I’m not sure how long this went on, but one night, at about two o’clock, there was a frantic knocking on our door. My whole family woke in alarm, and when father opened the door Mendl fell sobbing into his arms.
‘Mashinka, Mashinka,’ he wailed, turning to my mother, Masha. ‘It hurts! It hurts from here to here, from here to here!’ He repeated this a hundred times, pointing into his chest. ‘What am I to do? I caught them in the act, in the very act!... You know,’ he continued, as mother handed him a cold drink to quieten him down, ‘I asked that bastard brother of mine, Hey, what do you think you’re doing? And he unashamedly answered, A tango! and flew out.’
Mendl fell back in his chair, sweating all over. It was a miracle he didn’t suffer a heart attack.
Life in our tenement was full of open secrets. One morning, as Mendl was about to shave his chin, he noticed in the mirror his voluptuous but unreachable wife stepping naked from her bed. This incensed him so much that he hurled a little stool into the looking-glass, and all of a sudden saw himself staring back at himself, fragmented into ghastly triangular shards. Was this the straw that broke Mendl’s back? Or was it the fact that he couldn’t satisfy his Malkale the way Abrasha did? Hard to say. Obviously he was made wretched by his hatred of a love miscarried, and so this quiet, mild-mannered Mendl became his own monster.
I cannot remember the day of the week, but I can still see the black hearse rolling into our yard, two sombre-looking men sliding the coffin into the vehicle, Malkale’s arm hooked firmly into the arm of Mendl’s handsome brother, both of them dressed in black, and — under the watchful eyes of our entire tenement block — walking bowed behind the funeral procession.
The following day was like any other, and yet not the same. Abrasha stopped singing and Malkale didn’t stop crying; but it was White Haskel, our very own social worker, who voiced his consoling opinion outside their window. ‘Suffering in the present,’ he was heard to advise the grief-stricken lovers, ‘will not expiate the crimes of the past.’
The Assimilator
On a bright Sunday morning in June, a friend of my father’s, a small insignificant-looking free-thinker known as Pinchas the Logician — whose week was made up of seven Sundays — was sitting at leisure in a local park, trying to work out the reason behind the random motions of the celestial bodies. Presently he spotted a figure making its way towards him, and behold, it was his former neighbour Lev Solewicz, who, because of his disgust with the Yiddish language and the people who spoke it, had moved away from our neighbourhood and transformed himself into Leon Solarski.
‘Well, well,’ said Leon in his newly adopted tongue, ‘what a refreshing pleasure to see a man who, like myself, has had the courage to reject religious claptrap, long beards, sidelocks, fur hats, and all that.’
‘Quite so, my dear friend,’ the Logician replied. ‘And yet I still remain the authentic Jew I have always been.’
‘Really? How’s that?’
‘By the very fact that I cry whenever I hear that a Jew like you has been beaten up.’
‘But I am not a Jew, not any more,’ Leon shot back, indignant. ‘And what’s more, I’ll soon be converting!’
‘Have a seat, Lev,’ said Pinchas in his politest Yiddish, ‘and let me tell you a story.’
At this Leon flared up. ‘Don’t you dare call me Lev,’ he cried. ‘And don’t speak to me in your corrupted half-German!’
‘Whoa, hold it, hold it...’ The Logician raised his palms, as if offering a truce. ‘Rage is a fool’s trade and I don’t think you qualify — not yet.’ He smiled and continued quietly: ‘So please, join me on this bench and let me tell you a little story. You may find it quite... enlightening.’
Leon sat down reluctantly, checked his watch, and turned to Pinchas with a look of mock-resignation.
‘I knew a man,’ the Logician began, ‘who forsook his father’s wisdom, his mother’s warmth, the fount of hope which had nourished their dreams by candlelight, and he exchanged his parents’ ancient truths for a strange new god. Like Adam he stood in a hostile land, stuttering in his new tongue, with hands outstretched, a beggar awaiting a scrap of mercy. He died alone. Nobody walked behind his hearse — except the stonemason, whom he had instructed to inscribe above his tomb an epitaph that would sum up a wasted existence. It read:
A cat dreamt he was a tiger
And dreaming, lost his wits.
He fell asleep in the arms of a tiger
And woke up torn to bits.’
Lev-Leon shook his head. ‘Save your preaching for somebody else,’ he said, making no effort to disguise his irritation. ‘I’ve listened to enough sermons in my time. After I’m gone I don’t care what my epitaph says. What matters is life, not death.’
As he hurried off, his last words echoed in the Logician’s mind like a rifle-shot.
The Philosopher
Mechel Schiff, my father’s friend, would show up every Sunday morning to tell stories and partake of a hot cooked breakfast. The rest of the week he was fed by the Christian Mission, somewhere on Wólczańska Street. A stocky, red-headed, blue-eyed chap, who dwelt for most of his life in a dilapidated shed, Mechel was known as Der Hosenkavalier because, as he himself put it, ‘I come from a line of fastidious dressers’. At the start of spring, this unemployed philosopher would visit the local market, where for one złoty he would purchase an entire new wardrobe. He would spend 20 groshen on a pair of shoes, 10 on a shirt, 25 on a jacket, and another 5 on socks and a tie; the balance, a whole 40 groshen, he always chose to invest in a pair of hosen — trousers, according to him, being the most important item in a man’s wardrobe. Then, Mechel, the highly intelligent atheist, was off to the Christian Mission for a free meal.
‘And how was the soup today, Herr Mechel?’ enquired the head of the Mission, Johann Mentzeler, who had been trying for years to convert Mechel to the right path.
‘Fabulous,’ Mechel retorted. ‘I imagine that is the way they cook in your paradise kitchen, Herr Johann.’
‘That’s true, that’s true,’ Johann jumped up, excited. ‘I’m glad you can finally see a glimpse of the true light.’
‘Sir, I said it merely by way of conversation. But to be quite honest, I must confess—’
‘Yes, that’s it!’ Johann almost shrieked with joy. ‘Confess! Confess!’
‘—that I am more absorbed,’ Mechel continued, ignoring the intrusion, ‘with the economics of this world, than with the culinary art of the next. And to be truthful, I must lodge a small complaint: some mischievous devil, I know not of which denomination, has pinched the traditional marrowbone out of my soup.’
‘Yes, so I see,’ Johann replied, blushing. ‘But surely, in order to be happy, one must learn to detach oneself from such trivialities.’
‘Sir — a marrowbone is not a triviality. Not just to me, but even to the most stoutly religious believer.’
Johann was not to be outdone. ‘Ah, well, Herr Mechel. I know that some of your people are such stout believers that they fast every Monday and Thursday.’
‘True, Herr Johann. But that is not an expression of their belief — rather of the lack of it.’
‘Ah, Herr Mechel, dear Mechel, you are so clever! If only you could learn to love God — to understand God — to come to Him...’
‘Of course I can, and I will — but not until such time as a fellow can be locked up behind bars for preaching religion. So that no devil will ever dare to help himself to the marrowbone in my soup, which in their wisdom the gods — whatever their persuasion — have bestowed upon their beloved Mechel Schiff.’
Yankl Bolshevik
It was not by proper given-name and surname that a person was officially known in the territory of our community, but by his or her acquired nickname. For instance, if you were to state that Mr Samuel Haberman had passed away, no one would know to whom you were referring; but should you remark that lame Shmuel had kicked the bucket, a shudder-sigh of recognition and grief would run like an evening
whisper through the minds of our tender-hearted citizens.
Yankl Zelmanowicz, father of my school friend Laibush, and the man who had taught us to play Five Hundred (not that I needed any coaching), was known as Yankl Bolshevik. I am not sure that he was ever a true Communist; rather, from his political jargon I would conjecture that he was a member of the legendary SR, the Social Revolutionaries, a party that sometimes resorted to terror — though one should not equate that with the random banditry of more recent times. If, for example, the committee decided to take out a man for murdering his comrades, it had to be that particular individual alone; should the potential victim have even a dog beside him, the assassination would not take place.
Our Yankl had an analytical mind, and he loved to measure everything against his beloved Russian Revolution. ‘You know, children,’ he told us once, watching his son Laibush shuffle a worn-out deck of cards, ‘I often recall those monumental October days. History dealt the Russian people a terrific hand, yet some of our major players — like Zinoviev, Kamenev, even the great Victor Chernov, leader of the SR, a man I loved like a father — all of them pulled back at the crucial moment. It needed the ingenuity of an Ilyich Lenin, who took one look and declared: “Comrades, Red is our winning colour. Let’s play!”’
Yankl Bolshevik was soaked in fascinating stories — stories of night battles in snowstorms against White armies led by the bloodthirsty Denikin, Kolchak and others. But to me, the most unforgettable of all was the story of Maria Spiridonova’s return from Siberia; when he spoke about her, his eyes were aflame with black fire. Perhaps there was something more between him and the legendary great lady of the Social Revolutionaries!
‘I was amongst a thousand men or more,’ he would begin, ‘who awaited her on the outskirts of Moscow. As the train, its face draped with two red banners, came into view, we ran towards the driver, asked him to unhook the engine, and joyously harnessed ourselves to her carriage. Beholding that spectacle, Maria, this humble heroine, jumped from the train to haul our load with us; then, at the top of her lungs, she sang out the great opening words of the Internationale:
Arise ye workers from your slumbers
Arise ye prisoners of want...
and, like a mighty peal of thunder, a thousand voices responded as one:
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face;
The Internationale
Unites the human race.’
Yankl would spend his Saturday mornings at the barber’s. Here, Jews who could hardly make ends meet argued richly and passionately about Sacco and Vanzetti, Hitler, Spain, Mussolini and the war in Abyssinia, the famine in China, and a hundred other topics. A barbershop in those days was a political marketplace, and Yankl was always in the thick of the debate.
Although, in the wake of the Moscow trials, Yankl became a disillusioned man, come May Day he would still stand in front of the barber’s — dressed in a black dinner-suit with a red flower in his lapel — and as the procession passed by, he, the old Bolshevik, would shine once more. I saw him taking the ‘salute’ during our last May Day parade. He already knew that Russia’s revolutionary spirit had been imprisoned in Stalin’s gulag, that the children of Ferdinand Lassalle were wearing swastikas, that Europe was tensed for imminent war. Yet as the Internationale burst forth from the throats of ten thousand marchers, his face lit up again with that incredible romantic light. A light that, soon enough, would be extinguished forever.
Sport
Imbued with the spirit of the forthcoming Berlin Olympics, some of our fellow citizens embarked on a new yet generations-old sport: pogroms. The old cry went up: The Jews! — no one really knew why. But things seldom appear to people the way they really are, only the way they want them to be, and suddenly the land of my birth began to mushroom with pogroms — many, many pogroms. I will relate only the one I witnessed myself.
A mob of university students, in league with some individuals who were intellectually inept, rushed into the house at Zawiszy 7, home of my school friend Zisza Kliger, who dwelt there in a windowless flat with his younger brother and widowed mother. The soberly irrational Olympians ripped apart the only bedding the Kligers possessed, let the feathers fly all over the street like petals of snow, threw the mother’s ever-hungry cooking-pots out the window, and knocked her unconscious into the bargain for trying to protect us.
Warming to their task, they made for the home of my friend Huna Kurbic, who lived next door to the Kligers. Huna’s father was a gardener, and the only Jew in the city of the waterless river employed in the public service; he was also an old revolutionary who had fought against the Tsars for the independence of our country, and although hardly in his prime, he would not have let these rascals as much as spit in his porridge. But they quickly overpowered him and gave him a good thrashing, and for his temerity he was sacked from his job — for planting (as a bitter jest had it) Jewish trees in Slavic soil.
Encouraged by their successes and by the quiet acquiescence of the authorities, and filled with zest to emulate their Berlin contemporaries, our local heroes soon renewed their crusade; they reappeared on the corner of Zgierska and Limanowskiego, where they caught the seventy-year-old Alter ‘Herring’ (so called because he dealt in that variety of fish). Two medical students who were part of the gang gave him a proper physical, and to crown their victory they tipped Alter’s barrel of herrings into the gutter.
These outbursts and other similar demented deeds and disturbances stirred our town’s two organized trade unions into action. Jewish workers, together with an admixture of other men of goodwill, decided to make a stand. The next ‘sports event’ was scheduled for Sunday, right after the morning church service. The racial athletes gathered under their party flag on the local marketplace, Bałucki Rynek, fervently intoning their saintly hymn:
To our last drop of blood
We’ll defend our People’s right
Till we rid our sacred land
Of the ugly Hebrew blight.
Every Jew is a deadly foe
So help us God,
So help us God.
The name of the Almighty was invoked in profound solemnity, with eyes closed.
Haughtily, and in crisp military step, they entered Limanowskiego, my street. But to their bewilderment, they found themselves met by a wall of sternly resolute men armed with iron bars. For a moment they stood there as if paralysed. And then, hoodlums being by their very nature cowards, they took off in all directions, dispersing like a cloud of dust driven off by a gust of wind.
However — as I would learn later, much later — this dust never actually disappeared. It found shelter and settled, to reemerge all too soon from out of the dark crevices of time.
The Improviser
My little friend, pimple-faced Shmulik, lived with his parents and three siblings in an attic no bigger than an alcove. Shmulik was a born improviser. You’d say a word and he’d come back at once with a rhyme. On top of that, Shmulik had the voice of an angel. He could soften a stone with his singing. The young cantor of our local synagogue believed that we had Shmulik’s voice to thank for all the mercies the Almighty bestowed upon us.
But our landlord Motke was of another mind. We kids, he said, were the natural enemies of property, and Shmulik, our ringleader, was the worst of all. Perhaps he was right. Anything on his property that could serve the needs of us kids was fair game. Especially Motke’s timber yard, just inside the gateway to our block of apartments.
We were twelve youngsters, seven boys and five girls, between the ages of ten and fourteen. We had our own football team and card club, and the timber yard was our logical hideout. It was there that we played cowboys and indians, fathers and mothers, hide-and-seek; above all, we played cards — for real money.
One day Shmulik, the boy with a thousand pimples on his forehead and the voice of an angel, whose plain-looking thirty-year-old sister would shiver while I explored the topography of her meagre body, suggested that in or
der to stage an authentic adventure of the Wild West, it was necessary to light a fire. Well, there was no shortage of firewood in the timber yard; but the moment the smell of smoke seeped into Motke’s flat, he came running, waving his arms, brandishing his black-lacquered cane. ‘I’ll send you all to prison, you good-for-nothings!’ he screamed. ‘Prison, you hear? — that’s what I’ll do!’
Shmulik the improviser stood his ground. ‘Prison? Prison?’ he repeated, like a fiddler tuning his violin. ‘Then allow me, sir,’ he announced, effecting a deep bow before the furious Motke. And with one eye closed, tapping his right foot, he began:
From prison to sunny Spain
Shmulik flew in an aeroplane;
I was king of the sea,
No lord was greater than me.
Girls eighteen to the dozen I’ve had,
Come, pretty maiden, be my bride,
You’ll find me talented, and besides
I’m such a well-to-do lad.
On the word ‘lad’, Shmulik made another deep bow, took off his hat and held it out. Motke shook his head. ‘Don’t you ever dare to enter my timber yard again,’ he hissed, then tossed a small coin into the hat and walked off.
But nothing could discourage our Shmulik. Since we had lost access to our timber citadel, he immediately embarked on a search for a new hideaway. His choice was ingenious: the gently tilted tar roof of our block — where Motke had once kept a pigeon coop, where silence listened to the wind, and where our slightly limping landlord was not game enough to visit. Here we would set up home anew.
We climbed up on the roof by way of the loft (our leader alone had the privilege of arriving directly via his attic window) and we celebrated the occasion with a game of blackjack. Needless to say, Shmulik, may his memory be blessed forever, cleaned us out. Once again he bowed his domed head and, hat in hand, gave his bankrupt admirers another performance:
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