EVENTS MARCH 17–23, 1940. ENTRY MARCH 24, 1940. FROM DOLEK BERSON. Berson is not a religious man. Sarcastically he thanks me for the chance of being at Rabbi Goldflamm’s secret service at all yesterday morning, when the Schpunt affair took place. He was there, he says, as a direct result of my housewarming speech.
The speech got him all mixed up. He says it filled him with vague, troublesome aspirations. He reproached himself with those of his faults which he recognizes and kept himself busy trying to correct them. (This is funny, my being cast in the role of a corrective rabbi! Of all the impulses I may have had when I made that speech, one of them was certainly not to castigate anybody.) Berson says he hovered about Symka, plaguing her with uxoriousness—until, one morning at breakfast, she begged him to leave her alone: she had had enough of his sweetness. The Drifter amazed Kucharski (and himself) by giving the janitor a present of money, the first time in three years. He went once to Menkes’ bakery and asked the baker:
—— Have you any errands in the city, Pavel? I’d be glad to do them for you. I have to go down for Symka.
—— Send you on an errand? God! You’d forget what I asked you to do before you got out of the door.
Another result: Goaded by his friend Slonim, and urged also by Mordecai Apt—both of whom work in the bricklayers’ labor battalion—Berson has registered for labor, and has signed up, too, as a bricklayer. He might make a good one.
Berson also suffered, during these days, an attack of neighborliness. He remembered (apart from my speech) the pleasant, melancholy tone of the Mazur housewarming, and he dropped in, one afternoon, to see if there was anything he could do to help the family get settled. Froi Mazur came to the door, dressed in a linen smock, her head bound into a dustcloth turban.
Froi Mazur: —— Do you mean it?
Berson: —— Naturally.
Froi Mazur, doubtfully, perhaps suspecting that he must be after something: —— Nu, there is plenty to do.
Having once taken Berson at his word, Froi Mazur made no moves of false propriety. She put him to work. Before Berson realized quite what was happening to him, he had been given a broom with a cloth bag over its operative end, had had a dustcloth tied around his own head, and had been told to stand on a chair and sweep the cobwebs out of the angles between walls and ceilings. The men were out, Froi Mazur said: Schlome starting in at the Yeshiva school Rabbi Goldflamm had recommended, Stefan buying some things for the apartment, and her husband getting the family’s various permits and passes from the Judenrat. Rutka was working in the kitchen.
Froi Mazur sat in one of the straight chairs in the living room, making handsome armbands for her family. Star-of-David brassards can be bought from street venders for anywhere from fifty groszy, printed on paper, to three zlotys, on white linen, but none of these is good enough, Froi Mazur said. She told Berson that the Mazurs were proud of their Jewishness and were going to advertise it with embroidered stars on satin bands. As Berson worked, Froi Mazur talked along—of the Mazurs’ apartment in Lodz; of the ghetto decree there and the scramble for living-quarters within its boundaries; and with an open perplexity about her son Stefan, who makes her, she said, both proud and worried, because of his handsomeness and quick talents, and yet his sullen laziness; and some of the time she sat silently sewing. Once she got up, examined Berson’s work, and made him do over again one whole length of wall, where he had left broom-streaks.
While Berson was still working, Rutka came running in from the kitchen with some question for her mother. Berson, startled by her arrival, looked suddenly around, lost his balance on the chair, and went crashing to the floor. The sight of his fall, and then of his head, bundled up like a country grandmother’s, made Rutka laugh hard at him. Berson went upstairs nursing his vanity and his right elbow.
In these benign days, Berson even made a gesture toward his cousin Meier, whom he dislikes. He invited his cousin to join him and Symka yesterday morning, to attend prayers at Goldflamm’s secret prayerhouse, and to visit them all day. The idea of going to worship, Dolek says, was a direct result of what he calls the bogus religious atmosphere I worked into my speech, which had stirred his conscience.
On the way to the hidden “synagogue,” Symka walked ahead with Rachel, who alone in the Apt family occasionally attends prayers. Berson says he was feeling expansive; he talked about the Mazurs. Cousin Meier waited for an opening and said:
—— I have in mind a new business venture.
—— So? A sound one, I hope, this time.
—— I think so. In leather. We have a very good proposition. Only one thing remains.
—— And that is—?
—— We need some cash. Some working capital.
Berson says that the kindliness and humanity in which he had been luxuriating for the past few days suddenly dried up. He spoke harshly:
—— I told you the last time that I would never lend you money again. You owe me two thousand already. Why can’t you manage better?
Dolek says he was in a black and misanthropic state of mind as he entered the side door of the glove and hat store that, since the ban on public worship, had served as Rabbi Goldflamm’s holy place.
EVENTS MARCH 23, 1940. ENTRY MARCH 27, 1940. N.L. Rabbi Goldflamm’s secret prayerhouse, no longer available to us after what happened the other day, was in Sapir’s Hats and Gloves, a fairly large shop on Panska Street. We were gathered in the salesroom, all around the walls of which run cupboards and showcases. These used to have glass fronts, but the glass has all been taken out to repair windows broken in the siege of the city. On shelves in these cases are cheap felt hats, a few fur caps, and round black skullcaps; as well as kid and cotton and pigskin gloves. The room was dim, because the corrugated-iron shop front was down and latched from within. We were, I suppose, twenty-five or thirty people. About ten of the men wore prayer shawls and phylacteries. At the back of the shop was a small table covered with a white cloth and with two candles stuck by their own wax onto two tin plates, upside down. The Baal Tefilla, or leader of prayers, a man named Baum with a deep, rich voice, stood at the center of us, reciting petitions, blessings, and Psalms:
——…A brutish man knoweth it not, neither doth a fool understand this: when the wicked sprang up as the grass, and all the workers of iniquity flourished, it was that they might be destroyed forever….
[NOTE. EDITOR. Among Eastern European Jews, prayers are not necessarily conducted by a rabbi. Any minyan, or quorum of ten, may hold services, and any Jew may recite the ritual. A rabbi need not even be present. Indeed, it is basic in Judaism that any believer may speak directly to God at any time, and never needs the intercession or good offices of God’s mortal bureaucracy. The Rabbinate in Eastern Europe regulates the religious life of the community and devotes itself to the study of sacred literature.]
I myself was in a strange, contemplative mood. Like Berson, I had been somewhat stirred up by my own speech, but in a different way and with a different result. The words that had come out of me, as it were involuntarily, during my speech, had made me realize how important to me I had allowed my contacts with the Bersons and the Apts to grow. After the speech, at home, when my pleasure at having moved my hearers had waned, and when I had begun to be disgusted with the sentimentality of some of the things I had said, I suddenly felt endangered. I felt that if I let myself be drawn deeper and deeper into the pleasant sense of kinship these people gave me, I would become dull, domesticated, and lazy. In consequence, during the next few days, I avoided my new friends, I worked and studied. At the prayerhouse, that morning, Rachel had greeted me with a comforting anxiety:
—— Where have you been all week?
When Berson saw me, he saluted me, I thought, rather irritably. [INSERT. FROM ENTRY MARCH 28. N.L. I now know why Berson gave me the brusque greeting at the prayerhouse: it was his annoyance with Meier and with himself.] But on the whole I was very much surprised by the sharpness of my pleasure at seeing these friends again. And so, during the service, I sat musing about them, and about my dilemma: my desire for privacy and my desire for companionship. Both are so hard to achieve! The Baal Tefilla droned on, meanwhile, like a spiritual reciprocating engine.
——…The streams have lifted up, O Lord, the streams have lifted up their voice; the streams lift up their roaring….
A sharp clanging crash cut off the prayer. Our alarmed faces turned toward the iron screen at the front of the shop. Clank! Clank! Some club, some metal-bound heavy object was pounding on the corrugated iron store-drop. Then a straining German voice cried:
—— Öffnen. Öffnen Sie! Open up!
Crash! Crash! Crash! Crash! The club, the gun butt, whatever it was, insisted and would not be denied. It was ugly Schpunt who stood up and walked to the front of the store, unhooked the latch of the iron drop, and with his face reddening turned a crank which lifted the rattling screen. In the doorway stood three German soldiers: a sergeant and two privates. The sergeant stepped forward: a middle-aged man who appeared to be a professional soldier. He asked:
—— Who is the rabbi here?
There was a pause. No one dared look at Rabbi Goldflamm, who was sitting with the rest of the crowd. The sergeant simply waited. The silence was fearful.
—— I. I am the rabbi.
It was Schpunt. Schpunt, with a prayer shawl over his head and the box of a phylactery bound by ribbons to his forehead; he looked like an extraordinary, misshapen, stunted woman. The German voice cracked out as sudden and metallic as the sound of the rifle butt on the iron screen had been:
—— Aha! A handsome fellow! Come outside, please.
I looked over my shoulder and saw the soldiers lead Schpunt out into the middle of the street. Then the soldiers went off to one side, out of my view. Schpunt stood alone, mournful and ridiculous, framed by the doorway.
—— Dance!
The clanging voice echoed in the store. A look of incredulity joined the host of contending expressions on Schpunt’s weird face.
—— Dance, Rabbi!
Slowly, with a reminiscent expression, as if to say, Oh, yes, this is something from my boyhood, the small man began a clumsy jigging and hopping in the street. His motions were froglike. The Germans could be heard laughing.
—— Faster!
Schpunt increased his efforts. Hippity-hop, clop-clop-clop. The fringes of the shawl flapped, the phylactery shook up and down on Schpunt’s forehead. I had to smile, so funny was the sight.
—— More gaily!
An insane, fixed smile moved over Schpunt’s face, which, as a result, became dreadfully comical. I heard laughter all around me in the hat and glove store, and I myself laughed out loud. Schpunt seemed to be laughing now, too, as if he were conscious of his clowning effect.
The entertainment ended as suddenly as it had begun. We heard the sergeant’s laughing voice command Schpunt to stop, and then the sergeant moved back into view in the doorway. Tears were running down his cheeks, and the other two soldiers, behind him, were cackling, doubling over, and thumping each other on the back. The sergeant cried out to us, punctuating what he said with guffaws:
—— Go home, good people! Go home! Don’t you know that public worship is forbidden?
EVENTS MARCH 23, 1940. ENTRY MARCH 28, 1940. FROM DOLEK BERSON. We all walked home together—I with my friends (and how close I felt to them after what I had seen!). Dolek was walking with Rachel, and he reports to me the following exchange:
Dolek: —— Why did we laugh? Was it because we had fooled them, and it wasn’t the rabbi at all?
Rachel: —— That made it no less shameful.
Dolek: —— I know. I was just wondering….Of course, Schpunt was very funny.
Rachel, with sudden vehemence: —— You have no heart at all, have you? I should think that you would be ashamed of yourself. I saw you laughing in there with the others. You’re…you’re a fool.
Dolek says he turned in surprise, admiring Rachel’s spirit but at the same time deeply offended. They walked the rest of the way home in silence. Symka joined Dolek at the bottom of their stairway, and man and wife climbed the flights together. On the top landing, Berson said:
—— My dear, do you think I am callous?
—— Why, Dolek…of course not.
But, says Berson, Symka paused in her answer.
EVENTS MARCH 23, 1940. ENTRY MARCH 27, 1940. N.L. We laughed; that was our mortification. Berson has a theory that our laughter was indirectly caused by the fact that the Germans were tricked: they thought they were hazing a rabbi, and they only had Schpunt. I think it was not so simple. For one thing, the phylactery on Schpunt’s forehead waggled up and down in an absurd way over his even more absurd face. In that little leather box was housed our monotheistic faith; the words, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one God. And thou shalt bind these words for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. This our religion, which sets us apart, which keeps us erect in the face of no matter what affronts, which even maintains the spirits of those who profess to be faithless, our very Jewishness, the whole incredible nightmare we are experiencing now—all this bounced up and down before Schpunt’s eyes and ours. And so we laughed—at the Germans. We were also laughing, I suppose, in relief, for most of us thought Schpunt was to be shot when the soldiers led him so somberly out into the street. I have said it was not simple; it was not. We thought we were laughing at Fischel Schpunt. Indeed, he is endowed with an extraordinarily comical face, and it seems that the less comical Schpunt’s mood, the funnier his face. The moment he realized he was amusing the other day, and began to laugh himself, something was lost—for us Jews, that is: the Germans seemed to think him even more hilarious than before. We were laughing at Schpunt not simply as a clown, however; we were laughing, I think, at the persecution. That the unimaginative German should derive such pleasure and reward from the embarrassment of this harmless little scapegoat! Ha ha ha! I laugh now. And I blush now, too, for Schpunt was also our scapegoat, and he had the courage to elect himself to that honorable post. I envy him. But then, I would not have been quite so funny in his dancing shoes. I will not say that I am too handsome to be comical. I am too bitter, rather….