In fact, Nahman is the first to ask everyone to call him “Piotr,” adding “Jakubowski,” a Polish last name that means “Jacob’s” or “of Jacob.” Peter of Jacob. Piotr Jakubowski.
This loss of names in the Ivanie grass might be alarming, as the sight of disposable things, of transient and fleeting beings, always is, but Yente sees at the same time many things that repeat. Yente herself is repeating. The cave repeats. Repeating are the great river and the passage across it on foot. Repeating is the snow, and so, too, are the parallel sleigh tracks marking the exposed, broad space with that alarming digraph. Repeating is the stain in the snow, yellowish, unpleasant. Repeating are the goose feathers in the grass. Sometimes they catch onto people’s clothing and travel with them.
Of Pinkas, who descends into hell in search of his daughter
Pinkas, the secretary who is taking part in the council’s meetings, listens attentively to the discussions and does not miss a single word. Rarely is he bold enough to speak, fearing that his voice will begin to tremble and he will be unable to hold back his tears. Fervent prayers have not helped him, nor the chicken with which his wife removed from him any sorceries that might have been placed upon him. The chicken was then given to the poor, along with all that dust and dirt with which Pinkas’s soul had been covered.
For Pinkas, it has always been obvious that leaving the true religion and accepting another—even going so far as to be baptized—was the absolute worst thing that could happen to a true Jew and to Jews in general. Even talking about it is a terrible sin. The actual act, Pinkas can’t even imagine—it’s like dying, or worse than dying. Like drowning in vast waters, being a drowned man, and yet living—living only to experience terrible shame.
That is why, when Pinkas, writing out documents, comes to the word shmad, or “baptism,” his hand doesn’t even want to write it, and his pen rebels at the shin, mem, and dalet, as if these were not innocent letters, but rather yet another curse. He is reminded of the story of another heretic, Nehemiah Hayon, of whom everyone had talked constantly when Pinkas was young. Hayon, too, favored Sabbatian ideas and was cursed by his own people, wandered all around Europe, and was driven out of everywhere. Doors slammed shut before him. They say that when he made it to Vienna, sick and tired, the Viennese Jews also closed the door in his face, and there was no one who would dare so much as give him a cup of water. Then Hayon sat in some courtyard, right there on the ground, and cried, and didn’t even admit that he was a Jew, such was his shame, and when passersby asked what was wrong with him, he said he was a Turk. No Sabbatian, the length and breadth of Europe, could find in any decent Jew some hospitality, food, or even a kind word—nothing. At the time, there were not so many of those apostates. Now Hayon would find one of his own wherever he went.
Recently, at a council meeting, Pinkas watched as the rabbis were talking about the heretics’ book, which they treat as holy. In fact, “talking” is an exaggeration; the rabbis were more just stammering around it, exchanging a word here and there. Pinkas, who had been keeping the minutes, just listened, for when they were talking about the diabolical book, they bade him stop writing. Rabbi Rapaport, that holy man, said that reading two, three paragraphs was enough to set the hair all over your whole body on end—for that cursed book contains so much blasphemy against God and the world, and everything in it is upside down. The world knows nothing like it. Every copy of it ought to be burned.
Pinkas creeps along by the crumbling wall of a tenement house, heading to a place where he can rent a cart. The wall, which is coated in lime, leaves a white mark on his sleeve. Someone recently told him that he had seen Gitla on the market square. She was dressed as a servant and had a basket on her arm. It might not have been Gitla—it could have just been someone who resembled her. But this is why Pinkas, when he finishes his work for Rabbi Rapaport, instead of going straight home, keeps walking the streets of Lwów and scrutinizing women’s faces, so that some even mistake him for an old lecher.
Along the way, he runs into some people he knows, old merchants who, huddled together and looking excited, are having a noisy debate. Joining them, he hears again the thing that has had the whole town in an uproar since yesterday.
Two Jews from Kamieniec Podolski, disguised as peasants and armed with spades, tried to kidnap one of their daughters, who had married Leyb Abramowicz and had already prepared to be baptized, along with her child. The pair beat both of them badly, daughter and husband. Even killing her would have been better than letting her be baptized.
Thus Pinkas doesn’t really understand why the rabbis’ discussion takes a different turn. They refer to a certain letter that says they have to simply cut off these heretics, get rid of them as they would a gangrenous extremity, kick them out of the holy community for all time, condemn them and, so doing, ultimately cause them to vanish into oblivion. May their names be forgotten. He knows this letter by heart, for he has written it out hundreds of times:
Abraham haKohen of Zamość to Jacob Emden in Altona
The holy community of Lublin has paid a great deal for medicine to treat this plagued world. Our wise men who gathered in Konstantynów to confer about this matter determined that there is no way to proceed in this case other than to use cunning to force those afflicted by the plague to be baptized, for it is written: “People will live separately.” Let, then, this particular plague be cut off from the children of Israel for all time. Let us thank God that some of them have already been baptized, among them the cursed Elisha Shorr, may his name be erased. With respect to those who have not yet converted and are still donning Jewish attire and attending services in our houses of prayer, we shall be diligent in informing the Christian authorities as soon as we have discovered these supposed Jews’ hidden intentions. That is why we have already sent our messenger to Lwów, that he might arrive there before the sect of these villains does, to meet with the papal nuncio and present him with our report. May there be a chance to put these destroyers, these dogs, these heretics working against God in prison and to place upon them the curse we placed several years ago on one Moshe of Podhajce and on their evil leader, Jacob Frank.
Pinkas is profoundly convinced that the old tradition of their forefathers was the right approach, to pass over all matters connected with Sabbatai Tzvi in silence; nothing good, nothing bad, no cursing, no blessing. A thing that is not talked about ceases to exist. He contemplates that wisdom as he sits on a quaking cart that is covered in a fustian sheet. So great is the power of the word that wherever it is lacking, the world just disappears. Next to him sit some peasant women dressed up as if they are going to a wedding, along with two older Jews, a man and a woman. They keep trying to talk to him, but Pinkas resists their attempts at conversation.
Why talk? If you want to rid the world of someone, it does not take fire and sword, nor any type of violence. You just have to pass over that person in silence and never call him by name. In this way, he will gradually recede into oblivion. If another person insists on inquiring into the matter, you must threaten him with herem.
He stays in Borszczów with the rabbi, as the messenger of Reb Rapaport. He has brought with him a whole bag of writings and letters. Including the one about the heretics. They read it in front of all of the members of the kahal in the evening, in a cramped room where little bits of soot fly up toward the ceiling from the smoking candles.
The next day, Pinkas goes to the Borszczów mikvah. It is a shack with boarded-up windows and a sunken roof. Inside, it is split in two—on one side, the bony bath attendant, black with soot and in a cloud of smoke, throws beech logs into the stove and heats water in a pot. On the other side, in semidarkness, are two wooden baths for the women. Farther along, a reservoir with a capacity of forty buckets is dug into the ground. Its perimeter is strewn with the remnants of candles, an uneven rim of stearin and tallow, slippery, smelly, littered with black wicks. Pinkas submerges himself in the lukewarm water seventy-two times, then squats so that the water comes up to his
beard. He examines the mostly gray cloud of beard as it floats on the surface. Let me find her, he thinks, and he repeats those words in his mind: Let me find her, find her, let me just find her in one piece, I will forgive her, let me find her, that child, that child with the delicate soul, please, let me find her.
It takes a long time, this anxious prayer said in secret, for no one knows of Pinkas’s intentions. He realizes that it is late when he starts shivering. The bony, grimy bath attendant has gone off somewhere, and the fire under the pot has gone out altogether. Pinkas is alone in the mikvah. With a rough linen towel he dries himself until his skin hurts. The next day, pretending to be returning to Lwów but trusting in God, he hires a terrible driver and his terrible cart and heads for Ivanie.
The closer they get to Ivanie, the more traffic there is. He sees carts loaded with equipment, then a whole cart of potatoes covered with a big old horse blanket and a big basket of nuts, and beside it two men chatting, not paying attention to anyone else. He sees a family with several children and all their belongings on the cart, on their way somewhere from Kamieniec. These are they, he thinks. He feels disgust toward them, they seem dirty to him—their kapotas, their stockings, for some of them dress like the Hasidim do, while others dress like peasants, in peasant sukmana. How he must have sinned, for his daughter to be among these people.
“And who are you?” some bruiser asks in a hostile tone, from his post by the gate, which is nailed together from pieces of wood and adorned with spruce branches. The needles have crumbled off, and the bare branches look like spikes, like barbed wire.
“I’m a Jew just like you are,” Pinkas says calmly.
“Where from?”
“From Lwów.”
“What do you want from us?”
“I’m looking for my daughter. Gitla . . . She’s tall . . .” He doesn’t know how to describe her.
“Are you one of us? Are you a true believer?”
Pinkas doesn’t know what to say. He wrestles with it, then finally answers:
“No.”
The bruiser seems to feel respect for this older, well-dressed man. He has Pinkas wait, and after a long while, he brings up a woman. She is wearing a light-colored apron and has keys in her richly ruffled skirt. Her face, in a bonnet like the Christian women wear, is focused and sensitive.
“Gitla,” says Pinkas, and his tone unintentionally turns pleading. “She left last year, when . . .” Pinkas doesn’t know what to call him. “. . . when he was going around the villages. She was seen in Busk. Tall, young.”
“I know you from somewhere,” the woman says.
“I am Pinkas Abramowicz of Lwów, her father.”
“That’s right, I know who you are. Your daughter isn’t here. I haven’t seen her in a year or so.”
Hava feels like adding something hurtful. She feels like spitting at his feet. Saying, for instance, “Perhaps the Turks are blowing the grounsils with her now?” But she sees that all the air has gone out of him, his chest has deflated, he has suddenly shrunk. He reminds her of her father. She tells him to wait, and then she goes to fetch a little food for him, but he is no longer standing by the gate when she gets back.
Antoni Moliwda-Kossakowski writes to Katarzyna Kossakowska
In Łowicz, Moliwda sits down at the table and dips his pen in ink. Right away he blots the page, which he always considers to be a kind of warning. He sprinkles sand on it, and then he carefully scratches it from the paper with the tip of the penknife. It takes him a while. He begins:
My Ever Honored Lady,
You shall have such credit in heaven for your efforts on behalf of the Contra-Talmudists, who are already coming into Lwów in droves and setting up their camps like Gypsies, on the outskirts, right there on the ground—so impassioned are they about their new faith. But you, dear madam, as a woman with your wits about you, know perfectly well that behind this is not only a suddenly awakened love for the cross, but also other considerations, perhaps not so lofty, yet certainly very human and understandable.
The news has reached me here that they have written one more supplication, and it is a good thing that by some miracle it passed through my hands. When I glanced at the signatures, I saw: Solomon ben Elisha Shorr of Rohatyn and Yehuda ben Nussen, otherwise known as Krysa of Nadwórna—it was the two of them who knocked out this petition.
The blood ran to my head as I read. For what do you think they were demanding?
First, they complain that they are holed up in the Kamieniec bishop’s village, where they live off alms and the support of their brothers from Hungary—while they themselves remain without work. Then they write—and here I shall quote for you directly—“We demand first to settle in Busk and Gliniany, where a community of true believers has remained, and where we would therefore have means of seeking out our livelihoods, whether through trade or through craft, so long as it not offend Our Father. For we do not expect any of our own to subsist on innkeeping or to earn our bread in the service of drunkenness or by the extenuation of Christian blood, as the Talmudists have grown used to doing.”
And they go on to enumerate conditions, saying that after their baptism they wish to continue living in their little collective, that they do not want to cut their payot, that they want to mark their Shabbat as well as Sundays, and that they want to keep their Jewish names alongside the new Catholic ones, that they will not eat pork, they will be able to marry only amongst themselves and maintain their holy books, especially the Zohar.
How could I have shown this letter to the primate? They had had it copied out at the printer’s and translated into many languages to boot. I referred the matter to him only in broad strokes, not reading the letter itself, to which the primate responded, and this I consider to be final: “What’s the sense in listening to those people? A disputation is a disputation, but as soon as that’s done, there will be baptism. No conditions. After the baptism, we’ll see how they live, what kinds of Christians they are. But let them delay no further.”
If you could, dear madam, as you are not too far from Ivanie, warn Jacob that he is squandering the opportunities that have been given so freely to him and his people by permitting such deviations, and apply some pressure to him.
I must in addition warn you about Bishop Sołtyk, for rumors abound that he has gotten into terrible debt and finds himself in a very uncomfortable position, vulnerable to any type of influence. This is why he is quick to accept gifts, which are, of course, pervasive in this country. The weight of the Commonwealth rests upon gifts, everyone has something to give everyone else, in order to secure protection, aid, support. That is just the way it is, as you of course know perfectly well already. Often it is the tallest crops that yield the least. So, too, those who put on proud and boastful airs often prove to be mere empty vessels, with the least understanding, merit, or skill. That is why I must warn you, dear madam, that the bishop’s intentions are woven together out of all sorts of different ribbons, some of them beautiful and pure, others tattered and muddied. It was reported to me that in Warsaw he was recently spotted meeting with our royal cashier . . .
Katarzyna Kossakowska to Antoni Moliwda-Kossakowski
. . . You must not talk so about our dear Kajetan, for he is fully devoted to our cause. I know he tries to kill many birds with one stone, being a seasoned player, and that he does not need any special sympathy from me, yet it is a dangerous thing to try to show that we have a better understanding than those whose opinions must be held to be infallible. Let us simply take what is best about him.
There is another supporter now, too—I was able to convince Prince Jabłonowski, my dear friend’s husband, to join our cause. And since he always goes about everything rather methodically, he immediately came up with this great notion that on his property we might create a little Jewish realm under his protection. He became so enthused about the idea that now he is going around his estates trying to get everyone on board with it. I would like the idea were it not for the fact that
the prince is a bit chimerical and slightly flighty, and such a project would of course require great efforts and undertakings. The prince has read all about Paraguay, a country in America created out of similar poverty and savagery, the existence of which so fascinates the prince that he will not discuss anything else, and has not for some time. I asked him what those gentlemen live off over there, and the prince responds that there are no gentlemen there, and that everyone is just as equal in their property as they are before God, so from this, you understand, I can conclude that it is not for me!
The prince is known for his superior self-esteem. He carries himself like a royal, with his head held so high he often gets tripped up on his own legs. It is a good thing he has the wife he does, sensible and wise, who treats him like an overgrown child and ignores his eccentric excesses. I saw in their home a large picture with a representation of the Virgin Mary, before whom he had had himself painted tipping his cap to her as she stops him and says, “Couvrez-vous, mon cousin.”
We have also been joined by Prince Jerzy Marcin Lubomirski, who has agreed to accept one hundred and fifty neophytes onto his land and offer them hospitality there, as he is known for his great generosity (some would call it profligacy), and has become a great advocate of the matter, much like Bishop Załuski . . .
Of the cross and dancing in the abyss
In the afternoon of that same March day, a cross is brought from Kamieniec, a gift from the bishop, and a letter with an invitation.
Jacob first speaks with Rabbi Moshe, and then, considerably moved, he has everyone gather in the common room at dusk. He is the last to arrive, dressed in his finest Turkish gown with his tall hat on his head, which makes him seem even taller. The women line up, and he stands in the middle with the cross.
The Books of Jacob Page 55