The Lost Shtetl

by Max Gross

  Still, a moment after he hid himself away, Yankel felt the urge to look again. He wanted to see if the woman was outraged (as he would rightfully expect) or if she was so insane she had simply resumed her crazed behavior. He peered through the window again.

  The woman merely stared back at him, arms at her side. She stood proudly, as unashamed of her nudity as Eve before succumbing to temptation.

  They gazed at each other for several minutes, neither party daring to utter a word, and Yankel felt a stirring in his loins. After a while, he simply backed away from the heavy door that kept this woman imprisoned and returned quietly to his room.

  For the next week, he looked for this blond, brown-eyed siren around the ward and in the cafeteria, but could never find her. (Although, it should be noted, the dangerous inmates were separated from the harmless ones.) And when he couldn’t take it anymore, he walked past her room one night to take another look, but the lights were out and the room was empty.

  He meditated on all of this, back in Kreskol. After a sleepless hour passed he sat up, put his shoes back on, grabbed his tefillin bag and siddur,* kissed the mezuzah on the doorpost, and left his grandmother’s house.

  By the time he was out again in the streets of Kreskol, the remaining houses had gone to bed. The light from the moon had vanished under a quilt of cottony fog, and it was now so dark that you couldn’t see a hand in front of your face. Yankel inched slowly over the cobblestones, trying to feel his way through the alleys and streets, and had trouble believing how much he had forgotten in less than four months.

  And he realized this was the first time since that afternoon alone in Smolskie all those months earlier that he was the sole author of his fate. No one was checking in on him. No nurse would come by to tell him that it was lights-out. No one would wake him in a few hours. There would be no metal tray of watery scrambled eggs and potatoes for breakfast. He hadn’t realized how dearly he valued his solitude.

  At the same time, what was the point of freedom in a town like Kreskol, where everyone knows one another’s business and his future was more or less written already?

  Somehow, in this swirl of thoughts, his legs had taken him to the bakery where he had spent the bulk of his youth. Just then, the clouds opened and rain started crashing down.

  He was not about to blindly wander the streets in a downpour until it was time to wake up. So he opened the door to the bakery, found a spot in the corner, propped his head up on a sack of flour, and waited to fall asleep.

  Yankel was groggy the next day, walking around the bakery like a man who has weights fastened to his limbs.

  Not that he was obliged to perform any physical labor—on the contrary, once his cousin Avraham entered the bakery, shaking the morning rain off his shoulders, and spotted Yankel gently snoring in a corner, he wouldn’t let his famous relative lift a finger.

  “Welcome back, cousin!” Avraham nearly shrieked.

  From the moment the first woman came through the door, each one was giddy that they were in the presence of a celebrity.

  “You look good,” one of the housewives opined. “Big-city life agrees with you.”

  “So tell me, Yankel,” said Rukhl Weingott, who had two daughters about Yankel’s age. “Did you find some pretty wife while you were away all those months?”

  For a moment Yankel thought Mrs. Weingott, who had always treated him superciliously, was proposing a match. And he instantly lost the words in his throat, because the eminently marriageable Weingott daughters were universally acknowledged to be beautiful and well mannered, with very decent dowries.

  “No,” Yankel finally said. “I didn’t.”

  “Too bad,” Mrs. Weingott said. “You should have looked. That was your big chance, no?”

  Yankel hid his disappointment as well as could be expected. (Yes, even celebrity had its limits.) But throughout the day, more housewives came into the bakery, eager to talk to the boy whom they had always liked—or so they claimed—and pinch his cheeks and tell him how proud they were of him.

  Only one woman cast a shadow over the good mood; Bluma Gutthof, whose husband had been among those who had crowded around him in the study house the night before. “Hey, Yankel! Are you really off your rocker?”

  Yankel was, at first, too shocked to reply.

  “I’m not off my rocker,” he said quietly, feeling his cheeks go hot with embarrassment.

  “What kind of question is that?” growled Avraham, who had been standing two feet away. “What’s wrong with you, you old bat!”

  Bluma shirked Avraham off. “Throw salt in your eyes, you big lummox,” she told him. “I didn’t say he was crazy. Others said it. Don’t blame me.”

  “Get out of this store this instant!” Avraham bellowed.

  Bluma left muttering, “Everyone’s so touchy,” and Yankel’s mood quickly shifted from exhaustion to self-pity. Certainly, he had sensed that he wasn’t entirely believed last night, but did his fellow Kreskolites think so badly of him that these things he was reporting could only be attributable to madness? (And while it was true, that was also what the gentiles of Smolskie thought of him, Yankel excused it away because they didn’t really know him.)

  Still, there were more pressing matters to worry about—like where he would be living, for instance. No doubt his relatives would come into the bakery at some point during the day to discuss it. They couldn’t leave him in the lurch after he had so selflessly served as ambassador for our town. It was only right that the family make some effort at restoring his past, and they were no doubt negotiating among themselves a proposed arrangement. Besides, Gitel and Favish were probably frantic when they woke up and discovered that he was missing.

  Good, Yankel told himself. Let them worry a little.

  But as the hours ticked by, none of his relatives stopped by the bakery. The rain continued lustily slapping the roof until Avraham told Yankel that he didn’t think there were any more customers coming today, and he would be going home in a few minutes.

  “Wait,” Yankel said.

  “Yes?”

  “Am I going home with you?”

  Avraham looked surprised by the question.

  “Why would you do that?”

  Yankel considered this for a moment. He finally said, “Has the family been discussing me?”

  “Of course. We’re all very proud.”

  “No. I mean, have there been any conversations about where I would live, now that I’m back?”

  Avraham looked taken unawares.

  “Nobody’s said anything to me.”

  The conversation might have stumbled along from there, and who knows whether Yankel would have sputtered with rage, or tears, but Avraham was saved when Beynish Salzman came through the bakery’s front door and informed Yankel that Rabbi Sokolow wanted to speak to him immediately.

  Yankel dashed through the rain (losing his footing at one point, and narrowly avoiding a puddle of mud) and to the Rabbi’s court, where he was seated on the bench outside the study for a good twenty minutes and left to shiver. The Rebbetzin didn’t feel compelled to offer Yankel a glass of tea or a towel.

  “You can go in now,” the Rebbetzin eventually told him.

  Alone in his study, Rabbi Sokolow looked more imposing than he did the day before when he was surrounded by faces. Tracts and commentaries Yankel had never heard of lay open on tables throughout the room. Yankel was almost afraid to sit on one of Rabbi Sokolow’s chairs, on the off chance it might be too sacred to park one’s backside on.

  “Tell me everything you did and saw while you were away,” Rabbi Sokolow said, dispensing with any unnecessary introductions, and not bothering to address Yankel by name. “Don’t leave anything out.”

  Yankel proceeded to tell the Rabbi all I have related here, more or less. When he finished, Rabbi Sokolow sat quietly for a long time pondering these fantastic developments with a look of bemusement. Unlike the other wise men of Kreskol, Rabbi Sokolow didn’t look dubious or skeptical about
anything he had been told. Merely fascinated, forcing his great mind to probe deeper into these mysteries.

  “Still,” Rabbi Sokolow finally pronounced. “None of this explains how this fellow Sikorski can make it rain.”

  6

  Auguries

  The gentiles arrived in three helicopters the next morning, instead of one. Rajmund Sikorski was in the first, along with the interpreter (dressed in a blue suit and red tie so there would be no mistaking him for a messiah). But there were other strangers who arrived, too. A heavyset middle-aged gentile with a manicured gray beard who wore a homburg hat emerged from another. He was introduced to us as the governor. He immediately went to shake hands with Rabbi Sokolow.

  An energetic, orange-haired Jew leaped out of one of the helicopters wearing a blue-and-white knit skullcap and the same sort of contemporary suit that the gentiles wore.

  “Shalom!” he cried, extending a hand to Rabbi Sokolow. “The state of Israel sends its warmest greetings to its long-lost brethren!”

  This Jew traveled with an aide-de-camp; a dark, muscular fellow, who looked younger and more serious, and didn’t bother shaking anyone’s hand.

  In the third helicopter that had landed on the outskirts of town, there was a battery of reporters, photographers, and cameramen who sprung off the landing skids and hurtled toward us like they were bulls charging the matador. Questions weren’t asked so much as growled, the only criterion for being qualified to answer such a question was that your eyes had fleetingly met those of one of the reporters.

  “Tell us how you fed yourselves for a hundred years if you had no contact with the outside world?” one reporter shouted.

  “Did the Nazis ever come through here even if they never rounded you up?” another asked.

  “Who’s the mayor of this town?” asked one of two female reporters, with as little delicacy as her male cohorts.

  But those were the only questions that the translator would render back into Yiddish before the rest got drowned in the soup of voices and the blare of the local klezmer musicians, who it seemed had taken it upon themselves to spontaneously form in the town square with their clarinets and fiddles to give the occasion musical accompaniment.

  “Now, now, boys,” the governor said. “There’ll be plenty of time for questions later. First things first.”

  There would be an official ceremony to reintroduce us into contemporary Poland, the governor said. Next, there would be a friendship ritual between Kreskol and the governments of Israel and the United States. He had a proclamation that came from the prime minister’s office, as well as ones from the American secretary of state and the office of the secretary-general of the United Nations. Then Dr. Avi Fleishman, the orange-haired Israeli, would make a statement. “After that, you can ask all the questions you like—until two o’clock.”

  The reporters obediently silenced themselves as the photographers danced around the town square, flashing lights in our faces, while we stared back in mystification. (Esther Rosen’s only comment when shown one of the photos was: “Is that how I look?”)

  The day went by in a whirl.

  Nearly every mother brought her litter along to watch the spectacle, and the air convulsed with the shrieks and laughter of the young. The old were there, too, propped up on wooden canes and mopping their brows in the heat of the waning summer; their heads leaning forward to better see what they had never dreamed would unfold before them.

  Some families came dressed in mildewy gowns and formal wear that they last wore on their wedding day. Many of the older women had spent the previous evening polishing brooches or stone earrings or whatever other family heirlooms they kept hidden away, which they proudly pinned to their breasts. Hawkers were selling fruit juice and small fig hamentashen.*

  “Our hearts soar to learn that you have survived the onslaught of history,” said the governor, who was the first to speak. “It is a miracle that you and your people continue your proud tradition within Polish history.”

  We all rocked with laughter when we heard that.

  Even a people as ignorant as the Kreskolites knew the falseness of this. This isn’t to say that nobody was acquainted with history’s multiple instances where a particular fiefdom or county would issue a decree welcoming Jews to settle their land—so long as we didn’t forget to bring our moneylenders. But other Poles felt very differently.

  The governor was astonished that these sentiments should have been received so raucously.

  “Why are they laughing?” he asked to no one in particular.

  The translator shrugged.

  However, the governor was seasoned in ingratiating himself with a less-than-friendly audience and continued praising the miracle of our survival until the novelty wore off, and the speech grew a little dull.

  The American ambassador sent regards from the secretary of state and the White House and presented the rabbis with a certificate of friendship encased in glass and framed with gold leaf.

  The representative from the Israeli government told us that we were welcome to visit the Holy Land, and that a delegation from our town was invited for an all-expenses-paid trip in the coming weeks. “You will be treated no less than a visiting head of state,” the Israeli pronounced. “Have you ever heard of the King David Hotel?”

  No, no one ever had.

  “It’s the finest hotel in the Middle East,” he declared—before adding, “west of Abu Dhabi.”

  No one had heard of Abu Dhabi, either.

  All the while, the reporters who had accompanied them kept looking around and scribbling away on their notepads until it was their turn to ask questions and they barked at us as fervently as an unmuzzled bitch whose eye had been poked.

  As it happened, in the middle of the press conference Rabbi Sokolow turned away from the questioners and found Rajmund Sikorski staring directly at him.

  When they first met two days earlier, Rabbi Sokolow had been impressed by Sikorski. Maybe it was the glasses perched on his nose, which suggested a scholar (or, at least, someone educated), or his title—deputy head of dzielnica* affairs of the Szyszki voivodeship—which sounded important. But whatever the reason, Sokolow innately trusted him.

  After their eyes met, Sikorski made a subtle gesture pointing behind him, as if to signal that the two of them should step away from the crowd.

  Slowly, so that no one would notice as the questions continued, Rabbi Sokolow ducked away and started to move toward Sikorski. The aide-de-camp of the Israeli ambassador was standing next to Sikorski.

  “We’d like to talk to you,” the aide-de-camp whispered in Rabbi Sokolow’s ear, in an accent the Rabbi could not place. “Privately.”

  Rabbi Sokolow nodded, and he led the two men away from the crowd and toward the yeshiva, which he suspected would be empty.

  “Rabbi Sokolow,” the dark Jew said, translating for Mr. Sikorski when the entire party had been seated behind three hard wooden chairs, “the Polish government is eager to improve things for Kreskol, and we wanted to let you know what you should expect.”

  Rajmund Sikorski enunciated slowly and waited for each sentence he spoke to be translated before he moved on. He was a careful sort of man; one could see it in the punctilious way he was dressed. His jacket and trousers were tweed; his white shirt was ironed and free from the wrinkles that even the most dutiful laundress can miss; his bow tie—a ribbon of navy blue with small white polka dots—was knotted around his collar with the care of a person who paid attention to neatness.

  “You have rights,” the translator said for Sikorski. “And you have entitlements. For instance, every town in this district is entitled to be connected to the electrical grid. Do you know what that is?”

  Rabbi Sokolow did not.

  By way of demonstration, Sikorski took out of his pocket his mobile phone, dragged his fingers along its slippery glass-like screen, and shone a beam of light in the Rabbi’s eye. (Not that a flashlight on an iPhone was exactly the same thing, but the details were uni
mportant.)

  “We will run some cables through the town, and when you just flick a switch you will have light in your houses.”

  Perhaps Sikorski had been waiting for Sokolow to speak, but the Rabbi kept his thoughts to himself.

  “You are also entitled to a clean water supply,” Sikorski continued. “I saw some of the wells out there when we were walking through town, but it’s a very outmoded way of collecting water. And I’m positive it’s not as sanitary as it should be. There is a technology that will allow you to turn a knob and have water coming out of a faucet in your sink. You can have as much water as you like.”

  Rabbi Sokolow said nothing.

  “The whole system of plumbing has gone through many, many advances. Nobody uses an outhouse anymore. We all have latrines built into our houses that flush away waste without you ever having to leave your home in the middle of winter.”

  Rabbi Sokolow’s nose wrinkled in disapproval.

  “Doesn’t anybody complain about the smell?”

  The translator grinned before he rendered the question back to Sikorski, who smiled faintly.

  “Good question,” Sikorski said. “I can promise you that the odor isn’t the problem you assume it is.”

  The Rabbi looked skeptical.

  “You are entitled to new roads, coming in and out of town,” Sikorski continued. “Obviously, the roads in their current condition are useless for traveling to and from the rest of Szyszki. We will send a crew to clear out a path through the forest and create a service road which will be linked up to the highway.”

  The Rabbi said nothing.

  “This will be a very large change for Kreskol. Maybe the biggest of anything else to come. Once you have working roads you’ll be able to go back and forth to the rest of the province in a matter of hours—or less. You will be able to trade much easier with the rest of the province. You’ll be able to get shipments of fruit and vegetables in the winter; all the things you want or need can be delivered here.”