The Lost Shtetl

by Max Gross

  “Think of the poor man,” she said. “Think about what we know of her character now, versus his. Think of what he must have endured during their marriage.”

  Many agreed with her. They allowed themselves to blame Pesha for all sorts of misdeeds she could not possibly have committed—and freed Ishmael of crimes in which his guilt was never in question.

  Whatever bouts of fury Ishmael displayed had to have come from somewhere—she had probably driven him to it.

  “If I were married to a prostitute I would probably be cranky, too,” Inna Solomon remarked. And a handful questioned the very premise that Ishmael exhibited any signs of wrath in the first place.

  “How many people were really there to witness that incident?” asked Feiga about the public display that had occurred just before Pesha ran off. “I wasn’t there. And if I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I can’t say for sure that it happened.”

  Even among the witnesses to the incident, some of the weaker minds began questioning what they had seen.

  And while most were certain that Ishmael had died in the forest, there was a surge of speculation that he possibly survived. After all, nobody knew Pesha was alive until a few weeks ago. “How could a simp like Yankel Lewinkopf and a girl like Pesha Rosenthal have made it, and not a strong fellow like Ishmael?” Inna asked. “He must have reached Warsaw or Krakow.”

  The forest was less forbidding than once believed. He could very well still be living there, at this very moment, even though we would never see him again. “He probably doesn’t want to have anything more to do with us,” Inna continued. “Poor fellow. He’s hiding for something he didn’t do.”

  And some saw a larger problem in Pesha; she presaged the greater, fundamental change that had taken place in Kreskol. The shift from morality to immorality.

  Many more people began showing up at Katznelson’s shul. And even though the official posture from Rabbi Katznelson was that anybody who used modern currency was a Sokolowite, and Sokolowites were no different than apikorsim, these new arrivals received a warm reception. It was as if they were ba’al teshuva* returning to the fold. After Rabbi Katznelson’s service ended on Saturday morning, the newbies approached their old friends they hadn’t spoken to in ages.

  “Looks like Katznelson was righter than Sokolow about a thing or two,” said Leibish Applebaum.

  The Katznelsoners were dizzy with excitement. Yes, they said, Katznelson was right.

  Right to be concerned about spiritual decline, as evidenced by Pesha.

  Right about the currency, too. Nobody knew how to haggle or bargain with these crazy, inflated prices. And the fact that the tourists had abandoned us—well, what had been the point of the whole exercise? What had we endured the heartburn and anxiety for?

  And right about the interlopers who moved to Kreskol. True, Katznelson’s break came before the gentiles set up shop and began living among us, but the gentiles were another sign of encroachment that was accepted by the Sokolowites, and despised by the Katznelsoners. Now it appeared that the Katznelsoners had the better part of the argument. The transplants served as a permanent reminder that we were chained to all these things that we never wanted. It was outrageous that they treated Kreskol—which we had lived in, loved, and cared for for generations—as their home. Like they were entitled to what we rightly earned.

  What made it all the more galling was the fact that they were so transparent about their mercenary motives. They were there for a quick buck—they had no interest in the town beyond that.

  Nobody cared much when we were rich, but now that we were poor it felt unbearable. These mamzers wouldn’t even lower prices or offer trade in lieu of cash—even though we were in the middle of a financial crisis. And, perhaps, this was where Feiga Lutnick’s call came from.

  One fall morning, Cyril Mierzejak arrived home from a Saturday-night jaunt to the city to find that someone had broken into his store and looted it. The appliances that had not been carted off were trashed. Springs, knobs, screws, coils, nails, glass, metal, and plastic were sprinkled liberally on the floor.

  Aside from the store, the villains had gone into the back room that had served as Mierzejak’s residence and taken a knife to his bed and pillows, smashed the framed photographs on his wall, and, most revoltingly, left something foul on the floor that I’ll leave to the imaginations of my readers to figure out.

  A livid Mierzejak summoned the police and a squad car was dispatched from Smolskie. The investigating officers dutifully scratched out notes and inspected the scene of the crime, but Mierzejak felt they were simply going through the motions and he could feel his indignation rising.

  “Those assholes,” Mierzejak scowled to Szymon Wozniak after the cops had gotten into their car and driven home. “Those fucking assholes. They’re too lazy to come back out here and investigate it right.”

  “Amen to that.”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Mierzejak said.

  Wozniak considered this.

  “You’re insured, right?”

  “Yeah,” Mierzejak said. “But, I have to wonder, is it really worth sticking around this dump?”

  Financially, the gentiles had been among the groups most affected by Kreskol’s diminished reputation. While some of the gentile transplants quietly thought that the question of Kreskol’s authenticity was worth examining (and confirmed some of their worst opinions about their neighbors), it didn’t change the fact that it was decidedly bad for business. After the tourists stopped coming, their normal customers didn’t have money to spend. They were offering ludicrous exchanges: a dozen eggs and a quart of milk for coffee filters and a toothbrush.

  The only reason people like Mierzejak and the Wozniaks had settled in Kreskol in the first place was that these Jews suddenly had money to spend, and didn’t know diddly-squat about what anything was worth. Kreskol was easy money. But it was a decidedly unpleasant place to live. The town pub was filled with smelly bearded Jews who didn’t speak a lick of Polish. Internet reception was appalling. One had to drive forty minutes through the backwoods to get to a decent restaurant. And if an unmarried man wanted to get laid, he wasn’t about to do so in the village he now called home. (Mierzejak hadn’t been curious enough to explore Thieves’ Lane and its debauched offerings.)

  “I might just take the insurance and leave,” Mierzejak said. “If business has dried up, why should anyone stay in Kreskol?”

  Mierzejak was not the only one thinking this. Other gentiles had the same idea. The fact that Mierzejak would be getting a significant check from his insurance company made his fellow gentiles wonder if he wasn’t, actually, very fortunate to be the victim of wanton vandalism. More fortunate than themselves. (Some wondered if he wasn’t fortunate at all—if there had been something shaping his luck. And a lot of them started making calls to their carriers and asking what their coverage was like for theft, vandalism, and arson.)

  A few days later, as one of the public buses drove through the town, an errant rock came careering through the driver’s windshield.

  The driver lost control of the bus and skidded along Market Square, crashing into a stall. A young woman named Glika Bamberger was run over.

  What followed was chaos. Throngs of onlookers came to the scene to help and investigate. When the bus driver saw the anger in the faces of the crowd he fled. He turned up a day later hitchhiking along the road to Szyszki.

  Tears and howls went up in the air and an ambulance helicopter was eventually summoned, but it couldn’t save poor Glika, who died on impact.

  The next day, when the public bus came through town on its normal route, a mob was there to meet it. More rocks came through the driver’s window, along with soiled cloth diapers and garbage. Fists came pounding on the door and the widows. The driver didn’t wait around for yet another disaster, so he turned around and sped back to Szyszki.

  Later that evening, the bus company suspended service to and from Kreskol for the foreseeable future.
/>   21

  Misdirection

  Yankel Lewinkopf held his breath.

  Sitting on a bus, more than a week after his public testimony before the Sejm, he saw Pesha’s face. It wasn’t her actual animated face—rather, it was a photograph. A chunky, blond woman seated next to him had the most recent edition of Fakt in her hands and had stopped on a spread about the Jewish seductress of Kreskol. Pesha was captured gazing absently at the camera as she entered a sandstone house in Lodz.

  Yankel hadn’t heard the TV report a few nights ago. Until that moment, the whereabouts of his beloved was a mystery whose trail had long gone cold.

  After Kasia taunted him that Pesha would be sent away, Yankel didn’t see any purpose in staying in Warsaw. He didn’t know where Pesha would be exiled to, but it wouldn’t be there. Besides, he had grown to despise the city. Everything reminded him of Pesha. So after he was released from the hospital he used the last of his savings to purchase a bus ticket to Krakow, and began wandering from shop to shop in the tourist section of the city, asking if anyone was in need of a good baker.

  Yankel’s inherent cheerfulness—which unsettled many people on the streets of Smolskie the previous year—faded as his Polish became refined. He no longer inspired quite the same cautiousness, even if there might have been other reasons to distrust him. (A careful observer would note that some of his teeth had been knocked out, and that he walked with a limp. The doctors had given him a cane, but he decided it was better not to use it when asking for a job.)

  On the fifth bakery he tried the owner asked him: “Where have you worked before?”

  “Warsaw.”

  After Yankel told him the name of the bakery and correctly answered a few more questions—average punching time for a sourdough and amount of yeast typically used in babka—the owner decided to try him out.

  Yankel rose at dawn, worked until 3 p.m., and slept in the Jewish cemetery in Kazimierz for the first week. He furtively washed himself in the bathroom at the bakery and hid the sleeping bag he’d acquired before leaving Warsaw behind the oven. “Yes,” the owner said, “you’ll do.” The day he received his first paycheck he moved into a spare room in an apartment occupied by two other young men.

  Yankel worked with an older baker—a Turk named Orhan whose Polish was worse than his—and after he felt he was more or less settled, he began nosing around Krakow’s brothels, asking if they had a Pesha or a Teresa working there.

  Most of the pimps and madams found him suspicious. No, they told him, they didn’t know anyone with that name. But eventually one of the madams produced a woman named Teresa.

  Yankel shook his head.

  “No, this is not who I mean.”

  The madam didn’t mask her annoyance.

  “What do you think this is, Facebook?” she asked. “You came by to look someone up? Well, sonny, you’re not going to waste my time or my girl’s time. Whether she’s the right Teresa or not, you owe us fifty zlotys for a peek. If you want to take her in the back room it’ll cost you another two hundred.”

  Yankel gave the madam fifty zlotys—a somewhat modest sum, but one he could scarcely afford to spare—without arguing. But it occurred to him that he was going about this all wrong. If Kasia had taken precautions against him, walking into a cathouse and simply asking for “Teresa” or “Pesha” was surely a doomed effort.

  “You should hire detective,” suggested Orhan, to whom Yankel confided a heavily edited selection of his troubles. “Private detective. He figure out where she is.”

  It was worth a shot. Yankel went for a consultation with the first name Orhan found for him on Google.

  “I charge one hundred fifty zlotys an hour plus expenses,” the private eye, who operated in an office on the southern bank of the Vistula River, said after Yankel had laid out his case. “For an investigation like this, I think it would be a minimum of forty hours.”

  Yankel didn’t have anything close to 6,000 zlotys. It would take him a year to save up such a wild sum. And the private eye was careful to remind him that the forty-hour number was a probable minimum. It could be a lot longer and more expensive.

  “I don’t have that kind of money.”

  The private eye nodded sympathetically.

  “Best of luck to you.”

  Yankel’s disappointment was unmistakable and, for a moment, the investigator felt bad for him.

  “Do you have any advice?” Yankel asked.

  If he wasn’t going to entice Yankel to become a paying customer, the private eye decided there was no harm in giving away a few scraps of trade know-how.

  “Some of these escort services have websites,” he said. “Look through them for a photo of your sweetheart.”

  Yankel seemed perplexed.

  The investigator smiled. It was obvious that this weird fellow was socially warped and technologically maladroit; when Yankel had filled out the agency application he had left the space for a telephone number and email address blank. When the detective pointed this out, Yankel innocently replied that he possessed neither.

  “Look, pal,” the private eye said, “if you really want to search, your first purchase has to be a smartphone. Trust me, it will help you in every other area of your life, too.”

  Yankel took the advice to heart, and saved up for months. On the day of the purchase he consumed the entire afternoon of the sales clerk, asking question after tedious question on how to work the device. When he got home, he spent weeks scrolling through the pages of Krakow’s escort services, looking for any photo that resembled Pesha. He never found anything close.

  So he kept returning to the phone store with new queries. He asked how to use the phone to find a criminal complaint; how to use the phone to find out if there was some kind of bureau of missing persons; how to use the phone to find out if there was a sex workers’ guild and who was a member; how to use the phone to find venereal disease clinics where—god forbid—Pesha might have been treated. (All of which were dead ends.)

  The staff at the phone store rapidly grew sick of Yankel and his endless stream of inquiries that were grossly fixated on sex and prostitution. It was as if he had no sense and no shame. Only his affect of dumbness kept him from being banned outright from the store.

  “Mr. Lewinkopf,” a salesgirl named Alicja finally said after Yankel’s tenth visit in two weeks, “if I gave you a lesson on how to use your phone—I mean, a real lesson, took all day to go over it with you—would you promise to stop coming in here?”

  “All right,” Yankel said, “unless it’s an emergency.”

  That was probably the best Alicja could expect, so she pawned her customers off on the other clerks and carefully explained to Yankel how to properly google; how to use the app store; how to text and save phone numbers; and so on.

  Google, she explained, is the great Delphic oracle of our times. “You ask Google a question and it spits out an answer. Every question you ever pose should go through Google first.”

  Over the course of the afternoon it dawned on Alicja that most of Yankel’s requests seemed to focus on finding a long-lost person from his past, whom he believed had become a sex worker.

  “Have you tried Facebook?” Alicja asked.

  Yankel had heard of it, but didn’t understand what it was.

  The two of them spent the next hour creating an account for Yankel—and for a giddy second Yankel thought he had struck gold.

  “Yes—there’s a Pesha Rosenthal on Facebook,” Alicja said.

  However, the user in question lived in Tel Aviv and was a good two decades older than the Pesha Rosenthal he was looking for.

  I suppose the daylong lesson served a purpose in that Yankel became more or less conversant in how to use his phone, and he abided by his promise not to return to the store. (Opting, instead, to try a different store one neighborhood over when he needed help.) But it was largely a false lead. Pesha certainly wasn’t about to leave a trail of digital breadcrumbs for Yankel.

  After month
s of fruitless online searching, he took to wandering the streets, looking into the faces of the women he passed. And Yankel grew morose. He would think about Pesha until he dissolved into tears. He fantasized about a rescue. He likewise fantasized about a confrontation with Kasia and her goons. But in his more realistic moments, he recognized how unlikely it seemed. He would go to the nearest pub and quietly deaden his feelings with vodka. And unlike in the days when he first found out about Pesha and her dishonorable profession, he felt no desire to one-up her with another woman. Attractive young ladies would spot the handsome Yankel and catch his eye. He merely looked away.

  And then, as if hit by a bolt from the blue, there was Pesha. On the pages of Fakt. For a moment, Yankel thought he would faint. He brushed his hair back with trembling hands and felt the perspiration on his forehead.

  He didn’t dare ask the woman next to him if he could look at the paper. He simply got off at the next stop, went into a sundries shop, and purchased his own.

  He rushed back to his apartment, went into his bedroom, and opened the paper to Pesha’s story, which he read and reread with a strange mixture of giddiness and sorrow.

  Yes, Yankel resolved, he would go to Lodz immediately. He counted out his savings, told his roommates that he would be gone for a little while, and told his boss that he would need a few days off.

  Within two hours he was on a bus headed for Lodz. As he stared out the window he realized that he didn’t have the faintest idea what he would do when he arrived in the city.

  It occurred to Yankel that Fakt might not have been the only publication to report on Pesha and her rediscovery. He began googling and found a story that mentioned the neighborhood the house was in, even if the publication declined to provide the exact address.

  Yankel was a different man in other ways than the wayfarer who ambled through Smolskie more than three years earlier. He was more organized and he wasn’t as easily impressed with the new city. Certainly, he was eager to get to the industrial part of town and look for houses matching the one in the photograph. But once the sun set he realized how pointless it would be to wander the streets in the dark. He found a youth hostel for fifty zlotys a night that advertised free Wi-Fi. He bought himself two bubliks,* lay on the thin mattress, and spent the night searching Google Street View for possible avenues.