The Lost Shtetl

by Max Gross

  “How do you know her?”

  “I don’t.”

  A peculiar response, certainly.

  “How do you know she’s missing?”

  Yankel figured this was the opportune time to produce the two parchments and hand them over to the official.

  To the most honorable court of Szyszki—

  We, the humble people of Kreskol, founded under the auspices of the great and honorable reign of Casimir III, wish to report a most dastardly and treacherous circumstance in our village.

  Pesha Rosenthal, daughter of one of our tailors, Reb Issur Rosenthal, has gone missing from our town.

  The young lady left neither a note, an explanation, or the smallest evidence of why she abandoned a loving home and family. If the decision to abandon Kreskol was hers in fact. We have reason to suspect something more sinister. She was recently divorced from her husband, Ishmael Lindauer, who in a fit of anger cursed his former wife with violence in his voice, and swore great and bounteous oaths to do all manner of harm to her.

  Since Pesha’s disappearance, Ishmael Lindauer has also disappeared and, as a small town whose resources are modest and police is nonexistent, we thought it best to present the court with these facts and leave it to your discretion as to how we should proceed.

  The messenger of this epistle, one Yankel Lewinkopf, is at your disposal.

  Your humble servants,

  Rabbi Anschel Sokolow, Rabbi Meir Katznelson, Rabbi Joel Gluck

  The officer read the note twice. When he finished it a second time, he looked back at the emissary even more puzzled than before. “Where is Kreskol?” he finally asked.

  Yankel looked as if he didn’t understand.

  “Kreskol?” the young officer repeated.

  “Yes?”

  “Where is it?”

  Yankel thought about the question for a moment before he pointed in an eastern direction.

  The officer looked around for some confidant to share in the strangeness of the moment, but the rest of the station resumed its normal business with its accompanying clatter and roar. He read the letter a third time—even more perplexed this time by the flowery language; its ecclesiastic authorship; the operatic circumstances it described—and decided that this could not possibly be a serious complaint.

  He had to give this young buck credit: This hoax was elaborate. It had incredible backstory. And the Jew (if he really was a Jew) never broke character. He sat with a good-natured grin frozen on his face, completely unbothered by the skepticism with which this goodwill was returned.

  There was almost something the officer found insulting about his haplessness. He must believe we’re awfully stupid—awfully stupid, indeed—to think we would swallow such a story. And for that reason, the officer was not inclined to deal Yankel any kindness.

  “Get the hell out of here,” he said, returning the note to Yankel.

  Yankel nodded pleasantly. Then he said: “What?”

  The officer rose to his feet and pointed a finger toward the door. “Go!” he bellowed. “Get the hell out of here and don’t come back!”

  The sudden shift in tone frightened Yankel.

  “Excuse me!” Yankel said as meekly as one can when turning to run from a tormentor. “Excuse me!”

  “Go!” the screaming continued. “Leave! Go!”

  And with that Yankel ran out of the police station.

  3

  Wolf Boy

  Yankel Lewinkopf was probably better suited for this mission to Smolskie than the elders realized.

  While others might have been driven to the panic or despair that can overwhelm a young man when he first recognizes that the world is a friendless, pitiless place and he is alone in trying to tame it, Yankel accepted what happened in the police station calmly—the way he accepted all the misfortunes life had planned for him.

  After he dashed through the darkened streets for a few blocks, not daring to look behind him (and nearly being run over by a Fiat), he slowed to a walk as the office buildings, storefronts, and Soviet-era apartment complexes gave way to freestanding houses in the older part of town. All along the streets, jutting out of the concrete were great iron poles whose tops glowed with light that he stopped to admire.

  He ambled along until he reached Powazki Park, and after deciding it would be a quiet enough place to spend the night with only minimal chance of being bothered by hoodlums or vagabonds, he laid out the blanket in his pack and drifted to sleep thinking of the women who had brushed past him in the streets with their mystifying curves.

  The next morning he began stopping people in the street. He looked for clean-cut and well-groomed men in their middle years. The more officious-seeming, the better. Yankel decided these were the ones who were least likely to be superstitious about Jews. (Or, at the very least, done enough business with Jews to know that we weren’t all monsters and bloodsuckers.) And this time, he was more determined to get their attention.

  “Excuse me,” Yankel would say, “can you help me?”

  But most of these men couldn’t be bothered to break their stride. They would murmur, “Sorry,” and be on their way if they decided to answer at all.

  Some reached into their pockets and came out with fistfuls of coins that they dropped into Yankel’s hands. But when Yankel said to these men, “I don’t want money,” it barely registered. Most of them were in much too great a hurry to hear anything else.

  Yankel avoided men his own age. The tall, vigorous-looking youths, clothed in dungarees and ragged summer T-shirts, looked to him like thieves and ruffians. They would no doubt be the ones most eager to taunt him, rob him, and beat him senseless. (Rabbi Katznelson explicitly warned him against associating with the young. “They have the most zeal,” Katznelson advised. “And their zeal is reserved for pummeling Jews.”)

  And despite his immense fascination, he was terrified of the young women. When he tried to summon the words to ask them for help, they lost their way up his throat and came out of his lips in nothing louder than a whisper.

  He asked one middle-aged woman, “Where’s the nearest synagogue?” on the supposition that he would most likely get help from his own kind, but the woman looked baffled by the question.

  “I have no idea,” she said.

  “Where’s the Jewish quarter here, then?”

  “There is no Jewish quarter,” she replied, and before Yankel had time to ask another question, she darted away from him in what was more or less a sprint.

  That was odd, certainly. Rabbi Katznelson had told him before he left that if he had problems finding the local authorities, he should go to the Jewish quarter. Everyone in Kreskol knew that there were Jews in Smolskie—even though we didn’t care for these particular Jews very much. (The Smolskie Jews had long ago turned their noses up at us, and no one in Kreskol was inclined to forget an insult. Even if virtually no one remembered the story behind the insult.)

  However, Katznelson had assured Yankel they would surely help another Jew in need. “If worse comes to worst, they’ll at least be able to help you get around the city. They’ll speak enough Polish to translate for you. They’ll be able to tell you who to talk to.” It had been the primary reason the letter on the parchment had been copied into Yiddish as well as Polish. “And if nobody asks, there’s no need to tell them you’re originally from Kreskol, my lad.”

  But Yankel was slightly taken aback by the words there is no Jewish quarter. How was that possible? The Jewish community of Smolskie was older and larger than that of Kreskol. Their yeshiva was more respected. Their rabbis were more prolific writers. Their shtreimels* were taller and gaudier. (Supposedly. That could have been an old wives’ tale.)

  The possibility that the Jews of Smolskie could have just picked up and left didn’t dawn on Yankel until later—and even in the warm weather, it sent a chill down his back.

  When the church bells struck three o’clock and he hadn’t managed to get a single person to look at the parchment in his hands, he decided h
e would start going into the shops, where the proprietors couldn’t escape so easily.

  He first chose a bakery. No doubt, it was a welcoming, familiar sight, but he chose poorly. A great wooden cross hung over the oven, and he was met by a stout, middle-aged woman whose glare no doubt unnerved the women and children whom she disliked the looks of. And probably a few grown men.

  “We don’t have anything for you in here,” the baker declared, arms folded across her colossal bosom the moment Yankel passed through the doorway.

  Yankel smiled. “I’m not hungry,” he said. “I need help.”

  “No help in here.”

  Nevertheless, Yankel reached into his pocket and handed the baker the parchment. She refused to take it.

  “You going to buy something?” she asked.

  Yankel nodded. “Yes. I buy.”

  Not that there was anything he could eat in such a place. Or so he assumed. (Another warning he had been given was to be careful what he ate—the gentiles, as everybody knows, consume filth.) But if it would take a small bribe to get help, he was willing to do so. And he was flush from all the change that the dapper gentlemen of Smolskie had tossed in his direction (he had more than fifty zlotys, if you counted what Katznelson had given him). He pointed at a small brown roll studded with raisins wearing a thin cap of flour on top.

  “I’ll take that.”

  “Five hundred zlotys.”

  Yankel was taken aback. For a fleeting instant he wondered if that was really the price of bread; if so, he was doomed to severe poverty once he finished the food in his pack.

  But when he looked at the various cakes and breads stacked up behind the counter which had price tags affixed for three or four zlotys (or ten for something elaborate) he understood the message the baker was sending. With an overly polite bow of the head he thanked her and left. As he opened the bakery’s glass door, he looked back. The baker, whose red, corpulent face had remained hardened from the moment Yankel had set foot in the bakery, like a bust sculpted in clay, did not take her eyes off him—but in that moment, she turned her head to the floor and spat.

  However, in fairness to the citizenry of Smolskie, the baker was the most overtly hostile person he would encounter.

  An elderly, steel-haired gentleman manning the counter of the hardware store looked at the note, rubbed his chin, and said, “I don’t think there’s anything I can do for you—I’m sorry.”

  A florist laughed cheerfully when she read the note and offered him a long-stemmed rose.

  “But can’t you help me?” Yankel asked.

  The florist smiled again. “You’re funny,” she replied. “Very, very funny.”

  It didn’t make any sense to Yankel, but he obediently went on his way.

  He went to a slender, acne-scarred teenager who was the cashier at a supermarket and gave him the parchment. The boy grew more and more agitated and nervous as he read it. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what to tell you. You’ll have to speak to the manager. And he’s not in.”

  And that was the general reaction of the population of Smolskie. Some treated the parchment like a joke. Others held the view that Yankel was a freak—and thus somebody to be wary of. But most threw up their hands. They all told him to go to the police, and when he said that he had already been, they shrugged.

  The greatest sense of menace came not from the young, but the old. He appeared to them like some apparition they thought they were long rid of. Women’s eyes would narrow into slits and their noses would turn up. Yankel didn’t need to be told he was being given the evil eye.

  One elderly man, whose spine was crooked and whose hands shook as he gripped the gray rubber handle of a cane, turned to Yankel as they waited for the light to change on a street corner and barked, “I thought the krauts took care of all of you.”

  Yankel didn’t know what he meant, so he smiled, even though he sensed no measure of kindness in the old man’s voice.

  As the light changed and the old man inched across the street he threw his chin back over his shoulder and said, “It was the only thing the Germans ever did right.”

  He ate very little the next day. He had looked in his pack that morning, and his food supplies were dwindling. He resolved to be more conservative. When he began wandering the streets the next morning he no longer looked as cheerful and pleasant as he had the day before—he looked famished. The people to whom he handed his parchment no longer thought he was a nut; they assumed he was a charlatan and the pathetic story on the parchment was the best one he could come up with. Patience grew thinner. Responses were more rushed. The chimera of politeness he had enjoyed the day before evaporated.

  And if he had been amazed by the whirl of progress he had seen in his first full day in Smolskie, he had grown disturbed by it in his second. Toward four o’clock, with the sun beating down and his head light, Yankel went into an appliance outlet to catch his breath and was so stunned by what he saw he could barely stay on his feet.

  He saw a couple of dozen glowing black boxes mounted on the wall. Some were fat and some were thin. Each had a glass window along its side, with images of enormous trucks, tropical islands, soaring airplanes, madcap explosions, and a dozen other things continually, effortlessly, moving and shifting shape.

  The boxes chortled and hummed, as if they had a life of their own, and Yankel’s face turned white, as if he had seen a ghost.

  “Have you seen those . . . paintings?” he said to a bored-looking girl behind the counter of a café, trying to grasp the proper word for what he had witnessed. It was the wrong word, of course. The surfaces were too flat and seamless to be called a painting. But it was the only word that seemed to match what he had seen.

  “What paintings?”

  “The paintings that are on those boxes,” Yankel said. “They’re this big.” He parted his arms at roughly the length he had seen. “It’s a store a few blocks down . . .”

  “So?”

  “They’re alive.”

  He spoke those words with a kind of unsettling intensity. Even though the teenage girl hadn’t the slightest idea what he was talking about, she was unnerved by the conviction in Yankel’s voice.

  “Oh,” the girl said with a nod, but also with a look on her face that seemed to indicate she was uneasy. “Would you like some coffee?”

  Yankel said nothing. He handed the girl the note he had been carrying with him without a word. She studied it for a few moments and then looked over the exhausted, vagrant man standing in front of her.

  “Please leave,” she ordered. “Now.”

  A policeman was sitting in the café, and had observed the bizarre exchange.

  As Yankel turned to leave, the girl looked over at the officer, desperate to share her alarm with someone. She only spoke with her eyes, but the policeman stood up and began to follow Yankel into the street.

  Yankel did not know he was being tailed at first. But after a few moments he felt the presence of the officer, and when he turned, he saw the officer vigorously charging in his direction.

  Before he knew what he was doing, Yankel had taken off at a sprint and the officer gave chase.

  Yankel was fortunate that his pursuer was a good fifteen years older than him, and soft around the middle. As tired and run down as he was, Yankel felt the jolt in the legs that one feels when nearing trouble, and raced around a corner, and then around another, ducking and weaving, as various pedestrians stepped out of his path.

  When he turned a third corner and didn’t see the policeman behind him, he decided that he should take refuge somewhere until he was certain that his adversary had given up.

  He stumbled into a candy shop with frosted windows, where he was greeted by a tiny middle-aged woman dressed in brown and tweed who stood behind the counter. “Hello,” she chirped. “What can I do for you?”

  But Yankel couldn’t get the words out of his mouth. He started to breathe heavily, winded from his sprint, and thought for a moment that he would collapse
.

  “Someone was chasing me,” he whispered.

  “Calm down, young man.”

  But Yankel simply could not stop himself. If anything, he was growing more excited. And as the sweat poured out of him, he felt his knees begin to buckle. He backed into a chair upholstered in red velvet and flopped down.

  “Oh my!” the confectioner said.

  She disappeared into the back of the store for a moment and returned with a glass of water. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked, edging closer to him. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know.”

  With a familiarity between the sexes that surprised Yankel so much that he sat up straight in his chair, the confectioner put a hand on his clammy forehead and swept it over his cheeks.

  “Well, you don’t feel like you have any temperature, even if you’re awfully sweaty,” she said calmly and with matriarchal expertise. “Do you feel weak?”

  Yankel nodded.

  “Drink this,” she said, handing him the glass.

  He obeyed.

  “When was the last time you ate something?”

  “This morning.”

  “Hang on,” she said, and went behind the counter to select a piece of candy. She returned with a flat and light brown chocolate disk. “Here,” she said, extending her hand. “Eat this.”

  Yankel shook his head. “Not kosher.”

  The confectioner considered this for a moment, and disappeared again, this time returning with a red aluminum can of cola.

  “You guys drink Coke, right?” she said. “They sell Coke in Israel, don’t they? Here. Have some.”

  Yankel shook his head again. “Not kosher.”

  “Of course it’s kosher,” the confectioner said, examining the can. “I’m certain Jews drink Coca-Cola. Now, don’t be a child. Drink it.”

  Yankel was too weak to argue. She put the small cylinder—which was as freezing to the touch as if she had given him a dry icicle—in his hands. He stared at it for a moment, unsure of what he was supposed to do next.

  “Go ahead and drink it.”

  But Yankel couldn’t quite figure out how this woman expected him to drink what she had given him. He turned it around and around, looking for a way to open it, and saw none. He tried to twist the lid off the top, and when that didn’t work he tried to pry it off by digging his fingernails under the metal lip.