by Ilsa J. Bick
ccage: Wow, that’s big.
sarah13: Yeah, they can weigh up to 40 pounds. I read that if someone drops a Torah scroll, the whole congregation has to fast for more than a month. Anyway, they’re like these really holy objects and I guess they were still in the sanctuary. The reporter said that one of the synagogue members tried going back in, only your great-grandfather stopped him and went in himself. Then the roof caved.
Holy crap. I wondered if Uncle Hank knew this. Ten to one, he didn’t. So never mind that this was a piece of Winter’s past that no one ever talked about—which was kind of ironic, considering that our assignment had been to look at local history. Yet hadn’t Dr. Rainier said history was written by the winners? In this case, the town’s history had been completely whitewashed, obliterated, relegated to old newspapers.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. I mean, I was a prime example of something people wanted to forget. Ignore me to death and eventually I’ll go away. I could see that this might all be stuff people really wanted erased: the day the Germans came, the murder, the fire, all of it.
Perhaps the fire had been the final straw. After all that had happened, maybe it was just too much for the Jews of Winter to bear.
What would it be like to watch your community dissolve around you? Hell, that’s what. Mr. Witek would already be cut off from the community because of his father. His friends would drop away one by one. Pavel wouldn’t want to swing with him anymore. The other kids in school wouldn’t talk to him, or they’d elbow one another as he walked by. Going to school must’ve been torture, the whispers swirling in his wake.
I knew all about that kind of life. I lived it. Only I hadn’t left, not yet anyway. Planning on it, though. College never looked so good.
But here was what I didn’t get: why had Mr. Witek come back?
sarah13: Helloooo? You okay?
I shook myself back to attention.
ccage: Yeah. Sorry. Just thinking. This is a lot to take in all at once.
Then I remembered.
Did you figure out where the synagogue was in town?
sarah13: 8th and North Lake Street. Here, I’ll send you a picture.
I clicked on the link, and a scan of an old newspaper page appeared on my screen. The article, on page eight, was from the Milwaukee Post-Dispatch and was dated 5 November 1945. The story had been buried and took up one column along the lower right of the page. Above the headline—Fire Destroys Town Synagogue, Kills 15—was a black-and-white photograph of the synagogue as it had looked before being destroyed.
I took one look and thought: Of course, it had to be.
The White Lady was a synagogue.
XXIII
We IMed a little more; I told Sarah about the forensic anthropologist, and that got her all excited. Before we logged off, Sarah said:
sarah13: Oh, I forgot. I searched for that woman, Catherine Bleverton. I mean, we ALL know about Mr. Eisenmann, but his wife’s name was Judith, not Catherine.
She was right. That had flown right past me.
ccage: So tell me already.
sarah13: There wasn’t much. She was the daughter of some brewer down in Milwaukee, not as big as Pabst but in the same league. All I found out was that she drowned in 1946.
ccage: The very next year? After the murder?
sarah13: Not even. More like six, seven months. Some kind of boating accident. The newspapers didn’t say much, but if you read between the lines, I think she pulled a Natalie Wood.
ccage: What? Who?
sarah13:
ccage: Was there an autopsy? sarah13: I don’t know. I mean, it was an accident and this was 1946, so . . . What? You think this is connected? Like how?
I didn’t know. I wasn’t even sure I thought the murder and Catherine Bleverton’s death were related, just that it seemed kind of bad karma for all that stuff to happen so close together.
I guess I was thinking like Uncle Hank. For a cop, there are no coincidences.
I told Sarah I’d see her tomorrow at Dr. Rainier’s house and then turned off my computer. Tiptoeing to the top of the stairs—careful to avoid the creaky board dead center—I listened. I heard Uncle Hank’s low growl and Dr. Rainier’s soft, musical murmur, punctuated by the splash of water and clink of cutlery and glass. They were doing the dishes and talking. Just like . . . a couple.
That gave me a very complicated feeling.
I got ready for bed and then stretched out on top of my sheets. My entire body craved sleep; my brain felt sore, but I couldn’t calm down. I had the sense that I had disparate bits and pieces of an important story and that I was very close to things falling into place. You know how trees and garbage get all jammed up in strainers sometimes? That’s how my brain felt: like a logjam with white water roaring all around, only now things were moving, the strainer breaking up, and logs starting to float free and pick up speed.
After about a half hour of this—enough to hear the front door close and Dr. Rainier’s truck rumble off and Uncle Hank’s slow step up the stairs to his room—I flicked on a bedside lamp, padded to where I’d tossed my jeans, fished out my list, and then settled back against some pillows.
I’d inked in more information alongside some of the items—the White Lady as an old synagogue, for example—but there were now other things I knew, avenues to explore, and I felt as if I needed to order all this into some coherent narrative, if just for myself.
Flipping to a blank piece of paper, I wrote:
Mordecai Mendel Witek was a Polish artist who moved to Winter sometime after 1935. His wife’s name was Chana; they had two children, Marta and David. Witek worked in Eisenmann’s foundry as a ceramics artist, and during that time, he became involved with the labor unions. The unions must have had a lot of Jewish members because there was a large enough Jewish population to support a synagogue, Beth Tikva, which was nicknamed the White Lady, and the Jewish community let the unions use the synagogue for their meetings.
In June 1945, Eisenmann lent the dormitories on his foundry’s grounds to the military to house German prisoners of war. This wouldn’t be so hard because of all the Germans in town. The PWs were brought into Winter to work the fields and supply manpower for the foundry.
Something dinged in my head. Something important there, but I was missing it. I chased after the thought a couple seconds, staring at that last paragraph a moment, but nothing surfaced.
I continued: There must’ve been problems with the unions before this because the PWs had been in the U.S. since 1942. Maybe Eisenmann had asked for them before, and maybe he had to wait his turn, but Eisenmann’s a rich guy. He can get what he wants. Also, there are clearly enough workers in the foundry to support a union— so maybe the idea of getting the Germans to work here was to break the unions, not because Eisenmann really needed the help. This would be a way of rubbing the Jewish union members’ noses in it, by threatening to give their jobs to Nazis if the union called a strike.
Oh, I liked that. Eisenmann was ruthless enough to do that. I knew this was precisely the way other manufacturers had broken unions before: calling in scabs to work the jobs the union vacated. I knew from history class that there had been some well-known strikes in Wisconsin during the Great Depression.
I went back to my narrative:
The Germans arrive. Witek is a union official, and he’s pissed and so are the other union members. But there’s nothing they can do about it.
I stopped again. Here, my narrative started to break down. The Germans arrived in June or July; the murder happened in October. So what happened in between?
According to the newspapers, somewhere in that time period—or maybe before—Witek either had an affair or became obsessed with Charles
Eisenmann’s fiancée, Catherine Bleverton.
So what if Eisenmann decided to meet Witek and have it out with him, tell him to stay away from his fiancée or else? Witek went bonkers, attacked Eisenmann; Brotz was maybe someone Eisenmann brought along as a witness. Only Brotz gets killed; Eisenmann gets cut up; Witek panics and runs away....
Leaving his wife and kids? That may have made sense, but it didn’t feel right. But it did make sense because . . .
“Oh boy.” I actually hit my head with my hand. “You are so stupid.”
Katarina at Sunset. The painting of Catherine in Mr. Witek’s room: the one of the woman in the red silk kimono.
And now that I was really thinking about it, that weird jumbled dream bubbled up in my brain—the one about a garden room and brook and Papa painting....
I could fire up my computer again—but I didn’t really need to. I didn’t need to look up the various spellings of a particular name or figure out if one was the Russian or Eastern European variation. I knew it was. There were David’s charged, horrified memories, after all. So I knew that this is what I would find: Katarina and Catherine Bleverton—Mr. Eisenmann’s fiancée—were one and the same.
Well, that probably wasn’t a good thing.
On the other hand, women posed for artists all the time. Except Catherine Bleverton was rich, an heiress. She’d have a position in society. I doubted she wanted just anyone to see her nude because she’d surely have been recognized. And where would Mordecai Witek and Catherine Bleverton have met, and how? He was an immigrant Jew, probably poor, and married. He had kids. It wasn’t like they’d go to church and meet up with the Blevertons in the pews.
Milwaukee? Maybe. That’s where she lived and where Witek was when he first came to Wisconsin. I remembered the numbers above and below the Star of David signature Witek favored: 3 and 9. The numbers on the kimono painting were 4 and 5. Dates. They probably referenced a year. Maybe Witek actually met and painted Catherine Bleverton in 1939, way before she knew Eisenmann. So she and Witek had known each other for nine years? Maybe ten?
Wow.
Well, why not? I didn’t know what the rules of the Lakeside Arts Festival were, but I suspected an artist could enter anything he wanted, old or new. Entering that painting of a wellknown woman would’ve been seen as either incredibly daring or sensationally scandalous. It certainly made people sit up and take notice—and it solidified Witek’s reputation.
So was that when they started their affair? In 1939?
Even as I thought this, I realized there was another scenario. Catherine Bleverton might have commissioned the portrait herself. Witek might not have initiated a thing. Maybe she saw something he’d done and sought him out. Catherine could’ve said she wanted something scandalous for whatever reason. Then, years later, when Witek’s star is rising, she commissions another portrait, just as sensual. I wondered where the kimono portrait had been done. By 1940, Witek was living in Winter. So either they’d kept in touch or she contacted him in 1945 to paint her again. But by then, she’d have been engaged to Charles Eisenmann and . . .
Holy crap.
So an affair was discovered and a man was killed accidentally, and Witek went on the run—but then why the wolves? Why the swastikas?
It was so frustrating. The clues were there but jumbled up in David’s mind. For example, those wolves . . . no, no, men— Germans—who turned into wolves.
Then I remembered what Pavel had said: Wolfsangels.
So I broke down, flicked on the computer, and looked them up.
Turned out that Wolfsangel—or “wolf’s hook”—is an old German symbol that has two meanings. The upright version’s called a thunderbolt; the horizontal variant means . . . werewolf. Men who turn into wolves.
And, the Wolfsangel was used as a symbol for the 8th Panzer Division, World War II.
Okay, then riddle number two: what was with the barn?
Yeah, yeah, I knew that was where his father had murdered a man and attacked Charles Eisenmann, who must’ve confronted Witek about the affair. The barn had tremendous significance to David, which made sense.
Only here was something: why mix up the wolves and the barn? Was that only because David knew that German prisoners had worked the bean fields? That might explain it. The Germans would’ve been traumatic enough for the Jewish population. Given David’s history, the barn would be loaded. Only I wasn’t quite sure I bought that. David had seen Germans at the train station and the foundry, but I had gone to the barn. I had painted the barn, not the train station and not the foundry.
Here was another thing: I had climbed up to the hayloft, dangled from a window, and spray-painted a pair of wolf’s eyes and swastikas and the words I SEE YOU.
But David had seen his father, who wasn’t German but Polish. Had Brotz been a prisoner? No, that didn’t sound right; the paper said he was a local. I was missing something but what?
Okay, riddle number three: Could I time travel at will? Could I make it happen and do it while I was awake and not dreaming?
Only one way to find out.
Pen and pad in hand, I closed my eyes and imagined a simple blank canvas. I would jot things down as I went along; after all, I’d done this in my sleep. So maybe now.
XXIV
Well, the short answer was no. Not then, anyway.
The only thing new I had when I woke up was a crick in my neck from falling asleep sitting up. That and a nagging sense that something important had happened, but I couldn’t put my sheets from where I’d moved around during the night but nothing on the pad. Either David was off-line or I was just too exhausted. I suppose that was possible.
As I was brushing my teeth, though, the image of the White Lady—Beth Tikva—swam into my brain. There had to be someone who knew more about that place or the people who’d been here—because I was still having trouble wrapping my head around how a whole community just pulled up stakes and left.
After a few minutes’ Googling, I found what I was looking for: the Wisconsin Jewish Museum. The museum’s website said it had all kinds of archival material, which was good, but the museum was in Milwaukee, a three-hour drive from here. Also, the museum closed early every Friday and remained closed all day Saturday. The good news was they were open on Sundays, which was the only day I could get away anyway. I checked the hours and thought I’d call and say . . . what? Hi, I’m a stupid kid from Winter, and there used to be a synagogue here, only it burned down and everyone left, and do you have any idea why?
I clicked on Contact Us and that took me to a page that talked about archival services and how to submit questions. What did I have to lose?
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Winter Synagogue
To Whom It May Concern:
My name is Christian Cage, and I’m a junior at Winter High School in Winter, Wisconsin. As part of a local history project, I’ve discovered that there used to be a synagogue in our town called Beth Tikva. It also went by the nickname, the “White Lady.” This synagogue burned down in November 1945 and was never rebuilt. I would like to understand why. I would also like to understand why the Jewish population here left the town. Is this because there was a German prisoner-ofwar camp in town? I have since discovered that many German PWs, along with Italians and Japanese, worked the fields and factories in the United States during World War II. No one I have spoken to here seems to know much about this, and newspaper articles of the time don’t have much information.
Okay, that was kind of a lie; I hadn’t talked to anyone other than Sarah and Dr. Rainier, but . . . you know. Part of it was true.
In addition, this synagogue is something that the town seems to have forgotten, probably because so many years have passed. On the other hand, I think this may also have something to do with a murder that occurred here only a month or so before the synagogue was destroyed. I refer to the murder of Walter Brotz by Mordecai Mendel Witek, a Jewish painter who was kind of a local cele
brity. Witek was never caught. I have included the hypertext link to that article below.
I stopped typing. Should I mention David? What could I say about him? I resumed:
I think that Mr. Witek’s only living relative—and to the best of my knowledge, the last Jew in Winter—is a son named David. Mr. David Witek is suffering from terminal Alzheimer’s, however, and can’t communicate.
Okay, so that wasn’t exactly the truth either, but I didn’t want to sound completely insane.
The only other contact person I can find in newspaper articles is a man named Albert Saltzman, Beth Tikva’s president. In the one picture of him I found, he looked in his forties or fifties, so he’s probably dead by now. I mention him because he might have relatives who could answer my questions.
That was going to be the end of my letter, but my busy fingers had a mind of their own:
One more thing: If there was a synagogue here, wouldn’t there also have been some kind of cemetery? Does anyone know where that is?
I reread that last part. Why did I want to know that? That was the second time in a day that thought had occurred to me.