The Lost Shtetl

by Max Gross

  “Has the Temple been rebuilt?”

  For the first time, Sikorski looked as if he didn’t know the answer.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. He asked the translator if the Temple had been rebuilt.

  “No.”

  A short-lived sense of disappointment draped over the room.

  It didn’t last, however. Even if nobody uttered the word “Messiah” throughout the rest of the afternoon, we could see how Yankel made the connection. Few in attendance could feel doleful about much of anything. We didn’t even feel the loneliness that Kreskol, out of all of the villages in Poland, had survived the German atrocity. Rather, the mood was celebratory.

  Although the Rebbetzin and the rest of the women of Kreskol had been excluded from this meeting, they sensed the good news in the air. The wives and mothers all spent the day around dining room tables and asked one another, “What do you think is going on?” And they all arrived at the same conclusion: that whatever it was, it was a miracle.

  The only disquieting moment came toward the end of the afternoon.

  “I’ll be back in two days,” Sikorski said as the daylight began to wane. “Then we will discuss your future here.”

  These words sounded vaguely unsettling.

  “What do you mean?” asked Rabbi Katznelson. “What is there to discuss?”

  “There is much to figure out,” the gentile said simply. “This town is important. It will be an important part of Poland, going forward.”

  “Why can’t we discuss it now?” asked Katznelson.

  “It will take a long time to go through everything,” Sikorski replied. “I’d come back tomorrow and tell you all about it, but the weather is supposed to be crummy. And I’d like to update my colleagues back in Warsaw about our encounter today. It would just be better to wait until Thursday.”

  And with that, Sikorski and his translator thanked those who had assembled in the Rabbi’s study, shook hands with Rabbi Sokolow, and walked briskly through the town, past the throngs of onlookers, and flew back to wherever he hailed from. The only thing he left us with was Yankel Lewinkopf.

  Of course, nobody had known what Sikorski meant when he said that the weather was supposed to be crummy. The word he used—brundy—had been translated into shmutzy. More than one person assembled in Rabbi Sokolow’s study wondered how this stranger could be so certain that the weather would be bad when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. However, the gentile had tossed off this pronouncement so casually—as if it was unworthy of additional commentary—that most assumed they had misheard him.

  But when we woke the next morning, the sky was black and the rain was pounding down, turning the dirt roads into mud, springing leaks through the roof of the bathhouse, and compelling mothers of our town to keep their children home lest they catch cold, and the men who had been in Rabbi Sokolow’s study that afternoon felt a shiver run down their spines.

  One by one, they showed up at Rabbi Sokolow’s study and asked the Rabbi what explanation there could be of this gentile’s predictive powers.

  “He’s a wizard,” declared Dr. Moshe Aptner—adding the flourish of noisily plopping onto a chair in the Rabbi’s study. “He can fly. He can change the weather. He’s clearly some master of the occult.”

  “He was too cosmopolitan to be a wizard,” Rabbi Sokolow replied.

  Dr. Aptner reluctantly conceded that Sikorski did not resemble your typical magician. But that was what made him potentially dangerous.

  “I thought you were a man of science,” Rabbi Sokolow countered. “Since when do you put stock in wizards and magic?”

  And as the day wore on, others came knocking on Rabbi Sokolow’s door, eager to offer their own explanation of the gentile’s correct prediction. Most agreed that he must be a sorcerer who had conjured up the storm to rattle our nerves. “You don’t think the flying coach was impressive enough?” asked the Rabbi.

  After Rabbi Sokolow listened to the last of these convoluted theories, he went to his bookcase and examined the literature of Tsevi Hirsh Koidanover and Naphtali ha-Kohen Katz* for something concerning the human capacity for flight or for changing the weather. He couldn’t find anything.

  When the downpour had not let up by that evening, Rabbi Sokolow decided that he would need a better theory than the ones proffered, so he summoned Yankel into his study.

  From the day he got back, it was quite obvious to us that Yankel Lewinkopf had lost his mind.

  Not that he exhibited any of the outward signs. There was no muttering to himself. No furious scratching. No bubbles of spittle settling in the corner of his mouth. No tics. He didn’t scowl and harangue and rain curses down on us. He appeared more or less the same man who had left Kreskol three and a half months earlier, except that all the attention melted some of his natural reserve.

  Still, he spoke like a nut.

  An hour after the gentiles left, the luminaries of Kreskol led Yankel into the yeshiva and asked him to tell us all he had seen and done, lo these many months. (Rabbi Sokolow was not among them.) He told us of the great cities of Poland with their glass-and-steel towers, and their marvels such as moving paintings and horseless buggies and indoor plumbing. After an hour or so, everyone in the study house felt the discomfort of being in the presence of a diseased mind. The assembled men gradually began falling away until only Rabbi Katznelson remained—and even he came up with excuses around eleven o’clock to send Yankel on his way.

  Not that Yankel knew exactly where he would go for the night. He thought of making a spot for himself in a corner of the study house, like one of the beggars, but Katznelson told him that he should go back to his grandmother’s house.

  “I wouldn’t want to wake her.”

  “I’m sure your cousins are still awake. They’ll let you in and find some place for you to sleep.”

  Katznelson began blowing out the candles and putting away books while Yankel quietly watched. When Katznelson was finished he led Yankel out of the study house and locked its doors, bidding him a perfunctory adieu. Even in the warm crepuscular night, the thought of returning to his grandmother’s house chilled him.

  He had forgotten how dark it got in Kreskol as he slowly made his way over the dirt and cobblestoned streets. The majority of the houses had gone to bed for the evening and were unlit. It forced Yankel to follow the light of the moon, and when he finally reached his grandmother’s house, he had an unpleasant sense of déjà vu.

  His cousin Gitel, her husband, Favish, and their seven children had moved in the day he had left. (Their brood had grown exponentially since Yankel had lived with his aunt and uncle.) And as he looked at the house, which still had a light burning, he wondered what it would look like now that so many months had passed. He thought of Zipporah, his grandmother. She had never been well, and his cousins certainly wouldn’t have been able to give her the attention that he had. He wondered whether his grandmother—who was forgetful in the best of times, living in a different era populated by long-deceased relatives he had never known—would recognize him.

  It was many minutes alone in the dark before he knocked on the door and was greeted by an astounded Gitel.

  “Oh my!” his cousin nearly shouted. “Oh my! Look who’s here!”

  Gitel’s face had grown fuller than Yankel remembered. She had always been a pretty, slender girl. In her early motherhood she had managed to maintain her figure despite the fact that she kept having more and more children, which she left with her husband when she went to the stalls in Market Street to hawk flowers in the summer and yarn in the winter. But for the first time, she looked less attractive than Yankel had remembered.

  “Favish!” Gitel bellowed. “Look who’s here!”

  As the words left her mouth, an infant inside the house began crying.

  Gitel’s husband appeared in the doorway, also looking fatter.

  “Yankel, my boy,” Favish said, warmly. “Welcome home!”

  The house didn’t look very different, except in the
mess that had accumulated. Cloth diapers were draped over a soapy washboard, which sat next to a small embankment of soiled stockings, trousers, shirts, and undergarments. Crumbs, dirt, and raspberry jam were spackled on the floor, the walls, the doorknobs, and the tabletops. Off in the corner Yankel observed a meek, undergrown chicken staring back at him.

  The crying infant was brought out of its room to be comforted by its mother. With its hands blindly grasping around, and tiny legs kicking, the baby only added to the general sense of disorder that had taken hold of the otherwise familiar house.

  “Please sit,” Gitel commanded, cradling her daughter under her breast, and gesturing towards the wooden chair behind the dining room table.

  “We’ve been hearing about you all day,” said Favish, taking a seat across from his cousin-in-law. “All rumor, of course. Nobody knows what’s true and what’s false. But don’t let anybody tell you, Yankel, that you’re not an important man!”

  Yankel nodded, politely.

  “Well,” Gitel said, “what was it like to fly in the air, anyway?”

  Nobody had thought to ask him that question. He had almost forgotten how jarring the helicopter ride had been. Early that morning, he had been driven out to a small field on the outskirts of Smolskie and buckled into the back seat of the aircraft.

  But as soon as the propeller began thrashing the air above, Yankel had misgivings. His head began to swim and his hands began trembling.

  “Listen, bro,” the pilot shouted, observing the greenish tint of Yankel’s skin, “if you’re going to puke, puke out the window. Don’t get any in the cockpit.”

  A window was opened, and the unfortunate boy regurgitated over the forest the oatmeal, toast, berries, and banana he had eaten an hour earlier.

  “It was fine,” Yankel told his cousins about the helicopter ride. “You don’t feel as good as you do on solid ground. In fact, you feel terrible. But it is, I suppose, something everyone should try once.”

  His cousins roared at that. Favish laughed so hard that the older children stirred out of their sleep and were led into the living room, where, one by one, they were reintroduced to their famous cousin.

  “Tell us about what you saw in Smolskie,” said Favish once the children had been sent back to bed.

  And while Yankel might have been trusting and good-natured, he was no fool. He sensed the skepticism his story inspired among the wise of Kreskol. “There are no longer any Jews in Smolskie,” he said—beginning with the most believable and relevant facts first. “And there isn’t a marketplace there, either. At least none that I saw. There’s nobody in the town that speaks Yiddish—not a single solitary soul.”

  “No Jews in Smolskie?” Favish repeated in wonder.

  “No marketplace in Smolskie?” chimed in Gitel. “How is that possible? I can understand a town without Jews. They do it in China, don’t they? But how does a town survive without a marketplace? That makes no sense.”

  “They make do,” Yankel answered. “Everything is sold in a store.”

  Gitel rolled the thought around in her mind for a few moments.

  “That’s a bad way to run things,” she opined. “If a fruitier wants to go into business he has to open up a store? That’s such a commitment. What if, after a few months, he decides he’s no good at selling fruit? What if he decides to sell fur hats instead? He’s got to sell off a whole store’s worth of inventory and then switch over? It sounds . . .” Gitel’s eyes flitted around the room hoping, perhaps, to find the proper word hiding under a mound of dirty laundry. “Inefficient.”

  “I hadn’t thought about that,” Yankel replied.

  Gitel laughed, heartily. “Well,” she said, “if they hadn’t gotten rid of all their Jews, these goyim wouldn’t make such mistakes!”

  Favish joined his wife in her laughter, which became so loud that for a moment Yankel was worried that the children would again come back out of bed, but this time they stayed put. And these tidbits were enough to satiate Gitel until morning—she announced that she and her husband were retiring.

  “The children sleep in your old room, Yankel,” Gitel announced. “And we sleep in the spare room.”

  As if Yankel were suddenly a minor among adults again, he became passive.

  “Oh.”

  “You can sleep on the sofa tonight,” Gitel continued, comfortable letting her cousin know that she considered herself to be mistress of the house with the accompanying privilege of doling out permission whether he could stay or go.

  Yankel turned his head to the worn red upholstered sofa, which had several stacks of white linen on top and whose wooden leg the chicken appeared to be pecking at.

  “Favish,” Gitel commanded, “get the linens off the sofa.”

  Her husband obediently snapped to his feet and indelicately swept the flax sheets and tablecloths onto the floor. On his own accord, Favish disappeared into the bedroom and returned a minute later with a blanket.

  “This should do for you,” Favish said with a good-natured smile.

  The husband and wife were almost out of the room when Yankel said, “Wait a minute—you never told me anything about Bubbe.”

  “Bubbe?” Gitel repeated. “What about her?”

  “How is she?”

  Gitel considered the question for a moment.

  “Fine,” Gitel finally said. “She’s asleep now. But no problems to speak of. You’ll see her in the morning.”

  Before waiting for Yankel to follow up, Gitel and Favish disappeared into their chamber.

  Yankel sat in the living room for a long time and pondered the way his cousin had said, “You can sleep on the sofa tonight”—and his reluctance to challenge her. Not that he couldn’t register an objection tomorrow. But Yankel knew enough about himself to recognize that he rarely asserted his rights when it came to his family, and felt a familiar, crushing sense of disappointment in himself.

  His eyes surveyed the disordered living room. How, he asked, could his cousins have possibly kept his grandmother together in body and soul if they kept the rest of the house in such shambles? He had spent years feeding the old woman, wiping her mouth, cleaning up after her, and doing the thousand minor tasks that a feeble grandmother requires. They simply let her wallow in filth.

  He silently got to his feet and opened the door to his grandmother’s bedroom. The room was dark, but he could hear the heavy, labored breathing of the old woman, deep under the spell of sleep. He took a whiff of the air, to discern whether the squalor of the rest of the house had penetrated her room. But he smelled nothing peculiar. He stood for a few minutes, silently listening to each snore—just to make certain that it, too, was regular and normal-sounding.

  As he closed the door to his grandmother’s room—may God forgive him—Yankel was disappointed. The realization that his beloved grandmother had gotten along without him brought with it a certain measure of despair.

  He blew out the candles, sprawled out on the sofa, wrapped himself in a blanket, and closed his eyes. As he lay there, he pondered how rapidly his life had changed, and then changed back.

  His thoughts eventually returned to his time at Our Lady, but he didn’t dwell on the comforts he abandoned, or the attention he received from the doctors—rather, he thought of one nighttime incident about which he had never told anybody, and which he sometimes believed to be an extremely authentic dream.

  It was a reasonable precept. The incident had taken place during the weeks in which his moods rocked back and forth between extremes of fatigue and restlessness; when the doctors were trying new medications on him every day, prompting a new pattern of behavior. When he slept, his dreams were more vivid than they had ever been. He was mauled by wolves, chased by bears. He was trapped at the bottom of the ocean, or lost deep in the wilderness.

  He also saw his long-departed mother in these dreams, at her healthiest and most vibrant, and upon waking he found his cheeks glistening with tears.

  On the nights when Yankel didn’t sleep, th
e unending hours exhausted him. Sitting alone in his empty room, he sometimes thought he saw little creeping insects out of the corner of his eye, startling him to attention. But after examining the entire room, from top to bottom, he slowly drifted back into a foggy stupor.

  One such night, when he was too bored to sit still, he got up from his bed and wandered the halls. Tomas, the orderly on duty, knew Yankel and didn’t bother scolding him for being out of his room after lights-out.

  As he drifted near the padded cells of the truly insane where there were no knobs on the doors, Tomas said to him: “Take a walk by number five.”

  Yankel saw a single light coming from the cell. He looked through a square of Plexiglas at the door’s eye level and saw a naked woman pacing the cell, gnawing on her wrist like an animal.

  She was young, but not as young as Yankel—probably no more than twenty-four or -five. And although her eyes were wide, and her blond hair matted and unkempt, this mental patient was unquestionably beautiful. Her breasts were small, but her torso was toned, like that of a woman who didn’t care for food or any other corrupting pleasure. She might have been mistaken for a child, if not for the thick, untrimmed thatch of hair on her pubis.

  Yankel had never seen a naked woman before. He had formed his own vague ideas about what the female form must look like unclothed, but he was unprepared to be confronted with so stark a reality, and for a moment he held his breath, as if this vision would vanish once he exhaled.

  The mental patient didn’t notice Yankel at first. She had been pacing the room when Yankel passed by and continued her pacing and the frenzied but bloodless gnawing of her wrists. The strides that she took around her cell became wider and more furious—then shorter and slower. Her lips trembled, as if she were muttering to herself and alternating between kissing her wrists and biting them, but it was impossible to tell if she was actually speaking, as her cell had been soundproofed.

  However, it wasn’t too long before she sensed that she was being watched, and looked up to see Yankel.

  At that moment, Yankel jumped away from the Plexiglas, horrified that he had lingered so long over a woman in so vulnerable a pose. Tomas, who was all the way down the hall, turned and grinned.