by Max Gross
“How would I know?” the messenger said with a shrug. “I deliver them. I don’t write them.”
Tartikoff was in no condition to accept glibness for an answer; he grabbed the young courier by the lapels, spilling his beer, and demanded that he look at the dispatch.
“Take your hands off me,” the messenger said, and he grudgingly lowered his eyes to the slip of yellow paper in Tartikoff’s hand.
“Sounds pretty standard for what’s going on in the east,” the messenger pronounced. “Ever since that bitch Gelfman killed the Tsar, the rest of the Jews are taking their lumps.”
The tavern continued to stare at the messenger, who, now that he had an audience, felt compelled to explain things.
Among the nine conspirators in the assassination of His Imperial Majesty, Alexander Nikolaevich Romanov, King of Poland, Grand Duke of Finland, Emperor of Russia and Sovereign of the Order of St. Andrew, was a woman by the name of Gesya Gelfman. Gelfman’s status as a daughter of Israel was highlighted in the press accounts of the crime, as well as stories about her subsequent conviction and the scandal that she was four months pregnant when the sentence of death by hanging was read. But Gelfman’s lineage freed the great Russian masses to commit every dark fantasy that had ever entered their minds upon their Jewish neighbors.
“It’s the end of things for the Jews of Russia,” the courier explained. “They’re doing it in every town. Swarming the Jewish homes. Clubbing the men to death. Raping the women. Cutting the throats of the children. And burning the houses to the ground after, so they don’t have to ever think about it again. It’s everywhere. And it’s spreading like yellow fever.”
For the Jews in Kyrshkow, this episode presented a serious crisis.
After all, what was to prevent our neighbors on the other side of town from getting it into their heads to do something similar to the Jews of Kyrshkow? Some of the Poles listening to the courier’s account looked as if they were already angry and indignant.
Father Klement Nowak, the priest at the massive, blue-and-white-domed rectory on the other side of Kyrshkow, made no secret of the fact that he despised Jews from the very depths of his soul and believed that each and every one of us was personally responsible for the murder of Jesus Christ.
He was not the first to spread such slander, nor would he be the last, but he did so with unequaled zeal. According to Father Nowak, the Jews were akin to a vampire cult and we each had a consuming desire to kidnap whatever Christian child we could lay our hands on and drain them of their blood. “The devil walks among you,” he was known to say in mass. “And the devil—whose cunning knows no bounds, whose treachery is always at work, whose evil is never satisfied—has figured out the best way to disguise himself: He has split himself into hundreds of different people. He is in the soul of every single Jew in Kyrshkow. He spends every night sitting in his synagogue, plotting ways to murder you. Every last Jew—man, woman, and child—is guilty! Take heed, good people, for safety’s sake! Do not let these monsters destroy you!” (Father Nowak’s sermons were so inflated in their disgust for Jews that even the peasants—never known for their great subtlety—sometimes laughed at the depravity supposedly under way on our side of town.)
Some suggested that a visit be paid to Duke Boleslaw Szyszki and that we get assurances that he would send his royal guard to protect us if things turned violent—but the idea was eventually dismissed. The collective wisdom was that Duke Boleslaw was not nearly as well disposed toward the Jews as his father, Slawomir, had been.
There had long been a story that after discovering one of his prized hunting dogs poisoned, the Duke cast his eye on his Jewish estate manager as the most probable culprit. He ordered his Jew slowly tortured to death over the course of the next several weeks in the hopes of extracting a confession. The estate manager’s fingernails were pried out; his kneecaps were smashed with a big wooden mallet; he was lashed with leather whips and his left ear was cut off. However, even in his agony he refused to confess. It was later discovered that the dog had broken into one of the silos and gnawed through a block of poison that had been meant for the rats. No apology or restitution was made to the estate manager’s widow.
But in the absence of a strategy, Kyrshkow’s Jews collectively held their breath, waiting for the firestorm that was expected.
The gentile burghers of Kyrshkow, sensible enough to know that there were no horns hiding under our skullcaps, warned us that Father Nowak was acting giddy; like a twisted child presented with a kennel of helpless kittens. On the Friday night before his sermon, he had retreated into the rectory with pen and paper, a lusty expression on his face. He gave instructions that he was not to be disturbed for thirty-six hours.
It got around town that “no one should miss Father Nowak’s mass” that week—and that there would be at least one surprise from the pulpit.
When he heard this, Rabbi Naphtali Slibowitz (son of the late Yeshkel Slibowitz) heaved a great sigh of nervousness.
On the Sunday in question, Father Nowak was said to have had a glint in his blue eyes. He carefully observed the peasants file into the pews, and when he was satisfied that the church was full and that nobody of importance would miss his exhortation, he picked up a silver pitcher of holy water and began the mass.
But the Lord works in mysterious ways. Before Father Nowak finished the asperges the priest suddenly stiffened. His head jerked up straight, and the wisp of rust-colored hair that was normally brushed neatly over his otherwise bald head fell in a mess over his forehead.
The parishioners fell silent, sensing something was wrong. The priest wavered from his left foot to his right foot. He opened his mouth to give the next invocation but the silver pitcher tumbled out of his hands.
Before anybody had a chance to see if Father Nowak was all right, he keeled over, landing on the carpet with a great thud. It’s written that man is born so that he might die, and Father Nowak succumbed to the universal fate.
Some might have expected us to be overjoyed, but when we heard of this on the Jewish side of Kyrshkow, our jitters only intensified. There would surely be some hotheaded peasant who would take it into his head that the Jews had somehow hardened Father Nowak’s arteries. And when one hothead goes on a spree, he almost always lures confederates to follow. Calls for revenge were inevitable.
“If there is a way to blame us for this,” one of the Jewish housewives opined, “believe me, those mamzers will find a way.”
A meeting of town elders was convened in the synagogue and our pending doom was put up for discussion.
“We should move to America!” someone shouted.
“All of us?” replied Rabbi Naphtali Slibowitz.
“Why not?”
“Well, for one thing, none of us know English.”
A minor quibble.
“We can learn,” said Reb Lev Sanders, who had made the suggestion.
“How are we all going to afford to go?”
Which was a relevant concern, certainly. Steam tickets for more than a thousand men, women, and children would be expensive—and we were not exactly a wealthy village. (That’s not even taking account of the inevitable exit visa problems and paperwork we would encounter. Or the fact that plenty of the grandmothers and grandfathers couldn’t dream of taking a weeks-long land-and-ocean voyage at their advanced age.)
“We should start a new town,” someone else suggested. “In the middle of the forest. Away from all these gentiles. Let’s begin again from scratch.”
Rabbi Slibowitz’s eyebrows rose up into his forehead and he stared quietly at the assembled elders for a few moments before he spoke again.
“Does anybody have a more realistic suggestion?”
The synagogue fell silent.
When the meeting ended, it was agreed that the elders should go home, rack their brains, and reconvene in a week, hopefully with better ideas of how to proceed.
You could probably guess how quickly word spread among the Christians that we were
Father Nowak’s slayers. By Sunday evening the town was atwitter with rumor and innuendo. The more affluent families didn’t wait to hire wagons and coaches to take them to Hamburg, where passage could be secured to America. Others began selling off farm equipment and furniture and family heirlooms, with the expectation that they would have to also flee in the near term.
But then something peculiar happened. Rather than careening onto our side of town with knives and clubs and letting themselves run amok, the Christians of Kyrshkow were utterly discomposed.
When a Jewish butcher or a cobbler or a blacksmith crossed Market Street and went into the Christian part of town, the old women would turn white and cross themselves furiously. The chandler’s hands would tremble when a Jew would come into his shop and ask for candles. When the Jewish children would play along the cobblestone streets mothers would come running out of their hovels to scoop up their little boys and girls and bring them back home, lest one of these young monsters lay a curse on them, too. Almost overnight the goyim of Kyrshkow had become frightened of us.
Of course, the gentiles were always afraid of us in some sense. Long before Father Nowak had taken the pulpit they had heard the outlandish stories from his predecessors about all the evil that Jews hatched away from Christian eyes. For generations the priests had said that we poisoned drinking wells. That we were vampires who sucked the lifeblood out of gentiles. (Or, alternatively, that we used the blood of Christian children in our matzahs, depending on which priest you consulted.) They warned their daughters about the lasciviousness of Jewish men and told them they would be kidnapped and sold into white slavery if they responded to our courtesy. They said that we kept millions squirreled away in secret hiding places, and that when the town was asleep and the moon was out, we would commune with the devil.
Still, a legend—an outrageous legend, one filled with the improbable and the occult—takes on a different dimension when it starts unfolding before your very eyes.
While the Jewish evildoers might be only a few hundred feet away, it was also acknowledged our mischief was many hundreds of years in the past. No Christian in Kyrshkow could point to any specific child who had been abducted and found murdered in the forest. No poison had ever been found in the water supply. No devils or dybbuks* had been spotted stalking the graveyard during the witching hour.
In the instance of Father Nowak’s death, however, the gentiles of Kyrshkow believed they had witnessed an unambiguous use of black magic, and when faced with this stark reality many of the Polish braggarts and bullies became fearful. If they did decide to run riot on the Jewish side of Kyrshkow and smash up Jewish businesses, beat Jewish men to death and rape Jewish women . . . well, what would the Jews do to them in return? It was a question they apparently never considered before and it tied their stomachs in knots.
So not only did the attack that we had been awaiting never come, but the exodus that was expected unspooled in reverse. One year after Father Nowak’s death, no clergyman had been sent to take his place. Suddenly, the gentiles of Kyrshkow were less sentimental about their hometown—they began talking of the village like it was a backwater.
A year later, a factory opened up outside Smolskie that was in need of hearty young men, and hundreds picked up and left.
The next year, two more factories broke ground and the young men who originally beat a path to Smolskie sent for their younger brothers and cousins. Soon, Smolskie was like one of the boomtowns of the old west, and those looking to bid farewell to the demonic Jews of Kreskol now had the ideal excuse. Young women followed the eligible men, and elderly parents followed their adult children.
Then slowly, over time, those who hadn’t found a spot in a city vanished into the forest where the swamps could provide anonymity and where game and vegetation was plentiful enough to live on. There were, after all, hermits and mountain people who had lived in the woods for centuries. Better in the wilds, these gentiles reasoned, than sharing their town with demons. Within a decade, there were only a few dozen gentiles still living within the medieval walls of our town. Some of these goyim had begun growing beards and stopped butchering their hogs. They began speaking in Yiddish, rather than Polish, and would disappear completely a decade later—either into the woods, or into our synagogues.
God be praised, the Jews of Kyrshkow were spared!
While I’m sure that this ironic twist of fate may strike some readers as the moment when the Jews of Kyrshkow should have felt most triumphant and smiled upon by good fortune, in truth we never really felt that way.
In the ensuing years, we felt our abandonment was much more a curse than a blessing.
For one thing, with the gentiles of Kyrshkow no longer tilling the land and producing the kind of abundance we had grown accustomed to, the price of food shot up almost immediately.
The vendors who were still able to secure vegetables gouged their customers—they charged three times the normal price and refused to give any goods on credit.
Odder still, the next summer the price of everything else went way down.
Because the price of food had risen so dramatically, nobody had any money to spend on anything else. The Jews assumed it was wiser to save than spend, and everybody from shoemakers to ironsmiths was forced to offer their work for a song.
Rabbi Slibowitz insisted that the solution to this was to take over the abandoned plots and produce as much food (the one commodity that remained expensive) as possible. Several families began planting peas and onions and carrots and cauliflower and beets and dozens of other crops on the unused land—which meant that food was suddenly plentiful again. But this only dropped prices on everything, including food.
The price of a challah was cut in half. And the baker offered housewives the use of his oven to heat up Sabbath pots—just on the off chance that they would feel charitable toward him and perhaps buy an extra loaf. The shoemakers offered three pairs for the price of one. Yussel Schactman, the coachman, shot and killed his horse, Blueberry, because nobody was using coaches anymore and Schactman could no longer afford to feed the poor creature. He sold Blueberry’s remains to the gypsies, who apparently didn’t observe any taboos about the consumption of horsemeat.
We probably could have endured all this and more, but in a parting gesture of contempt, the gentiles of Kyrshkow proceeded to ruin our reputation in the cities with which we did the most trading.
It is always impressive how quickly gossip can take root and bloom; it has the wherewithal and adaptability that no crop can match. Even plagues of pestilence can be wiped out over time, but not gossip. Almost immediately after Father Nowak’s death, the whispering began in the Smolskie marketplace that Kyrshkow was an evil town—filled with wizards and witches—and thereafter nobody would buy grain, which might very well have been contaminated by whatever voodoo the people of Kyrshkow bestowed on it.
This mumbo jumbo was not confined to the gentiles, mind you. Other Jews seemed to think there was something awry, too. Even the sensible and educated believed that we conspired to head off a pogrom by poisoning our chief antagonist. The legend arose that the night before his sermon, a Jewish boy had been sent into the rectory and instructed to spike the holy wine with cyanide.
Rabbi Naphtali Slibowitz became a character of mythical villainy among the Jews of eastern Poland. He was called a charlatan. A ruffian. A disgrace to his sainted father. An atheist. A thief. A murderer. And a dozen other vile things I won’t bother to mention.
Aside from the accusations that he had murdered Father Nowak, others arose that Rabbi Slibowitz was practicing some sort of heretical brand of Judaism—one part based on the apostasy of Shabbetai Zevi, one part on the debauchery of Jacob Frank, one part Karaite, and one part Zoroastrian.*
We supposedly engaged in wild orgies in which not only did men sleep with a dozen or more women at once, but men slept with other men, and women slept with other women. Children as young as eight years old were encouraged to join the depravity. Mothers were married off to
their sons. Fathers to their daughters. Brothers to sisters. Marriages between first cousins were permitted, so long as Rabbi Slibowitz gave his blessing, but marriages between non-relatives were forbidden.
We were said to throw dinner parties with free-flowing wine and vodka in which the candles would be blown out in the middle of the main course, and men would blindly swap wives with each other.
And if our degeneracy would have sickened any gentile man or woman, they were doubly revolting to Jews.
Just to prove our defiance, we made Shabbat the one day of the week in which we’d work, and the rest of the week we treated like Purim. We lit enormous bonfires after dark on Friday night and broke every law and commandment we could think of (from gathering sticks, to handling money, to writing out long legal documents). Then, from Saturday night until the following Shabbat, we idled away in our drunken sexual romps.
Finally, we had erected in the center of Kyrshkow a statue to a pagan goddess Demeter, which stopped the flow of Jews willing to go through our depraved town, lest their pious eyes be defiled by our excesses.
When the rumors came back to us, we were stunned. “How could anybody believe such nonsense?” Rabbi Slibowitz would say. But when our merchants would go into Bialystok to sell our goods they were turned away without even uttering a word. Any Kyrshkow face was instantly shunned. “Get out of here!” the Bialystokers would growl, and chuck rocks, or tomatoes, or eggs at the merchant’s head. “You people are animals!”
The Rabbinic Council sent an expedition out to Kyrshkow to get to the bottom of these rumors, and the head of the delegation supposedly was taken aback at how unchanged everything had been in our town. “What’s been going on here?” he demanded.
“Nothing!”
The delegate looked downright perplexed that a town with such a bad reputation could look so normal and upstanding.