by Max Gross
“What’s this business with Father Klement Nowak?” the delegate asked after he had poked his nose through the slaughterhouse and the synagogue and the mikvah and the inns and the tavern and every other place he could think to look for signs of transgression. “How did he die?”
“Nobody knows, exactly,” said Rabbi Slibowitz. “None of us were there at the time. But it sounds like he had a stroke in the middle of his sermon.”
“And what did you do to him before the sermon?”
“Nothing at all!”
“How do you know? Have you spoken to everybody in town?”
“Of course not, but sometimes people just have heart attacks or strokes, don’t they?”
The delegate frowned, not seeming particularly satisfied with the response, but that was the toughest questioning he would venture. When he left town a few hours later, he told Rabbi Slibowitz his report would be favorable, which it was. The Rabbinic Council ruled that we had been the victim of lashon hara* and that nobody should have any reason not to do business with us or stay the night in a Kyrshkow inn. We were given an official pronouncement, signed by five rabbis, and written on sheepskin parchment, with all the necessary legalese to make it sound important. A fat lot of good it did.
Just as a young girl who gives in to the pleading of a frisky boy will never again be thought of in quite the same manner—no matter how many paupers she feeds—a bad reputation will stick to a town until the day its last hovel burns to the ground.
When our merchants would drive their wagons through the Bialystok market the Bialystokers remained determined to have nothing to do with us. “Didn’t you hear?” our merchants would plead. “We did nothing wrong. The Rabbinic Council said so.”
The grain merchants would shrug, if they deigned to do that much.
After another year in which Kyrshkow failed to interest anyone in our grain or our furs or our produce or anything else, the town fathers sat down and tried to figure out how we could save our town from economic oblivion.
“What if we change the name of our town?” asked Reb Simon Gluck.
The town fathers hadn’t considered this, and there was a moment of silence as the various elders stroked their beards, furrowed their eyebrows, and drank in the suggestion. An hour later everyone agreed that this was Kyrshkow’s only hope—even if its chance of success was slender.
A petition was sent to Duke Boleslaw Szyszki’s court for the change to be made official, along with a request for a new town seal and charter, and the people of our village were instructed to start throwing the word “Kreskol” into conversation whenever they could—just so we could become accustomed to the name. The record is spotty in terms of who came up with the word “Kreskol,” or what it meant, but it was agreed that the name sounded good, was easy to remember, and was close enough to the original that the transition wouldn’t be too tough.
Perhaps because he thought he was setting a good example (or maybe because his name had become so speckled with mud in all the swirling gossip), Rabbi Slibowitz announced that in the spirit of change, he, too would alter his surname from Slibowitz to Sokolow. Furthermore, like our great ancestor Jacob, he would adopt Israel as his given name.
A festival was planned that summer to inaugurate the new name. The town square was prepared for dancing, and little Elkana Sanders composed a ditty for his fellow yeshiva students to sing:
Kreskol, Kreskol—
My heart belongs to thee!
Kreskol, Kreskol—
Wait until the Warsaw lasses see!
Kreskol, Kreskol—
No town under the sun is finer.
Let them sing it atop the mountaintops
With voices ablaze with fire!
A great display of honey cake and rugelach and babka* and bagels was planned, along with a table full of lox and pickled herring and sable and pike. It was all, of course, free for the taking.
Tevye Berkowitz practiced juggling knives and forks, and the wedding jester prepared jokes and magic tricks. The young girls of Kreskol took out their holiday clothes, ironed out their wrinkles, and stitched up whatever the moths had eaten.
Several days before the festival, a handful of the more boisterous yeshiva students were dispatched to the marketplaces in Smolskie, Bialystok, Krakow, and Duke Boleslaw’s court to tell their fellow Jews of the festival in Kreskol. “Come one, come all!” they chanted, like a pack of carnival barkers. “The first annual Kreskol summer festival! Help us inaugurate the new village of Kreskol in the great Duchy of Szyszki! Entertainment, food, and cider will be provided for all, absolutely free of charge!”
Most of the Jews in other villages who heard this announcement were unsure of what to make of it, exactly.
“Where’s Kreskol?” they would say. “Never heard of it.”
Some thought that this announcement sounded like a ruse; an effort to lure a group of helpless saps into the forest where they could be robbed outside the eye of the law.
“How will we get there?” several asked.
I’d like to think that if coaches and wagons had been provided, it wouldn’t have made much difference, but who can say? The yeshiva boys who were asked this question turned red and stammered some evasive response.
“It’ll be up to every man to find his own way there,” one of the yeshiva boys answered confidently. “It’s not like we can take care of everything.” But he was the only one who had enough chutzpah to respond with conviction.
When the festival arrived, few outsiders visited our little village. Those who did were mostly schnorrers,* who didn’t mind a long journey because they had no place better to go, and didn’t mind running the risk of being robbed, as they had nothing worth stealing.
A few of the hermits and mountain people also came out of the forest and helped themselves to glasses of cider. When they were tipsy and sated they staggered back into the woods and we never heard from them again.
The festival was deemed a disappointment if the idea had been to lure visitors back to our town.
However, the Jews of Kreskol felt a great deal of pride in their “new” town. And when the summer moon appeared and we were in the throes of the cider and dancing, everything seemed right with Kreskol—even if the baker, the fisherman, the winemakers, and everyone else lost money on the festival.
It would be the last time our little village would make an effort to reach the wider world.
Loneliness can be an affliction, like typhus or pneumonia—and it wasn’t long before Kreskol came down with a serious case of the disease.
The longer our village stayed undisturbed by the outside world, the more we grew to resent it and all its emissaries.
No longer did the people of Kreskol think with envy back on their brothers and cousins who had had the money to abandon the town for America. Instead, we began remembering them with sadness; as if they were poor besotted creatures who had never made it all the way across the ocean, but whose ships had sunk halfway and now lay in a watery grave.
In the ensuing years, we grew extremely proud of Kreskol’s natural beauty in a way that we had never been before. While we still exhibited all the natural prejudices of our race in favor of the life of the mind over nature and physical exercise, we encouraged Kreskol’s young to roll up their sleeves and hike the nearby mountains, or swim our streams. “Go out and get some fresh air,” mothers commanded. (So long as they left the forest alone.) Their children obeyed.
Tilling the soil, we realized just how fortunate we were: Whoever it was who founded Kreskol all those centuries ago had picked an excellent plot of land if cultivation and agriculture had been his chief concern.
Even as the economic wind seeped out of our sails, the earth beneath Kreskol kept producing its abundance year after year. Fruits and vegetables appeared every summer, along with corn and grain. A stream flowed a few hundred yards from our town square that was stocked with fish, and helped us irrigate our crops during the droughts. Our cattle and goats and chickens to
ok the invocations of Genesis seriously and multiplied.
In short, if loneliness was to be our lot, we could survive it well enough, thank you very much.
However, long after the infamy of Kyrshkow died down in the marketplaces of Bransk and Bielsk—long after the names of Rabbi Israel Sokolow and Father Nowak and Duke Szyszki had been forgotten by all except the town chronicler—we did not let ourselves forget just how cruelly the rest of the world had treated us.
Rabbi Menachem Sokolow (Naphtali’s son) proved to have a knack for figures, and dealt with our economic turmoil by deflating prices. He put a strict ceiling on the price of every commodity, from eggs to female wigs to belt buckles. There was some grumbling at first, but over time the value of money changed in our minds. And those children who grew up when the price controls had been fixed were accustomed to it, hardly thinking twice about the fact that they sold a loaf of bread for a penny—even if their fathers had sold it for three times as much. (Money had always been used in sui generis ways in Kreskol; in decades past when visitors came through town bearing rubles and saying that this was now the currency of the land, Kreskolites hung on to their zlotys. This almost always proved sensible in the end.)
We treated scornfully the few merchants from the outside who still made the trip through Kreskol every few months. When they offered to sell us a teakettle, they were too stunned by our counteroffers to be insulted. After a while, the merchants stopped trying, as did everybody else—save the gypsies, who still saw the value in Kreskol’s wares and were willing to put in the time and effort to reach Kreskol in one piece, and were shrewd enough to maximize their profits reselling it.
All the while, we had very little idea just how dramatically things were changing outside Kreskol.
One summer, a member of the Austrian nobility was shot dead in Sarajevo, and the whole of Europe embraced its most violent, most barbarous persona. They clawed and chopped and shelled and sank white hot slugs of lead into one another’s flesh. War broke out on a scale never imagined by humanity—but we heard very little about it in Kreskol.
One afternoon, a Polish cavalry officer whose uniform was blackened with soot and grime galloped into our town square and broke into tears when he saw the butter and the bread and the golden pyramids of apples on display in the marketplace.
“What’s wrong with the fellow?” Hoda Levy asked another housewife.
“He must be a deserter,” came the reply. “Worried that we’re going to turn him in.”
When the Pole recovered his wits, he began reaching his arms into the barrels of vegetables, frantically filling his pack with our goods. He didn’t give so much as a penny in return.
“I’m requisitioning this,” he told Rabbi Menachem Sokolow. “By order of the Polish cavalry.”
No one could remember a gentile ever attempting something so brazen in the past but the man had a savage, wild look about him—as if he’d lunge at the throat of anybody who tried to stop him. And after all these years free from violence and harassment, nobody felt the need to make trouble now.
“I’ll be back,” he declared, with a tremor in his voice. “The army will be back, too. You people ought to be ashamed of yourselves, holding on to contraband in a time of war!”
That was peculiar, certainly. One doesn’t usually feel shame from a man who is robbing you. The villagers all shared a look of puzzlement after the young officer mounted his horse and galloped away, never to be seen again. No one knew what to make of those goyim. Their morals shifted with a strong wind.
But to truly understand why Kreskol was spared the hangman’s fate that awaited so many other towns in the remote regions of the White Wilderness or the Tuchola Forest, it is necessary to relate the story of Jacek Krzywicki, the man whom we later learned would figure most significantly in our rescue.
Not that Mr. Krzywicki ever appreciated his outsized role in our fate. According to all available sources, he had no opinions about Jews, one way or the other, and spent his life as a drunkard and a spendthrift whose gargantuan appetites led to his execrable discovery in an alley in Warsaw one November morning shortly after his forty-first birthday, dead of cirrhosis of the liver. At the time of his expiration—with only two zlotys in his pocket—he owed an obscene amount of money to a range of pimps, gamblers, and innkeepers in Warsaw, Krakow, and Lublin. The division of his meager estate was the subject of not less than seven different court actions.
After our rediscovery, we made an earnest attempt to find out more about unfortunate Mr. Krzywicki, to whom we owed such a great debt—but very little was known about him other than that his cousin was Ludwik Krzywicki, who founded the Central Statistical Office in Warsaw, and that he collected data for the office’s yearbook. With a prostitute in Lodz, he had fathered a bastard daughter named Wanda whom he never acknowledged as his own—but it is not clear whether Mr. Krzywicki was even aware of his daughter’s existence.
Our own encounter with Krzywicki was extremely limited. We met him on precisely one occasion not too many years after the cavalry officer came and went from our village.
Krzywicki rode into town on a white mare, and several of those who saw him say that they were surprised that a horse—even a strong, sturdy one—could support a man of his considerable girth.
“Where am I?” he asked in Polish when he was in our town square. He reached a swollen hand into the inner pocket of his uniform, pulled out a white slice of paper, and said, “Am I in Kreskol?”
Many of those who now manned the stalls in the market square no longer spoke any Polish, so Rabbi Sokolow was summoned to speak to this elephantine, ruddy-faced official.
“Yes,” Rabbi Sokolow answered, “you are in Kreskol.”
Krzywicki reached into his inner pocket for a second time and pulled out another slip of paper along with a yellow map, both of which he studied for a minute before he said anything else.
“Now, have you people ever heard of a place called Kyrshkow?”
Rabbi Sokolow nodded.
“Where is that place? According to this map, it should be here as well.”
“We’re one and the same,” the Rabbi answered. “We don’t go by Kyrshkow anymore. We only go by Kreskol.”
It took Krzywicki a few minutes to understand this. He sat on his horse and studied the paper in front of him intensely before he asked Rabbi Sokolow to explain the change, which Rabbi Sokolow did with outright embellishment. “We had discovered that there was a village also called Kyrshkow in Russia where there was a scandal,” Rabbi Sokolow said, his voice moving up a few octaves. “We didn’t want to be associated with scandal and thought it was easier just to change our name.”
Krzywicki listened to this explanation before rubbing his temples and saying, “You don’t happen to have any vodka, do you?”
Under normal circumstances, the Rabbi might have noted that nine o’clock in the morning was considered early for indulging in spirits in these parts, but he simply sent Dudel Aaronson to fetch a jug from the distillery.
“You don’t get many visitors out here, do you?” the man said after he had gotten off his horse, taken a few significant gulps of vodka, and was suddenly a little more at ease.
“No.”
“Well, I’m with the census for the Second Polish Republic’s Central Statistical Office.”
Rabbi Sokolow had never heard of a census. Or the Central Statistical Office. And he had no idea that there was a first Polish republic, much less a second one.
“What’s that?”
Krzywicki didn’t look particularly surprised by the question—as if he had heard it before. This was, after all, a time when Kreskol was not the most primitive village in Poland. With greater care than one would have expected from a stranger, Krzywicki took pains to explain all that had happened since the end of the Great War.
The war ended—he explained—only to be followed by a smaller war with the Ukrainians and a third war, with the Russians. With the final peace treaties the kingdom around u
s was transformed into a republic, and the Duchy of Szyszki was turned into the District of Szyszki. This was part of the Second Polish Republic’s effort to organize itself in a more sensible, modern way. For that reason, he would need to make a report on Kreskol, along with every other village in the district.
This was largely irrelevant to us. Rabbi Sokolow was as polite as could be expected, believing our town’s best path to peace and prosperity was to smile, nod, and not ask too many questions.
“So see here,” Krzywicki said. “What I have to do is evaluate this town. And by that, I mean I have to find out how many people are here.”
Rabbi Sokolow said nothing.
“Do you know?”
“No . . .”
Krzywicki looked disappointed.
“Don’t you people keep records?”
It was true, there was the archive in the yeshiva’s library. There would be records of all Kreskol’s births and deaths. But nobody kept a running tally of the various souls of our town.
“Can you estimate?” Krzywicki asked. “It doesn’t have to be perfect.”
The Rabbi looked perplexed. He cast his eye about the town square, to the crowd of Jews watching the exchange. “Maybe two thousand?” he answered.
Krzywicki’s eyebrows leaped up. I suppose he expected a smaller figure. He reached into his uniform yet again and this time pulled out a small, red leather booklet and a pencil. He began scratching out notes.
Krzywicki spent the rest of the day with Rabbi Sokolow and the town archivist, going through our synagogue’s records. As the morning wore on, he asked for more vodka. He was sweating furiously even though it was a cool, balmy day, and began wiping his brow and patting down his cheeks with a red handkerchief. Just before noon he asked somewhat sheepishly if he could use the outhouse, and the archivist and Rabbi Sokolow later reported hearing the sounds of heaving and gagging.
He emerged with his handkerchief at his lips, not baring even a hint of the sickness and misery he knew a minute or two earlier.
“This town might have tax problems,” the official said. “When was the last time you paid an assessment to the Rabbinic Council?”