The Lost Shtetl

by Max Gross

  “You’ve never had a soda before?” the confectioner asked with a raised eyebrow.

  “No.”

  She plucked the can out of his hands and snapped open the top. “Drink,” she ordered for a third and final time.

  Yankel put the can to his lips, but the moment the caramel-colored liquid touched his tongue he stood up, as if a surge of electrical current had run through his body, and spat the soda out on the floor.

  “That’s alive, too!” Yankel cried. “There are things jumping up and down on my tongue!”

  “Are you crazy?”

  But Yankel didn’t hear her. He was on his feet, and after an instant he ran out of the shop, nearly crashing through the glass door. The pedestrians on the sidewalk all jumped away, but Yankel was too far gone to take note of any of them. He ran straight ahead for about fifteen feet when a BMW, going full speed, crashed into him.

  The confectioner wasn’t sure whom she should call. She called for an ambulance first. And after she had stepped outside the store and heard someone say, “Yeah, he’s alive,” she reconsidered the general strangeness of what had taken place, and came to believe she was within her rights to lodge a complaint. So she called the police, too.

  The police came first, and she described all that had happened with a growing sense of outrage.

  “There’s something wrong with this young man,” she said, pointing to the crowd that had formed outside her shop. “He spat on me, for goodness sake! He says he never saw a Coke before. When he started drinking it, he said that it had living things in it. I’ve never heard such nonsense in all my life. He’s got a screw loose.”

  The cop scribbling notes for the official report didn’t seem to share her alarm. “The ambulance will be here in a minute.”

  Once Yankel had been strapped onto a gurney and wheeled into the back of the ambulance and had his vital signs checked, the ambulance workers were less impressed with the incident. “He’s fine,” one of them said to the other after listening to Yankel’s heart beating normally. “Maybe a broken leg.” The siren was turned off, and the driver began staying in the traffic lanes.

  They went through his pockets when he was admitted to the emergency room, and found only thirty zlotys in cash and a few collectors’ coins. The young man had no driver’s license, no passport, no ATM card. Not even a wallet. There were three pieces of paper in his pocket—one a piece of scrap paper with a phone number scribbled on it, and the other two were weathered yellow parchment. One of the documents was written in Hebrew, and the other one was a letter, which nobody thought to read. The nameless patient, after all, had bruises, a concussion, possible internal bleeding, breaks and fractures, and was dehydrated, so there were more immediate concerns than figuring out the young man’s identity. Or in remarking on how bizarre his custom-made clothes were. Or how rank the young man’s odor was.

  It was only after he had been moved into a private bed and the doctor on call asked for the young man’s chart and found him listed as a John Doe that anyone thought to actually read the parchment.

  “Admit him to the psych ward,” the doctor instructed a nurse after examining the document.

  That was where Yankel would stay for the next few months (long after he recovered from his most serious injury, a fractured leg), and that was where he tried to tell anyone who passed his bed—be it a doctor, or a nurse, or another patient—the story of poor Pesha Rosenthal and murderous Ishmael Lindauer. But the doctors at Our Lady of Mercy Hospital had much more interest in the messenger than his message.

  “Tell us about your village,” they all said when they sat down to examine him.

  Most addressed him in Polish, which Yankel spoke as well as he could. (And which improved as the weeks went on.) But after the first month—as the questions directed at Yankel got more specific and detailed—an elderly professor of Germanic languages named Johann Fishbein, whose father was Jewish and wore the white whiskers of a rabbi, was summoned from Uniwersytet Fryderyka Cybulskiego* to act as translator.

  Yankel, ever obliging and eager to do what was expected of him, answered all queries without complaint.

  Some of the doctors were content to simply sit and listen. A few were willing to engage him on the subject of Pesha and Ishmael. But most of them were curious about Kreskol’s history, and economy, and system of local government—which Yankel tried to answer as best he could. The doctors nodded solemnly. Smiled frequently. Some took notes. A few asked skeptical questions. And more than one was outspokenly dubious of every word that left Yankel’s mouth.

  “We should start with the truth, Mr. Lewinkopf,” one middle-aged psychologist said. “We know there is no such place as Kreskol.”

  “But of course there is. Where do you think I’m from?”

  “I don’t know—but you’re speaking of an imaginary place. Let’s start with the truth, shall we?”

  “Maybe you don’t know about it,” Yankel insisted, “but Kreskol is there.”

  “No, it isn’t,” the doctor stated, firmly. “There are three realistic possibilities for your story about Kreskol. One, you have been lying to us this whole time. Two, you are mistaken about the name of your hometown. Or, three, you are completely crazy. Those are the realistic possibilities. Now which is it?”

  Even if Yankel hadn’t been a polite person, he had been very concerned about how to comport himself among the gentiles. He certainly didn’t have the courage to contradict one directly. He felt like a child whose honesty has been called into question by a capricious adult.

  “It’s been called Kreskol as long as I’ve known it,” Yankel said, turning his head away from the doctor. “I’ve never heard it called anything else.”

  The doctor stared at Yankel for a few lingering moments before he said, “All right—now we’re getting somewhere. Why don’t you tell me where you’re really from.”

  But none of Yankel’s subsequent answers satisfied this psychologist. After spending another hour trying to wheedle the name of a different town out of Yankel, the doctor stormed out of Yankel’s room with the parting words: “The man’s impossible!”

  In addition to the many hundreds of questions asked about our hometown of Kreskol, Yankel was asked hundreds more about himself and his views on life—the majority of which he hadn’t the slightest idea how to answer.

  He was asked about his departed mother and his phantom father.

  “How old were you when you realized your father had abandoned your mother?” asked a female psychiatrist in her early fifties named Dr. Maria Babiak.

  “I don’t exactly know.”

  “And how did it make you feel?”

  Yankel shrugged. “I never gave it much thought.”

  “Do you think your father was a bad person for leaving your mother and you like that?”

  It was a question no one had ever thought to ask him before, and Yankel was more surprised by the novel realization that his father might have been a wicked man than he felt a duty to defend him.

  “That never occurred to me.”

  Some of the questions were of an impropriety that nearly brought Yankel to tears. He was asked whether he had ever made love to a woman. He was asked how frequently he masturbated. He was asked to describe erotic dreams and nocturnal emissions. He was asked whether he had homosexual yearnings. “That’s immodest” was his constant reply—which he always delivered in Polish.

  And even though the doctors assured him that they wouldn’t tell anyone his answers—that everyone had prurient thoughts from time to time; that they were only there to help him; that what he said would be held in the strictest confidence—sex was the one topic which he refused to indulge the doctors on. Which had the ironic effect of making the psychiatrists at Our Lady of Mercy more convinced that Yankel’s sex life was essential to understanding this improbable fiction about Kreskol.

  He was quizzed on his knowledge of the modern world and its history over the last century.

  He was asked if he had ever
heard of Pol Pot or Joseph Stalin or Winston Churchill. (He had not.) He was asked if he knew of Vladimir Putin or Barack Obama or Donald Trump. (He also had not.)

  But, then, Yankel didn’t know much history from any epoch, except for that of Ancient Israel.

  He vaguely knew a few names such as Columbus and Napoleon—and even knew that Columbus had made his mark in history when he discovered the New World and that Napoleon made his when he conquered the Old—but those were exceptions. Most of the other great, earth-shaping figures from centuries ago were unknown to Yankel, especially if they came from the gentile world. He was equally unaware of Martin Luther, Johannes Gutenberg, and Genghis Khan. Likewise, he had never heard of Marilyn Monroe or Michael Jackson or Greta Garbo or Charlie Chaplin. One psychiatrist simply could not accept the fact that Yankel seemed familiar with the writings of the rabbis Moses ben Maimon and Joseph Karo,* but had never heard of William Shakespeare. “You never heard of Hamlet?” the psychiatrist nearly bellowed. “‘To be or not to be’—you never heard those words before?”

  Yankel simply frowned. “Hamlet who?”

  And the longer he stayed in the ward, and the more calmness he showed in the wake of his doctors’ incredulity, the more confounded the psychiatrists at Our Lady of Mercy grew. There had to be some explanation for this strange fellow and his story.

  True, the doctors had encountered their share of delusionals floating through the hospital who claimed to be the mighty and accomplished of history, from St. Augustine of Hippo to Alexandrina Victoria of the House of Hanover, reborn in modern times. And, like Yankel, these cranks had detailed explanations for how they wound up in this lonely corner of Poland.

  Some knew the particulars of their former incarnations fairly well; from the silverware and china patterns at the Golden Jubilee to the six months spent in Cassago Brianza with Saint Monica. But none of these yarns sounded as convincing or straightforward as the story Yankel told.

  “He’s very intelligent,” Dr. Babiak declared during one of the biweekly meetings the staff convened to discuss their most puzzling patient. “But he’s like a feral child—those boys raised by wolves or bears. He’s never been civilized. I’m not saying that he couldn’t learn the rules of modernity and civilization, but I don’t believe he was putting on an act when he said he had never seen a TV or an airplane before.”

  Just to be safe, the doctors punched “Kreskol” into Google when Yankel first told them where he was from, and found nothing. They tried misspelling it in more than a dozen different ways without luck. And the doctors all told themselves that it was impossible for a Jewish village to have survived the onslaught of World War II in one piece. It was a preposterous story. The Germans were simply too efficient; too attentive to detail; too committed to whatever otherworldly voices induced them to conquer and exterminate to allow an entire town to escape their notice and remain untouched through the ensuing decades. “Nonsense,” they all told themselves. “Complete nonsense.”

  Eventually, they started the patient on a drug regimen.

  Yankel was given an antipsychotic drug called risperidone, which dried his skin out, made him constipated, and caused him to gain seven pounds—but his story about Kreskol remained unaltered.

  They then tried quetiapine, which put him to sleep for most of the day and turned his waking hours into a dreamy, narcotic haze—but changed nothing about his life story.

  One of the doctors suggested fluphenazine, which made Yankel roam around the psychotic ward all night and kept him from sitting still for more than thirty seconds. He grew moody and bored and his customary politeness waned. He offered only one- or two-word answers to the doctors’ questions. And one night he was discovered in the bathroom digging under his fingernails with a beard scissor, which had left his hands drenched in blood. (Scissors were henceforth taken away from him.) But the next morning, with his fingers bandaged and rapping on the table in impatience, when he was asked where he was born he responded with the same simple answer he had for weeks:

  “Kreskol.”

  When drugs failed, a hypnotherapist was summoned from Krakow who took over an examination room one afternoon with Johann Fishbein, turned on a recording of soft, Oriental music, and spun a white spiral on a black background in front of Yankel until he was in a trance.

  When the hypnotherapist emerged two hours later, he could scarcely contain his ebullience.

  “Extraordinary!” the hypnotist said. “Just extraordinary!”

  Dr. Antoni Polus, the head of psychiatry, and the rest of the staff looked surprised—as if they had not really expected this hypnotherapist to be of any use. The psychiatrists, psychologists, and neurologists monitoring the case all filed into the conference room and eagerly awaited the hypnotist’s diagnosis.

  “Well?” Dr. Polus said. “What’s Mr. Lewinkopf’s story?”

  “This is incredible,” the hypnotist said. “Strangest case I’ve ever seen. But Mr. Lewinkopf is not delusional—not at all.”

  The doctors all sat up straighter in their chairs.

  “He’s from a little town in Poland that it appears was overlooked by the Nazis in the war! He’s never even heard of Hitler or World War II.”

  The room was silent for a moment, the doctors unsure of whether this hypnotist was trying out some kind of joke. Only Dr. Ignacy Meslowski laughed softly, more out of politeness than amusement.

  “He told me all about it,” the hypnotist continued, not appearing to have noticed the discomfort that had settled over the doctors. “It’s in a small corner of Szyszki called Kreskol. And it would appear that they’ve had almost no contact with the rest of Poland for the past century.”

  At that moment, Dr. Polus looked angry enough that several of the doctors present were worried he might take a swing at the hypnotist.

  “Sir!” Dr. Polus nearly shouted. “That’s the delusion he’s suffering from!”

  “No, no. It’s no delusion.”

  “Why do you think we hired you? There is no such place!”

  “Perhaps we don’t know about it,” nodded the hypnotist. “Obviously, if it’s as primitive as Mr. Lewinkopf describes, there’s no reason it should have a significant paper trail. But you should begin investigating.”

  “I thought we made it very clear to you before you went in there,” Dr. Polus said, taking a breath before he spoke, lest his anger break loose and overwhelm him. “There is no such place as Kreskol. There never was such a place. We’ve already looked into it. He’s invented his whole background! You were supposed to go in there and find out where he really grew up!”

  The hypnotist looked puzzled.

  “Why is it so difficult to believe that there would be a town that would have been missed by the Nazis?” the hypnotist asked. “In the 1930s there were many isolated rural villages in Poland. There still are today. You don’t think there are settlements in, say, the White Wilderness or the Carpathian Mountains that were untouched by World War II? Why is it so odd that a Jewish shtetl should be equally solitary?”

  “You’re an idiot!” Dr. Polus screamed, finally throwing the last vestiges of decorum to the wind.

  The hypnotist, who was Dr. Polus’s age, looked insulted. He was an elegantly dressed man who carried himself with a patrician air, and was not accustomed to being spoken to in such a manner.

  “You told me you had a psychotic in there,” the hypnotist said quietly, trying to preserve his dignity.

  “What a waste of time!” Dr. Polus said, now on his feet and heading to the door. “What a waste of money! All you hypnotists are frauds. Just a bunch of gypsy fortune-tellers! I’m sorry I let myself get talked into hiring a phony like you.”

  He slammed the door behind him.

  If it sounds like the doctors at Our Lady of Mercy were cruel or callous toward Yankel, I should correct that impression.

  In fact, with one or two exceptions, the doctors at Our Lady were extremely fond of their bizarre, cheerful patient—and eager to cure whatever malad
y had overrun his mind.

  Moreover, while Yankel was certainly bored with the questions the doctors asked—and reasked, then reasked again—he was generally not bored with the doctors themselves. In fact, he found their explanations of the world fascinating.

  During the middle of one therapy session, a sweet, high-pitched melody began humming out of thin air, and Siwinski, the young doctor who was interviewing him, reached into his lab coat and removed a black iPhone.

  “What is that?” Yankel asked when the doctor had finished his phone call.

  “The phone?”

  “Yes. What is it?”

  The basic principles of the telephone were explained, and the explanation was concluded with a demonstration: Dr. Siwinski called his wife back—which left Yankel astounded. He asked if he could phone his grandmother back in Kreskol.

  “Certainly,” Dr. Siwinski said. “What’s her number?”

  Yankel had no idea.

  The patient could be found staring at the toilet in the middle of the night (long after evacuating his bowels) with the same reverence.

  He stared at a digital clock on the wall as intently as if he were watching a child taking his first steps; waiting for its minute to change from 8:58 to 8:59. And then he would watch all three numbers change when it became 9:00. He would count for sixty seconds, hoping (it would seem) to trip the device up—and always looking slightly disappointed when the clock obeyed all its functions faithfully.

  When Dr. Polus declared that he had played enough games with the young man, and that he intended to get to the bottom of his candor or madness, ordering a polygraph examination at once, the doctors were too embarrassed to hand down their boss’s decree—as if they were questioning the honesty of a friend rather than a patient.

  Yankel didn’t seem to mind. “What is it?” he said when they asked him if he would submit to an examination. He wasn’t offended when told that it would determine his honesty.