Mosaic

by Diane Armstrong

  Daniel didn’t encourage Avner to complain about cheder. He must value learning and respect his teachers. When Avner said that he wished he could play in the courtyard with the other children instead of learning Hebrew, Daniel looked into the child’s miserable face and shook his head reproachfully. ‘I give you the opportunity of studying, and all you want to do is waste time!’ It never occurred to him that his three-year-old might not share his enthusiasm for religious learning.

  Daniel’s every waking thought was taken up with educating Avner, but it bothered him that the noisy, idle boys in their building might undermine his mission. One evening after he’d finished writing accounts in his neat, elongated hand, he looked pensive. ‘The child doesn’t have suitable companions,’ he told Lieba. ‘Those empty-headed little larrikins around here could be a bad influence on him.’

  Lieba could only shake her head at her husband’s notions of turning a small child into an old scholar. Her father had been a strict disciplinarian but her brothers had been allowed to play and kick balls in the sand dunes and forests of Szczakowa. ‘Little boys need to run and play,’ she protested, but Daniel said that Avner was meant for higher things. Time was precious and must be used wisely.

  When an apartment became vacant in their house, a tall thin Chassid in his wide-brimmed hat and long coat came to inspect it. The house was a handsome two-storey building whose apartments overlooked a large central yard which was the communal playground, laundry and meeting place for the tenants and their children. As they hung eiderdowns over their railings to air, or looped their rugs on wooden stands and battered them with flat bamboo beaters, housewives with kerchiefs tied low over their foreheads called out to each other, gossiping over the day’s events in Yiddish.

  ‘Did you hear, Yentel’s Taubele refuses to marry the rabbi’s youngest son, she says she’d rather die, may God forgive the expression.’

  The woman’s hand flew to her cheek. ‘Oy gewalt!’ she lamented. ‘What’s the world coming to? When my sisters and I were at home, our father—may his dear soul rest in peace—chose our husbands. Who would have dared to say one word against his choice? I don’t mind telling you, I had my eye on the tailor’s son but my father cared as much about my dreams as he did about last year’s snowfall.’ And she gave the rug an extra thump.

  Down in one corner of the yard, women with rolled-up sleeves carried buckets of water which splashed over their laced-up boots as they walked. Boys in baggy breeches and peaked caps chased each other and teased the girls in long pinafores who tucked up their skirts in their bloomers to play hopscotch. The language that echoed around these walls was Yiddish. Today housewives still hang eiderdowns on the railings and children still play hopscotch in the yard, but the Jewish voices have been silenced.

  The sound of children shrieking in the yard floated up while Daniel’s prospective tenant was looking around the apartment. When my grandfather noticed the Chassid’s solemn little boy standing beside his father, his eyes lit up. This child would be an ideal companion for Avner.

  The father bent down to his son whose pale red hair hung in straight strands in front of his ears. ‘Nu, so what do you think of this place?’ he asked in Yiddish. While the little boy looked around the apartment, Daniel asked him whether he knew any Hebrew. When the boy nodded, Daniel nudged Avner to come forward. ‘My son knows some Hebrew words too,’ he said.

  ‘What’s the Hebrew word for wall, then?’ the Chassid’s unsmiling child asked Avner in Yiddish. Avner stood planted on his sturdy legs, his pointed chin thrust out with a confident tilt. But when he tried to guess the answer, the boy shook his head. ‘That’s not the right word!’ he said disdainfully.

  ‘It is so!’ Avner retorted.

  The little boy turned to his father. ‘Tateh, let’s go,’ he said. ‘This place is not for us!’

  The man shrugged his hunched shoulders and spread his white hands as if to say, ‘What can I do?’ and left.

  With every passing year, Avner resented his upbringing more and more. A mischievous child with an exuberant sense of fun, he felt suffocated by religious rules and strangled by the restrictions which his father imposed on every aspect of his existence. He especially loathed the Chassidic costume he had to wear, the long coat with the fringed prayer tassels hanging outside his trousers. He began to feel like Isaac being sacrificed to God by Abraham in a Biblical pact.

  But no matter how distressed he was about these restrictions, it was impossible to tell his father how he really felt, unthinkable to upset or disappoint him. It wasn’t fear of his power, but awe of his authority. When his children thought of the Almighty, they saw Daniel as God’s role model: omniscient, omnipotent and awesome, and yet compassionate.

  Daniel was a strict disciplinarian who never made idle threats. He would give one quiet warning but never shouted or lost his temper. After a belting with the leather shaving strap had been administered, he took his son’s little hand in his. ‘Git?’ he would to ask, meaning ‘Friends?’, and curved his little finger to denote that the episode was over. Instead of replying with the same gesture, Avner usually turned away his angry face and raised his index finger, which meant that he was ‘broiges’, or offended.

  Half a century later, whenever I was upset with my father, he would curve his little finger and ask in a jocular tone, ‘Git or broiges?’ This overture only added to my sense of grievance, and irritated me just as it must have irritated Daniel’s children.

  Avner felt that he was choking on this religious diet, but at a time when most of the people of Galicia were illiterate, there wasn’t a Jewish boy over five who couldn’t read Hebrew. Apart from studying ancient commentaries which analysed, dissected, and interpreted the meaning of the Torah in minute detail, the Talmud also examined issues of justice, law and morality, and taught boys to think. They sharpened their wits by looking at problems in different ways and considering various options. ‘Two men find a coin,’ the melamed would say. ‘Whose is it?’ Or ‘A farmer’s bull gores a cow. Who is responsible? Should he pay compensation? How much?’

  Avner didn’t have a cow and couldn’t care less whether it got gored or if anyone received compensation, but his active mind loved the mental acrobatics involved in exploring all the possibilities, and he soon became the star pupil. Whenever visitors came to check on the boys’ progress, the teachers knew that he could always be relied on to give the smartest answers.

  By then he was no longer the only child, although he always remained Daniel’s best-loved son. From the moment they were born, the other children knew that their eldest brother was the smartest child in the family, a paragon they could never match. It’s no wonder that with such adulation Avner developed an overinflated ego. The others admired him excessively in their youth but turned against him unmercifully in their old age.

  Over eighty years later, the telephone rings in my Sydney home and I hear a quavery voice speaking in a Jewish-American accent with a European intonation. ‘This is Avner.’ It’s the first time in my life that I’ve spoken to this legendary uncle about whom I’ve heard so much. ‘I got your letter about your father,’ he told me. ‘How come no-one else told me that my brother died? Someone should have told me.’

  All my life I’d heard about his chequered career, his ups and downs, the grandiose schemes and their subsequent failure in Vienna, Antwerp, Rio and New York. Of all the family, Avner arouses the strongest emotions, good and bad. Their father’s favourite, the showpiece of the family, I’ve heard him described as extraordinarily bright, extraordinarily selfish, self-assured, self-absorbed, a storyteller, a user, a charmer, a fraud.

  And now this fabled old uncle in New York is speaking to me. ‘What can one say?’ he muses in his indeterminate accent. It’s a rhetorical question. He has nothing to say about his brother’s death, except to complain that he wasn’t notified earlier. As we speak, I recall being told about his prodigious memory and inexhaustible fund of anecdotes, and ask whether he plans to write his memoirs. ‘
No,’ he replies. ‘There is nothing in my childhood that I remember with any pleasure. Nothing. I did not have a happy childhood.’ He emphasises the word ‘not’ with a New York drawl.

  ‘My father was a strict disciplinarian,’ he continues. ‘He sent me to a religious school where I didn’t fit in. I always felt like a white raven in a black flock. To this day I don’t know why my father did that to me. Perhaps he was counting on me to become a rabbi and intercede for him in the other world. And one day, when he was dead, I was to say Kaddish for him. I don’t want to go into all that at this stage of my life.’

  ‘My father was very fond of you,’ I tell him.

  ‘And I of him!’ he cries. ‘Sometimes I tried to get him out of going to cheder. I don’t know why they didn’t tell me. It’s not right,’ he repeats querulously. Then he asks, ‘Are you planning to visit the States?’

  ‘Not at the moment. Maybe later on.’

  ‘I hope I’ll still be here when you come,’ he sighs.

  He wasn’t.

  It was Avner’s death in 1985 that spurred me on to collect information about the family. Whenever I asked my relatives about their childhood, their response was invariably: ‘Ah, if only Avner were still here, the stories he’d be able to tell you! Avner knew everything. If only you’d spoken to him!’ It’s devastating for a researcher to hear that the best source has just died, but although I’d missed Avner, I was determined not to miss the rest. Five of my father’s brothers and sisters were still alive, scattered around the globe. I would create a mosaic out of their memories.

  In 1897, when Avner was eighteen months old, Daniel and Lieba’s first daughter, Serla, was born. Lunia, as she came to be called, lacked Avner’s mercurial mind and self-assurance but this little girl with light brown hair and level grey eyes was shrewd and observant.

  Because she was a girl and not allowed to learn Hebrew or study the Torah, she was sent to the state school instead of cheder. Lessons bored her but she read voraciously. Reading was a passion she shared with Avner and they often fought over books. Hiding a torch under the bedclothes for fear her mother would catch her reading late into the night, Lunia lost herself in aristocratic worlds of princely suitors and refined heroines.

  From an early age Lunia felt that her life fell far short of her ideal world. Avner teased her and grabbed her books when she wasn’t looking; her teachers criticised her for inattention, while her mother never had time to play with her. Her father’s reserved though forceful presence also didn’t measure up to the courtly behaviour of princes in storybooks. Instead of rescuing damsels in distress, all he did was fix gas pipes.

  On Tuesdays and Sundays, when weddings were held in the temple across the road, Lunia used to stand in the doorway of their house, breathless with excitement as the brides arrived in their horse-drawn doroskys. They resembled the princesses in her storybooks and she dreamed of a Prince Charming who would take her away from Miodowa Street and gallop with her to a castle where the walls would be covered with tapestries and the platters would be made of gold.

  In 1901, when she was four, Lunia smiled at her reflection in the looking glass. In her new muslin dress and laced-up white boots which squeaked, she finally looked like a princess. It was the wedding day of her mother’s sister Karola, and she couldn’t wait to go. Suddenly she gave an outraged howl: Avner, restless in his sailor suit of navy velvet with gold buttons and matching beret, tugged at the big white bow perched on top of Lunia’s well-brushed hair and the bow collapsed like a dead bird dangling over her eyes. When the bow was retied and peace was restored once again, Lunia looked into her parents’ bedroom and stood riveted by what she saw. Time stopped, and the image she saw remained engraved in her mind forever.

  Ninety years later, in a nursing home in Petach Tikvah in Israel, a grey-haired woman with a stylish hairdo, level grey eyes and the aristocratic air of an old dowager, recalls how her mother, whom she always called Mamuncia, had dressed for her younger sister’s wedding so long ago. Speaking slowly with a beatific smile, Aunty Lunia recalls the scene she’d witnessed as an enthralled four-year-old. ‘Mamuncia sat in front of her mahogany dressing table with the cheval mirror where she kept her tasselled perfume phial. Her head was bent forward, and Tatunciu, my father, stood behind her, fastening the clasp of a magnificent diamond choker he had given her,’ she said. For one brief moment, life and fable had merged in one perfect image. Aunty Lunia reminisces with a fond smile, ‘Mamuncia loved dressing up, she was very vain. She used to say to me in German, “A woman is vain from the moment she is born until the day she dies.”’

  The bride was the prettiest of the three Spira sisters, in spite of the mole on the end of her nose. In her wasp-waisted gown with a bustle and long lace veil, Karola was a vision from a fairy tale. There was a big wedding breakfast, with guests Lunia had never seen before who made a fuss of the wide-eyed little girl with the big bow in her hair.

  Then the band struck up. The adults formed themselves into rows and began to dance the stately quadrille. Later they twirled around the hotel ballroom to the strains of the Polonaise, while little Lunia watched intently, determined not to forget a single waft of perfume or secret glance. She tapped her little laced-up boots as the newlyweds waltzed around the parquet floor. Suddenly Uncle Ozjasz, the dashing bridegroom, bowed in front of the child and bent down to invite her to dance the waltz. Straining on tiptoe to reach her new uncle’s hand, Lunia closed her eyes and wished the music would never stop.

  Aunty Lunia is wallowing in the romance of the past, but suddenly her eyes narrow and she fixes me with a look stern enough to wither the roses that I’ve brought her. ‘Nobody needs this history of yours,’ she says. ‘Nobody. There is nothing there that brings honour to the family, no-one you can be proud of.’ She shakes an arthritic forefinger at me like an ancient sibyl. ‘Don’t do it,’ she warns. ‘Your children won’t thank you for it.’

  By 1901, Daniel and Lieba had two more children, Jerzy and Rozia. Lieba, who only five years earlier had been distraught wondering whether she’d ever have any children, was now distracted trying to take care of four youngsters. Adam and Eve, who had been commanded to go forth and multiply, had stopped at two, but Daniel intended to have as many as the Almighty blessed him with.

  Daniel loved looking after the babies as soon as he came home. Throughout their lives his children recalled fondly how he used to cradle them in the crook of his firm, comforting arm and put them on the potty at night. ‘I want to do weewee with Tatunciu,’ was a plaintive cry often heard at 19 Miodowa Street in the middle of the night.

  Both Jerzy and Rozia had problems with their ears. Jerzy was born with one misshapen ear which was stuck to the side of his head like an unfurled flower. Physical irregularities were regarded with suspicion at the time, and women wondered whether some misshapen dwarf had stepped in Lieba’s path while she was pregnant. Perhaps, may God protect us, some malevolent crone had cast a spell on her. Lunia hated going out with her little brother because everyone stared at him. She never noticed that he was a good-looking, friendly child who looked people straight in the eye. Even now after all these years, the only thing she mentions about him is his deformed ear.

  Rozia, who was born in 1899, was hard of hearing as a result of scarlet fever. The frustration of never being able to hear properly affected her all her life. She had a narrow face and would have been attractive if not for her anxious expression and highly-strung personality. Lieba, who got on well with Lunia, had very little patience with her deaf daughter. But despite her difficult nature, Rozia had a loyal and loving heart, as her mother was to discover in the terrifying years to come.

  Privileged because he was the favourite son, Avner felt superior to his younger siblings but he waged a continual power struggle with his father. Apart from resenting the fact that he was imprisoned in cheder every day at the mercy of the strict melamed, he felt alien among boys who looked down on him because his father was neither a Talmudic scholar nor a profession
al man. ‘How come Baldinger’s son is so smart?’ visitors used to mutter whenever Avner shone with his quick answers. He knew that they were asking ‘How come the son of a mere tradesman is brighter than the sons of lawyers and scholars?’ and hated their condescension.

  Avner felt as alien at home as he did at cheder because he was the only one of the children whom Daniel dressed like a Chassid, with the Chassidic peaked cap and long side-locks. The neighbouring boys and his cousins made fun of him. ‘Avner the Chassid! Avner the Chassid!’ they chanted in singsong voices. He wished he could make them all disappear.

  The Chassidic sect had started during the eighteenth century when mainstream Judaism had grown stagnant. By the time Daniel was born, most of the Jews in shtetls all over Poland had been swept along by this religious revival which initially prized joy and fervour above scholarly learning. My grandfather, like his father before him, was ambivalent about the Chassids. Reserved by nature, he disliked their exuberant dancing and singing and the way they paraded the accoutrements of their faith outside their clothes. In spite of that, he consulted a Chassidic rebbe and sent his children to be educated in their cheder.

  Since it was unthinkable to oppose his father openly, Avner tried one ruse after another to induce Daniel into allowing him to discard his Chassidic clothes. One day he returned home from the barber’s without his hated side curls. Looking very pleased with himself, he told his mother with an innocent expression, ‘The barber accidentally cut one peyis off, so naturally he had to cut off the other one too, to make them even.’

  One afternoon Avner came home from cheder with the peak on his cap missing. ‘Avner, what have you done to your cap?’ Lieba cried, her hands flying to her face while she looked accusingly at her eldest son. ‘Always up to some mischief!’ she grumbled. Lieba hated waste and unnecessary expense. Now they’d have to buy him a new cap.