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Warsaw, Poland, November 1937
“Would not Brzozowski’s anti-determinism preclude your assigning us homework this week, professor?” I stood from my chair on the left side of the steeply-tiered lecture hall as sparse winter sunlight angled in from the hall’s narrow windows, illuminating galaxies of dust motes in its beams. My folding seat retracted suddenly as I stood, making a crash that was a finale in the silence following Professor Lutoslawski’s solemn closing remarks.
I turned to face the other students of Introduction to Modern Polish Thought, as they started to gather their things in anticipation of the lecture’s end. I put on my most inquisitive face, widened my eyes innocently, opened my hands in a childlike ‘why not?’ gesture, and turned back to the Professor. “After all, if the experience of work follows from the physical act of working, would it not be overtly deterministic to actually do homework in order to, shall we say, ‘experience the experience’?”
A titter of laughter flitted from seat to seat, echoing up and down the tiers of the lecture hall. This was not going as I had hoped.
The Professor looked up from his crumpled lecture notes and stroked his goatee pensively. The hint of a smile crossed his stern lips.
Perhaps there’s hope?
No, for then his eyes narrowed, and his booming voice shook the smirk off my face. “The utterly flawed logic of your statement, which I assume was on some pubescent level intended to amuse, is actually an excellent argument for extra reading, young man. You may add Chapters 51 through 54 to your reading list and summarize these for the class next week. Good day.”
The titter swelled to a hearty collective guffaw, quickly swallowed by the snapping of a hundred retracting seats, heels against hardwood floors, and the rustling of books being stuffed into canvas rucksacks.
Jacek looked over at me from his seat across the hall, shaking his dark curls with a smile. Again? His look said, Must you?
I smiled back from my place on the “ghetto bench.” Yes, I must. I must, because you don’t become the youngest staff writer at Nasza Opinia, which is my plan, by holding back.
Even from the side of the lecture hall newly designated for Jews only, I expressed my thoughts and hoped like hell that someone wanted to listen. Because if I didn’t express them, I would know that no one was listening, and not being listened to....
Is there really anything worse? If I’m not listened to, who am I?
Because I was then—had always been and would always be—my words. I was Samuel Katz, but I couldn’t actually say I was born of great words. I’d have loved to claim I was the son of a writer whose words illuminated thousands of nescient eyes, but no. In fact, my father’s words, tripping eloquently across the carbon-copied quarterly employee newsletter in the Praga branch of Bank Zachodni, which he’d managed for these past ten years, may have moved some office drones to giggle around the water cooler, but they were never of greater impact. This happened not because he lacked thoughts of inherent value or the eloquent words with which to express them, but because he chose—from timidity or humility—not to share them. He chose to remain unheard.
How can one with the ability to move mountains choose not to do so?
My father once did move mountains, in his quiet way. He moved himself from the raucous shtetl of his childhood to Warsaw. He chose to raise his family in the secular vibrancy of Warsaw’s up-and-coming Praga neighborhood. He insisted we children speak only Polish at home, despite the fact that he and Mother regularly slipped back into their childhood Yiddish, especially when they argued. He made the break with what he called the Dark Ages of Jewish life in Poland, into what he called the “enlightenment of equality and mutual respect.” We were to accord ourselves always, he reminded us nightly over family dinner, as “Poles of Jewish extraction, not Polish Jews.”
As the students filed out past me, I still smiled sheepishly while making a tidy stack of my textbooks and sliding the pile smoothly into my faded canvas rucksack.
The majority of students had already left the hall, and Jacek waited for me just outside the door, smoking, his eyes lowered to the floor. The heel of one foot casually supported his weight as he leaned against the wall in a ne’er-do-well pose. He’d adopted this “bad boy” persona as subtle compensation for his short stature, perhaps, or his entirely urbane upbringing, or some combination thereof. He pinched his cigarette so tightly between thumb and forefinger that its tip flattened into a narrow oval, on which he sucked with the intensity of a hungry infant at a nipple.
He looked up as I approached him. He peered around quickly and—he thought—surreptitiously. Jacek never realized that I knew of his embarrassment at being friends with a Jew, even though we had been friends since kindergarten.
“That was a stupid joke, malpeczko, he said. “Aren’t you ever going to learn to keep your mouth shut?” He’d called me malpeczko—monkey—ever since I’d revealed, over too many glasses of vodka one evening, that it was the diminutive of my favorite stuffed animal as a child.
“I’ll keep my mouth shut if you keep your finger out of your nose in lecture, you pig. God, it was so far up there, I swear I could hear you scratching your brain.”
Now it was his turn to smile, but only for a moment. He lowered his voice further. “Seriously, you need to watch your mouth. You don’t hear the whispers on my side of the lecture hall. The only reason they’re not louder is because the professor is a Jew, too.” Jacek got that look that always reminded me of the squirrels we loved to feed in Lazienki Park—wide-eyed, wary, concerned.
That look was the inspiration for my own hastily conceived pet name for him. “Relax, wiewiorka,” I said, far more loudly than necessary. “After all, I’m a citizen of the Great Second Republic of Poland. I have full legal rights and civic obligations, and am entitled to do or say anything that a fellow Pole unfortunate enough to have a foreskin can do or say. As long as I do it from my fucking side of the lecture hall, that is.” I looked around brazenly, hoping for an audience. There was none, but I still felt vindicated.
I’d been stunned to be relegated to the “ghetto benches” in Warsaw University lecture halls. I could think of no allegory to use, no children’s fable to quote with a moral that illustrated my point. Only these words came to me: stunned and infuriated. The order had come directly from the Polish Ministry of Education, and the university Rectors had seemed eager to comply. The decision had been, after all, widely popular among non-Jewish students. So, I’d filed into the Student Administration office one grey day last month, together with a long line of Jewish students, so a bored secretary could stamp my student ID card with the innocuous-looking and euphemistic purple stamp: “Seated on Odd Benches.”
“This is the undertow, Samuel,” my father had told me over dinner that evening, his calm voice doing little to assuage my boiling anger. “Yes, it is unpleasant, even dangerous, but it is a natural part of the tide of enlightenment on which we now float. Of course, there are those that have trouble accepting our integration into Polish society, but we have the legal and social tools to fight back, do we not? We have rights, and we must never fear to exercise them.”
By “we,” my father had apparently meant “you.” He had yet to join me in demonstrating against this affront to the enlightened Polish society in which he purported to believe. He had yet to sign his name to any of the petitions against the ghetto-bench, or to lend his words to my occasional articles in Glos Gminy Zydowskiej, the Voice of the Jewish Community. He had to consider his position in the community, he claimed. He had to consider his increasingly tenuous position at the bank.
Once again, he’d chosen to withhold his words, instead of putting them to good use.
Jacek lit another cigarette, flipping the lock of hair from his eyes to avoid singeing it as he did so. He adamantly refused to trim his bangs, thinking it lent an air of mystery to his otherwise plain visage.
I thought he looked like a poodle on a bad hair day, but had learned to hold my tongue.
“On a different note, malpeczko, why don’t you come out with us this evening? There’s a poetry reading, drinks afterwards. Would it add an extra crack to your Semitic ass if you spent one evening away from your notebooks? Maybe you’ll meet a girl, and be able to spend a few less hours in the bathroom with the lingerie catalogs.”
I stuck my tongue out at him. “I’ll leave my notebooks if you agree to finally get rid of your dolls, little girl. And don’t tell me again how they’re miniature cast-whatever soldiers. They’ll always be dolls to me.” Grinning, I turned to leave for my next class.
I did indeed have plans that evening with my notebooks. I’d reached a key juncture in my play, and had spent the day running the next scene’s dialog repeatedly through my head, but it hadn’t fully formed yet, not quite ready to come out. So, on a whim, I turned back.
“Fine. You know what, wiewiorka? I will come out this evening. Let’s see if your gentile poetry holds more my attraction for my mammoth foreskin-free putz than the pictures of your sister I’ve got under my mattress. Should I come by at 8:00, or will you still be having your diapers changed then?”
I walked away, trailing the glow of our friendly banter behind me like a cloud of sweet pipe tobacco smoke.
***
I never even considered that the evening would, defying all physical and temporal logic, never come for me. My clock stopped that afternoon, and in many ways never restarted. It stopped just after they grabbed me, pushed me against the wall, and pulled out that knife.
More accurately, it stopped when she first spoke.
