The Lost Shtetl

by Max Gross

  When the examination indicated that Yankel had been responding truthfully, the doctors looked more relieved than Yankel.

  As if to make up for the bizarre ritual, the next Sunday afternoon, Drs. Babiak and Meslowski took Yankel on his first outing since he had been admitted to the hospital and drove him to the fairgrounds just outside town.

  “Have you ever been to the circus before?” Dr. Babiak asked.

  Yankel shook his head. He took a seat among masses of shrill, laughing Polish children and quietly observed the wild animals that had never appeared in any forest near Kreskol before: elephants, hippopotamuses, giraffes, and a striped horse. “It’s a zebra,” Dr. Babiak explained.

  As they watched the show, a pink cloud floated past Yankel on a white stick. “Would you like some?” Dr. Meslowski asked.

  Yankel shook his head, but was intrigued as Dr. Meslowski took a stick for himself and began breaking off pieces of the cloud and popping them into his mouth.

  “What does it taste like?”

  “Sweet,” Dr. Meslowski answered. “You sure you don’t want? You can’t go to the circus without getting cotton candy.”

  When the doctors realized that he had never heard classical music before, Dr. Meslowski began playing Mozart for the patient.

  “Do you like it?” asked Dr. Meslowski.

  Yankel considered the question.

  “I’m not sure,” he finally said. “It just sounds so . . .” Yankel’s eyes flittered around the room as he searched for the proper word. “Gentile.”

  “Is that bad?”

  Yankel nodded. It was the first suggestion of impoliteness Dr. Meslowski could recall from the patient.

  After Mozart, the doctors played Bach and Beethoven. Then Vivaldi and Rossini. Then Schumann and Schubert.

  “Why are you only playing classical music for him?” Dr. Polus asked. “Have you tried any pop music?”

  “Not yet,” replied Dr. Meslowski.

  “What’s stopping you?”

  “Nothing.”

  So the next morning they played him Beggars Banquet by the Rolling Stones.

  “What do you think?” Dr. Meslowski asked.

  Yankel stroked the soft stubble on his chin and considered the question.

  “Not as good as Mozart,” he finally pronounced.

  Yankel’s musical tastes were old-fashioned. The doctors played Elvis Presley and Louis Armstrong for Yankel; he preferred Armstrong. He couldn’t have understood it, still he liked the quick and clever ditties of Gilbert and Sullivan but had little to say about Grandmaster Flash.

  When Yankel heard the Ray Charles number “The Mess Around,” he laughed and clapped, and even got up to dance. Which might have come across as comic, because the only dancing Yankel knew was the horah,* but he looked so sincere as he circled Dr. Meslowski’s office with his arm raised in the air that the doctor didn’t have the heart to laugh at him.

  “This is wonderful!” Yankel declared.

  “Duly noted,” Dr. Meslowski said, and smiled.

  “It sounds like a klezmer** tune!” Yankel exclaimed, which Dr. Meslowski had to admit was a good description.

  And in a moment of bliss, Yankel erupted, “Everything here is wonderful! I feel bad for everybody back in Kreskol. They have no idea of how interesting the world became.”

  The next morning, Dr. Meslowski came into the staff meeting with a list of other things that they could show Yankel for the first time: Paintings. Sculptures. Movies. Television shows. “He’s got the whole world at his feet!” Dr. Meslowski cried. “To think what it must be like to see Michelangelo and Renoir for the first time!”

  And as they spoke of modernity, in all its variety and splendor, a sinister thought appeared in Dr. Babiak’s mind: “Do you think he knows about the Holocaust?”

  The question dangled in the air for a few moments, ominously, everyone too frightened to furnish the obvious answer.

  “Who knows,” Dr. Meslowski finally said.

  “Shouldn’t we tell him?”

  No one quite knew the proper response.

  “Why is it up to us to tell him these things?” asked one doctor. “We aren’t here to educate him in European history.”

  “Well, of course not,” said Dr. Babiak, “but don’t you think an observant Jewish person would want to know that kind of thing?”

  “Not everybody cares about history,” Dr. Meslowski offered.

  But no one believed that the Holocaust would be an issue of no importance to a man who had devoted every waking second of his life to being a devout Jew.

  “And what about Israel?” Dr. Babiak asked. “Wouldn’t he like to know about that, too?”

  Dr. Polus nodded. “Probably.”

  “But how do we explain it all to him?” Dr. Babiak asked. “All these events happened so long ago. How do you let him know how important they were?”

  “Maybe we should just show him Schindler’s List,” one doctor suggested.

  The idea was deemed acceptable (after all, it wasn’t as if Yankel knew anyone who was killed in the Holocaust) until someone asked the unarguably practical question: How would he understand it?

  The dubbed version in Polish would no doubt go too fast for Yankel. And weeks earlier the doctors had discovered (to their surprise) that Yankel spoke no modern Hebrew—so a Hebrew-dubbed version wouldn’t make any sense, either.

  “This is just silly,” Dr. Babiak said. “Forget Schindler’s List. I’ll try to explain the Holocaust to him.”

  And so when Yankel’s next session was winding down, Dr. Babiak began to try to explain the complicated history of World War II, in simple terms that her patient could understand.

  She decided that the tortured saga would be impossible to tell without going back to the establishment of the Second Polish Republic, after World War I. “Actually,” Dr. Babiak tried to explain, “there were two wars. There was a war against the Germans, which was World War I, and after that one, there was another war right after against the Soviets.” She hadn’t even mentioned Marshal Józef Pilsudski taking Kiev from the Soviets in 1920, before she realized that her patient was asleep.

  The next day Dr. Babiak started at the beginning of the hour—when he wouldn’t be groggy—and failed again. She lost her nerve as she looked into the simple, trusting eyes of her patient. “I have delivered bad news before,” she later told her husband. “But it felt like I was telling him that overnight his species had gone extinct.”

  The next day she told her colleagues that someone would have to figure out a different solution, because she didn’t have the heart for this.

  “It should really be explained to him in Yiddish,” declared Dr. Meslowski. “There should be no mistaking what he is being told. Frankly, I think Dr. Fishbein should be the one to tell him.”

  Dr. Meslowski’s use of Johann Fishbein’s academic title made the rest of the staff feel less troubled assigning a man who had no experience in such matters the grim job none of them preferred to do themselves. And Fishbein, while hesitant, had to respect the importance of telling a man a tragedy in words that he didn’t have to puzzle over.

  “Yankel, do you remember how you told me that when you first got to Smolskie you asked for the Jewish quarter and that woman had no idea where it was?” Fishbein said late one Friday, after most of the staff had gone home for the weekend.

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you suppose that was?”

  “I suppose she didn’t want to talk to me.”

  Fishbein nodded. “Yes, that’s always possible. But did you know that there was no Jewish ghetto in Smolskie?”

  “Oh—I heard there was.”

  “Certainly, there was. But no more. Do you know what happened to the ghetto?”

  “No.”

  “It was destroyed.”

  Yankel did not respond.

  “More than three-quarters of a century ago. The Germans came through Smolskie, rounded up all the Jews, and massacred them.”


  Yankel nodded his head, glumly. “Terrible,” Yankel pronounced, but with an element in his voice that implied these sorts of tragedies happen now and then.

  “It was not just in Smolskie either,” Fishbein continued. “All over Poland, Jews were rounded up and destroyed. The German army went from town to town, hunted down Jews wherever they could find them, and they slaughtered them.”

  Yankel shook his head. “Terrible,” he repeated. “Very sad.”

  “Almost all the Jews in Poland were killed.”

  Yankel’s eyes, which were cast on the floor, suddenly shot up with surprise.

  “All the Jews of Poland?” he said. “How could that be?”

  “The Nazis . . .” Fishbein stopped. He was unsure of whether he had used the word “Nazi” as opposed to “German” when he had first begun the conversation. “The Germans were very efficient. They kidnapped the Jews, took them out into camps, and gassed them to death. The old and the young. Women and children.”

  “But how could they have killed all the Jews of Poland?” Yankel asked. “You’re still here, aren’t you?”

  Fishbein smiled. The professor’s father was Jewish, it was true. But the professor’s mother had spent his childhood rigorously instructing him that he was not to consider himself Jewish—no matter who told him otherwise.

  Sonia Fishbein had good reasons to be concerned: her son’s Semitism had been written on the curve of his nose, the olive tinge of his skin, and the richness of his dark eyes. No one needed to hear the Jewish sound of his last name to guess his ancestry. And the children he grew up with never let him forget it, calling him every dirty name they could think of for a Jew, and even coming up with a few original ones.

  “I am not Jewish, Yankel.”

  Yankel looked surprised. “You could have fooled me.”

  “My father was Jewish. But my family became Catholic a long time ago.”

  “Oh,” Yankel said. He meditated on this for a moment before he said, “So did all the Jews convert? Like during the Inquisition?”

  Now it was Fishbein’s turn to be surprised. It was the first time Yankel had alluded to a commonly known historical event. And had alluded to it so casually; as if the Spanish Inquisition was something every adult should be familiar with. Fishbein thought he should probably make a note of this and tell the other doctors. (He promptly forgot.)

  “No,” Fishbein said. “All the Jews were killed. Most of them anyway.”

  “But how could all the Jews have been killed?” Yankel replied. “There must have been hundreds of thousands.”

  “There were millions,” Fishbein said. “No longer.”

  “What about the Jews of Krakow?”

  “They were killed.”

  “Warsaw?”

  “Killed.”

  “Bialystok?”

  Fishbein nodded grimly. “They were killed too. There are no more Jews in any of those places. Only a few hundred.”

  “Come, come,” Yankel said with a wave of his hand. “You’re kidding me.”

  “I wish I was.”

  Yankel stared into Fishbein’s eyes, expecting the man would burst into laughter. And he wondered if he shouldn’t just play along, like some straight man waiting for the inevitable punch line.

  “It wasn’t just Poland where the Germans went on their rampage,” Fishbein continued. “They killed Jews all over Europe. Greece, France, Russia, Ukraine. Everywhere the Germans set foot, they killed Jews.”

  “You’re saying there are no more Jews in Europe?”

  “Yes. Six million were killed, all told.”

  Of course, a mind like Yankel’s didn’t traffic in millions. As Fishbein later told the other doctors, he no doubt was struggling to wrap his arms around the sheer volume. “I didn’t know there were that many Jews in the whole world,” Yankel finally said.

  Fishbein’s lip curled into what he hoped was a smile that could be interpreted as understanding. “There were.”

  Fishbein began recounting (in less detail than Dr. Babiak) a truncated history of the Jews in the twentieth century. He started with World War I, and the dissatisfying peace that had left the Germans feeling rudderless and betrayed. He explained how in the chaos of the Weimar years a charismatic Austrian corporal whipped the masses into hysteria by laying Germany’s problems at the feet of the Jews. And then he described what happened after the Germans swallowed the Sudetenland and then bounded east, and their satanic methods of killing Jews along the way.

  The night before, Dr. Fishbein had rehearsed what he was going to say; he would end this gloomy history with the triumphant birth of the state of Israel. A land where “the cop and the criminal and his lawyer and his bondsman are all Jews,” as Fishbein would exclaim. It was now as mighty a nation as any other on the face of the earth. But he never got that far.

  Midway through his explanation of the tragic prologue to Israel’s founding, he saw that his audience looked bored.

  “What do you think of all this?” Fishbein asked.

  Yankel looked as if he were going to say something else, but he stopped himself and it was several minutes before he spoke again.

  “Not to be disrespectful, Dr. Fishbein, but just how dumb do you guys think I am?”

  4

  The Myrmidon

  After almost three months, the perception took shape among the administrators at Our Lady of Mercy Hospital that too much time, too much thought, too many specialists, and far too much money were being spent on the mysterious patient kept in luxurious seclusion (or so it was believed) in the hospital’s eastern ward.

  This view took several months to solidify, mostly because the details of the convalescent were known only as gossip. The departmental heads at Our Lady of Mercy abided by an unspoken agreement not to meddle in the fiefdoms of their fellow administrators, and, for several months, this protocol was honored.

  While the rumor had circulated that a nut—a real nut; a costumed, delusional wacko, with a backstory like something out of a movie—had pitched a tent in the mental ward, and that the entire staff of psychiatrists and psychologists had been utterly flummoxed in trying to treat him, that was the extent of what was known. The nature of what afflicted “Patient X,” as he was commonly referred to, was left vague. The doctors and nurses who had seen the patient firsthand, when he showed up in the emergency room with a broken leg months earlier, observed only that he had been dressed in an “old-fashioned costume”—but nobody knew what this was supposed to mean. Some thought this meant he showed up in a Roman toga. Others assumed he had been wearing a suit of armor.

  But, nevertheless, Patient X remained safely confined in a high citadel of gossip and nobody had any cruel or petty thoughts about him or his caretakers, until the quarterly budget meeting.

  As the department heads sat in the main conference room going through the budget, line by line, several of the doctors in the other departments asked Dr. Antoni Polus what “Lewinkopf Expenses” were.

  “They’re to study our delusional patient, Yankel Lewinkopf,” Dr. Polus answered simply.

  This explanation might have sufficed had the expenses been small. (This, despite the fact that most of those in attendance immediately guessed the connection with Patient X, and could practically taste a morsel of scuttlebutt.) But, alas, a simple explanation would never do. The breakdown of the Lewinkopf Expenses was too bizarre—and the figures too oversized—not to demand further annotation.

  Of course, tens of thousands of zlotys had been spent on tests, X-rays, physical therapy, CT scans, and drug regimens few doctors would question the use of. But bringing in Dr. Johann Fishbein as a semi-regular consultant had cost well more than a hundred thousand zlotys, and that was the first item that the committee wanted to know about.

  “What kind of doctor is he, exactly?” asked Dr. Bartek Krol, the head of radiology.

  “He’s a professor at Cybulski University.”

  The answer lingered in the air for a few moments. Dr. Polus turned his h
ead back to the budget, not meeting the eye of any of his colleagues.

  “Professor of what?”

  “Germanic languages,” Dr. Polus answered. He then added with what he hoped was finality in his voice: “Dr. Fishbein’s help on the case has been indispensable.”

  Johann Fishbein at least had some sort of expertise attached to his name. A far stranger expense had been the thousands of zlotys spent every month on food.

  “And what’s this?” asked Dr. Krol again, who assumed the role of inquisitor in this matter, which suited the other doctors and administrators in the room just fine.

  “The patient has an irregular diet,” Dr. Polus answered.

  The air conditioner had broken in the conference room that morning, and after briefly trying to find another room—and discovering that all the remaining ones had already been reserved—the assembled departmental heads removed their jackets, rolled up their shirtsleeves, and resolved to “just get it over with.” But the mood in the room was perceptibly more hostile than it had been when they sat down. Sweat had soaked nearly every shirt and blouse in attendance. And when questions were asked, there was subtext in each that even the most sensitive observer might have missed an hour earlier.

  “What kind of irregular diet?” Dr. Krol asked. “We’re a hospital. We can’t feed him?”

  When Yankel was admitted to the psych ward all those weeks earlier, he was deemed undernourished by the examining doctor. He was ordered to go on a diet of high-fat dairy and animal fats to boost weight, iron, and calcium levels. But the patient had stubbornly refused to go along with these recommendations. “Not kosher,” he insisted when he was handed his first tray of beef stew, butter noodles, and eggnog, agreeing to consume only the banana and the bottle of water. The nutritionist had told Dr. Polus that the patient couldn’t go on eating just bananas and apples if he expected his bones to heal, or reach a healthy weight. Somehow he would need to be fed. “What are you suggesting?” Dr. Polus asked.

  “Let’s call a kosher supplier. Get some meat and some dairy into his diet,” was the answer.