…Well, that was the day my next historic dream came true, so to speak—one more line from my personal national doctrine and I became a subject of Poland. You’ll die laughing, but I went to war as an Austro-Hungarian, and came home a Pole. Not that I emigrated to another country or, say, ran away to distant lands. No, I came back to my dear old Kolodetz by Drogobych, with that spoiled coquette—the little river in the valley, with the same little Catholic church on this side, and the Christian Orthodox temple on the other side of the river, with the same little white synagogue, which looked like anything but a shrine of Yahweh, and even with the same café of David Leibovich, where once upon a time Liova Weissmann used to show his exciting bits of films. But now this was within the borders of the United, Indivisible, and Sacred Land of Poland, the Inalienable, Ancestral Motherland. Sorry about overdoing the capital letters, I know it’s just the same as overdoing black pepper in borscht, but I’ve got no other means of expressing the historic pathos of the moment when the Germans delivered to us the duly certified new boss of Poland, Joseph Pilsudski, may Adonai put him up there on His right knee.
And here, my dear brother, begin my real troubles with this chronicle, which will lose its native vignettes, pizzicatos, and caprioles and start moving, just like the dusty and monotonous roads of our Carpathian foothills, a little bit upward, a little bit downward, up again, down again, and so on all the way to the horizon, with neither abysses nor dizzying peaks. Which reminds me of the rabbi Ben Zvi, who rented a carriage to take him to the next shtetl. So the rabbi and the driver made a deal and took off. At the first little hill, the driver asked the rabbi to get off and push because the horse was skinny and feeble. So Ben Zvi got down and pushed up to the top. Then the driver asked him to pull the carriage down, and so it went, hill after hill, Ben Zvi was either pushing or pulling, till they reached their destination. In front of the synagogue the rabbi paid the driver and said: “I understand, my dear, why I came here—I have a sermon to give at the synagogue. I also understand why you came here—you have to earn your bread, after all. The only thing I don’t understand is why we took with us this poor horse!”
With this I don’t mean to say that you, my dear reader, are the poor horse, whom I have to pointlessly drag up and down the hilly monotony of life, but if we look at it objectively—well, my apologies, but this is how it seems. Moreover, in the beginning I promised you I would step on two whales, just as the ancients did, one being the First World War, and the other, naturally, the Second. And what do you think is there between those two, I mean not between the two wars, but between the two whales? Water. It’s as clear as day.
On the other hand, though, if you were to take a look at even one little drop of this water through the microscope of my favorite teacher, Eliezer Pinkus, may he rest in peace, you would see that there is only seeming emptiness and that there, in the water drop, it is bursting with such life as you couldn’t find even in the center of Lemberg, which is now Lvov. Amoebas and other one-celled creatures are living their regular but quite intense routines. They get together and reproduce, they look for something or someone to eat up, and there probably are dramatic separations—especially when one paramecium splits up and its two halves will never meet again in life. You can also see even with your naked eye little fish who, seemingly surprised, as if they’d just run into an old acquaintance, are just about to say “Oh!” when in fact they’re devouring a whole company of plankton together with its sergeant major. But don’t start crying with astonishment at the great mystery of Nature; this is the only thing I remember from my biology lessons and in this particular case I’m using it as a metaphor.
Because of the aforementioned reason, I don’t want to bother you with petty details from our life of amoebas and occasionally of fish who seem about to say “Oh!” but just devour you like nothing, if you know what I mean. This is of no interest to anyone and it’s doubtful whether it will wet God’s eye with the moisture of compassion. In this sense I understand and modestly share the outlook of our great teachers and prophets from biblical times, who composed line after line, and manuscript after manuscript, The Book of Books, in our language the Law, or the Torah. They knew where their story should run slowly and widely like a river at high water, and where events, like a wild waterfall, should rush down right before your eyes with astounding velocity. At such places in the Bible, where you don’t even have the time to stop and look around at the surrounding area, my ancient teachers of composition and the description of things take full liberty to walk the road they want, with the big strides of a hundred Roman stadii each. For example: “Adam knew his wife again (you know what they mean, it’s not about a regular acquaintance) and she gave birth to a son and gave him the name of Seth. The days of Adam after he begat Seth were another eight hundred years and he begat sons and daughters. And all the days of Seth were a hundred and twelve years, and all the days of Enoch were a hundred and five years, and all the days of Mahalalel were eight hundred and ninety-five years….” And so on, my dear reader, let me not burden your mind with more examples. I am talking about this big stride of my writing ancestors and prophets, may their memory live eternally and unto the end of time, because they left us writing that is being read over and over again, and everyone interprets it his own way and reads it over again, and like this—one thousand, then two thousand, then three thousand years, not like a newspaper that if it’s yesterday’s, it doesn’t serve any other purpose but to wrap salty fish in it. And please don’t dare, and if you do may God forgive you, cast a shadow of doubt over the truthfulness of this writing, because it contains a lot of wisdom and it’s flowing like the springs of David in the Judaic desert and offers you knowledge for all situations in life. And they’re not shamming, the prophets, seized by God’s inspiration or by the desire to impress you when they’re speaking of people who lived eight hundred or even nine hundred years. If you look at it formally, and from the low point of view of a coldblooded frog, this definitely contradicts science, but I think that in those mighty times of Genesis, thick and strong like a heavy Easter wine, every full moon marked a yearly circle in the life of the oaks and the people, and our human time is measurable with the biblical as the river paramecium with the diamond or the sparrow with the eagle.
But I got carried away and now with God’s help I will try to turn and go back to the main path, from which I strayed like old man Noah, who fell asleep Between the Rivers and when he woke up, found he’d landed at the top of Ararat.
And so, let’s come down from that distant peak of the Ark and go to our Kolodetz by Drogobych, where I’m standing, with a shy half-smile, the wooden footlocker at my feet.
My mother broke into tears and did not stop covering my now manly face with kisses, my father was more severe and composed, and gave me a rather rough pat on the shoulder, but I noticed the moisture in his eyes.
My mother said, “My dear boy! I can imagine what you’ve gone through, down there in the trenches. Such horrible things they say about the Senegalese!”
“What Senegalese?” I asked.
“The French, the black ones. They ate up the prisoners of war alive!”
“Yes, sometimes…,” I mumbled. Not that it was vanity that prevented me from telling the whole, so to say, gray and prosaic truth; moreover, apart from me, our rabbi Ben-David was also familiar with it, but I just didn’t want to destroy, in the eyes of my dear parents, the invisible but heroic monument they’d erected for me.
While Mama was bustling around preparing the food—doubtlessly a festive dinner with our famous stuffed, or gefilte, fish, which I have detested since childhood, though I was obliged to partake of this common, and, as they claim, world-famous glory or even triumph of Judaism—Uncle Chaimle and I went over to David Leibovich’s café. There my uncle bought for everyone who had the luck to share this historic moment a glass of marvelous wheat vodka and he did it with such a flourish it was as if we’d won the war, and won it mostly owing to my heroic deeds. They started asking me about one thing and another and I was ready to answer—including about the Senegalese!—but just then our rabbi entered the café and I instantly deflated like a French reconnaissance balloon shot down by a German Fokker. The interest of the Kolodetz military analysts, led by the postman Avramchik, who, if you haven’t forgotten, participated in the Russo-Turkish war as a signalman, was immediately transferred to the rabbi and he was literally bombarded with questions.
I don’t want to say anything bad about the Jews, God forbid—you know I am one—but you’ve probably noticed that unusual passion, I would say obsession, with which they ask questions and are in no way, no way at all, interested in the answer, because they know it in advance or so it seems to them. And if your answer isn’t what they’d expected, hard luck for you: then they tumble you up and down inside an avalanche of arguments, smash you down under an iceberg of proof, and at the end finish you off by sticking you up against the wall like you were wallpaper, with a quote from either the Bible or Karl Marx. For a similar case in life I can give you the following advice: if Jews bombard you with questions, listen to them calmly and go smoke a cigarette in the room next door. They won’t notice your absence at all but will start arguing among themselves. There’s another way out: instantly, at that very moment, agree with them and in no way take up the catastrophic initiative of disagreeing with them. This option, by the way, is probably even wiser. Like this rabbi of whom they asked: “Rabbi, what in your opinion is the shape of the Earth?” “Round,” said the rabbi. “Why round? Can you prove it?” “Well, then, let it be a square, am I going to argue?”
In our case, however, Rabbi Ben-David did something, to tell you the truth, a little mean: he calmly listened to the questions, accompanied by comments, references to historic sources and their respective quotes, and he neither answered nor agreed nor disagreed, but generously pointed to me with his hand: “Why are you asking me—a, so to say, rearguard rat—something like a mess supplier or a shopkeeper of God’s Word, who hasn’t even touched a weapon? Here, ask him—he’s the fighter, he’ll tell you how he protected the motherland with full army equipment, with a bayonet stuck on his gun and a gas mask gassed by the French in the pouring rain!”
All faces, just as if obeying a command, turned to me, and in them I read admiration and respect, and if I am not exaggerating, even adoration. Thank God, at this hour in the café of David Leibovich there were only Jews and, as I told you, no one was interested in the answers to their questions.
Please don’t think that I’m deliberately delaying my meeting with Sarah by using trite literary techniques to create suspense—suspense itself exists in the natural order of things. My soul was flying to Sarah, longing for her, I was telling her a hundred times in my thoughts everything that had built up in my heart. “My dear,” I would say, “my one and only little bird! Dream of my dreams and blooming peony, my quiet Saturday joy! Your two little bubbies—” Wait, this bit about the little bubbies is from King Solomon and does not refer to Sarah! I’m taking it out but I won’t start all over again, because no matter how I approach it, I’ll still slide down the ancient track and fall into the arms of Shulamit. And it wasn’t her that I loved, but Sarah, may the author of the Songs of Songs forgive me.
Sarah and I met as soon as the next morning. I pretended to be strolling just by chance with Ben-David to the synagogue—or was it the other way around?—the rabbi pretended to invite me just by chance to walk with him. Then he casually suggested, “Why don’t you come in and have a glass of tea?”
And I casually shrugged my shoulders in agreement and then I saw her: she was carrying a basket of laundry on her hip, her sleeves rolled up, bare feet in slippers, her wet shirt open and revealing a tiny part of what wouldn’t have escaped the eye of King Solomon either.
We stared at each other like complete fools, and the rabbi, so it seemed to me, was enjoying our embarrassment. Eventually she said, first wiping her hand on her skirt and then shaking my hand, “How are you?”
“Fine,” I said. “And you?”
“I’m fine, too. Please, come in.”
“All right,” I said.
I had forgotten all about the little birds, and the blooming peonies, and my quiet Saturday joys. I don’t know why people are so shy about expressing openly in front of the world their longing for each other, the most powerful and tender natural attraction, but they pretend to be proud or indifferent and they don’t consider, especially if they’re young, that the sands of our life have been measured by God unto the last grain and that every carelessly wasted second of love sinks irreversibly into eternity. And the young, don’t they figure out that in this voice of the heart is hidden all the strength of humankind, all the divine meaning of its existence, with all its pyramids, Homers and Shakespeares, Ninth Symphonies and Rhapsodies in Blue, all the admirable beauty of the verse for Shulamits and Juliets, and the different Nefertitis, Mona Lisas, and Madonnas?!
But one way or the other, we were sitting by the table in the little parlor of Ben-David; Sarah and I didn’t dare look at each other and now, while the dear rabbi is pouring the tea, I’ll show you by example how long a biblical phase is: exactly nine months and ten days from the moment I sank my spoon in the tea cup, the mohel was circumcising our little boy, to whom we proudly gave the name of my grandfather—may he rest in peace—Elia, Ilyusha for short. Or as they say: “A boy was born and God’s blessing came upon the earth.”
All night I was playing, or if you’d rather call it, screeching on the violin, good Jewish men and women with heavy shoes were dancing and singing old songs, clapping hands to the rhythm, while I myself, my father and mama, then Uncle Chaimle and the already-graying Ben-David were dancing the Ukrainian gopak. Sarah was still exhausted from the delivery but boundlessly happy, and Mama wasn’t letting her do a drop of work—not even pour vodka for the guests. Pan Voitek came, he wasn’t a policeman anymore but the mayor of Kolodetz, and he brought a huge white round loaf of bread, covered with a white linen cloth. And other neighbors too—Polish and Ukrainian—came along to raise a glass to the health of little Ilyusha. The only people who didn’t come were the local Catholic priest, who was in any case a pure anti-Semite, and the Christian Orthodox priest Theodore, who kept to himself because of that old reason, which you already know, related to the misunderstanding that changed the faith of humankind, specifically that it wasn’t Christ who kissed Judas on the forehead, which is what I think happened, but the other way around. This is a separate story, it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism, and it’s purely our own internal issue whom we should crucify and whom we shouldn’t, as far as Yeshua is concerned; in other words, Christ and Judas are our own Jews, not from Kolodetz, of course, but this doesn’t change anything. Anyway, the priest didn’t come.
So all through that wonderful day and during the following long night after the Eighth Day, when our rabbi Shmuel Ben-David laid on a pillow of purple velvet his little crying nephew by the name of Elia Blumenfeld, whom the mohel then carefully circumcised to bring him into the bosom of Abraham, and when neighbors were coming in one after the other, like the wise men to the Virgin at the cave outside Bet Lehem, or Bethlehem as you call it, then I, happily embracing Sarah, deeply understood that all people—it doesn’t matter who—the Jews, the Poles, or even if you take the Bushmen from the Kalahari desert—are created by God, glory to His name, to love each other, and not to wage war against each other. This was the real end of my war and the beginning of the profound peace that I concluded in my soul with all human beings, may they be blessed by His generosity with goodness and wisdom!
There is one more circumcision coming up—my second son Joshua seems to have been hiding behind the door and came up right after his brother. I already told you that Joshua, or Yeshua, means Jesus (it’s the Greeks’ fault because they couldn’t pronounce a bunch of sounds and in this way misled humanity) but this is a different issue too. I don’t mean to offend anyone, I’m just reminding you that the Christian Son of God Yeshua was also circumcised on a purple velvet pillow and I’ll just use the occasion to be a nuisance to you with my old joke about Mordechai, who couldn’t figure out why his Polish neighbor would send his boy to a seminary:
“Because,” said the neighbor, “he can become a priest.”
“So what?” asked Mordechai, surprised.
“Then he can become a cardinal!”
“And, so?”
“And one day he can even become pope!”
“So?”
The neighbor got upset. “What do you mean ‘so’? A pope! What do you want him to become—God?”
“Why,” said Mordechai, “one of our boys did, didn’t he?”
Sarah and the children and I had a little house with a little vegetable garden, not far from my father’s workshop, you remember, Mode Parisienne. I was of course working there, not as an apprentice anymore but as an equal, so to say, associate, and from the thought of hitting me with a wooden yardstick on the head, my father was very far. On the one hand, my heroic past from the war had changed his attitude toward me, and on the other, I was now really far from being that silly boy who would lose his mind over fiacres and ladies in pink.