Twenty-Six

 

THE UNDERGROUND NETWORK related war news—persecution, destruction, and death in so many cities, towns, and villages. In short doses, we heard about Brest. On September 13, the day before Rosh Hashanah, bombs fell in Brest’s Jewish quarters. About two hundred died in this bombardment and thousands were left homeless. On September 17, after a fierce three-day battle with Polish forces, the Germans captured the Brest Fortress.

My sisters and I had never been religious. But every night during the German occupation, we had prayed to God for help.

Help came in the form of Russians. In Brest, meeting little resistance, Soviet forces overtook the Fortress from the German army and reached the city on the 18th when the two invading armies met. On September 19, the Polish army surrendered. The war was practically over.

The Russians were nearing Kobrin. Drora was unable to contain her euphoria. She practiced her Russian every available minute and helped formulate a myriad of secret plans with her “comrades,” some, I learned by listening to Drora and a girlfriend’s pressed-head talks, involved moving to Russia. I only prayed that these were merely pipe dreams because if my mother ever suspected that her oldest daughter would be immigrating to Russia, while her son was living in Palestine, I couldn’t imagine what she would do.

On the morning of September 20, the Red Army entered and took control of Kobrin. No longer terrified of going outside, we all rushed to the main street and saw streams of Russian tanks and soldiers chugging along. The crowd was ecstatic. People kissed soldiers’ dusty boots. Many were skinny and wearing torn or frayed uniforms. To me, they looked more like tired and dejected men than jubilant conquerors.

Within minutes, Kobrin was flying red flags that the local Communists made by tearing the white stripe from red-and-white Polish flags. Gangs scattered leaflets denouncing the fascist Polish regime. Jews greeted each other with, “Mazel tov.”

Drora had been right all along about the “secret” partition pact between the Soviets and Germans. I didn’t always get my facts right, but this I wrote down in my journal: Out of the deal, the Soviets received some 77,000 square miles of new territory, with the Bug River as part of the demarcation line; and they inherited more than thirteen million people, including an estimated 3,500,000 Poles and 1,300,000 Jews. All-in-all, with at least half of Poland’s area and one-third of its population, the Russians got a very large piece of the pie. We were no longer part of Poland.

 

THERE WERE SO many changes in our lives then, that it’s difficult to keep them straight in time. Although the war was not officially over, we felt that it was.

To mark it in my own way, I took out Miriam from her “safe” place under my bed. Whether I was in Brest or Kobrin, Miriam was never far from where I slept. I stroked her hair and whispered, “Miriam, I think all is good now. You’ll see. Soon we’ll go in the yard and sit in the sun. How nice that will be.” I was careful to cheer her up, but not to talk down to her.

I stood with my back against the wall and, with a ruler flattening my hair, I marked my height with a pencil line. My sisters and I did this regularly. And to make Miriam feel good, I always marked her height, too. I know this sounds crazy, but I can swear that Miriam measured an inch taller. Still, there was no escaping the fact that the distance between us was longer than ever. But I assured Miriam that even if I got all the way to Drora’s marks, I would never abandon her. To make her feel extra good, I promised that we would soon be back in Brest. I know how much she loved Ania.

 

Not everyone was so optimistic. When my grandfather heard that the Soviets agreed to give Germany three hundred thousand tons of crude oil a year, the output of Polish fields, he predicted the downfall of our economy. He went for longer and longer periods without a joke, one of his Yiddish sayings, or even a recitation of a religious text to make up for our “heathen” ways.

I took on the job of cheering him up, though my mother said that I shouldn’t be disappointed if my efforts failed; some things you couldn’t fix.

Occasionally, I read my grandfather a quotation from my journal. He seemed amused at my dedication. He thought Ida was the most wonderful girl, even if she encouraged my outspokenness. Her love of literature and philosophy, especially the Yiddish and Hebrew masters, was “unusual for a girl.” I made a note to tell Ida about my grandfather’s praise, though I’d never include his comments about “unusual for a girl,” which he had said with more jocularity than conviction.

On one afternoon at my aunt Khane’s house, I found my grandfather at the desk, bent as close to the page in his book as he could be without touching.

“What are you reading?” I asked, hoping he wasn’t sleeping as he continued to stare down without turning a page.

“Nothing important.”

“Would you like to see more of the writings I have copied in my journal?”

“My eyes are tired, Esfele. Read me a little.”

I read him some quotations, including the last by Mendele Mocher Seforim, as explained by Ida, “the grandfather of modern Yiddish and the father of modern Hebrew literature.”

“So, Esfir, you think you are the only one who appreciates Jewish literature?”

“No. Ida does too.”

“Oh, the famous Ida. Would you be surprised to learn that your zeyde has read writers like Seforim?”

“Really?”

“Really. And this zeyde doesn’t need to put it down in a book.”

Then he closed his eyes, sat back in the chair, and recited, “If two Jews were to be shipwrecked on one of those desert islands, where there was not one other human being, there is no doubt that one of them would open a shop, and the other would start some little business of his own, and they would give each other credit.”

“That’s funny I guess.”

“You guess? That, my little girl, was directly from Mendele Seforim’s novel, The Book of Beggars, 1869.”

And I had wanted to impress my grandfather!

My mother had been listening to our conversation and, when my grandfather resumed his reading posture and finally turned a page, I sat next to her on the couch. She put her arm around me and kissed my cheek. “Esfir you are a compassionate girl,” she said. I wasn’t certain what she meant except that my grandfather acted out two lengthy jokes during dinner that night.