The Lost Shtetl

by Max Gross

  Fortunately, the misperception that he was both innocent and simple kept the other boys from ridiculing his mother to his face. It was believed he couldn’t take any ribbing. The one time that Falk Goreman—the biggest boy in the cheder, and two years older than Yankel—had shouted, “Hey, Lewinkopf! I think I left my tzitzit*** on your mother’s bedside!” the incident did not end well.

  Yankel looked puzzled by Goreman’s words. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Figure it out.”

  Yankel stared at the big, lumbering Goreman, who had turned his attention away from Yankel and back to the other young men. But Yankel strode toward his nemesis, tapped him on the shoulder, and said, “Would you repeat what you said?”

  “I said I think I left my tzitzit on your mother’s bedside when I came around for a visit last night.” Goreman smiled, unfazed. “Why don’t you be a good boy and run along home and fetch it?”

  The other boys stopped what they were doing to observe the scene.

  Those who witnessed the incident said that in the ensuing minute or so, every boy felt his heart thumping in his chest. A challenge had been proffered, and all the boys wondered whether Yankel would accept it. Some were waiting for him to break down in tears. Others assumed he was too dumb to realize he had been insulted. A few half-expected him to go running for the Rabbi. And a handful were hoping that Yankel would throw the first punch at Goreman, which would lead to Yankel’s subsequent pummeling—something that held a macabre fascination for every boy. One and all studied Yankel’s face for some clue as to what would come next.

  The pummeling happened—but it was not of Yankel. It was by Yankel.

  He lunged at Goreman so quickly that no one had time to stop him. His hands grasped Goreman’s throat with every ounce of his strength.

  The other boys fell on them both and tried to tear Yankel away, but to no avail. Falk Goreman’s thick, fleshy throat was firmly locked in Yankel’s hands, and for a moment it looked as though the boy might in fact be choked to death.

  An adult was summoned, and slowly Yankel’s fingers were pried off Falk’s neck by the young teacher’s assistant, who looked more terrified than any of the children that a charge might actually die on his watch.

  Falk—the large, immense lummox of a boy, whose size had always made him a purveyor of fear in the schoolyard—now collapsed in the dust. He was beet red, gasping for air, with tears streaming down his cheeks. His blond sidelocks had become matted and hair was strewn every which way over his face. Even after he had caught his breath, he continued to sob and howl and quake in misery.

  But Yankel still had a crazed look about him, and no one dared trust him not to lunge again. The teacher’s assistant held him down, and the other boys all hovered over him, waiting to pounce, as the minutes ticked by and the lunacy finally left his eyes.

  Once Yankel had calmed down and seen the terror he had inflicted on Falk Goreman, he burst into tears, too. Each boy was made to apologize to the other. And despite this pathetic display of cowering misery, after a few weeks Falk returned to his rightful role as the biggest (and therefore the scariest) bully in the cheder.

  But Yankel was forever afterward treated as a leper. Not only was he an idiot, it was reasoned, but he was violent. Like one of the goyim. And the son of a whore, anyway. He was thereafter spoken to only when absolutely necessary. Even the other outcasts, who were reviled and picked on, refused to have anything to do with him. As did the pious boys who, knowing they should steer clear of a mamzer,* had avoided him for ages.

  When Yankel’s mother died a few months later, rather than feeling any sympathy for the orphan a theory emerged among the cheder students that it was an act of divine retribution.

  “This,” declared Manis Fefferberg on the playground that afternoon, “is what God does to you when you act crazy. This is how he repays you.”

  The other boys nodded, solemnly.

  “Even when you act crazy toward a bully like Falk Goreman.”

  Another nod.

  “I suspect that Yankel Lewinkopf is cursed.”

  And this was the perception that remained forever after etched in stone whenever his name was mentioned: Yankel was jinxed.

  For the aunts and uncles who took him in after his mother perished, they did not think of him as jinxed per se, but as a reminder of the family’s abiding shame and as an inescapable slab of dead weight who had to be fed and clothed and washed and educated.

  While Devorah Lewinkopf might have been a low, lewd creature, who spent the day of atonement with the other riffraff at the beggars’ synagogue on Thieves’ Lane, it would be a mistake to assume that she had come from a bad family. In fact, there was a time when the Sandlers (her surname before she became a Lewinkopf) were considered one of the better families in Kreskol.

  The Sandlers were once moneylenders. Pincus Sandler, Yankel’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, had been a rich man who had built one of the village’s more splendid houses, just outside the old medieval walls of the village. Sandler women were given diamonds and pin money and gentile maidservants to clean up after them, and all sorts of other goodies that most women in Kreskol could only dream about.

  But, of course, that was a long time ago. The Sandlers’ fortunes had fallen several generations earlier when a recession caused numerous families to pick up and leave Kreskol. The Sandlers eventually drifted out of the lending business and into different lines of work. But they remained respectable. While they might not have the riches they once possessed, they hung on to a hoard of silver and diamonds. They never wanted for meat on their Sabbath tables. Their sons studied at yeshiva and became educated men. They had decent dowries to give to their daughters.

  Moreover, Devorah Lewinkopf’s mother, Zipporah, although not a Sandler by birth, had lent the clan added respectability as the daughter of Rabbi Reuven Nussbaum, one of the most pious and educated men to ever reside in Kreskol. Zipporah had widely been known to feed the poor, scrupulously say her prayers, and share all the important attributes of a saint. It was a shame, the other females lamented, that her faculties deserted her so early in life, because she would have never allowed her daughter to turn into such an abomination.

  “Do you think she even knows?” the women would ask at the marketplace.

  The answer was, as always, a shrug.

  No, Zipporah Sandler did not seem the slightest bit aware of the whispering about her daughter as she trudged through the stalls, examining eggs and cabbages, or on her way to the tailor to have a dress mended or her wig restitched. She held her head high and wasn’t hesitant about volunteering some nugget of information or news about her youngest daughter if the subject seemed to fit into the discussion. She could never quite figure out why gazes would suddenly fall and the conversation would grind to a halt.

  What went on between mother and daughter when a seed took root in her daughter’s supposedly abandoned womb?

  Lord only knows if the old lady had wit enough to understand the implications. But, nevertheless, Devorah told her mother that her husband had reappeared one evening to reassert his matrimonial privileges and—just as quickly—vanished again into thin air. At least, this was the public story that Zipporah gave to anyone who asked her. (Not that too many felt compelled to ask.)

  When Devorah died, and the rabbis met with the family and discussed what should be done, Devorah’s sister and brother each prayed fervently that they would not wind up with their sister’s young bastard.

  Rabbi Sokolow was firm. Devorah’s kin had an obligation to raise Yankel—mamzer, bastard, orphan, or whatever he was—as one of their own, and Zipporah Sandler was too feeble in mind and body to do it herself. The Sandlers hewed to the Rabbi’s ruling with the most grudging sense of duty possible.

  Indeed, Yankel was given a place in his aunt’s house. But he was never made to forget that he was a transient, subsisting on her charity.

  “I don’t know what other aunts would do for you, Yankel,” Shosha Marko
witz would tell her nephew. “But aren’t you lucky to be here with me?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Other relatives, they just might leave you to the wolves,” Shosha continued.

  “I know.”

  “But not me. You’ve got a warm house here. You’ve got three hot meals a day. You have it awfully good.”

  “Thank you, Aunt Shosha.”

  She winced, slightly, at hearing the word “aunt” affixed to her name.

  “And you shouldn’t forget that you have obligations, too, young man.”

  The boy nodded.

  “This house doesn’t run itself. Food doesn’t magically appear on the dinner table every night. It takes a lot of work to put it there.”

  “Yes, Aunt Shosha.”

  “If you want to live here, you’re going to have to work for it—just like everybody else.”

  Yankel helped his aunt wash floors, iron clothes, peel carrots and potatoes, pound out flanken, render the chicken fat, beat out the rugs and carpets, preserve fruits and vegetables for the winter, chop firewood for the stove, and anything else his aunt could think of—even though the “just like everybody else” part of her pronouncement was decidedly false.

  Yankel’s cousins were rarely asked to contribute the same share of labor. Or any labor at all, for that matter. Even Shosha’s daughters, who might be reasonably expected to do more of the household chores than her sons, lifted a finger only if it was to bring a fork up to their mouths.

  It should be noted that Shosha Markowitz treated her offspring as if they were a band of wayward royalty who had only accidentally wound up in her care and feeding. She fully believed that her children were talented, intelligent, important people (even if nobody in Kreskol was particularly important), and her responsibility for their happiness was a sacred trust.

  Not only did her sons and daughters not have to contribute any labor they didn’t want to, Shosha believed that the normal strains of childhood amusement were too much for them, as well.

  When they left the house to play with other children, she tearfully begged them to please—please!—care for their safety. When they would scrape a knee or bruise an elbow, she would cry along with them and ply them with cookies and potato pancakes and anything else they felt was their due.

  But this doting and attention did not extend to Yankel, whom she viewed as if he were part of the hired help. He was never thanked for his efforts; rather, he was led to believe that they were nothing more or less than reasonable compensation for room and board.

  Moreover, Yankel’s excellence in performing every task put before him did little to endear him to his aunt. In fact, it had the opposite effect. After a few months of living with Yankel, Shosha began viewing his sprightliness and good nature as the sign of something sinister.

  “Who is this boy?” she asked her husband one night when they were alone in their bed. “He never speaks his mind, for goodness sake!”

  “So?”

  “So I can’t figure out whether the boy’s a simpleton on whom we’re wasting all this food, space, and effort, or whether he’s truly his mother’s son—a little rascal, working up some sort of plot in his head, to cheat us out of house and home.”

  For the rest of his tenure in the Markowitz house, as he stitched and whittled and canned and ironed and did everything else his aunt desired, Shosha’s suspicion remained fixed on him.

  Yankel sensed that he had somehow done something to offend his aunt, and he thus put forth greater effort to be as useful as possible. He took on extra chores and duties—things that he was never asked to do—and he did them well, which only exacerbated his aunt’s misgivings. Suspicion was calcified into certainty. Shosha would leave Yankel to his chores, and when she was satisfied that her nephew believed that he was alone, she would burst in on him—expecting to catch him, in flagrante delicto, in some violation of the family’s trust. Or she would close the door to the kitchen and study him through a keyhole for signs of disobedience.

  The relationship between aunt and nephew came to a climax (or reached its nadir) one winter night when all the children had gone to sleep, and the Markowitzes were alone in their bed. Conversation began with the broken stove in the kitchen that desperately needed to be repaired before it got too cold, progressed to mittens and scarves the children needed, and culminated with the question of Chanukah gifts, and what each child deserved.

  “I suppose we have to give something to the mamzer,” Shosha said, with a little laugh.

  Solomon frowned, disapprovingly.

  “You shouldn’t say that,” he said. “It’s not nice. The boy can’t help who his mother is.”

  Shosha sighed loudly. “Yeah, not nice,” she said. “But, of course, it wasn’t nice for my sister to leave us with a mamzer. What did we do to deserve that?”

  Shosha’s sister was a topic that she never tired of, even after Devorah’s ignominious life had been swallowed up by the finality of death. When Shosha was alone with her husband, she still conjured up long-ago memories of her sister to prove what a bad seed she was, right from the start. She told stories of plates of food hurled against the wall when Devorah was a toddler; how she had been shoved by Devorah, knocking out two of her baby teeth; how Devorah had once run stark naked through the house, reached the front door, and galloped outside in the July sun for all the world to witness.

  “I still can’t get over her,” Shosha said. “Still, after all these years. It’s not even that she was a whore. But she was such a dimwit. She became a whore because she didn’t have the smarts to make a living in an honest way. She couldn’t cook. She couldn’t sew. She couldn’t do anything except spread her legs.”

  At that, Solomon stood up to close the slightly ajar door to their bedroom, just on the off chance that the children were still awake, and when he reached the door he found Yankel standing in his nightshirt in the hallway.

  Both Shosha and Solomon Markowitz’s faces reddened. They merely stared at the child in horror.

  For his part, Yankel’s brown hair was swept over his forehead, making him look, if anything, even younger than he was. His eyes were wide with disbelief. His mouth cracked open, but silent.

  “What are you doing out of bed?” Solomon finally thought to ask.

  But Yankel didn’t say anything. He could only respond in a mousey squeak; as if he were afraid any rumble coming out of his mouth might provoke an avalanche.

  “Jacob’s awake,” he said of his two-year-old cousin, who slept next to him. And before he said anything else, tears began silently falling down his cheeks.

  Solomon thanked him for bringing it to his attention and quickly led him back to bed.

  “So typical,” Shosha said when they were alone again. “Instead of acting maturely, he tries to make me feel guilty. What a number this little stinker is doing on us!”

  Shosha’s guilt grew strong enough that a few days later Yankel was banished from his aunt’s house altogether, and sent to live with his uncle Yitzhak. “It’s time for you to live with your uncle now,” Shosha said by way of explanation. “You’ve been here long enough.”

  Yankel nodded obediently, betraying neither great disappointment nor exhilaration.

  “Watch him,” Shosha instructed her brother upon delivering their nephew to Yitzhak’s doorstep. “He’s up to no good.”

  Yitzhak Sandler was more sympathetic to the young boy than his sister. He believed that Shosha’s stories about all of Yankel’s evil plotting were just stories—the work of a female with an overstuffed imagination.

  Which is not to say that Yitzhak, or his wife, Geneshe, liked the idea of caring for another child. Whereas his sister’s objections to Yankel had to do with the shame of bringing a bastard into an otherwise spotless house, Yitzhak and Geneshe Sandler had more practical reasons: They already had thirteen children. Their house was a maelstrom of chaos and noise. Someone in the house was always crying. Someone was always accidentally hurting themselves. Someone was always lodgi
ng a complaint or leveling an accusation.

  Things had eased up, somewhat, when their eldest son, Avraham, left to be married, followed six months later by their eldest daughter, Gitel. But the house still hiccupped and rustled and creaked late into the night. The idea of caring for another youngster wasn’t just daunting, it was depressing.

  However, as with his aunt, Yankel was determined to prove himself useful. He did every chore Yitzhak and Geneshe could dream up, even if they never really felt the boy had anything to prove.

  They grew to like having Yankel around, and unlike with his aunt Shosha, the boy was never made to feel like too much of a freeloader. Of course, everything changed once their daughter, Gitel, her husband, Favish, and their infant twins, Alte and Itzel, showed up at the Sandler home one night and announced that Favish had not finished his studies adequately and had been asked to leave yeshiva. Favish’s parents threw them out of their house and told them not to return until he was reinstated.

  Suddenly, a marginally tolerable situation was made unbearable. A house of fourteen (if you considered Yankel and the adults) ballooned to eighteen. Two of whom were wailing, screaming, colicky infants. And in a matter of months that number would become nineteen owing to the fact that Gitel was already expecting yet another child.

  “This is ridiculous!” Geneshe said to her husband the next night. “There are going to be nineteen people living in four rooms. Nineteen! Such a thing is not possible!”

  “I know . . .”

  “Who knows—it might be twenty! After all, that daughter of ours gave birth to twins once. Who’s to say it isn’t possible for lightning to strike a second time?”

  “What can we do?”

  “Remind me again why Shosha can’t take in your nephew?”

  “She doesn’t like him.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I think so.”

  “That can’t be it. There has to be some other reason. And if that’s the reason, it’s ridiculous. We’re going to have twenty people living in this house. She has eight. She should take Yankel in.”