The Running Years

by Claire Rayner

  Bombay was all he could have ever hoped to find. A vast sprawl of buildings stretched over the seven islands which had given birth to the settlement and on into the mud flats beyond. There was a fort which the British had built and still named and around it the city seethed, one vast bazaar. And the people – the sight of the people made Abdul’s lips curve above his greying beard.

  There were Muslims and Hindus; there were Parsees, still wearing pointed shoes and bright pantaloons of their ancestors in Persia; there were Afghan horse dealers with their hair oiled to a cap; there were Musselmen in bright turbans, Bokharan traders in long gabardine robes with tall sheepskin caps on their heads and Armenians who wore there beards dyed with henna. Abdul kept well away from them. Armenians were not people he had ever found congenial business partners. But the others, the other promised great possibilities. Everyone seemed to get on well with everyone else and there seemed little evidence of the rigid caste structure that he had been told made trade so complex on Madras, far away on the other side of the continent. Here indeed was hope for a lavish future.

  He sold his cargo of horses for an excellent price, and negotiated another of cotton to take back to Bushire. But he did not hurry to go; there were other things to consider, first.

  He found the synagogue easily enough, in the middle of a tightly packed Jewish quarter, and went to the service on Friday night to be at once invited, as a stranger should be, to share the Sabbath meal with one of the residents.

  The talked long into the night, of Talmudic matters of course, but also of more mundane things. Like the amount of British trade there was available.

  ‘Take a look at the wharfside, down beyond Bazaar Street,’ his host advised him. ‘The British traders have their warehouses there. There’s business to be done – they buy more than any others. They tell me the island they have come from is very small, but I tell you, the people there have such appetites – they buy so much, so much…

  It was unusual for Abdul to wish the Sabbath over, but he did that week. He sat in his host’s house and in the synagogue itching to be about the new business that he could see beckoning, and when at last Monday came (for the British Sabbath was carefully kept and that meant a wasted Sunday fro him) he was on the wharfside again, watching, listening, thinking.

  The port was so congested with shipping that men could go far out over the water by jumping from deck to deck. The most agile and busy jumpers were the Parsees, their tall shining Khokas on their nodding heads, accompanying the British.

  Abdul stared at them florid complexioned men in crumpled white suits, with hats pushed to the backs of their heads, cigars in their mouths – a very strange way to use tobacco, he thought, for to him tobacco was the solace of one’s peace and leisure, not the accompaniment of work - and sweaty shiny faces. Some of them looked ill and yellow in the heat, and brushed away the omnipresent flies with a much greater irritation than their attentions seemed to warrant. The British, decided Abdul, were not comfortable in these climes. But they were busy, oh, but they were busy.

  He found a boy in rags, a thin creature with a pointed chin and eyes so huge in his small face that he looked like a sprite; half starved, illiterate – and fluent in a dozen languages. Including English, and that was what Abdul did not speak, and needed.

  With the boy at his side to tell him what was said he listened to conversations in which enormous amounts of money were discussed, huge cargoes were traded as casually as a sweetmeat would be sold from a wharfside barrow, and the promise he had smelled in this fetid port grew solid before eyes.

  Before he returned to Bushire with his cargo he had taken a house in Oleander Alley, just outside the Jewish quarter, as close to the wharves as he could get. It was small, but there was room for an office and living quarters above, and below there was a sizable godown, the warehousing space that the local people labelled with this old Malay word. He would need more space eventually if his plans were to come to fruition, but this would do to start with.

  He left the small boy, who said his name was Sanjib and that he had no parents and that he lived on his wits and what he could steal, in the house in Oleander Alley and promised him a reward if he took care of the property. Sanjib, who knew a good thing when he saw it, swore passionately he would do so, defending it with his life for the sahib if necessary, and Abdul went back to Bushire.

  Esther was not too pleased with the plans when she heard them, fearing that her Abdul was about to repeat his own history, but there was little she could do to affect them. She was only his wife, and though she had her own ways of showing her displeasure, could certainly not expect to deflect a man from his business. How could she? But she pouted all the same.

  Abdul did not worry about that. She’d get over it, he told himself, and called his sons and his son-in-law and told them his plans.

  They were eager, especially Solomon, who was to have the most exciting part of them. Briefly, Abdul’s plan was to make a permanent link between Bushire and Bombay and ultimately with England.

  ‘They tell me it’s the biggest market anywhere,’ Abdul said, pulling at his ear in the way he always did when he was excited. ‘They buy and buy and buy, and the amount of goods that go through Bombay to get there is monumental.

  The sons’ eyes opened wider.

  ‘I will leave you, David, to head the Bushire office. You understand me? You will be responsible for all the goods incoming from Baghdad, and for preparing cargoes for Bombay. Also you will deal with the return cargoes. What they will be depends on what Solomon finds.’

  He turned to his younger son. ‘You will be in Bombay. You will see the incoming goods from Bushire into the godown in Oleander Alley and then onto the ships for England. Then you will see the fresh cargoes for Bushire back onto the ships going back to David.’

  ‘And I?’ asked Samuel. ‘What will I do?’

  Abdul smiled. ‘You will make the occasional journeys to Baghdad, to be sure we’re getting the best goods from there. You and Sarah will keep the books, as well. And I – ’ he smiled more wildly. ‘I will travel between Bombay and Bushire, regularly, and make sure we keep those ships going to England full of our goods instead of the Parsees’. It’s time they gave up a share for us. And we will use our name in the English way. Sanjib told me the English buyers will say our name as Lammeck. We must make it easy for them. That’s good business, isn’t it?’

  The Orleander Alley House was the first. They had seven more by the time Abdul was fifty and Lammeck and Sons owned a great swathe of the Bombay waterfront by the time he was seventy and ready to take life more easily. He had done well, the old man, shrewdly foreseeing the value of wharfside property long before any of his competitors. He had ploughed every rupee he could into those ramshackle buildings, slowly replacing them with better structures.. Other merchants had watched him and laughed – until they realized that he was not better placed than any of them to get the best cargoes and the best prices.

  Ships from England took five months to make the hazardous journey to India when Abdul first arrived in Bombay, but he had heard of the new steamship services that were being planned and knew what a difference they would make. They did. Ships poured into the docks, and needed space to tie up and unload. Abdul had it, and that meant he had the pick of their goods, long before the city dealers did. Also, because many of the ships were forced to hold port waiting for the monsoon to pass, their captains needed money to tide them over. Abdul provided it, and was repaid by being given first pick of cargo space going back to England.

  No wonder he thrived.

  Abdul and his sons deal in everything and anything. If there was trade to do, they did it. Cotton and wool, hides and turquoises, silk and nakeen and muslin, opium and tea.

  The opium trade was highly regarded despite the half-hearted attempts by China to control it, for it had the seal of approval of mighty Britain. No merchant of any sense, or any pretensions to standing in the Bombay mercantile community, could afford not to be
part of it. Abdul and his sons were therefore part of it, sharing their responsibility with many other major firms, including the great British traders Jardine Mathieson. Why should Lammeck and Sons be any different? They had never seen the effect of opium on a regular user. They felt no more concern about opium than they did about silk; both were highly lucrative.

  It was the opium trade that took the business to Shanghai. Sarah and Samuel’s eldest son, Simon Hazzan, was sent there to open the first Lammeck office in China, with his cousin Moses and also the firm’s oldest employee, the much trusted and highly experienced Sanjib, now a dapper well dressed family man enjoying great respect from, his neighbours and fellow merchants, to accompany him. Soon branch offices sprang up in Hong Kong and Macao and Tienstsin, and even, eventually, across the Sea of Japan in Yokohama. Indeed, there was not a corner of the world where the ledgers and lading notes of Abdul Lammeck and Sons did not penetrate.

  Abdul had long since realized that the best thing that had ever happened to him and his family was the plotting and greed of his brothers and fellow Jews in old Baghdad.

  ‘Had it not been for them,’ he would tell his great-grandchildren,’ we would all be living in a half dead city, knowing nothing of the world outside instead of here in our beautiful bungalow in Poonah here the wind is cool and the trees are shady in the summer.’

  And he would look down from his terrace in the general direction of Bombay and think of his industrious sons working there to improve the family fortunes even more and smile.

  When he dies all mercantile Bombay, his rivals as well as his colleagues, turned out to watch his simple interment and to listen to the Kaddish being intoned over him by his sons and grandsons, and to see his daughter Sarah, a large and powerful lady now, standing there with her head covered in a silken sari, braving men’s disapproval of her presence to mourn her father. Women did not usually go to gravesides, remaining in the house to wail and weep and greet the returning men with salt fish to remind them of the painful saltiness of tears and cooked eggs to remind them of the way the human spirit is toughened by tribulation, as an egg is made rocklike by boiling. But Sarah was no ordinary woman. She was the widow Sarah Lammeck Hazzan and a power I her dead father’s great business.

  As soon as the mourning month was over, she sent her own son, the youngest, David, to take the place of his half nephew Bartholomew in Shanghai, and summoned Bartholomew home again.

  He came to Bombay, kissed his aunt and listened with his mouth half open when he heard what she had to say. He went to his uncles and to his cousins and they talked and planned far into the night. The next day, they all went to call on Sarah, and talked and argued and talked more.

  In the end she had her way. Bartholomew Lammeck, aged twenty, took ship on 17 January 1859 for Southampton, England, to open the first London office of Abdul Lammeck and Sons.

  He arrived to a muggy rainy day when the town looked wary and unwelcoming, to stand on deck in his neat turban and silk robe shivering little in the unaccustomed chill, for all it was now mid-spring. But this was not Bombay or Shanghai. This was the north and after a little while he went below to change into the clothes that hitherto he had regarded as mere fancy dress, but now saw as inevitable.

  When he came up again he looked awkward and miserable in his cutaway coat and stiff white shirt with its overlarge black cravat; his whiskers looked far too luxuriant against his yellowish skin and his eyes wee bloodshot. He looked very alien to the other English passengers, very much a foreigner, but Bartholomew was not aware of their sideways looks and half smiles directed at each other. He just saw the bustling docks and felt the chill in his bones and thought gloomily of the years to come, a long way from all he had ever known. How could he ever enjoy life here?

  The second of the families had arrived in England.

  10

  For most of the children of Micah, through his sons Daniel and Akkub, life had become circumscribed by the Ghetto. In city after city throughout Europe, Jews had been forced to live in their own special quarters behind high walls with locked gates, observing curfews which were viciously enforced by the Christian community that surrounded them and wearing the yellow circle above the heart whenever they ventured outside to trade.

  In some of the cities the ghetto was little more than a street or two; in others it was a widespread tangle of alleys where the houses were built even higher in the most rickety of structures, for the Jews were never allowed to extend the ghetto boundaries as their communities grew. When a man’s family enlarged all he could do to increase the living space to match was build another story on top of the house he lived in, which never bothered his Christian landlord (only Christians being allowed to actually own property, even inside the ghetto) for it improved his rent handsomely.

  As a result of the families suffered dreadful tragedies when they filled their houses to celebrate a wedding or a bris, the circumcision of a son, or observed the days of mourning after a death; the ramshackle buildings would creak under the strain of the influx of visitors, and all too often collapsed, or worse still caught fire. A fire in the ghetto was hell indeed, for none outside - apart from the landlords of course – cared enough to offer to help to extinguish it, and it could spread like a crimson dye in a bowl of water, affecting every other house in no time at all.

  But still the families survived, going on much as they always had. The ill fortune which had always dogged the footsteps of the children of Micah seemed an entrenched as ever; over and over again men appeared in the family tree who could make no money but could make lots of babies. For every one who could manage to scrape respectable living as a pedlar of odds and ends, there was at least one other who subsisted largely on the goodwill of his brothers and neighbours, whose children went bare-bottomed as well as barefoot and whose wives became grey and bent long before their time in the struggle to maintain a decent Jewish home. Not for the wives of Micah’s great grandsons the handsome black stuff gowns and snowy white Sabbath aprons that other more fortunate women wore; not for them the gold earrings and bracelets and finger rings that glittered and flashed discreetly in the women’s gallery of the synagogue on Sabbath mornings. They were lucky if they had the wherewithal to but a chollah and a salt herring for the Friday evening meal, let alone the chicken for the pot more comfortable off families enjoyed.

  Yet it was not all gloom. There were the scholars. Over and over again, in generation after generation, were boys who showed such a thirst for the Talmud and the Torah that it was inevitable that they became denizens of the yeshivas, the study places of the truly and devout and learned.

  The families were very proud of them. Women who were gaunt with hunger would preen themselves over their sons’ scholarship. Men who could hardly hold their heads up in public for shame at their poverty gleamed with satisfaction in the synagogue on Sabbaths where every man was equal, rich and poor, and none more equal than the father of a true scholar.

  And there were, too, the midwives. What it was about the women of Micah’s descendants that made them so adept at matters to do with childbirth they never knew themselves: yet so it was, over and over again. The wise woman, the one the neighbours ran for when a young mother’s time came and she began to grunt and push her baby out of her body, was a daughter of Micah. It was a most valuable gift, and one they tried to encourage in their own daughters to make sure they always had the skill, for as well as bringing the respect of the neighbours it also brought more concrete forms of gratitude. Many were the families that were maintained more by the nursing and midwifery skills of the mother than the acumen of the fathers.

  Of course some did well enough, marrying into richer families – like the girl who became a Van Praag of Amsterdam. But never did any of the children of Micah become entrepreneurs in their own right; there seemed to be some deep defect in them that made that impossible.

  They went on, limping through the generations as at last the ghettos of Western Europe disappeared. Emancipation came, slowly, as
statesmen and philosophers began to look at the way Jews had been ill treated for so long and felt compunction. In Holland first, and then parts of Germany, and Norway and Sweden and Denmark and Italy and Great Britain – all over the West the yellow circle disappeared and Jews came blinking out of the ghettos to become layers and doctors and musicians and philosophers and robbers and beggars and thieves just like everyone else. It was a heady time for some – but not for all. Not in Eastern Europe.

  Micah’s family had mostly got it wrong again. Several of the branches of the children of Akkub had turned towards Poland in the good days when that country had offered the most civilized living conditions for Jews. Others went to Russia and settled there. So when, after yet another of the long struggles between Poland and Russia ended with the annexation by Russia of much Polish territory, the decision was made to push all the Jews together tidily into one place to solve for good and all the problems posed by their stubborn determination always to be different, these already poor families were the ones who suffered most.

  Some of course were already living in what was to become knows as the Pale of Settlement, the family who lived in Olbia, now called Odessa, for example. They’d been there for as long as any of them could remember, and when they were told that from now on they could not live anywhere else they shrugged their shoulders and went on as they always had, for what difference did it make? They had nothing to go anywhere else for.

  Like the families of millers, distant cousins of the Van Praags, who lived in Lublin, they had been there for a dozen or more generations, so they felt that new laws made to compel them to stay there lacked force; though they were, like many of their neighbours, a little aggrieved at the way the Russian and Polish authorities sent hordes of newcomers pouring into their towns, until there were all crowded together into shtetls, the special townships and villages that were set aside for the Jews and the and the Jews alone. A million square miles running from the Black Sea to the Baltic, twenty-five provinces where one person in nine was a Jew. Which did not precisely endear them to the other eight.