The Lost Shtetl

by Max Gross

  It was an open question what would become of the empty hovels in the center of town when Brina Pressman had the brilliant idea of putting her son and daughter-in-law in her old house. She thereafter began matching deserted abodes with budding young families, becoming Kreskol’s first real estate broker, and a wealthy woman in the process.

  But in those days there was still little by way of luxuries readily available—so, I suppose, there was really no place to park our riches except real estate.

  One of the tourists from Smolskie who came through our town could sense the rising opportunity. The fellow—a tall, scrawny chap named Cyril Mierzejak, who spoke no Yiddish and had no previous profession that we’ve ever been able to discern—appeared on Brina Pressman’s doorstep one afternoon with Berel Rosen, who said: “Cyril here wants to live in Kreskol. Do you think you could find a home for him?”

  Mierzejak seemed pleasant enough, even though he made no effort whatsoever to learn the local language or customs. He had chestnut-brown hair and brown eyes, and wore a sizable gold cross that he kept visible at all times, as if he were worried we might forget he was not one of us.

  Mierzejak turned the outer parlor of the small house he rented into Kreskol’s first appliance store, filling it with blenders, toasters, lightbulbs, fans, dust busters, compact refrigerators, and dozens of other doodads that we had never heard of before.

  He hired a teenager who was reasonably fluent in Polish—Bunem Nudelman—to act as his translator and sat back and waited for us to throw our money at him.

  “What’s this?” asked Basha Richter when she came into his store and opened up the compact refrigerator.

  “A teeny-tiny ice house,” Bunem answered. “It’ll keep fruit, meat, milk—or whatever you want—ice cold. There’s a bigger one that stands roughly six feet high, but he’d have to order it from Warsaw.”

  The refrigerator proved to be Mierzejak’s biggest moneymaker; he sold more than a hundred of them (some big, some small) over the course of his first six months, turning him into a rich man with minimal effort. Toaster ovens became his second-biggest seller, even though one of them nearly burned down the Applebaum house and sales briefly plummeted before recovering.

  Several other gentiles from nearby towns and villages also appeared before Brina Pressman soon thereafter. A hardware store opened, followed by a pharmacy. Another goy had the idea of selling televisions and DVD players, which must have sounded like a proposition that couldn’t lose given that TV was another wellspring of fascination, but the idea was overripe. Few of the townspeople were willing to plunk down 1,500 zlotys on such an extravagance. There was nothing on TV in Yiddish if they had. And while the moving images might have been riveting, they were also unnerving; they operated outside the known laws of the day-to-day, and few townspeople intended to bring black magic into their house.

  One of the gentile wives opened a beauty parlor and nail salon out of the front room of her house. At first, it looked like another idea ahead of its time, but the proprietress, Jadwiga Wozniak, refused to accept what seemed preordained. She snatched three teenage girls off the street and offered the full makeover, free of charge.

  When they claimed they were uninterested—and had no idea what a “makeover” was—Jadwiga raised her hands, the fingernails of which were manicured and painted red.

  “How’d you like me to do your nails for free, too?” Jadwiga said in Yiddish. (She learned this sentence and six or seven others before embarking on this mission.)

  The girls’ eyes stayed fixed on the nails and then crept over to Jadwiga’s violet eye shadow and scarlet blush.

  “What do you have to lose?” Jadwiga said. “You might enjoy it.”

  And with that final inducement, Jadwiga had her first customers. A pack of a dozen or so young men spontaneously formed outside the Wozniaks’ house (Jadwiga left the door conspicuously open) and watched silently as the metamorphosis was undertaken. When the girls left the salon two hours later—their eyebrows plucked, the lids blue, their faces white with powder, their lips crimson and fingernails pink—they were a vision.

  Thereafter, there was a line outside Jadwiga’s salon six days per week, starting when the sun went down on Saturday evening.

  The gentiles mostly kept to themselves. The attempts they made to speak to us in anything other than Polish were modest. They could be seen smoking cigarettes behind Mierzejak’s house, laughing at jokes. They put satellite dishes on their roofs and merrily whooped and hollered as they watched football games moistened with beer and vodka. One of their houses served as Kreskol’s makeshift Catholic church, where they assembled every Sunday morning to consume the blood and body of Jesus Christ.

  Far stranger additions came in the form of several black-clad, bearded Israeli pioneers.

  “Israel,” their twenty-five-year-old leader, named Uzi Yagoda, told Rabbi Sokolow in a Hebrew-flecked Yiddish, “was a historical mistake. It should have never been settled before the Messiah had arisen. Jews should not be living there. The ones who do live like the goyim.”

  It sounded peculiar, but Rabbi Sokolow was not prepared to challenge a stranger. A dozen single Israeli men, and five families, took up residence in the town’s empty houses and bestrode the town like they were our long-lost brethren, greeting every weaver and glassblower with a hearty “Shalom!” However, after they heard of the rift that had taken place within our town, they instantly took the Katznelson side, and stopped speaking to the rest of us.

  In the midst of our buying and spending sprees, the greatest hunger was for daily (or at least weekly) reports from the outside world.

  A year after our rediscovery, some American tourists came through Kreskol carrying a faded tabloid newspaper that—much to our surprise—was printed in Yiddish. It caused a sensation.

  The newspaper was passed from hand to hand until the newsprint became smudged and faded and the stories readable only if your eyesight was sharp. Still, we pored over every article—from bombings in Syria, to an actress named Gwyneth Paltrow, who, despite her gargantuan height and straw-colored hair, was Jewish. Or partly. (Gwyneth Paltrow became the first real celebrity of Kreskol; when the matchmakers were trying to sell a girl to a boy’s family they began saying: “She’s a regular Gwyneth Paltrow.”)

  When it got out that Kreskol might be a big news consumer, a distributor for Fakt and Gazeta Wyborcza* came on a fact-finding mission to our town—only to be disappointed when told how few of us spoke Polish.

  Bunem Nudelman—who still had his job at the appliance store—came up with the idea of ordering a half dozen of the Polish journals every day, and charging the men and women of town five zlotys each for translations, which he would administer orally to groups of twelve at a time. After a while he realized it would be simpler to wake up early, handwrite summaries of everything, take them to the Poczta (the only institution in town to possess a copy machine), and pay some kid to hand them out on a street corner for two zlotys apiece. He called it The Kreskol Crier.

  It became something of a badge of honor to be able to discuss current events. “What do you think of Mateusz Morawiecki?” one of the housewives would ask at the teashop.

  “He sounds like a decent man,” came the considered answer. (Given that we considered Morawiecki’s rank roughly akin to that of a tsar, few felt entitled to offer more muscular criticism.)

  We talked about Radoslaw Majecki, the goalkeeper for the Legia Warsaw football team, and Robert Lewandowski, the captain of the national team—even though few of us really understood the rules of football. But the sports sections appeared in our news summaries every day, and most of our citizens felt duty-bound to take an interest.

  Even the Katznelson Jews, who claimed that they had no use for tabloid rags (“Gossip,” Rabbi Katznelson pronounced, “is just like murder in that it does irrevocable damage to its victims”), could usually be seen leafing through discarded, day-old copies of the Crier.

  And then, one day, we started reading about our
selves in the Crier.

  No one in our town had ever heard of Zbigniew Berlinsky, the scholar.

  After the scandal broke, Rajmund Sikorski went around town with a photo of Berlinsky, and asked every shopkeeper if he had come into their establishment asking questions. “No,” came the reply, “but many have come through town in the last few years.”

  Dr. Berlinsky, a professor of modern history and Judaic studies at the University of Krakow with degrees from Cambridge and Hebrew Universities, was (we found out later) one of the world’s foremost experts on contemporary Jewish history.

  Like many others in our town, I have since looked over the translation of the paper he submitted about Kreskol at a conference of Holocaust scholars at Bar-Ilan University. And I will concede that he is a persuasive and engaging writer. His credentials and erudition are beyond dispute, and one could see the evidence of this in the throwaways and asides throughout the document. Still, this doesn’t change the fact that what he wrote about our town was filled with the worst flights of fancy and irresponsible speculation.

  I feel slightly uneasy quoting such a false source at any length. But in telling the story of Kreskol, it would be a dishonesty all its own to leave it out of the record.

  “I speak to you as a mere onlooker in this latest discovery,” Dr. Berlinsky began his paper, which he read before an audience of about two hundred. He was an old man—well past seventy—and he had a hunched back, wrinkles, and gray hair. “I have observed from the sidelines the breathless reports about this latest—and, possibly, last—major addition to the scholarship on pre–World War II European Jewry. Naturally, the idea of an untouched, undisturbed specimen of Jewish life that escaped the Nazi invasion of Poland would have been intoxicating to any of my fellow scholars.

  “Let me revise that; it would have been intoxicating to anyone who had the least amount of interest in World War II and the Holocaust—be it the scholar or the lay reader—which is checkered with so many ghastly, horrific stories that it is a palpable relief to delve into an unambiguously happy one.

  “A subject as elaborate as Kreskol would require an extraordinary amount of time and energy devoted to it—time and energy I do not possess at this advanced age and stage of my career. Still, make no mistake, the time would be spent debunking an obvious fraud.

  “I do not believe that the Nazis skipped Kreskol during their migration east, because I do not believe that Kreskol existed then. Kreskol is a sham. It is not a Jewish village. It is not a Polish village. Honestly, I have no idea what it is. My suspicion is that it is the well-financed prank of some demented person or group of persons who have either brainwashed weaker-minded compatriots into believing their obvious nonsense or bribed them into being accessories to this hoax.

  “But it is simply not possible for Kreskol to have existed as a Jewish village in the location it stands today and escaped notice of the German army.

  “It is not possible that a village of several hundred Jewish souls should have lived, breathed, and died for hundreds of years and failed to pay taxes to the Jewish councils and tribute to the local nobility. The lists of towns used by the Einsatzgruppen during the liquidation of Jews from Poland came directly from the Jewish councils, and it is not just doubtful—it is unthinkable—that an entire village should have escaped their notice. Kosher inspection alone was an elaborate bureaucracy employing many hundreds of Jews throughout the Pale of Settlement, and the inspectors would never have allowed a purported Jewish village to fail to adhere to its regulations. Kreskol is the greatest lie ever perpetuated on academia in the forty years since I handed in my dissertation. And, frankly, I’m surprised that I’m the first to say so out loud.”

  The paper caused a great commotion in the hall. Within moments, the spectators collectively unsheathed their blackberries and iPhones, and began frantically typing. Hushed exclamations of disbelief rolled through the auditorium, and of the five other scholars seated on the stage with Berlinsky, three turned red with outrage.

  Berlinsky was oblivious to the chaos he had fermented. He continued reading his paper as dryly as only an academic septuagenarian knows how, pausing to refresh himself from the paper cup of water on the podium and wink at the fluorescent light. And after the thunderous, prosecutorial manner in which he began the paper, he reverted to a very mundane recitation of facts: Tax structures existed in Poland from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries—including the Protection and Tolerance Tax, the Property and Occupation Tax, and the Kosher Meat Tax—which, he argued, no local government, no matter how corrupt or badly organized, would forgo. And once this village was on the books, there was no way the Germans could have missed it.

  He then pointed out that for a small village to have spent a century in isolation, there had to have been significant inbreeding and our gene pool would no doubt have been polluted. “If Kreskol had been really left alone all those years, problems such as Down syndrome and mental retardation would not be a rare occurrence but one of the dominant characteristics in the town. That has never been reported.”

  It appeared that Professor Berlinsky had been unaware of Kreskol’s name change, even though this point of information appeared in the official government report about Kreskol. Or, if Berlinsky did know, he chose to ignore it. And this business about our mongolism was sheer fantasy. As was pointed out later, our population was not in the low hundreds, but well over a thousand (closer to two thousand), implying there was plenty of room for diversity in our breeding. (He would be corrected on this point on the dais a few minutes later, but it remained a major element of the story.) However, Berlinsky took pains to say, he had never really researched Kreskol—this was just his reaction as a scholar of more than four decades.

  “This paper,” he ended, “is meant to introduce necessary skepticism into the conversation. I do not pretend to know the solution to the mystery of Kreskol. That should be left to younger, sprier historians. I only hope that this raises the right questions that academics—and the greater public—should demand and that a thorough debunking follows. Thank you.”

  Dr. Berlinsky then took his seat amid the uproar, with his audience frantically waving their hands to get his attention.

  The moment the report hit our newsletter, most of us were full of an even greater sense of outrage and disbelief than Dr. Berlinsky’s intended audience. Who was this altercocker* to say that we were a sham? What did that even mean, anyway? How could this guy know every village, hamlet, and city in Poland? How could anybody?

  “So we’re a sham village,” joked Zanek Boscowitz. “If Berlinsky should pay us a visit, I’ll be sure to punch him in the nose with my sham fist, and he’ll no doubt be happy that he’s only in sham agony.”

  But Dr. Berlinsky’s accusations were taken seriously by other academics and important people.

  Berel Rosen (one of the few in our town at the time to possess a mobile telephone) was bombarded over the course of the next few weeks with requests for an interview. Calls came from as far off as Tokyo and Cape Town, with reporters who wanted to know how we, the good people of Kreskol (or, once good people of Kreskol), wished to respond to these allegations.

  “They’re insane,” said Berel.

  A few of the reporters chose to argue with him. “But surely some of the allegations aren’t insane,” countered the reporter from Le Monde. “You read Berlinsky’s paper, didn’t you? He raises serious questions. What do you say about this tax issue—how did Kreskol slip through the cracks?”

  “It’s insane because it’s not true,” Berel replied. “Either something happened or it didn’t. Either Kreskol is a real place or it isn’t. I assure you, Kreskol is real.”

  “And how do we know you’re not in on this hoax, Mr. Rosen?” the reporter asked.

  He would be the only such journalist to offer so direct a challenge, but that insinuation was lurking in the shadow of each pointed question.

  The reporters, at least, would ask their questions and go on thei
r way. A few of the politicians got it into their heads that this scandal was a monstrous case of duplicity and they made impassioned pleas in the Sejm to “get to the bottom of the fraud of Kreskol.”

  Indeed, an auditor and a panel of three government experts were chosen to come to our archive and reexamine all our records. When their report was deemed inconclusive (“Everything that’s in the records supports the history of Kreskol as the Kreskolites have told it,” the report said, “which can mean that this narrative is correct—or the hoax has yet to reveal any flaws”), a geologist was sent to Kreskol to examine the soil and the buildings in an attempt to find any chemicals or materials that could have been used after World War II.

  “Aside from the houses that were recently built, the Poczta, and the hotels, there looks to be no discordant xenobiotic chemicals—such as solvents, pesticides, lead, heavy metal, or hydrocarbons—in the village or the surrounding areas,” the report stated. “This would support Kreskol’s claim as to its limited interaction with other towns and villages.”

  But a member of the Sejm got another scientist (who had never been to Kreskol) to say that the evidence could have been tampered with, which was enough to keep the seeds of doubt alive.

  Even the tourists—who had been so kind and generous—turned against us.

  What had been several hundred tourists per day was suddenly cut in half. And the tourists who did come usually had some wiseguy in their ranks, eager to trip us up. He would toss a phrase in English or Russian at us, expecting our masks to slip. Or he would interrupt the tour guides as they expounded on the history of Kreskol’s synagogue, calling it all a lot of baloney. And in many cases this troublemaker would convince his fellow tourists not to buy anything in any of Kreskol’s shops as it was obviously fake and what was the point in buying leather gloves or a wool coat from a fake town?