The Lost Shtetl

by Max Gross

  A kosher butcher was found in Berlin who supplied frozen beef and poultry to the Chabad House* in Krakow. The meat cost a fortune, but Dr. Polus shrugged it off at the time. Two new frying pans were procured. On one of them was written the words “Yankel Lewinkopf, meat,” and on the other, “Yankel Lewinkopf, dairy.” The pans were given to the patient to examine along with a special cupboard where they would be kept, away from the other pots and pans, and it was solemnly promised this cookware would be reserved exclusively for him. An orderly went to the supermarket to look for orange juice and pints of ice cream bearing an Orthodox Union stamp, which the doctors took great pains to assure Yankel was a universally accepted insignia for kosher food.

  Yankel’s weight rose—and everyone was more or less happy. Except the hospital administrators.

  “No,” Dr. Polus explained. “He’s on a kosher diet. He refused to eat until we brought him kosher food.”

  “Kosher diet?” Dr. Krol repeated.

  “Yes.”

  Despite the fact that Judaism and its accompanying orthodoxy were the first things that had been noticeable to everyone who laid eyes on the patient, this fact had somehow failed to make it into the hospital’s tattle about Patient X. Most of the doctors just knew that the patient was “strange” and “mysterious.” Some took the word “strange” to mean a physical deformity; a case of elephantiasis, perhaps, or dwarfism. But this was the first true explanation of Yankel’s oddity. Several brows rose around the conference table, filling in the first murky details of the patient in their mind’s eye.

  “So we’ve become a restaurant now?” Dr. Krol asked. “We’re here to suit everybody’s palate?”

  No one responded.

  Dr. Krol stared at the budget for another second. “And what is this four-thousand-zloty expense for . . . Aldar Kosa?”

  “Who?”

  Dr. Krol looked at the budget line again. “Aldar Kosa,” he repeated. “The note says ‘Hypnotherapy.’”

  Dr. Polus blushed.

  “Oh, yes. Yes . . .”

  Dr. Polus’s voice trailed off, as if he expected the matter to end, but the assembled doctors and administrators would wait for an explanation.

  “We tried hypnotizing the patient. We thought he might be able to talk more freely under hypnosis.” After a few moments, Dr. Polus felt compelled to add: “In retrospect, that might have been a mistake.”

  The room was quiet, as the doctors now stared at psychiatry’s budget with a second, vivified eye. The last few minutes of the meeting had been an almost unprecedented exchange as far as these sorts of meetings went. Not that there hadn’t been expenses that were challenged—that happened all the time. But they were never quite this colorful. Each doctor and administrator present hoped for yet another explosion.

  They would not have long to wait. The administration of a polygraph exam was next.

  “Very necessary,” Dr. Polus said.

  “Why is that?”

  “We had to be certain that the man was mentally ill and not a con artist.”

  There were three tickets to the circus.

  Dr. Polus reflected on that for a few moments. “I concede, that shouldn’t be in the budget,” he said. “I’ll pick up that expense, personally.”

  “What’s this fellow’s problem, anyway?” Dr. Krol asked.

  For the first time since the conversation had begun, Dr. Polus stared directly at his adversary. Radiology, like every department, had to weather cuts. And Dr. Polus wondered if his colleague wasn’t just projecting some of his personal frustration and rage on Yankel Lewinkopf. Or, perhaps, his colleague was simply hot and sticky. Was he eager (as the rest of the hospital staff undoubtedly was) to plunge into the intriguing details of another man’s madness? Maybe he had just never outgrown the voyeurism of youth, and it was not an unreasonable assumption that Dr. Krol was simply a more aggressive hoarder of detail than his fellow hens.

  And Dr. Polus was sorely tempted to say to Dr. Krol—as he might say to a fresh child—“None of your damned business,” and defend himself later against Dr. Wojciech Kowalski, the head of the hospital, in a less public setting. (Dr. Kowalski was not in attendance that day.) But just as quickly as this thought sprouted, he abandoned it and assumed the most diplomatic tone he could muster.

  “He’s suffering from a mixed type of delusional disorder,” Dr. Polus said. “We have yet to isolate the root of the disorder.”

  The other doctors in the conference room all moved their eyes back to Dr. Krol, as if they were watching a game of Ping-Pong. Dr. Krol scratched the chin of his beard for a few moments before he spoke.

  “What’s the delusion?”

  Dr. Polus sighed almost imperceptibly. “He thinks he’s an eighteenth-century Orthodox Jew from an imaginary shtetl in the forest.”

  A peal of laughter erupted from a female department head in a cocoa blazer, and the rest of the staff followed suit, albeit with more tempered, polite chortling. Dr. Polus’s face reddened in embarrassment.

  “Who’s managing his case?”

  “Doctors Babiak and Meslowski are managing the case on a day-by-day basis. But the whole staff has taken part in attempts at a prognosis.”

  “Babiak and Meslowski aren’t working on this full-time, are they?”

  “Yes.”

  It was difficult getting into a scrum with Dr. Bartek Krol. Dr. Krol was the youngest department head, and had risen in the hospital bureaucracy because he was an efficient doctor who had a reputation for not suffering fools lightly. Moreover, Dr. Krol was slender and dark, and favored almost universally by the female staff.

  Another strain of gossip that had worked its way into the hospital’s bloodstream was that Dr. Krol had carried on romances with at least four of the more comely nurses on staff, and two of the female doctors—one of whom was married. Nobody could say when these romances had begun, or if they had ever been called off. (It was strongly suspected that at least two of them were still ongoing.) And while Dr. Krol remained discreet, the same could not be said for his partners in these frolics.

  One nurse, who had been carrying on an affair with the doctor, overheard a rival talking to one of her friends about the man whom she had assumed was her property. She marched over to Dr. Krol’s office and scrawled “Cocksucker!” on his door seventeen times in red lipstick, triumphantly put the cap back on the lipstick and returned to her rounds. The nurse was dismissed, but, as if honor-bound to treat someone who had shared his bed with some minimum courtliness, Dr. Krol talked the administration into letting her keep her job provided she paid for the damage and promised to keep private affairs out of hospital business.

  These stories did little to scare away future lovers. If anything they heightened Dr. Krol’s value in the eyes of the women at Our Lady of Mercy. Every single nurse believed that she would be the one to tame his oversized libido. It was rumored that his seduction method both in administrative and private matters was the same: his extreme confidence. It was an unfeeling, arrogant beam of entitlement that unnerved any man or woman he chose to shine it on. Including Dr. Polus.

  As he sat in the swivel chair with each doctor and administrator waiting for his reply, Dr. Polus wondered—briefly, for only a few seconds, really—if the Lewinkopf case didn’t sound silly in the cold light of day; if his odd patient wasn’t any more or less of a mystery than the other derelicts and schizophrenics encased in a padded cell. Perhaps too much money had indeed been spent on Yankel Lewinkopf.

  “Dr. Polus,” Dr. Krol said with undue formality. “I submit to you that this patient is a waste of resources. In looking to make this year’s budget projections, I suggest that you alter his treatment.”

  The conversation did not go much further. When he next spoke, Dr. Polus could feel the air sucked out of his corner of the room. “I’ll manage my own budget, thank you,” he replied, meekly. “And I have cuts that I’ll have to deal with the same as you, Dr. Krol. Mr. Lewinkopf’s treatment will not be altered.” But the
witnesses that afternoon came away with the distinct impression that it had ended with a decisive winner (Krol) and loser (Polus).

  Dr. Krol merely shrugged, and as the committee began examining Gastroenterology and Hepatology’s budget Dr. Polus experienced the dreary sensation one gets not when ending an ordeal, but beginning one. Word of this embarrassing exchange would no doubt escape the meeting. Dr. Kowalski (who was at a fundraiser in Krakow, and was expecting budget recommendations on his desk next week) would probably ask him to take even more money out of his budget. Overnight, he would become a laughingstock. It was all very depressing.

  And, indeed, Dr. Polus was correct; the hundreds of thousands of zlotys that had been designated as “Lewinkopf Expenses” became a source of effrontery and amusement to the hospital staff at large. It became a font of speculation and gossip. It became the punch line to several dozen private jokes. And, finally, it evolved into such outlandish and bewildering falsehoods that it resembled nothing approximating the truth about the patient or the department.

  The patient’s kosher prohibitions were translated into a diet of champagne and caviar. And it was assumed that this food was not just for a patient but for the pampered departmental head and one or two of his choice deputies.

  The fact that Dr. Polus had put a professor of romance languages in his budget meant that the shrinks were taking German and English lessons, at the hospital’s expense. In the weeks that followed, Dr. Polus had to turn two doctors and three nurses away who came knocking on his office saying they heard that the department was offering free English lessons, and could they sign up, too? When he told them that there were no such lessons, they assumed he was just hoarding them for his staff and his friends.

  And the hypnotist—the same meddlesome quack whom Dr. Polus had instantly regretted hiring—was painted by the same malevolent brush of gossip as nothing more than a pricey astrologer hired for kicks. Hospital funds, it was said, were being used by the psychiatrists to have their fortunes told. The department was taking field trips to the circus. They were testing out polygraphs on one another—for lord-only-knows-what!

  The patient barely came up in all this. But when Yankel’s name was mentioned he, too, was viewed with cynicism and exaggeration.

  Some made the claim that he was a missionary, out to convert (or, as one doctor put it, “Zionize”) the staff. Others told a wild story that Yankel had come to the hospital seeking Holocaust reparations; in this fetid account, the hospital had been built on land that Yankel’s family had once owned, and he had come to the hospital demanding an ownership stake. “Why do you think they’re spending so much money on him?” asked one anesthesiologist. “They’re doing it to shut him up.”

  And as he sat in Dr. Kowalski’s office two weeks after the budget meeting, and listened to the litany of distortions being spread through the hospital like Spanish flu, he could scarcely find his voice. “Wojciech,” he finally croaked, “that’s the damnedest list of lies I’ve ever heard.”

  And as he tried to go through the list and defend each expense and correct the misrepresentations, he was defeated by their sheer volume. (It should be noted that Dr. Kowalski didn’t bother mentioning the stories that were obviously untrue, such as the whopper about Holocaust reparations.)

  “Antoni, I don’t doubt that every item has some solid purpose behind it,” Dr. Kowalski finally said. “Each could be defended just fine in its own individual day in court. What bothers me is the totality of it. I’m seeing a larger picture of excess and waste.”

  When Dr. Polus limped back to the mental ward he reconciled himself to the inevitable—he would no longer have money to lavish on Yankel. Perhaps he would no longer have money for anything.

  Certainly, it was a depressing blow to science. And to his patient. But mostly Dr. Polus felt the rage of impotence; the humiliation of suddenly losing control of a budget he had managed for almost twenty years. He spent the night in the throes of violent self-pity.

  The next afternoon, Dr. Polus summoned Drs. Babiak, Meslowski, and four other psychiatrists who had been attending the case part-time, and told them that there would be a decision in the coming days about Yankel Lewinkopf’s status, and whether he could remain at Our Lady of Mercy.

  “Yes, yes,” Dr. Polus said from behind his desk, not looking directly at the startled expressions of the doctors in front of him. “We’ve all found Mr. Lewinkopf fascinating. No question. And I would like someone here to get the chance to publish. But at this point there have been no plausible theories about the genesis of his condition. So we are going to have to come to a decision; should we keep him in the ward with only one of you looking in on him in your roster of patients, or should we release him.”

  “We should keep him,” Dr. Meslowski said quickly.

  Several others nodded and murmured in agreement.

  “Pardon me, Dr. Meslowski,” Dr. Polus said. “But when I said ‘we’ what I really meant was ‘I.’ I have to decide. And I should add that I’m not terribly inclined to keep a healthy, grown man in a hospital against his will, if he’s not a danger to himself or others. If, in the next few days, someone here could offer me something useful about him, maybe I’d change my mind. Otherwise, I believe we’ll be releasing Yankel Lewinkopf.”

  And with those final words, Dr. Polus put on his reading glasses, picked up one of the folders on his desk, and bid the staff a good afternoon.

  Several of the doctors retreated to the tavern two blocks from the hospital to toast shots of vodka to the memory of the Lewinkopf case, but Dr. Meslowski went straight to his office.

  Dr. Meslowski was alone in taking seriously the idea that their work could continue if there was a breakthrough in the next couple of days. Not that Dr. Meslowski didn’t appreciate the unlikelihood of a reversal, but Ignacy Meslowski was thorough. He opened his file cabinet and examined every note he had made, every scrip he had written, and every X-ray taken, for something the collected doctors missed the first time around.

  In recent weeks, after Johann Fishbein had sat him down for the grave report on the fortunes of the Polish Jewish population, the patient had grown distrustful of the medical staff, refusing to believe anything they told him.

  This had not been anticipated.

  A few of those on staff predicted that Patient Lewinkopf would have been more or less undisturbed by the misfortunes of World War II. After all, he was of an age where such large-scale global tragedies do not carry the same weight that they do with men of more sober years.

  Plus, the doctors at Our Lady of Mercy had tiptoed around the most gruesome truths. They spoke of the vast numbers of dead (millions and millions), and the fact that the war altered forever the trajectory of world events—but declined to show Yankel the photos of emaciated survivors; the industrial ovens; the ghoulish lampshades fashioned out of Jewish and Gypsy skin which any other student of the Holocaust could find in an internet search. Hopefully, the lack of visual aids would make the whole thing less traumatic.

  But much to everyone’s surprise, Yankel was utterly dubious of everything.

  When he was asked in the next therapy session what he thought about all that Dr. Fishbein had recounted for him, he told Drs. Babiak and Meslowski that he didn’t believe a word of it. “I’m still trying to figure out the punch line,” he said.

  When all the doctors swore up and down that no, honestly, this horrible event occurred and the Jews were really and truly driven out of Poland and the rest of Europe, Yankel seemed to think that the staff had conspired together to play a prank on him. “Keep on telling me this till I’m ninety years old,” Yankel said. “I still don’t get it.”

  “Why would we lie to you?” asked Dr. Babiak. “Why do you think we’re so interested in you and your story? We didn’t think there were any Jews left in Poland.”

  Yankel merely nodded his head, glibly.

  “You think we’re completely making this up?” asked Dr. Meslowski.

  “Well,” Yankel said, sound
ing a little like a rabbi in all his preening and sagaciousness, “might there have been some sort of big massacre of Jews? Perhaps. That sort of thing is not unheard of. But all of them driven out of Europe or killed? Every last Jew? Millions of them? I don’t think so. The Jews have been in Poland for a thousand years—they’ll be here for another thousand.”

  When Drs. Babiak and Meslowski said that no, not every single Jew had been killed or driven into exile—a few remained here and there in Warsaw or Krakow—Yankel nodded his head, knowingly, as if he were right to treat what they told him warily.

  “Dr. Babiak,” Yankel said, careful as always to be respectful of the gentiles, “maybe I am a chump who doesn’t understand big-city ways. But I’m not dumb enough to fall for this nonsense.”

  And over the next few weeks, Yankel grew doubtful not just about the Holocaust, but about everything that the doctors had described during his three months at Our Lady of Mercy. He became distant during his therapy sessions. He stopped eating the meat that they cooked for him, and consumed only fish and roughage.

  Indeed, when one has heard a lie—a grand, operatic lie that no one in their right mind could take seriously—one has to take stock of the source of this falsehood. With a suddenness that startled Yankel as much as any of his doctors, he began to wonder what else these seemingly kind, seemingly knowledgeable, seemingly competent gentiles had been lying about.

  Of course, the world of Smolskie was a surreal one, and there were too many technological advances to figure out at once, but every explanation they had proffered now seemed suspicious. When he first moved into the ward, he had asked a doctor how the light switch worked, and had heard convoluted ravings about “electric current” and “heated filaments.”

  “What’s electric current?” Yankel had asked.

  “The movement of electrons,” said Dr. Babiak.

  “What’s an electron?”

  “You don’t know what an electron is?”

  Yankel shook his head.

  “Well, the whole world is made up of atoms,” Dr. Babiak explained. “These are the smallest particles known to man. And each atom is divided into three parts . . .”