The Lost Shtetl

by Max Gross

  Rabbi Sokolow was unsure of how he should respond to this, but the two strangers had their eyes focused on him, and he felt he should say something.

  “That sounds fine,” Rabbi Sokolow said, with a nod.

  “Kreskol will be included in the Poczta postal system,” Sikorski continued. “When was the last time the town had a working postal system?”

  At around the time that Kreskol’s reputation began to fade, our forefathers found that messengers refused to come to Kreskol unless there was an exorbitant fee attached. Some messengers left for Warsaw with a parcel or a letter and simply never looked back.

  “I don’t know,” the Rabbi said.

  “Well, you’ll have one soon,” Sikorski said. “Poland has a system of socialized medicine. Do you know what that means?”

  Rabbi Sokolow shook his head.

  “It means that you’re all entitled to medical care. If there is an emergency, the state is obliged to take you to the hospital. Now, we’ll need to carefully weigh the pros and cons of how to address this entitlement. The hospitals in Smolskie and Szyszki are a long way off. Are we going to send a helicopter out here every time somebody breaks his leg? Or, would we build a medical clinic here? I have not looked at the numbers yet but this is one of the many questions we are going to have to discuss in the coming months.”

  “We have a doctor in our town,” Rabbi Sokolow said quickly. “Dr. Aptner.”

  “Naturally,” Sikorski said after hearing the translation. “But what training did he have?”

  “Why, Dr. Bauer was the town doctor before Aptner,” Sokolow answered. “He apprenticed Dr. Aptner. And Dr. Aptner’s son is apprenticing with his father now.”

  “But Rabbi Sokolow,” Sikorski said with a grin that might have been mistaken for glibness, “don’t you see how much has changed in medicine in the last hundred years? The training your doctor has wouldn’t take him through his first month of medical school at one of today’s universities.”

  If Rabbi Sokolow had been inclined to like Mr. Sikorski when they were introduced, he did not any longer. In this lordly manner, Sikorski had just insulted centuries of Jewish medical expertise.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Rabbi Sokolow hissed. “Was Maimonides a fool? Was Moses Tibbon* a fool? Jewish medicine is the best in the world.”

  “Naturally,” said Sikorski. “I’m no doctor, but I assume that Jewish doctors formed the bedrock of much of modern medicine. Still, things have changed very significantly. There are machines now that can see clear through your skin and your tissue and look at your bones. A scientist today could take a little drop of blood from a pinprick on your wife’s finger and tell you whether she’s going to develop breast cancer in twenty years.”

  Rabbi Sokolow didn’t answer.

  “What if I told you that if we found this out in time, we could give her a procedure to make sure she would never succumb to that cancer? All those things are true, and much more. We are living in the greatest era of medical science in human history.” For a moment, Sikorski seemed taken aback by the sweeping nature of his own declaration. But rather than retreat, Sikorski only seemed to grow more comfortable with the grandeur of the idea. “A little cold could have killed a person a hundred years ago. It’s a minor annoyance now. Technology has saved us all.”

  The man no longer looked wise to Rabbi Sokolow. He looked like a Cossack who was trying to explain how things proceeded in the afterlife. It was slightly unnerving. Rabbi Sokolow suddenly felt the sweat in his mustache and beard.

  “I’m assuming that no one in this town has collected taxes in quite some time, correct?”

  Rabbi Sokolow shook his head.

  “It’s not something you should worry very much about,” Sikorski continued. “I’m sure your holdings, assets, and revenues are such that you wouldn’t have much to tax right now. And no one in the governor’s office has expressed anything except sympathy for your plight. Tax holidays can be granted. But you will have to pay taxes in the future. All this land will have to be assessed.

  “But I think you have many more potential revenue streams than you know about. The reporters who are here right now are all convinced that your story will be a popular one. It’s a little early to start counting your millions, but there’s no reason to think that Kreskol can’t become a tourist destination. Poles, Israeli and American Jews, Germans, and maybe even Russians will want to visit. You have a yeshiva system here, correct?”

  Rabbi Sokolow nodded.

  “Modern education is very different. The government in Szyszki is obligated to build a public, secular school in Kreskol for those families who choose to send their children there. Not that the yeshivas will go away, but there are standards that the yeshiva will need to uphold.”

  “Like what?”

  “Polish, for one,” Sikorski said. “Every child ought to learn the language of the state.”

  It was a reasonable enough demand, so far as it goes. While the Jews in town knew Polish a long time ago—back when we had gentile neighbors—it faded as Kreskol became isolated and hermetic. But like a vestigial tail that has outlived its original purpose, the language remained spoken as a slang around the marketplace. Every child learned it as a way of speaking blasphemes among themselves. The Aramaic teacher who died a few years ago offered to teach it to anyone who asked.

  “The children learn Polish.”

  “Not well enough, I’m afraid.”

  Which was true. And, if Rabbi Sokolow’s defenses weren’t up, he might have even conceded as much.

  “Nobody’s blaming you for this,” Sikorski added. “You haven’t had contact with other Poles for a very long time. Learning it today is a lot like seeing a copy of a copy. But today, every student who sits for a matura exam must be proficient in Polish. And have a secondary modern language—English, French, German, Spanish, or Russian.”

  “What’s a matura?”

  “They’re the standardized exams for higher education,” the aide-de-camp offered, without translating the question for Sikorski.

  “We don’t need it,” Sokolow said quickly. “Our yeshiva is education enough.”

  “Certainly, you may not need it, but the young should be acquainted with the basics, Rabbi Sokolow,” Sikorski continued. “Judaism isn’t everything. Every child should know their multiplication table, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry.”

  Rabbi Sokolow said nothing as the man prattled on about unemployment insurance and garbage disposal until Rabbi Sokolow felt compelled to interrupt him.

  “Excuse me?”

  The translator stopped mid-sentence.

  “Yes?”

  Rabbi Sokolow sat straight in his chair, perhaps remembering the days when he was a schoolboy in the same room and made to feel the same sense of dread when posing a question to a figure of authority.

  “Can we say no to everything you’re offering?”

  A few minutes later, Sikorski could be seen sauntering through the town ahead of Sokolow, and not seeming to care if the aged rabbi kept up. Even the Israeli translator struggled to navigate through the bobbing eddies of humanity, all of whom had their attention fixed on the presentations in the center of town.

  Sikorski caught the attention of the governor, raised his palm in the air, and spun his finger around in a few circles, mimicking the rotor of the helicopter.

  The governor nodded and proceeded to step into the middle of this press conference. “All very good questions. We shall let Rabbi Katznelson answer this last one, and then that will be all for today.”

  The press groaned, as if they were a pack of children being put to bed.

  “Now, now,” the governor said. “There will be other visits. But we’ve already been here for hours. The people of Krushkool need to get on with their lives. I’m likewise certain that you have enough copy to file a story.”

  And in a matter of minutes, these strangers were back on their chariots and flying away. One of the reporters (a female one) waved at us as her h
elicopter slowly lifted off the ground. A few of the little boys waved back.

  The afternoon was peculiar, certainly, but a few minutes after the chariots took off, everybody went back to work.

  Only Rabbi Sokolow wore an expression different from all the others. He looked simultaneously worried and enraged.

  “Are you all right?” asked Meir Katznelson.

  Rabbi Sokolow merely nodded.

  But Sokolow didn’t acknowledge his colleague in any other way. He merely walked through the hot summer sun, until he was back in his study, and sat wordlessly down on the sofa.

  The Rebbetzin also felt compelled to ask him how he was feeling.

  “Fine,” the Rabbi said. “Now please leave me alone.”

  It was a curter answer than the Rebbetzin was accustomed to, and for a passing moment she wondered whether it wasn’t worth fighting about. But she was able to discern that her husband was troubled by something serious. She closed the door to his study, leaving the Rabbi’s assistant, Beynish Salzman, out on the bench in the hallway.

  After six, the door to Rabbi Sokolow’s study finally opened.

  “Beynish,” the old man said in a voice just short of a growl. “Go find Yankel Lewinkopf at once.”

  Beynish hurried over to the bakery. Avraham Sandler was tending to the fires when he entered.

  “I’m looking for your cousin,” Beynish said.

  “Haven’t seen him all day.”

  “Do you know where he is?” Beynish asked. “Is he with your cousin Gitel?”

  Avraham didn’t take his eyes off the fires in the oven.

  “He didn’t sound like he had any interest in staying with Gitel,” Avraham finally said. “And he’s not at my house. So I have no idea where my cousin is keeping himself. He’s not my concern. Maybe the beggars’ synagogue, but your guess is as good as mine.”

  The prospect of a journey to the beggars’ synagogue was not one that Beynish relished. It was a little clay house at the far end of Thieves’ Lane, and Beynish—like others of his education and pedigree—had been warned against spending too much time in that section of town. It was where Lamkin Fogel sold cheap wine, beer, and vodka. Where the ragpickers and beggars passed their days. Where the handful of drunks and thieves in our otherwise respectable village lurked when they didn’t even have six pennies for a half-beaker of wine. And it was where two unwedded maids—Rifka Steinberg and Binke Singer—shared a hovel.

  The only Jews who prayed in the synagogue there were too poor to afford a pew in Kreskol’s Market Street Synagogue on Yom Kippur—or bastards, like Yankel, who had no place else to go.

  As Beynish walked down the alley toward the synagogue he saw the heavyset figure of Lamkin Fogel step out of his tavern to take in the late afternoon air.

  Even though Beynish had never spoken a word to Lamkin, this wicked man’s reputation had traveled well beyond his footprints. Beynish kept his eyes on the ground and quickened his pace.

  “Yeshiva bachur,”* Beynish heard a low voice say softly.

  Beynish kept his eyes down.

  “I said,” came the low voice, this time a little louder, “yeshiva bachur.”

  Beynish might have kept walking if Thieves’ Lane hadn’t been a small, confined block. And he might have clung to the fiction that this ruffian had addressed someone else if the two of them hadn’t been entirely alone.

  “Are you addressing me?” Beynish asked.

  Lamkin didn’t answer.

  “What do you want?” Beynish asked after a few moments.

  Lamkin rubbed a lightly bearded cheek.

  “Don’t be shy,” Lamkin finally said. “One zloty for half an hour, whether you’re finished or not.”

  Beynish froze, as if the words couldn’t be coaxed out of his mouth. All that came were burps of noise that the wisest of the wise could never discern.

  “Help!” Beynish finally cried at the top of his lungs.

  He took off running as fast as his legs would carry him, down the empty lane and into the beggars’ synagogue, slamming the door behind him.

  As Beynish caught his breath, he heard shrieks of laughter coming from the alley. The drunks of Kreskol emerged from the tavern to see what the commotion was about and they laughed, too, when Lamkin recounted the story of the wayward yeshiva student who had lost his nerve the moment he was closest to his prize.

  Rifka and Binke emerged from their hovel and listened to Lamkin’s story, laughing even as they felt sorry for the poor boy. “Everyone has to have a first time,” Rifka commented sympathetically. “It’s never easy.”

  When he stopped listening to the gossip about himself, Beynish realized that the beggars’ synagogue was empty. Humiliated as he was, Beynish would have to turn around and go back the way he came at some point. After a few minutes he decided to weather Lamkin Fogel’s cruel laughter and try somewhere else that Yankel Lewinkopf might have hidden himself.

  “It’s no big deal, Yeshiva,” cried Lamkin. “God himself commanded you to be fruitful and multiply. You’d just be doing the work of the Lord.”

  “I wasn’t here for that,” Beynish shouted over his shoulder as he continued walking. “You ought to be ashamed!”

  This provoked another roar of laughter.

  “What were you here for?” Lamkin asked. “To wrap tefillin* with the thieves?”

  “If you must know,” Beynish said, “I was looking for someone.”

  “Who?”

  “Yankel Lewinkopf.”

  Lamkin, still rustling with joy as the rings of fat around his chest rippled and quaked, tried to calm himself.

  “I haven’t seen Lewinkopf,” Lamkin finally said.

  Beynish sharply turned and stomped out of Thieves’ Lane, his anger multiplied by the fact that he had been humbled enough to ask these rogues for their help.

  When Beynish had nearly gotten to the edge of the lane and out of earshot he heard a barely audible murmur, “I saw Lewinkopf.” Just as abruptly as he had turned around to head back to town, he spun around.

  “Who saw him?”

  An elderly drunk with a red nose, whose grayish blond beard had never quite filled in, stepped forward.

  “Where did you see him?”

  The drunk rubbed his nose. He reeked of vodka, and even in the summer heat he wore a long black coat that was caked with dirt. If Beynish Salzman had ever met the man before, he certainly didn’t remember him.

  “He’s gone,” the drunk finally said. “Got on one of those flying machines. Left Kreskol for good.”

  The drunkard belched loudly, which had the distinct aroma of onions.

  7

  Schema

  It was only by happenstance that Yankel fled.

  After his late interview with Rabbi Sokolow the previous evening, he had been grudgingly invited to sleep on the bench outside the Rabbi’s study. “For tonight only,” Rabbi Sokolow warned. “I understand that you don’t know where you’ll go, but you shall figure out a permanent solution tomorrow. This is only for tonight and only because you stayed so late.” When Yankel woke up the next morning, he was weary and stiff, and wondered why the Rabbi hadn’t at least offered him the sofa.

  It was the Rebbetzin who had roused him out of his slumber.

  “Young man,” she said, declining to address him by name. “It’s time for you to go. The Rabbi already left for the marketplace.”

  He spent the rest of the morning wandering the empty streets of Kreskol like a drifter, frothing with rage.

  He fumed about his cousin Gitel and her useless, moronic husband. And the aunts and uncles who had despised him all these years with no good reason. And the haughty, fool-headed rabbis who had no real idea of how the world had changed. And Rukhl Weingott, who thought her daughters were too good for the likes of him. And Bluma Gutthof, whose manners were something less than those of a billy goat. In his anger he didn’t realize that these complaints were being softly mumbled under his breath, audible to any passerby.

&nbs
p; “Are you talking to me?” asked one such passerby in Polish.

  Yankel looked up and saw two of the journalists—one with a microphone, the other with a bulky video camera—who had slipped away from their colleagues and were lurking behind the bathhouse.

  “No,” Yankel replied.

  One of the journalists—the one who had spoken—was not much older than Yankel. He wore a barbered, barely grown beard, and longish dark hair. The cameraman with him was a blond, stocky fellow a few years older, who wore a blue cap with a red “C” outlined in white that was stitched to the front.

  “Do you speak Polish?” the dark-haired journalist asked, expectantly. His partner wordlessly swung the camera toward Yankel.

  “A little.”

  “Aren’t I a lucky man!” the reporter exclaimed. “Where did you learn to speak Polish?”

  Yankel was, for the moment, almost afraid to speak—as if these men were delicate, fawn-like creatures and an imprudent noise would scare them away. He had told himself an hour earlier that there was nothing he could learn from the visiting caravan of gentiles. Besides, he had met enough gentiles to last a lifetime. But one doesn’t need to be especially learned in matters of human emotion to realize that there was a self-protective impulse at work. He hadn’t wanted to go to the town square to see the gentiles because he was afraid once the tears started they would never stop. Or that bile would come spewing from his mouth. Now that he was face-to-face with these two reporters he wasn’t entirely sure what he would do.

  “We all learn it,” Yankel replied. “When we’re young.”

  “I see,” the reporter replied. “I don’t suppose you were the fellow that they picked up in Smolskie, were you?”

  Yankel reddened. The reporter reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper.

  “Is your name Yankel—Yankel L.?”

  Yankel nodded.

  The reporter laughed and looked at his partner.

  “I suppose we’re even luckier than we thought, right, Karol?”

  The cameraman grunted something indecipherable.

  “Well,” the reporter said, extending a hand to Yankel. “My name is Mariusz Burak. This is Karol. We’re with TVP Kultura. Do you mind if we ask you a few questions?”