The Lost Shtetl

by Max Gross

A floorboard creaked, as someone in the room shifted from one foot to the other.

  “You didn’t do anything to her, did you?” asked Rabbi Sokolow.

  “Of course not.”

  “I recall you saying yesterday that you would be avenged against Pesha,” Sokolow said, evenly. “I recall you swearing this on the holy Torah.”

  Ishmael started to protest, but thought better of whatever he had planned to say.

  “I didn’t touch her.”

  Of course, none of the men of Kreskol were skilled in the arts of investigation and interrogation. After a few more tense questions were asked and answered (“What were you doing last night?” and “How do we know you’re telling us the truth?”), it was decided that Ishmael should be allowed to leave.

  “The Torah says at least two witnesses are needed,” Katznelson explained to the suspect. “And we’re not sure if anything happened to Pesha in the first place.”

  A dazed Ishmael nodded.

  “Just remember,” Katznelson said as Ishmael stepped out of the study, “we might need to ask you further questions.”

  Ishmael was sent home with Levinson and Shapiro at his side, but it was the last time the elders would see him.

  Levinson and Shapiro stood watch outside the Lindauer family dress shop into the night, waiting for the candles to get blown out in the residence above. When the house went dark, they quietly stood across the road for a full ten minutes before deciding that its inhabitants must be asleep, and it was safe to go home.

  But Ishmael Lindauer managed to slip away before morning. Bread, cheese, and butter from the Lindauers’ larder were missing. A few pieces of ripe fruit had been picked off the trees behind their house. And a note was left on Ishmael Lindauer’s pillow, written in Ishmael’s childlike, blocky script and addressed to his older brother.

  Dear Gershom—

  I’ve decided to leave Kreskol. I don’t believe I will ever again be at ease here. Every single person in town thinks that I’m a murderer.

  The charge is a lie. I never laid a finger on my former wife. She might deserve all sorts of punishment—much of which I’m sure she’ll receive in the world to come—but the fact remains that I never touched a single hair on her head.

  My only hope is to start anew in a new city.

  Forget all about me, Gershom. If it makes it easier, pretend I was struck by a bolt of lightning. Or got crushed by a horse. Or came down with pneumonia. Your brother is dead and gone. Forget that you ever heard the name Ishmael Lindauer.

  There was no signature affixed.

  “Well, there we have it,” said Rabbi Sokolow after the beadle had again assembled the elders of Kreskol and the note was examined. “The man is guilty of something.”

  Which many of the elders felt was worthy of dispute. “But he says in the note that he’s innocent,” Katznelson replied. “He knew he was leaving, yes? Why should he lie in his farewell letter?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” scoffed Sokolow. “We might catch up with him. The real question is what will we do when we apprehend him.”

  It was finally decided that Yankel Lewinkopf, the baker’s apprentice (who it happens was an orphan whom nobody would miss), should get on a horse and travel in the direction of Smolskie. Upon his arrival, he should find whatever official he could from the district and relate the whole case. As far as the elders of Kreskol were concerned, this might be too important not to get the gentile authorities involved.

  Yankel was outfitted with twelve days’ worth of food and water, the town archives were rifled through for maps of the forest, and a compass was procured from Dr. Moshe Aptner. But hours before Yankel was about to get on the road out of Kreskol, we were all relieved to see the caravan of gypsies in their horse-drawn wagons coming through for their semiannual visit, which everyone agreed was too great a coincidence to be a mere whim of fate. Our heavenly father clearly wanted to help his children in Kreskol.

  In the broken Polish that Rabbi Katznelson spoke, he got the gypsies to agree to lead young Yankel Lewinkopf to Smolskie in one piece.

  “Maybe I’m crazy,” said Esther Rosen that night, as she sat on the bench outside her house with four others, taking in the May breeze, “but I have the feeling that this is the start of something terrible.”

  “Like what?” one of them asked.

  “Like who knows.”

  When two weeks had passed, and neither Pesha, Ishmael, nor Yankel returned to our village, most of those who had known and loved the trio began their descent into despair. What hope could these poor souls have of crawling back to our town after weeks alone in the forest? Issur Rosenthal tore his garments, draped the looking glasses in his house with black cloth, and began reciting the kaddish* every morning. He stopped going into his shop and just sat in the Rosenthals’ clay house in unhappy, tortured silence.

  Likewise, the Lindauers went about their business under a cloud of grief, as if their brother was never very far from their thoughts (but they refused to appear in synagogue, on the off chance that they’d run into Issur Rosenthal).

  Yankel Lewinkopf, however, didn’t have much family—only a few aunts, uncles, and cousins who bothered with his welfare—so nobody kicked up much of a fuss that he had gone missing. Besides, he had been the most prepared. Of the three, he had the most chance of returning, even if nobody cared very much whether he did or not.

  “Do you think the gypsies knifed him for the twenty zlotys in his pocket?” Reb Shapiro asked.

  The question, it would seem, had been answered by being asked in the first place.

  We are, of course, a town with many hundreds of inhabitants, so the grief of two particular families is not enough to stop the business of Kreskol in its tracks. The spring labors were conducted as they always were, with an eye on the summer and fall. Naturally, tragedies such as that of the Lindauer and Rosenthal families thankfully do not happen very often, so all through the spring its aftertaste lingered and worried us, and made Rabbi Sokolow say at the end of every sermon: “We all hope for the speedy return of Pesha Rosenthal, Ishmael Lindauer, and Yankel Lewinkopf.”

  However, I would probably not be telling this story if all three had simply vanished. One August afternoon a boy’s voice came whooping through the streets of Kreskol, singing a single word over and over again.

  “Moshiach!”* young Ezra Schneider cried. “Moshiach! Moshiach! Moshiach!”

  When somebody asked the boy what he was going on about, he pointed a pink finger up in the air, and we saw something remarkable.

  An iron chariot appeared in the sky, thrashing its metal wings in the air like the sound of a thousand scythes busily at work. It came with a great gust of wind which blew a cloud of dust up in the air that sent some of those who had gathered in the town square doubling over in fits of coughing and wheezing.

  Indeed, the boy was not touched in the head. He was not seeing ghosts and demons. The Messiah was flying into Kreskol!

  Somebody thought to summon Rabbi Sokolow, and the sexton recovered the ram’s horn from the synagogue. The horn was blown as if it were Yom Kippur, even though it couldn’t be heard under the noise of the chariot. Heads started peeking out of their shop doors and homes to see the spectacle.

  Several women fainted dead away. Others crumpled to their knees and broke into tears. The wisest of the wise looked as helpless and humbled as little children, too scared to speak. A draftsman ripped his apron off, hunched over, and was sick all over the earthen ground. Even Rabbi Sokolow’s hands were trembling.

  The only ones who didn’t seem surprised or worried were the yeshiva boys. They looked merely enraptured. Their eyes turned glassy, and they began to form a circle, singing and dancing to herald the glorious destruction of the world as they had known it. They seemed to accept this miracle as having happened in due course, rather than something extremely unusual. (Several little children joined them in their dancing and good cheer.)

  After hovering above the ground for a few moments, the chariot
found a spot it approved of in the town square and floated to earth. A painted door opened and a white-bearded man set foot on the ground.

  “Moshiach!” someone shouted.

  The rest of the town shouted the word at the tops of their lungs, and bowed to their knees.

  The white-bearded fellow looked surprised to be addressed in such a manner. He gazed at the multitudes of devotees. But before he had a chance to speak, a younger man emerged from the chariot—this one without a beard, and dressed like a gentile.

  The two exchanged a few words that no one in town understood. And if we had been readying ourselves for an outpouring of emotion, we hesitated. Of course, we had seen gentiles like the gypsies before. But it was puzzling, nonetheless, that the Messiah should be traveling with a non-Jew.

  What happened next was even more bizarre: Yankel Lewinkopf hopped out after the gentile.

  Yankel’s clothes looked spiffy and cared for. And although he was the same rail-thin creature who had left Kreskol three months ago, he looked healthier than he did when he left, like he hadn’t been forced to stew roots and grass to keep himself alive in the forest.

  The three men who had stepped out of the chariot all conversed with one another, as the roar of the chariot’s wings died down.

  “Yankel?” Rabbi Sokolow finally ventured.

  “Hello, Rabbi,” the boy said, before turning back toward the Messiah.

  “What is going on here? Is this the messiah?”

  “They want to know what’s going on,” Yankel said, loud enough for us all to hear him. “What should I tell them?”

  The messiah turned to the gentile and spoke furtively, as Yankel looked on. The messiah leaned over to Yankel and whispered something in his ear.

  “No, Rabbi Sokolow,” Yankel said to all those who had gathered in the town square. “This man is not the Messiah. The end of days has come and gone already. We missed it.”

  Rabbi Sokolow stopped trembling. He was too absorbed in what he was hearing to do anything other than listen raptly. The weeping and the hysterical invocations also died down.

  “The Messiah came many years ago,” Yankel said, plucking a handkerchief out of a trouser pocket and mopping the heat off his brow. “His name was David Ben-Gurion.”

  Well, what a shock we all experienced!

  Of course, many of us had resigned ourselves to the fact that the Messiah might never appear in our lifetimes—but none of us thought that he could have returned and Kreskol simply could have been left out of this miracle. Where was the sounding of the ram’s horn? Where were the disasters of the end of days? When had our loved ones risen from the graves, and when had the era of peace been heralded?

  Several of the town elders took a step back from Yankel, as if he had uttered some black witchcraft, and Lazer Frumkin, the town sofer, burst into helpless tears.

  “When did this happen?” asked Rabbi Sokolow, who appeared to be the only member of our town who kept his head well enough to ask questions. “How did we miss out on the end of days? Wasn’t there supposed to be terrible disasters that would destroy the whole world?”

  “There was,” Yankel replied. “Many years ago a terrible war was launched by Germany, with the intention of destroying each and every last Jew in Europe. And the war was very nearly successful. Every shtetl in Poland was destroyed—except for one.”

  The town was silent.

  Yankel looked as if he didn’t quite know what to say next. The Messiah whispered again in his ear.

  “Our beloved Kreskol was the only one to survive the onslaught,” Yankel said, this time with a note of triumph in his voice. “The armies somehow overlooked us! We were spared!”

  The town was quiet again before someone said loud enough for everyone to hear: “Oh.”

  Yankel looked as if he had been expecting a greater, more exultant response, and one could see the disappointment on his face.

  “A lot has happened in the last few years,” Yankel said. “These men will explain everything.”

  2

  Yankel

  Of course, when I described Yankel Lewinkopf as an “orphan,” I was speaking euphemistically.

  He was, indeed, an orphan in that his mother had contracted typhus and perished before his eighth birthday, and in that he had grown up in several different broods. He lived with an aunt one year. With an uncle another year. And with his grandmother until he was old enough to begin his apprenticeship in his cousin’s bakery.

  But he was decidedly not an orphan in that his father was surely alive and well among Kreskol’s pious men—even if no one could say which man his father was, precisely.

  Devorah Lewinkopf, the boy’s mother, had married young, and before she had reached her twenty-first birthday her husband had vanished one night from their bedchamber. He had the foresight to pack a bag before this disappearance, but that was the only detail that was known. What had happened to Yehuda Lewinkopf is anyone’s guess, but since her husband had never divorced her and his whereabouts remained a mystery, the beit din ruled that Devorah was forbidden to remarry until she got some word of her husband’s death or she formally received a get.

  But despite this somewhat dire fate for a lively woman still in her childbearing years Devorah seemed at ease with her new status as an agunah.* In fact, she seemed happier than she did in the days when her husband was lord and master.

  No one could figure out the source of her good cheer at first, but after a few years it was noticed that she had almost entirely withdrawn from the society of other women. She lived alone in a little cottage on the edge of Kreskol, supporting herself without taking up knitting, or washing, or baking so much as a basket of cookies to sell in the marketplace. After a few years, when the other women of Kreskol saw the way the men looked at her, Devorah became widely despised.

  They called her a seducer of the young. A spreader of disease. A destroyer of morals. A blasphemous buffoon. A promiscuous whore from whom no good was possible.

  To this very day if you asked one of the older women—years after the worms have given up feasting on whatever remained of Devorah Lewinkopf—you will get sour looks and deep frowns upon mention of her name.

  She was not a particularly tall creature. Her skin was dark, and her hair was pitch black. She had a wagging tongue that she used to tell jokes, curse, swear oaths, whisper endearments, and sing rhymes that could redden the face of any coachman in Warsaw. (She could do other things with her tongue that were rarely spoken of, and then only in hushed tones.) But there was no denying that there was something alluring in her dark eyes, which gleamed with secret mischief.

  And the mischief had its intended effect. It was not uncommon for two yeshiva boys to run smack into each other during moonless nights directly in front of Devorah Lewinkopf’s lawn. These boys were often so frightened that they would charge off in different directions, not to be seen again until morning. But this rarely stopped them from returning to Devorah’s hovel at some point in the future.

  When they were feeling crude, and when they were absolutely certain that the Rabbi and the teacher’s assistant were nowhere in sight, the yeshiva boys talked among themselves about “Dirty Devorah.” They would speak of Devorah’s plump breasts with their brown nipples. Her round rump. The thicket of hair between her legs with its musky odor that left one weak-kneed and light-headed upon examination.

  Some of the talk was make-believe, to be sure. You were considered less of a man if you had not called on Devorah at some point, and not every student had the courage to do so. In some cases, midway through his sojourn, a boy would be visited by the spirits of long-departed grandparents, or disappointed mothers, and, with tears running down his cheeks, beg Devorah not to say anything to anybody about what had transpired between them. He would steal away, leaving her the zloty or two in their pockets.

  But others were not by any means telling tales. They had spent the extra effort and money necessary to make certain that their stories of Devorah were at least part
ially accurate.

  When she died, she was buried in a plot outside the walls of town where the bastards and whores and thieves of Kreskol were planted, and the general consensus among the wives and mothers of our town was that we were well rid of her, and that it was a fate no other woman in town had so richly earned.

  The fact that she left behind a little boy, who was good-natured and intelligent, was not much of a consideration.

  However, it should be noted that her bastard, Yankel, was the complete opposite of her in almost every respect—and the females of Kreskol should have been more compassionate with the unfortunate boy. Where the mother had been bawdy and immodest, the son was exceptionally decorous and well mannered. He had his mother’s cheerful good nature, but little of her carnality. At least none that anybody could detect. It was believed that he not only didn’t know anything about the dubious way his mother kept food on the table, or her shameful nickname, or the older men who would tiptoe in and out of their house in the dead of night, but he probably wouldn’t have understood it even if one of the other boys had been indiscreet enough to mention it in his presence.

  Indeed, most of the cheder boys subscribed to the theory that the chief difference between Yankel and his mother was the fact that he was an imbecile, who didn’t understand much of anything.

  This was almost certainly untrue. While never quite at the top of his class, Yankel Lewinkopf was not at the bottom, either. He could memorize Talmud* and Chumash,** and recite it well enough. (His teachers, who more or less assumed the same thing about his intellect, were often taken by surprise that he could answer their questions thoroughly and with obvious quickness.) And even though he had a reputation for being an innocent, this was probably exaggerated as well.

  When the conversation turned to the female sex, as it does with boys of a certain age whose imaginations must fill in the details not yet gleaned through experience, he did not cover his ears, or turn away, or brighten with embarrassment as the more prissy children did. He was not stupid—rather, he was reflective. He listened to the ribald half-truths that his fellow boys told one another about women when they were alone, and he kept his opinions on these matters to himself. But he surely thought something.