East of Time

by Jacob Rosenberg

In the end Itzik managed to persuade his old adversary and they went off to the East together, though circumstances eventually drew them apart and they lost contact with each other. In October 1943, in the company of a military officer, Bainisz was sent beyond the Urals to repair some equipment. Their train broke down just outside a gulag (‘a camp for dangerous enemies of our state,’ the officer explained, though Bainisz didn’t need any explanations). They would have to spend several days at the camp, since the next train was almost a week away.

  One can picture Bainisz’s astonishment when, as he walked through this camp of dangerous enemies of the state, he spotted little Itzik, lying uncovered and miserable on a wooden bunk in the freezing night. ‘Itzik!’ he called. ‘Itzik, is that you?’ His former neighbour stared at Bainisz in disbelief. Bainisz wore a woollen uniform coat, fur hat, high boots, and seemed to be well fed. ‘Why are you here, Itzik?’ he persisted. ‘What have you done to deserve this?’

  ‘Bainisz,’ the other replied at last. ‘I can see that you are in the company of a high officer. Maybe you can help me.’

  A while later Bainisz returned to Itzik’s bunk with a pot of hot thick soup and a black sweater. ‘That’s all I can do for you. But tell me, Itzik, what crime did you commit?’

  ‘I mentioned to my foreman,’ the poet stuttered through his soup, ‘that the lice were eating me up. The foreman reported this to the authorities, who were convinced it was a metaphor for something else.’

  In August 1946, right after the Kielce pogrom, Bainisz returned to the city of his birth. There, to his joy, he discovered little Itzik again, reborn in a white jacket and standing in front of his barber shop. ‘Itzik, thank God you made it!’ he cried.

  ‘Yes, and so did you,’ his old enemy replied. ‘Thanks to the East.’

  Over coffee, Bainisz made it known that he would shortly be leaving for America. Itzik was unimpressed. ‘You shouldn’t go, Bainisz, you shouldn’t. We’re building a new life here, a new order.’

  ‘Yes, complete with pogroms,’ Bainisz retorted. ‘Tell me, is there any other land in Europe where Jews are still being murdered after the war?’

  Itzik didn’t answer. But next morning, when Bainisz dropped by his shop to say goodbye, the old poet was ready for him:

  The American Imperialists are a pest

  Hotza-tza, hotza-tza

  For spies and snakes a rotten nest

  Hotza-tza, hotza-tza.

  Over there things are harder

  Hotza-tza, tza hotza-tza

  Stalin is still our beloved Father

  Hotza-tza, tza hotza-tza.

  A Chat

  Sergey Nutkiewicz, our tutor in political economy during our school days, was a corpulent five-footer on short legs. In defiance of nature’s unkindness, he carried his frame with great dignity and resoluteness. He had a face like the open book of an illustrious spirit, a pair of big sad blue eyes, and a velvet voice that drove the fairer sex to distraction. He was a leading Bundist in our city of the waterless river, but much more a Fabian than a fanatic.

  We would meet many years after the war, at the tail-end of a beautiful summer. Sergey was already rich in seasons but still very much awake. We sat in a little garden, sipping black coffee across a marble table. The warm afternoon breeze played havoc with the last three grey hairs on his head. We sat for a good while before I finally broke the silence.

  ‘I recall one of your talks — to a group of us, when we’d already left school. It was in the late thirties, after the Moscow purges...’

  Sergey was stunned. ‘Really? How can you remember a thing like that?’

  ‘Well, Sergey, the gods have endowed me with a long memory — which by the way is not always a blessing.’

  He smiled, still shaking his head.

  ‘Yes, this may sound incredible to you,’ I went on, ‘but I can still hear, in vivid detail, your emphatic avowal of the importance of a strong socialist brotherhood, of the unity of mankind. And how, in the wake of the Moscow trials, you said: “History may for once contradict nature. I think the time has arrived for the sun to rise in the west.”

  ‘Well, it seems to me,’ I continued, ‘that this will never come to pass. Not only are western skies too narrow for your rising sun, but the ideal of a united humanity has surely been killed off at the roots.’

  Sergey wrinkled his brow, and as his sad blue eyes scanned my face, I could sense how carefully he was composing his thoughts. I waited, and this time it was he who broke the silence.

  ‘Dulcinea del Toboso never existed, my friend,’ said Sergey. ‘Don Quixote de la Mancha dreamt her up. Yet for his Dulcinea he was ready to lay down his life.’

  The Spaniard

  One of the most colourful personalities in our microcosm was the mystic seer, Ezro the Spaniard. I had a great regard for the man’s exuberant fancy. I loved to listen to his buoyant, often arcane stories, and to his claim of being a direct descendant of Abraham Ibn Ezra, that marvellous twelfth-century scholar, traveller and hero of many a legendary tale.

  Our own Ezro’s outlandish approach to life obliged him to live outside the cultural perimeter of our community. People could not accept the fact that he called his old shack ‘Andalusia’, that he wore his long black hair in a ponytail, and that he sported a gold ring in his right earlobe. Then there was his needle-thin moustache, his sideboards like two meticulously shaped sickles that ran almost into the corners of his mouth, and, on top of that, his habit of going about, even on the hottest days, in a black woollen ankle-length coat adorned with a brown fur collar.

  At the beginning of 1939, on a day that had already shed its afternoon, Ezro my fanciful friend waved me over. ‘Psst, hey, young fellow, would you care to step into Andalusia for a moment or two?’ Ezro looked unusually secretive. After a tense pause he announced resolutely: ‘I’m going away at daybreak.’

  I was stunned. ‘Why?’ I almost shouted.

  ‘Ezro is a restless man,’ he replied, ‘and must leave his tent and rejoin the road from time to time, perhaps for his own wellbeing.’

  ‘Sir, I don’t understand.’

  ‘You soon will...’

  ‘But where will you go?’ I persisted.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You mean you’re going to... nowhere?’

  ‘No,’ Ezro shook his head. ‘A man who has nowhere in his heart cannot go there. How can he be in something, when that very something is in him?’

  By now I was utterly confused.

  ‘Existence,’ he went on, ‘is but a passing phenomenon. Ours is only the present, of which we comprehend nothing. Our future may well be an illusion, and our past is in love with oblivion, which enables us to repeat our follies with a smile.’

  I nodded absently, but he had well and truly lost me.

  ‘I once heard of a prophet,’ Ezro continued, ‘the homeliest of all prophets. Yet his life was an eternal rendezvous with legend, and likewise with dreams — one without the other would make no sense, this prophet said. As for me, I love exile, because in exile I can hear God’s cry. He cries over his worshippers’ stupidity: they don’t realize that their foolishness is their own worst enemy.’

  He stopped to take a breath, then began to pack his belongings. ‘The road is longing for my footfall,’ he declared.

  Bewildered, I looked up into his face.

  ‘Well,’ said the mystic, pointing at the skyline. ‘You will see how our vistas are consumed in flames. Soon there will be only ashes left...’ A profound sadness had entered his eyes, and seemed to colour his deep voice. ‘It’s time for me to go, my friend,’ he announced, and his meaning was clear again. I shook my head, but Ezro merely smiled.

  ‘Time to go,’ he repeated, ‘in search of the thing which does not exist.’

  The Last Summer

  Early on the morning of 12 August 1939, as the mist cleared — though a few patches still lingered, making our street more distant and unreal — mother called out: ‘Quickly, go to the village where
Pola and Frumetl are staying.’ My sister and little niece were on a summer break in the nearby countryside. ‘Help them pack up their belongings. Hurry! There’s no time to lose, we’re on the brink of war!’

  As if to himself, father murmured: ‘You spend a lifetime spinning dreams, and in the end you have to face a crude reality. Mankind,’ he added quite audibly, ‘can’t control its own destiny. We are forever the cause, the tool, and the tragic casualty.’

  The village was only an hour’s tram-ride out of town, and from there the walk to the hamlet took a good thirty minutes. I made my way through a dense forest of rustling pines, over green clearings sprinkled with yellow wildflowers, across fields of rippling corn. I advanced amid a stillness, except for the cornstalks’ dreaded whisper of a premature harvest, of a life prickly as thistles.

  I arrived just before noon. My sister was already packing, assisted by her host, the old German, Kling. A clever, kindhearted man with an unsteady gait, Herr Kling was a wealthy farmer, owner of miles and miles of fertile land, hundreds of cattle and countless fowl. In the centre of his yard, besieged by random archipelagos of moss, stood a circular whitewashed well. I remember its freezing water, even on the hottest days, and the wooden bucket humming on its rusty iron chain.

  As we finished packing I heard Kling remark: ‘War is stupid, Herr Hitler is a madman.’ But the farmer’s son Ludwig, who each evening after a hefty meal would sit under the linden tree and play Für Elise on his trumpet, disagreed. ‘Father,’ he argued, ‘you don’t understand our brothers in the west, their lack of Lebensraum. The Führer’s intention to annex the east, and thereby bring to fruition Germany’s historical dreams, is a very wise one.’

  The next day, sitting for dinner around our table with Pola and Frumetl, I repeated to my father the conversation I had overheard at farmer Kling’s. ‘What a grotesque absurdity!’ he exclaimed. ‘What pathetic, juvenile arrogance! A leader might have an idea of how and where a war begins, but never how and where it will end.’

  Late at night we all went next door and congregated around our neighbour’s Telefunken. ‘This is Radio Berlin,’ the loudspeaker crackled. ‘Guten Tag, meine Damen und Herren. We are repeating excerpts from our Führer’s daily address.’ Then the hated, distinctive voice. ‘Die Juden,’ it thundered, and it was the hollow barking of a mad dog. ‘Die Juden werden nicht mehr lachen!...’ When the speaker made some arrogant reference to Polish territory, I observed father’s reaction: his face had turned grey. ‘We are facing difficult times,’ he said.

  ‘Reb Gershon,’ replied our deeply religious neighbour, Zilberszac, ‘keep in mind that, since the beginning of time, Jews and hope have been interchangeable. Keep in mind our mighty God, and His Messiah. In days like these, even a Jew who does not believe in an Anointed One is not absolved from nevertheless believing that he is on his way.’

  Father smiled, not just because he could not share our neighbour’s faith, but because he loved this Talmudic twist. And out of respect to Zilberszac’s opinion, naive though he regarded it, he preferred to end the exchange by shrugging his shoulders and remaining silent, rather than arguing and trying to disprove the other’s abstractions.

  A few days later, on a morning brimming with light and hope, I watched with pride as the intrepid Polish cavalry rode through our street. And I, a boy of seventeen, thought: Is there any power in the world that can measure up to this? Never!... Little could I know that the brilliant morning light was already infested with darkness, hope was already riddled with despair, and fate had propelled us on a journey of no return.

  Patch of Light

  Isaiah, son of Amoz, come down from your azure throne and see how the city of the waterless river celebrates, on this scorching August day, your beautiful vision. See how Poles and Jews, with spades and pickaxes in their hands, march shoulder to shoulder, singing songs, digging defensive trenches together against the oncoming common enemy. See how the little babushkas run from post to post with buckets of fresh water, quenching the thirst of Jews; see how pious chassids in traditional black garb, with resolute curly sidelocks, and their women in solemn wigs and with Sabbath blessings on their lips, wipe the sweat off the brows of Polish men with crucifixes dangling over hairy chests. Oh, how can one forget that patch of light, that moment of brotherhood, of those unforgettable summer days in August 1939?

  I was digging near my school friend, Josef Wiesenfeld, enthused by this human panorama, this rare unity of resolve. Out of the blue, Josef climbed up on a hillock of soil and, with his heart burning and his body swirling about like a living flame, began to recite his own version of ‘Brothers’, a poem by the great Yiddish poet I. L. Peretz, inspired in turn by Schiller’s ode, To Joy:

  White and black and brown and yellow,

  Mix together all the colours —

  Jew or Pole or Turk or Arab,

  People everywhere are brothers!...

  But before long, on the first of September, German planes darkened our skies. And a week later, a scaffold appeared in Bałucki Rynek, our marketplace. Three men were hanging from it, strung up as if to give us a taste of what we were in for; they had white signs pinned to their lapels, bearing the words JUDE SCHWINDLER scrawled in large black letters. And as, to my dismay, I heard the tumultuous crowd argue over the correctness of these executions, I knew that Isaiah’s utopia had been bitterly betrayed once more.

  Moving away from the black spectacle, I bumped into my friend Josef. His face was grey, and he seemed ten years older than the last time I had seen him, three weeks earlier. And Josef — who even after the catastrophe of these years would not relinquish his belief in universal brotherhood; who never stopped repeating ‘A mensch is a mensch’, that all people are equal — Josef turned to me and said: ‘All of this is just a temporary darkness that we’ll overcome.’

  No doubt he expected me to agree. After all, we were both Bundists, the idea of brotherhood was fundamental to our ideology. And he was still basking in that remarkable display of common endeavour of just a few weeks ago.

  ‘My friend,’ he continued without waiting for my response. ‘Roses blossom only briefly, yet no one will deny their beauty.’ And then, this incorrigible romantic added: ‘One drop of radiant hope may help humanity cross over an ocean of despair.’

  ‘That’s all very well,’ I told him as we parted, ‘and it might even be true. But for the time being, Josef, we’d best observe the curfew...’

  The Sun in My Mother’s Song

  Like most of my school friends I was brought up in a socialist spirit, in the belief that socialism would free our working-class parents from the drudgeries of life; that socialism — and, in the view of some of our people, Communism — would bring bread into our hungry homes. At the age of twelve, not one of us had yet read Das Kapital, Max Beer’s History of Socialism, or other books dealing with that subject. Our educational literature consisted mainly of poetry and songs; every word in these songs and poems we took for gospel, since they spoke to us with an ingenious and trusting credibility. Mother had a beautiful voice, and after a day of hard work, in order to lull her wrenching pain to sleep, she loved to sing of the glory of the coming revolution.

  I was quite convinced that the prophecies in my mother’s songs would soon, very soon, be fulfilled. But history, like nature, is full of bizarre twists. So it was that on 23 August 1939 two mortal foes, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, embraced each other in friendship, thereby making our time the victim of an abominable trick.

  Shortly afterwards my sister Pola’s friend, an ardent Stalinist, ran breathlessly into our flat. ‘There are circumstances,’ she shouted out of the blue at my father, whom she knew to be a confirmed anti-Communist, ‘in which language cannot express the magnitude of a historic event... It’s impossible,’ she continued, her voice subsiding, ‘to define the genius of Stalin’s dialectic!’

  My dad smiled hesitantly. Then, with a disconsolate gesture of refusal, he repeated the lines he had pencilled after
the infamous Moscow trials:

  From Warsaw to Paris,

  From London to Iraq,

  Has Moscow dispatched

  Her bloody axe.

  The woman stood there, an incredulous look on her face. ‘Fascist!’ she exclaimed, and brusquely walked out the door.

  Nine days later, on 1 September 1939, as the dawn awoke from a nervous night dark with anticipation, and Molotov– Ribbentrop cocktails began to rain on our heads from the German bombers swarming overhead, I watched as the sun in my mother’s song died on her lips.

  Initiation

  Friday morning, 8 September 1939, in the city of the waterless river. I happened to be standing on the corner of Lutomierska and Zgierska, facing the Church of St Mary and her tall, sad spires. The arms on the clock froze at a quarter to ten; they were not to budge for five years.

  White flags of defeat fluttered obsequiously from every window, and high above, up in the unreachable sky, a solitary plane swam like a grey shark. Fear cannot always be seen, but one can be frightfully aware of its presence. In the foreboding stillness I picked up the poignant murmur of the cobblestones. For a split second I experienced the illusion that I was here alone, all alone; but before long, as if in a black-magic play, the street had come to life with throngs of blue-eyed, hefty-bosomed maidens carrying flowers in their naked arms, screaming Heil! Heil! Heil! at the oncoming invaders as they rolled through our town.

  When I got home I found my father arguing with our religious neighbour, the widower Zilberszac. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man in his early sixties whose beard, pencilled with fine silvery strands that tumbled from his chin like a black waterfall, might have been the envy of the rabbinical world.

  ‘No, Panie Gershon,’ he was asserting, ‘it won’t be as bad as people are saying. Remember the Germans in the last war? Their incredible politeness, friendliness even, the business we used to do with them? Panie Gershon, my son the history teacher told me a remarkable thing. He told me that one should not forget Heinrich Grätz, who, after completing his History of the Jews, wrote to his grandfather that he had concluded the work with a joyful feeling — knowing, he said, that the Jews had at last not only found a just freedom in civilized lands, but had also gained a certain recognition.’