Brothers and sisters, let us march together.
A plague on Tsar Nicholas and his mother.
Hey, hey, down with the police.
Down with the Russian oppressor.
I used to taunt my grandfather with this revolutionary Russian jingle which class-conscious dressmakers, seamstresses, embroiderers, carpenters, lathe turners, tanners, and apprentice butchers would sing under their breath. This was my childish rebellion against his fear of incurring the wrath of the authorities. “Go rub your nose in a fart!” Grandfather would exclaim, breaking out the obscenity he reserved for times when he was truly angry. “We’ll all be sent to Siberia because of this rascal!” I paid him no heed and recruited my little brother, who was two years younger and barely able to pronounce the words “Russian oppressor,” to the class struggle.
I was five or six at the time. My friends were snot-nosed kids with hanging shirttails and narrow-brimmed Jewish caps. The ground, as I recall, shook underfoot, as we tottered about, playing “Knock down the King.” We must have looked like a yardful of penguins.
I don’t mean to brag about my revolutionary credentials, but even then I knew that the huge fortress-prison that loomed over the city was not reserved for thieves alone. The ferocious-looking soldiers, rifles at the ready, patrolled it day and night. It was visible from all points below, from every Jewish street, stretching as far as the main synagogue. Jews going to pray had to make their way under fearful government scrutiny, in full sight of the weapons flashing on the hill above.
At the foot of the prison stood the Krasutski factory, where coughing cigarette and cigar makers, stooped and exhausted, toiled. Between factory and prison, particularly the section that housed the political prisoners, there was a living bridge—the Krasutskis’ gentle daughter, who was lame. She wore glasses, and her earnest face could have been taken for either Jewish or Gentile. At dawn she would step out on her balcony and fearlessly chat with the prisoners who appeared, from the neck up, at the little barred windows of the prison.
My concept of revolution was garnered from the heroic tales Grandfather would tell me about a certain Berek Joselewicz, who defied the Russians, about the Jewish tavernkeepers who hid Polish aristocrats from the Russian authorities, and even the joke about those same aristocrats, who would crawl out from behind the oven after the Russians had departed, twirl their mustaches, and shout at their protectors, “Jews, off with your hats!” Grandfather, who was nothing but a realist, would also tell me that when the Cossacks would catch a revolutionary, they would cut off his most important member and hand it to him with a bow: “Kuritye pozhalusta—here, have a smoke.” He also had a pack of tales about stubborn guerrilla battles in thick Polish woods, about gallows, lances, daggers, and Cossack whips.
Then came the first steps of actual revolution. Late at night, long after midnight, not in the well-to-do suburb outside the city but right on the crooked, timorous Jewish streets, there was a sudden eruption of singing. The flimsy houses, held together by spit, trembled awake but stayed silent, not taking sides. We understood what was going on, but were afraid even to look out the windows and kept our heads buried under our featherbeds. The revolutionaries were trying to gain control of the city by force, one street at a time, hoping to get the job done before the arrival of the troops. Meanwhile, members of the Polish Socialist Party were pouring into the streets, from the Hess foundry which manufactured heavy scales, from the brickyards and the sugar refineries, carrying torches, waving flags, and singing:
Workers to the barricades.
Raise aloft the red flag.
At first they marched slowly, then the pace quickened. The torches flashed by the windows, followed by an ominous silence that seemed like a cry for help. Suddenly, there was the sound of angry hoofbeats, as the fiery Cossack horses came galloping in. Enraged at having missed their chance, the Cossacks relieved their fury by firing into the air a shot that pierced the Jewish night like a red-hot nail.
Another time, on the fast day of Tisha B’Av, when everyone was at the synagogue mourning the destruction of the Holy Temples in ancient Jerusalem, the comrades decided to show off their revolutionary fervor by marching upon the synagogue courtyard, waving their flags. Soon the Cossacks rode up, lashing away with their whips. The synagogue doors were hastily locked. For several hours thereafter, we could hear the Cossacks sniffing around like angry dogs. They didn’t dare enter the synagogue, while we were afraid to leave. Long after we had finished reciting the various laments, we remained huddled in the synagogue through the night.
What a Tisha B’Av that was! We actually relived the ancient destruction. The lights in the synagogue flickered. The cantor remained sitting on the steps leading up to the ark. I half-dozed on a hard, overturned lectern, rummaging in the straw on the floor with my stocking feet, delighting in the fleas that tickled the soles of my feet in their frenzied attempts to reach a child’s warm flesh.
In the center of the synagogue, the fearful shadow of a hanging lamp swayed back and forth, like a body dangling from a rope. In my mind I kept hearing stray echoes of the plaintive lament for Zion and her devastated cities that the cantor had just led the congregation in chanting. I was desperately hungry, and thought about the starvation we had heard described in the Book of Lamentations, that drove the parents of besieged Jerusalem to eat their own children. Like our ancient forebears, we too were under siege. Titus and his legions were on the prowl, about to pounce and devour me. I looked in terror at my father, who was nodding off, stroking me with a sleepy hand.
I can’t remember exactly which pogrom it was—Kishinev, Bialystok, or some other bloodbath. Father had come home with a newspaper and was weeping so uncontrollably that everyone in the house joined in, my mother, my brother, and even the maid, who was mute—everyone, that is, except me, whose heart gets hard as flint when it comes to shedding a tear. I looked at the black-bordered photos with their caption, “Martyrs,” and thought of the Ten Martyred Sages, the rabbis of old who were tortured to death by the Romans and whose sorrowful fate we recall on Yom Kippur, recounting how the Romans tore the flesh from their bodies with iron combs. The newspaper pictures showed a dead synagogue sexton holding a Torah scroll, dead, glassy-eyed children, and shredded sacred books. My swirling thoughts had already formed an idea of what a Jewish revolution should be—on the one side, Tsar Nicholas and his pogroms, and on the other, the young people in their blue, black, or red peasant shirts, with their sashes and tassels. These Shirts would some day topple the Tsar from his throne.
I conjured up an image of Tsar Nicholas sitting atop a high throne, like Pharaoh in Egypt, every word out of his mouth a decree against the Jews. Like Ahasuerus in the Book of Esther, he holds a gold scepter in one hand and a wand in the other, and instead of going to wash in the baths, bathes in Jewish blood. As he is about to issue his next evil decree, in rush the two whirlwinds, Yankl, the redheaded carpenter, and Yosl, the pockmarked locksmith. First, they pay their respects to the monarch and rattle off all his imperial titles, then, without ceremony, they say: “Get the hell out of here, my lord king, you’ve ruled long enough.” They toss him off the throne, fire a few bullets into him, spit three times, and shout: “Take that, for the Jewish blood you’ve spilled!” They grab a pole, press a spring, and out pops the red flag. At once, they’re off to Russia, where they march up and down, singing:
Hey, hey, down with the police,
Down with the Russian oppressor.
And yet, when the Shirts once took over the synagogue and stood there “slandering God,” as my Hebrew-school teacher later explained, my heart was heavy. To oppose Tsar Nicholas was one thing, but to oppose the Jewish God? What sins had He committed? Those were His scrolls of the Torah being stomped on and ripped to shreds, His Jews being massacred. What claim could you have against the God who went into exile with His people and never enjoyed a worry-free moment, except, perhaps, on the festival of Simhat Torah that celebrated His Law?
This Je
wish God of mine looked exactly like Rabbi Avremele Eiger, the Hasidic master of Lublin, a gaunt, soft-spoken man with a long, white beard, dressed in white stockings and slippers, who didn’t know what money looked like, who accepted no fees, who fasted every Monday and Thursday, and got by on next to nothing all year long, whose cracked voice was always lamenting Jewish disasters. This was the Jewish God of my tormented, childish imagination. What could one have against such a God, who was ready at any moment to hasten the Redemption, but whose hands were too short and weak to bring on the Messiah?
It was on a Purim night, when Jews were in the synagogue observing their ancestors’ deliverance from the evil Haman, that the Shirts invaded the premises, seized control, and bolted the door. Their leader, a youth with long black hair, mounted the rostrum and launched into his harangue: “Comrades and citizens, today is Purim. They want you to believe that on this day a miracle occurred, that God—in a pig’s eye!—saved the Jews from a pogrom … ”
“Get down from the pulpit, you infidel, you sinner, the devil take you. Get down!” The voice resounding throughout the synagogue was that of Moyshele Glisker, a Kohen, scion of the priestly line of Jews, a man with a hot temper and a forehead that turned red as a rooster’s comb when he was angered. “Get down from there,” he shouted, ignoring the threats of the Shirts, that they would knock him dead, that they would put a bullet in him—and to prove their point, they even aimed a gun at him. But he kept on shouting, as if in a burning blaze, “Down from there.”
I plead guilty that in this particular struggle, between the blasphemer against God and Moyshele Glisker, the unalterable opponent of revolution—and by “revolution” I meant against Tsar Nicholas for shedding Jewish blood—I sided with Moyshele. To me he was a hero, like Mattathias, father of the Maccabees, wielding a sword and shouting, “Who is for God, unto me!” I myself became a little Maccabee, and together we fought the Lord’s battle on His behalf, since He Himself had grown weak and tearful, too compassionate, a shadow wrapped in a prayer shawl, spending His days weeping.
To this day I cannot abide defiance against God. No matter how often I repeat the Marxist gospel, that religion is the opiate of the masses, it doesn’t help in the least. Whenever I see someone insulting the sheer, innate goodness that lies behind that mysterious misery we call life, I feel deeply offended by their confusion of the kernel with the husk. I know that my children will never be bothered by such concerns, having encountered neither Avremele Eiger nor his noble, gentle colleague, Rabbi Hillel Lifschitz, and thus denied the privilege of hearing the good Rabbi Lifschitz’s sigh-laden discourses on Rosh Hashanah prior to the blowing of the shofar, or his cracking voice calling out the sequence of staccato blasts to the shofar blower, my uncle Khiel-Osher, who executed the broken Shvorim sounds with a poignancy beyond compare.
Nonetheless, following the Purim incident, I began to sense the presence of a new force in town. Until now Jewish power had resided in the underworld, the toughs who were handy with a knife—Avreml the Torpedo, Mordkhele the Bastard, with his patent-leather boots, and other such gruff specimens. What they said they meant, what they threatened they carried out. When they beat a whore almost to death and she pleaded with passersby, “Jews, children of mercy, save me!” the merciful children hurried past, pretending it was not they who were being entreated, afraid they might be beaten up, too—you didn’t want to mess with those guys. But with the advent of the Shirts, the underworld lay low. I once saw some members of the Jewish Socialist Bund beating up a thief who had stolen a couple of rubles from a servant girl. “Give back the money!” They pummeled the miscreant until his blood streamed like red soup and he returned every last groschen, as the poor girl, her hands like frozen apples, cried, “Enough!”
This was a new form of power, exercised in the service of an ideal, though I became confused again when this new power pumped a few bullets into Elye Taub because he refused to give his employees a raise. Young and old wept at his funeral. Elye Taub had been a tailor and himself not a rich man. When I saw his black casket being carried through the streets of the Jewish quarter, it occurred to me that his transgression against his workers paled in comparison to his punishment. His wife tore her hair, his children wept, and the schoolboys following the coffin chanted the traditional verse from Psalms, “May righteousness go before him.” I weighed his sin and his punishment on my child’s scale of justice, and somehow the two didn’t balance.
Elye Taub’s death sent a shock throughout the community. For the first time, it began to feel as if the vaunted Jewish unity, as expressed in the precept “All Israel are brethren” and voiced so keenly in the New Year prayers for the collective well-being, no longer extended through the rest of the year. There were now two camps, workers and bosses. The first salvo had been fired in our town’s class warfare.
The workers sang their songs with growing pride and joy, and whenever eight or nine gathered, a tenth would invariably spring up from somewhere to preach to them, always beginning with, “Comrades and citizens.” Elderly Jews, passing such gatherings, would mutter disapprovingly under their breath, “If things don’t get better, they’ll surely get worse.”
Thus it was no great surprise to me when one day the new powers brought Shimen Berger over to our house. Reb Shimen, my father’s employer, was the owner of a large clothing store. He sported a broad, flaxen beard and lived in a beautiful home in the best part of town. Father would call on him on holidays to pay his respects, but it took the new powers to bring him down from his lofty perch to our lowly dwelling in the shadow of the jail, on an ordinary weekday.
Several young men whom I didn’t know were seated around our big table under the lamp. Their stern faces showed that they meant business. At the head of the table sat not Shimen Berger, as might be expected, mopping his brow, but my father, who had been assigned the heavy task of arbitrator. The new powers respected his decency and fairness, even if his class-consciousness was not yet fully developed.
Reb Shimen, it turned out, had slapped a clerk in the face, and the powers were demanding justice. The aggrieved party, who was among those present at the table, a youth with the piping voice of a choirboy, kept jumping up from his seat to shout into his boss’s face. Reb Shimen wiped the sweat from his forehead and tried to answer, but my father cut him short, saying, “Keep still, Reb Shimen. Have you forgotten Elye Taub?” That was enough to quiet him down for a while, until the young clerk again began leaping up like a bantam rooster and Father once more had to invoke the ghost of Elye Taub. As a sign of how peaceful class warfare could be, a revolver lay on the table, the weapon’s blue steel reflecting the flickers of the overhead lamp.
My father handed down his ruling: Shimen Berger must pay such and such a sum to the workers’ party, in compensation for damages. The young clerk was to be given a pay raise of half a ruble a week, plus cloth for a new suit of clothes. Furthermore, Reb Shimen was to promise henceforth to keep his hands to himself, because, as the young clerk had observed, “These days, you don’t go around smacking people!”
Reb Shimen accepted the judgment. The workers were satisfied and left. Reb Shimen remained sitting across from my father, a murderous look in his eye. After a moment, he rose and began pounding his head with his fists. “Itskhok,” he shouted at Father, “I’ll kill myself, I’ll hang myself. If you can no longer beat your own worker, then the world’s come to an end. If I can’t have the pleasure of slapping such a little snot-nose on both cheeks to show him who’s boss, then who needs this lousy life?”
Yes, long before Tsar Nicholas, Shimen Berger felt the heavy hand of revolution coming down on him, and submitted, never raising his head again. He went about stooped, gloomy as doom, giving the revolution its first sweet victory.
Days of unrest followed. The comrades, flush with success, next began a campaign against an offending janitor, no ordinary caretaker but a Cerberus of his courtyard, zealous in his eagerness to serve the tsar. He looked down on his broom and pail a
s merely incidental to his higher calling of informer, keeping a sharp eye out on the comings and goings in his building, constantly on the lookout for suspicious, illegal behavior. His own children went about in rags, begging for crusts from the Jewish children. In reverse of the usual pattern, in his case it was the wife who was a drunk, often to be found sprawled next to the garbage bin, cursing out her husband and children. The janitor himself was always sober. He suspected that schemers were plotting revolution right under his nose and he took his spying duties with the utmost seriousness. But early one morning, the career of this most loyal of the tsar’s local servitors was brought to an end.
After this promising beginning, more janitors, an occasional policeman, and even an assistant to the mayor met their fates. I remember once hearing on our street several dull claps, like the hasty raps of a stick against a shutter. A policeman, who had just bought a bag of flour, fell several feet from where I stood. The contents spilled across his face and soon dried clots of blood began to appear in the white, chalky mass, looking like chunks of raw liver and lung. The policeman lay there for a long time in his lifeless, polished boots, and Jews felt as if he had been thrown there as faked evidence in a blood libel, until the law arrived from its station on the other side of the clock tower, wrote up an official report, and took him away.
Then there was the affair of Abele Tsimring. No Jew in town sported a longer beard—it was a triumph of facial adornment. He always walked slowly, as if out for a stroll, his hands folded behind him, resting on his posterior, his large, black eyes peering out from under bushy, black eyebrows. He was already as gray as a dove, but his eyebrows refused to follow suit. As he looked around, from time to time he would remove his right hand from its resting place to give his gray beard a good stroking. His gaze was a form of inspection. As he continued on his way, he would call over to the first youngster whose eye caught his, saying: “Sonny, no one ever got anywhere by staring. Have you prayed today? Here’s a groschen, go buy yourself some candy.” No boy ever took up his offer. Abele’s benevolence sent a chill down the spine.
The Glatstein Chronicles Page 9