*The Kuzari, by the medieval Jewish philosopher and poet of Spain, Judah ha-Levi (c. 1075–1141), is a defense of revealed religion in the form of a dialogue between the pagan king of the Khazars and a Jew who has been invited to instruct him in the tenets of Judaism. Isaac ben Judah Abravanel (1437–1508), a medieval statesman, financier, philosopher, and exegete, took the social and political issues of his time into consideration in his commentaries on the Bible.
*The choice of blue as a color for the newly painted shutters of this house is another of Bergelson’s satiric comments on the attempts of Avrom-Moyshe Burnes to acculturate himself and his family, of a piece with the university student he hires to tutor his children in secular subjects. It was customary in Ukraine for Gentiles to paint their shutters and window frames blue; the normative color for Jews was brown.
*In the tsarist empire, fully qualified pharmacists were among those categories of Jews permitted to live outside the Pale of Settlement, together with merchants of the first guild, exceptionally talented craftsmen, and university students.
*Yiddish affectionate diminutive of the word bobe, “grandmother.”
*Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit in ihrem organischen Aufbau [The Evolution of Culture] was published in 1886–87 by the Czech historian Julius Lippert (1839–1909). Its Hebrew translation was published in three volumes in Warsaw between 1894 and 1908.
*Observant Orthodox Jewish men do not touch women in public, least of all women who are strangers to them.
*A member of the szlachta, or Polish nobility.
*The heder was the traditional religious elementary school where boys between the ages of three and fourteen were taught Torah and Talmud. The heder differed from the Talmud Torah in being a private institution run by the local rabbi or another religious functionary in his own home. The parents of boys attending the heder were expected to pay for their sons’ tuition.
*In the early 1900s, skunk fur was among the most popular and costly of pelts from which coats were made.
*Russian for “young lady.”
*In tsarist Russia—and still in Eastern Europe today—a gymnasium is a secondary school that stresses academic over vocational education.
*Polish: “Oh, he’s a sly one, that Mr. Tarabay … sly as a fox …”
*Simchas Torah (Hebrew, meaning “rejoicing of the Torah”) is one of the happiest days in the Jewish liturgical year, when the annual cycle of public Torah readings is completed with the last section of Deuteronomy and begun again with the first section of Genesis. During both morning and evening services all the scrolls in each synagogue’s possession are removed and carried around the synagogue in a series of seven circuits with much singing and dancing. This honor of carrying a Torah scroll is often auctioned to raise funds.
*A feldsher was a rudimentary health-care professional who provided many medical services in tsarist Russia, mainly in rural areas. The word feldsher derives from the German term Feldscher, meaning “field doctor,” which described medieval barber-surgeons attached to the Russian army as far back as the seventeenth century.
*In the belief that this would ward off the evil eye and protect them from contracting the same disease.
*This book’s full title is Dicta septem sapientium Graeciae (Sayings of the Seven Sages of Greece), a collection of moral aphorisms from the classical world compiled in Latin by Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536). For centuries it was immensely popular as a source book for easily digested moral precepts. An English translation with commentary by Thomas Berthelet was published as early as 1525, during Erasmus’s lifetime.
†Latin: “All happiness is false.”
*The Fast of Esther is observed on the thirteenth day of the Hebrew month of Adar (generally corresponding to the secular month of March), a day before the festival of Purim, which is celebrated annually on the fourteenth day of Adar.
*The Fast of Esther is observed from daybreak until the appearance of the stars at night. While according to Jewish law the fast must continue until nightfall, people who feel unable to fast the whole day try to fast at least until after the afternoon service.
*According to Jewish lore, this is the place to which erring souls are exiled.
*Before prayer, every Hasid ties around his waist a black sash or girdle made of silk or wool, known in Yiddish as a gartl, symbolically to separate the heart and mind from the lower part of the body.
†Esther 2:21.
*Before World War I the profession of dentist—for which Bergelson himself tried to study in his youth—was highly popular among Jews in the tsarist empire. It occupied an intermediate position between that of a fully qualified physician and the lower rank of feldsher or medical aide. Here Bergelson is satirizing the attempts of upwardly mobile Jews to assimilate into Russian society by adopting the Russian language.
*Here a Hebrew scholar with a love of secular learning and culture.
†Ahad Ha’am, pen name of Asher Ginsburg (1856–1927), was born in Skvira, near Kiev in the Ukraine, and became a central figure in the movement for cultural Zionism. Initially enthusiastic about Ahad Ha’am’s ideals, in time Bergelson and his circle came to reject what they regarded as the narrowness of his “cultural nationalism.”
†A surtout is a long, single-breasted lightweight coat. The fact that this one is shortened denotes its wearer’s gradual move away from Jewish tradition toward a more modern, Westernized style of dress.
*Musaf is the “additional service” in the Jewish liturgy, recited on Sabbath and on festivals in commemoration of the additional sacrifices formerly offered in the Temple of Jerusalem (Numbers 28, 29).
†Like Reb Gedalye, all those who attend services here originate from, or have ties with, the Hasidim of Galicia. Husiatyn, today a town in western Ukraine, is located on the west bank of the Zbruch River, which formed the boundary between the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires before World War I. The Hasidic population of the town grew sharply after Rabbi Mordkhe Shrage-Feyvish Friedman (1835–1894), the youngest son of Rabbi Yisroel Friedman of Ruzhin, established his court there in 1865. Rabbi Mordkhe was succeeded by his son Rabbi Yisroel Friedman (1858–1949), who led the Hasidim in Husiatyn until 1912.
*This is because, according to Jewish law, eating a full meal is not permitted before the recitation of the morning service.
*The Sabbath of Consolation is the first Sabbath after Tisha B’Av, the fast of the ninth of the month of Av (July), which commemorates the Destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. It derives its name from the reading from the Prophets for that day, Isaiah 40:1–26.
*Kiddush (Hebrew, “sanctification”) is a blessing recited over wine to sanctify the Sabbath or a Jewish festival. By extension, the term Kiddush may also refer to a reception of wine, cake, soft drinks, and buffet items following the Sabbath morning services at the synagogue. Often a Kiddush is hosted by a family celebrating a barmitzvah, a wedding, or—as in this case—an engagement.
*A desyatin is an old imperial Russian unit of land measurement equivalent to 2. acres. The area under discussion here is therefore about 800 acres.
*Three festive meals are eaten every Sabbath: on Friday night, Saturday midday, and early Saturday evening. After the ceremony of Havdalah, which ritually marks the separation of the Sabbath from the working week, a fourth meal or snack commemorates what is called melava-malkah (Hebrew, “escorting the queen”).
*The Talmud Torah was a tuition-free elementary school maintained by the Jewish community for the poorest children. It was generally better organized and employed more-efficient, better-qualified teachers than the traditional heder because it was supervised by the leaders of the community.
*The Torah (Exodus 12:15–20) prohibits the eating or possessing of any bread, leaven, leavening agent, or any food containing such, from the day before Passover until the end of the eighth day of the festival. All leaven, down to the smallest particle, must be removed from every observant Jewish household. The night before Passover, theref
ore, immediately after sunset, the head of every Jewish household begins the ceremony of “the search for leaven.” Equipped with a candle, a feather which acts as a broom, and a wooden spoon into which the crumbs of bread are scooped, the head of the house goes from room to room reciting the appropriate blessing.
*It was formerly the custom in Orthodox Jewish families for the engagement contract to include a specified number of months after the marriage during which the young couple would live at the expense of the bride’s father.
*A britzka is a Polish-Russian open carriage with a folding hood and space in which passengers can recline when taking a long journey.
*Conjugal relations are among the many quotidian activities prohibited on the Day of Atonement.
*Throughout the night before the ritual circumcision of a Jewish male child, the father devotes himself to Torah study and recites prescribed passages from the Zohar. Children are also invited to the home of the newborn where they recite prayers, say psalms, and partake of a small meal which includes chickpeas.
*A week prior to the marriage ceremony—during which the bride and groom do not see each other—on the Saturday evening following what is known in Yiddish as shabes forshpil (“prelude Sabbath”), the bride’s family arranges a party to wish her a long life blessed with many children. On the same day, the groom is called up to the reading of the Torah, after which the congregation showers him with nuts and sweets, symbolic of the same wishes.
Part 3
The Beginning of the End
3.1
—Shmulik, go away!
Shmulik stood over her with his mouth half-open, chuckling and picking his teeth after his meal. Fully harnessed and waiting for him outside was his own britzka, which would take fully three hours to carry him to his father’s distillery.
He eventually moved away from the sofa on which Mirel was lying, sucked something from between his teeth, abstractedly spitting the debris from his mouth as he passed through the doorway, and lied to her:
—Friday, Mirele, Friday.
On Friday he’d return early from the distillery. He’d be in town and would find out why the big grandfather clock hadn’t been sent.
His lie was superfluous; it awakened not interest but disgust in her. She had no desire even to look at him. Every inch of his neglected figure, including his reddish beard which he’d not trimmed for two weeks now, called to mind that a month previously she’d given herself to him with neither passion nor will; that Shmulik had now received from her everything he needed, and had therefore grown calmer, shabbier, and more repulsive. The day before had been the Sabbath, and in his white shirtsleeves he’d spent the whole afternoon sleeping on the low sofa in his small, square study. Just before sunset, one of his mother’s young relatives had woken him with tickling, and he’d rolled himself into a ball and begged this youth:
—Don’t … Stop tickling … I’m an old man already.
And Mirel had imagined that she’d married in jest and had stipulated a clause in her engagement contract:
—He should have no expectation of living with her as a husband lived with a wife.
Many young brides-to-be who had no idea of what they wanted imagined, as she had done, that they were marrying in jest, merely for the time being, and had stipulated the very same clause in their contracts with their luckless bridegrooms.
At long last the clatter of Shmulik’s departing britzka was heard, and the fact that he’d be away for a whole week lightened the atmosphere somewhat. Later, though, gloomy silence pervaded all four of their newly furnished rooms, while from the kitchen came the sound of dishes being rapidly washed up. Plates clashed against other plates with a plaintive muffled rattle, as though being knocked about caused them pain.
For no particular reason she went out to her large half-cultivated, half-withered garden, stopped, and looked around:
By now everything there was yellow, parched, and redolent of late summer; plucked cherry trees stretched all the way down from her small wing to her father-in-law’s huge whitewashed house, whispering secrets to one another about the melancholy skies and the chill onset of the month of Elul. And in the farthest corner of the orchard into which the glass conservatory of her father-in-law’s house jutted out, her mother-in-law poked her head out of an opened window and yelled:
—Mirele! That half pound of tea … You borrowed a half pound of tea—why haven’t you remembered to return it?
This immensely rich woman was not concerned about the half pound of tea itself; she was annoyed by Mirel’s nonchalance and wanted to teach her a lesson:
—A young wife ought to bear in mind once and for all: what one borrows, one must remember to return.
Mirel made no reply. She detested her mother-in-law. She turned back to the front entrance of her own wing where she sat down on the verandah steps.
A well-rested coachman on a hansom cab was driving slowly off toward the long chain bridge that led to the provincial capital with its many streets and its half-million bustling inhabitants who filled day and night with the din of their weekday tumult. From where she sat, she followed the cab driver with her eyes:
—What might she be able to start doing now?
Far, far away, on the paved road at the other end of the deserted suburb, someone else’s moving cab rattled along, but this noise sounded not like that of churning wheels but of a dry, disembodied voice that kept on repeating:
—Tomorrow will be just the same … The next day will be just the same …
Directly opposite, an old cock scrabbled its way up the dilapidated stone wall that enclosed the deserted courtyard of the church and opened its beak:
—Ku-ku-ri-ku-uu.
And then silence. Nothing. Filled with penitential thoughts,* all the houses around this sandy end of the suburb, grand and mean alike, seemed to have breathed their last. People were nowhere in evidence, and an incident that had taken place at the beginning of summer, two months before, came to mind:
Reb Gedalye and Gitele had been here. They’d spent the noisy Sabbath immediately preceding the marriage ceremony, traditionally known as “the joyful Sabbath,” here in her father-in-law’s house. Feeling ill at ease and isolated because they’d married into the family of people wealthier than they, and having nothing of their own with which to impress or assert themselves, they’d kept calling each other aside to whisper secrets together. Later they’d sat like outsiders among the many affluent guests from the city who’d come to celebrate the concluding meal of the Sabbath† here in her and Shmulik’s newly furnished wing and they’d left without fuss, with the hidden distress of estranged relatives who’d come down in the world.
Now they were infinitely remote from here, with their sense of inferiority, with all the desolation of their little shtetl, and with their verandah, the door to which was always kept locked. If they did ever come to mind, it was exclusively as people who slept during the day, whose rooms were perpetually silent, and whose walls stretched up in boredom and mused: “Mirele’s been married o. by now, married off by now.”
Now she’d given herself to Shmulik, and went often into the city to visit her cousin Ida Shpolianski, an enormously rich, licentious woman-about-town who deceived her frequently absent husband. As Mirel had often passed the time right in the center of the provincial capital, it was not long before she’d encountered Nosn Heler, who was attempting to publish a penny newspaper here in the metropolis. On one occasion, returning home from visiting Ida late at night, she’d been walking down the central avenue when she recognized him from behind for the first time. In a broadly cut new autumn cloak, he was standing at a deserted intersection next to the tall upright of an electric lamp about to be extinguished, speaking to a respectable elderly Christian about his long-planned penny newspaper:
—Ponimayete—you understand—but the first number must appear no later than the fifteenth.
Overcome with confusion, she was not fully conscious of what she was doing until she was close
enough to recognize his oblong, oliveskinned, youthful face with its freshly shaven cheeks and whiskers that appeared intensely dark, like those of a Romanian.
—At last—he said excitedly, standing opposite her—at last they’d met each other again.
For a short while her heart pounded rapidly. What he’d said was plainly ridiculous, and made her think:
—He’s no cleverer than he was before, this Nosn.
But all around him the fragrance of the air called to mind those spring evenings in her shtetl two years before and the damp grass of the green hill near the peasant cottages on which they’d sat until late into the night.
In her sleep she dreamed that she was two years younger and was in love with Nosn. And in the early mornings thereafter she was drawn to the bustling city center and beyond, to that quiet, leafy street where Nosn was supposed to wait for her at the start of every evening.
During the day she reflected that she was foolish to be so drawn to him. She sat on the steps of the verandah, gazed out at her deserted end of the suburb, and mused that she herself had once despised this feeling and had sent this fellow Nosn packing. At that time she’d wanted something else, but now her life was empty and she’d given herself to Shmulik and had parted forever from Reb Gedalye and Gitele.
As twilight drew on, her sense of desolation intensified. Her reason and emotions seemed to be clouded with the burden of the day that had passed, and recollection came that somewhere people were happy. At almost the same time, the automatic gate to the left at the end of the iron fence that surrounded her father-in-law’s house seemed regularly to clang behind Shmulik’s very smartly dressed younger sister Rikl as she went out. She was a tall nineteen-year-old who’d completed her studies at the gymnasium only the previous summer, looked older than she actually was, imparted around herself an attitude of either weariness or apathy, and who with huge hat and coiffure—both angled to one side—seemed to have been manufactured according to big-city fashion. She stopped laboriously next to Mirel as though she were too tightly laced into her long corset and new big-city suit and explained that she was just about to take a streetcar into town:
The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) Page 21