Nineteen

 

THAT SUMMER, NOT much was happening, which was all right with me. I discovered that even Drora was becoming involved in Zionist activities, something she kept secret because my mother was so upset over Velvel’s parting. Rivke must have found out. I had gotten a little suspicious when they were whispering a lot and not fighting. Then, they started leaving together. When I asked where they were going, they never answered specifically. They were stepping “out,” to “visit friends,” to the “library,” etc.

One day in mid-July, however, I got an opportunity to join them for the day, basically after my mother insisted that they take me someplace so I would get out of the house. They even told me I could invite Gittel, my neighbor friend. I hadn’t spent much time with Gittel, not the way I used to in the summers when we’d go to the river and the pick blueberries. Gittel was not as experienced as Ania, but she was a good person and let me boss her around in a way that I could never imagine with Ania.

It was a steamy day and we packed lunches in a basket and headed for the Mukhavets River. We marched on the promenade and crossed the bridge, which divides the city in two. There were barges and boats in the river and we walked toward a large neatly trimmed space where there were crowds of youngsters laying on the grass. Drora took Rivke aside and they looked at Gittel and me with conspiratorial nods.

Rivke led us to another area with poplar trees, and we leaned against a large one and ate our lunch. She promised to take us swimming by the riverbank later.

Although it was obvious that Drora wanted us to be away from the action, I could hear loud chanting. I stood and turned toward the noise. Rivke ordered me to sit down and mind my business, but she couldn’t contain me. Forgetting my fears, like at the Lag b’Omer event, I grabbed Gitttel’s hand and we scampered in the direction of the activity, caught in the momentum of others with the same idea. If Drora and her friends wanted their meeting to be a secret, it was no use. That’s how it was in my city: the more you tried to hide, the more everyone knew your business.

In the middle of that lawn, Drora and the others had moved their blankets to form a semicircle. In the center, a boy—or I should say, a young man—about Velvel’s age was warning the group that they had to be more careful in the future if they wanted to continue their activities. “Meetings should be held in smaller groups, in someone’s house or a synagogue,” he urged. “Nothing should be discussed away from those quarters. Don’t trust outsiders. You could be arrested or worse.” He stopped talking when he noticed all of us coming toward him and held up his hands as if to push us away.

“No,” he yelled, “please!”

This wasn’t enough and the people, mainly youngsters in their teens, swelled forward. Finally, he shouted, “In the name of Palestine, you must go away. It is not good to make such a commotion. From now on, we need to carry on in more discreet ways. Please, I beg you, for your own sakes.”

That last plea got to us and independently, singly and in pairs, we dispersed in different directions, many with our heads down as if this posture would not draw attention. Near our spot by the poplar trees, Rivke beckoned us with large curving arm gestures. Drora joined us minutes later.

On our way home, Gittel and I skipped ahead of my sisters, not frightened by the young man’s dire predictions. How could we take him seriously when he was drawing a crowd and then telling them to be secret?

 

I will never be sure of what happened that day because Rivke wouldn’t divulge anything. Even though I loved my sister madly, she was ordered by Drora to keep us in the dark as much as possible. Rivke, the middle girl, usually obeyed her older sister’s commands, especially, as in this case, when Drora made her feel important. Jealous or not, I wouldn’t try to entice Rivke my way. Even at my age, I sensed that she needed to feel special more than I needed to know what was going on. When I got home, I had written in my journal, “Something to do with teenagers, 1937.”

A few days later, I went with Rivke to meet Drora outside of her youth group. It was held at the big building on Tragota Street that had been sectioned off to include the main offices of the Jewish cultural youth movements (where my father had performed secretarial duties), four Jewish schools of different orientations, relief organizations, an orphanage (where Gittel and I had volunteered), reading rooms, and libraries.

For the students, the days were for studying. At night, hundreds of young people gathered at the Tragota complex for recreation. While Polish schoolchildren could become members of Mloda Polska,Young Poland, an artistic and cultural movement, Tragota was the creative soul of Kobrin’s Jewish youth.

Drora was an hour late and Rivke was pacing around the periphery of the complex.

“Should we go inside to the meeting room?” I asked.

“No, Drora said to meet her here. She wasn’t sure where her meeting would be held. Finally, we saw Drora running in the street toward us. Her hair was disloged from its pins and it looked pasty with sweat. Her blouse was pulled out of her skirt and her left eyeglass was cracked.

“We have to get out of here,” she said in a semi-hysterical tone. “They came and took the house. The police are all over. Let’s run, follow me.”

I heard a commotion and behind me I could see local police chasing Rivke’s friends and other members of Zionist groups. They carried sticks and hit anyone in their way. One young man resisted by holding up his arms and a policeman beat him to the ground. Carriages arrived and mobs—we don’t know who they were—loaded what they could take from inside the building. Again, we heard the curse, “Wait. Hitler will come upon you!”

We were lucky and made it home. Drora found out that some Zionist groups found shelter in large homes and rented space elsewhere. Maybe this is why that young man in the park had been urging his followers to be careful because he expected trouble, or maybe the purge had already begun. Anyway, in 1937, the year that Kobrin’s fire brigade got a motor pump, the singing stopped on Tragota Street and the Jewish youth’s dreams crumbled. And for me, there seemed no safe place. In Brest, I had been in a pogrom and now saw something even sadder: my sister Drora became a frightened and angry young woman.

 

AT THE END of July, early in the morning, my mother and I went to visit her parents. Though they shared a house with Aunt Khane and her children, it was really my grandparents’ house. Khane had moved in when her husband, who was older, had died from a stroke. Slowly, Aunt Khane had taken over a lot of the cleaning and cooking—of course keeping kosher—as my grandmother Elke had a bad back.

My grandparents had moved to a small room on the first floor, so that my grandmother wouldn’t have to climb stairs. This gave Khane the main bedroom. So with all these changes, the family soon began to call it Khane’s house. My grandparents were probably hurt by that.

We sat in the living room where Grandpa Yankel was praying, standing in the corner. Grandpa was a small man, maybe five feet two inches tall, though he slumped and appeared shorter. He was very thin and always hoisting up his baggy black slacks, or rolling up his sweaters and jacket sleeves, even though Grandma Elke was an excellent seamstress and was only too happy to alter his clothes. He didn’t want to bother with changes to his wardrobe, unaware that the cuffs of his slacks dragged on the ground, fraying and attracting mud. Elke had given up nagging him, not only about his clothes.

I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear he had tripped over his overlong pant bottoms. My grandma said he looked like a starving peasant. My sisters had been embarrassed by his disheveled appearance.

My grandparents were religious, meaning that they were orthodox. Elke didn’t look any different from other women, except that she always wore a dress with long sleeves, wool stockings, and a babushka head scarf covering her long gray hair. My grandpa didn’t wear a fur hat and he didn’t have peyes, or the uniform of the Hasidim. He had his own uniform, his own look that never changed.

My mother and grandmother left to go into the kitchen and I stayed on the couch, supposedly reading a book. Instead, my eyes went toward my grandfather, by now swaying fervently, totally unaware of my presence. He sported a white uneven, triangular-shaped beard, with a reddish brown and gray mustache, a white shirt, black silk vest, a black rumpled jacket, and a black yarmulke. During morning prayers, he wrapped his long white talis over his shoulders. Outdoors, he wore a black fedora with a black grosgrain band; and in the winter, he added a double-breasted gray overcoat, also wrinkled and too big.

When my grandfather finished his prayers, he turned and walked slowly in my direction, adjusting his eyeglasses as if he wasn’t sure he was seeing me or a phantom. They were perched at the end rise of his lumpy nose, broken twice from falls. I was transfixed by his cloudy blue eyes, and I loved his long bony fingers, especially when they traced the lines in a book. I giggled at his constant throat-clearing noises, and was fascinated by his false teeth that were too big for his mouth and made a sucking sound when he ate.

Basically, I was of two minds about my grandpa. Sometimes I thought he was the most distinguished and learned man I knew; and others, I was terrified of his outbursts. Mostly, I felt ignorant around him; I didn’t understand his Hebrew, despite his attempts to teach me. The thing that confused me more than anything was the way he spoke in normal conversation. It was usually mixed with proverbs that sounded like curses or the words of Moses. This is how I felt when someone told a joke—that I should laugh because I couldn’t admit that I didn’t understand the punch line, and was terrified of being asked to explain it.

One of his choice expressions was, “Afn ganef brent dos hitl.” I never understood what it meant. My mother explained that, “On the head of a thief, burns his hat,” implied that someone always feels guilty for something or a guilty person is always sensitive. This I understood.

As he came to sit by me on the couch, I felt my nerves intensify. I wished my mother and aunt would return. What would I say to him? What if he asked me about something religious, something in his prayers? What if he wanted me to explain the book on my lap, a collection of silly folktales.

Luckily, he lay against the back of the couch and sighed. “Esfele,” he said, “I will rest my eyes a little, no?”

“Sure, Grandpa,” I said, too quickly. To show my support, I also closed my eyes. I thought about how my parents used to fight about religion. My mother had tried to keep kosher, but abandoned it when my father mixed meat and dairy products and the appropriate plates and utensils. He could never remember what animal or animal parts were permitted and often complained that sticking to the “number of rules regarding the slaughtering and blessings of what we eat could make a man starve to death.”

My grandparents had rarely come to our house for a formal meal because, to them, my father was practically a heathen, and they didn’t trust my mother to follow the kosher rules. This had hurt my mother very much because she went to great pains to do everything to the letter.

There was one custom she had clung to. Every Friday, just before sunset, whatever my father did, my mother lit the Shabbes candles, closed her eyes, motioned her palms over the flame, wafting their fumes toward herself, and recited the prayers. Then the family would sit down to dinner, complete with challahs. That was as far as she would go; my father sat respectfully even though he was nonobservant in the extreme.

It’s strange, after my father died, when my mother could have reinstituted her orthodox customs, she didn’t. She left my father’s chair empty and nodded toward it just as she always did to signal the beginning of the Shabbes meal. It was more like a reflex. By that time, I figured that my mother herself no longer believed in religious customs.

It was difficult for me to keep up with religious rules. When I went to a relative’s house, I was never sure how I should act, what I should say. Perl said that family bickering over religion was common in this day and age. Many from the older generation clung to their ways while their children wanted to assimilate to the culture around them.

“What are you two dreaming about?” my grandmother Elke asked, carrying a tray with glasses of water and cheesecake.

“Nothing,” I said, startled from my daydreaming.

My mother joined us and I smushed a piece of cake with my fork and licked off the silky sweet residue. Grandma Elke began to tell us about Grandpa Yankel’s brother, Hymie, who lived in Visoke, the Visoke where Ida and her father traveled in the hailstorm. This great-uncle Hymie was very sick with something so terrible that nobody would mention what it was, but it was clear he was dying.

“Since your father found this out,” she said to my mother, as if my grandfather was not in the room, “he’s been paralyzed. He hasn’t gone to his bookkeeping job. He prays. He stares out the window.”

My grandfather suddenly jumped up as if he had been bitten by a snake, and said to my grandma, “That does it, Elkele, I’m going to Visoke, to see Hymie.”

My grandma nodded, but Grandpa continued as if his wife was forbidding him to go. “After the death of my father, of blessed memory, Hymie took over the bakery even though he wanted to continue his studies. He was the first to teach me how to read the Talmud.”

“Yes, you should go,” my grandmother said. She didn’t offer to go along as she had to help with her grandchildren while Khane worked in my uncle Sam’s grocery.

With this pronouncement, I went beserk. My grandfather would be going to Visoke, so close to Ida! I had always treated my grandfather with the utmost respect; I rarely said much to him. But now, I was obsessed or I should say possessed.

“Can I go with you?” I asked timidly.

My grandfather didn’t answer.

I then badgered my mother and my grandmother to let me go with Grandpa. To my surprise, my grandmother said, “Take the girl, Yankel. She could use a little fresh air.”

“So why doesn’t she go outdoors?” he said.

“This would be another place.”

“I’ll be lucky if I get there in time, God willing, without having to wait for a child.”

“Esfir will not slow you down.” My grandmother had a quiet way of getting what she wanted.

“And what if Esfir cries for her mother?”

“Now, Yankel, Esfir is an experienced traveler. She will be good company for you on the train. She will be able to look after your briefcase when you need to pray, and I’m sure she can be helpful in other ways, too. And Hymie will be very happy to see her.”

He thought for a while and said, “A make unter yenems orem iz nit shver tsu trogen,” which means, “Another person’s problems are not difficult for you to endure.” With that, he made up his mind. “Okay, Esfir can come on one condition.”

I yelped.

“Why must there always be a price to pay?” my grandmother asked. Now that she saw him weakening, she got bolder. “Yeder mentsh hot zayn eygene mishegas.” In her peculiar way, by saying, “Every person has his own craziness,” she was thanking him.

I can’t repeat all the epigrams and retorts that ensued. It was a game my grandparents played, and I just sat and listened, reveling in my good luck. Whatever the condition my grandfather was going to impose got lost in their repartee.

My grandmother and my mother made it clear why I was so eager to go with him, explaining that Ida lived close by in Volchin.

“I know where that is,” he said, gruffly. “There’s no time to wait for her friend to contact us. I may not be able to take her to Volchin, and we don’t even know if this Ida is going to be there.”

With that, my grandmother answered with another Yiddish expression, which I can’t exactly recall, but it is something like, “Things will work out as they are supposed to.”

My mother and I went home so I could change my clothes and get ready. Not being a fatalist, my mother gave me money to pay a driver to take me to Volchin and back to Visoke, in case my grandfather wouldn’t. She pinned a note to my blouse with Ida’s full name, her father’s name, and the name of my uncle in Visoke, as if I needed help. I could have spelled Ida’s whole name backward if someone asked.

Then we returned to my grandparents. I went in the kitchen to get a bag of fruit my grandmother had prepared for our trip. When she thought I was out of earshot, my mother said, “Father, I have never asked you for anything. Now I am asking you to take care of Esfir. Try your best to take her to Volchin. It would be a mitzvah.”

Grandpa Yankel didn’t come back with a Yiddish saying. This was his way of conceding. But with him, you could never be sure.

I didn’t care how I got anywhere. One way or another, I was going to Volchin!