years later, when they met in Germany. Julian Brinken, now aged, a writer and an officer, initially Prussian, then Napoleonic, finally of the Kingdom of Poland, shrugged:
“Madam, it is a novel. It is literature.”
“What does that mean?” the pianist insisted. “Is it true or not?”
“I would expect you, being an artist yourself, not to think in a manner more suited to simple people. Literature is a particular type of knowledge, it is”—he sought the right words, and suddenly a phrase came ready to his lips—“the perfection of imprecise forms.”
He surprised himself in formulating it so well as that. Szymanowska’s consternation hushed her now.
On the following day, she invited him to join some other guests in her living room, and she played for them, and when everyone else was leaving, she asked if he would stay behind. Then she turned to convincing him—and it took until nearly morning—not to publish his novel.
“My cousin, Jan Kanty, enjoys too high and steady a self-regard in a country still ruled by chaos and disorder. It is easy to impute . . .” She hesitated and then finished: “. . . anything to anyone, and then they’re simply finished. You know, I can’t sleep at night, I’m always afraid something terrible will happen. What use is the kind of knowledge contained in your book?”
Brinken departed, stupefied by her grace and by several bottles of excellent wine. Only in the morning did he feel angry and offended. How dare she? Of course he would publish the book in Warsaw. He already had the publisher.
Soon so much was happening that he no longer had the attention his manuscript required. He started organizing aid for the refugees coming in from the eastern realms of an insurgent Poland, and in the winter of 1834, he caught a cold and suddenly died. The manuscript, meanwhile, never published, was laid to rest in the vertiginous stores of the National Library.
The travels of New Athens
That is also where the Rohatyn copy of New Athens, from which Jacob Frank learned to read in Polish, ended up. At first it traveled all the way to Offenbach, but it was brought back to Poland, to Warsaw, by Franciszek Wołowski, after the court was cleared out. There for a long time it remained in his library, where it was read by his granddaughters.
The copy given by the author to Bishop Dembowski, meanwhile, was almost completely burned in one of the great private libraries, on Hoża Street, during the Warsaw Uprising. The fine work of the Lwów bookbinder, who had firmly pressed in the book’s pages, meant that for some time they were able to resist the flames. Which is why New Athens didn’t burn up altogether—at its heart, the pages stayed unscath
ed, relishing the rustling of the wind for a long time yet to come.
The New Athens given to Mrs. Elżbieta Drużbacka stayed in the family and ended up with her granddaughter; later, the famous writer Count Aleksander Fredro, who was also Elżbieta Drużbacka’s great-grandson, would dip into it sometimes. After the Second World War, that copy ended up, like most of Lvov’s books, in the collections of the Ossolineum in Wrocław, where it can be read to this day.
Yente
From where Yente is looking, there are no dates, and so there is nothing to mark with any celebration, nor any cause for alarm or concern. The sole traces of time are the blurry streaks that travel past her sometimes, stripped down to just a few characteristics, ungraspable, stripped of speech, but patient. These are the Dead. Yente slowly gets into the habit of counting them.
Even when people completely stop being able to feel their presence, when they can no longer be reached by any sign from them, the dead still traverse this purgatory of memory. Deprived of human attention, they do not have places of their own, nor any sort of foothold. Misers will take care of the living, yet the dead are neglected by even the most generous. Yente feels something like tenderness toward them, when they graze her like a warm breeze—her, stuck here at the limit. She permits them these relations for an instant, attending to these figures who were present during her lifetime, and now, having receded into the background upon their deaths, they are like those veterans in Częstochowa whom the king and the army forgot.
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