Have I Got a Story for You

by Ezra Glinter

  A native of Lodz, Karmiol graduated from the city’s Jewish-Polish high school and went on to study literature at Warsaw University, where he received a master’s degree. In the mid-1930s he moved to Palestine, where he pursued graduate studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

  Upon the death of his father in 1937, Karmiol returned to Poland, and was imprisoned in the Lodz Ghetto from 1939 to 1945. While in the ghetto, Karmiol worked as a teacher, wrote plays and short stories, and married his wife, Sabina. He survived the Holocaust by hiding in the ghetto after its liquidation in August 1944.

  After the war Karmiol remained in Lodz, where he worked as a journalist for a Polish newspaper and published stories in the Yiddish newspaper Dos naye lebn (This New Life). After learning that his wife had also survived the war and was living in Sweden, he bribed the captain of a fishing boat to smuggle him into the country.

  In 1947, Karmiol and his wife immigrated to the United States, where he taught in Jewish schools in Philadelphia and Detroit, and worked for Israel’s General Federation of Labour—known in Hebrew as the Histadrut—in New York.

  Throughout this time Karmiol continued publishing fiction in Yiddish newspapers and literary journals. “After Liberation,” which appeared in the Forward on May 12, 1968, reflects Karmiol’s experience as a journalist in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, and describes the narrator’s attempt to report on an incident similar to the infamous Kielce pogrom in 1946, in which some forty-two Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors were murdered in the presence of Polish Communist forces.

  In 1970, following the death of his wife, Karmiol immigrated to Israel, where he published several collections of short stories, including Hersh and Miriam and Other Stories, which appeared in English in 1973.

  After Liberation

  (MAY 12, 1968)

  Translated by Chana Pollack

  HUGE RUSSIAN TANKS making grating sounds rolled through the snow-covered streets. Trucks filled with soldiers sped down the road towards Berlin. The clanging of metal, the clamor of engines, the sound of soldiers’ voices, carried through the frigid air over the evacuated streets of Lodz, its boarded-up shops, its shuttered homes.

  Battered and solitary, only a few days out of the ghetto, Yosef stood on the sidewalk and contemplated the Red Army marching through.

  Here they are then, the liberators . . . too late though to save the tens of thousands of Jews in the ghetto.

  The row of tanks came to a halt. A tall man with a long gaunt face called out from a truck: “Comrade!”

  Yosef came closer. The man wearing a gray officer’s uniform bent down towards him. “Were you in the ghetto?” He said it in Yiddish, hiding his mouth by cupping his palm over it as if blowing through a tube, so that soldiers in a nearby truck wouldn’t overhear him.

  “Yes!” Yosef’s face lit up and he reached a hand out to him.

  “Are there many Jews left?” The Russian Jew bent down to Yosef.

  “Very few, very few.”

  The tanks moved on with a clattering din. The officer bellowed. “So long!” And he waved his hand.

  The surviving Jew followed him with his eyes until he disappeared at the bend in the road.

  Yosef ambled slowly along. He found himself on Piotrkowska Street. Shop windows were broken, doors torn off.

  House walls were darkened with graffiti reading LONG LIVE THE POLISH ARMY! LONG LIVE WLADYSLAW GOMULKA! 72 Half a dozen Poles in sheepskin coats stood in the shadows of a little restaurant. A late-arriving Red Army soldier, submachine gun in hand, rushed to meet his unit. A woman, wrapped up in a shawl, lurched by him. A cocky youth sold homemade cigarettes. Two ragged children stood outside the grocery store pulling their faces back from the cold windowpane where a loaf of bread lay.

  Yosef lingered at the entrance to the editorial offices of Lodz, where a small group read the Polish newspaper’s freshly published headlines from the front pages.

  He went upstairs into the hubbub of people, the chatter of typewriters and the smell of machinery.

  The editor, outfitted in a chartreuse uniform, raised a pair of sharp blue eyes at him, and grumbled:

  “What do you have to say? Are you trained in Polish language and literature? Sure you are! Get to work, you’ll be our copy editor and try writing some yourself as well. The secretary will get you a map to the station and we’ll find you an old uniform and a pair of boots.”

  So began the journalistic career of Yosef Pravidla.

  Before long his name was a frequent byline in the Polish press. The young journalist reported news and wrote features articles.

  More of the liberated Jews arrived in Lodz. The community center resounded with the racket of nervous feet; anxious, worry-filled eyes; the odor of sweat and cheap tobacco; the rancid air of ditches and barns; neglected men in German military jackets; women in found clothing with straw-strewn disheveled hair and faces covered in sores; rumpled young women restraining themselves from scratching—and everyone talking at once, arguing and babbling, like orphans who feel the warmth of their new home and smell the aroma of cooking.

  Yosef used to run up the stairs to the community center breathlessly, asking the vocal women whether they had encountered his wife, who had been deported from the ghetto. They eyed him scornfully.

  “Were we once individuals? Numbers, merely numbers!”

  In the factories where Yosef went to gather material for his reporting, the workers besieged him with questions and complaints.

  Yosef had just left the government-appointed factory director’s office, which used to belong to the Zeibert Brothers. He was surrounded by the women weavers and cutters.

  “We have to stand all day long in dust and dirt, and we don’t receive even one drop of milk.”

  “And the Jewish children do receive milk.”

  “Yes, that’s true, they do receive milk and all kinds of provisions.”

  “How do you know this? And how many children, on the other hand, survived?”

  Yosef was furious.

  The workers surrounded him.

  Yosef was jerked about in place but remained upright—he wanted to chase after them, screaming until their eardrums burst: “You see and know it all—except the diamond ring on the director’s hand. He’s permitted to steal from you being that he’s Polish! And whose factory was it originally, if not the ‘kikes’?”

  With the arrival of the refugees from Siberia, Jews from the camps, and folks who had hidden in villages and forests, pale Lodz took on the redness of their sunken cheeks.

  The city buzzed with weddings, balls and dances. The former nightclub Tabarin was packed with Russian artists, acrobats and illusionists. The orchestra played “Warsaw, My Warsaw” and drunken Poles and tipsy Jews lamented the destroyed Polish capital. The Jewish newspaper that had begun publication brought news of a wedding in a Jewish town near Warsaw where local farmers and gentile townsfolk had entertained the bride and groom with song and dance.

  One night Pravidla’s grim, elderly landlady, steeped in worry and fear, entered his room.

  “Did you know that in Rojek, near Lublin, they murdered two Jews?”

  Yosef headed to the editorial offices only to find that no one had yet reported news of any murders.

  At the community center it was confirmed. For a while unrest in the provinces was discussed. The rabble claimed that ever since ’46 the kikes had grabbed the reins of power in Poland. Who knew what the Poles were planning?

  The writer went over to the editor’s office.

  “I’m heading to Rojek,” he informed him urgently. “I’ve got to find out who’s to blame for the death of the refugees.”

  The head of Lodz nodded his head.

  “Comrade, you are brave, but the road there is dangerous. The area is teeming with the Home Army 73 fascist guerillas who are fighting the government. You’d best arm yourself.”

  The journalist missed the bus and had to take a truck carrying passengers through the towns an
d villages on the way to Lublin.

  Aside from Yosef, the “luxury vehicle” carried a couple of farm wives and their husbands, who agitated themselves the entire way as they loudly discussed how the Russians were shipping coal out of Poland and ransacking its best and finest.

  By evening the vehicle was jerking along, causing Yosef to recall grim memories. The peasants lay outstretched on the bench, snoring.

  “Up! Get up and get out!”

  The passengers were blinded by electric lanterns cutting through the darkness.

  The driver was ordered to halt the trip until further notice.

  The soldiers vacated. The driver cursed harshly. People stood on the sidewalk beside the immobilized truck.

  An ominous hand suddenly tore off the raw black cover of night. A pinkish glow lit up the sky, as if day was breaking. Spilling across the horizon was a sea of flickering red.

  “Jesus Christ! The Home Army lads are burning through the forest!” The gentiles crossed themselves fearfully. When would the Poles cease shooting each other?

  Bloody tongues wrapped in gun smoke licked the dismal sky. From the distance came the windswept aroma of scorched pine trees, shrubbery and gold-hued grasses.

  It was midday by the time Yosef reached town. The only member of the ruling militia the journalist encountered grumbled that the Home Army lads had murdered the two Jews.

  Yosef meandered between the wooden houses, observing the peacefulness emanating from glowing sun-streaked windows bordered by white curtains and decorated with milk pails full of flowers.

  Grandmothers’ peeled potatoes sat on porch settees, warming themselves in the sun.

  An elderly Polish woman swayed in her rocking chair in front of a red brick house at the end of town.

  “Peace be with you,” she greeted the journalist.

  “I’m from the city and I’m looking for a nice piece of bacon, perhaps you have some?”

  “For our own, always. But not for the Muscovites or the kikes.”

  “I see, you hate the kikes as I do.”

  “Oh, I know them well. We just rid ourselves of those last two a few days ago.”

  “Tell me more about that, I’m curious.”

  “They came to town, having returned thinking we’d welcome them with bread and salt—the creeps were searching for family and friends the Germans had wiped out long ago. They started brawling and Polish townsfolk ran over, as did the local farmers, and dragged the two kikes to the orchard with pitchforks, knives and iron cudgels. They beat them, wounded them, and stabbed them to pieces.”

  Yosef lost the strength to stand upright. He dropped onto the stairs leading up to the house.

  “Where’s the grave they tossed them into?” He asked the elderly woman.

  “The militia knows.”

  The government-appointed representative dozed with his head on the desk. When the journalist shook him awake, he jumped up and angrily demanded:

  “What’s wrong with you? Where are you from?”

  “Come along then!” Pravidla drew a revolver from his bag. “Come show me the Jews’ grave or I’ll shoot you on the spot. You and this entire town will be locked up in prison! It’s just too bad, if I could only hang each of you here in the marketplace!”

  The deathly-pale envoy lowered his head and walked on wobbly feet.

  The cemetery was studded with broken tombstones. Chickens and ducks dawdled amidst graves. The victims’ grave lay next to a fence—an earthen mound trod over and marked by footsteps.

  “On your knees!” Yosef ordered the gentile. “And kiss the sacred ground!”

  The gentile lowered to his knees and placed his lips on the grave.

  “Now leave, and wait to be summoned by the court!”

  The militant left. Pravidla quietly spoke to the hallowed ones:

  “We won’t forget you, and the Christians won’t forget me either.”

  Yosef gathered up a handful of earth from the long grave.

  “I take this with me, on my way out into the world!”

  72 Wladyslaw Gomulka (1905–1982) was a postwar Polish Communist leader.

  73 The dominant Polish underground movement during World War II. Although the Home Army was disbanded after the war, individual militias loyal to the Polish government in exile continued to operate against the Soviet army and the Polish Communist government.

  SECTION FOUR

  The Old Country

  THE FORWARD WAS a forward-thinking newspaper. Alongside its progressive political outlook it encouraged its readers to make a home for themselves in the United States. Instead of isolating themselves in a social and cultural ghetto, it urged them to learn about American culture. Rather than dwell in the past, it looked to the future.

  This open-armed embrace of the new world wasn’t always well received. Socialists disliked the paper’s preference for populism over ideological rigor. Intellectuals objected to its broad sensationalism, both in its news reporting and in its literary output. And those committed to the furtherance of the Yiddish language condemned the Forward’s seeming indifference to that cause. By wholeheartedly encouraging its readers to learn English, it could even be said that the Forward sowed the seeds of its own decline.

  But together with the optimistic spirit that carried the Forward through the first decades of the twentieth century, it always had at least one eye looking backwards. Even after mass immigration to America, cities like Warsaw and Vilna remained major centers of Jewish life, and the Yiddish press served as a vital link between those communities and the growing Jewish population in the United States. Nearly all Forward readers had family in Europe, and in the Forward they could read news of the places where parents and siblings—even spouses and children—still lived.

  News of home quickly took on a nostalgic flavor as well. The towns and cities of Eastern Europe represented not just a different place, but also an older way of life. The Jewish market towns of the Russian Empire, with their synagogues and schools, markets and craftsmen, formed a common background for first-generation immigrants, and a vividly pictured heritage for their children and grandchildren. Even prior to the Holocaust—and certainly after it—Yiddish fiction took an elegiac tone, looking back at a world that was vanishing even before it was brutally wiped out.

  Thus readers of the Forward relished Zalman Schneour’s vignettes about his upbringing in Shklov, which appeared in the paper for decades. Many of the stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, who published regularly in the Forward from the time of his immigration in 1935, took place in a mythologized version of the old country, full of spirits and demons and magical forces. And starting in the 1970s the Forward began publishing the renowned Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade, who wrote numerous stories about his own hometown of Vilna, as it had existed before the war.

  To be sure, such work was not strictly an exercise in nostalgia. In these stories the complexities and contradictions of Jewish life in Eastern Europe were examined in detail, from the injustices inflicted on women by a patriarchal society to the religious, economic, and social fissures that had been appearing at least since the nineteenth century. And following the Holocaust, the Forward became a powerful repository of Jewish memory for the people, communities, and institutions that had been lost. This was the world that the Forward and its readers had come from, and which had now all but disappeared.

  Yona Rozenfeld

  1880–1944

  YONA ROZENFELD, ONE of the more obscure masters of modern Yiddish prose, was a regular literary contributor to the Forward until the mid-1930s, when a creative dispute with editor Abraham Cahan caused him to leave the newspaper.

  Born in Tshartorisk, in what is now Ukraine, Rozenfeld received a traditional religious education until the age of thirteen, when both of his parents died of cholera. With the help of an older brother he moved to Odessa, where he worked as a lathe operator for ten years, an experience he later described in his 1940 autobiographical novel Eyner aleyn (One Alone).

  Ro
zenfeld began writing in his early twenties and showed his work to I. L. Peretz when the latter visited Odessa in 1902. His first publication came two years later in the newspaper Fraynd (Friend), and he continued to publish stories in both the European and American Yiddish press.

  In 1921, Rozenfeld immigrated to America, where he became a regular contributor to the Forward. He also wrote for the Yiddish stage and became best known for a dramatic adaptation of his early short story, “Competitors.” Several collections of his work appeared in the 1920s, and a posthumous volume of selected works was published in 1955 under the editorship of novelist Chaim Grade and the critic Shmuel Niger.

  “A Holiday,” which appeared on October 8 and 9, 1922, is set in an unnamed European city and illustrates the unspoken tensions between Jews and Christians in this commercial metropolis.

  In the mid-1930s the Forward stopped publishing Rozenfeld’s work on the insistence of Cahan, who felt that Rozenfeld’s focus on character psychology and his discursive style had become too difficult for readers. Rozenfeld died in New York in 1944.

  A Holiday

  (OCTOBER 8–9, 1922)

  Translated by Rachel Mines

  SAYING GOODBYE FOR the eight days, Elya, the worker, shook hands with his boss and the boss’s two daughters, wished them a happy holiday, and left.

  The workshop had already been swept and cleaned when they parted. The apprentice boy had gathered the last few shavings into a sack, flung it over his shoulder and taken it away. The house too had been cleaned and tidied, and the family prepared to wash themselves. The boss went off to the baths, but his daughters had to bathe at home in a tub, a large wooden vessel in which they washed laundry. And the girls smiled at the thought of stripping naked and bathing.

  Elya said goodbye and left. The girls didn’t invite him to visit, thinking that if he wanted to see them he’d do so on his own, uninvited. But each in turn smiled into his eyes to show him they’d be pleased to welcome him back as a guest. It was their father who said, “Drop by!”