The Lost Shtetl

by Max Gross

  Before Yankel had a chance to answer, a thought—a dazzling, glittering thought—came to him. The subsequent plot hatched in Yankel’s mind in only a matter of seconds; as if he were a painter visited by the elusive ghost of inspiration. Yankel opened his mouth to speak, then closed it quickly, sucking air through his teeth, his mind reeling as these strangers stared at him.

  Not every detail in the plot was filled in, mind you. He wasn’t sure where to begin, for one thing, and was half afraid that he might destroy this delicate seed of an idea by getting off on the wrong foot. But he could see the larger canvas plainly. More than anything else, he had to temper the impulse not to smile too broadly or sing with joy.

  “No,” Yankel said finally. “I don’t want to answer any questions.”

  When he was in captivity Yankel had learned the value of selective disobedience. Most of the time he did as he was told and took pains to be helpful and sunny. But he had also found that when a man with good manners raised an objection, it was treated seriously. He learned that when he asked to be returned home, the doctors around him made greater efforts to make him happy. (He also had to wonder if things might have unfolded much faster if he hadn’t been so congenial.)

  Now this glimmer of willfulness proved a shrewd opening move. From the moment Yankel said no, the reporters were so determined to keep hold of such a precious find—a Kreskolite who actually spoke Polish—that higher costs were paid than might have been under different circumstances.

  Not only did the fellow, Burak, plead with Yankel, but the cameraman joined in. It would just be a few questions, they promised. They wouldn’t include any personal details that he didn’t want them to. It would make their story about Kreskol so much better . . .

  The younger reporter, dressed in a white-and-blue checkered shirt and a pair of summer khaki slacks, would have been considered handsome if he wasn’t quite so thin. The slightly older cameraman looked a bit more worn; and he didn’t make nearly the effort that his colleague made to persuade. But Yankel was determined to make them wait before he said anything. He let them talk.

  “I’ve got something better for you than answering some questions,” Yankel finally said after several minutes had passed. “How would you like to know how a boy from Kreskol adjusts to the big city?”

  Both reporters looked puzzled.

  “Yes,” Burak smiled. “That’s exactly what we mean. We would love to get your story from your days searching out the authorities.”

  “You’re not understanding me,” Yankel said. “How about you take me with you when you go back to Smolskie.”

  Burak looked over to his partner, and then back at Yankel.

  “We’re not from Smolskie,” replied Karol. “We’re from Warsaw.”

  “It makes little difference to me,” Yankel replied. “Warsaw is bigger than Smolskie, yes?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Then Warsaw is even better. I just want to leave Kreskol, right away.”

  The two reporters again exchanged a glance—much longer than the previous one.

  “You want to come with us to Warsaw,” Burak said to himself more than to Yankel. “Why would you want to do that?”

  “That’s my affair,” Yankel answered in a tone that surprised even Yankel. “If you just get me there, I’ll answer any questions you like.”

  “Do you know anybody there?” the reporter asked.

  Yankel shook his head.

  “How will you survive? What will you do for money?”

  It was a good question. And, admittedly, it wasn’t one that Yankel posed to himself in the fleeting moments he had pieced together this on-the-spot proposal. Surely, they would never permit him back in the hospital, but he also assumed it wouldn’t be too hard for a good baker to find a situation. No one had ever complained about his ability to knead a challah. He wouldn’t mind working for low wages until something better came along.

  “I’ll make my way,” Yankel replied. “But you can check in on me in a few weeks and I’ll tell you all about my adventures.”

  The fact that Yankel used an old-fashioned word like “adventures”—implying that Yankel viewed himself as the hero of his own story—made Burak smile for a moment. If he had been disinclined to accept the scheme, this moved him slightly—ever so slightly—closer to Yankel’s position.

  “I’m not sure we’re allowed to do that,” Karol piped in.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, are you allowed to leave?” asked Burak.

  “Who would block me?”

  “Isn’t that rabbi in charge?” asked Karol.

  Yankel shrugged. “Maybe he’s in charge of the synagogue, but he’s not in charge of me.”

  The two reporters turned away from Yankel for a final time and stared at each other.

  “All we’d be doing is giving him a ride, right?” asked Karol.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Burak said. “The moment he gets on the helicopter, the other reporters will be all over him. And Sikorski isn’t going to let us take one of these guys home with us like he was a lost dog.”

  For a moment, Karol looked resigned to the fact that his partner was probably right, and began nodding.

  “Maybe,” Yankel chimed in. He then pointed to the camera that Karol held on his shoulder. “But maybe they wouldn’t notice me if I was carrying that.”

  Burak and Karol looked at the camera.

  “And if I was wearing that,” Yankel said, pointing to Karol’s cap.

  Neither of the gentiles spoke. They merely let the notion percolate. And a strong idea takes on a logic all its own. Before any better arguments had been proposed, Burak took note of Yankel’s build, and concluded that he could probably switch shirts with him without it being too obvious. He had a pair of scissors on his penknife, if it proved necessary to trim this Jew’s beard or sidelocks. And, yes, when he thought about it, there was room in the helicopter. None of the reporters who had flown in that day knew one another very well. At any rate, there were enough of them so that they could conceivably get away with it, as long as their secret passenger kept his head down and his mouth shut.

  And there was no question it would make a fascinating story. Everybody in the press corps would be caught flat-footed. Besides, as Karol took pains to remind Burak, was this boy a prisoner? What law was he violating by giving the kid a lift?

  So, yes, within a few minutes—and without much more coaxing from Yankel—the unlikely trio found a quiet spot in an empty alley and they cut off Yankel’s beard. (Or, rather, did as good a job as one could expect when the whiskers are as uneven as they are on a nineteen-year-old.) With two big snaps they discarded the sidelocks that Yankel had been growing since birth on the ground without ceremony. After they had glanced over each shoulder to make sure nobody was watching, Burak and Yankel switched shirts.

  When the press had all found their seats in the helicopter, Yankel was grateful to have the camera to cling to when the aircraft lifted off the ground and began sailing into the sky. The dizzying, sweaty feeling returned, and Yankel closed his eyes tightly and kept his head down, which proved helpful in keeping himself unnoticed by the other reporters—and which made Burak think the kid was sly.

  The helicopter landed on a large square just on the outskirts of Warsaw, a few meters from a rail yard. The other reporters hopped out of the helicopter and went straight for the officials who had been flying in the other aircraft. But Yankel seemed much less troubled than Burak or Karol (whose last name he still did not know) as he ambled toward the trains without a care in the world. His two companions had to jog to keep up, looking as if they were the ones at risk of being discovered.

  “So these are trains,” Yankel said as he walked toward the enormous brown and red cargo cars, taking greater pleasure with every step he took. “Do you know something? I had heard of them. Even before I left Kreskol that first time. But I’ve never seen one.”

  Burak and Karol shared a confused glance, wondering if this weren’
t some pearl of wisdom that should be taken note of, or a non sequitur to be ignored.

  “Yup, that’s a train,” Karol said. “Do you think I can get my camera back?”

  Yankel handed him the camera and the cap without being asked.

  “What happens now?” Burak ventured.

  “I suppose we get away from the others as quickly as possible before anybody notices who I am,” Yankel offered, as if he were the only calm and rational one in the bunch. His co-conspirators nodded vigorously, and in a few moments they were in the TVP Kultura van, on their way to downtown Warsaw.

  Burak spent much of the drive into town wondering if he shouldn’t offer to give this Jew some money, and maybe a bed to sleep in for the night. However, it occurred to him that by helping the guy out he would be changing the story.

  “You got a place to stay?” Karol finally asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, what are you going to do?”

  “I’ll get by.”

  Karol, who had been behind the wheel, turned to his partner and tried to catch his eye. “That sounds like a shitty plan,” Karol finally said. “Are you going to sleep out on the streets?”

  Yankel said nothing.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Karol said. “You can stay with me for tonight. I’ve got a sofa that folds out.”

  Burak shot his partner a reproachful look, suddenly self-righteous and protective of the mores of his business.

  “Thank you,” Yankel replied politely. “Very kind.”

  8

  Terra Incognita

  Back in Kreskol, Yankel’s disappearance was a low-ranked item on the long list of things we had to contend with, and after a few days nobody remembered much about him.

  Shortly after Rabbi Sokolow’s less-than-satisfactory meeting with Sikorski, the Polish government sent a team of officials to Kreskol to determine how, precisely, we “escaped history,” as they put it.

  These officials (two of whom spoke Yiddish) spent a week in the town archives, examining birth and death certificates, as well as the minutes of the beit din meetings, legal rulings, and various other archived materials.

  Some of the documents were so old that they crumbled and dissolved into thin air the moment they were handled. “Uh-oh,” said one of the Poles. The other two nodded, conspiratorially, but they were evidently prepared for such a contingency. Baby-blue rubber gloves were removed from their pockets, and small black boxes unsheathed. They pointed the boxes at these various documents and snapped a button before they proceeded with any further examination.

  “What’s that?” Kreskol’s archivist asked.

  “We’re taking photographs,” one of the Poles answered.

  It was not a particularly illuminating answer, but the archivist simply continued painstakingly going through each page of our town chronicles as these strangers snapped many thousands of photographs.

  When they exhausted all the material, the officials bid us farewell and visited Szyszki and Smolskie to examine the records there, before prowling through the yearbooks of the Central Statistical Office in Warsaw and tax receipts going back two centuries.

  Three months later they issued a report, which I have taken the liberty of summing up here.

  I should start by saying that we weren’t always called Kreskol—back in the old days we were called Kyrshkow. Nobody, to my knowledge, has ever been able to say how long Kyrshkow stood, but at the very minimum it was four centuries old. According to the town archives, our founding dated to sometime during the reign of Casimir the Great*—but you have to take that claim with a grain of salt, as many laudable deeds were attributed to Casimir that he didn’t really have a hand in. (Even the account in our archive was hesitant to commit to this as uncontested fact. “It was widely known that Kyrshkow was probably established under an order from the great Casimir,” its author wrote, “even though the order itself was lost to history.”) Nevertheless, Kyrshkow was solidly established two centuries later when Sigismund II Augustus** took his throne. By then, some government official had sent Kyrshkow a town seal and charter and begun collecting taxes.

  We were a happy village, as far as it goes. One-third of the town was Christian, and the other two-thirds were Jewish, and all available sources indicate the residents of Kyrshkow treated one another with relative civility despite a mutual sense of distrust. Naturally, there was the occasional peasant who would lose his wits in a jug of vodka and go rollicking through the fields, hurling dung against barnyard doors, and unmaidening whatever unfortunate Jewess stepped in his path, but this was a relatively rare occurrence.

  The Rabbinic Council*** sent a delegate to Kyrshkow every year to certify that we were milking our cows properly and butchering our chickens in accordance with the laws set down in the Talmud, and our record was unblemished.

  Runners went back and forth from Smolskie every week, and peasants came out of the forest to swap silver goblets or pearl necklaces with our pawnbrokers. We sold grain in the market in Lublin, and if a relative set out to make their fortune in Warsaw, we received regular letters updating everyone on their progress. (These dispatches usually included a zloty or two for a widowed aunt or crippled brother.)

  No, we were not isolated, exactly. (Or, not extremely isolated.) We were simple—and proudly so.

  “And what’s so bad with simplicity?” Rabbi Yeshkel Slibowitz—the Rebbe of Kyrshkow—asked in one of his surviving writings from a century and a half ago. “It is complication that is evil. Adam and Eve were perfectly happy with their humble, unadorned garden. It was only when they reached for knowledge, for understanding, for an ability to be godlike, that everything started going wrong. We here in Kyrshkow shouldn’t want for more.”

  Reasonable enough, one would suppose.

  In those days, however, it wasn’t just gypsies, hard-up gentiles, tax collectors, and Rabbinic councilmen who would ferry through our town, but all sorts of other Jews who would stay at one of Kyrshkow’s inns and tell us about the wonders of the world. “There’s a machine that can take you from Warsaw to Paris in under a week,” one such visitor told us. “It is called a railroad.”

  All the villagers knew that this was nonsense. “That’ll be the day” was our reply. The man was obviously touched in the head.

  That is, until another visitor came through who said the same thing.

  “You people are behind the times,” a rabbi from Krakow said. “These sorts of huts will be replaced by the end of the year. Any of you people ever heard of cement?” None of us had. “It’s the way of the future.”

  There were other, greater inventions of the industrial age that seeped into our awareness in dribs and drabs. There was a contraption that eliminated the need for walking from location to location, called a velocipede. There was a miniaturized printing press that you could keep on your desk called a writing ball. And someone told us of a machine that could send a message from Paris to Lyon through the thin air called the pantograph.

  When a peddler brought a sewing machine to town and demonstrated it before an incredulous crowd, our thriftiest mothers and grandmothers flew to the floorboards in their bedrooms or dug up the flower beds in their backyards, counted out their savings, and demanded a machine of their own.

  And while we didn’t exactly have a great stream of current events to worry about, the outside world’s comings and goings made similarly dim appearances.

  We learned of the brilliant French general who marched a gleaming, fully outfitted army through Europe—to military victory after military victory—only to have it destroyed in the Russian winter. We knew vaguely of the cadet uprising in Warsaw and that almost a quarter of a million men had taken part in the fighting. Several of our young men who had been sent to yeshiva in Warsaw came back telling everybody that a new prophet had been born in Trier. His name was Karl Marx and his evangel was entitled The Communist Manifesto—which the students handed out in Yiddish translation and Rabbi Slibowitz attempted to read.

  “I don
’t understand a word,” Rabbi Slibowitz said to one of the yeshiva boys who had brought it back.

  “This is what will make us all equal, Rabbi,” said the student. “This will result in the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

  “What’s the proletariat?” the Rabbi asked.

  “We are.”

  The Rabbi considered this.

  “Who’s this other fellow besides Marx?” the Rabbi asked. “Friedrich Engels?”

  “A goy.”

  An answer that required no further explanation.

  Still, there were other, more painful disturbances from the outside world, including the one that would end our relative normalcy and cast us into isolation and infamy. This happened shortly after two bombs were thrown at the Tsar—the second of which killed him.

  The news came in the form of a telegram to the Tartikoff family. The telegram was the first of its kind in these parts (the telegraph office was all the way in Smolskie and needed to be delivered to the recipient by hand), and after giving Yochanan Tartikoff the message, the courier—a pinched, poorly shaven young fellow with brown curls—helpfully informed him: “It’s customary to give a gratuity for carrying a telegram such a long journey.”

  Tartikoff handed him twenty groschen. The courier looked ready to spit in his face, but said nothing. He turned around and left.

  The telegram contained within it a minor apocalypse: Tartikoff’s brother, who had gone east to marry several years earlier, had been killed along with his wife and three daughters by marauding Cossacks.

  Few supplemental details were in the telegram, but a stricken Yochanan Tartikoff came staggering out of his hovel and tried to catch up with the courier before he got too far away.

  Tartikoff found him at the tavern, blowing the foam off a mug of ale before heading back to Smolskie.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” Tartikoff demanded, his voice cracking and his face white, waving the telegram in his face.

  The Polish peasants and fur traders seated around tables stopped what they were doing to listen, but the messenger was less impressed with Tartikoff’s distress than the rest of the tavern.