The Running Years
Page 11
The Russian government set about trying to Russianize their Jews. They looked at these people in their antiquely styles clothes based on a century old fashion, at their inability to speak any language but their own Judisch Deutsch, which they called Yiddish, and their stubborn refusal to regard any form of study except Talmudic as true scholarship, and frowned. Many of the Jews of the western countries outside agreed. Their brothers in the shtetls were so – well, so rough. To emancipated and cultured French and German and Dutch and English Jews it was very understandable that the Russian authorities would want to contain this alien presence in their midst. Even the way they did it made sense.
They made rules about their clothes and hair to try and iron out the difference first. Jews were no longer to be allowed to wear the full length coats, capottes, which were their traditional garb. It had to be short coats – and also short beards. So pious old Jews found themselves being chased in the streets by policemen with scissors, who, when they caught them, chopped first their beards and then their overcoats. The old men were puzzled, mortified, and no more Russian than they ever had been for all their shearing. They just let their beards and earlocks grow again, and patched their capottes, and stayed as stubbornly Jewish as ever.
The Russians tried other ways. They began to encourage handicrafts and agriculture, to get the Jews away from their traditional pedlar’s packs into more productive employment. They allowed the brighter young ones who were able to learn Russian to take up some municipal jobs. They leaned on the Jewish schools to teach the children Polish and Russian and mathematics – as well as traditional Hebrew and Talmudic lore; they tried to stop the ancient Jewish practices of self government which had grown up so inevitably during the ghettos years – in fact, they tried in a few short years to undo the grinding effects of centuries of misery and oppression.
And were angry when it didn’t work.
The blank faced stared which greeted the Russian officials trying to enforce the new ways infuriated those gorgeously uniformed gentlemen. Even more maddening was the nodding smiling acceptance which some Jews offered, before going to away to carry on precisely as they always had.
They got impatient, the Russians. They pushed harder and harder. And in 1827 there was an Imperial Ukase. The privilege of conscription into the Tsar’s army was to be extended to the Jews. The period of service which the Jews had to give was to be twenty-five years just like all the other soldiers. Not all that bad, really, when you considered that the recruits were to be taken from the age of twelve – even eight, sometimes – so that they could have special indoctrination before becoming true solders. There would still be a bit of life left over to live outside the army, wouldn’t there? And a much better life, as an ordinary Russian, for it would be an exceedingly strange boy of twelve who could maintain his Jewishness under the care of a drill sergeant rather than his pious parents. And who would bother to keep up contact with them over the many many miles that separated army camps from the Pale.
Little wonder then, that parents whose sons were torn from them by the recruiters of the Canton regiments, as those to which Jewish boys went were called, mourned, and sat shivah for their lost sons.
For years after that Jewish parents became adept at hiding their sons from the Tsar’s recruiters. Each shtetl had to produce its quotas of Jewish boys for the army, and sometimes kidnappers were employed to make sure the quota was up to strength. So the parents had to do something.
They tried all they could to keep their children by them. Those who were physically small were the easiest to protect; birth records were kept poorly and falsifying them was easy, especially with the rabbi to help you do it. So they fed them as little as they could, to keep them full while preventing their growth, and the streets of the shtetls filled up with deep-voiced hairy-chinned short statured youths who would stare strangers in the eye and swear they were only eleven years old, even though they had been telling the same story for the past five or six years.
Some even went as far as maiming their sons. A boy with his feet bound up so that they became deformed and made him limp made a poor recruit; one who had lost his right forefinger, the trigger finger, was even less useful. To destroy a baby’s finger for such a reason was a painful thing to do, but not as painful as parting with a son forever, so there were those who did it. They would tie a ligature around the small finger, gradually tightening it so that the circulation was cut off and the finger was irreparably damaged. The parents would look at their boys and pray for forgiveness for having had to do that they had to do.
There were other ploys the frantic parents could use, like disowning their own much loved boys. That was what happened to Chaim Ben Yacob, of Lublin.
He was a handsome boy, right from his birth. Red hair with a saucy curl to it, and blue eyes that laughed a lot, and his mother Shoshannah would sit and twist locks of the coppery hair around her fingers and sing at him and pray that by the time he was of an age the miracle would have happened and the Tsar would have decided he wanted no more Jewish boys in his army.
Chaim reached two and his brothers Gershon was born, and Shoshannah wept bitterly that the tragedy of another bris should be upon her, even as the men celebrated the birth of a man to the community.
Chaim reached three and then four and he and his brother grew like reeds, and looked every moment of their age and Shoshannah wept more than ever.
Chaim became old enough to start at cheder and learn his Hebrew, and still his mother prayed, and still her prayers showed no sign of being granted as boy after boy was spirited away from Lublin to disappear into the sea of platoons and regiments and battalions which was the hated army.
When Chaim was seven, she could wait no longer; whoever’s prayers God was listening to they weren’t hers, she told her Jacob. Chaim had to be looked after. Now.
They went to Benjamin, Jacob’s brother. A lovely man, rich in many ways, with his successful butcher’s business, his three roomed house behind the shop and slaughter yard, his real silver candlesticks and no less than three white Sabbath tablecloths. And his three daughters, poor man, lucky man.
When Jacob and Shoshannah had finished speaking, Benjamin shrugged and looked at his Rachel, who stared out at the children in the yard with her face blank, and then nodded as well.
Benjamin said, ‘What else can we do?’
It was a common answer in these bad times to the dilemmas of parents of sons. The Tsar had humanity enough not to take only sons. The family that could produce one boy and thereafter girls only considered itself blessed indeed; they and their children could live together as families should. Others had to do as the brothers Jacob and Benjamin had done – exchange children, exchange their names, altering the records with the rabbis’ cooperation, so that when the officials came to take them they found that Chaim Ben Benjamin and Gershon Ben Jacob were cousins, not brothers.
Shoshannah had been wise; she did it in time. Gershon was only four and enough years would elapse for even the most perspicacious of the Tsar’s men to be hoodwinked. Those who tried to keep their boys in their own homes until the last possible moment were most likely to see their trick uncovered and be punished as well as losing their beloved young.
So, Chaim grew up with his Uncle Benjamin and his Aunt Rachel, and visited his mother and father often, until even he could not quite remember to whom he belonged. Was Rachel Mamma, or was Shoshannah? Both were, really. With two adoring women to feed him titbits and spoil him above the girls, how could he fail to be content? Unlike his long ago ancestor, Micah, he had not lost a harsh mother to gain a tender aunt. He had gained two tender mothers. He was one of the rate fortunate ones.
The years drifted on, and life within the Pale remained as it always had been, while in the liberal world, beyond, where emancipated Jews lived and worked and were respected, where one had even become Prime Minister of Great Britain (though he didn’t really count as a Jew, for his father had left Bevis Marks synagogue in a huff and converted to Chr
istianity even before the boy was born), the mood was changing. The Age of Reason which had seemed to sweep away the old hatreds and superstitions had been a thin bristled broom. It had seemed to have banished intolerance and stupidity in a great wave of philosophical wisdom and humanitarian politics, but it had left much behind, in the corners and under the carpets of Europe, and slowly another wave began to build up. Another wave of hatred for the Jews.
Perhaps it was the energy that had been released when the ghetto walls were razed. Out had come a people who had been unable to use their natural gifts for years, and in the sunlight of that much vaunted Age of Reason they had grown and blossomed, soaking up new ideas, new knowledge, new skills. They had married their old pen-up energies with their shining new abilities and gone into the society that lay about them like hot knives through butter. There wasn’t a corner of endeavour that did not have Jews in it; new Jews, looking and behaving like everyone else, on the surface, but stubbornly practicing the old religion. Still maintaining close ties with each other. Still forming a tight, threatening brotherhood.
It was this that seemed to be a menace to the middle classes and the poor western Europe. These urbane, rich Jews with their quick tongues, and their sleek good looks, what could they not be capable of, given their heads? Had they not had enough of their heads already? Some started to whisper. Isn’t it time we looked to our defences? They will overwhelm us.
The cry of the xenophobe was heard everywhere, and the wave rose and became a tide of anti-Semitism, a new and pseudo-scientific name for an old game, the baiting of the outsider.
The hatred was at its most intense in the Pale. How could it be otherwise, in a place where Jews were in such numbers?
The Russians found a label for what happened. Pogroms. The first was in Odessa, where individual men, probably good in their own way, coalesced into a howling hysterical mob; they ran through the Jewish quarter of the city, a place which had hummed with excitement and creativity as young men sang songs and wrote books and talked politics at each other, and destroyed it. The shops which bore Jewish names over their doorways, were looted and then burned. The houses where the mezuzzah was set proudly on the doorposts were burned down. The women who ran shrieking into the streets were chased and raped by jeering men, one after the other, and then had their throats cut.
It went on, and became worse.
‘One third should convert,’ Konstantin Pobedonostsev, procurator of the Holy Synod said. ‘One third should emigrate. And one third should die.’
They died. In city after city the fashion of pogrom, started in 1871 in Odessa, spread. The spring of 1881 turned into a blood washed summer. In Kiev, in Odessa again, in any number of insignificant townlets and villages the officials stood by and watched their eyes blank, as the peasants burned synagogues, and looted and killed and raped and enjoyed themselves greatly. The Jews, who had thought their suffering stopped at the rape of their religion and the induction into the army of their sons discovered there were greater sorrows than even they had thought possible.
In Lublin, some did not wait to see what would happen. A tall red headed boy, one Nathan Ben Lazar, the seven-year-old grandson of that Chaim who had changed families to escape conscription heard what had happening, and kissed his mother and small brother tenderly and hugged his father warmly and set off to walk over the border of the Pale in Galicia. His older brother had already made the journey, and he would follow him.
The town was full of others like him, refugees running from pogroms and the fear of pogroms. Bewildered women along with children were herded along the Galician authorities. There were old men and young men like himself, and every one of them was struggling to get a ticket to somewhere – anywhere away from the troubles.
Nathan bought a ticket for New York. It cost him every penny he had brought with him, but he thought it well worth while. When he arrived there, in the great land of promise about which they had all heard so much, then he would earn enough to reline his thin pockets. When he got there.
But a message came, an expensive message sent on the telegraph, by his father Lazar Ben Chaim in Lublin. It was a miracle the message reached him at all, in that hubbub of milling people, all with their luggage clutched in their hands, their bundles on their backs. But he was a noticeable sort of person, was Nathan, with his red hair and his blue eyes and his father had directed the message very carefully.
When Nathan read it, standing there with the ticket to New York in one hand and the message from his father in the other, he would have cried, had he not been a man. He had to go home. The message was uncompromising in its urgency. They had need of him. He had to return.
11
Nathan had always been a sunny tempered individual. There had been no reason for him to be otherwise. His father, Lazar Ben Chaim, an easygoing man with a friendly way, was a miller, so the family had always been well fed and shod, if not precisely rich for everyone needs the miller.
Nathan’s older brother, Reuben, had been kind as older brothers go; although he was stout and Nathan was slighter in build he hadn’t beaten him more than most big brothers smaller ones, and had defended him in arguments with other boys at the cheder. His younger brothers were no threat to him either, for in many ways, he was his mother’s favourite. She, a quiet shy little woman, had found her second son’s charm and sense of fun much to her taste, when compared with solemn Reuben’s rather dull heaviness.
Even the threat of danger, of pogroms happening in distant places, had not ruffled Nathan unduly. So far Lublin had not suffered, so although he listened with fascination to the stories that came from less fortunate places they did not really touch him. He could not imagine such things ever happening in his home. For tales had been a useful lever to get his parents to allow him to travel. His brother had left because he was genuinely frightened; but that, Nathan had told himself scornfully, was just like Reuben. He, Nathan, was made of sterner stuff. He’d soon make his fortune but because he was hopeful, not because he was frightened.
Then the telegram had come and, like the obedient, cheerful boy he was, he had swallowed his anger and disappointment and returned to Lublin.
‘Listen, Nathan,’ his father said, his face pinched and grey in the dull morning light. ’the mill - it’s burned down.’
Nathan cocked his head to one side and looked at his father intently. ‘So? I thought that was the idea. I mean, before I left, you said all being well there’d be money coming one day, and you’d be able to follow Reuben and me when you had the money to buy the tickets for you and Mamma and the boys.’
His father shuffled his feet under the kitchen table and looked helplessly across the room at his wife who was sitting on a low chair by the fire with her shawl thrown over her head, rocking slightly as though she were praying.
‘Rivka? Tell him, Rivka - don’t just sit there. Tell him!’
‘Tell him? Oh, I'll ell all right!’ Rivka listed her head and Nathan stared at her, open-mouthed. Her usually quiet expressionless little face was suffused with fury, the cheeks blotched and the eyes red rimmed. ‘What won’t I tell him! That he’s got an idiot for a father?’ She turned to her son. ‘I’ve told him believe me, Nathan, time and again I’ve told him, think first, make sure, don’t do things in a hurry. So what does he do? He makes up his mind the only way he can get enough money for the tickets is to burn down the mill so he burns it. Does he find out first if it'll be all right, if there'll be problems? That shlemiel - does he? I ask you!’
‘What more could I do? I make sure the premiums are paid. I make sure no one sees me when I go to the mill at night, I make sure there’s no signs I been there. What more could I have done? It wasn’t my fault!’
Nathan shook his head, confused. ‘So, what’s the problem? You say you paid up the insurance? That no one saw what you did? So what’s the problem?’
‘The army, that’s the problem,’ Rivka said in a tragic voice. ‘The army!’ ‘What has the army got to do with it?’
‘And I can’t see Reuben coming back to go in the army, can you?’ Lazar said and stared at Nathan with his chin tucked in so that he looked like a lugubrious dog waiting to be beaten. ‘All the way from London … ’
‘London?’ said Nathan mechanically, trying to organize his thoughts. ‘What’s he doing in London? I thought he was going to New York.’
‘So did he,’ Rivka said, and sniffed as tears began to course again down her face. ‘The letter he sent - the rabbi read it to us, you weren’t here so the rabbi read it, and it said he thought he was going to New York, he bought a ticket for New York, but the captain of the ship, he cheated him. He arrived, he thought he was in New York already, until he went to a letter writer and the letter writer told him it was London. But he’s all right, thank God. The letter the man wrote for him, it said he was all right. He’s got work in a stick factory, he’s all right.’
‘But he will come back to make it all right for us? And where’s the money to come from to pay his ticket back, if he does, which he won’t? You, thank God, hadn’t gone too far - Brody, I can get of you, London I can get hold of nobody - and it’s not so bad, the army. Only three years it is now a soldier had to be. Only three years. And you're young yet.’