‘Enough words have been exchanged, let us at last see deeds.’ The schoolmaster had pushed his way between them and pushed Pinchas in front of him like a schoolboy who ignored the bell for the start of the lesson.
‘So let’s go in,’ said Chanele, and wanted to hold out her hand to Salomon. He looked at her as if she was a meshugena, gripped his umbrella more firmly and nodded to Reb Tsvi. The two of them formed the rearguard of a little procession making its way into the assembly.
In the doorway Gubser let Pinchas step in ahead of him.
In the hall of the Guggenheim the men sat closely packed together at long tables; their shoulders touched, and they could hardly reach for their freshly filled beer glasses. They stood side by side along the walls as well, obscuring the sight of the laurel wreaths and club flags in the glass cases.
On the stage a big Swiss flag hung from the ceiling. The man standing in front of it at the lectern looked almost tiny in comparison.
‘Has it started already?’ Pinchas asked, baffled.
‘Of course not,’ said Gubser. ‘Of course not. It’s just a bit of entertainment so that people don’t get bored.’
A wave of laughter made it clear that people actually weren’t getting bored.
The man at the lectern was reading a poem from a slender volume:
‘Here stands the Jew, with dross to sell,’ he recited,
To his Christian clientele.
And though he knows for trash they pay
Herr Levi sells it anyway.
‘Exactly!’ called a voice somewhere in the hall, and the agreement of the others was one big shared exhalation.
And while the Jew counts out his gold,
The Christian’s produce goes unsold.
You fool! Behave like Jacob’s seed!
Devote yourself to fraud and greed!
This time it was not an exhalation, but a common shout.
‘This is wrong,’ Pinchas said furiously.
‘Why? It has nothing to do with the subject at hand.’ Gubser assumed the suffering face of a man who is constantly obliged to explain the simplest things in the world to others. ‘Or did you want to talk about Jewish shops?’
‘Of course not!’
‘Then I don’t understand what you’re getting so worked up about, Herr Pomeranz. You people are always so thin-skinned.’
To sit more comfortably, the audience had pushed their benches far back, and now, a rampart in its Sunday best, blocked the passageways between the table. If two ushers had not created a path for the speakers, it would have been impossible for them to get through.
The little man in front of the big flag saw Gubser coming, snapped his book shut and held it aloft. ‘This is all in the songbook of Ulrich Dürrenmatt,’ he called into the hall. ‘Get hold of it if you want to learn something!’ Then, to thunderous applause, he stepped away from the lectern.
The long tables that stood at an angle to the stage, didn’t reach all the way to the front. Right in front of the steps was a single row of unoccupied chairs, guarded on either side by young lads with blue and black arm bands. They stepped back simultaneously, as precisely as if they had been practising, and freed the path. The schoolmaster sat down in the middle, flanked on each side by Pinchas and the master butcher. The gentlemen from the league sat down in this row as well. There were a few chairs free on both sides. None of the people who had failed to find a seat dared to use them.
Pinchas looked searchingly around, but there was no sign of Salomon and Chanele now. They had probably stopped by the door.
One could sense that the people in the hall were impatient, albeit in a disciplined way. Pinchas was reminded of Simchas Torah, how, in his childhood, the silence required during the service had also been kept only with difficulty, in the knowledge that a bag of sweets was waiting for him at the end.
When the schoolmaster climbed up onto the stage, he was initially greeted with applause. But then the mood quickly changed, when his words of greeting turned into a long address. In an effort to remain on the level of his audience he only quoted Swiss writers, and kept weaving a pithy quote from Gottfried Keller or Conrad Ferdinand Meyer into his remarks. Except that the people hadn’t come to hear him set out the goals of his Popular Education Association. A buzzing noise, as if from an irritable swarm of bees, swelled from the back of the hall to the stage, and because the schoolmaster would not be deterred and had now reached Pestalozzi, they started calling for another speaker, at first only a few voices and then more and more. ‘Gubser! Gubser!’ they shouted.
In a bid to drown out the catcallers – how he would have put them in the corner of his schoolroom, the lines he would have given them to write! – the old schoolmaster’s voice grew ever shriller, and so squeaky that the people eventually started laughing at him. When he resignedly announced the first speech and then climbed back down to his seat, it was as if he were running away.
Gubser took the four steps to the stage very slowly, like a parson climbing to the pulpit, collected and calling the assembly to silence. He didn’t step behind the lectern straight away, but stood right at the front by the steps, looked into the hall and shook his head sadly. ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves,’ said master butcher Gubser. ‘Just laughing at a man like our schoolmaster. Are you all children?’
That was not what they had expected of him.
‘What will the world think of us if you behave so badly?’ asked Gubser, and seemed to mean it quite seriously. ‘It isn’t as if we’re just among ourselves here. We have visitors from a long way away. People want to check if we’re doing everything correctly, we simple Swiss. Someone has come to us from Lemberg. That is somewhere far away in the East, where the garlic grows. The gentleman’s name is Lowy. Or Löwental or something of the kind. I am too stupid to remember those foreign names. But it’s something to do with a lion, I’m sure of that. He certainly has a wild mane, at any rate.’ He pointed to the hall entrance, and people craned their necks round or even stood up to see who he meant. The sudden attention so startled Reb Tsvi that he took shelter behind Salomon, which prompted laughter in their immediate vicinity.
‘So, do not shame your country,’ said Gubser. ‘Or do you want people in Lemberg to say that people in the Aargau don’t know how to behave themselves? In Lemberg, of all places, that centre of civilisation, compared to which Paris and London are only shabby little backwaters?’ They showed clear signs of relief that Gubser hadn’t been serious after all. Those unaccustomed to irony are twice as pleased when it opens itself up to them.
Gubser laughed too, just for a moment, and then made his serious pastor face again. He stepped out from behind the lectern, took a manuscript from the inside pocket of his jacket and carefully aligned the pages. Then he poured himself a glass of water from the carafe that stood ready for the purpose, and took a long sip.
‘Dear friends,’ he began, reading from his manuscript, ‘the reason for meeting here today is a very serious one. In a few weeks we Swiss will be summoned to the urn to vote for a very serious matter that touches the innermost heart of our state. It is not simply about the pros and cons of the duty of stunning before blood is drawn, no that is only the outward occasion. On that Sunday we will all be called to answer a much more fundamental question. Can there, in our country, can there, in a state in which laws are made for all, be special rights for a single small group?’
‘No!’ cried the hall.
‘With all respect for traditions, even if they are not our own . . .’
‘This is still a Christian country!’ a voice called out.
‘With all due respect: can customs which – I do not wish to dispute this for a moment – might have had a certain justification thousands of years ago, can such practices carry more weight in our modern times than the suffering of a tortured animal?’
‘No!’
‘Let us take another look at the facts!’ said Gubser, and began to list all the arguments that Pinchas had expected. He himsel
f, said Gubser, making sentimental eyes, he himself was a friend to the Jews, a friend who welcomed with his heart, with all his heart, the fact that in Switzerland the old narrow-minded barriers had fallen, and that the Israelites were now granted the equal rights that should be nothing more than their due in a modern state. However, he said, and made a long, significant pause after that word, however, it must also be possible to demand that the Jews for their part also acknowledged their newly acquired equality, and did not behave like pettifogging lawyers and only try to pick the raisins out of the cake.
‘That’s what they’re like!’ The heckler seemed always to be the same one.
The Jews, and this was not an unreasonable demand, Gubser continued, must accept the duties that came with their new rights, which applied to all the other citizens of the country, and not, as in the question of animal slaughter, insist for a long time on an outdated practice. Indeed, his fraternal feeling towards the Jews went so far, he said, and put his hand on his heart, that he felt compelled, indeed obliged, to voice a warning here. Clinging to Medieval practices could only, in uneducated circles, encourage the belief in unproven tales of horror, as the ritual murder trial in Tisza-Eszlar had demonstrated once again only recently. He himself, and he had thought about the problem for a long time, could only say, ‘Only in the stuffy air of outdated practices can such superstition flourish!’
Then Gubser turned his attention to the various methods of animal slaughter. As a butcher of long standing he was confident in all modesty, yes, in all modesty, that he could deliver an expert judgement on his question. He himself had witnessed shechita countless times from close to, and the Jewish shochet Naftali Pomeranz, who was incidentally the father of his adversary today, had always been, if not a close friend, then at least a valued colleague, and he had to admit that the bloodthirsty process had always shaken him to the core. And even though he was not, as anyone who knew him was aware, an old maid who only had to cut her finger with a letter opener to fall into a faint straight away.
The audience, who would have welcomed a little more ribaldry, received his little joke with grateful laughter.
Even throwing the animals down, said Gubser, caused them unnecessary pain, and it was not rare for horns or ribs to be broken, or for innards to be crushed. He would not describe the actual process of shechita in detail, to spare his audience’s sensitivities, but only quote what the royal-court veterinarian Dr Sondermann of Munich had said on the subject. One could but admire, he had written in an essay, anyone who could perform this act of human senselessness without internal outrage.
But in order to find a reliable witness, one did not have to go all the way to Munich, Gubser continued, because there were enough experts here in Switzerland who enjoyed an international reputation.
‘I hope he’s going to mention Siegmund here,’ thought Pinchas, because he could easily discredit this entirely biased crown witness of the opponents of shechita. Siegmund was the inventor of a cattle-bolt mask that he was trying to promote across Europe, and therefore had a very personal pecuniary interest in disparaging other competing methods of slaughter.
‘The abattoir administrator and veterinarian Siegmund from Basel,’ Gubser said, ‘has established that the death of an animal in shechita takes between one and a half and three minutes. One and a half to three minutes! And killing slowly, when one could do it quickly, is in my view, gentlemen, nothing but animal torture.’
The first row applauded, and the rest of the audience joined in.
Gubser counted out a whole list of authorities, all of whom described shechita as unnecessarily cruel and no longer in line with the times. During his list of names, titles and the same unchanging arguments, certain of the guests’ heads were starting to sink to their chests when Gubser switched direction.
‘Anyone who knows me,’ he said with his hand on his heart, ‘knows that I am a simple person, a man of the people, and I like to call a spade a spade. If it were up to me, I would say at this point, “That’s it, that’s enough, you know how you have to vote in August.”’ He raised his hand to stop the incipient applause. ‘But here we are, not at an assembly of our league, as one might think in the presence of so many dear and familiar faces, but at the inaugural meeting of the Endingen Popular Education Association. That means that it is not only one side that has the floor; the other side must speak too. How do we say that in Latin again?’
‘Audiatur et altera pars,’ squeaked the schoolmaster.
‘You see how much more intelligent that sounds if you don’t understand it?’
The audience laughed gratefully.
‘So I shall now hand the lectern over to a man who has opinions quite different to my own about shechita.’
Somewhere in the hall a shrill whistle rang out.
Gubser shook his head disapprovingly. ‘Please, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘What will our adjudicator from Lemberg think of us?’
Again all heads turned to Reb Tsvi.
‘I shall now pass the floor . . .’
Pinchas straightened his tie.
‘It is my great pleasure to pass the floor to . . .’
Pinchas made a sudden decision. He took his kippah from his head and put it in his pocket.’
‘. . . I shall pass the floor to a man who has studied everything to do with shechita from the bottom up.’
Pinchas got to his feet.
‘No Jewish haste, Herr Pomeranz,’ said Gubser. ‘It isn’t your turn yet.’ His smile was one of toxic friendliness. ‘It is our honour to be able to greet a real rabbi, who will explain to us everything that we do not yet know.’
For one confused moment Pinchas thought that Gubser, unaware that a reb is still a long way from being a rabbi, had suddenly decided to invite the shnorrer Tsvi Löwinger to the lectern.
But it was far worse than that.
With the elastic gait of a tightrope-walker, his watch chain dancing merrily on his belly, a man whom Pinchas would never have expected to see here skipped onto the stage.
Dr Jakob Stern.
33
The defeat was worse than anything that Pinchas could have imagined in his worst nightmares.
Dr Stern, who was also impertinent enough to greet him from the stage as if they were old friends and sparring partners, knew exactly how to get a meeting going. He was a Jewish scholar of the Talmud, he said by way of introduction, a modern Talmud scholar, please note, one who fully and completely accepted the duties of the modern world as Herr Gubser had just accurately described them; after all, we were no longer living in the eighteenth century, but in the nineteenth, and there was no room now for bigoted hypocrisy and wrongheaded piety. (A shout from the first row: ‘Quite correct!’)
It was with a heavy heart that he had to admit that if truth be told, of course there were still many fellow holders of his office who, in what they called their faith – but faith was not the same as knowledge – were so stubbornly blockheaded that they couldn’t even spell the word ‘progress’. But such people had, if he might put it in the clearest of terms, no business being in modern, enlightened countries like Switzerland, and might be better off retreating as quickly as possible to those dark realms where their medieval world-view still prevailed. To Lemberg, for example.
Heads turned to the back.
Reb Tsvi, who spoke only Yiddish, hadn’t quite been able to follow the speaker’s words. But he had understood the name of his home town, and when everyone looked at him now he thought he was being welcomed, and waved back.
The hall growled like a watchdog.
He himself did not come from a metropolis exactly, Dr Stern continued, but from the little town of Buttenhausen in Swabia, which could easily be compared to Endingen. But it was his experience, he said, and bowed to his audience, a magician who is about to pull a rabbit from a hat, it was his enjoyable experience that in smaller places of this kind practical common sense was at home precisely among the so-called simple folk, who weren’t afraid of a bit of hard wor
k, and who had acquired everything they owned through the sweat of their own brow.
Yes, said the hall, that was exactly how it was, and if people at the top would only listen to them more often, lots of things would be better.
In the big cities people liked to believe, Dr Stern said, that they were the navel of the world, when in fact they were a quite different part of the body, of which one might only be aware if one looked backwards.
He had often used the joke before, and knew that he would have to give the hall time. But then they exploded with laughter and struck the tables with the palms of their hands.
Dr Stern gave a complacent little skip. His watch chain skipped with him.
So he knew, he continued, that the people before him today were not the kind who would allow their minds to be obfuscated in the long term with big words and complicated theories.
Certainly not, the hall opined, and waved the waiters over with their beer glasses, which were empty yet again.
But it was precisely that kind of obfuscation being practised from a particular direction, and it was urgently necessary that a fresh wind be allowed to blow in. The whole debate was in fact entirely without foundation. Absolutely unnecessary. To prove this to them, he invited them to take an excursion into the world of the Talmud, an obscure and strange world, he must say without further ado, in which many people had got lost in the past. The man from Lemberg – heads turned – in his outmoded garb was a good example of the kind of people who flourished in that world. But he promised his listeners, Dr Stern said, that he would take them by the hand and guide them safely out of the labyrinth of pseudological pitfalls. Were they brave enough to follow him on this expedition?
The people in the hall didn’t quite grasp what it was that he wanted of them, but they were certainly brave, and they liked this speaker. They had only known him for a few minutes, but they were putty in his hands.
All the fat volumes of the Talmud, Dr Stern said, were concerned only with using all kinds of logical convolutions and distortions to derive from the Old Testament laws and prohibitions that were not even mentioned in it. One must imagine such a Talmud rabbi as a less-than-pure lawyer, who liked nothing more than to talk to pieces the clear and intelligible text of a contract until it seemed to mean the precise opposite of what was actually agreed in it. Would anyone who has endured such legal acrobatics to his own detriment in real life now please raise his hand?
Melnitz Page 36
