Vilna My Vilna

by Abraham Karpinowitz

  Just a week earlier, the man had been the hero of the synagogue courtyard, and now everyone was railing against him. “Imagine. He made half of Vilna crazy with his Jewish money, with his buying and selling, the devil only knows why.”

  In a single instant, the good times were over. People fought, accusing each other of terrible things, all because this crazy guy had led everyone around by the nose. The story reached the policeman with the red beard who patrolled the Jewish area, ate cholent at Velfke’s restaurant, and was on a first-name basis with everyone. He wasn’t happy with the situation. “How can you have Jewish money in Poland? What are my Jews thinking?” Avromke the Anarchist barely managed to appease the policeman with a gift for his wife. Then Avromke informed the man in no uncertain terms that he had to stop distributing Jewish money and close his bank.

  The man’s presidency came to an end. He struggled to pay his debts for the counterfeit shekels and was left without a groschen. No matter how much money his sister sent, it wasn’t enough to silence all the screaming mouths. If Sheyndel from the teahouse hadn’t given the man food, he would have collapsed in the street. He sat at the bare table in his garret apartment, waiting for Vintsenti the janitor to show up and tell him to come down to the courtyard to have a talk with Tsokh the landlord. The man trembled with fear that Tsokh would ask him to leave because he was behind with the rent.

  One morning, just before Shevuos, Tsokh showed up in his carriage and told Vintsenti to ask the man to come down to the courtyard for a little conversation. The landlord stood next to the gate of number 12 Daytshe Street with his tenant, the former president of a Jewish state he had financed out of his own pocket, almost losing his shirt in the process. Tsokh asked about the rent. The man began to stammer, making excuses. Tsokh listened. The man’s words flowed from his mouth like drops of water off a goose’s back. Finally he whispered in a muffled tone, “Believe me, Mr. Tsokh, I didn’t drink away the money. Someone took me for a ride and counterfeited my Jewish money. One day there’ll be a state and this wrong won’t be forgotten.”

  Tsokh looked at his renter as though seeing him for the first time. “One day there’ll be a Jewish state. Hmmm. The man says it with such conviction. Maybe he’s right.” And Tsokh, who would have demanded rent from the sparrows on the roof, smiled and said, “Bring down your shekels—all of them. I’ll accept them as rent until your sister sends money.”

  The man brought down a bundle of bills. The janitor couldn’t believe his eyes when the landlord put the colored pieces of paper into his pockets, got into his carriage, and with a lively giddy up, urged his midget of a pony down the length of Daytshe Street. Tsokh glided over the Vilna streets toward a distant place where Jewish money would be vindicated. But he never arrived there. The Germans wiped his building off the face of the earth, together with the synagogue courtyard. He and the man with the Jewish money went to their deaths at Ponar with all their Jewish neighbors.

  Only the shekel survived. It arrived at a distant shore far, far from Vilna, in the Jewish state that the man with the Jewish money had imagined.

  11

  Tall Tamara

  The trouble began at Stovepipe Berta’s. Berta had a brothel on Yatkever Street. It was a well-established spot, a business truly to envy. Because of Tamara, the place was always packed. Vilna guys couldn’t get enough of her. On Friday evenings, Tamara didn’t have a free moment.

  But Berta was greedy. She wanted to grab ahold of the entire world. She started screaming at Tamara, turning her days into a living hell. First, she accused Tamara of talking too much, then of laughing when she shouldn’t and ignoring customers. Tamara would have swallowed these insults because, after all, Berta’s brothel was warm and cozy, but one Friday evening Berta did something that was too much to bear. So Tamara waited until after Shabbes and the next morning, first thing, she took her little trunk, packed her few dresses and all the installments of the novel Regina the Spy that she bought every Friday, and left Berta’s.

  The other girls in the trade told Tamara not to leave. After all, they’d all swallowed plenty of insults from the madams. It’s true that Tamara wasn’t one of the grand ladies of Vilna. She didn’t have a dacha in Volokumpie, the beautiful area just outside Vilna, or spend her days in the Griner Sztral Café. But still, she had her self-respect.

  So why did Tamara leave Berta’s? Here’s the story.

  Every Friday evening, all of Tamara’s regular suitors came to see her. There was Itsik the Hare, One-eared Zorekhke, Sender the Stutterer from Yiddishe Street, Mendel the Fireman, and plenty of others. They all sat on a bench in the foyer waiting their turn. They’d prepared for Shabbes and were washed, clean-shaven, and wore clean shirts.

  Hershele the Porter, a dwarf whose feet didn’t reach the floor, stood out from the others. Tamara caressed him differently than the others. He didn’t grab her like she was the kugel in the cholent or insult her with vulgar language. He had beautiful manners and even brought her a little bag of candy every so often.

  Women tore each other to pieces over men like Hershele. With his virility, he really needed to stay the entire night, but he could barely afford one visit. Afterward he lay with Tamara, his short legs stretched out to her ankles and asked, “Tamarinke, let me lie next to you for another moment. I want to feel like a married man.” Tamara didn’t say a word. She took advantage of Hershele’s fantasy to catch her breath with a glass of cold tea she’d prepared earlier but not had time all evening to drink.

  Meanwhile, Berta noticed several guys get up from the bench, preparing to leave. She heard Sender the Stutterer suggest they pay a visit to Four-eyed Esther’s brothel on Zavalne Street, next to the lumber market. Sender stuttered, “Wh-wh-why should w-w-we sit here like h-h-hens on our eggs?”

  And so, while Hershele was lying next to Tamara, luxuriating in the moment, Stovepipe Berta began banging her fist on Tamara’s cubicle door and screaming, “Hershele! May you burn . . . You know where? Guys like you shouldn’t come Friday night. Come during the week. You’re ruining my business!”

  Tamara dragged her little trunk to her friend Black Leyke’s rented room on Shkaplerne Street, behind the train station. As she made her way to Leyke’s, Tamara’s entire being raged against Berta. “That woman has completely forgotten that a girl from the trade is also a person with a heart and feelings, like they sing in the Yiddish theater. I’m not just putting holes in matzoh, where the oven’s burning hot and you have to shove the merchandise in as quick as possible. And who did that gangster Berta pick on? Little Hershele, the loneliest guy in Vilna. He doesn’t have a single soul to cuddle him.”

  At Leyke’s, Tamara had a little time to open a book. She was better educated than any of the other women in the trade. She even exchanged books at the Mefitsei Haskalah Library on Zavalne Street where she depended on Krasni, the librarian, to tell her what to read. He recommended a book called The Lady of the Camellias by a certain Dumas.

  Tamara read the story to her friend Black Leyke. They both had a good cry, especially at the end when the camellia lady, who was no lady at all but ate the same bitter fruit as they did, earned from lying in strangers’ beds, went to her death.

  When Siomke Kagan, the reporter for the Vilner tog newspaper, had tried to establish a professional union for Vilna streetwalkers, Tamara was the first to speak up. She’d raised the issue of overtime, which the brothel owners, the pimps, refused to recognize. Like many of Siomke’s projects, nothing came of the professional union. But from that day on, Tamara used strange words like “exploitation,” “class consciousness,” and “general strike.”

  Tamara left the profession and lived with Leyke on Shkaplerne, pretty far from the center of the city. Leyke supported herself from the occasional guests she brought home, elderly Jews who weren’t from Vilna. She was able to offer her friend a bowl of soup and a glass of tea.

  Tamara felt badly about leaning on Leyke, so she looked for a way to earn a groschen but her efforts didn’t lead t
o much. Stovepipe Berta wanted to take her back, but Tamara had her self-respect. Tamara still saw Hershele the Porter, who stopped by Leyke’s every so often to see her. But she got more love than money from Hershele.

  Siomke Kagan really wanted to help Tamara. He saw her as a victim of the brutal capitalist system, which he had fought so bitterly throughout his youth. He tried once again to open a school for love in Vilna and wrote a long article in the newspaper about the project, underlining its importance and the honor that such a school, the first in the world, would bring to Vilna. He pointed out that, to add to the bargain, Vilna had two highly qualified educators: Tamara Shimeliski and Leah Brener, known in professional circles as Tall Tamara and Black Leyke. That’s how Siomke Kagan introduced his readers to Tamara and Leyke.

  Tamara didn’t put any stock in Siomke’s plan. It had been tried once before. They’d even ordered a sign, but nothing had come of the plan. Siomke didn’t give up on the idea and searched the city for teaching material. He rummaged in Funk’s, the small bookshop on Daytshe Street, until it dawned on him that Khaykl Lunski, the librarian at the Strashun Library, would be able to help him.

  So Siomke went to the library to see what Khaykl could do for him. Khaykl Lunski walked to an out-of-the-way cupboard and took out a pamphlet that precisely spelled out the rules for having sex with a woman as well as what to do to pleasure a man. He stroked the pamphlet, reprinted from a manuscript that had to be a good few hundred years old. The author’s name wasn’t given. The pamphlet, written in Hebrew, was called “Ahava be-ta`anugim,” which in plain Yiddish means “Pleasure in Love.”

  Siomke asked Lunski to translate the pamphlet into Yiddish, but Lunski dismissed the suggestion. Smiling into his thick beard, he murmured, “Ah Siomke, our sages have already given us the knowledge you’re thinking about bringing to Vilna. You won’t discover America with this.”

  It didn’t help Siomke to argue that his idea would be a huge success. “It’ll stir up the entire world—a school for love in Vilna, using pedagogic material from original Jewish sources, literally from rabbinic literature.” Khaykl Lunski patiently heard Siomke out. Then he put the pamphlet back in the cupboard with the other rare religious books.

  Tamara wasn’t counting on Siomke and his fantasies, so she searched around for a way to earn a living. She’d already tried standing in the market with a basket of chicken giblets, but the market women sent her away, claiming there were already too many women selling their wares. Tamara went to work in the chicken shed plucking poultry. There, the women readily accepted her. Before long, she brought Black Leyke to work. The two women sat with their legs buried in mountains of chicken and goose feathers, reminiscing about the old days when they had earned more from one client than from ten plucked chickens. Leyke’s boy Elinke ran around the chicken shed, making all the pluckers happy. (Elinke was the product of a casual encounter with some unknown Jew, but Leyke insisted the father was Elijah the Prophet.)

  Siomke did do one thing for Tamara. He got her involved in a group that met secretly in a garret in Ramayles Courtyard on Yiddishe Street. A pair of trouser stitchers, several journeymen tailors, a few seamstresses, and a glove maker sat together for hours in the evenings. A young man with hungry eyes praised life in the great Soviet Union under the sun of the Stalinist constitution. A life to envy. Everyone in the group knew about Tamara’s former life. The skinny young man presented her as a former slave of the bourgeois order.

  Tall Tamara plucked chickens, attended the group from time to time, and tried to be happy with her life. It wasn’t easy. Sometimes she felt the urge to slip on a low-cut blouse and her skirt with the deep slit that showed off her long legs, take her patent leather bag in hand, and stand on Savitsher Street, beside the Piccadilly Cinema, winking at passersby. But what if someone from the group happened to walk by? What would they say? In the garret on Yiddishe Street, they treated her like she’d never worked for Stovepipe Berta. Tamara made do with the chicken shed and taking books from the library.

  Once, Krasni the librarian hurriedly handed Tamara a book of stories called Folktales, written by someone named Peretz. Tamara wanted to ask for something else right away—a novel, a love story with duels. But it was Friday and readers were rushing around and pushing and shoving to get a book for Shabbes, so Tamara put the Folktales into her basket and went to Leyke’s on Shkaplerne.

  That evening, the two friends sat at the table without saying a word, like a pair of discharged soldiers. Elinke was already asleep. The candles, which Leyke had started lighting every Shabbes after Elinke, her kaddish, was born, flickered on the chest of drawers. It was autumn. A light rain tapped on the low window looking out on a small garden, in the style of the wooden houses in the neighborhood. Tamara leafed through the Folktales, her full lips frowning uncertainly while Leyke silently collected the challah crumbs from the Shabbes tablecloth. She resented Tamara who’d been so absorbed in her book that she hadn’t said a word all evening. Finally Leyke couldn’t stand it any longer. “Tell me what’s so interesting,” she grumbled.

  Tamara lifted her chestnut cat’s eyes whose glance had so warmed the blood of Stovepipe Berta’s customers. She smiled. “These stories are hard to understand. There are a lot of Hebrew words. You have to be a rabbi to figure them out.”

  “So why knock yourself out?” Leyke asked. “On Sunday you can ask for a book you won’t have to kill yourself to read.”

  Tamara thought for a moment. Then she said, “There is one story I did understand. It’s very . . . very . . . well . . . about . . .”

  Leyke prodded her, “So tell me. About this. About that. About what?”

  “It has a deep thought.”

  “What’s the thought?”

  “I have to read it to you.”

  Leyke was impatient. “Just tell me what it’s about.”

  Tamara cleared her throat and began, “It’s a story about three gifts. A Jew dies, but he isn’t allowed into Paradise until he brings three gifts to heaven.”

  “What? They need gifts in heaven?”

  Tamara became annoyed. “If you ask stupid questions, you won’t get to hear the story. A writer wrote it. Just listen!”

  “What’s the problem? I can’t even ask a question?”

  Tamara dismissed Leyke with a wave of her hand and continued. “He brought a pin to heaven as a gift.”

  Leyke was afraid to ask why they’d need a pin in heaven, so she kept quiet. Tamara continued, “The dead Jew brought two more gifts: a little sack of earth from Israel and a yarmulke. The story about the pin really touched me.”

  Tamara closed the book. “Here’s what happened. The priests condemned a rabbi’s daughter to death because she was out on the street when a church procession passed by. Years ago, Jews weren’t allowed to be on the streets where goyim lived. To punish the rabbi’s daughter, they tied her braid to the tail of a wild horse so the beast could drag her through the cobblestone streets.

  “When the priests asked the rabbi’s daughter for her last wish, she wanted a pin. She pinned her dress to the flesh of her legs. That way, her dress wouldn’t lift up in the wind and people wouldn’t see her female parts when the horse charged through the streets.”

  Leyke grabbed her head. “To her very flesh?”

  “Just like you heard it.”

  This didn’t sit well with Leyke. “She was going to her death. Didn’t she have other things to worry about? At that point, what difference did it make?”

  Tamara disagreed. “That’s exactly the point. She went to her death as a rabbi’s daughter, not a shameless woman.” Leyke shrugged and frowned, not convinced that the rabbi’s daughter in Peretz’s story had done the right thing.

  The two friends, who regularly removed their clothes for strange men, went to bed, each drawing her own conclusion about the story.

  Tamara stayed in the chicken shed surrounded by feathers until the war broke out. The Germans and Russians divided up Poland. On the nineteenth of Septemb
er 1939, on a beautiful morning at the beginning of autumn, tanks with red five-pointed stars on their steel sides appeared on the streets of Vilna. Tamara shook the down feathers from her apron and ran along with everyone else to see the miracle. The entire group from the garret in Ramayles Courtyard on Yiddishe Street danced around the tanks like close relatives at a long-anticipated wedding.

  But the party didn’t last long. In total, six weeks. Then the Russians gave the city to the Lithuanians as a gift. The Russian tanks, looking like well-fed turtles, snuck out of Vilna in the middle of the night. The klumpes, as the Lithuanians were called in Vilna, enjoyed the gift for eight months, until the Soviets decided to return and free them from the problems of running their own state. This took place on the fifteenth of June 1940.

  That’s when the members of the group that met in Ramayles Courtyard really came to life. Shayke Eykher, who lost an arm in the Spanish Civil War, became the director of the city buses. Lam, a men’s hat cleaner, was appointed manager of a movie theater. Brayke the trouser tailor took over Berger’s soda water plant. Vilna was drenched in the odor of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Everyone said that Tamara had had leftist sympathies from way back. The new regime installed her in a meat cooperative warehouse.

  Black Leyke did better than anyone else. She ensnared a lieutenant from the Red Army, a fine sheygetz. Not a big drinker. He immediately bought her a white shawl, the type worn by the lieutenant’s wives, and even went to live with her on Shkaplerne Street. The shawl lay on Leyke’s locks like snow on a hill of smoldering coals. It was a pleasure to look at her.

  Leyke fit right in with the other garrison wives. She quickly picked up bits of Russian, enough to explain to her cronies the difference between a long nightgown and a formal gown. The ladies, who’d just arrived in Vilna, were sure you could go dancing in the officer’s club in a nightgown. With the lieutenant, Leyke became more refined and took on style. Vilna didn’t recognize her.