Mosaic

by Diane Armstrong

  As the battle of wills continued, Daniel became increasingly disappointed at Avner’s defiance. Lieba could only watch the power struggle and shake her head. Secretly she sympathised with her son’s desire to look like his friends, but she never argued with Daniel in front of the children.

  Lunia looked up from the sampler she was embroidering for her mother with rose-coloured Filoflos thread. ‘Don’t fight with Tatunciu about this,’ she would advise her oldest brother. ‘You can’t win.’

  Avner usually listened to Lunia, but he knew that these skirmishes were part of a larger battle and refused to surrender. ‘I don’t care what Tateh does. I’m not going to wear those horrible clothes and be laughed at,’ he said.

  So when his mother bought him a new cap, he did exactly the same, fully aware of the consequences. ‘I hear you’ve ruined your new cap,’ Daniel said quietly when he returned home. ‘You know what I told you last time. Go into the bedroom, pull down your trousers, lie across the chair and wait for me.’ While Avner lay across the chair, trying not to tremble, his father, who understood the punitive value of anticipation, took his time.

  Slowly he walked into the room, closed the door and reached for the shaving strap. For the next few moments the others listened to the dreaded swish of the strap with the mixed feelings children have when the favourite is being punished. With each blow, Daniel repeated in the same quiet voice, ‘Are you still going to ruin your clothes?’ But after the punishment had been administered, he hung up his strap and took his son’s hand. ‘Git? No hard feelings,’ he said cordially. The cordiality was one-sided.

  Lieba let out a sigh of relief when Avner emerged from the room, white-faced but nonchalant. Rozia ran up to comfort him but he shook her off. ‘Didn’t hurt,’ he told Jerzy, but he sat on the edge of his chair for the rest of the evening.

  But that wasn’t the end of the affair. Next Avner used all his ingenuity to get rid of the long caftan he loathed. Eventually Daniel realised that Avner had no interest in the religious life and that his dream of turning his eldest son into a rabbi was not going to be realised. Graceful in defeat, Daniel accepted his son’s decision, but he never stopped hoping that his firstborn would one day discover the solace of religion. And he was comforted by the knowledge that no matter what path Avner would follow in life, one day he would say Kaddish for him.

  CHAPTER 3

  Hesiu hopped over the lozenge-shaped tiles on the entrance floor and skipped out into the street. Suddenly the smile froze on his lips and his boots seemed nailed to the ground. It was dark and gas lamps cast eerie shadows on the street over which hung a crescent of new moon no wider than a sliver of lemon peel. In front of him, men in long coats, big black hats and tangled black beards formed a circle on the pavement. As the men moved, their grotesquely elongated shadows looked like phantoms. In the centre of their circle sat a small boy.

  Hesiu’s eyes were fixed on the child who reminded him of stories that his older sister Lunia sometimes read aloud, about helpless children captured by witches and dybbuks. And now he was seeing that happen right here in Miodowa Street. Somewhere inside the sinister folds of those black caftans lurked cruel knives, and as soon as they’d finished their magic rituals, he knew that these demons would sacrifice the child.

  Heart pounding, Hesiu dropped the letter that his father had asked him to slip into the postbox and raced indoors as fast as his chubby legs would carry him, too terrified to tell anyone what he had witnessed in case the sorcerers came after him too. Wriggling to avoid his brother Jerzy’s bony knees in the bed they shared, he pulled his eiderdown high over his head and waited, too frightened to close his eyes.

  My father Hesiu, who was born in 1901, was delivered by Ewa Silbermann the midwife, given the name Hirsch, and circumcised eight days later by Szymon Fischer the mohel. It seems that once Daniel and Lieba had finally found the recipe for having children, they didn’t know how to stop, because Hesiu was their fifth child within six years. With three sons to study the Torah and say Kaddish for him, it looked as though Daniel’s prayers had been generously answered but, as my grandfather was to discover, you can’t cheat fate.

  Many years later my father told me that what his overactive imagination had turned into a satanic sacrifice was in fact a prayer of thanksgiving which Chassidic Jews offer for the new moon. The little boy must have been the son of one of the worshippers waiting for the prayers to finish so that he could go home. But the damage had been done. For years to come, Hesiu had only to glimpse a Chassid to quake with terror. Perhaps it was this experience that turned my father against religion for the rest of his life.

  There was no point telling his mother about his terror. By this time Lieba already had two more children, Izio and Andzia. With a new baby in her arms and a brood of youngsters to look after, she was rushed off her feet from morning till night and had no time to listen to her children’s nightmares or their dreams.

  One evening Hesiu noticed a strange woman in their house, bossing everyone around and taking charge. A big slow-moving woman whose body reminded him of billowing pillows, she walked into his parents’ bedroom with a large enamel basin steaming with water and a pile of clean white towels, and closed the door quickly behind her. It was the midwife. She rarely hurried, knowing that anxious husbands always called her too soon, but she’d already delivered seven of Mrs Baldinger’s babies and figured that this one wouldn’t take long to join their crowded household. Throughout the night, Hesiu heard strange muffled noises. Next morning, his father announced with a happy smile that they now had a new baby brother, Jakub, who was later called Janek.

  In between her babies, Lieba had several miscarriages as well, so the woman who in 1895 was worried about being barren had remained in a state of almost continual pregnancy ever since. She had ample opportunity to ponder the wisdom of the proverb that when the gods wish to punish someone, they make their dreams come true.

  Lieba appreciated her husband who was hard-working, kind and generous. He bought her jewellery, treated her with respect and provided well for the family. She had everything that a woman could wish for, except the one thing she wanted most of all: the right to limit the number of children she bore.

  None of the Baldinger children shared Daniel’s joy about the new baby whom they saw as yet another rival for their adored father’s attention. Hesiu, a sensitive child, always craved more of his parents’ affection than they were able to give him. At the age of seventy, my silver-haired father could still recall the longing he’d felt when he watched his father cradling the new baby in his arms. Daniel sat in his wooden rocking chair, tenderly smiling at the baby and stroking his cheek. But when Hesiu tried to clamber onto his father’s lap, Daniel turned a surprised gaze on his four-year-old son. ‘You want to sit on my lap? But, Hesiu, you’re already a big boy, and he’s only a baby,’ he said with a hint of reproach. Hesiu’s face burned with humiliation at his father’s rebuff. He remembered that rejection for the rest of his life.

  Hesiu’s feeling of deprivation became even more acute shortly afterwards when he was sent to cheder. Daniel had intended to start his Jewish education at three, like that of his older brothers Avner and Jerzy, but when Lieba’s family criticised him for sending babies to Talmud-Torah classes, he agreed to wait one more year. To Hesiu, going to cheder meant being banished from home, but to Daniel it meant being given the keys to heaven. ‘You’re very lucky, Hesiu, you’re going to learn our holy language, read the sacred books of the Torah, and study the commentaries of the sages,’ Daniel explained. Perhaps this son would become the rabbi he longed for.

  But while his father regaled him with the wonders of learning, his older brothers warned him about its tortures. ‘You’d better listen to every word, because if you don’t, the melamed will give you such a wallop that you’ll feel that birch cane on your toches for a month,’ Jerzy smirked.

  On his first day, Hesiu dragged the heels of his new boots along the narrow streets of Kazimierz as Daniel led him by
the hand towards Chevre Tilem. Inside the cold, bare classroom, a group of little boys surveyed him with the superiority of the initiated. Looking at Hesiu out of the corner of his eyes, one boy spat saliva through a gap in his front teeth as he shrilled, ‘Remember when they had to run for the doctor because the melamed cracked Shmuel’s skull and all his brains dripped out on the floor?’

  Hesiu began to tremble. Encouraged by his reaction, his classmates soared to greater heights. ‘That’s nothing! What about the kid he bashed to death last week for not knowing his aleph bet?’ a skinny boy sniggered. Hesiu looked longingly at the door. He wanted to run away but didn’t know the way home.

  From my father’s description of cheder, I know that it was sheer torture for a lively little boy who could hardly sit still for a minute to have to spend six hours each day in this confined classroom. As he was the smallest in the class, the teacher had to place two wooden blocks under his feet so that his head would be visible above the table. This made the others titter, which always brought tears to his eyes, and then they giggled and pointed, which made it worse.

  The melamed had a scruffy beard the colour of winter carrots, and watery red-rimmed eyes, probably from studying over flickering candlelight long into the night. Whenever the boys couldn’t answer a question, he slid his hand into their trouser pocket and pinched their thighs with pincer-hard fingers. These teachers of religion saw no anomaly in using violent methods to inculcate love of God. Nor did most parents. But one parent did object. At the end of one day’s lessons, when the melamed emerged from cheder, Srulek’s father was waiting for him. Planting himself in front of the teacher, the burly butcher slapped his face so hard that he left the imprint of his huge hand on his cheek. ‘That will teach you to hit my Srulek!’ he shouted.

  Perhaps it was as a peace offering that soon afterwards the melamed announced a walk in the park. Excursions were a rare treat and the boys ran to pull on the patched, fraying jackets that had been passed down from brother to brother. The prospect of being outdoors in the warm sunshine made them jump around in a frenzy of excitement, like prisoners unexpectedly set free. Skipping and chattering, they set off for the Planty Gardens.

  This straggly line of little boys in stiff peaked caps and side-locks hanging in front of their ears, shepherded by the stooped melamed in his long caftan and untrimmed beard, aroused the immediate notice of some Polish youths playing in the park. While kicking an acorn along the path, Hesiu suddenly felt a sharp stinging sensation on his arm. Then another on the back of his neck. Recoiling with shock, he thought he must have been struck by lightning, until he heard jeering laughter and scuffles behind the trees.

  As they pelted the cheder boys with lumps of dirt and handfuls of acorns, the larrikins yelled, ‘Take that, you lousy Jewboys! Get out of our park, you filthy Christ-killers!’ Hesiu had heard Polish children jeering at Jews but he’d never been physically attacked before. As the teacher shepherded them quickly away from the park, he felt humiliated for them all, as though they’d been belittled by the attack.

  After several months a new teacher arrived. This one had a dreamy expression and a flustered manner. He had no idea how to keep little boys in order. At the end of the first week, when the old rabbi who ran the cheder unexpectedly stood in the doorway, an uneasy silence descended over the classroom. The rabbi was an ancient man with a flowing beard who reminded Hesiu of Methuseleh. The classroom smelt of fear. ‘Translate the first word of the chapter you’ve been learning this week from Hebrew into Yiddish,’ the rabbi commanded.

  From his seat at the far end of the row, Hesiu watched as the rabbi stepped up to the first boy. Chaim rose, scraping his wooden stool against the bare wooden floorboards. ‘What does the word “bechaloschu” mean?’ the principal snapped. Chaim cleared his throat and surveyed his inky fingers. ‘I don’t know,’ he mumbled. Without a word, the rabbi raised his veined hand and, with the elegance of a samurai wielding a sword, struck the boy across the face.

  While the shocked child rubbed his red cheek, the rabbi moved on to the next pupil, who also didn’t know the answer. Again a sharp retort resounded in the silent room. By the time he reached Hesiu, the rabbi had slapped every single boy in the class. As it happened, my father did know the answer, but he was terrified in case the old man struck him from sheer reflex. Damp with perspiration, Hesiu blurted out the answer even before the rabbi had finished asking the question, and sank to his chair in relief.

  But the episode wasn’t over. The bridge of his bony nose pinched with anger, the rabbi strode towards the white-faced melamed. Before anyone had time to realise what was happening, he whacked the startled teacher so hard across the face that the young man staggered, fell backwards, and only came to a stop when he landed with a thump against a cupboard. The force with which he fell made his legs fly up in the air, and in that instant Hesiu saw that his trousers, which were usually concealed by his long coat, were threadbare and torn, and that his frayed shirt showed through the hole. This wasn’t unusual for the boys, but it was shocking to see a teacher’s clothes in that wretched state. The boys tittered and pointed, but Hesiu couldn’t join in their derision. He felt sorry for the melamed whose poverty had been exposed in such a humiliating way.

  To add to his misery at cheder, Hesiu was lonely. He didn’t fit in with Chassidic boys who sneered at him because his father wore western clothes and trimmed his beard. They called him a ‘dajsche’. As the progressive Jewish movement had originated in Germany, the word ‘German’ became a derogatory term for assimilated Jews.

  When finally one boy accepted his invitation to come home to play, Hesiu was overjoyed. At last he had a friend. During the visit, while his brothers and sisters came in and out of the house, he noticed his new friend frowning as he strained to hear what they were saying. In Chassidic homes, Yiddish was the only language spoken. But in the Baldinger household, Daniel spoke to Lieba and Avner in Yiddish, to Jerzy in German, and to the others in Polish, which the children used amongst themselves. As the realisation hit him that he was hearing the language of nonbelievers, Hesiu’s playmate stared at him accusingly, jumped to his feet and ran out of the house as though pursued by the devil with a pitchfork. He’d never been inside a home where Polish was spoken and was frightened of staying in such an ungodly environment. Resigned to his loneliness, Hesiu gave up trying to make friends.

  Although there were no lessons on Saturdays, the Baldinger boys had to go to cheder even on the Sabbath, probably to keep them out of mischief at home and to give their parents a few hours of peace and privacy. The boys hated having to spend even the day of rest in the hated schoolroom while most of their friends were running around the Blonia playing fields and having fun.

  Sitting in the classroom one Saturday afternoon, almost jumping out of his skin with boredom, Hesiu began fiddling with the enamel inkwell which fitted into a hole in his desk. As Jews are forbidden to touch any work implements on the Sabbath, the boy next to him immediately called out, ‘Muktzeh! Forbidden!’

  Hesiu had an inquiring, argumentative mind. ‘Why is it forbidden?’ he asked.

  ‘Because that’s what it says,’ the other boy replied.

  ‘Who says so?’

  ‘Moses.’

  ‘And who told him?’

  ‘Hashem did.’

  The devil was goading Hesiu’s tongue. ‘Prove it!’ he shouted.

  For a moment the boy fell silent, and then he spat out one word which ended all discussion. ‘Apikojres!’ Calling someone Epicurus, or heretic, was the worst insult, because no self-respecting Jew would stoop to speak to such a despicable person. Hesiu abandoned the argument but seethed even more at the stifling restrictions of his father’s religion.

  No matter how much work he had, Daniel always came home early on Fridays to observe the Sabbath. On Saturday mornings he donned his top hat and walked with his measured gait to the Alte Shule Synagogue at the top of Szeroka Street, not far from the smaller Remu Synagogue in whose cemetery Lieba’
s famous ancestors, Rabbi Moses Isserles and the scholar Nathan Spira lie buried. ‘Gut shabbes, Reb Danil,’ the other worshippers would greet him as he made his way towards his seat near the wrought-iron bimah, where generous donors like him used to sit.

  Wrapping his fringed prayer shawl around him, Daniel began to doven in that swaying motion whose rhythm helps worshippers focus on the Almighty and tap into five thousand years of prayer, dialogue and supplication. During the service, the buzz of conversation formed a low hum in the synagogue whose walls had heard news, gossip and rumours for over three hundred years. Looking up from their well-thumbed siddurs, the men whispered into their neighbour’s ear the latest gossip and scandal about embezzlement, fraud, law suits and adultery. Daniel took no part in these conversations. He disapproved of gossiping and despised the hypocrisy of those who came to synagogue to pray to the Almighty but spent their time judging their fellow man.

  Back home after the service, Daniel sat contentedly in the wooden rocking chair with the rush back which was always known as ‘Tatunciu’s chair’. No-one ever presumed to sit in his chair, or to take his place at the head of the table. In my own home, too, my father’s chair and place at table were sacrosanct, so although as a child Hesiu rebelled against his father’s restrictions, in adult life he imposed some of them on me. While relaxing in his wooden rocking chair, Daniel sipped a small glass of brandy while Lieba brought him a plate of the crescent-shaped kichelech which she baked for him every Friday and placed on top of the glass-fronted sideboard out of the children’s reach. Although the children eyed the plate longingly, they knew that this treat was for Tatunciu, but if they hovered around when he returned from shule, he always offered them one of the coveted cookies.