He then spoke at length about the poet Adam Mickiewicz, and about the hunchback Jew Yankel the musician in his Pan Tadeusz — one of the great Polish literary masterpieces of all time — and went on to analyse the Polish influence on our Jewish writing, in particular that of Wesele by Stanisław Wyspiański (another exalted Polish poet) on Peretz’s play At Night at the Old Market. Wolman also read out a poem which the Yiddish master had dedicated to his beloved Polish poet, Maria Konopnicka:
I saw poems white as snow
blossoming fragrantly as in spring
and pure as the bluest sky at night,
and like a sad angel in thought
they sang of love...
After this, each of us read a piece — most of them about our disrupted lives, our aborted youth, our sadness, but few without a ray of hope or a longing for universal peace and redemption. The last to read was my no-longer girlfriend. I cannot recall the exact form of her poem, but the message at its heart is lodged in my memory:
A ghetto might tarnish the nobility of young love,
but to erase it completely is to succumb to cowardice.
The moment she finished her poem she ran from the room as if it was burning. I gave chase, flying recklessly down the three flights of stairs, and caught up with her on the bottom, street-level landing. I pulled her to me and tried to kiss her tears away. ‘Don’t!’ she almost shouted, tearing herself away. ‘There’s no need to pretend — we’re not on the stage!’ And she hurried off sobbing into the night.
Enigmas
Future scholars of the social sciences will shake their heads in disbelief. How was it possible, they will ask, for so many of these permanently hungry ghetto-dwellers, whose only release from their miseries was death (a death which arrived daily), to continue to immerse themselves in writing poetry, studying languages, engaging in philosophical discourse, and conducting heated debates over purely intellectual abstractions?
Once, while in the ghetto, I had the good fortune to spend time with a group of former yeshiva students, twenty-odd years my seniors, to whom the Yiddish language had opened the gates to European literature and had transformed these people into a formidable intellectual elite, flag-bearers in the republic of words, with a hatred of all dictatorial systems. No wonder our overlords saw them as enemies of the state.
‘Perhaps,’ one of the group remarked, ‘our mistake is that we forever consider ourselves citizens, whereas the people we alive amongst think of us merely as sojourners. Look, for fifteen hundred years we lived in Spain,’ he argued, warming up. ‘We settled on the Iberian Peninsula when it was still a waste and desolate land, we invested our blood, our sweat and our intellect in its future, yet in the end we were made to leave. And now? We have dwelt in this country for over a thousand years, and helped to build it, and we’re still considered intruders by our neighbours.’
‘But do you know why?’ asked another, and proceeded to answer his own question. ‘Perhaps our crime is, on the one hand, that we are constantly seeking shelter with xenophobic rulers disliked by the masses; and on the other, that we inject into the insularity of our neighbours the dream of a universal brotherhood, which antagonizes those rulers — who conveniently rob us by exiling us from their land.’
‘Though wouldn’t you think,’ commented a third, ‘that it is our wanderings which forged the very essence of what we are?’
‘And what might that essence be?’
‘Intellectual acumen.’
‘And yet, according to Rashi, wandering has three effects: it breaks up one’s family life, reduces one’s wealth, and lessens one’s standing in the world.’
‘Precisely so,’ said a man we all called Trotsky, not for his political hue but on account of his goatee. At heart a poet trapped between the present and the past, Trotsky was a real charmer. The only thing I resented about him was his slow, condescending smile. ‘It seems to me that you all lack passion for the land that our faith should have ingrained in our psyche,’ he went on. ‘The land where we can all be regarded as legitimate settlers...’
‘Nothing will change,’ someone interrupted him. ‘Do you really believe that after two thousand years of wandering we can transform ourselves into settlers?’
‘Vil nor...’ retorted Trotsky. ‘If you but so desire it.’
Gazing up at the firmament, he continued: ‘It’s only just past midday and our mighty God has already dipped his brush in the blood of our martyrs.’ Then, out of the blue, he launched into a Yiddish verse by Yosef Papiernikov:
Maybe I build my castles in the air,
Maybe the story of God isn’t true;
In my dreams it’s better, in my dreams it’s brighter,
In my dreams the sky is bluer than blue.
As he made for the door, Trotsky pulled up his jacket collar, turned his head towards us and, with his condescending little smile, announced: ‘It seems to me that all our intellectualizing may have led us to the brink of an unavoidable abyss. At a time like this, gentlemen, an ounce of common sense might be better than a ton of scholarship.’
For some reason, we laughed as we waved him off.
Purim
It was ghetto life which brought about the democratization of sorrow in our tenement. David Klinger, a refined well-educated man, lost his wife to a sudden selection; three months later his unlearned neighbour Rachel, ten years his senior, was cradling him to sleep every night. David’s political enemy Velvele, nicknamed Sheker (lie), who believed that V. I. Lenin was King Solomon incarnate, walked around our yard after the Soviets’ successful spring offensive, singing, in Yiddish-accented German:
Auf, auf zum Kampf, zum Kampf!
Zum Kampf sind wir geboren!
Dem Karl Liebknecht haben wir’s geschworen,
Dem Rosa Luxemburg reichen wir die Hand.
Velvele said that David strutted about like a national hero but was in truth a coward afraid to sleep in the dark by himself.
‘Unfortunately,’ David would retort, ‘misery acquaints a person with strange bedfellows. This life we lead has no precedent. Whether we like it or not, we are being terrorized daily by loneliness.’ And perhaps to aggravate Velvele, he might add: ‘As far as I can see, without a national homeland our whole Jewish existence will have been one frightful mistake.’
David Klinger was a fine fellow, a wonderful idealist, and a Zionist who belonged to the extreme wing of that movement. Joseph Trumpeldor, killed in 1920 defending the Tel Hai settlement in Palestine, was to David a legendary hero, while the name of Jabotinsky he uttered like a psalm.
Even in the most adverse circumstances, David would uphold the Jewish national tradition — if only verbally. I recall a visit he paid us one cold and cheerless evening. After a word or two about the political situation he mentioned Purim, and all at once, as if entering a trance, David the dreamer was on a hike into history. There, he eyed the foolish king Ahasuerus (also known as Xerxes), and then his malevolent chief minister, the former barber and bath-attendant Haman; and when the beautiful queen Esther made an appearance David’s face lit up. Arm in arm with Mordechai the Just, who brought to naught Haman’s deceitful machinations against the Jews, he would lead our people into a free Palestine under the triumphant flutter of blue-and-white banners...
So hallucinated our idealist friend on that howling evening of 9 March 1943. The morrow would bring Purim, commemorated by the Jews as well as the Germans: the Jews celebrated Haman’s demise twenty-four centuries ago, the Germans his present and glorious rebirth.
In the gallery of my memories there hangs a picture covered with rag-years and framed in white snow. It shows a morning in fog, and hundreds of wooden clogs shod with slush, tramping across a timber footbridge, and in the background stands a gallows, where, from nine ropes and with mouths open, ten Jews are dangling (for one of the ropes is shared by a father and son), on their faces a few meek and dying rays of sun, and around them six men in black rejoicing at Haman’s resurrection. The picture is dated
‘Wednesday, 10 March 1943’. Time has almost erased the painter’s name.
Anniversary
The closeness of the Jewish family unit was something of which our arch-adversary was all too aware, and its final destruction was his obsession. Maybe this stemmed from the fact that his father had been born out of wedlock. In any case, he set out on a course of effectively starving his victims to death, doubtless in the belief that we would soon be eating each other’s flesh...
At the start of every week we would collect our weekly bread rations. My mother took out her innocent scales, her indifferent knife, and cut the bread into three equal parts. (My two sisters, each with her little girl, lived apart from us, though in the same tenement block.) Mother made sure that we had enough for just one slice each per morning, so that the loaf would last through the week. But on one occasion father transgressed, secretly helping himself to some of mother’s portion. Mother was horrified when she discovered this, and recalled her friend Berenice’s anguish over her own Josef’s lapse. But she responded by giving father the rest of her bread. ‘He needs it more than I do,’ she said. ‘He is weaker, and he’s only human.’
My parents had been married on 25 December 1913, and this was a date we celebrated even in the darkest moments of our family life. I recall our last such celebration, their thirtieth anniversary, in the winter of 1943–44, when the walls of our unheated room wore a brilliant coat of frost. I never learnt where my sisters had got hold of the two brown candles they brought over — I thought the colour was a bad omen. Meanwhile, however, there was a cake baked from chaff and another from potato-peels, and mother boiled up a special brew of water.
We ate and drank. Then, as he did every year, father took out the old letter — yellowed from spending its life between the pages of an ancient book — and the three desiccated twigs that had once been abloom with three glorious white roses, and he read out, as he did every year, the words he had written to his bride on their wedding night.
When he came to the line ‘I’ll be true to you, my love, for the rest of my days’, his tongue stumbled, his face broke, and suddenly father was sobbing. I had never seen him cry. My two sisters were aghast, they didn’t know what had happened. But mother and I knew. That transgression of a few months ago weighed heavily upon him, he still couldn’t forgive himself. I’ll never forget the way mother got up and embraced him. ‘You are my husband,’ I heard her whisper. ‘You’re my husband.’
Confession
It is early April 1944. The winter is almost gone but, here and there, clusters of snow are still rusting away what remains of their white lives. The forenoons are still freezing, and up above, on the unblemished blue expanse, the sun like a golden iceberg is eyeing the discontented day tottering on the crossroads of the seasons.
It’s Sunday morning. My father in his sheepskin coat gazes into the stove, where our last picture-frame is fighting the flames for its wooden life. He looks resigned, he is not well, plagued by a severe inflammation of his joints, and the only remedy is fatty food and Vigantol, both of them available only to those who are part of, or connected to, the higher levels of the ghetto pyramid.
He beckons me over and, without preliminaries, begins. ‘My existence has become a bitter drink,’ he says, ‘yet I must swallow it day by day, drop by drop, until there is no more liquid in the flask.’ Thus speaks my father, the eternal doubter, at this moment uncharacteristically firm. ‘We know there are strong rumours,’ he goes on, ‘of a final ghetto liquidation, and as your mother once said, if any of us will make it, it must be you, the strongest and the youngest in the family.’
‘No, dad!’
‘Please, son, don’t interrupt. Perhaps I’m telling you this because I have a need to talk, to talk at a time when our lives hang between a yes and a no. My father — your grandfather Yeruchim — was a melamed, a teacher, a fanatically religious man. My mother, Perl Gittel, was a housewife, and I a yeshiva student. We were very poor people, but my father believed that it was God’s will. I rebelled against such a God, I refused to serve a cruel God, and joined the revolutionary Bund. In 1907 I was arrested. My mother came to visit me and, seeing her son behind bars, suffered a heart attack and died. I have never forgiven myself. After I was freed I went to see my father but he wouldn’t look at me.’
He stopped, as if to gasp for a breath of air before continuing.
‘I threw myself into socialist activities, into party life, hoping to build a just world without poverty, but my mother’s image never left me, never, never. Now, thinking back, I’m sure I was exactly like my father, a zealot, only on a different landscape. Bundist theory became my Torah, the red flag my prayershawl. Now, all this has lost its meaning. This war, like the previous one, has miserably betrayed socialism, and this ghetto has transformed our once glorious party brotherhood into a soup-kitchen idealism. I am not blaming anyone. Humanity and decency are the first victims of hunger. When the ghetto was set up, a group of my comrades formed themselves into a self-appointed council; it was the only way we could reorganize the party and mobilize the membership. They approached me to head a delegation of textile workers (I had been one of their leaders, and for twenty years their elected judge), a delegation to Chaim Rumkowski, who had just been appointed by the Germans as Eldest of the Jews. The Germans knew precisely whom to choose when they usurped our town. I told my colleagues that to negotiate with this character was to succumb to his demands or bribes, so they picked somebody else. What happened I don’t know, because their dealings took place behind closed doors.’
Here father paused again. I had the impression that he was chewing over what he had just told me — perhaps he had said too much. This man, who had seen in the Bund the ideal latter-day expression of the prophets, this God-intoxicated agnostic, had always been cautious with words. He was not one to needlessly condemn or praise: nothing gets better for being condemned, he would say, nothing gets better for being praised.
‘Son, all this reminds me of a passage I once read in Søren Kierkegaard’s book, Either/Or. A fire broke out backstage in a theatre, and the clown came out to inform the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated his warning, but they cheered even more loudly. Kierkegaard supposed that this was how the world would be destroyed — amid general applause from all the wits who believed it was a joke...’
Father fell silent and I knew he was already somewhere else. He was a master at being absent when the need came upon him. Turning his face away without another word, he fixed his stoical gaze on the embers dying in the stove.
The Logic of Water
Sickly sixty-year-old Szymon Brener, known in our little world for his intrusiveness and his crude loquacity — who, thanks to his son’s diligence in the ghetto police, had evaded, along with his wife, many roundups and resettlements — invited himself into our apartment a week before the rumours of the total liquidation of our ghetto became a reality.
When Szymon opened our door, father was making some notes on a few pieces of paper. ‘Panie Gershon,’ he shouted excitedly, ‘have you been keeping a diary?’
‘Sort of,’ father replied.
‘Can I have a peep?’
‘No, Szymon, you can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s private.’
‘So at least tell me what you’re writing about.’
Father maintained his customary calm. ‘It’s about memory,’ he said.
‘Memory?’
‘Yes — the liar’s greatest enemy.’
Not knowing quite how to take this little conundrum, our visitor smiled foolishly and plunged ahead regardless.
‘Panie Gershon, they’re talking about a complete liquidation of our ghetto, but don’t believe them. You know, Panie Gershon,’ and his voice assumed an authoritative tone, ‘my son has first-hand information. Sure, some of us will have to go — maybe fifteen thousand, thirty thousand, perhaps even fifty thousand, who knows? But just like on the previous occasions, our Ru
mkowski will outsmart the Germans, and at the end of the war he’ll march victorious out of the ghetto, ahead of all the people he saved. You know, Panie Gershon, there’s a chapter in the Talmud which actually legitimizes our Eldest’s strategy.’ And without stopping, Szymon launched into his Talmudic commentary.
‘Two men are travelling in the desert. One of them has a flask of water. If they both drink from the flask, neither will survive the journey, as there isn’t enough water to sustain them both before they reach the next settlement. However, if only one of them drinks, he will be able to reach the settlement. Concerning this problem, Ben Petura held that it is better that both should drink and die, than that one of them should see the death of his fellow traveller. This teaching was accepted until Rabbi Akiva came along and invoked the Torah, where it is written that “your brother may live with you” — implying, he argued, that your own life took precedence and there was no obligation for a person to save another’s life at the expense of his own. Thus the owner of the flask should use all the water to ensure his own survival...’
I looked at father and knew that he was about to explode. Yet somehow he harnessed his rage. ‘Do you know, Szymon, what you’ve just said?’ His voice was slow and controlled. ‘Do you know?’ he repeated, the anger beginning to show. ‘To equate Rabbi Akiva’s sense of justice and respect for life with Rumkowski’s logic is, in my opinion, an unforgivable obscenity.’
‘But why, why?’ cried the other, taken aback.
‘First of all,’ said father, regaining his composure, ‘the Talmud talks of two people, and only one of them has a flask of water, and it’s his right to decide to drink and live. But here, there was once a community of a hundred and seventy thousand souls, and from the very inception of our confinement — of our desert journey, if you like — not I and not you, but only this so-called Eldest has held in his hands the flask of water, and he, this miserable clown, has adjudicated — in the interests of our enemy — who is to drink and who is not. And let me reiterate, Szymon: only a fool could employ the Talmud to justify Rumkowski’s madness.’
East of Time Page 19
