By 1916 they have been cooling their heels for two years already, the war is still the same murderous enterprise and it will take anyone it can get, even a Yiddish-speaking itinerant bookkeeper. Jossel was filed into the East Lancashire Regiment, part of General Allenby’s forces in the Battle of Gaza, and was discharged back to Liverpool in early 1919 with no medals or war wounds or tales of bravery, but with a complete re-engineering of his personality so he had half forgotten the name of Spinoza, couldn’t remember how to spell it and certainly had no recollection of anything he’d read. He knew what death was now, and that there was no God. Nowhere was that large, domineering personality with his commandments and promises and threats to be seen on the battlefield. Boys had wept and called out for their mothers. They also cried for Jesus but he didn’t turn up either. There was an absence of miracles. It wasn’t even worth debating Spinoza’s questions, his disciple’s mind had been washed clean of that fog.
In later life, accompanied by his usual paraphernalia when he could afford it – a cigar, a glass of his beloved Haig & Haig whisky – and easing off his shoes, Jossel would embark on his war story. It reverberated down the generations, it became the Mendel gold standard for storytelling, a challenger even to Mina’s story of the forest.
During his period of active service in the Holy Land, as everyone called it (but to Jossel was the setting for what he regarded as family history), he had palled up with another Jewish soldier, Private Polack, whose mother and father at the close of the nineteenth century had come from Poland before he was born, no recollection of the ship, the masts, the rigging, the rushing water. The family had got no further than Leeds, where his father set himself up in the chamois leather business and prospered. Now, in hot Palestine, the two conscripted young men (one of whom didn’t even yet know the tune of ‘God Save the King’) vowed to look out for each other. The heat, the dust, the noise of the guns, the constant barking of their sergeants and the distant figures of the officers, beautifully attired, on horseback, got on their nerves. For what exactly were they fighting?
The two of them moaned in Yiddish about the war when nobody could overhear them, fearing they would be mistaken for speaking German and shot. Everything was, in Private Polack’s expressive phrase, verkrapped. What war does, Jossel agreed, is to makhn ash un blote of a man. It grinds him to dust.
One humid afternoon Louis Polack came under enemy fire. Not dead yet, but worse than a flesh wound. He looked done in, his face as white as a blank page in a book, his breathing shallow. He’s a goner, Jossel thought. The captain ordered the stretcher bearers to take him back out of the line to the field hospital. As he was waiting, lying on the ground, Jossel looked down at him, at the life ebbing away, and a cunning thought entered his head. Years later he said he couldn’t account for having even dreamed up such a stunt, the devil must have got in him. But it was the war that had entered his brain, the war and all its scams and wheezes. War was rebuilding him. He had seen so much, he had endured boredom and fear and tension and weariness and inexplicable orders and movements under cover of darkness so that he felt reduced to the small core of his own survival. His father would not have found any trace left of the airy luftmensch.
He seemed now to one observer to walk at an obstacle, a rifle left unattended on the ground. Walked straight into its path and fell over it. Came down heavily on his knee. An hour later the joint was swollen, he started to hobble. Then he presented himself to the captain. In his best night-school English he outlined the situation.
‘Private Polack is seriously wounded,’ he said. ‘Look at him, he’s on his way out. Me, I’m no use with my knee, it’s nothing, it will go down in a day or two. But why don’t you let me accompany my friend here back to the field hospital, gee him up, stop him from losing hope and pegging out? He gets treated, my knee gets a rest, you get two soldiers back instead of maybe only one.’
Captain Bostock was beyond caring. He had been an auctioneer in a provincial sales room before the war, an expert in old furniture. The two lads were nothing to him, let them go. Anything to stop the man yapping in his ear in an accent. It could have gone the other way, but that’s the way it happened to go that day.
Behind the lines the doctor examined Private Polack. He had lost a lot of blood. ‘Well, it’s touch and go,’ he said. ‘If he falls asleep he’ll lose consciousness, then he’s a goner. Can you keep him awake?’
‘How do I do that?’
‘Just keep talking; talk to him, don’t stop.’
Jossel pulled himself up to his full height (he was only five feet seven) and said, ‘Sir, in the whole of the British army you could not have found a better man.’
When the sun was setting over Gaza, Jossel began his monologue, mustering all the resources he found he possessed when he had set out his plan to his parents to emigrate to America. He spoke of the conduct of the war, of the idiocy of the officers, those pale strips of piss with brows full of pimples under the shadow of the peaks of their hats, of the hot strange land they were in, the sound of the muezzin, the Oriental Jews who were their cousins and the Arabs who were even more distant cousins – the descendants of Ishmael. Of moving pictures he had seen starring Mary Pickford, of his father and mother back in Riga from whom there had been no word for a long time, no letters at all. The inner secrets of bookkeeping, the streets of Liverpool with the grand buildings of the waterfront, the Liver Building topped by its winged chained bird, what a sight! The temples to commerce and insurance, and how he had not abandoned his dream of sailing to America where his wife’s father had already gone and made a new life in the Bronx and had a new wife, too, and everything there was waiting for them.
The night passed like a ghost emitting a strange chill. The usual chorus of groans added its voice. Jossel’s knee was throbbing. The face on the pillow held eyes that were still open. Jossel began to tell old folk tales he had heard as a child. On and on he talked.
Finally he began to run out of things to say. He had been talking for seven hours in one of the great acts of oratory and filibustering of the era, though it had only a single witness. Jossel felt he had found a voice worthy of a world-famous rabbi; if he were still devout he should start writing sermons. He felt in his pockets to see if there was anything of interest there, letters from home, photographs, and he came across a picture of his little sister Mina, now working in a munitions factory. The photograph had been taken in 1915 in a photographer’s studio. She was demure beneath a fan of ostrich feathers which partly concealed her chin. A rope of artificial pearls, another photographer’s prop, was round her neck and she was standing in front of a painted balustrade by a painted potted palm. The impression was that of a young girl who had never in her life so much as heard of Bolsheviks let alone set foot in such a savage place as a forest. The photograph had been hand-tinted and her eyes had been covered with a watercolour wash of bright Arian blue.
‘This,’ he announced, ‘is my little sister Mina. We call her Millie now, it’s more modern. Is she not pretty? Don’t you like the look of her? Back in the old country she fell in with the Bolsheviks in the great forest, can you imagine? Only fourteen and knew about Marx and all them troublemakers. But I got her away.’
He waved the photo in front of Private Polack, whose eyes were looking like those of a dying fish, filmy. His concentration returned for a few seconds, the eyelids flickered, he made a slight nod of his head and then fell back, exhausted by even this tiny effort.
‘Well,’ Jossel said, his throat extremely hoarse, still wanting to impart hope in a probably unattainable future, ‘when this war is over maybe you will come to our house and meet her and ask her to marry you.’
The Mendels and the Polacks imparted to their descendants the following advice.
Never take after the English with their reputation for being taciturn and prone to meaningful silences. For where would Louis Polack be without Jossel’s incessant chatter? Definitely dead.
‘Never let anyone say you talk too much,’ Mina told her daughter. ‘And they will; believe me, they definitely will.’