by Max Gross
“The currency you had a hundred years ago is worthless in today’s economy,” Mr. Pruski said after he made his introductory remarks. “This is just a fact of life. Inflation has risen more than three thousand percent since then. Kreskol could never sustain this distortion in the market that is coming. Prices will have to change.”
At first this was greeted passively, as the Kreskolites didn’t understand what the man was talking about. But as Pruski began outlining what the change would mean—that the price of a loaf of bread should rise from two groschen to roughly two zlotys and forty groschen—a bloodcurdling cry swept through the synagogue, and several of the mothers in attendance burst into tears. The council of holy men (who had been briefed on what would be said several days ago) nervously stroked their beards, and we all understood why they looked so unsettled.
“Please, people,” Mr. Sikorski took it upon himself to say. “Please, good people—quiet down. Let Professor Pruski speak. He’s worked out solutions to this.” But it took the translator many minutes before the clamor died down enough for Pruski to get a word in.
The solution, Pruski said, was that the Sejm* had voted to swap our town’s coinage on a grand scale—there would be an exchange. It would be run out of the Poczta, and it would award 37.8 zlotys in modern currency for every prewar zloty recovered.
“Hold on to your money until the Poczta opens,” Pruski advised. “We’re setting aside two weeks where we’ll have money changers in the town for ten hours a day, six days a week. The swap will allow you to make the adjustment. Nobody will go broke. Just turn your old money in, and you’ll get new money. Simple as that.”
It was at this moment that Shifra Rothstein shyly raised her hand.
“Excuse me,” Shifra said. “But you said that we had to turn in old money . . .”
She waited for the first half of her question to be translated.
“But the Poles have been coming into town for weeks now. And they’ve been giving us new money. We’ll be able to swap that, too, right?”
It was perhaps the most prescient question of the evening. A few weeks earlier, when word came back that tourists were already streaming into the town and deep in the throes of a spending spree, the officials in Warsaw decided that the currency swap had to be rushed into place because of that very issue. However, the Sejm had felt it was being generous enough, and that it wouldn’t spend a couple of extra million enriching individual merchants who had merely been lucky.
“No,” Mr. Pruski said. “Unfortunately we’re not going to be able to swap any money that was issued after 1941.”
Another howl (not quite as loud as the first) reached the rafters of the synagogue, and several of the merchants looked as if they were ready to riot.
I suppose nobody could blame them much. It’s one thing to live your life poor, with nothing more than a few vague fantasies about striking it rich some day. But it is quite a different matter to hold these oft-dreamed-of treasures in your hand only to receive the cold, unfeeling news that this is not the case. Not at all. In fact, you might be poorer than you were. Some of the newly rich refused to believe this. “He’s not talking about us,” one of the fruiters was overheard saying to his son.
Others believed no greater villainy had ever been visited on our town. “This is rape and murder,” proclaimed Moritz Lemkin, who had recently made a fortune selling honey to the tourists, raking in almost two hundred zlotys in a week. “This man—Sikorski—is a modern-day Bogdan Chmielnicki!”*
However, the rabbis in attendance had seemingly made their peace with this plan.
“Good people,” said Rabbi Sokolow over the murmuring that had infected the synagogue. “We should all try to keep in mind that riches are for this world, but they will not buy entry to the next.” A comment that was largely beside the point. He then added, a little more relevantly: “For better or worse, we cannot get undiscovered. That page has already been written.”
And the stark truth of those last two sentences hushed the audience long enough for Filip Pruski to finish his presentation, and for the masses to moodily go home.
Over the course of the next three weeks the town underwent a constant feeling of foreboding. There were some who declared, flat out, that they would never turn over their savings to the Poles, no matter what they promised. Never. This was some kind of trick; this goy, Sikorski, had charmed the kahal* into going along with him. When their money was safely in his hands, Sikorski would make a run for the woods and leave us with nothing.
“That’s silly,” Rabbi Shlussel said to his congregation at the beggars’ synagogue. “The government just spent millions of zlotys paving a road to our town. Why would they do that if they just wanted to cheat us out of our money?” But common sense and reason are poor companions next to the much more lively entertainment provided by alarm and dread.
The morning after the meeting, when a lorry of tourists came from Bialystok with their cash for the taking, the merchants refused to sell them anything. Or, as the hat salesman, Fishel Pashman, told a customer: “I’ll take your money, but only if the coins are a hundred years old or more.”
Transactions slowed to a level not seen since our years of infamy. The newly moneyed, who now had possession of thousands of modern zlotys, couldn’t get rid of them. The bagel sellers tried to do business with the fruiterers, but until the currency issue was resolved, nobody would accept anything other than old coins, or trade. For weeks, everything from silver to potatoes to salt was hoarded. Gold was the most valuable commodity of all; a little gold ring or a pair of earrings was now worth six or seven times what they were a week ago. Those who would not accept money were offered massive wooden wardrobes or cushioned sofas for jewels.
At the merchant’s shul, each call to prayer ended with the congregants bitterly moaning to one another how unfair the whole thing was, and that the entire beit din should be replaced, as they had so obviously failed to stop the pending calamity.
It was a weird time to live in Kreskol. No two people in our town had the same opinion of developments.
Others who were excited about the arrival of the gentiles the previous year—who listened to the stories of their gleaming cities and endless invention with rapt attention and were relatively untroubled by second thoughts—had to rethink the whole proposition.
Some now believed that Rabbi Sokolow had been right to be skeptical; we hadn’t known what we were getting into, and the good Rabbi had been the only one who had sense enough to see this.
Others, who had been doubters from the get-go, thought that Rabbi Sokolow had been too weak-willed in allowing all this to unfold under his very nose. “Maybe he’s too old to take on these shmegegges,”* one housewife opined. “If he knew this was such a bad idea, why didn’t he try harder to stop it? The man could have put his foot down.”
“Besides,” another replied, “did you see him there at the meeting the other night—up there with the rest of the beit din and the gentiles? He’s no better than the rest.” Rather, it was obvious to all that Rabbi Katznelson had exhibited much more contempt for the process from the very beginning. Maybe he should be leading things.
And some now spoke of Rajmund Sikorski with the same spite and hatred as we would normally reserve for a Cossack. “Who is he, exactly?” was the question that came up again and again—as if we might be able to discern his motives slightly better if we knew a little more about his personal life.
Still, for a majority of Kreskolites the voluptuous future still bowed, strutted, and shimmied before us. We had even had our first taste when a young boy—Reuven Kornstein—caught a cold and collapsed a few days later in cheder. After hot soups, ointments, a visit from Dr. Aptner, and a séance didn’t do the boy the slightest bit of good, he was airlifted to the nearest clinic, where he proceeded to make a speedy recovery. The powers of Sikorski, and the rest of the gentiles, were temporarily restored.
“Who cares what they want to do with our currency when they can heal a child wh
ose grave is already waiting?” asked Esther Rosen.
It turns out, many disagreed.
The opening of the Poczta (to be followed by the money exchange) was set to take place two days before Tisha B’Av,* and the naysayers pointed to this coincidence as a harbinger of doom.
“It has been an unlucky day for us throughout our history,” Rabbi Katznelson would tell whomever he could rope into listening. “Why the goyim decided that this was the time to institute all these changes is beyond my reckoning.”
But at least Rabbi Katznelson was walking around town and making his voice heard. Rabbi Sokolow, on the other hand, was nowhere to be found. In the weeks leading up to the opening of the Poczta he barricaded himself in his study, not even showing up to shabbos services.
Some guessed that he was too depressed to show his face around Kreskol. Others hoped he was at least using his solitude to form some collective response; some unmistakable message that could be sent to the gentiles indicating we would not go along with these changes passively. It was not simply a matter of money; something greater was at stake.
Regardless, preparations went on for the opening of the Poczta. Itcha went around to every house in town and explained that in a few days they would get their own red mailbox with a lock and key, which would be affixed to the side of their property. He left each family with a four-page pamphlet in Polish and Yiddish explaining the intricacies of the postal system, from the price of standard mail to warnings against putting hazardous liquids and powders in a parcel.
Five teenage boys were recruited to work a mail route in five different parts of the village. They were each outfitted for uniforms, each given a few rudimentary lessons in Polish, each told to study an alphabet book, each taken on a tour of the grid system that Berel had devised, and each paid four hundred zlotys a week for their efforts.
All that summer, power lines were being laid through the forest to link the town to the nearest plant, about forty miles away, and shortly before the Poczta opened, linemen could be seen putting up poles at various discreet points throughout town. Distribution panels were ordered for the more than four hundred houses and buildings in Kreskol.
“You’ll also be giving out pamphlets about electrical power when we start the mail routes,” Berel told his recruits. “But before you do so, you will all become familiar with electricity and what it will do for Kreskol when it is installed, because you’ll be getting many questions about this.”
12
Heresy
“Gentlemen,” Rabbi Sokolow began. “I have been meditating about developments long and hard. And I think we have to face certain unpleasant facts.”
Four days before the Poctza’s ribbon-cutting ceremony, Rabbi Anschel Sokolow finally reemerged from his study and called the beit din to order. The holy men of Kreskol rushed to his court to hear what their leader thought after weeks of brooding and meditation.
“I think that if this money exchange goes through, it will be the end of Kreskol as we know it,” Rabbi Sokolow pronounced. “I believe that the gentiles are determined to see us sin. The new currency will make us more dependent on them and slowly wipe out the way of life here. I think that Rajmund Sikorski is as much a menace to this community as Tomas de Torquemada was to the Jews of Spain.”
These words—shocking as they were from such an esteemed, levelheaded figure as the main rabbi of our humble town—were somewhat stale by the time Rabbi Sokolow spoke them. Since the day Moritz Lemkin had compared what was happening to the foul deeds of Bogdan Chmielnicki, the exchange had been likened to every disaster that had befallen our cursed people since the time of King David. Rajmund Sikorski had been equated with Nebuchadnezzar and Titus;* the attempt at changing the currency a second People’s Crusade;* the townsmen willing to go along with it were Hellenists or apikorsim.**
With Sokolow’s words, Rabbi Katznelson finally looked pleased; his old friend had decisively declared where his loyalties lay and was taking the situation seriously.
“However,” the Rabbi continued, “the truth of the matter is there is nothing to be done about this. I’m not Simon Bar Kokhbar, and this is not Betar.*** Kreskol has no good options to preserve itself—our fate is sealed. We must accept all this craziness, and pledge our personal fidelity to God.”
Rabbis Shlussel and Gluck were moved by these words and the pain written on the Rabbi’s face. Despite the fact that both believed the sentiments were overblown (after all, did exchanging money really equate to the Spanish Inquisition?), to see a man as educated and as esteemed rendered helpless appealed to an ancient sense of respect. A small drop of solidarity rolled down Rabbi Gluck’s cheek.
But as he turned away from the beloved Sokolow, Gluck caught the eye of Rabbi Katznelson, who appeared to feel nothing of the sort. He looked disgusted.
“Nothing to be done?” Rabbi Katznelson ejaculated. “Nothing?”
Rabbi Sokolow did not look up at his challenger.
“I’ve thought long and hard about this, Meir,” he said, surprising everyone in the room by using Rabbi Katznelson’s given name. (Rabbi Sokolow spent years insisting on proper etiquette during beit din meetings.) “There is no way to stop this.”
“I disagree.”
In the past few weeks, Rabbi Katznelson had moved swiftly away from anyone in town who argued that the gentiles should be given a chance. No one, Katznelson said, appreciated the dangers posed. “The exchange could very well be the first step on the road to something even more sinister,” he would say. And merchants like Moritz Lemkin believed that Rabbi Katznelson had things exactly right. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
“I think there are hammers available to us we have not used,” Rabbi Katznelson declared. “I think we’ve been entirely too accommodating. We should tell our people no. Firmly and unambiguously. They are not permitted to participate in the new exchange. Anyone having anything to do with Rajmund Sikorski should be driven out of Kreskol. If we have to issue a herem* against half the town as apikorsim, I believe we should do so.”
Now, this was a shock. Nobody—not even the most implacable enemy of Sikorski—had toyed with the idea of excommunicating Kreskolites who did business with the gentiles. It was the kind of radical idea summoned from hundreds of years ago, where whole towns were infected with the heretical ideas of Sabbati Zevi or Jacob Frank.
“Moreover,” Rabbi Katznelson continued, “I believe that some of the apologists who have poisoned the atmosphere are in this very room. I think there are members of this very court who have not yet appreciated the seriousness of the changes that these gentiles are proposing.”
Well, it didn’t take a genius to figure out whom he was talking about; Rabbi Katznelson was no longer interested in shielding Sokolow from his critique.
Rabbi Sokolow’s eyes darted around the rest of the council, perhaps hoping that one of them would have the courage to challenge this rogue in their midst. But the hush in the room after these fateful remarks spoke for itself.
Rabbi Shlussel finally broke the silence.
“I’m confused. What do you mean by a herem against anyone having anything to do with the gentiles?”
“Anybody who changes any money.”
“What are the violations of the law?” asked Shlussel. “Are you really saying that doing business with outsiders is such a transgression that we are willing to treat fellow Jews like gentiles? Worse than gentiles? What are the relevant passages in the Talmud? I would like to examine them.”
Rabbi Katznelson turned to Shlussel and stared at him coldly, without speaking.
“Katznelson,” Shlussel finally said, “I’m only asking questions. Since when is that a transgression worthy of being an apikoros?”
“I agree,” Rabbi Sokolow said. “If we’re going to speak about taking such drastic steps there would need to be a firm basis in law.”
“I’m not sure I trust everybody’s reading of the Talmud,” Rabbi Katznelson said, his eyes fixed on Sokolow.
; If there had ever been another beit din meeting like that one, I have not heard about it. The notes from every single session weren’t necessarily entered into the town archives, but nobody could recall a member of the court suggesting that the court itself was infested with apostasy.
When the shock wore off, Rabbi Sokolow’s instinct was to placate his friend. “There are two questions at stake here,” Rabbi Sokolow said. “The first is the legal basis for a herem. There is certainly an argument that inducing others to sin is itself a sin. I don’t think it’s such a leap of the imagination to say that those who are encouraging the tourists to come here are guilty of something.”
Rabbi Katznelson remained still.
“But the other issue—which is at least as important—is the issue of following secular law,” Rabbi Sokolow continued. “These laws might be perverse; they might do damage. But nobody says that the Poles don’t have the right to do this. If they decide that they want to change our currency, we don’t have the right to challenge them. That’s the way it’s always been.”
“There is a third issue,” Rabbi Katznelson replied. “And that is one of time. Once we switch our money over to the secular system, we will never be able to go back. We will have to abide by that monetary system forever. In a few days we’re not going to have any recourse. Today we do. We should issue stringent warnings tomorrow morning. We can’t fritter away the next few days—they’re too valuable.”
“There is not a Diaspora community in the world that does not use the local currency,” Rabbi Shlussel pointed out. “Or abide by the local laws. As long as the parliament or potentate are not asking us to explicitly disobey Jewish law I fail to see how changing money constitutes a violation of any command in the Talmud.”
The conversation lingered on until Rabbi Katznelson couldn’t stand it anymore.