by Chaim Potok
All the material in my possession—tapes, faxes, records of face-to-face conversations, and telephone calls—constituted the chronicles of a family that was in many ways an extreme example of the perennial Jewish plight in Russia, the plight of a deviant people against whom the Russians had unceasingly defined themselves. But as I went through those chronicles again and again, a very particular family drama began to surface, and I came slowly to realize that what I had in my possession was not only the classic tale of Russians and Jews at each other’s throats but also a tangled and singular human story about a father and a son—with a baffling mystery at its core.
THE FATHER
1
The Fire Bringer
Shortly after the turn of the century, a thirteen-year-old boy in a small town in White Russia fled from the impoverished home of his mother, his father having died five years earlier. In the years that followed, he went on moving, across oceans and continents. By the time he reached the mainland of Asia nearly two decades later, he had been remarkably metamorphosed from a harmless small-town Russian Jewish boy into a cultured and dedicated Bolshevik killer.
The small town was Kopys, about fifteen kilometers from the town of his birth, Dubrovno, on the Dnieper River.
In 1766 there were 801 Jewish taxpayers in Dubrovno and its environs. One hundred years later it had become the center of a textile industry that manufactured and distributed prayer shawls throughout Russia and Europe and as far away as America. By the end of the eighteenth century Dubrovno also had a tile factory and a community of religious scribes, who wrote phylacteries, Torah scrolls, and mezuzahs, the little containers with passages of the Torah that Jews affix to the doorposts of their homes.
The weavers of Dubrovno labored on antiquated handlooms and were brutally exploited by the merchants, who sold them yarn at high profit and purchased finished products at low prices. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, big-city competition from machine-woven prayer shawls crippled the textile industry of Dubrovno. The weavers began to leave. In 1897, four years after Solomon Slepak was born, there were 4,364 Jews in Dubrovno, constituting about 57 percent of the total population. The town was so inconsequential that it did not even have its own railway station.
Photographs offer us images of Jewish life in Dubrovno.
A portrait of Solomon Slepaks father shows a man with a long black beard and a tall dark skullcap. He had migrated to Dubrovno from somewhere in the Ukraine. Family lore relates that he was physically very strong; that his life’s dream was to send his son, Solomon, to a yeshiva, an academy of higher Jewish learning, where he would study for the rabbinate; and that in a certain Ukrainian town about one-third of the Jews were named Slepak, which in Ukrainian means “blind.”
There is a full-length photograph of an elderly man named Munya, who was a sexton in a Dubrovno synagogue. He also wears a tall dark skullcap and a long dark coat that hangs slightly open, revealing knee-high boots and ritual fringes. He stares at us through shadowed, melancholy eyes. His lips are thin, unsmiling. A flowing white beard reaches nearly to his chest. There is a stoic grace about his poverty, a quiet dignity to his burdened life. Though there is no evidence that he was related to the Slepaks, it takes no prodigious leap of the imagination to envision him as similar in look and garb to Solomon Slepak’s father, who was a melamed, a poor teacher of children.
And there is a photograph of a synagogue celebration in Dubrovno. An extraordinary occasion, one of enormous joy: A scribe has completed the writing of a Torah scroll, a lengthy and demanding sacred enterprise, a year or more of the most painstaking labor. In the photograph we see the Holy Ark, which is richly ornamented with a bevy of animals and birds and a delicately filigreed facade. A crowd of about sixty men, women, and children stand in a loose semicircle behind a bearded man in a cap, knee breeches, and boots, who appears to be doing some sort of dance. Two young-looking men, a fiddler and a clarinetist, play their instruments. The clarinetist has no beard and is wearing a derby; perhaps he is a professional musician, an outsider, hired for the occasion. A bearded elder carries the Torah scroll, which is suitably adorned with a silver crown. In the background, near the Ark and the wall of the synagogue, stand women and children in neatly arranged rows. In the foreground are men and boys. And once again it is no great feat of the imagination to envision one of those boys as young Solomon Slepak, who was a student in his father’s little school and certainly attended synagogue.
No face in that photograph wears a smile. This was, after all, a picture for posterity, marking a high moment of public celebration.
Other photographs mark suffering and death. There is an intriguing photograph that invites us to contemplate the miracle of a pogrom mysteriously averted: The synagogue in Mstislavl, built in the first half of the seventeenth century, stands tall and boldly peaked against a whitish sky, its destruction suddenly halted by Tsar Peter the Great, who, on entering the city with troops in 1708, visited the synagogue and mysteriously and abruptly ordered his soldiers to cease their plundering and killing of Jews. “Only with the help of God did the tsar save us,” comments the record book of that Jewish community. But the hand of God seemed unable to save others. And so we have photographs of a different sort: pogroms consummated with singular barbarousness.
Pictures of pogroms are difficult to bear. The head wounds are what shock one most. The Russians, wielding sabers and axes, seemed to go for the Jewish head. One photograph of the wounded shows nearly every head bandaged, thirty or so heads, assembled to record and display the event to the world, most of them the heads of elderly men and women. And there are photographs of rows and rows of bodies with heads fearsome to behold. City after city in Russia, from 1881 to 1917, witnessed fractured Jewish heads and rows of Jewish bodies: Mogilev, Minsk, Gomel, Bialystok, Lodz, Kiev, Zhitomir, Vologda, Simbirsk, Balta, Smela, Odessa. And Kishinev.
Solomon Slepak was about three years old when his family moved from Dubrovno to nearby Kopys. They lived with a family of rabbis friendly to Solomon’s father. The Jews in and near Dubrovno would certainly have heard of the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev, a city not far from Odessa near the Black Sea; it attracted the attention of the world. More than three hundred dead, thousands wounded, six hundred children orphaned, fifteen hundred homes and shops plundered, forty thousand people left without property or means of work. The Kishinev pogrom occurred when Solomon Slepak was ten years old. His father had been dead about two years.
In October 1905, there was one week in which three hundred pogroms took place in cities throughout Russia. Five months later young Solomon Slepak became a bar mitzvah and entered adulthood. Soon afterward he was told by his mother, Basheva, that she wished him to enter an academy of traditional Jewish learning, become a rabbi, and carry on the tradition of his late father, Israel, by linking his fate to the generations of rabbis and teachers in the father’s family. Either that or—the implied threat, though unstated, was quite clear—leave the house. Slepak family history reverberates with echoes of furious quarrels between mother and son, the mother defending her dead husband’s dream, the son weighing his own future.
The chronicles tell us that at the age of thirteen, Solomon Slepak left home.
Other young Jews were leaving then, too, fleeing from their religious homes, living with fellow runaways in vile rooms, sharing food and clothes, attending or watting to be accepted into Russian schools, barely eking out livelihoods by tutoring the children of well-to-do Jewish families or working at odd jobs. Many died of hunger and disease.
Solomon Slepak fled to his older brother, Aaron, who still lived in nearby Dubrovno and worked in the textile factory. Aaron was then twenty-seven, devout, married, and with children. Solomon sought his brother’s support, but his brother thought it a fine idea that Solomon become a rabbi and urged him to return home.
Solomon moved on once again, to the town of Orsha, some twenty kilometers north of Dubrovno, to the home of a Dr. Zarkhi, an old friend of his family’s.
The doctor, who was not an observant Jew, took the boy in and gave him a room in the attic.
No one seems to know why this Dr. Zarkhi accepted the thirteen-year-old Solomon into his home and what his precise connection was to the Slepak family. But it was not uncommon in those days for people to take in the runaway children of friends rather than abandon them to a bed in a reeking cellar or tenement, to streets and hooligans and the specter of disease, starvation, death.
Solomon Slepak intended to enter a technical school, but he was too young and unprepared for the qualifying entrance examinations. He helped himself by getting his date of birth changed on his official documents from March 6, 1893, to March 6, 1892—no details are available as to how that feat was accomplished; probably a small bribe was slipped to some low-level official—making himself a year older and, he hoped, thereby gaining earlier admission to the school. He began to study for the examinations.
About ten thousand Jews lived in Orsha; they were a little over 50 percent of the total population. Like Dubrovno, Orsha was situated on the Dnieper River; unlike Dubrovno, it had a railroad station. More than thirty Orsha Jews lost their lives in the pogroms that swept through the cities of Russia in October 1905.
That was a time of upheaval not only for Jews but also for Russians. In January 1905 workers had demonstrated in the streets of St. Petersburg, urged on by an Orthodox priest, Father Georgy Gapon. They asked to meet with their beloved tsar in the Winter Palace and present him with a petition of grievances; they were met instead by a hail of bullets from the tsar’s troops. Estimates of the slain ran from 130 to nearly 1,000. Regarded until then with profound reverence by most Russians, the tsar now became an object of loathing and fury. “Nicholas the Bloody,” the Russians began to call him.
It is hardly likely that Solomon Slepak was unaware of the events then taking place in Russia. The sophisticated, secularist family of Dr. Zarkhi no doubt contained avid readers. More than two thousand periodicals of all opinions were being published in Russia in those years; tsarist censorship of the press was lax. Between 1906 and 1914 the different factions of the Social Democratic Party that were calling for revolution published legally more than three thousand titles. Surely some of those publications found their way into Dr. Zarkhi’s home and were read by Solomon Slepak.
After passing his entrance examinations, Solomon entered the technical school, where he studied mathematics, physics, accounting, German, and French, among other subjects. Not part of the curriculum was the everyday talk among students about contemporary events: the tsar’s reluctant agreement to transform the country into a constitutional monarchy; the election of the first parliament in 1906, its dissolution by the tsar, and the three parliamentary elections that followed; the more than forty political parties that were represented, including delegates from Jewish parties; the stratagems and maneuverings of the revolutionaries. In the corridors and classrooms of the school, and while swimming in the waters of the Dnieper and lounging along the riverbank, older students quickly radicalized younger ones.
The family chronicles tell us that Solomon was introduced to radical ideas during his years in the technical school, and attended meetings of the Social Democratic Party. But there is no indication that he had yet turned into a revolutionary.
He was graduated in 1913, intending to continue his studies in a university. He was twenty, short, stocky, with thick, curly hair black like the wing of a crow, a somewhat too-large nose, thickish lips, and slanted dark brown eyes that gave him a slightly Mongol look. He had short arms and legs, was broad-shouldered, very strong, and in excellent health. Splendid material for the army of Tsar Nicholas II.
Solomon Slepak completed his studies in a year rife with rumors of impending war. He applied to the High Technological Institute in Moscow and was rejected; the institute’s quota system admitted a low and fixed number of Jews. The rage in the hearts of young Russian Jews because of that quota system!
The country was preparing for war. Solomon Slepak, now supporting himself by tutoring, was a relative newcomer to Orsha and still unmarried. And regarded as somewhat unstable politically, not an actual member of a revolutionary party, to be sure, but a participant in meetings of a suspicious nature. The police seemed to be watching him. His name was near the top in the recruitment lists the Orsha community was required to submit to the army. But he had no intention of joining the army of Russia. Instead he fled, crossing the border on foot into Russian Poland. It is not known if he had somehow obtained the necessary passport from local officials or if he crossed illegally; the only document it is certain he had with him was his school diploma. Carrying few clothes and very little money, he made his way across Poland into Germany, somehow avoiding the numerous control points along Germany’s eastern border. For a while he worked at odd jobs, fixing this, lugging that, accumulating the necessary thirty dollars—about one hundred rubles, a great deal of money in those days—for his travel ticket and the additional thirty dollars he would need to show the American immigration officials at Ellis Island in order to be admitted into the country.
In Hamburg he obtained a United States visa from the consular office and boarded a ship that sailed to England and America. He traveled steerage class in one of the three enclosed lower decks of the ship with more than a thousand other passengers, in a crowded room that was about seven feet high and extended the entire breadth of the ship and to about one-third its length. The air was unutterably foul, reeking of dirty bodies, tobacco, garlic, disinfectants, and the stench of the nearby toilet rooms; the floor slippery with the vomit of the seasick.
One sailed in steerage—so named because it was originally located near the rudder—to the noise of the stirring screws, the roll and thud of waves, the staccato of hawsers, and the trembling of steel railings. At times, when the weather grew calm, there might be cardplaying and even music and dancing on the decks, but nearly always the journey, lasting about ten days, was a hell that some thought cleansed them of sins and prepared them as if newly born for the land of Columbus.
At the end of that dreadful voyage, as the ship made its way through the Narrows between Brooklyn and Staten Island, Solomon Slepak gazed spellbound at the Statue of Liberty, utterly mesmerized by the sight of the tip of Manhattan Island. And when the ship docked at one of the piers on the New York shore, he watched as those who had sailed in first and second class disembarked and entered customs directly to have their papers and baggage checked; then he and all the others who had traveled in steerage, save American citizens, left by walking down a gangplank at the stern and assembled on the pier in groups of thirty. From there they were loaded onto barges, together with their baggage, for the brief journey across the water to the red buildings on Ellis Island.
In 1913, the year Solomon Slepak arrived in the United States, nearly nine hundred thousand immigrants came through Ellis Island. The immigration procedures on the island were a fearful experience. Faces in photographs reveal the fright in immigrant hearts.
Solomon passed through the preliminary medical inspection in the second-floor registry room—no hernia, no TB, no heart ailments, no mental defects—and then stood on numerous lines and sat on clean wooden benches and went through further examinations: the genitalia for venereal disease, the skin for a “loathsome or dangerous contagious disease.” Light streamed into the vast room from tall side windows, and the air was fresh. One doctor examined his scalp, another his fingernails; a third painfully probed his eyes. He was asked his age, his destination. Was he an anarchist, a polygamist, had he ever been in prison, who had paid his passage, could he read and write, did he have a job waiting for him? To the last question he replied that he did not have a job, and displayed his school diploma to verify his employability and usefulness to America. An interpreter translated his responses to the examiners and the immigration inspector. To the inspectors final query, “Do you have thirty dollars? If less, how much?” he responded by showing the equivalent of thirty dollars in foreign money he had
earned as an itinerant fixer in Poland and Germany and received his “Admitted” card. Together with other new immigrants he left the building and walked to the ferry.
A mile-long ride over the waters of Upper New York Bay brought him to the terminal at the Battery. Behind the wire netting that entirely encapsulated the walk from the boats waited the anxious and eager crowd of relatives and friends. He looked around for his older sister, Bayla.
Bayla was an outcast, a virtual excommunicate from her family, a daughter whose name was never spoken by her mother. Before departing for America some years earlier, she had committed a heinous act. One of her children, a daughter, had been born retarded. As conditions in Russia worsened into deepening nightmare, Bayla became determined to take her family to America. Aware that the retarded child would be turned away by the immigration authorities and thereby jeopardize the entry of the entire family, she did the unspeakable: She decided to deliver the child into the care of her grandmother, Bayla’s mother.
Violent quarrels rocked the family over that decision. It was unheard of, scandalous, to leave behind forever one child while taking the others. What kind of mother did such a thing—deserted a disabled child? One had to have a heart of stone! And what would happen to the poor creature when her grandmother passed on to the True World? Who would care for her then?
Bayla turned away from her child and left her mother and older brother and sailed with her family to America, and was waiting on the dock when her younger brother disembarked from the ferry with his few belongings, his thirty dollars, and his diploma. They took the subway to her family in Brooklyn.
It was during his years in New York that Solomon Slepak became a revolutionary. He lived with his sister’s family on Division Avenue in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The streets were a mix of Jews from Eastern Europe, Italians from Sicily and the region around Naples, and Ukrainians and Poles. Dirty, noisy, crowded streets. Old nineteenth-century brownstones with bay windows and ironwork fences; and walk-up apartments; and wood-frame row houses later to become firetraps and slums. A steel bridge, completed in 1903, spanned the East River. It became known as the Jews’ Bridge; the New York Herald called it “the Jews’ Highway.” It linked the newly arrived immigrant Jews on the once-elegant streets of Williamsburg to the Jews who lived on Delancey Street in the heart of the teeming Lower East Side of Manhattan, the “miserably darkened Hebrews” with whom “the thoroughly acclimated American Jew … has no religious, social or intellectual ties,” in the words of the Hebrew Standard in 1894. Riding or walking across the bridge on a warm, clear day, one could see the Manhattan skyline, gaze into the heart of capitalism. Did Solomon Slepak, recently come to Marxism and the Social Democratic Party, marvel at the power of this purported enemy of the proletariat? Did he see class struggle in the swarm and crush of people on the streets, the Jews pushing their carts, the filthy sidewalks, the dark tenements; or in his first job in a factory that made men’s and women’s belts, wallets, and purses, where he labored at a hot press stamping out leather patterns? In capitalist fashion, the leather company soon went broke, there being scant demand for its goods. He took a job selling dishes, peddling his wares before the Passover festival, when dishes used all year long must be stored away and dishes used only for the festival brought out or acquired. And he caught on to a common scam: Start across the street with your cart of dishes, step into the path of an oncoming truck, and then jump adroitly out of the way while letting the truck smash into and destroy the dishes. And claim the insurance. Learning quickly the seamy side of America.
