Sunrise West

by Jacob G. Rosenberg

  ‘Shtum,’ mother warned, ‘they’ll soon be here!’ After a moment, however, she herself resumed the reminiscences. ‘Do you recall, Gershon, how you managed to talk her into breaking off the engagement — and then, in a fit of remorse, you were kneeling beside her bed, begging forgiveness? And how you rushed off and brought back that good-for-nothing to our home? And yes, she married him. It was a huge wedding — which your new son-in-law, without any consideration for my religious relatives, converted into a political meeting! Soon afterwards the newlyweds attempted an illegal crossing into the land of their hopes. They were caught, deprived of everything, and came back empty-handed. With your last penny you bought that barber a business on Limanowskiego...’

  Father, sitting on the bare floor, leaned back in dismay. His wife’s outpouring was painful. ‘It doesn’t make sense to bring back things from a world that is no more,’ he said.

  But mother had entered a kind of trance and seemed intent on inflicting more anguish on her broken heart. ‘When my daughter’s marriage ran into trouble,’ she continued, ‘her husband accused me of interference. Remember that Monday morning, while we were at work? How he came into our home in the company of his two brothers — the older a soldier in military uniform and known for his underworld connections, the younger a mischievous little barber. Remember how they broke up all my china, and then hurled a chair into the big wardrobe mirror?’

  ‘One doesn’t have to be a goy to make a pogrom.’

  Suddenly there were footsteps, so soft, so thin, as gentle as the whisper of blue smoke from a dozing chimney. Mother held her breath, father peered into the gloom, like an old weaver threading a single strand of cotton into the eyelet of his textile machine.

  Clasping her hands, mother called out excitedly: ‘I knew it! I knew they would all come! A mother’s heart knows her children. Our son is here too! We’ll have lunch just like in the old days.’

  The greatest excitement was on account of my two little nieces, Frumetl and Chayale, who accompanied their mothers, Pola and Ida. Oh, how sweet, how transparent they looked, as light as a summery breeze. Frumetl tugged at my sleeve. ‘Uncle,’ she said, ‘last night I heard my dolly Gittele crying, because now she lives in a strange place. But I told her not to cry, to be good, to play with the other dollies and not to tell anyone that Frumetl is her real mamma.’

  My mother meanwhile had taken Chayale into her scorched arms. ‘Sweetheart,’ she told her, ‘when you were born your mamma, Ida, became very sick, and there were no doctors or medicine, and no food, and no fuel for the stove. When she cried out for a spoon of warm water I couldn’t do anything for her, so I asked your uncle, my son Jacob, to go out and try to fetch some help. And he went into the night on his wooden clogs, stumbling through icy fields and snow. The wind and frost cut into his face like a razor, and when he finally reached the ghetto’s first-aid station, the two men on duty sitting around a fire laughed and slammed the door in his face. When he came back he was so angry that he smashed your mamma’s mandolin to pieces, and with those pieces brought our stove back to life.’

  Lunch was served on shards of broken china, we ate emptiness, the fog still hung around our window, the arms of the old clock stood still. Mother’s shapeless figure bent over me and her lips uttered a single word: ‘Curfew.’ As I walked over to the opening that had once been a door, father said: ‘If you ever see my comrade Wojciechowski, who used to frequent our home, and marched with me under the same red flag, ask him — Why?’

  Emil

  Santa Maria’s summer lasts ten months, but this didn’t make you immune from severe sunburn on any day of the two months remaining. All through the year our women-folk wore only cotton dresses, while the men wore shorts and linen singlets. One exception was moon-faced Emil, a stocky man of about thirty-five who even on the hottest day would not dare to leave his room without his pinstriped jacket, black slacks and shoes, grey felt hat, and a book under his arm. I can’t for the life of me recall his surname; I always just called him Emil.

  There was a visible demarcation line on Emil’s face, perhaps the reason for his moody nature. Only the left side could smile; the right offered the steady gaze of a glass eye and the scar of an old knife-wound. No one suspected that he was a somewhat extraordinary man — not because he carried a legacy any different from most other survivors, but because this erudite survivor was entirely self-educated. His favourite saying was, ‘I wouldn’t like to live in a world without books.’

  I met him several times in the library, where my young wife Esther was cataloguing some recent arrivals from America. ‘Hopelessness is suicidal, something the Nazis understood well,’ he remarked on one occasion, skimming a book (because of his love for his country, he never referred to them as Germans). ‘But what they failed to grasp is that Judaism and hope are interchangeable.’

  Esther looked up from her work. ‘Tell us, Emil,’ she ventured, ‘how did you get the glass eye, and that scar on your cheek?’

  Emil’s voice dropped. ‘Kristallnacht,’ he sighed, and began to tell us his story. ‘We had a modest haberdashery shop, on a side street in the centre of Berlin, an inheritance from my father. The year of our Olympic Games, 1936, was a good year for business — everybody wanted to look their best. One day an apprentice of a tailor called Joachim Haber flew into our shop, bought a set of buttons and vanished. Later, as we were about to close, Herr Haber himself, who had often expressed his desire to own a shop just like ours, came through the door. “Emil,” he said arrogantly, “why did you increase the price of your buttons?” “We didn’t,” my wife Sylvia answered at once, “we’ve been charging the same price for two years.” Joachim ignored her. “You Shylock!” he thundered. “I’ll make sure you pay for that.”

  ‘Two years later, on the morning of 9 November 1938, Haber — dressed in a high-booted Nazi uniform adorned with shiny tin regalia, and accompanied by a gang of thugs — again crossed the threshold of our business. “I’m back, Jude Shylock,” he announced. I tried to respond calmly: “I am honoured, Herr Haber, to be addressed by that name.” But this answer merely enraged him and he raised his fist to strike me. My poor Sylvia jumped between us to protect me. One of the thugs thrust her aside roughly and drove his knuckleduster into my eye, while another plunged a knife into my cheek. A fountain of blood spurted all over the shop. Sylvia fainted, they trampled on her beautiful body, then arrested her for obstructing the authorities in their duty. I never saw her again.’

  ‘Emil,’ murmured Esther, ‘I can picture very well what took place in your shop, because I also had a taste of German brutality.’

  ‘Nazi brutality,’ he corrected her.

  ‘I was locked up at sixteen,’ she went on, ‘and spent my entire youth in concentration camps. But tell me, why did you feel so privileged to be equated with that despicable character, Shylock?’

  Esther’s question ignited a black flame in Emil’s good eye; but maybe to gain time and gather his thoughts he appeared to disregard what she had said. Clapping me on the back, he declared: ‘I hear you’ve been writing verses of lamentation. I’m glad. Aristotle argued that poetry is more universal, and hence more worthy of our serious attention, than history. Poetry is concerned with universal truths whereas history treats only particular facts.’

  Then he turned back to Esther. ‘The renowned actor Henry Irving, reputedly the greatest Shylock of all time, explained, after many performances, that he looked upon Shylock as virtually the only gentleman in the play, and the most ill-used. Like that pack of greedy dogs who attacked us in the shop, the Venetians encircled a helpless Jew and destroyed him.

  ‘You see,’ Emil continued, looking straight at Esther, ‘the great literature of every culture is universal, and yet particular too. The heroes that appear in nineteenth-century Russian novels would be at home in any of the books written at that time. Dostoevsky’s Karamazovs could quite comfortably inhabit Gogol’s pages, as Tolstoy’s Pierre Bezukhov could inhabit Turgenev’s. And cou
ldn’t Balzac have chiselled out a Jean Valjean?... But now tell me, friends,’ and he spread out his arms expansively, ‘in which other English book of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, aside from Shakespeare, could you find a Hamlet, a Lear, or a Shylock?’

  I was struggling to follow his logic. ‘Are you implying,’ I asked, ‘that Shakespeare doesn’t fit into the family of English writers? Do you think this about Marlowe as well?’

  Emil, clearly impressed, gave me a sharp approving look and for a moment I thought his glass eye had come to life. ‘There was a time,’ he said, ‘when I toyed with the idea that Shakespeare wrote Shylock’s famous speech, “Hath not a Jew eyes”, long before he decided to write The Merchant of Venice. Perhaps it was the Bard’s rebuff to Marlowe’s play, The Jew of Malta...’

  A spell of silence descended on the three of us.

  The library had no windows, yet I could almost see the day waning, the sun sinking in flame, the white foam of the angry waves pounding the shore.

  It was a restless night for Esther and me. Emil kept us apart.

  Resettlement

  ‘Resettlement’ was a term that had left an insidious echo in any survivor’s psyche. In our present circumstances, however, it took on a very different character when we were told that our DP camp at Santa Maria di Bagno was to be abandoned and we would be relocated, since the rightful owners were demanding the return of the properties that had been temporarily allotted to us. This time it was not fear but a sense of restless curiosity that took hold of our mood.

  Meanwhile I had been instrumental in forming a Bundist group within the strongly Zionistic ‘kibbutz’ to which I and many members of our camp belonged. The kibbutz was called Aliyah, and was in essence a collective within the broader camp. But no one objected to my Bundist cell, for the kibbutz brought together people of many different political persuasions and I remained a welcome member. Its leader, Aron Sokolowicz, a dynamic yet dreamy individual, considered us more a cultural than a political movement.

  Aron would later become one of the founders of the Holocaust Centre in Melbourne. Over the years we would share endless discussions about Jewish civilization and language. A tallish, willowy, pale-faced man, Aron was a fine Yiddishist; but since he operated within a political milieu, he favoured Hebrew — although I’m not sure his heart was really in it. Aron agreed that Yiddish was an all-embracing vernacular. Not only was it spoken on six continents, but for hundreds of years it had kept Hebrew alive, renewing the flame of our spirit. Despite Aron’s strong ideological views, he understood that while Hebrew could not become a living language in the Diaspora, the demise of Yiddish might have far-reaching repercussions for the unity of our people.

  Our departure was in the best traditions of friendship, though Aron knew that Esther and I were to join a Bundist and hence non-Zionist collective. It had been established in Rome with the financial support of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (known simply as Joint), in a beautiful villa situated at Via Casetta Mattei 12. The property, with its opulent staircase and marble baths, was nothing like I had ever seen in all my life; it stood in silent pride amid a forest of dreamy perennials. Its owner, a wealthy and distinguished Italian doctor who would drop in from time to time for a friendly inspection, appeared to me like an endemic part of the peaceful landscape.

  I was quite enthused by the prospect of building a socialist colony in the very capital where Fascism had reigned supreme. But ideals, once institutionalized, tend to disintegrate or succumb to corruption. True ideals, those that uphold human dignity, are like free doves; institutions can become their death cages.

  We were given a room to ourselves, with a private bath! Esther couldn’t believe her luck. But her joy was shortlived, for we were soon notified that we would have to share the room with another couple. This turned out to be a sickly fellow with cheeks like inflated red balloons, and his young wife, sweet-faced and buxom, with an oversized behind. By day she was placid and reticent, saying hardly anything; yet from the moment the light was turned out at night, her erotic needs and noises would keep us awake. And there was nothing we could do about it.

  One hot July morning I was summoned urgently to the office. There, in a winter coat, shaking like a malaria sufferer, her face set in an expression of dread, waited a prewar party comrade of mine called Leah. ‘I have nowhere to go,’ she said. ‘I heard you were here. Please help me. I’m very much pregnant, as you can see. My husband Julek, whom you know, was detained at the border. He made me run, for the child’s sake. Many Jews were murdered in Kielce, and Kielce is everywhere. The war is over but in our country Jews are still being murdered. People who collaborated with the Nazis walk about freely but those who saved a Jewish life are afraid to admit it. Such is our situation.’

  And so we were now five in one small room.

  In September 1947 we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Bund. It was a festive occasion, full of speeches and reminiscences. The collective’s management invited Pietro Nenni and Palmiro Togliatti, leaders of the Italian Socialist– Communist alliance, as well as Giacomo Mateotti, son of the anti-Fascist leader murdered by Mussolini. But the star guest was Angelica Balabanova, personal friend and political foe of Lenin. I was invited to deliver the opening address. As I stood up I could sense Esther’s tension. She knew I had never fronted such an eminent gathering. What she didn’t realize was that the only one among all these luminaries who understood Yiddish was Balabanova.

  I spoke with fire, as most young and inexperienced orators do, about the history of the Bund, the sacrifices of the Jewish worker on the altar of international brotherhood, and the betrayal by those with whom we had pledged an oath of allegiance, and with whom we had marched on May Day under one flag. Of course, my friend Leah’s predicament added to my bitterness.

  After supper had been served I was called aside — by Balabanova herself! ‘How is it,’ she asked, ‘that a young man like you, a member of the glorious socialist movement, is brimming with such chauvinism?’

  I was at a loss how to answer; I knew very well who was asking the question. Perhaps the grand old lady expected an apology. But something within me, some subconscious impulse, told me not to surrender. And so, true to my conviction, I replied: ‘As you know, I recently got out of Auschwitz. They wreaked misery on us there. The gas chambers never shut. I cannot remember Italians, Poles, French, or any other nationals being gassed purely on account of their birth.’

  Balabanova nodded earnestly. ‘So tell me, my friend,’ she resumed, ‘how is your life now?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps it’s too early to say.’

  ‘Do you think you will ever know?’

  ‘My father once said that a man who spends all his life in a cave in the side of a mountain will never be able to describe the mountain.’

  At this Angelica Balabanova dropped her beautiful grey head and — like a sister who after years of separation has suddenly recognized her younger brother — opened her warm arms and, with tears in her eyes, whispered: ‘Young man, permit me to embrace you.’

  The Trial

  My life in the Rome socialist collective grew more complicated every day. I was constantly at loggerheads with management, and perhaps this wasn’t entirely their fault. Maybe it had to do with my ‘wrong’ upbringing, with the Fabianism my father and my teachers had inculcated into my psyche, and of course with my ignorance about the running of a socialist economy. In hindsight I can see how naive were my demands for more transparency, more accountability. Is there, anywhere in the world, a self-appointed hierarchy that can realistically agree to such silly, starry-eyed requirements?

  As in most communities, the mishandling of finances as well as other open and clandestine abuses by the ruling clique spawned an organized opposition faction among the disgruntled citizens. In the event, I was accused of being its prime mover. Fearing a rebellion, management decided to bring me to trial, Moscow-style.

  Behind a huge mahogany desk sat a ste
rn-looking quartet. In their midst was a smallish, dark-complexioned man in his early thirties. This was the collective’s treasurer and economist, and today the presiding judge. His square face beamed with standover confidence; between his pinprick eyes hung a defiant nose. His sleeves, rolled up in the proletarian manner, bespoke determination.

  Next to him sat a character whose presence would seem foreign in any working-class context: an odd man with a cool supercilious demeanour, dressed in an elegant grey mélange suit, with blue stripes to match the colour of his razorblade eyes. At the collar of his crisp white shirt bobbed a black bowtie, and a gold ring glinting from the third finger of his left hand completed the effect. Folding his manicured hands, he gave an arty sigh.

  ‘Now, let’s hear what this is all about,’ he said. ‘Why can’t comrades of our glorious socialist party live harmoniously with one another?’

  Squareface jumped up and pointed at me with his thick short fleshy finger. ‘Our party has had enough of his subversion,’ he declared in a kind of raspy shout. ‘He hasn’t stopped demanding “accountability”, though he knows very well that in our present circumstances such demands amount almost to treason. By demanding “openness”, he is cunningly undermining trust in our leadership and in our well-earned good name.’

  ‘Malignant nonsense and self-deception!’ I shouted back.

  The Cool One raised his palm. ‘Just a moment, just a moment,’ he stated firmly, politely, but with a superior smile curling his lips. ‘We cannot have a slanging match here. We are all comrades, imbued with the same ideals and aims. We all share a common past — and a common future.’

  The other ignored this attempt at conciliation. ‘I want him exiled from our commune,’ he roared.