Excuse me, please, for starting with a khokhma, you know, an Hasidic fable that’s not even funny—but maybe with some effort you’ll figure out the moral. It’s about the blind man Yossel, whom even the children, otherwise capable of making fun of any unfortunate soul, respectfully help across the street. So one time this Yossel goes to the rabbi, feeling the way with his cane, and asks him, “Rabbi, what are you doing now?”
“I’m drinking milk.”
“What does milk look like, Rabbi?”
“Well, it’s a kind of white liquid.”
“What does ‘white’ mean?”
“Well…white like a swan.”
“And what does ‘swan’ mean?”
“This kind of bird with a curved neck.”
“What does ‘curved’ mean, Rabbi?”
The rabbi bent his arm at the elbow. “Touch here and you will know what ‘curved’ means.”
The blind Yossel carefully felt the arm and eventually said, gratefully, “Thank you, Rabbi. Now I know what milk looks like.”
In the same way, my dear and patient reader, don’t be fooled by either the curve of my arm, which is writing these lines, or by my modest attempts to explain things to you. Don’t be fooled into thinking that you’ll understand, just like the blind man Yossel, what milk looks like or, for instance, my new motherland the U.S.S.R., for I never learned whether what was happening in Kolodetz by Drogobych looked like what was happening, say, in Tambov or Novosibirsk, and if the term “Soviet” had the same meaning here, there, or for the Yurts somewhere in the Kara Kum desert. That is why to this day I get irritated when some little journalist from abroad passes through Moscow for three days and then, according to his political affiliation, starts explaining, with an expert’s tone, to the ignorant and blind world what milk looks like, without realizing that he’s only felt the curved arm of Moscow and that the seemingly good and the just can be fake, and the seemingly bad, which we are in a big rush to get rid of, could be a misunderstood or unappreciated good. Especially if you think about the immense size of this newly acquired motherland of mine—so immense that there are places from which it’s closer to go over to Japan and buy half a kilo of meat than to reach the next Soviet town. Let alone that problems with meat aren’t only related to the close proximity of Japan, since it was exactly from those distant Siberian lands that there came to us all the way down to Kolodetz the case of the citizen who entered a Soviet butcher shop and asked: “Could you weigh half a kilo of meat for me?” He got a polite answer: “Sure, bring it in.”
Because of the above reason, don’t expect from me head-spinning generalizations, because, on the one hand, I’m not the kind of person who thinks that way—you remember the rabbi once described me as a little slow—and on the other hand, because I simply didn’t understand many things, which even to this day, in my old age, have still got me scratching my head. Don’t expect either, that following the fashion, I will jump and start spitting on this third motherland of mine, because, if you’ve noticed, I may have unconsciously made a harsh or critical comment about the first two, for which I apologize, but I never allowed myself to talk against them, or to speak of them with disrespect. So don’t think that now, in my capacity as a Soviet citizen, and hence a fighter in the avant-garde of progressive mankind, I have suddenly changed so much that you won’t recognize me. Don’t be like that fool Mendel who saw someone in the street and exclaimed, “How different you are, Moishe, without a beard and mustache!”
“I’m not Moishe,” said the other one, “but Aaron.”
“Look at you! Even your name is different.”
My name remained unchanged, but in Russian fashion I am now citizen Isaac Yakobovich Blumenfeld—a fact that, I swear to God, in no way makes me different.
Otherwise things in general changed quite substantially. To put it in other words, our transition from Austria-Hungary to Poland was somehow easier and smoother, with no major calamities, just David Leibovitch taking down the portrait of Franz-Joseph in his café and sometime later, when the situation got clearer, putting up Pilsudski in his place, and Pan Voitek going from policeman to mayor. For greater vividness and clarity we could say that my father, Aaron Blumenfeld, had stuck his needle in one side of the caftan as an Austro-Hungarian, and pulled out the thread on the other side as a Pole. Well, there were some minor mishaps, like the assassination of President Narutovich, or, say, the Krakow uprising, but that one didn’t knock us out and passed like a spring cold. Whereas things were now changing radically, we could even say at a revolutionary pace, otherwise there wouldn’t be any sense in any of this shot-swapping October 1917, and Lenin could have quite calmly ridden in the first class compartment of the Berlin-Petrograd train, and not, as they say, in a sealed freight car, and then he could quite as easily have gotten a cab, instead of climbing onto an armored personnel carrier. I would give you as an example of such a radical, or if you prefer, revolutionary change, the taking down of the Mode Parisienne sign. This French fashion seemed to the new bosses, who had come either from the inner part of the country, or from the Polish prisons, quite decadent and incompatible with workers-and-peasants’ fashion trends, and we—that is my father and I—became simple workers at Artel #6 of the Headindprodunit. Don’t be amazed at this difficult-to-pronounce abbreviation; I don’t remember if it sounded this way or something like it, but it’s just a kid’s toy in comparison to some other considerably more complicated and more revolutionary blends of nine or even twenty-three words, that after you try to pronounce them, it takes you half an hour to untangle the sailor’s knots your tongue’s been twisted into. What is inexplicable in this case is that sometimes a similar Soviet abbreviation is longer than the word that it’s made out of—a phenomenon that was researched by the Institute on Paranormal Physical Phenomena in Leningrad. A similar phenomenon was discovered by Shimon Finkelstein, who claims he saw a snake one meter and twenty centimeters long from head to tail, and two meters long from tail to head. To the objection of Mendel that such a phenomenon is impossible, Finkelstein replied: “Well, how then in your opinion is it possible that from Monday to Wednesday there are two days, and from Wednesday to Monday, five?”
The change in name and status of our atelier also brought about as a natural consequence the taking down from the window, which, if you remember, was at the level of the sidewalk, of the by now quite weathered ladies in pink and gentlemen in tuxedos, and their replacement with the slogan “THE FIVE-YEAR PLAN SPEEDED UP!” And in that case, as with the ladies and gentlemen from the damned bourgeois past, something enduring and eternal was put up—and thank God for that, because there was no indication of which five years it was all about, or in what way my father and I had to implement it.
Of course, it would be naive of you to think that this was the only change that the new Soviet reality lavished on the modest life of our forgotten little province. It might seem a little exaggerated, but even though our life from one point of view became harder, especially with regard to provisions, from another our confidence grew, and we were filled with the sense that we were part—a small, perhaps, but important screw—in a great, not quite completely incomprehensible mechanism, something like a time machine, and I do mean future time, with its own place or role in the gigantic historic khokhma that was playing on the world stage. Believe me, it’s true, and most people believed in the Soviet power or wanted to believe in it, even when it dawned on them that it was an illusion and they realized they were being plain lied to. Only if you’re religious will you understand what I mean, because the Holy God, glory to His name, has more than once deluded you and promised things that He might have intended to fulfill, but was then distracted by other things and forgot. But you haven’t even for a second come to doubt His glory, you’ve searched for extenuating reasons or consolations of the God-delays-but-doesn’t-forget or God’s-mills-grind-slow variety. Or don’t you think so?
And while we’re on the subject of God, I can solemnly announce to you that the unreasonable action of the Polish military authorities, who cut the hair and shaved the beard of the wise Shmuel Ben-David, speeded up the process of his final choice: he became chairman of the Club of Militant Atheists, which was situated in a corner of the Culture House “October Fireworks.” If you’re wondering from where these fireworks popped up in our Kolodetz, I’ll give you a simple answer: this was the former café of David Leibovitch, who was appointed culture commissar with a fixed Soviet salary. Pan Voitek, or more precisely Comrade Voitek, was arrested and questioned for only two hours in his capacity as former mayor, but the loyal citizens of Kolodetz gave favorable references for him and he was appointed the Director of ZAGS, which was the Office of Citizen Registration. He noted down in the Kolodetz council records the weddings and the divorces, the newly born and the deceased, may their souls rest in peace—the deceased, that is.
Don’t ask me about the other common acquaintances of ours—every one took surprisingly fast to his frontline post in the generally clumsy, forgive the expression, system of Soviet bureaucracy, but still we have to spare some time for Comrade Lev Sabetaevich—you remember Liova Weissmann with the films?—because he became the editor in chief of the Red Galicia newspaper and his case turned out to be not so simple. Because, if you remember, he wanted to unite the Jewish social democrats, and this last word, especially in combination with the last but one, enraged the Bolsheviks like the red bullfighter’s cape enrages the bull. Poor Liova Weissmann, at a meeting in front of the comrades, including the representative of the Center, Comrade Esther Katz, had to criticize himself elaborately and honestly. If you’re wondering what “the Center” might mean, I’ll give you a hint that this was a very foggy Soviet definition, which was simply intended to create respect and it could mean anything, from the local committee in neighboring Truskovetz to the higher institutions of the endless party or state ladder from Lvov, Minsk, and Kiev to distant Moscow. I hope you know what self-criticism means: it means butchering yourself with your own hands, skinning yourself and presenting your skin stretched on a rack, or to put it in biblical terms, covering your head with ashes, tearing your shirt, and only then will the convened panel make a great effort to prevent you from plucking out all your hair. I would give you a piece of advice for a similar case in life: in no way try to prolong and take the guilt as a bitter medicine, spoon by spoon, but jump courageously into the ocean of regret and confess at once all your sins and mistakes since the time of the First and the Second International till the present day, and if in the silence you hear the tapping of a pencil on the table, and the Russian “malo, malo” (“insufficient, insufficient”), just go straight ahead and without any petty bourgeois run-around, place upon the scales of compassion also your personal guilt for the death of Herculaneum and Pompei. Then you’ll be saved, and your career for the next two or three five-year plans secured, because the Russian as a rule has a sensitive and emotional nature and if he’s touched by the sincerity of your repentance, he may even invite you to his house for tea, though you’ll hardly get any, because this is the code name for a different beverage, and after one bottle of this stuff, he’ll kiss you on the forehead and announce that he not only loves you but also respects you.
I wasn’t present at the rehabilitation, because I’m neither a party man nor an activist like my brother-in-law Ben-David, but he told me that Esther Katz was silent most of the time, because she could hardly stand the fools, and she meant not the poor well-intended Liova Weissmann but the comrades, who came from the Center to investigate him.
In general, our transition from petty bourgeois, class-unconscious slaves of Capital, I mean that capital in the safe of Rothschild and not Das Kapital of Karl Marx, to the avant-garde of workers from all over the world, happened without special histrionics. With one exception that I don’t understand to this day and whose logic I continue to search for without success: the German family Fritz and Else Schneider was most politely asked by the Soviet authorities to pack their bags, and, as we learned later, accompanied to the border and handed over, against a written receipt, to Hitler’s authorities. This was done, they say, according to some Soviet-German agreement but—forgive my rude expression—I piss on an agreement that renders back the refugees of one regime into the hands of that same regime, so that they could be sent to camps and maybe even executed. As my parents used to say: “God’s deeds have neither length nor depth, neither is it given to us to comprehend them.”
Even Esther Katz shrugged her shoulders helplessly. “I don’t know…maybe they’re agents from Hitler?”
“And so they return defective merchandise to the producer?” asked Rabbi Ben-David skeptically.
Esther Katz swallowed her ready answer, which, as it seemed, wasn’t convincing even to herself.