Vilna My Vilna

by Abraham Karpinowitz

  Foreign armies made their final attempts to wrest the city of Vilna from each other. Meanwhile, my father rented a theater to stage Sholem Aleichem’s Stempenyu. He had adapted the story for the stage himself. My father had immense respect and admiration for our classic Yiddish writer, Sholem Aleichem.

  In 1914, a few months before the outbreak of the first world war, my father had organized an evening for Sholem Aleichem in Vilna. The street around the hall where the event was to take place had been black with people. The performance was an enormous success.

  My father often spoke with admiration about Sholem Aleichem’s talent as a reader of his own work. A postcard Sholem Aleichem sent my father was displayed in our home like a holy relic. I am certain that when my father walked the final road to his death, he had Sholem Aleichem’s postcard in his breast pocket.

  It was 1918, and there was no established authority in Vilna. People were afraid to stick their noses outside in the evening. The actors predicted that not even a dog would show up for the performance. My father stood his ground. “We have to give it a try,” he insisted. So they gave it a try and people came. A lot of people. The hall was full. My father didn’t, God forbid, gloat over his success. He just stroked his beard with pleasure and murmured quietly, as though to himself, “Jews need theater. They love it.”

  Father took over the Eden Cinema and converted it into a theater. Nozshik directed The Rabbi’s Reyzele with Yokheved Zilberg as Reyzele. After that, a play called The Yeshiva Student premiered. Standing in front of an open coffin, Zubak the actor talked to his dead father. The critics said Shakespeare’s Hamlet didn’t hold a candle to The Yeshiva Student. In another performance, the handsome young Motl Hilsberg played Bar-Kochba. Standing half-naked on the mountains of Palestine, he ripped off the chains of foreign oppression. The chains were paper and the sword made of wood, but Hilsberg’s acting was the real thing. Ignoring the cardboard mountains, the audience believed every word and kept coming back for more.

  And so a generation of theatergoers was groomed. Later, a troupe that could grace any world stage, including Zigmund Turkow, Jonas Turkow, Ida Kaminski, Moyshe Lipman, and Isaac Samberg, performed at the city concert hall. Night after night, the building teemed with mature audiences who knew exactly what they wanted.

  Even my mother got used to the commotion. She wore a black silk dress and a lambskin coat to the premieres. In truth, she still looked on everything with critical eyes, but she stopped berating my father when he got carried away during a successful run. Once, she even experienced the theater’s lofty possibilities. This was when Mr. Khayim Gordon, one of Vilna’s religious leaders, came to a performance for the first time in his life. The Dybbuk was playing, as I mentioned earlier. The Gordons were our neighbors. They also lived in the synagogue courtyard in the center of the city, at number 12 Daytshe Street. When he had a free moment, my father used to visit Mr. Gordon to study a page of Gemara with him. Ramayles Yeshiva had left a deep impression on my father’s soul.

  Father convinced Khayim Gordon to attend a performance of The Dybbuk. My father kept his guest in a separate room until the hall became dark. As the curtain went up, Mr. Gordon slipped quietly into the hall and sat down on a chair that had been placed behind the last row for him. A moment before each intermission, my father led the observant Jew back to his hiding place. For weeks afterward, Khayim Gordon made no mention of his visit to Father’s theater. But one day, during a chance encounter in the synagogue courtyard, he said, “Mr. Moyshe, I’m sure you realize that I’ll never go back to the theater. But I want you to know that the Divine Presence actually resided for a moment in the Miropol tsadik. I congratulate you for bringing the Divine Presence onto the stage of your theater, if only for a moment.”

  My mother figured that if Father could persuade Mr. Khayim Gordon to watch Avrom Morevski play the Miropol tsadik, then the theater couldn’t be so crass. There had to be something about it that couldn’t be grasped with simple common sense. She stopped criticizing Father when he spent a few hours after a performance with the actors at Velfke’s restaurant on Yiddishe Street. That’s where the devotees of Yiddish went to eat broiled kishke and chopped liver. Coachmen, who drove passengers around the city in their horse-drawn carriages, sat in one area. The hucksters, who dragged customers into the ready-made clothing shops on Daytshe Street, sat with them. The actors and writers sat in another area with the patrons who helped out in a pinch, during a bad theater season or by providing whiskey for theater celebrations. Shapely girls, fans of various artists, adorned the tables. Itsik Manger imparted wisdom over a glass of slivovitz. Shimson Kagan, the reviewer for the Vilner tog newspaper, thundered against performing trashy plays. Avrom Morevski, who had a huge appetite, tore pieces of meat from a duck and shouted hoarsely, “Velfke, I’m hungry.” A frying pan of latkes with griven immediately appeared.

  Behind the restaurant, there was a little walled-in courtyard where the actors gathered on summer evenings with my father. A linden tree grew there. The branches of the tree peered over the wall at Velfke’s guests, offering them its honey scent while they ate cold beets with slices of white cheese, the cheapest dish on Velfke’s menu. My father stroked his beard and declared the tree to be a symbol of the blossoming Yiddish theater. In 1944, when the Germans retreated from the city, the crown of the linden lay buried under a heap of debris. All that remained of Velfke’s sanctuary was a broken piece of wall.

  My father achieved a degree of security. He had his own theater, the Palace Theater, and he was renowned in the theater world. Zelverovitsh, the director of the Polish Theater in Vilna, had enormous admiration for Father’s accomplishments, particularly given his modest resources and the fact that he had no state support. Even my mother was happy. Thank God, the business was doing well. But my father wasn’t satisfied. He kept imagining building a theater with a balcony that would have as many seats as the parterre, so the common people could also afford to buy tickets. “What’s a Yiddish theater without the common people?” he’d ask. The Palace Theater didn’t have a balcony, and from my father’s point of view, this had to be rectified.

  The actors often marveled at how my father produced financial reports on the covers of cigarette packages. He wrote out the tiny figures like little mosquitos and, rubbing his hands together with glee, slid the pack over to my mother so she could look at his calculations. “Rokhl, it’s as good as gold. One evening from the balcony will cover expenses for an entire week.”

  My mother pushed the pack away and groaned, “Meyshe, you’re just looking for trouble.”

  My father went to see the former home of Tzinizeli’s circus on Ludvizarske Street and decided it was the perfect place to build a theater. He chose the circus for one very important reason: it already had a balcony for the common people. My father decided to put the parterre in the arena.

  Elaborate performances took place in the Folk Theater. Morris Liampe played A Heart That Yearned. Women were so moved by the play, they used to come to the box office very early to get cheap tickets. The balcony was full and my father walked around the theater like a conqueror striding across the battlefield.

  On Saturday nights, the balcony was so packed it almost collapsed. A woman once fainted during the scene in A Heart That Yearned when two children sing the sad refrain, “I’ll remember you. I’ll always yearn for you.” The loyal women from Father’s theater audience left the performances with swollen red eyes, cursing the seducers with deadly insults and taking a lesson from the melodrama for their own lives. Men crinkled up their noses and quietly wiped away a tear.

  And so my father gave the Folk Theater to the common people to whom he was so attached. The theater tickets didn’t lie in a lacquer purse but in a basket amid a heap of greens, a piece of lean meat, and a small carp for Shabbes.

  One day, when my father came home from the theater, instead of busying himself with his collection of cigarette lighters (he had a weakness for all kinds of fire-producing paraphernalia), he j
ust sat on the edge of the couch, rubbing his eyebrow. He used to rub his right eyebrow when he was deep in thought—this was an old habit from his yeshiva days. He often sat like that at night after a performance, but this was the middle of the day. When Mother came out of the kitchen with a plate of chopped herring and saw father rubbing his eyebrow, she felt a twinge in her heart. “No doubt he’s thinking about something new for the theater,” she thought. “He’s bothered by the few groschen he earns.”

  Sure enough, when we sat down to eat, my father said, “You know, Rokhl? I’ve been talking with people. There are complaints about the theater.” My mother didn’t ask about the complaints. She just looked at Father with the chestnut-colored eyes he loved so much. My father explained. “The problem is that the Jewish intelligentsia goes to the Polish theater. We have to lure them away.”

  My mother cut the Spanish onion, my father’s favorite appetizer, and mumbled under her breath, “The intelligentsia. Hmm. How much do we get from them anyway?”

  To satisfy the Jewish intelligentsia in Vilna, my father traveled to Warsaw and hired the famous Vilna Troupe as guest performers. Expenses were huge. The troupe set difficult conditions. My father realized that the honors from the visit wouldn’t go to him, but to Mazo, the director of the Vilna Troupe. But none of this affected his decision to bring the troupe that bore its name to Vilna.

  Mazo did, in fact, take the honors for himself. At the gala premiere, he stood at the door greeting all the important guests. He also gave interviews to journalists and spoke at all the banquets. But my father had his satisfaction. During the intermissions, the Vilna upper crust paraded around the foyer of the Folk Theater praising the play in the Polish language with Jewish enthusiasm.

  The troupe performed Shakespeare’s Shylock. Vayslitz played Shylock and Yakor Mansdorf, Bassanio. Mansdorf strolled gracefully across the stage, dressed in short velvet breeches, with stockings covering his young muscular legs, and a little velvet jacket tossed over his powerful shoulders. Zakovitsh, the prop master, girded Mansdorf’s hips with a rapier. The actor smiled with his full lips and beautiful white teeth. The audience really enjoyed his youthful appearance. They also enjoyed the fresh new tone the Vilna troupe brought to the Yiddish theater.

  What happened to that world?

  The Germans converted my father’s Folk Theater into a garage for military tanks. They tore down the balcony. Before they left the city in 1944, they destroyed the theater, tearing it down to the ground. Not a single one of the beams that my father had so lovingly placed in the building remained intact. He went to the mass grave at Ponar with his audience, the loyal Vilna theatergoers.

  My father walked the last road alone, without my mother, the love of his youth. The Germans had already taken her and my sister Devorah, a gifted actress, to Ponar to be murdered. Devorah’s husband, the actor Leyb Vayner, went with them.

  My father’s dream about a theater, actors, performances, scenery, the stage, and special effects: about the entire colorful world that gave him so much joy went up in flames. The ash from that dream still smolders in my memories of my decimated home.

  Translator’s Note

  There is some repetition in the original version of this story, “Zikhroynes fun a farshnitiner teyater heym” from the book Vilna mayn Vilna, and the story entitled “Der boym nebn teyater” from the book Auf Vilner vegn, translated here as “The Tree beside the Theater.” To avoid this repetition in this collection, three paragraphs from the original Yiddish of this story have been omitted in this translation.

  15

  Vilna, Vilna, Our Native City

  For years, a Jew with blue spectacles stood on Daytshe Street begging, “Take me across to the other side.” His plea was so heartrending that, rather than asking to be taken across the few cobblestones separating Gitke Toybe’s Lane from Yiddishe Street, he sounded like he needed to cross a deep and dangerous abyss. Maybe he was the first Jew in Vilna with a premonition about the Holocaust. Just the name of the street, Daytshe Gas, German Street, drove him from one side to the other. We could all see the little water pump and Yoshe’s kvass stall on the other side of the street, but through his dark spectacles, that Jew saw farther. Fate didn’t take him to the safer side. He ended up in the abyss at Ponar with everyone else.

  When I think of that man, who can serve as a symbol of our fate, what comes to mind is the decimated beauty of Vilna.

  I must confess in the name of the survivors, in the name of the small group of Vilna Jews who managed to travel to the other side and escape their native city when it was converted by the murderers into one bloody Daytshe Street; in the name of all those who escaped from the hellfire through ghettoes, through forests, through camps, combat zones, and battlefronts; in the name of them all, I must confess that we were in love with Vilna. To this very day that love pierces our hearts like a broken arrow that can’t be removed without taking part of us with it.

  Vilna gave us every opportunity to dream exalted dreams about bringing happiness to the world, about creating a better future, about bringing all people closer to the beauty that surrounded us. Vilna possessed youthful joys that couldn’t be purchased with money. Because none of us had very much, the joys of Vilna were all the sweeter.

  The Viliye River brought us greetings from vast, distant waters. We cooled our feverish fantasies in the Zakrete forest. From the Shishkin hills, we pined after distant, unknown worlds.

  It’s not surprising that people walked through Vilna who couldn’t be seen anywhere else in the world. Take, for example, a Jew like Khaykl Lunski, the librarian at the Strashun Library. His gentle gaze reflected the naïveté of the hundreds of children who came to the library, like sheep to a spring, to imbibe knowledge. Or Gedalke the Cantor. For years, he stood in the courtyard next to the Great Synagogue and sang. He chose that spot so the echoes of prayers that were once sung with such flourish by Hershman, Sirota, and Koussevitzky, the greatest cantors of our time, would reach their highest expression in him.

  Where else in the world could you find jokers like the guys in Vilna? The hucksters on Daytshe Street with their expressions, their jokes, and their ridiculing of the entire respectable world. They could convince a peasant to buy a tuxedo jacket to match a pair of striped pants. Only in Vilna could those oddballs have paraded around in all their outlandishness. Every Vilna Jew possessed their own peculiarities, so they could understand the fantasies of others. The Jews of Vilna didn’t only relish the tasty meals at Usian’s restaurant and Taleykinski’s peppered salami but also their own wild and expansive dreams.

  On Yatkever Street, Kive the Locksmith tinkered with a lock shaped like a nightingale that sang when the door opened. The carpenters in the production cooperative on Troker Street tried to figure out how to make a sofa that would also work as a desk.

  Siomke Kagan decided to translate Gypsy songs into Yiddish, so he went to Trok to live in the Gypsy camp and learn their language. Gedalke, the crazy cantor, didn’t sit around with his arms folded. During the winter, he would freeze religious melodies by singing them into a teapot of water in the synagogue courtyard so they wouldn’t be forgotten by springtime.

  Our restlessness drove us to wander in search of traces of yesteryear’s snows in the summer shallows of the Narotshe Lake.

  Was there anything the Jews of Vilna didn’t think of? Even about buying a plot of land in some corner of the world and creating a Jewish republic where everyone from the street cleaners to the president would speak Yiddish. A Jew created bills for that republic in a garret in Leyzer’s Courtyard on Yiddishe Street. He made sure to draw a Star of David at the center of each bill.

  The criminal organization the Golden Flag spoke about loyalty and friendship in their constitution. “Our members should behave properly and not forget that even though we are who we are, we are still Jews.” There was a directive for the general treasury to provide dowries for poor brides. The organization bought all the tickets for Shriftzetser’s jubilee performance
so their beloved actor would come away with funds.

  It’s difficult to figure out where all that dreaming, all that yearning for better and more beautiful things, came from. We had very little. Few of us came from wealthy homes. And yet, hardworking youths strode through Vilna with clear and open faces. Far from feeling depressed, we were full of life and at peace with ourselves.

  We should be careful not to idealize Vilna. We shouldn’t turn all the outlandish Vilna notions, the fantastic ideas and the perfectly crafted expressions into moral virtues. As well as light, there was plenty of shadow. There were poor, hopeless days. That hopelessness drove hundreds over the border to a great snow-covered land in search of a better life. Let us remember the pure souls who believed, with true Vilna faith, in the lofty slogans. Let us remember those who crossed the border with open hearts and naïve faith and who were murdered in prisons and camps. They were the forerunners of Ponar. They, the believers in a just world under the red flag, were the first to be murdered.

  In Vilna, we lived a full-bodied Jewish life. Despite the alien surroundings, despite our poverty, despite the pressure from all sides, we contributed with creativity and enthusiasm to Jewish culture and to Jewish continuity.

  Vilna left her mark on her inhabitants. The narrow Vilna alleys possessed a magic that inspired boundless effort. You find yourself walking down a vaulted street. You feel there is no way out. The old walls press in on you, trying to merge over your very head. Just when you are about to turn back, a little garden and the Vilenke, a happy rushing stream, opens up before you. You want to take off your shoes, roll your pant legs up to your knees, and stand on the shore with a fishing rod in hand.