Hirshke the Canary started by warbling in his high falsetto, “Dear brothers, we have come together to redress a wrong, but we don’t know who the culprit is. Some crook with no ties to our organization had the nerve to clean out a business on my turf without my knowledge. If that isn’t enough, he robbed Ortshik the Barber, who took one of our own, Libke the Waitress, to live an honest life with her. I have to inform everyone that as long as Hirshke the Canary walks down Krupnitshe Street, such behavior will not be tolerated. It’s true that I don’t know who to go after, but I swear to you, my dear brothers, in the name of my freedom, if I capture that scoundrel, he’ll not only have to bring everything back at his own expense, he’ll be carried out of Vilna in pieces.”
Hirshke’s lecture made an impression. The table shook under the banging of fists. Guys remembered old injustices and stirred up forgotten matters. Dodke the Ace threatened to pull a knife out of his bootleg. If it hadn’t been for Zelik the Benefactor, the meeting would have ended in a bloodbath. Zelik asked Itske to bring a few more liters of whiskey to calm everyone down.
After the crowd settled down a little, Rabbi Kivele gave them a piece of his mind. “Even though God gave you this kind of work, you should still behave like decent human beings. There’s a specific law in the Shulchan aruch about this matter. We have to make sure that the city of Vilna, the Jerusalem of Lithuania, is not disgraced. The thief had better return everything, down to the last thread. If not, we’ll have to light black candles and call for the culprit’s excommunication. At that point, the thief better not fault the all-powerful God if he burns his hands on whatever he touches. As long as God helps, the most difficult locks will open for you. But without Him, at some point you’ll open a door to find a full slop pail.” After warning them to keep God in their hearts, Rabbi Kivele downed a shot of whiskey and went home.
At dawn, Ortshik set off with a little ladder. He wanted to remove the sign over his barbershop before anyone was stirring in the streets, so no one would see him. The meeting of the underworld organization had upset everyone, but so far, nothing had come of it. Hirshke the Canary assured Ortshik that everything would be returned. He knew his people. “Even if my fraternal request doesn’t help, do you think people will ignore Rabbi Kivele’s warning? Excommunication with black candles is no laughing matter. The entire passageway is in turmoil.”
With sad steps, Ortshik walked along Kleyn Stephan Street to Krupnitshe Street. The pre-Passover sun yawned, stretching its pink limbs over the Viliye. In the early morning light, shadows could be seen packing up their wares. Gradually it grew brighter. Puddles of melted snow captured the sun’s rays, dragging them into the gutters. Ortshik jumped over the springtime rivulets. He felt no joy at the prospect of the days ahead when he would be able to put his baby in the buggy and take a Shabbes walk with his little family down Breyte Street to the Bernardine Garden.
Over the past few days, Ortshik had started to philosophize. He remembered one of his father’s sayings. “It’s a foolish world. A man hustles and bustles, fusses and frets, and what does he get? The devil comes along and takes everything. Then he’s left high and dry. He could have lived it up with his few zlotys, eaten some udder, and gone to the theater.” But what was past was past. When Ortshik reached his barbershop, he sighed deeply and resolved that from here on, he would know how to live on this earth.
Ortshik leaned his ladder against the wall above the window and was about to lift his foot up to the first step when a shudder went through his entire body. For a moment, he stood in front of the window like a stork, with one leg raised. Then he pinched himself, quickly freed the iron bar from the hanging lock, and pulled the door wide open.
The barbershop was ready to receive customers, as though nothing had happened. Everything was in place: the chairs, the mirrors, the hair dryer for women, and all the furniture. The shaving knives, scissors, soap mugs, and clippers were perfectly arranged on the shelves. The smock with the little blue collar was also there, without a speck. Libke’s painting of the woman in her nightgown hung on the same nail from which it had been taken.
Dazed, Ortshik touched every tool and every screw. He opened one shaving knife after another and tried a comb on his own hair. Was this a dream or reality? Now he understood why Hirshke the Canary had told him, in no uncertain terms, that neither he nor Libke should leave home on Saturday evening, not even for a second.
Ortshik was about to lock the door and run home to tell Libke the good news when he noticed a brush lying in the corner by the doorway—a dark brown brush with short hair for a stiff beard. He’d bought the brush when he started at Bendel’s as an apprentice. Ortshik held the brush in both hands as though it was a beloved little bird that had fallen from her nest. For the first time since he had entered the trade, Ortshik the Barber wet a brush with his own hot tears.
8
Vladek
I want to tell you about Vladek, one of Yusef the janitor’s boys. Yusef was a goy who drank constantly and hit his wife and children whenever he felt like it. His son Vladek wasn’t safe at home, so he grew up with us. The cellar where they lived was always dark. Yusef’s wife had something on the boil all day long—either wash or cabbage. The steam only let up a little in the evenings.
Vladek hung out with us, the courtyard children. He didn’t do too badly. Sometimes he got a piece of challah, other times a bit of buckwheat kugel—whatever one of our mothers had shoved into our hands. We didn’t have much ourselves. The courtyard was full of poor, barefoot people, one poorer than the next. Seremetinke, the owner of the courtyard, was always fighting with his tenants about rent money. He was hardly a rich man himself.
When we were young, Vladek had somewhere to go. But when we got bigger, we were sent to a Talmud Torah, the Toras Emes School. Vladek was miserable. He had nothing to eat and no one to play with. In the afternoons, he stood watch, waiting for us to return.
We didn’t walk to Toras Emes, we ran. They handed out American milk and wheat dumplings. We played cops and robbers in the large courtyard. No one pushed us very hard to study. Our teacher, Mr. Gershovitsh, knew who he was dealing with, so he gave up without a struggle. Tevke the Tapeworm, Orke the Lucky Seven, and Shmuel the Organ Grinder’s Twin sat in the first row. They were already thugs by then. We had another teacher, the tiny Miss Funk, one of the daughters from Funk’s bookstore. We called her by her first name, Chana-Bashka. She tried teaching us at first, but eventually she also let go of the reins.
Figure 2. “Vladek wasn’t safe at home, so he grew up with us.” By Yosl Bergner from Avrom Karpinovitsh, Baym Vilner durkhhoyf (Tel Aviv: I. L. Peretz, 1967). Courtesy of the artist.
If it hadn’t been for the principal, Mr. Ayzikov, we would have looted the entire Talmud Torah, brick by brick. He barely talked to us but just gave us a look. Even if we were rolling on the ground and grabbing each other by the throat, one look from him was enough to send us crawling into the corners like wild animals in a circus. We sat quietly during his lessons. Sometimes he’d walk between the benches and stroke one of our heads, something that never happened at home. If we, hooligans that we were, left the school knowing how to write a letter from prison or give an accounting to a fence, we had only our teacher Mr. Ayzikov to thank.
Once Vladek asked his father to send him to school. Yusef was drunk. He beat Vladek badly and chased him out of the cellar. The only thing the janitor cared about was his bottle of whiskey. Vladek got tired of wandering around the courtyard on his own, so he started following us to the Talmud Torah in the mornings. One recess, Mr. Ayzikov noticed him and asked him what he was doing there. Vladek explained. Mr. Ayzikov was surprised to hear him speaking Yiddish. He told the other teachers to give him food along with the other children. Tevke started smuggling Vladek into class. Mr. Gershovitsh was ill and Chana-Bashka had no idea what to say. She was afraid if she walked through the classroom, one of us would grab the front of her dress. I got a pencil stub and a piece of paper for Vladek and he learned
the alef-beys with the rest of us.
And so we grew up and went off, some earlier, some later. Every person at home was an extra mouth to feed. Lots of families didn’t know where their next meal was coming from. The courtyard was in constant turmoil. Yusef died from drinking, and people started chopping up the bannisters to heat their ovens during the winter. Even Seremetinke stopped coming around to inspect his property. There was a brawl in the courtyard every single day.
We boys spread out through the city trying to find a way to earn a few groschen. Some of us managed to organize something. Zevke the Little Mirror started selling the Ovnt-Kurier newspaper. Shmuel, the Organ Grinder’s elder son, had a good voice, so he sang and begged for money. One of the coachmen hired Tevke the Tapeworm. Vladek and I wrenched copper doorknobs off expensive doors and sold them for scrap. Before that, we’d tried working on the freight cars on Bunimovitsh’s branch line going into Kinkulkin’s mill, but it didn’t pan out. One day there was work and ten days, nothing.
And so we got drawn into the profession. We stopped coming home to sleep. No one really cared. My father was ashamed of me. Even though our neighborhood was swarming with criminals, he never had anything to do with them. He collected rags for the Olkeniker paper factory until the day he died and never took so much as a thread for himself. My father even told my mother not to take money from me, but what choice did she have? Aside from letting her children go hungry. Vladek also used to toss a little something into the cellar. He wasn’t a bad sheygetz.
Life went on. Before long, we’d served a few long sentences in Lukishke prison. I lost touch with Vladek a few times. He tried settling down outside the city. The life of a criminal just wasn’t for him. Prison was really hard on him. As for me, after my last year in the clink, I also started to hate that life.
When people took off for the Soviet Union, I went looking for Vladek and said, “Let’s go. We’ll start over, get some training and live an honest life.” Vladek was enthusiastic. We went to Hirshke the Canary, who took people across the border. Ten of us crossed into the Soviet Union at Radoshkovich. There was a long red banner with the words “A New Life Awaits You” hanging from the military outpost in Zaslov.
They took us to the Minsk prison. There was a famine in Russia and people were starving to death. In jail, we lived on two hundred grams of bread a day. We whittled pieces of wood from the bed planks for cigarettes. At that point, Lukishke was looking pretty good as far as prisons went. Vladek was going under. He didn’t have the strength to stand up.
It was quite the new life. They interrogated us, hitting us everywhere. We told the truth: who we were and what we wanted. The officials wrote and erased. At one point, they took a group of detainees and ordered us into formation and onto a train. We had no idea where the train was taking us until the last minute. In the middle of the night, they ordered us to leave the heated freight car and told us they were sending us back to Poland. If we wanted a lighter sentence, we should tell the Polish border guard we were getting ready to cross into Russia. The Russian official told us we were being sent back to set up a Soviet government in Poland. In Mołodeczno we were convicted of trying to cross the border. We got off with a few months.
I want to talk about Vladek. We returned from Mołodeczno in rags, without a groschen. Vladek was so weak, he could barely speak. He went to stay with distant relatives in one of the villages to regain his strength. I asked Itsik the Buckwheat Pudding if I could keep score in the pool hall. It was a way to survive, at least in the short term. I got drawn into the world of the pool hall. There was no difference between day and night. Everything went by in a fog.
A good few months passed. One day the door of the pool hall opened and in walked Vladek, looking well fed and wearing a nice suit. He didn’t rush over and throw his arms around me. He played a few games and then asked if I wanted to go to Velfke’s restaurant with him for some liver with kishke.
Vladek was looking good. In our trade, you don’t ask a person how they got their money; you wait to be told. But I was miserable and wanted out of the pool hall. So I broke the rule and asked Vladek if he’d snagged a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity or if he could bring a partner into the business. Vladek laughed so hard the glasses on the table shook. I was looking straight at him, but I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. When he calmed down a little, he said, “It’s a business all right, but not for you.”
I was insulted. “What do you mean, not for me? Haven’t we broken enough locks together? You doubt my skill?”
“Well,” he answered, “if you’re ready to picket Khanovitsh’s ready-made clothing shop and make sure no goyim enter, then okay.”
I couldn’t believe it. “You? You’ve joined those hooligans? Do you realize they don’t let Jews walk the streets?”
“We tell them not to carry sticks. Anyway, I do other things.”
I got up from the table. Vladek called after me, “I’m done with being a criminal. No more jail for me.”
Jewish students were being beaten up at Vilna University. And the anti-Semites hired guards to stand outside Jewish shops and stop Christian customers from entering. The threat of violence hung over the city and here Vladek was part of it.
I made for the exit. Here I’d thought he’d offered me whiskey to celebrate his success with a cashbox. But drinking to the money he was earning now? I left the restaurant without looking back.
To this very day, I don’t understand what was going on with Vladek at that time. The sheygetz was raised in a Jewish courtyard. He knew the alefbeys as well as any of us. So well in fact that Zelik the Benefactor, a trustee for the small prison synagogue, once tried to include Vladek in a prayer minyan for a yortzayt service. I’d recruited Vladek into the profession and made something of him. And after all that, he went and joined the hooligans, the students with foxtails on their caps who beat up Jews. Had the Minsk prison broken his spirit? Quite possibly. After all, there were plenty of ways to earn money at that time. Mitsken was putting people to sleep on the trains and needed a helper to steal their suitcases. Handsome Mishke was looking for someone to travel to the fairs with him and sell fake lottery tickets. Vladek could have had any one of those jobs. He had a good reputation with us. But the gangsters decided the wolf had gone into the forest, and that was that.
I’d grown up with Vladek and knew him better than anyone. I remembered when we were boys and went swimming at the French mill. When the village louts attacked, Vladek was the first to grab a brick, even though they kept yelling they weren’t after him.
The situation with Vladek really bothered me. I waited for an opportunity to talk to him. I knew the guys wanted to knife him. They said it was a short road from picketing to informing. I had to warn him. After all, he was no stranger.
The goons from the student associations used to sit in Sztral’s Café. Behind the café there was a pool hall, one of the best in the city. That’s where the party underlings, guys who earned their money breaking windows or causing a ruckus on market days, hung out. I knew Vladek spent his evenings there. I went to Sztral’s, but I didn’t go in. I didn’t want the goyim to pick a fight with me and for Vladek to get pulled in. I asked Yane the Scorekeeper to tell Vladek I was waiting outside for him.
I remember our meeting like it was yesterday. It was a summer night. We sat on the grass next to the Viliye. The guys who pulled logs out of the water were baking potatoes on campfires at the river’s edge. Some of the light from the fire reached us, and I saw Vladek’s swollen face. He looked like he’d started drinking heavily. For a moment I thought about his father, our courtyard, and our childhood. I wanted to say something, to scold him like a younger brother and tell him to give up the whiskey, but before I could say a word, he stood up and said, “So, you want to pull a heist?”
I felt like he’d doused me with cold water. Can you believe it? Yusef’s son Vladek had become honest and I was just a thief with nothing on my mind but breaking into a stranger’s shop in the dea
d of night. Vladek obviously thought he was better than me, so who was I to tell him how to live his life? I just warned him that the guys were watching him. They’d figured him for an informer.
Vladek flew into a rage. He grabbed at his chest. “Let them stab me. Just let them, those dirty dogs. If it wasn’t for me, Zevulin the Peach would have rotted away in Lukishke.”
There was a story going around about Zevulin the Peach. He’d been a big shot in the gangster’s organization, the Golden Flag, and some of the guys had questioned his authority. An argument broke out and Zevulin thrashed a few of them. He’d had to get out of Vilna quickly. Someone had definitely helped him get papers. Now Vladek was telling me he’d had a hand in it.
Vladek was standing with his face to the river, breathing heavily. I put a hand on his shoulder, “Vladek, maybe we’re destined to be criminals. There are people like that.”
“No. Not me. They promised me, when they take power, they’ll give me a job on the trains. I want to work. I want to be like other people.”
In the time I’d known Vladek, he’d never been a big-time crook. A real criminal loves the trade and the risks that come with it, but that just wasn’t in Vladek’s blood. He’d dreamt of becoming a machinist all his life. They’d promised him exactly that, so he was doing their bidding. Meanwhile his bosses were happy to look for Jewish children in the streets to crack their heads open.
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