After Grandpa’s death, a pall of sadness descended on the family. Wealthy Uncle Leyzer went back to Lodz one day after the funeral. Impoverished Uncle Avrom-Ayzek remained, passing the mourning period, the seven days of shivah, in Grandma Rokhl’s little house. All week we recounted stories about Grandpa. On the day after the shivah, before he himself left, Avrom-Ayzek, who was also a tailor, completed sewing the last blue uniform that Grandpa had started.
That night he boarded Yarme the coachman’s omnibus and returned to Warsaw, to his wife and child.
Grandma remained all alone in the little, white house. Now, there was no one to use the flatirons. There was no one to sing little songs. The only person to look after her was Wladek, the foolish Gentile.
So Grandma set about dealing with the inheritance left by Grandpa. Some things she sold, some she divided up among the family. Uncle Avrom-Ayzek took back with him to Warsaw Grandpa’s prayer shawl, his phylacteries, several prayer books, and a box of needles. Mother received all the Passover dishes and the Elijah cup for display at the seder. All that Grandma kept for herself was Grandpa’s worktable and her own small, wooden chest. With those few possessions she moved into Aunt Miriam’s house.
By then, Aunt Miriam was living in a new place, in a large, brick building with a long courtyard. Her one room and kitchen, over a porch, were crammed, but she managed to make space for Grandma’s chest and for Grandpa’s work-stained table.
Now that Aunt Miriam had changed residences, and Grandma, in her old age, had been transformed into a dependent child, it didn’t seem to make sense for us to stay on in the prison lane. All the more so, since Mother had long detested the place.
Accordingly, she began making inquiries, looking for another place that was dry and also wouldn’t be too expensive.
This time, her quest took longer than usual. But when the days grew hot and the feast day of Saint John came around, the traditional moving time, once more we loaded our few household belongings onto a small cart, said goodbye to the neighbors and to the beautiful orchard, and, with luck, transferred ourselves to the very same street where Grandpa Dovid-Froyke had lived and died.
I took one look at the new place, up to which our wardrobe and our beds had been carried, and wanted to cry. Father, who this time had helped with the moving, stopped short and stood still for a while, with a stunned look on his face, as if he had suddenly come into a strange house and happened upon a woman undressing.
What here had attracted Mother? What made her so eager to exchange the orchard and the garden for this hole-in-the-wall? The windows could hardly be called windows. There were two dovecotes set up on the tin roof, on which the sun beat down mercilessly. So what if you could see all of Warsaw Street from up here and all the chimneys on the rooftops? What did that matter when down below, where the municipal droshkys collected, the street reeked from the stench of the horse manure?
Maybe what attracted Mother was the fact that our windows were the only ones looking out on the roof, even if Crazy Leybl leaned all day against the wall of the building, munching manure.
The new place didn’t even have a painted floor. And where did the kitchen go? In fact, there was no kitchen, just one big room, like an entry hall, with a low ceiling, a broken, old-fashioned clay stove, and two small recesses in one of the walls, smelling of cats.
Mother must have been taken with that corner between the stove and the wall with the recesses, which she called an “alcove.”
“If you like,” she said, “it’s not just an alcove, but a whole room. You can put in two beds and a dresser, hang a curtain across, and rent it out as a room. And downstairs,” she added, “on the ground floor, lives the district stationmaster, and the stairs are painted red.”
The district stationmaster did indeed live on the ground floor, but the stairs were painted red only as far as his door.
To get to our place, one had to climb a crooked, dusty staircase, go past an attic hung with strange items of wash, scary human shapes not filled out by bodies. One had to shuffle and grope one’s way in the dark, so as not to step on the many cats that had gathered there to wail and to cry out their hearts.
Even the courtyard wasn’t the same as our old one in the prison lane. It was narrow and enclosed by walls with low ledges that, in some places, opened into cubbies for storing firewood and for chickens. The only embellishment was a round, green water pump.
In this courtyard, I thought to myself, there would be no one to tell my stories to, no Yankl, Yarme the coachman’s son, and certainly no omnibus. What would I do with myself here?
I was so unhappy that I often sneaked back to the prison lane to take a look at the orchard and the garden, and at our old windows, now graced by Gentile flowerpots.
But God doesn’t abandon His creatures. After we had been living in the new dwelling for a while, Mother befriended a neighbor, a woman who was quite different from all our former neighbors, one with a totally different outlook on life.
“She’s not one of your run-of-the-mill women,” Mother said, “She’s a real lady.”
This “real lady” didn’t even wear a wig, didn’t bless the Sabbath candles, and never attended synagogue. Nevertheless, Mother, as well as several other women, held that Reyzele the wine-seller was a righteous woman, with a kosher, Jewish soul.
Reyzele herself was short and plump, with a well-filled double chin. She spoke in little, genteel gulps and owned her own shop, selling wine, cookies, and cakes. Reyzele, the “real lady,” could speak German and write in French. She sat in her wineshop wrapped in a shiny, black apron from top to bottom, wearing a pair of gold-rimmed glasses and reading books in foreign languages.
Every year she went to a spa and returned from taking the waters slimmer than before. She had a Gentile servant girl whom she treated as an equal, even though she herself was an educated lady able to hold her own with the governor. She addressed her servant not with the familiar “you” but with the respectful “Pani … Madam.”
The well-to-do housewives thought her insane.
“Reyzele,” they complained, “whoever heard of such a thing? You’re going to make trouble for all the other maids!”
Reyzele replied that the Master of the Universe created all human beings alike. It wasn’t He, but people themselves who divided themselves into separate worlds, with some having it very good and others very bad. Was it that poor girl’s fault that she had to work as a maid, serving others? And if she had to be a servant, why shame her for it?
The well-to-do housewives considered Reyzele a bit crazy and mocked her behind her back. They said that she was giving herself airs, so people would think that she was somebody.
The poor housewives, on the other hand, didn’t make fun of Reyzele at all. They said that you would have to go searching far and wide, with a lit candle, before you would find anyone like her, as well as someone like her husband.
It might very well be that for a man like Reb Menakhem, Reyzele’s husband, you had to go searching with a lit candle.
First of all, because Reb Menakhem was unusually tall, so tall that he was stooped over. And apart from his height, he was also hunchbacked, the only tall hunchback in town and, possibly, in the whole world.
A member of the kohen—priestly—class of Jews, ill-tempered, learned in both Jewish and general subjects, he was compelled at an advanced age to go to work as a bookkeeper for a wealthy man with a neatly trimmed beard and shiny, squeaking boots, but the dim wits of a peasant.
Like his wife, Reb Menakhem didn’t believe in lighting the Sabbath candles nor in praying in the synagogue.
“Let my employer go and pray,” he said. “He’s a thief, and thieves fear God.”
When he was reproached as to why he spoke this way about his own employer, Reb Menakhem wrinkled his bony face and replied, “Did I ask him to be my employer? Besides, God loathes him, too. Three things He loathes—converted Jews, pigs, and rich people.”
Reb Menakhem wore a stiff, black, dusty hat, a businessman’s long frock coat with a slit in the back, and a pair of unpolished boots. He wasn’t too fond of his outfit.
“Why can’t a man,” he complained, “dress the way he wants, in whatever suits him best?”
“Of course!” respectable Jews mocked. “Why shouldn’t a Jew like Reb Menakhem go around like a Hasid, in a velvet hat and a satin kapote?”
Reb Menakhem was aware that he was being made fun of and replied that a velvet hat was good only for work, and that the satin kapote should be made into women’s underpants.
“Did Jews ever once dress like that?” he sputtered. “On the contrary! Show me where it was written in the Bible that Jews in ancient days used to wear satin kapotes and velvet hats? Isn’t it far better and healthier to go bare-headed and barefoot, and not in those ridiculous clothes?”
“But you go around in a frock coat don’t you? What more do you want?”
“This coat means nothing. It’s my wife who makes me wear it. If you would ask me, I would tell everyone to wear a cape. There’s nothing better than a cape. It’s loose, airy, and leaves room for your hands.”
“Just like Tshapele the juggler and Dovid-Froyke the tailor.”
The respectable Jews smiled into their beards and whispered quietly that Menakhem the bookkeeper was also a bit crazy.
“Tshapele the juggler and Dovid-Froyke the tailor,” Reb Menakhem retorted, his face flushed, “are far dearer to the Almighty than you with your greasy kapotes and your thieving shenanigans. Tshapele can at least perform tricks, and Dovid-Froyke knew how to sew a garment. What can you do? You can’t even properly translate a chapter of Torah with the Rashi commentary.”
Reb Menakhem, on the other hand, very well could. People said of him that it was precisely his vast learning that led him to become a heretic and active in Zionism. Years ago, he had been friends with a certain Reb Yisroel, known as “the teacher.” It was he who had founded the New School and turned out a generation of what some derisively called goyim, Gentiles. Reb Menakhem and Reb Yisroel would talk about books all the time, debate day and night, and tug at their beards as they played chess.
But after Reb Yisroel died, Reb Menakhem had no further friendships, except with the Lithuanian Hebrew teacher, who smoked a pipe and kept asking the same question: “Is there a God, or not?”
Was it any wonder then that my acquaintance with Oyzer, Reb Menakhem the bookkeeper’s and Reyzele the wine-seller’s youngest son, should have made such a great impression on me?
I had already heard about Oyzer in Sima-Yoysef’s kheyder. There they said that he was as ill-tempered as his father, that he never performed the ritual of washing his hands and reciting the proper benediction before eating, that he walked around bare-headed. People in town thought that he, too, was a bit crazy, but after we became friends, I realized that all that was said about him was an outright lie.
Oyzer was something special. He wasn’t from the same cut as Yarme the coachman’s son, nor any of the boys in the New School.
Oyzer was tall and thin, almost as tall as his father. He had his father’s bony face and black, restless eyes. But he wasn’t hunchbacked.
By the time I got to know him, he was already attending the Russian gymnasium and wearing a silver-buttoned blue uniform that my grandfather had once made for him. In time, the silver buttons had turned yellow, like brass, and the uniform itself changed color from blue to green. But this didn’t bother Oyzer, nor was he concerned about the trickle of dry dust that fell from his thick, black forelock. He didn’t like combing his hair, and he also didn’t like the wine and cookies from his mother’s store. He maintained that the best things to eat in the whole world were plain rolls, dry and crisp, just fresh from the oven.
He actually brought a pile of rolls into the courtyard, put them down on the pump or the steps, sat on them like a hen on its eggs, and pinched off pieces and tossed them into his mouth.
Oyzer wasn’t, God forbid, a glutton, but he couldn’t abide being hungry. “That way,” he said “it’s easier for me to think and talk.”
And he certainly loved to talk.
In the summer evenings, when the dust-laden rays of the setting sun streaked into our courtyard, and I had already returned from the shkole, the two of us would meet at the wet pump or at one of the ledges that opened into a cubby.
Oyzer spoke slowly. He pondered before speaking. His talk was more questions than anything else. I never saw Oyzer laugh or tell a funny story. Altogether, he held stories in contempt and said that everything in the storybooks was made up.
I wasn’t sure whether I liked Oyzer or not. I never made any such accounting. But I felt more drawn to him than I had been to Yankl or to any of my friends at the shkole. Often, before falling asleep, or even while sitting in class, Oyzer’s words pressed on my heart like a stone. I felt it wasn’t easy to be with him, but harder not to keep seeing him.
“Do you believe in God?” he once asked me, on one of those sweltering evenings, placing a hand on my shoulder and looking me straight in the eye.
I choked up and couldn’t tell whether this was because of the heat or because of Oyzer’s question. A shudder ran through me, from head to toe. What could I reply? Nobody, in my entire life, had ever asked me such a question. Was it even proper to ask such a question? Who doesn’t believe in God?
“Are you afraid to say?” Oyzer taunted.
“I’m not afraid. Who should I be afraid of? But it’s forbidden to ask.”
“Who told you that?”
“It says so in the Torah.”
“What do you think the Torah is?”
“Holy.”
Oyzer moved slightly away from me. Crazy Leybl came ambling into the courtyard, the boy who stood all day in the street chewing on horse manure. Oyzer and I didn’t say a word. Our eyes followed Crazy Leybl until he disappeared into his father’s house.
Oyzer then broke the silence.
“Do you know why he became crazy?” he asked.
“No.”
“Because he kept waiting for the Messiah and couldn’t wait any more.”
“All Jews are waiting for the Messiah.”
“In that case, all Jews are going to become crazy.”
I began to tremble. No doubt about it, Oyzer must be, as they said, a bit crazy himself. Even though there was nobody else in the courtyard, and no one had heard us, I was sure that any minute now a hailstorm would come down on our heads, pelting us with brimstone and fire.
I was scared to go on sitting alongside Oyzer. All night long, I kept seeing him, with horns and a goatee, running about in the streets. I was running after him, barking. No doubt, Oyzer had been changed into a demon, and I into a dog.
The next day we met up again. I didn’t tell Oyzer about my dream, but I looked at him closely to make sure that he didn’t have horns and a goatee. This time Oyzer posed a new question.
“Have you studied the Bible?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“Do you know how the world was created?”
“Of course, it says so in Genesis.”
“My father says that no one knows, that what it says in Genesis is nothing but a fairy tale.”
“A fairy tale?”
“Yes, a fairy tale. My father says that it’s a nice story, but not true.”
“And you believe what your father says?”
“My father knows all the books of the Bible, as well as the Talmud, with all the commentaries. He says it was all written by human beings.”
“And what do you say?”
“I don’t know. My father teaches me Bible. He says that a Jew must know everything. I might not believe in it, but one has to know.”
“And when you are bar mitzvah, will you start putting on phylacteries?”
“I don’t know, but my father is teaching me all the laws concerning phylacteries.”
I was aware all along that Oyzer knew much more than I, but why did he keep asking these peculiar questions? Wasn’t he afraid?
“Well,” I said, “if your father knows so much, then let him tell me who created the world.”
“Nobody did,” Oyzer replied. “The world came into being by itself.”
“What do you mean? What thing comes into being by itself?”
“See for yourself.”
“I don’t see anything.”
“If I explain it to you,” he said angrily, “will you understand?”
“Of course I will.”
“Alright then. It was Nature that created the world.”
“Nature?” I was stunned. “What’s Nature?”
“See, already you don’t understand.”
I really didn’t understand, but I wasn’t ready to give in so quickly.
“What about Moses and the Ten Commandments?” I asked.
“Nobody knows if there ever really was a Moses.”
At that moment he grabbed my hand and drew me close. I felt his hot breath on me. He had a look in his eyes that I couldn’t properly describe. This was how somebody going mad must look.
I recalled my late teacher, Reb Yankele of blessed memory, and his teaching of the Prophets. His Isaiah and Ezekiel had certainly been real people. And my other teacher, Reb Dovid—his Moses had come alive before our very eyes. So how could Oyzer have said that Moses never lived, if his portrait hung on the wall of our house, as well as in many other Jewish homes? Besides, who had stood up to Pharaoh? Who had led the Jews forth from Egypt? Who had smashed the Golden Calf? Could an entire world of Jews have gone mad and the only one to remain sane was Oyzer’s father?
I began to be afraid of that man. His hump appeared to me to be a living creature, looking at me with live eyes, laughing into my face.
“Of course,” it seemed to say, “all Jews are crazy. Do you mean to say they’re not?”
Oyzer himself, in my eyes, turned into an angry hunchback. His words tormented me. They took my father and mother from me and deprived me of both this world and the world-to-come. It seemed to me that the Sabbath was no longer the Sabbath, and the holy days no longer holy.
Despite all that, I couldn’t tear myself away from Oyzer. He both terrified me and attracted me, but apart from that, there were often times when Oyzer forgot what his father said and became a friend like anyone else, a boy like all the others. Although he attended the gymnasium and had the exalted status of “student,” he would still come up the stairs to our house on a Saturday night for a game of “Lotto” and, when Mother wasn’t home, to play “Disguise” with me.
That was our favorite game. Oyzer would bring over scraps of colored paper from his mother’s shop. When we spat on them, the color came off and we smeared it all over our faces. We turned our clothes inside out and, with brooms in hand, spread out across our large, disordered room. Oyzer was Moses, I the Israelites, and he was leading me forth from the land of Egypt.
“Come,” he said, “leave Pithom and Ramses and let us go to the land flowing with milk and honey. Enough toiling for Pharaoh! Enough slavery!”
He took me by the hand and said, “Israelites, go cautiously. This is the sea. Don’t fall into it, soon it will split. Look! The waters are already receding to the right and to the left. Come, don’t be afraid.”
We walked into the sea, that is, we stepped across the kneading board lying in the middle of the floor. Once we were safely on the other side, whole and dry, we stood up straight and burst into the biblical song of exultation and thanksgiving, as we watched the Egyptians, with their horses and chariots, drowning.
The game was fun, but often when we played it, I was gripped by an awful fear. At those times, Oyzer’s cheeks turned hollow and the whites of his eyes yellow.
When that happened, I tossed aside the broom, threw off my rags, and shouted in a voice that wasn’t my own, “Oyzer, one shouldn’t make fun. They’re going to burn us and roast us for this in the next world!”
Oyzer, it seemed, was also rather scared. He, too, threw down his broom, turned his cap back to its right side, and stood there, somewhat bewildered, his lips blue, his breath coming in heavy gasps.
We didn’t always disguise ourselves as Moses and the Israelites. At times, Oyzer dressed up as the rabbi, imitating his stiff walk, with his umbrella thrust forward, and as Bentsien, the community scribe, running after him with short, mincing steps. He imitated Aunt Naomi’s Mendl, how he puffed himself up while singing, his cheeks red, his eyes bulging.
I choked up with laughter. It was satisfying to see that Oyzer wasn’t afraid to make fun of the rabbi, of Bentsien the community scribe, of Mendl the boy singer, and even of such a wealthy man as Ruvele Beckerman.
What I liked best was when Oyzer took the blanket off the bed, wrapped himself in it, put one leg forward, and raised one hand. At that moment, his disheveled mop of black hair looked just like a brand-new broom.
Oyzer told me to stand quietly and watch him. Then, as the blood rushed to his neck, he began to declaim loudly in Russian, his chin quivering:
Oleg the seer readies himself,
To take his revenge on the foolish Khazars,
For their brutal onslaught on the villages,
For putting the fields to the torch.
His voice rang out ever louder and clearer. He was no longer declaiming but singing. This wasn’t the same Oyzer, the one who asked wild questions to which he himself had no answers. This was a different Oyzer standing there, taller, older, strange and handsome.
“Do you know what that is?” he asked.
“No, I don’t.”
“It’s stikhi … poetry, Pushkin’s stikhi. Do you know who Pushkin was?”
“No, I don’t.”
“And Lermontov, do you know who he was?”
“I don’t know anything about them. Teacher Mattias doesn’t teach us any Pushkin or Lermontov, only penmanship.”
“Wait,” Oyzer said, waving his hands. “I’ll recite something for you by Lermontov.”
Once more he put one foot forward, shook his shaggy mop of hair, and again began reciting in Russian, in a haughty, arrogant voice that made me see sparks before my eyes:
Not for nothing was Moscow set ablaze
And captured by the French.
It was a fierce battle,
And not merely a battle …
Again, I didn’t understand a thing. I had the feeling that Oyzer was addressing someone, but I didn’t know who. He was both himself and the unseen stranger. He asked a question and gave back the answer. He parried with himself.
It was only later that he told me that the Lermontov recitation was from a tale about the Emperor Napoleon, who advanced on Moscow with his army, but Russia couldn’t be conquered. When winter came and Napoleon’s soldiers began freezing to death, he was forced to retreat.
Oyzer also told me about the Pushkin of the stikhi, that he had been a member of the royal court, that he had written a story about a golden fish and about someone with the ugly name of “Mazeppa,” and yet another story about the son of an aristocrat called “Eugene Onegin,” and that he was only in his twenties when he was shot dead in a duel.
Oyzer said that when he grew up he’d like to be someone like Pushkin.
I cared nothing for this Pushkin. In any event, I didn’t know who he was. I just enjoyed listening to Oyzer. I now felt closer to him and began to like him. He said he’d teach me all the Russian poems he knew and would bring me the books of someone called Tolstoy, who went from being a count to becoming a simple peasant.
Oyzer knew everything. But I, apparently, wasn’t fated to be his student. A black cat, so to speak, came between us, an unfortunate incident that severed our friendship. Thereafter, it was many years before we again renewed our acquaintance.