The Lost Shtetl

by Max Gross

  “She thinks that Yankel is a bad seed.”

  “Why?”

  “Lord only knows. Because he was too nice, I think.”

  “Too nice?” Geneshe repeated.

  “I think so.”

  Geneshe considered this for a minute.

  “That’s the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard,” she finally pronounced. “I mean, is the woman insane?”

  “Of course she is.”

  “Well, sane or insane, we have a serious problem,” Geneshe continued. “As dear as Yankel is, he’s going to have to find some other place to live. We simply can’t have four adults and sixteen children living in this house. We’ll go crazy.”

  “Fifteen is more likely,” Yitzhak said. “Gitel won’t be giving birth to twins, so far as we know.”

  A week of strained and moody negotiations took place between brother and sister. Sensing that her husband was getting nowhere, Geneshe Sandler paid a visit to her sister-in-law, and after laying all her cards on the table (and being told in no uncertain terms to drop dead), Geneshe stormed back to her house, slammed the door behind her, and declared her sister-in-law a horror, whom “Yankel shouldn’t live with under any circumstances.”

  Yitzhak assumed this meant that his nephew would remain, and was, for the moment, relieved, as he had grown fond of the boy. But, alas, it was not to be.

  “He can’t stay here, either,” Geneshe declared. “And it’s not just because of the issue of space. Now it’s a matter of principle. We can’t let that cow win. She can’t just walk out on her responsibilities and leave us with the bill. There’s something at stake here.”

  And so, setting aside their instructions from the rabbis, Shosha and Yitzhak went to their mother, Zipporah, and told her that they couldn’t abide having Yankel in their houses anymore. Zipporah didn’t quite understand the objections to her grandson, but she was too docile to argue. Besides, a child is a child. She had borne seven—three of whom reached adulthood. As old as she was, she could raise one more. It was settled. The boy would stay with her, and that was all there was to it.

  The boy grew.

  He didn’t grow particularly tall. Or particularly sturdy. But after his fourteenth birthday—as he spent his days kneading flour and water, and shoveling dough in and out of the baking oven—he turned into something resembling a fully formed man. The whispers of a beard came inching down his chin alongside red zits. He developed calluses and blisters on his hands, working without complaint from the time the cock crowed in the morning until the sun went down at night, and he kept his eye on the fires even during the Sabbath, when the housewives of Kreskol would come in to retrieve pots of cholent* and soup that he kept warm. He greeted every man and woman who entered the bakery with a hearty smile. He jumped like a trained dog to retrieve a challah for the most dour housewife.

  Yankel was not liked, exactly. The people of Kreskol were not sophisticated enough to overlook their innate distrust of a mamzer. But he had earned a certain place in our town. He was not fully accepted, but he wasn’t scorned, either.

  Of course, that didn’t mean his illegitimacy wasn’t always lurking somewhere nearby. When he was seventeen, he went to Mira Rut, the matchmaker, and asked her to find him a wife. She laughed in his face.

  Not that he was ugly. Nor did he have terrible professional prospects. (There was a reasonable possibility he might, after all, run the bakery in which he was now working.) But—Mira said—an orphan is always impossible to marry off. His only hope, she told him, was Hodl Lebowitz, who, in addition to being hunchbacked and missing most of her top teeth, was the daughter of the town ragpicker; or Lila Tanenbaum, who was blind and feebleminded.

  Yankel brusquely told Mira Rut he would call on one of her rivals. (It was the only time anyone could remember the boy being choosy about anything.) But the other matchmakers must have told him the same thing, because his eighteenth birthday came and went and he was still a bachelor.

  And, yes, some of the good people of Kreskol felt pity for him.

  It was difficult to think of any interests the young man had, aside from his work and the time he spent every day in prayer.

  He attended services at the beggars’ synagogue (the good synagogue, off Market Street, would never count a mamzer in its quorum), where his mother had said her prayers, and led what anybody would agree was an upright life. And we all wondered how he could possibly fill the hours without a wife and children to occupy him. He might be jinxed; he might be a bastard; but it was widely believed that Yankel Lewinkopf was largely blameless in his misfortunes.

  And he could have easily spent the rest of his life blameless—a footnote in this book, whose existence was on the edges and not in the center of Kreskol—if he hadn’t been visited in his bakery by Rabbi Katznelson the day after Ishmael Lindauer went missing.

  “Yankel Lewinkopf!” Katznelson said upon entering the bakery. “I’ve got good news for you.”

  Yankel had been tending the fire. He cast an eye in the corner toward his cousin, Avraham, before he shut the oven and turned to the man who had entered.

  “Hello, Rabbi Katznelson,” Yankel said.

  “Yes, yes. Hello Yankel. I hope you’re well. I’m here with some big news, my lad. Don’t you want to know what it is?”

  “Certainly.”

  “You’re about to go on an adventure!”

  Yankel was unsure what the Rabbi meant. He looked over to Avraham for some clue, but his cousin was busy kneading a challah into two white braids.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we’re sending you to the big city. You’re going to Smolskie.”

  Avraham evidently heard this, because he stopped kneading and craned his neck around.

  “Smolskie?” Yankel repeated. “Why? Who’s sending me?”

  “Kreskol is. You’re going to be our ambassador there, you see. We have a very important mission. You’ve been following this whole business with Pesha Rosenthal and Ishmael Lindauer?”

  “People talk,” Yankel acknowledged. “It’s only natural to overhear.”

  “Have you heard the latest?”

  “That Pesha is missing? Yes, I heard that.”

  “Old news,” Katznelson scoffed. “Things have changed completely since then, young man. Completely. No, the latest is that Ishmael has run off, too.”

  For a moment Yankel thought the former husband and wife had run off together in an elopement, which sounded unusual, to be sure, but piqued his interest.

  “Oh?”

  “We don’t know what happened, of course, but we’ve decided that it’s time to alert the gentile authorities that a murderer might be on the loose.”

  “A murderer?” Yankel repeated. “You think the wife was murdered?”

  “Anything’s possible. We just don’t know. But the goyim have much more experience in these kinds of things than we do. We need to alert them. You need to alert them.”

  Yankel considered this for a moment.

  “That sounds dangerous.”

  “Why?” Rabbi Katznelson asked. “No one’s asking you to go out and catch a murderer. You’re only going to report one. And who knows—it might be nothing at all.”

  “But I’ve never been out of Kreskol in my life.”

  “Who has?”

  “But I wouldn’t know the first thing about contacting the authorities.”

  “Nobody does,” Katznelson answered. “It’s not as though we’re going to send you out without maps and a compass. Or without food and water. You’ll be provided for.”

  “But who will look after my bubbe?”*

  It was true that not long after he moved in with his grandmother Zipporah and Yankel switched roles, and he was the one who cared for her. He had prepared the meals for her, and washed the linens for her, and gone shopping for her, and done everything that an old and demented woman could not. “Don’t fret about it, my lad,” Katznelson said. “If that’s the worst of your worries, you’ll be fine. Your cous
in Gitel can take your place, no? I’m sure that your uncle Yitzhak and aunt Geneshe would like to get her and her family out of their house, wouldn’t they?”

  “I can’t do that,” Yankel said. “I would never dream of leaving her.”

  Rabbi Katznelson didn’t have the patience to flatter the citizens of Kreskol into doing his bidding. “Maybe this was a mistake,” he said loudly enough for Avraham to hear. “And here I thought we were sending you on an adventure. Here I thought I was giving you what was practically a gift! I thought, ‘What a lucky man! I wish I was young and off to the big city!’ Here I was wishing I could trade places with you. I guess I was wrong.”

  As I have said before, Yankel was no fool. He had never yearned to see the city—certainly not a gentile city—because it had been drilled into his head from the time he was still a toddler that the world outside Kreskol was a dangerous, treacherous place, and that he should consider himself fortunate that he was born far away from it.

  The other students in cheder told ghost stories of what happened to boys who had strayed too far into Kreskol’s woods; how there were demons and warlocks lying in wait, ready to rip the flesh from one’s bones and fry one’s liver in chicken schmaltz.* He had heard tales that the howling in the trees at night were the moans of disobedient boys who had trespassed and been turned into wolves by whatever witch they had come across. Not all of it was witches, either. There were stories of boys who had been chased, captured, put in cages, and turned into bars of soap at the hands of mad, bloodthirsty gentiles who only did so out of a limitless loathing for Jews.

  And he had heard that the cities were temples of iniquity, sin, and antisemitism. These were the places where loose women prostituted their bodies. Where every sin known to man—from theft to adultery, to the eating of filth—existed to be performed and celebrated. Where evil men would slit a little boy’s throat simply for the coins jangling in his pocket. (In point of fact, they wouldn’t even need pocket change as a pretext; they would kill you if they didn’t like the look on your face.)

  However, Yankel’s cousin’s interest was piqued.

  “Wait a minute!” Avraham cried out. “Just wait a minute, here!”

  Katznelson turned.

  “Yankel! You heard the man. This is a great adventure he’s proposing.”

  “But who will take my place here?”

  Avraham waved this away with a white-powdered hand. “We’ll manage.”

  “But I don’t speak Polish.”

  “Sure you do,” Rabbi Katznelson chimed in. “All the boys learn Polish.”

  Which was true, so far as it goes. Polish was treated as a kind of secret language among the young. Still, Yankel hadn’t spoken it in years.

  “I don’t remember a word.”

  “What are you so worried about?” Katznelson asked, pinching his ruddy nose and sniffling. “You don’t think there will be other Jews in Smolskie? You don’t think anybody there speaks Yiddish? If that’s your only objection, I think you’ll get by just fine.”

  And while Yankel couldn’t exactly get excited about his mission—or as excited as Avraham and Katznelson appeared—he felt a natural inclination to do what he was asked. It was something that he had been taught since he became orphaned: to be useful. He believed that he should trust in the wise elders of Kreskol, because they knew what was best for everybody.

  “Very well,” Yankel said. “I’ll go, if you want me to.”

  A pair of new boots were procured. As was a satchel that was filled with nuts and raisins and dried berries, and enough salted beef that he could withstand a couple of weeks out in the wilderness if he got lost. Rabbi Katznelson and his assistant, who still owned a Polish grammar book, sat down together with the town sofer and wrote out two notes, one in Polish and a second one in Yiddish, which Yankel should present to the authorities when he reached Smolskie. (This would, it was reasoned, save Yankel the trouble of summoning the necessary Polish, just in case his linguistic skills deserted him.)

  He was taken to the town’s archive and he sat patiently as he was instructed on what route he should take through the forest—where the trails would turn into dirt roads, and where the dirt roads would turn into paved ones—and how he would know if he had veered off course. Ancient maps had the dust blown off them and were placed in Yankel’s young hands.

  Dr. Moshe Aptner, the keeper of all the scientific devices and doodads in our town, produced a dull golden compass.

  “What’s it used for?” Yankel asked.

  Dr. Aptner looked, for a moment, as if he wasn’t quite certain of the answer. “Why, it tells the difference between north and south,” he finally declared.

  “How?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  If Yankel felt nervous, he took pains not to reveal it. A mule was taken to the blacksmith and fitted with new shoes, and then loaded with supplies.

  However, I’m not going to say that we didn’t all breathe a great sigh of relief when, only hours before Yankel was to depart, the caravan of gypsies came through Kreskol’s market for their spring visit. “Thank god,” Katznelson whispered when he thought no one was listening. “Oh, thank god!”

  The gypsies had taken the primitive, unpaved path through the forest that their ancestors had beaten several centuries earlier. Why they remained faithful to this route was something of a mystery. Some in Kreskol believed that it was more out of a respect for custom than anything else—they certainly weren’t coming back for any money we could offer. As poor and unsophisticated as the gypsies were, they let us know that we were much worse. Our cash offers were too insulting to even be countered; they would only accept trade.

  Still, every spring and every fall they hitched their horse-drawn wagons to a fence that stood just outside the walls of town, and dragged the elaborate birdcages and grandfather clocks and baskets of puppies to the market square along with more practical items like sewing needles and boxes of nails and castor oil and Epsom salts that were unquestionably in demand.

  As much as nails and sewing needles were needed, we were never exactly welcoming. We treated trespassers suspiciously and didn’t mind if it came off as rudeness—but the gypsies weren’t exactly polite or effusive, either.

  They would spend hours thoughtfully examining Szeina Rifkin’s embroidered aprons and summer frocks, or Shalom Shmotkin’s sheepskin slippers, before making an offer for the entire inventory.

  “A box of five hundred matches for each dress,” a gypsy would say in Polish, and then hold up the box in her left hand and the dress in her right, indicating a one-for-one trade. Seeing that she could turn around and swap these matches for shoes or gloves or even a goose, it didn’t seem like a bad bargain to Szeina, and for a few weeks thereafter she was in the match distribution business. A hand was offered and accepted. The gypsies spent the afternoon sifting through our market and making their offers before turning around and heading on their way.

  This time, however, when Rabbi Katznelson was summoned out of the study house and he saw who was riding into town, he waved hello, gave them his best smile, and said in broken Polish, “Too long, too long!”

  The main plenipotentiary of these wanderers, a man in his fifties who wore a gold ring in his left ear, was named Washo Zurka, and he looked as surprised as we had ever seen him to be greeted so warmly.

  “Well, hello,” Zurka said.

  “Good!” Katznelson said. “Good to come!”

  Zurka didn’t know what he meant, exactly. “Yes,” Zurka replied with a nod, scratching nervously along his plump cheek. “It’s good to be here.”

  The rest of the conversation was hammered out in a broken, piecemeal way, but led to Yankel being plucked from the blacksmith’s and Rabbi Katznelson telling Zurka, “This boy needs to go to Smolskie. You will take him?” And Zurka shrugged before agreeing, “Why not?”

  A price was offered of twenty zlotys, but it was laughed off.

  “But twenty zlotys?” Katznelson said, looking alarmed. �
�That’s a fortune!”

  Zurka smiled with sympathy. He was not an unfriendly person. While he hadn’t yet quite figured out what this crisis was all about, he could sense that something was wrong among these Jews and he was willing to help them if it didn’t cost him anything. Nevertheless, even a charitable man couldn’t help but be taken aback by these Hebrews’ sense of money. “You have not been to Smolskie recently, have you?” Zurka asked.

  “Never. I never been.”

  “Well, then you would know that twenty zlotys is not very much of anything.”

  For a moment, Rabbi Katznelson looked dumbstruck. He would have to take the twenty zlotys from the synagogue’s treasury, and it would take some time to replenish it. Months and months. But if Yankel Lewinkopf’s safety was at issue, he was willing to spend it. However, how was it possible that twenty zlotys was “not very much of anything”?

  If they had been speaking Yiddish, Katznelson might have been able to ask better questions, but the surprise had thrown him. He shook his head before saying: “Forty.”

  Zurka laughed again. He watched his partner in this negotiation with fascination more than anything else.

  “You laugh?” Katznelson said. “Forty zlotys and you laugh?”

  “It’s not much more than twenty.”

  “Two times twenty! Two for one. Double!”

  “I know the math.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “For you, maybe. But it’s just not very much money today in Poland.”

  Katznelson wondered if this gypsy was tricking him. He had no way of knowing what went on in other places, but in Kreskol two groschen bought you a loaf of bread, therefore forty zlotys would buy two thousand loaves of bread. It was a staggering figure. Could it really be that worthless in the rest of Poland? Besides, all he was asking was that the man take Yankel through the woods and to safety. What could the man want for that?

  “Forty-five,” Rabbi Katznelson said. “That’s final.”

  Zurka said nothing. He merely looked at the Jews of Kreskol who had come to watch the negotiation. Zurka imagined that they rarely saw anything this exciting play out in their daily life, and he decided to give the villagers their money’s worth. He looked as if he was weighing the decision carefully and was unsure of how he would decide.