The Lost Shtetl

by Max Gross

  Nobody quite knows what happened between husband and wife in the ensuing months, except that neither of them looked happy. And there had to be some explanation. What could sour the joy of two young people unless there is something terribly wrong?

  After their birth, rumors can grow into large, untamed beasts—and the ones about the Lindauers grew particularly oversized and savage.

  Some wondered why Pesha had been so hesitant to accept the match in the first place. The thinking went that this must have been because she was doing something illicit, like carrying on an affair with one of the yeshiva students or, god forbid, one of the married men. (Which was not impossible. Pesha stirred sinful thoughts in even the pious men of Kreskol.) The fact that she would sometimes walk through the market with her wig slightly skewed and was once noticed with a button undone on her blouse caused tongues to wag in every direction.

  These rumors culminated a few months later when Ishmael came into shul one morning and, just as the amidah* ended, sat down on the sharp end of a ram’s horn that some mischievous person slipped onto the bench.

  As he jumped into the air, the congregation broke into raucous laughter. Even Rabbi Sokolow smiled. Ishmael could barely contain his pique, and stormed out of shul without a word.

  It was a week later that Pesha requested a divorce.

  “All this is past,” declared Katznelson to the beit din. “Now our only task is to look forward. Be that a divorce or a continuation of the marriage.”

  “I’ll tell you what I’m worried about,” said Rabbi Sokolow. “Even if we all agree that divorce is the best thing for everybody, he seems so angry that I don’t know if he’ll accept anything.”

  “We’ll talk him out of any craziness,” Katznelson said. “Those two haven’t been married long enough to truly hate each other.”

  Temerl Katznelson was dispatched to the Rosenthal house, where Pesha had decamped, and after tea was poured and a lemon cookie offered and accepted, the two women unsheathed their blades and inspected the nuts of the matter.

  “Honestly, you’re going about this all wrong, Pesha,” Temerl said. “If you’re really hoping to get your husband to agree to a divorce, you’re not going to convince him to do anything if you run around town telling everybody that he broke your arm.”

  Temerl later recalled that Pesha looked disoriented. Her dress was wrinkled, and her face gaunt. Her eyes were sunken into two enormous gray bags falling into her cheeks, as if she hadn’t slept in a long time. And she had an air of disquiet around her, as if she would drop any dish or cup you placed in her hand.

  “I never said he broke my arm,” Pesha replied, her voice drained of any emotion. “I said he hurt my arm. Which he did.”

  “You’ve got to think strategically,” Temerl said, having long since worn through her patience with young brides who hadn’t learned the illogical nature of men and the necessary sacrifices in placating them. “If a woman is serious about a divorce, she can’t turn the thing into some big battle of the heart. You want him as clearheaded as possible. Don’t you think that when he stops and thinks things through he’s going to realize that it’s pointless being married to a woman he doesn’t get along with?”

  Pesha didn’t say anything, she merely grunted.

  But it appeared that Temerl Katznelson’s advice was taken seriously. A few days later, Pesha appeared at Ishmael’s dress shop with a honey cake. Her dress was free of wrinkles and her wig was combed. Before she entered the shop, she was observed pinching her cheeks to bring out their rose.

  The encounter between husband and wife was observed by Ishmael’s brother Gershom, who reported that everyone in the store held their breath when she entered.

  “Hello, Ishmael.”

  Ishmael had been hanging a dress on a mannequin and he froze, his fingers tightening around the white fabric.

  “I brought this for you,” she said, presenting him with the honey cake.

  “Is it poisoned?”

  Gershom cackled, which caused both Mr. and Mrs. Lindauer to turn in his direction.

  “Let’s go in the back,” Ishmael said.

  Husband and wife went into the stockroom as Gershom and their brother, Shmuel, lingered around the front of the shop, occasionally craning their necks toward the back. The store had a haunted silence for the fifteen or so minutes in which the Lindauers vanished into its viscera.

  Eventually, Pesha briskly walked out of the back without bothering to say goodbye to either brother. Ishmael emerged with the heavy air of a man who had just discovered an unexplained lump on his body.

  “What happened between you two?” Shmuel asked.

  Ishmael didn’t look at his younger brother. He shuffled over to the yard of fabric by the worktable and lugubriously sat in his chair.

  “Nu?” Shmuel said again. “What happened?”

  Ishmael didn’t say anything. When he finally spoke it was in a whisper.

  “None of your business.”

  Gershom and Shmuel exchanged a look of puzzlement.

  “Are you two getting divorced?” Gershom asked, taking advantage of his prerogative as an older brother, who could not be answered so curtly.

  “No,” Ishmael said, not looking up. Then he added, “I don’t know.”

  It was an odd incident, certainly. Later, Gershom and Shmuel went over to Kreskol’s tavern and parsed the brief episode as much as within human reason, looking for hidden meanings and possibilities. But they ended up as confused as when they sat down.

  To their surprise, Pesha appeared again at the shop the next day. The snow had begun dissolving, and Pesha had gone searching for wildflowers in the forest. She presented a bouquet to her husband, who accepted it with obvious embarrassment.

  “Let’s go for a walk, Ishmael,” Pesha suggested.

  Ishmael hesitated for a moment. He stole a fleeting glance at his brother. “I’ll be back in a little while, Gersh.”

  He put on his coat, kissed the mezuzah,* and disappeared with his wife for a half hour.

  When he returned, he appeared to be in a better mood than he had been after Pesha’s previous visit.

  “What happened?” Gershom asked again.

  “We talked,” Ishmael said. “Just talked a little. Don’t concern yourself with it.”

  A marriage is a funny business.

  For a few weeks, anyway, it looked as if all of the revulsion and abhorrence between Ishmael and Pesha Lindauer had thawed and melted away with the snow on the ground, and perhaps even turned into love.

  Pesha would come to the dress shop every afternoon, usually with a gift as if she were the suitor and he were the pursued, and the two of them went for a walk in the forest.

  “Could it be?” asked Esther Rosen at her stall. “Could they have put all this nastiness behind them?”

  “You never know,” answered one of the women.

  “Hmm,” Esther said. “I’ll believe it when she moves back in with him.”

  Of course, Pesha Lindauer did not move back in with her husband. A month after she had begun courting her husband, Ishmael said that he was ready to agree to a divorce.

  “This is ridiculous!” exclaimed Gershom Lindauer. “One minute, the two of you are acting like a couple of honeymooners—now you’re agreeing to a divorce?”

  “I know what I’m doing.”

  “I don’t think so,” Gershom replied. “I think you’ve been sold a bill of goods, brother. I think she tricked you.”

  But Ishmael couldn’t be dissuaded. As he explained to those who asked, he believed that giving his wife a divorce would pave the way for a reconciliation. His willingness to seem reasonable would make her love him more; it would prove that he trusted her, and it would show the entire world that she would come back to him of her own true volition. Theirs would be one of the few love matches in Kreskol.

  “You’re crazy,” Gershom said. “Completely crazy.”

  The beit din was summoned, where Rabbi Katznelson, Rabbi Sokolow, and Rabb
i Joel Gluck all conferred with the sofer,* and after the divorce agreement was drawn up, Ishmael was given a piece of parchment and a goose-feather quill with which to sign it. He made his mark, and after the document was inspected a final time, it was given back to him.

  “Now drop it in her hands,” Rabbi Sokolow instructed.

  He did so.

  Rabbi Sokolow turned to Pesha.

  “Turn and walk away from him.”

  She did as she was told, stepping across the Rabbi’s study and stopping at the door.

  The three men of the beit din exchanged a look, to make sure that everything had proceeded according to the ancient regulation. Rabbi Sokolow nodded.

  “You’re hereby divorced.”

  Ishmael nodded solemnly, but when he looked over to his former wife he was surprised to see that she had tears in her eyes.

  They were not outpourings of grief—they were tiny crystals of happiness and relief. She threw a hand over her mouth to stifle whatever joyful exultation was about to leap out. And as Ishmael followed his ex-wife out of Rabbi Sokolow’s chambers he felt his brother’s words more acutely than he had been expecting.

  Walking into the daylight, Pesha skipped ahead of him.

  “Why are you walking so fast?”

  Pesha didn’t answer, but nevertheless she slowed her pace to appease him.

  They wordlessly strolled for a minute along Cobbler’s Row. Pesha’s tears had dried—but she looked as if she was trembling even though the weather was warm and she was bundled up in a wool coat.

  “Well, that wasn’t so bad,” Ishmael finally said. “I thought it would be much worse.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Why are you being so quiet?”

  Pesha kept her eyes on the ground.

  “I don’t feel like talking.”

  Ishmael stopped. He stood firmly as she kept walking. “Pesha!”

  She turned around.

  He didn’t quite know what to say, I suppose. Those who witnessed the scene say the flash of temper was the same as Rabbi Sokolow had seen a few months earlier. If you didn’t know any better, an unprejudiced observer would have had no trouble believing that he was a violent man. Moreover, the language he used was the kind that would make a Cossack blush. I myself debated whether or not to commit the actual words Ishmael Lindauer used to paper, but I finally decided that it was more important to be truthful than to hew to the most delicate sensibility. So those readers who are sensitive to such matters might wish to skip a few pages ahead.

  “You really are a cunt, aren’t you?”

  Pesha’s mouth flung open.

  “I beg your pardon!”

  “All this time,” Ishmael said, his voice now rising, uncontrollably. “All this time that you were being nice to me! It was all a trick, wasn’t it?”

  “You’re disgusting.”

  “And you’re a whore!”

  Pesha turned and began walking away.

  “Whore!” Ishmael thundered at the top of his lungs. Needless to say, this was not the kind of scene that we witnessed every day in Kreskol. A crowd surrounded Ishmael, to make sure his crazed words wouldn’t digress into action.

  “I married a disgusting, filthy little whore!” Ishmael shouted loud enough for half the town to hear. Not even the sight of the holy Rabbi, who had come rushing out of his study with the rest of the beit din, did anything to assuage Ishmael’s anger.

  “Calm down!” Rabbi Sokolow begged. “Please, Ishmael!”

  “Whore! Whore!”

  “Ishmael—everybody’s watching!”

  He turned back to Rabbi Sokolow. “I want to take the get* back! I want to take the divorce back!”

  “You can’t,” Rabbi Sokolow said. “It’s too late.”

  “But she tricked me!”

  It was useless to tell him that there was nothing to be done. He jumped up and down and howled like a child. Tears came to his eyes and he swore by everything that was holy that he would someday be avenged for this humiliation and disgrace.

  “She’ll pay!” Ishmael bellowed. “She’ll regret this! I swear it! I swear on the Ark of the Covenant and the holy Torah!”**

  Pesha took off running. She ran past the synagogue and the mikvah***—past the candlemaker’s shop and Garment Lane, past the marketplace and the cemetery—and she did not stop running until she was safely inside her father’s house, with the door securely locked behind her.

  An unpleasant affair, certainly. And throughout the rest of the day, we all speculated about what would happen next between this loopy pair, because no one could believe that the story was over.

  “I have a theory,” said Esther Rosen, as she sat on the bench outside the Rosen household, holding court with four other Kreskol wives. “The two of them will wind up married to each other again.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Neither of them will emerge from all of this nastiness able to marry anybody else. Who would marry Ishmael Lindauer after what we all just witnessed?”

  It would be difficult to challenge that.

  “And I think Pesha ruined her reputation a long time ago. No man in his right mind would agree to marry a woman who could drive her husband to such madness. I don’t think it will happen tomorrow. I don’t think it will happen next year. But when the woman hears the last gasps of motherhood calling, she’ll realize she doesn’t have anybody else.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” one of the other matrons postured. “Pesha Rosenthal has the face of an angel and the figure of a nymph. Maybe she won’t get her hooks into a rabbi, but she’ll find somebody willing to take her.”

  Esther Rosen smirked, and the women continued chattering for the next hour about what fate would bring, before, one by one, the coven stood up to go home.

  But what happened instead was something nobody had been expecting: Pesha up and vanished the next morning, leaving nary a trace of herself behind.

  Her sister had come to her room to wake her up, and found that her bed was made and her room empty. Hadassah went out into the barn to see if she was milking the cows, or tending to the goats, but the animals were undisturbed. She walked into the woods and began calling Pesha’s name. The only answer she got was from the chirping of the birds.

  “Wake up! Wake up!” Hadassah rushed through the Rosenthal house shouting. “Our sister is missing!”

  Within an hour, the beadle had knocked on the doors of all the town elders with a wooden hammer and they had assembled at the synagogue to discuss this latest development.

  “What do you suppose happened to her?” someone asked.

  “She probably ran off,” another answered.

  Foreboding words, among the people of Kreskol. Few townspeople ever roved deep into the forest that lay beyond the town walls; once or twice a decade an unhappy widower or an adventurous youth would make the journey without telling anyone, and, to a man, they were never heard from again. Certainly, they could have made safe passage to the nearest town. Or, for all we knew, they could have died of thirst with the vultures left to pick over their remains. Nobody knew for sure. But the consensus was that leaving Kreskol was a decision not dissimilar to suicide.

  “Ran off?” the first elder said. “Into the woods? By herself? But she’ll be torn to pieces by wolves!”

  “Don’t worry. If she’s run off, we’ll find her.”

  There was, of course, another sinister fear that didn’t dare speak its name for the first thirty minutes of the meeting. “You don’t suppose that husband of hers did something to her?” one of the elders finally asked.

  “Preposterous,” said Rabbi Katznelson.

  Rabbi Sokolow, however, refused to dismiss it. He merely ran his hand through his beard. After a few moments, he pronounced: “I wouldn’t put it past him.” The meeting ground to complete silence.

  “God forbid!” Katznelson finally replied.

  “It must be considered,” said Rabbi Sokolow.

  “Yes, it must be,” someone else chi
med in.

  “Just be careful,” said Rabbi Gluck. “For those who falsely accuse the righteous lose paradise for themselves.”

  “Yes, yes—very worrisome,” said Sokolow. “But what if we have a murderer in Kreskol?”

  It was an astounding thought. A murder had not been committed in Kreskol in a hundred and eleven years.

  Back then, according to our town archive, an expedition was sent out to the Polish authorities while the murderer (a man who knifed his brother over a business dispute that was complicated by the fact that the victim had seduced the assailant’s wife) was kept locked away in the cellar of the town’s shechita,* under constant watch, alongside an ox that was marked for slaughter. It took weeks before the murderer left our fair town in chains with a troop of gentile policemen.

  “I suppose we’ll have to do something similar,” Rabbi Sokolow said. “Provided that Ishmael Lindauer is guilty.”

  Reb Dovid Levinson, the ritual slaughterer, and Reb Wolf Shapiro, who operated the kiln and led Kreskol’s fire brigade—two of the biggest men in town—appeared at Ishmael’s house and took him to the synagogue with an arm around each shoulder.

  When Ishmael appeared before the town elders, the furious fire-breather had dissolved into a frightened man. His face was ashen. Sweat poured from his brow and fell into his dark eyes. Every time he wiped the sweat away, Reb Levinson and Shapiro shared a glance.

  “Have you heard what this is about?” asked Rabbi Katznelson.

  “Yes.”

  “Your wife is missing,” continued Katznelson.

  Ishmael said nothing. He merely turned his head and gazed at the assembled elders.

  “Do you know anything about it?”

  “No—nothing.”