The Lost Shtetl

by Max Gross

  “All right,” Katznelson said, unprompted. “I will make one more offer. Take it or leave it. I cannot spend another penny . . .”

  Zurka waited for Katznelson to say something, but he didn’t. Katznelson’s eyes were cast on the dirt ground, as if he were stealing himself for his next concession.

  “Yes?” Zurka said.

  “Fifty. Fifty is it. If you want more, we’ll let the boy find Smolskie on his own.”

  Zurka smiled. “Fifty?”

  “Yes, fifty. And he’ll bring along his own food and water.”

  “Very well. I accept. In fact, you can keep your fifty zlotys. What I want is for you to give me the mule he was planning on taking. And two dozen of Shmotkin’s gold slippers.”

  Rabbi Katznelson looked not just relieved but ecstatic. They shook hands and—after the yearly negotiations commenced and more swag was exchanged—Yankel was led with the little mule back to the four covered wagons on the outskirts of Kreskol.

  The gypsies stared at Yankel as if they were encountering a never-before-seen animal, whose passivity or malevolence they were unable to fully gauge.

  The horses were untied, and one of the gypsy teenagers mounted the mule and started on the forested path ahead of the other animals.

  “You’ll ride in that one,” Zurka said to Yankel, pointing to the last wagon in the caravan, where he had put the cache of slippers, as well as shawls, boots, summer vests, and pottery the gypsies had successfully traded for.

  Yankel had a hard time understanding the gypsy. The conversation between the gypsy and Rabbi Katznelson had been agony to follow, and things weren’t any easier now that Zurka was speaking directly to him. He recognized terms here and there, but the words had shot out of Zurka’s mouth far too quickly for him to fully grasp. Yankel simply stood, dumbly.

  Zurka repeated the instruction and pointed to the wagon.

  An old mother with a black kerchief wrapped around her head was standing guard, and Yankel turned back to Zurka, who was watching him at a distance. Yankel pointed to the wagon. “Go in?”

  Zurka nodded.

  The old woman opened the curtain to the back of the wagon, pointed out a seat in the middle of a sea of metal and wooden junk, and began talking to him in a language he was fairly sure wasn’t Polish.

  At first, Yankel didn’t know what the gypsy mother—whose fingers were long and bony, like the fingers of a witch—meant as she pointed to the empty space in the back of the wagon next to a large wooden wardrobe lying on its back, and a faded gold candelabra that could have been replicated from the Arch of Titus.

  He turned in the finger’s direction and stared mutely at the great mounds of clutter, stacked from the wagon’s floor to its canvas top.

  The gypsy repeated her command.

  Hunched over, like an old man who had to make every move with the deliberateness of age, he navigated around the silk scarves, cardboard boxes of plastic-wrapped shirts (transparent wrapping was something Yankel had never seen before), crates of lightbulbs and electric irons.

  The old woman followed, and took a seat across from Yankel. After a minute the horse was whipped, and the caravan began the next leg of its journey.

  For some reason, even though she knew not a word of Polish or Yiddish, the old woman took a liking to Yankel.

  It might have been the fact that there was something childlike in the esteem with which Yankel held the mess surrounding him. It occurred to her that the poor boy, all the way out there in the boondocks, probably had never been exposed to these things before. Every digital clock or stereo brought a glint to his eye, and the old woman could not help but admire his wonder.

  She held up a blender and began to explain the instrument’s purpose in the Romani language. Yankel gave her his full attention and nodded vigorously as she spun her fingers around to illustrate the thrashing manner in which the device smashed and pureed vegetables.

  She held up a cardboard box containing a hot plate, which had on its box a Chinese family poised with chopsticks over a wok full of sautéed vegetables, and Yankel marveled at the image, having never actually seen a photograph before or features as distinct as those from the Orient.

  The old gypsy mother was a talker, and she liked having an audience. She produced a white stick from her jacket, which she put in her mouth and lit on fire. The fire did not consume the stick, however; after its tip was lit, blue rings of smoke drifted out of the old woman’s nose. And she proceeded to ply her audience with great, long-winded monologues.

  Yankel was the ideal audience because he was unable to interrupt. When she wasn’t explaining the technical marvels in the back of the wagon, or smoking cigarettes, she passed the hours recounting gypsy folk stories and bits of worldly wisdom. She accepted his smiles and nods as the only affirmation necessary.

  She occasionally pulled back the wagon’s canvas curtain and pointed to some oddity of nature, or the dirt road they were traveling on, or a deer studying their caravan, and Yankel looked eagerly on, as any explorer setting foot in the unknown.

  When the wagons stopped for the night, and all the gypsies spread out blankets and mattresses on the ground, built a bonfire, and took out their mandolins, the old woman kept Yankel away from the youths who were smoking pot and drinking beer. “He’s too pious to sit with you,” she told her teenaged grandson. She gave Yankel a blanket, lay down next to him, and continued talking to him until Yankel was snoring soundly.

  The next day, the forest path gave way to a dirt road that, in turn, gave way to a paved highway that the horses walked slowly along. When, on the third day of their journey, a loud buzzing and vroom could be heard, much to her young guest’s bemusement, the old woman pulled back the curtain and pointed to the cars and trucks burping and zipping ahead of the wagon.

  Yankel’s reserve vanished almost instantly.

  “What’s that?” he asked in Yiddish, and then repeated the question in Polish.

  “Automobile.”

  Yankel barely knew what to say about the enormous, gleaming, red, silver, and blue metal cans that flew past them.

  “But how does it work?”

  It was a useless question. The old mother didn’t understand him.

  Yankel was almost tempted to find a way up to the front of the wagon to ask Zurka what these contraptions were, exactly, and what they were doing. He stuck his head out of the back and stared at the men and women who were sitting quietly behind the steering wheels. He waved at them with barely containable excitement as they whizzed by.

  “What’s it called again?” he asked the old woman, but this time she didn’t understand his question. She just shrugged. He turned back to the machines and watched them as they glided over the highway and honked horns at one another and gave bewildered looks at the young bearded Jew in the back of a horse-drawn gypsy caravan, flapping his arms wildly.

  The old lady was somewhat surprised by the man that Yankel had suddenly become. Once the levee of words had been breached, the flood that followed was almost too much for her.

  “How do you like that!” he kept saying. “How do you like that!”

  The old woman nodded politely, just as Yankel had done an hour or two earlier.

  “Maybe when we get to Smolskie, we could stop one of these buggies”—which he decided was the best fitting word for the contraptions—“and ask the owner how the thing works.”

  The old woman nodded, again.

  “It’s like it’s being pushed along by magic! I still cannot believe it. They keep running and running.”

  The old woman said nothing.

  “At first, I thought they must have rabbits inside, pushing the wheels along. But those things are far too big and heavy for rabbits. There are no rabbits inside, are there?”

  No answer.

  “And besides, look at those things. They look as if they’re made out of metal. How could they move as fast as they do being moved along by rabbits? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  Not that she di
sliked Yankel’s newfound enthusiasm, but she was an old woman and no longer possessed of the energy or willpower to match it, so she kept quiet. (And, in truth, the fact that her stories and explanations had failed to capture the young Jew’s interest as strongly as these modern marvels was a small blow to her vanity.)

  As the day wore on, and the speeding contraptions grew into a harder and more unalterable reality, Yankel continued to dominate the creaky back of the wagon with stories and speculation.

  “There’s a horse in Kreskol who was the fastest thing I had ever seen. I once saw him get spooked by something—maybe a mouse, I don’t remember, exactly—and gallop from the market square to the cemetery in what must’ve been ten seconds. It was something to see. But I don’t think he could run half as fast as those buggies.”

  Yankel loved the roar of the highway. “Listen. I’ve never heard anything like it.” And he was fascinated by the calm of the drivers. “How could they all look so bored? Are they really so normal, these machines?”

  The gypsy had no explanation.

  The road to Smolskie was adorned with traffic lights, and once the caravan hit the town limits, the wagon slowed to a stop at a small shoe seller.

  Without a word, Zurka opened the back curtain and grabbed the golden slippers he had traded for Yankel’s safe passage to town. He disappeared into the shop and returned a quarter of an hour later, counting a thick stack of zlotys, which he put in his front pocket.

  Yankel watched this side of the transaction with quiet fascination. Not that it shouldn’t have occurred to him—and everyone else in Kreskol—that the gypsies kept returning to our backwater, year after year, for some practical purpose.

  Yet, for a moment, Yankel felt wiser and more sophisticated than his fellow townsmen; like he had just uncovered for himself one of the mysteries of adulthood that children are never privy to.

  “All right, young man,” Zurka said upon his return. “This is as far as we’re taking you.”

  Yankel grabbed his satchel of food, clothes, and maps, and said farewell to the old crone.

  “How do I get back?” Yankel asked once he was on the paved sidewalk.

  Zurka shrugged.

  “Will you take me?” Yankel asked.

  “We’re not going to be near Kreskol for quite some time. If you want, I can give you my cell, but I doubt you’re going to want to wait four months.”

  Yankel looked puzzled.

  “Here,” Zurka said, and he reached into his pocket for a slip of paper on which he wrote his mobile phone number. He handed it to Yankel, who stared at the Arabic numerals blankly. “Goodbye, and good luck.”

  I’m sure the sophisticated reader will think very little of the sights that Yankel observed in the city. They were ordinary things, and Smolskie is not by any means a large or memorable town.

  But those scattered members of the human race whose homes are still far from the reaches of civilization will no doubt understand how humbled Yankel felt as he stepped out onto a mostly abandoned sidewalk.

  He had never seen a building more than two stories high, and he stood staring at a five-story apartment in quiet revelry. He looked at the windows that studded the side—which were blinking in the afternoon sun—and quietly tried to figure out where all this glass had come from; how it had been fitted so seamlessly into the bones of the building; how the building’s draftsmen could make a structure so symmetrical and unblemished, unlike the coarse, homespun-looking ones in Kreskol.

  Yankel looked across the street and saw another, grander structure. And as he gazed down the block, the line of buildings stretched off into the distance—some of which were shorter, some taller and stouter—and made him hold his breath. He felt like a pilgrim stepping foot in Jerusalem for the first time, or among the porticos of Ancient Greece.

  The cars on the street slowed down and stopped at a traffic signal, which lit up in red, and then switched to amber and green—something that also drove Yankel to contemplation. The lights had a will of their own. No candles were poised behind the colored glass. No sentry was switching the light from amber to red. It worked automatically, as if by witchcraft.

  Raised above his head was an enormous fresco of a blond gentile woman—with a beautiful white-toothed smile, wearing a low-cut blue top that revealed the cleavage between her breasts—holding a plastic tube of dishwashing liquid in her hands.

  Yankel took a step backwards when he saw it.

  He had never seen such immodesty in public before, and this first glimpse reddened his cheeks and made him recoil. He looked around to make sure no one else was watching him before he looked up at the billboard again and studied it carefully.

  And as he took his first few steps along the sidewalk, like a newborn infant encountering the fully formed world for the first time, Yankel had the sensation he got late in the night on Purim,* when he had forgotten how many glasses of vodka he’d drunk, and the room suddenly spun free from its earthly moorings.

  The people he started to see as he walked closer to the center of town were all gentiles—there wasn’t a single Jew in the mix. They were a race of beautiful, hearty men and women, whose clothes were short and revealing, in deference to the warm weather.

  At first, Yankel stepped forward to approach the men, but they all walked with far too much determination to stop.

  As for the gentile women, Yankel’s courage faltered there, as well. He was too shy and embarrassed to ask for help. But as he stared at them—ripe women whose shoulders were uncovered in the sunshine, and whose breasts clung to white cotton halter tops—he thought for the first time since he had left Kreskol that perhaps Rabbi Katznelson was more right than he imagined. Maybe he was lucky to go on this mission, after all.

  So Yankel wandered out into this strange city, his eyes gleaming at every bus that roared past him, at every mother who pushed him aside to make way for her perambulator, at every supermarket with their crates of lemons and oranges out front, at every bakery, at every hardware store, at every electronics outlet.

  It was hours before he would say to anyone, “Police . . . ? Police . . . ? Would you help me to find the police?”

  “Do . . . you . . . speak . . . Yiddish?”

  Yankel knew those words reasonably well. He had practiced them with Rabbi Katznelson as he had been fitted for his boots. If the answer had been in the affirmative, the rest of his memorized questions would become unnecessary, Rabbi Katznelson said. So they were the best ones to learn, backwards and forwards. However, Yankel spoke these words haltingly, considering each syllable before they left his mouth, just to make sure that no one could fail to understand.

  Nevertheless, the policeman he directed the question to managed to miss it.

  “What’s that?” the officer said. “Do I speak what? Speak up, son.”

  The policeman had strawberry blond hair, which had been sculpted into a crew cut. And despite the fact that this officer—whose bulk filled out every spare inch of his uniform—spoke diminutively toward Yankel, he was not quite old enough to make the word “son” sound convincing.

  “Do. You. Speak. Yiddish?”

  “Yiddish? No.”

  Yankel took this as a matter of course, and jumped to his next question. “Does somebody . . . speak . . . Yiddish?”

  The policeman stared at the young buck before him for a few moments before answering. The buck, when he had entered the station a few minutes earlier, had caused a considerable stir. Not everyone in Smolskie had ever seen a Jew in the flesh—much less a Jew fully outfitted in the black-and-white trimmings—and as Yankel had wandered into the precinct, the station came to a standstill, with officers staring at him openly. Telephones rang, and angry prisoners growled from their holding cells, but the police ignored these unseen disturbances. It was a good minute before Yankel was directed toward the strawberry blond officer.

  “No. Nobody here does.”

  Yankel nodded, sagely.

  “Can . . . you . . . help me?”


  For a second, the officer wondered if this were a put-on; if the whiskers on Yankel’s face were fake, and if the black trousers and black hat weren’t a costume. Some teenager’s idea of a weird joke. “That depends. What do you want?”

  “I wish . . . to be reporting . . . lady.” Yankel looked pleased with himself that he had managed to get as much out. Then he added, “Missing lady.”

  “You want to file a missing persons report,” the officer said, suddenly taking the decorum of his profession seriously. He selected a form from his desk, took the cap off his pen, and went to business. “What is the name of the person in question?”

  Yankel looked baffled.

  “The missing lady,” the officer said. “What’s her name?”

  “Name” triggered something. “Ah . . . Pesha Rosenthal.”

  “When did she go missing?”

  It was not a question Yankel had been prepared for—and he was not entirely sure he understood what he was being asked. “When?” he repeated, and pondered the answer. He had been on the road for three days. And he had been preparing for his trip for two days while still in Kreskol. And she must have taken off at least a day or two before her husband had gone missing as well. “A week.”

  “Are you a relative?”

  Yankel didn’t understand the query.

  “Are you a relative?” the officer repeated. “Are you her brother? Or her husband?”

  “No.”

  “Are you colleagues?”

  Yankel certainly didn’t understand that one.

  “Do you work together? Have the same job?”

  “No,” Yankel replied. “I’m a baker.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Pesha Rosenthal,” Yankel said, understanding only the word “name.”

  “No,” the officer said. “What’s your name?”

  “Ah!” Yankel said, and told him.