Remember Us

by Vic Shayne

  We waited, standing around panting and checking ourselves for injuries. There were some gashes on hands, a broken finger maybe, red marks swelling into big bruises on some of the faces and arms, and a couple of bloody noses. But we were okay. We stood in a circle so we could keep an eye on every direction at once, and we recounted our battle down to the detail until we all, at last, started to calm down. Perhaps an hour passed before we said good night to one another and all made our way into our homes to settle down for dinner. My heart was still racing when I walked through our front door and into my mother’s arms.

  That night we were lucky. A hundred years before, the Cossacks nearly burned down the entire shtetl, and when I was a little boy, too young to fight, I watched as the Cossacks chased Jews in the street, through fields, and behind our homes. Women were raped and torches were thrown on roofs. After trying to fight them off for an hour, the Jews were bloodied and some nearly beaten to death, and the Cossacks were racing out of town. They returned the same night and rode to the water mill on the edge of town. Houses and barns burned all through the night, and the entire town worked to bring water from the river in buckets to dowse the flames. I do not know how many died that night or were made homeless or crippled. But if you asked me at that moment whether we were Poles or Russians, my answer would be neither; the Cossacks, like everyone else, reminded us we were Jews.

  I thought about the Cossacks when I grew into my teenage years. I wasn’t afraid of them, but I thought about them when my father decided to build our family’s new house on the street where Zayde and his sons lived with their wives and families. Memories of fires in the night made my home and family that much more precious to me. Our homes protected us from the cold and gave us a place to sleep and eat. But safety from random violence was a luxury we didn’t necessarily share with our neighbors. Cossacks could turn the biggest home in the shtetl into ashes in a matter of hours.

  Living with Our Differences

  There is a Yizkor book (a memorial book) that was written about Maitchet. It’s in Hebrew and it sits on my desk at home in my basement. It reminds me of my lost life. When I look at the pictures, I can slip into the Maitchet of my youth. I hear the children playing in the street. I see my little friends as we play soccer—Poles and Jews all mixed together, wearing the same dirt and cuts and scrapes. We argue over penalties and goals, and we fight one another with our fists. But when the game is over, we shake hands and run off. We’d see each other the next day on the road somewhere and start up a new game.

  Some of these kids went to school with me, but most were kept out of school by their parents by the time they were ten. The Poles wanted their children to work on their farms; paying for labor was too expensive, and there was no end to the chores. This created problems, if not on the surface, then just below it. They wouldn’t let their children go to school, but they resented that the Jewish kids were educated—girls and boys alike.

  My sisters and their friends went to Bayt Yakov, a girls’ school that not only taught secular and Jewish subjects but was also a center of cultural learning, with school plays, performances, and dances. I went to both Polish school and Jewish school, as did my friends. This was our tradition: it was believed that education made you a better person and better able to serve others.

  All the while, though, parents of our Polish friends complained about us. They mumbled under their breath about how the Jews owned shops and made a big profit at the market—that we were good in business. “The Jews know numbers,” they’d say. Then they would be distrustful and reconstitute rumors about how we were shrewd or stingy. They used the word “clever” as if it was evil and a threat to their own security. The worst of the anti-Semites were farm children who were made to labor in the fields while Jewish children were playing or learning in school.

  It wasn’t like we weren’t close to our Polish neighbors. Though the majority were simple folk who clung to superstitions and were afraid of anyone different from themselves, there were exceptional people among them. One such person was a neighborhood girl I knew named Tamara Ulashik whose older brother, Vlojik, eventually married a Jewish woman and rose to the highest position in the police department. I recall hours of talking with Tamara in the forest. She taught me how to play the guitar. For hours we would sing songs as Tamara would strum away at the strings to her old Spanish-style guitar. We would laugh when we forgot the words. Some of the words we made up altogether. Tamara would ask me about what I was learning in Jewish school. I taught her about the Talmud and she guided my fingers to the right places on the neck of the guitar. The more I explained Jewish law and tradition, the more she wanted to learn. But she was an exception.

  We lived in a superstitious, prejudiced community, but stoking the fire of anti-Semitism were the town’s churches. How could we ever see one another as individuals when the churches preached how different we Jews were from everyone else? They perpetuated stereotypes and unfounded gossip. Every Sunday the Poles learned how the Jews were the root of all evil in the world. To them we were Christ-killers. We were the “they” whom the priests talked about as killing their savior, not following the Christian religion, not fearing their God, and not terrified of going to hell for being nonbelievers. It was repeatedly told to parishioners that Jews spoke a different, secret language, that we had our own law, and that we wore funny clothes and partook in strange traditions.

  We could never figure out the logic of this hateful teaching, and we couldn’t escape the hate. Any progress in forging good relationships all through the week was canceled out by hateful teachings on Sunday morning.

  All our logic and knowledge of the Talmud was no help to us in making sense of the Christian point of view that Jews were “the enemy.” How could we be enemies when we were also neighbors? How could we be hated when the one person our Christian neighbors most revered and loved was a Jew? After all, Christ was a Jew. He was their God—a perfect being praised for his righteousness, honesty, and love. But weren’t we—who were living next door—also Jews, just like their savior? The Poles could not bring themselves to see us in the same light. Week after week, for centuries, priests painted Jews as killers, thieves, and lechers, except, of course, for the Jew who hung larger than life on the walls of the churches, over beds, and in kitchens. I couldn’t understand the hate taught in the churches. Raised on the logic of the Talmud, I would wonder: If this Jew Jesus was a god, how could anyone, Jew or non-Jew, have really killed him? Or, if he was meant to die for people’s sins, then why look for someone to blame for killing him? None of the Poles I knew had answers to these questions. I learned that it was best not to discuss religion with them. This way, we stood the best chance of getting along.

  There were two churches in our shtetl: the Polish Catholic church and the Greek Orthodox. The Polish church taught hate; there is no other way to put it. Even the priest of the Greek Orthodox church, a gentle, family man who enjoyed spending hours in our house discussing local affairs with my father over a glass of vodka, was very uneasy about the level of anti-Semitism in the Polish church across town. Parishioners emerged from the building cursing the Jewish people for all their problems, from the murder of their savior to their failed crops. It was the Jews who had all the education; the Jews who polluted their children with books bearing new ideas and telling of diverse customs; the Jews who refused to accept Christ as their lord. The Jews, it was well understood, were the root of all evil. We had a big problem, although few of us realized that the ground beneath our feet was already starting to simmer.

  My Yizkor book on Maitchet doesn’t show the Greek Orthodox church, but I remember where it was in relation to the other buildings—right across the street from my house. We were neighbors on Handlowa Street. The church was a formidable structure gleaming in bright white with steeply-pitched roofs and elegant spires appointed with Catholic crosses rising toward the sky. The church’s blue-gray domed spires could be seen from far away, like a beacon to residents and visitors. Arched windo
ws with leaded glass adorned every wall, inviting light into the church. The interior was beautiful, with golden religious objects on display and highly polished wooden railings and pews. In our poor shtetl we had a well-to-do church. In the winter the building was kept warm with fireplaces that burned day and night.

  Every Sunday, across the street from our house, looking out our living room window, we watched scores of parishioners file through church doors in a long procession that wound out onto the sidewalk. After services there was a reception line where the priest patiently shook the hands of his flock as they carried thoughts of his sermon home with them.

  I was inside the Greek Orthodox church many times, sometimes just for fun, playing around with my non-Jewish friends. On other occasions, I would be playing soccer or chess or going out with our school girlfriends when a fight would break out. Fights led to chases that led into the church, a place of sanctuary. I’d follow the perpetrators into the church, sit next to them in the quiet, and then follow them outside again where the chase continued until our disagreement would finally be settled one way or another.

  The priest of the church was a good-hearted man. He was on very good terms with our entire family and the Jews of our town. Recognizing the wisdom of our rabbis, the priest would sometimes talk with Zayde about a problem he was having or how to mediate a disagreement between two parishioners.

  All on One Block

  We didn’t always live across the street from the Greek Orthodox church. Before I was a teenager, we used to live in a small, cramped house behind Zayde’s house, on his property. But it became obvious that, with a baby sister and plans for more children in the near future, there just wouldn’t be enough room for all of us any longer. It was time to move into bigger quarters.

  I remember when my father told me we were going to build a new house. I was a boy but old enough to be useful. Our new house, my father said, would join the row of homes on Handlowa Street that belonged to my uncles—my father’s brothers—across from the Greek Orthodox church. Before I knew it, I was driving nails into the new walls. I was too young to see this as work. It was fun and exciting.

  In those days, every inch of a house was built by hand. We had few prefabricated parts but no electric saws, cranes, or trucks. Maitchet was too remote to enjoy any of these modern tools. All wooden boards and studs were cut down from huge logs at a nearby mill. Neighbors joined in to help, especially in lifting heavy beams into place and handling the two-man saw needed to fashion timber into girders. When the walls of our new home went up, it was a neighborhood celebration. Everyone took part in the success, especially our uncles, aunts, and cousins whom we joined on the same block.

  Later my father and I would build a small house behind ours for my Uncle Zimmel so that all five sons of the Shmulewicz brothers, would live in a row. Our family took up more than half the street. From their house at the end of the block, my grandmother and grandfather would proudly look out onto Handlowa Street and see their children’s and grandchildren’s comings and goings. The head of the family was at the head of the block. My grandparents were very proud of their family. Looking out the window and seeing them parading back and forth was an exceptional source of nachas.

  From the front windows of our house we had a perfect view of the beautiful Greek Orthodox church. We had a big open veranda with a wooden floor and a couple of chairs. Our houseguests loved to sit out there from late spring to early autumn and read the newspaper in the morning.

  When you entered our house, there was a room on the left. It was a sort of reception or living room. Toward the back of our house was my parents’ room and, next to it, my sisters Peshia and Elka shared a room. I had my own room on the side of the house.

  My room was filled with books on all the walls—books written in Hebrew, Russian, Polish, and Yiddish. They were all very neatly placed and stacked according to subject matter on bookcases made of bricks and planks of wood. I can still see the titles peering back at me from my shelves—books of poetry, humor, history, and heroism. I was an avid reader of the most famous Jewish writer of the Yiddish world, Solomon Rabinowitz, best known by his pen name, Sholom Aleichem. His stories of shtetl life and the hardships of Tevye the Milkman and his daughters left a lasting impression on me. We Jews had a special respect for Sholom Aleichem because he took our shtetl language—Yiddish—and made it a respected medium of literature. I also loved to read the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz, a local literary hero born not far away in Nowogrudek, who became Poland’s greatest poet. I also had books written by the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, Prague’s Franz Kafka (his book The Metamorphosis remains one of my favorites), and other writers whose ideas and passion lifted me far beyond my shtetl surroundings. I used to read in my room well into the night while tucked into bed as the wind whistled through the trees outside my window. Not until I stirred from the clanging of baking dishes in the kitchen did I awaken, many times with my nose still pressed between the pages of a novel.

  The kitchen came alive at dawn almost every morning, with food preparation as the focus of our home. While my mother went to work, my sisters started their chores. Our house was always tidy. Just before Shabbos, as with other holidays (especially Passover), Peshia and Elka worked with Momma to clean our house in preparation for the sacred occasion. When cleaning was complete, it was always back to the kitchen, the one place in our house that never rested.

  The family kitchen sat right in the middle of our house. It was a big, inviting, open room resembling a restaurant. In the middle of our kitchen was a cast-iron stove and oven that gave off a tremendous amount of heat. Just behind the oven was another oven, lined with a tiled hearth used for getting warm. We kept our fire logs in our barn, and my sisters carried loads of wood into the house to refuel the fire. In the dead of winter, when temperatures were well below zero and the Siberian winds rocked our house and whistled through the walls, we would bring cots into the kitchen or sleep in storage alcoves to keep warm by the blaze.

  My mother was a wonderful cook. She got up very early in the morning to make me pancakes, and throughout the day she and my sisters would make bread, cakes, kugel, and soups. For special occasions and holidays, the three of them were like elves, turning out pastries like a bakery. Sometimes my mother baked bread for the poor and brought it to their homes, saying she just happened to be passing by. Like her namesake, Esther, my soft-spoken mother was the queen of our home; her presence graced the air and sanctified our lives. I can still hear her singing as she baked. So many times I would come home from school or work to listen to this music. The three of them would be lost in song, hands caked with flour and a fog of white dust rising through the air.

  My father, a very handy and resourceful man, used his self-taught carpentry skills to make our windows and the shutters. It took months, maybe a year, to cut down trees and have them milled into planks for the walls and ceiling to build our house. We cut and nailed in strips of wood, wet the wood down, then filled the areas in between with cement. Because there were no sophisticated tools available to us, we had to align and construct everything by eye. My father had a knack for doing this, and somehow the walls came out plumb and the windows perfectly level.

  One of the features of our new house was that it was partially used as an inn. Maitchet was a popular destination for tourists, and my father was wise enough to realize that tourists needed a place to stay and eat during their visit.

  Visitors would come from miles around just to breathe in the scent of the pine trees. We had a forest so full of pine trees that in the winter you couldn’t see the sunshine if you went for a walk deep into the woods. People believed that the pine aroma was good for the lungs and had healing powers. Maitchet was known as a popular resort from late spring to mid-autumn. But even outside of tourist season, we always had local people stopping in for breakfast, a bar of chocolate, ice cream, or a shot of vodka.

  Having an inn at our house meant that there were always strangers staying with us. My mother
was a good hostess, cooking meals and keeping our guests company. She made every visitor part of the family, cooking eggs and pancakes for breakfast, and for dinner the guests would join us at our table.

  Breaking bread with our houseguests gave us a fresh perspective on the news from around the area; people would tell us what was going on in their shtetls: news of births, deaths, politics, and pogroms. They spoke of their relatives in America or the bigger cities like Warsaw or Kiev. Sometimes our guests even told us about towns that we knew little, if anything, about, including Jewish communities to the west and across the German border. My father was a great conversationalist. He knew how to keep people talking. Papa’s interest in others brought the larger world around us into our living room and it kept visitors coming back over the years to stay with us.

  After we built our house, my father set out to build a small shed to the rear of our property surrounded by a fence. In the little structure, which was closer in size to a small barn, we kept our milk cow. My cousins and I were always running to one another’s houses with milk, cheese, cream, butter, and eggs. Our mothers and aunts were never without the essentials for baking, and nobody was going hungry.

  Outside, my father and I fashioned a small area where we walked our horse around in circles tied to a wooden bar. The bar was attached to a grinder in the center, and with each step the horse would cut straw into food for the rest of the animals. Leading the horse around in a circle, I used to get dizzy and have to sit down to take a rest. I don’t know how the horse stayed on his feet either. Maybe he was better at it because he had two more legs than I.

  Our watchdog, Milsh (Russian for “shut up”), patrolled the area to the rear of our house, including the shed. He was an ornery, temperamental German shepherd who was very vicious. A big, powerful, territorial dog, he was prone to barking at everything that moved. You couldn’t get near him without alarming all of Maitchet. Only my father and I dared approach this dog. In Milsh’s case, his bite was greater than his bark. His ferocious growl and the show of his teeth made sure that nobody came within fifty feet of him. At night, he would bark and bark, pacing back and forth until he wore a path in the grass. He was calling out for the only thing that would settle him—our cat. Once the cat came to him and curled up at his side, Milsh would be quiet. The two of them would sleep together until the sun came up. Then the cat went his own way and Milsh returned to guard duty.