I take the heavy bag of books and practically fly to the school. For the rest of the week I carry those books back and forth. Pani Grabowska walks by herself and arrives at the school a little later than I do.
In 1926 Mama is pregnant again, and now that I am ten I feel differently than when I was eight. When Rifka was born, I had been so excited. Now, at ten, I feel embarrassed that my mama is having another baby and a little afraid that the new baby will die, too. When Regina is born, she looks just like Rifka, with large bright green eyes, but with curly red hair. She is a strong baby and the new maid, Janova, loves and watches her very carefully. While there would always be sorrow over losing Rifka, Regina brings the joy of new life back into our home.
Judaism
In lighting the Sabbath candles, women help take away some of the darkness of the world.
—Hendla Libeskind Gomolinska
1926
I have always lived on a Jewish street in a Jewish neighborhood, sheltered and protected. My elementary school teachers and Krysia are the only gentiles I have ever known well, and I feel great love from all of them.
However, we do have one gentile tenant in our apartment building. He gets drunk and knocks loudly on our door, shouting that we are Christ killers. He threatens us, and we are all afraid, even Tatte. I don’t understand why, but I know that he can make trouble for us just because he is a gentile and we are Jews. But these outbursts are rare.
We are not a strictly observant family, but my mother has a deep faith. I was told that after my parents’ marriage, their first Friday night together was the occasion of their first fight. My father had decided that as the man of the house he was free to establish his own family traditions and no longer needed to blindly follow the practices of his father. After working hard all week, he preferred spending a quiet evening at home with his new wife rather than attending synagogue. To my mother, this was unthinkable. It was all right for women and children to stay home, but she expected Tatte, like all good Jewish men over the age of thirteen, would go to synagogue and not dishonor his new family this way. After arguing and being unable to sway him, she walked out and went home to her mother. Her mother sent her right back, but Mama had made her point, and from that time forward, Tatte went to the synagogue every Friday night and never forgot to put on a yarmulke when he came back to make the blessings over the wine and challah for Shabbos dinner.
Aside from Tatte, none of us go to synagogue, except on the High Holidays: our New Year, Rosh Hashanah, and our Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. But welcoming in the Shabbos is a special time for all our family every Friday night. At eighteen minutes before sunset, Mama puts a lace cap on her head. Her hands make three circles over the lit white candles standing tall in the two large silver candlesticks passed down from my great-grandmother.
Mama’s beautiful blond head is bowed, her eyes closed, as she blesses God, who has given us His laws and commanded us to light the Shabbos candles. She sometimes says that maybe these little lights will take away some of the darkness of the world. She tells Hela and me that it is our responsibility as Jewish girls to always fight the darkness. Then Tatte says his blessings. The “religious” part is over, and we get to eat.
Like most of the Jews in Piotrków, we keep kosher. The laws passed down from God to Moses taught that “the kid should not be cooked in its mother’s milk” and from that Jewish law and tradition it became forbidden to mix any meat products with any dairy products. If we cannot mix meat and milk (fleishik and milchik), then we must have different dishes and silverware and pots and pans for each of those categories. And then what do you do when you wash the dishes? Krysia is very careful to use only the red-striped dishcloths to wash and dry the meat dishes and the blue-striped for the dairy. Even the soaps are striped, one red and one blue so that the suds from one set could never accidentally contaminate the other.
But this is nothing compared to what has to be done for Pesach (Passover). In preparation for this holiday, our maids work very hard to clean all traces of any of the forbidden leavened foods, the chummetz, out of the house. They go through all the drawers looking for crumbs and sweep all the corners of the apartment with extra care. It is not enough to simply throw away what they have collected with the regular trash; all of it has to be burned on the morning before the holiday begins. Then they put all the everyday dishes and silverware and pots and pans and towels and soaps in storage and take out two other (one for the meat and one for the milk) special Passover sets of plates and silverware and pots and pans and towels and soaps, just for the eight days to celebrate the holiday of Pesach. And once Pesach is over, everything is switched around again.
This is standard Jewish observance in Piotrków, even for more secular Jews like us. But when I am around nine years old, I start to wonder why at home we pick and choose, following some of the laws and not others. I’m not used to following rules that don’t make sense to me. Mama always explained why I should or shouldn’t do something, but mostly let me decide what to do for myself. So if we can decide which laws to follow, why obey any of the ones that don’t make sense? But if we’re supposed to let God decide, shouldn’t we obey them all? I am still best friends with Rozia and Sala, but I start spending more time with Itka Ber, who lives one building over and whose family is strictly observant.
They are very devout and very poor. Pani Ber does all the work in their small shop, which is on the ground floor of their building. She bakes challah and makes ice cream, and that is just about all they sell in their store. Pani Ber is so sweet! In the summers, when Itka and I are playing at my house on our balcony one flight above the street, her mother comes outside with a bucket attached to a rope. She puts a dish of ice cream in the bucket, throws the other end of the rope up to us, and Itka and I loop it to the balcony railing. Then we pull on the rope to raise the bucket and sit on my balcony eating ice cream and watching all the people walking up and down Piłsudskiego Street.
Meanwhile, Pan Ber does not have a job to provide for his family because he spends every day at the synagogue praying and studying the Talmud. This is the rabbinical commentary interpreting all the laws in the five books of our Torah, given to us by God. The men debate the tiniest legal intricacies, even though a lot of the situations they ponder don’t even exist anymore in the modern world. For the very religious Jews, this study is the highest calling and what our most brilliant rabbinical scholars devoted their lives to. I used to think this was a silly waste of time, but now from school and talking to Itka, I’m learning why this is important.
We’re not born smart enough to comprehend the ways of God. But He did make us smart enough to figure out how to be good Jews. God wants us to be just, fair, and merciful with one another and to care for ourselves and to revere Him. So we follow God’s laws because He knows what’s good for us, whether we understand or not. Deciding how to apply them throughout changing times is the part we Jews, relying on our Talmudic scholars, use our intelligence to figure out for ourselves. That’s why it’s okay for the men to spend the day thinking and arguing and studying and praying without making any money while their wives work to support their families.
I understand the explanation for this arrangement, but I’m not sure how I feel about it.
Every Friday night my family has a delicious Shabbos dinner, but the Bers have a Shabbos festival! They eat and sing and pray. Unlike my family, the Bers keep Shabbos inside the house, too, not just outside. Itka tells me that Shabbos is our holiest day, even more than Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. God gave us Shabbos so that no matter what hardships or pain we might be suffering, this one day a week we feel joy and thank God for the gift of life. Even when we are in mourning and sit shiva for a week, on Shabbos we are not supposed to grieve. And if we have to choose between going to a wedding or a funeral of people equally close to us, we go to the wedding. The gift of life is more important than the pain of death.
In Genesis, the first book of the Torah, we learn how God created the worl
d in six days and then on the seventh He rested; so we are forbidden from working and must also take this day, our Shabbos, to rest, study Torah, and forget all worldly concerns. But what counts as work? The Torah gives us thirty-nine categories of work based on the tasks of agriculture, like planting and plowing and harvesting and engaging in commerce. This is from olden times when all of our ancestors provided for themselves by farming the land. Since farmers aren’t allowed to harvest their crops on the Sabbath, the rabbis taught that we must refrain from any similar act, like pulling a blade of grass from the earth or picking a leaf off the branch of a tree. And to protect us from accidentally breaking this rule, we are forbidden from climbing a tree.
On Shabbos, the Bers don’t buy anything, nor carry any money. They can’t even push Itka’s little baby brother in his baby carriage. They don’t light any fires, cook any food, turn on their gas lights, take a train, or write. If they had a radio or telephone, they wouldn’t be able to use them. It is also forbidden to cut or tear anything, so just before Shabbos, Pani Ber rips a lot of toilet paper into little pieces and stacks them into piles to use during the Shabbos. (The rule I find so funny is that because writing business records and contracts means making marks, we are forbidden from peeing in the snow!) I am intrigued by all of this.
Itka also teaches me that God wanted Moses to lead our people away from the barbaric practices of the other tribes. Five thousand years ago, some of them would sacrifice an animal and then drink its warm blood as it was dying. I shiver when she whispers that some of those tribes would even drink the blood of the enemies they had killed, so they could gain the dead men’s power. Itka says God wanted to be sure that we Jews never practiced animal cruelty or human sacrifice, so He told Moses to proclaim that none of the meat we eat should have blood in it. Also, we had to be sure that the animal had been killed mercifully. The other tribes would keep hitting the poor animal over the head, and it would die slowly and painfully. So instead we cut the jugular vein in the throat so that death comes quickly and a lot of the blood leaves the animal’s body. It’s also why we can never eat meat from the rump or back legs of the animal, where the large veins might still have blood in them. This is one of those times when the law makes sense to me.
Then some of the other laws of kashruth—the kosher laws—don’t make sense. We are allowed to eat only the meat of an animal that both chews its cud and has a cloven hoof, like a cow, a sheep, a goat, or a deer. Animals with only cloven hooves, like the pig or rabbit, or that only chew the cud, like a camel, are forbidden. Only fish that have both fins and scales are kosher; shellfish like shrimp and oysters are not.
But we are to obey them all. I never thought about what Mama and Tatte did in the shop as anything besides a business to make money for us. But now I see what an important responsibility this is, making sure that all the customers are correctly obeying God’s laws.
One time when I sleep over at Itka’s house, we wake up early in the morning to get ready for school. Pan Ber has the flu and is too weak to go to the synagogue to pray. Pan Ber normally prays three times every day at the synagogue, and even though he is feeling sick, he has still gotten out of bed at dawn to pray at home. He is standing in the sun parlor, facing east and praying very softly, bowing his head and moving his body up and down in a lovely rhythm. This is called davening. I’ve seen the men praying like this when I go to shul on the High Holidays, but I didn’t know you could do it by yourself at home. On the inside of his left arm, just above the elbow, there is a little black leather box held in place by a black leather strap wrapped seven times around his arm and three times around his middle finger. Another box rests on the center of his forehead, with its leather strap hanging down over his right shoulder. I learn that these are called tefillin (also phylacteries). He also wears a tallis, the white prayer shawl with blue stripes, wrapped around his head and shoulders. I am practically hypnotized watching Pan Ber pray and I feel bereft that my father is not a “real Jew.”
Itka already knows most of the 613 mitzvot (commandments) from the Mishnah, the oral law handed down over the generations and put in writing by Maimonides in the twelfth century. She says that 248 are positive “Thou shalts” and 365 are negative “Thou shalt nots.” I decide to try and learn all 613 mitzvot myself. Then I will know what is the right thing to do every minute of my life.
I suppose I want something more to believe in, some kind of focus. I yearn for some religious standards, some rules of what is wrong or right.
For one year I strictly and wholeheartedly keep all the laws and commandments Itka Ber teaches me. My sister and brothers make fun of me but I don’t care. My religious discipline gives me comfort and quiets all the noisy questions that have always bubbled in my mind. I feel safe and calm, and at peace with myself and my world.
And then my views change. Is it because I get older and more practical, more questioning; or is it only because of what Itka does to me at school?
It is in late September, just before the Jewish New Year. In our home economics class the teacher, Pani Lewinova, holds a contest to see which student can sew the most perfect hem of an apron. Itka’s comes out puckered. I love the waviness of it and think it looks beautiful and tell her so. The teacher has other ideas and judges that my boring, straight hem is the winner. Itka gets very angry with me. Her dark eyes bore through me and she says that I lied to her about her “beautiful hem” just so I could win. She says I am not a good friend and she should have won the contest. She pouts and won’t talk to me.
But then, at the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, Itka starts acting like we are friends again, because at this holy time of year we are meant to let go of any hard feelings toward other people. But her friendship only lasts for the ten holy days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, when Itka again stops talking to me.
I am really hurt and shocked by this selfish behavior from my dear friend. How can I be friends with someone who doesn’t wish me well and falsely accuses me of tricking her and lying? And how can she be so hypocritical and think that following the rules but not the meaning and spirit behind them is the point of being religious? She may know all 613 mitzvot, but that by itself doesn’t make her a good Jew.
Maybe it just isn’t in my nature to obey without doubting, but gradually I become more and more skeptical. So much of what might have made sense when Moses took the Israelites out of Egypt five thousand years ago doesn’t seem to me to apply to life in the twentieth century.
If the Sabbath is a day of rest, why do the Bers have to work so hard not to work?
Why can’t they push the baby in the carriage on Shabbos? They have to carry him instead and he is very fat.
If anything, Pani Ber, who strictly keeps Shabbos, works harder than women like my mama, who don’t.
I realize I don’t have the faith to make my religious practice feel like more than just shallow rituals. And without true belief and sincere devotion, it makes no sense to keep it up. I still yearn for deeper meaning and purpose in my life, but I feel I’ll have to find another way, one that is true to the values I believe in but is not tied to religious practice or even to belief in God.
Zionism
Palestine is our unforgettable historic homeland … The Jews who will it shall achieve their State … whatever we attempt there for our own benefit will redound mightily and beneficially to the good of all mankind.
—Theodor Herzl (1860–1904)
1928
Somewhere, from my very first memories, I have always understood that a Jew must work for tikkun olam: healing the world. We are the chosen people, chosen to improve the world, to work toward world peace and justice for all.
Searching for a purpose, a cause to believe in, I am attracted to Zionism. There are many branches of Zionism based on different principles and political philosophies from far left to far right, some atheistic and some very religious, but all devoted to establishing a Jewish state, Eretz Yisrael, in our ancestral homeland of Palestine. Together with Sala an
d Rozia, I join Hanoar Hatzioni. Our movement is not religious or political but devoted to educating young people about Jewish culture and preparing them to immigrate to Eretz Yisrael.
We meet in an apartment we call “the clubhouse” once or twice a week, after school and homework are finished. Leaders come and talk to us about the land of Israel and Zionism and teach us Israeli songs and dances. In the summers we go to camps and learn to swim and develop other practical skills for taking care of ourselves outdoors. We are like all the youth scouting organizations in different parts of the world, but with the extra passion of our cause.
Even though Zionism has been around since the early 1900s, frightening trends in Poland and throughout Europe since the end of World War I make my devotion to Zionism feel especially urgent. The Versailles Treaty ending that war in 1918 punished the defeated Germany harshly. The German economy has been getting worse and worse, with life extremely hard, jobs and food scarce, and the Germans feeling humiliated and demoralized. At this difficult time, a new political movement called Fascism is attracting followers. Fascism offers a utopian vision of honor and power and superiority. It is also a way to place the blame for hardship on others, and the Jews are the easiest target because anti-Semitism has a long history in Europe.
Fortunately, except for my fear of our gentile tenant, I have never personally experienced anti-Semitism. We Jews all live safely together in our Jewish communities, and my parents don’t talk about it much. But I know about the suffering inflicted on Jews in the past from my history and Torah studies in school. Now we are hearing horrible stories of recent pogroms (massacres of Jews and destruction of their villages), hatred, and discrimination against Jews—which, all too soon, we will experience firsthand.
Even though the New Testament teaches that Jesus had been a rabbi and that Mary and Joseph and the twelve disciples were Jewish, for centuries the Church’s teachings had encouraged prejudice against the Jews. It was said that Jews had killed Jesus and were the cause of many of the troubles in the world. Even in modern times some people still believe that on the days before Passover, Jews kill Christian children to use their blood for baking the matzot (unleavened bread) we eat during the Seder, the feast that begins the eight-day celebration of Passover. They have even said Jews would put the blood of those murdered children in their wineglasses to drink.
Claiming My Place Page 4
