Next door to the synagogue at 13 Tlumatzka Street, writers, actors and painters from across Warsaw gathered to talk, eat, laugh, smoke cigarettes, drink vodka, but most of all to argue. The Yiddish Writers Union shared the premises with Shayndel the Shayneh, who made a few zlotys on the side wearing knee-high black boots, a peaked leather cap and not much else.
Alter Mayseh was the secretary of the club and spent most evenings there. His nephew Yosl would accompany him on Wednesdays. The young boy looked after Shayndel’s tsedrayte crazy white cat while she worked, wheeling the petulant animal around in an old pram. She paid Yosl with pieces of chocolate. It was also his job to pin up the Slave Market every week, a list of the various towns and villages where each writer was scheduled to give lectures on every subject imaginable, from Impressionism to the healing properties of garlic or the magic of gefilte fish. Yosl was small, so nobody noticed him as he sat drawing under the table, studying the sultry subterranean goings-on between the adults. He had a worm’s-eye view of a famous poet rubbing the knee of a beautiful novelist, who in turn tickled the crotch of her husband, the editor of the gossip column in the local Yiddish newspaper.
‘Yosl?’ his uncle called. The boy sat very still in his hiding place and would have avoided discovery if Shayndel the Shayneh hadn’t finished early with a client that evening and entered the room unexpectedly.
‘Ketsele!’ she called loudly. ‘Here puss, puss, puss.’
The cat jumped out of the pram, mewing loudly.
Alter Mayseh pounced. He reached under the tablecloth, grabbed Yosl’s ankle and dragged him out.
‘Ribono shel oylem! God in Heaven! What are you doing there?’
Yosl was a scrawny boy, with spindly legs and a sunken chest, but what he lacked in physical strength he made up for with intelligence and wit. As articulate as he was, though, he answered his uncle with a lengthy silence. He held up half an apple, the juice trickling down his wrist. In the other hand was a crumpled-up piece of paper that Alter Mayseh snatched from him, smoothing it out to see what the boy had been up to. The sketch was ostensibly of the inner workings of the piece of fruit he was eating. But the child had been doing life drawing from his worm’s-eye view – the seeds and folds resembling what Yosl had seen up the women’s skirts, as the men furtively fingered them under the table.
‘Get out, now, you little zhulik!’ He pointed to the door, trying to hide his smile. ‘You wild boy! Go straight home to your mother.’
Alter installed himself back at the table between Rinek, the new director of the Yiddish Writers Union, and a young man who sat hunched over, poking at a greasy piece of herring on his plate before slipping it between his lips. Yosl scooted out, leaving his uncle to talk to his friends about the problems of the world.
‘Send me somewhere,’ Alter begged Rinek. He tore a piece of rye bread in two.
‘Believe me, we’d like to, but to be honest, there is really nowhere left that you haven’t been, Alter – England, Denmark, Hong Kong.’ He cleared his throat several times and coughed into his fist.
Although he had passion and talent enough for ten men, as well as drive, energy and a vision for the future in which he felt certain all people would live in harmony, there was one thing Alter lacked: money. He dreamt of travelling to a land of opportunity, where he could live a free and prosperous life.
‘A young man surely needs a little adventure,’ Joshua Singer chimed in. Alter wasn’t sure if he was referring to him, or to Yosl’s recent peregrinations under the table into the secret world beneath women’s skirts. He thought he saw a smirk on the man’s face, but it may have just been a shmeer of oil left over from the herring.
‘I couldn’t agree more. Thank you.’ Alter smiled at the sycophantic freeloader.
‘Enough, Alter! We have no money,’ said Rinek. ‘There is no gelt left to throw away on any more of your luftgesheft. All your outlandish schemes are founded on air.’
Rinek was a man with rheumy eyes and yellow teeth – a very average essayist, lacking in both courage and imagination. But Alter had to admit to himself that what he said was true. As the group’s secretary, Alter had spent the past two years travelling between cities, villages and towns across Europe, selling subscriptions for the Yiddish newspaper. People invited him into their homes. Everywhere he went he was offered a slice of honey cake and a glass of tea with two lumps of sugar, all washed down with fantastical stories of scheming thieves, naïve princesses and demonic ghosts. He witnessed firsthand the daily hardship in the shtetls: the cobbler’s son walking barefoot, the tailor’s daughter dressed in rags, orphans on the street begging for food.
‘I haven’t been to Australia,’ Alter said.
‘Why would you want to go to Austria right now, with all that’s going on there? That fellow Hitler – a cholera oyf im, may he catch the plague – will soon gobble them up too. Mark my words,’ Rinek snorted, a glob of snot catapulting from his nostril onto the white tablecloth.
‘Not Austria, Rinek. Australia.’
‘Ah. Azoi! So now it’s ek velt you want to reach – the ends of the earth! You, of course, would be the one asking us to send you there.’ He slapped his thigh. ‘Tell me something, Alter. Are you planning on becoming a comedian? Because you’d be very good at it. Maybe you should do that instead of scribbling narishkeyten for a living? Writing gibberish and nonsense doesn’t pay the rent.’ Rinek wheezed heavily as he tried to stifle his laughter. ‘And, by the way, I’m interested to know: how does one reach this new goldene medine – isn’t America your golden country?’
Shepsl Wolfe, who had been sitting in an armchair in the corner, his eyes closed, piped up: ‘You travel to the edge of the world, then turn left.’ An ardent overwriter himself, Wolfe had always been jealous of the ease with which Alter seemed to have poems accepted for publication.
‘We know you are a luftmensch, my friend,’ Rinek added, ‘Always walking around with your head in the clouds, making up rhymes. But this is beyond all your wildest imaginings. Have you gone totally meshuge? It’s sheer craziness.’
Alter pushed his chair back and stood up. He tugged at Rinek’s sleeve, forcing the man to follow him like a puppy dog into the anteroom, where the Yiddish Writers Union office was crammed into one corner. They huddled over an old map of the world, which rested on a small desk. Rinek started to cough and splutter. Alter reached into his pocket, pulling out a handkerchief. He used it to wipe his friend’s spittle off North America.
‘Here,’ he handed Rinek a small flask. ‘Drink some of this. It eases catarrh.’
Joshua Singer had followed them and stood peering over Alter’s right shoulder. His older brother Isaac, who had left for America three years earlier, was the former editor of Literarishe Bleter. Isaac had brought the lazy little pisher to Warsaw to work as a proofreader for the magazine. He grabbed the flask from Alter and took a swig himself.
The outline of Australia was clearly visible, but someone had stuck a street map of Warsaw on top of it, making it difficult to prise the giant continent out from underneath.
‘You see, Alter. That’s a sign,’ said Rinek. It’s impossible to get to Australia, even on paper. And besides, what will you do once you arrive? Surely there aren’t many Jews living there.’
Picking at the glue with his nail, Alter carefully dissected away the map of Warsaw. ‘Allow me to give you a small geography lesson, Rinek.’ He drew an invisible line around the great southern continent. ‘Look closely. Can you see how Australia resembles a human head looking up at the rest of the world?’
Rinek grunted.
Alter took out his ruler and measured the girth of the country, which looked quite small on the Mercator map. He picked up a pair of scissors. Rinek watched him as he traced the outline of Germany and cut it out, fitting it inside Australia like a piece of puzzle. It was tiny by comparison. He snipped around Poland, followed by France, Belgium, Switzerland, and the UK, placing them all beside Germany. But even the whole of Europe couldn’t fill the space inside the giant southern continent’s borders. Surely, there was a tiny patch of land in this vast country that would take in a tortured Jew or two. After the Kishinev pogrom at the turn of the century, countries such as Uganda, Argentina and Ecuador had been floated as places of potential refuge for persecuted Jews, but it had all amounted to nothing. The British had closed off Palestine, so any vision he might have flirted with of longing for Jerusalem was unlikely to ever come to fruition. But that didn’t bother Alter. All that mattered was to get as far away as possible from Europe before things got even worse there for Jews. He felt it coming, knew he needed to find a way to leave. How was he going to convince Rinek to approve of his outlandish new scheme? Perhaps he would start by simply telling him the truth and see where that led.
‘Rinek,’ he said, trying to sound somewhat dramatic. ‘You know, I had such a bad dream last night. I woke up in a cold sweat. The village in which my family lived was ablaze and I was running from the flames with my brothers and sisters. One by one they fell, until I was the only one left.’
‘Ach! You and your crazy nightmares, Alter. Loz mikh geyn. Leave me alone with your nonsense.’ The podgy man, his sweaty brow furrowed, settled into a chair and opened a ledger filled with columns of spidery numbers. Alter knew this would be his response. Rinek wasn’t one to believe in dreams. This lack of imagination was probably what made him such a lousy writer. Alter wanted to think that human beings could live in harmony within a global utopia. Now was the perfect time to realise his vision. Over the last couple of years travelling around from pitiful village to village in Eastern Europe, he had felt the urgency to find somewhere in the world that would take in a few Jewish refugees like himself. There he could build a community of like-minded souls, be the headmaster of a Yiddish school, grow his own food, set up a theatre troupe that would take the dramatised works of Bialik and Spinoza from town to town. Here in Europe, his people were increasingly either being shunned or subjected to violent attacks, no longer welcome in places they had lived in for up to ten generations. Most countries had immigration quotas akin to seven locks protecting their doors. Perhaps Australia, with its vast, gaping expanse, would only have six locks? It was worth a try.
He pictured himself in the far-off island surrounded by vast seas, a country that held a true promise of freedom. He closed his eyes and stabbed the map with a pin, landing somewhere north of the centre. He had to squint to read the name of the town he had landed on. Birdum. It had an earthy sound about it. He was a poet, after all, and must follow his heart, wherever it might lead.
Rinek interrupted Alter’s musings. ‘You know the story of the poor man who complained to the rabbi that his house was too small for his family of thirteen children, four grandparents and five cousins?’
Rinek was such a bore. Of course, Alter knew the story – how the rabbi told the poor Jew to bring his chickens inside, followed by all his goats and sheep. Finally, his cow moved in with the family. The very next morning, the man begged the rabbi to help him. The house had become so crowded and noisy it was impossible to live in. So, the rabbi told him to return all the animals to the barn. The man did what he was asked and when he came back inside, he looked around. ‘It’s so quiet and peaceful in here now.’ He embraced his wife ecstatically. ‘Look how much room we have, Rivka!’
Every story that Rinek told was burdened with a heavy lacing of morality.
‘You see, Alter, you must never say things are bad,’ Rinek said, lowering his voice to a whisper. ‘Because they can always get so much worse. Tfoo, tfoo, tfoo.’ He spat three times on the floor to ward off the evil eye. ‘It’s important to appreciate what you have. We cannot know what waits for us around the corner.’
Whatever might have been left of Alter’s naïve vision of a global utopia was destroyed the following night, right on cue. His brother’s grocery shop was looted and set on fire, windows smashed, swastikas daubed across the entrance.
He rushed back to the office of the Yiddish Writers Union the next morning and burst in on a meeting.
‘Rinek!’
‘Can’t it wait, Alter? I have some important business to discuss with Joshua about Isaac’s new manuscript.’
Alter had read some of the older Singer’s hopeful scribblings. Even though the man was still chief editor of their journal, he honestly could have done with a thick red pen through many of his own clumsy sentences.
Before he left Europe he had attended one of Alter’s lectures. Afterwards, he offered up a half-smile. ‘You are quite the dreamer, aren’t you? It takes a brave man to believe the world of justice will come today or tomorrow, where we all become brothers. And, sooner or later, no Jews, no gentiles, only a single, united mankind with the common goal of equality and progress. Ha! A nekhtiker tog! An impossibility, like the return of yesterday. I suppose you also believe great poetry will hasten us into this joyous epoch.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Alter said, trying to ignore the annoying nudnik.
There was always one in every crowd, droning on with their hefty dose of criticism just to garner attention. The man was a no-hoper.
Alter turned to Rinek, trying to hide his impatience. ‘It won’t take long. Please. I just had a wonderful idea.’
‘You and your narishkeyten. All right, all right. Quickly then. Nu? What folly is it this time?’
‘I figured out how I might be able to get myself to Australia.’
‘Oh, really? Do tell us your incredible plan.’
‘Well, I thought maybe I could canvas for donations there? I’ve found a fellow in a city called Melbourne who subscribes to our newspaper. His name is Retter.’
Rinek coughed up a plug of mucus, spitting it into his handkerchief. ‘So, why not get this fellow to sponsor you?’ He winked at Joshua.
For once, thought Alter, Rinek had come up with an idea that wasn’t altogether useless. That same evening, he wrote a letter to their antipodean subscriber. A few weeks later, to everyone’s utter astonishment – not least his own – money arrived for a ticket. Alter Mayseh – fundraiser and Yiddish poet – soon found himself on an old boat, bound for the ends of the earth.