Neifeld said that he was a lawyer—or rather, that he had been a lawyer. He had made quite enough money, he said, out of Jewish troubles, Jewish fears, and Jewish helplessness. He was retired now. Though only forty-three, he was well enough off to live quite well, he said. So he had given up his practice.
“Believe it or not, I was once an ardent Polish patriot. In fact there was a time when all the Jewish youth was patriotic. When Poland gained its independence, we became confident and held our heads high. The Polish soil of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers seemed doubly dear to us. But we soon saw our mistake. We began to be persecuted at every step, pushed and kicked around, hard enough to make us realize that Poland was not freed for us, that Polish independence did not include ours. Equality before the law turned out to be no more than a paper promise. But I scarcely have to tell you all this, the facts are well known. We are being impoverished here in body and spirit—and Polish Jewry has spirit. It is a burning bush.
“What makes it so bad is that our children have no future here. The conditions are such that they simply cannot get ahead, but the reason they are doomed is that love has died out among them. Our young people are becoming terribly unromantic and practical, it’s almost frightening. The dowry system is going to destroy Polish Jewry in the end. We are chained, fettered, bound, and tied. Since the young people have no future, material security comes before everything else. The young men set a price on themselves, sell themselves for so many złotys. And you can’t blame them: they have no choice. With a bit of money it is at least possible to get started in a business—never mind that most such businesses end up bankrupt. But to try to make a start without money condemns a man, and his wife and children as well, to starvation. As a result people are afraid to fall in love. No young man makes close friends with a girl unless he knows in advance what her dowry will amount to. To be sure, the very young ones still play the silly boy-and-girl game, but in just a few years they have learned to demand of love that it be profitable.
“That’s the situation. We are becoming stunted because there is no love among us. There is adultery and fornication, and the sacredness of the family is no longer absolute. Real love, love beyond price, which is the foundation of a healthy people, is dying among us. The institution of the dowry is an old one among the Jews, but we were not afraid of poverty in the past. Today we have been so terrorized by all sorts of persecution, and our economic life has been so undermined by every kind of official and unofficial discrimination, by boycotts both open and hidden, that our youth is haunted by the specter of poverty as never before. In the end, dowry or no dowry, they end up poor, but now without even having known the marvelous comfort and compensation of love.
“So what’s it all come to? To this: that many a poor girl embraces the Christian religion. Rather than become old maids, they throw themselves into the arms of a Gentile. Gentile young men enjoy greater material security, for they can always become government officials at least. Also, Gentiles don’t put so much emphasis on the dowry.
“The epidemic of conversions today is the more alarming because people are getting used to it, taking it for granted. Indifference on this score saps our vital strength. It isn’t generally realized that we are too poor and weak to afford the luxury of tolerating converts.”
Our driver turned around, smiling and yawning at the same time. “Didn’t I tell you that once you were riding with me, you couldn’t be sorry you were going to Kazimierz?” he said. “To the contrary, you’ll like it.” He yawned again.
“The problem of conversion is quite interesting,” Neifeld went on. “In the course of my practice I ran into many people who had changed their faith. They were ambitious to get ahead, to climb, to obtain posts as judges. Many embraced Christianity even after they had been appointed judges, merely because their friends urged them to do so, with an encouraging tap on the shoulder, ‘Why don’t you do it and get it over with?’ This is good-natured social pressure. Others were pushed to it by their wives. Women can be more ambitious than men, and they know that once you’ve been sprinkled with a bit of holy water, advancement is much easier. Such women become devout Catholics, having soberly calculated that they want their children to be integrated people, and integration, for them, is inseparable from the Church.
“There are converts who are very unhappy afterward, and they dream only of getting back to the fold. In some rare cases they move to a new town and give up their new religion. Poland is theoretically a free country, and you can go back to Judaism if you like. But this doesn’t happen very often. As a rule such converts put off returning to the fold until it is too late. And once you’ve given up the ghost, you get a funeral with all the Catholic trappings. At such funerals you will find a brother of the deceased who has not yet become a convert, an enlightened uncle, so enlightened, indeed, that he doesn’t care whether he is a Jew or not, and an aunt who has become a Catholic and married a Gentile. The priest may well have a Jewish nose for all that he sounds as though Latin were his mother tongue. Believe me, if the dead man only could, he’d get up and run! For although a convert may get used to living with Gentiles, the thought of having to lie next to dead Gentiles forever after terrifies him. It’s an alien world, and their cemeteries are alien too. My guess is that every convert comes to his senses when he realizes that he is stuck with the alien company of his fellow dead. But then it’s too late.
“I must warn you, however, to discount what I say on this matter of converts. I have a morbid prejudice against the whole tribe. In the exercise of my profession I occasionally had to deal with them, and after all you’ve got to be civilized, but God knows it was a strain for me. To me, a convert’s hand is always dirty. I’d keep telling myself that I mustn’t be unfair, that I must respect other people’s convictions, but it didn’t work. The whole business of passing over to another flock has always been hard for me to understand. Often I’d find myself investigating the circumstances of a given conversion, trying to discover why a man had made up his mind to change his faith, and whether it had been easy for him. I would go into the circumstances of childhood, the kind of parents and grandparents, trying to find out why people take such a step.
“Many so-called ‘progressives’ are motivated by love for their children. They are eager for their children to make their way in the world and don’t want them to suffer as Jews. So they sacrifice themselves for their children and cross over. Many fathers of this type keep up their Jewish contacts, eat in Jewish restaurants, and still buy kosher meat (for they couldn’t touch any other), but they do it secretly. What sustains them is the thought that they have provided for their children.
“I know a grandfather of that kind, whose Gentile grandsons and granddaughters love him dearly, but as soon as he opens his mouth and talks Polish with a Lithuanian Jewish accent, they beg him to stop. They love their grandfather as long as he keeps quiet and they can call him by the anti-Semitic pet names. No, the grandfather hasn’t become a Christian, but he is happy at the thought that his offspring will not have to bear the Jewish burden.
“Nowadays there are too many contacts between the renegades and the Jews. Much of this may be explained, on the part of the Jews, as awareness that converts could be dangerous if not watched, for after all, what is a convert if not a rotten Jew? Poland is a Catholic country, and the Jews fear that should they boycott the converts or show them hostility, they’d be charged with offenses against the state religion. This is why many people keep quiet. And in many Jewish restaurants you’d be sitting next to Jews eating real Jewish dishes—stuffed chicken necks, gefilte fish, cholent—and discussing Jewish problems, with all the usual sighs and jokes and puns, but these same Jews have Gentile wives and Gentile children at home. They themselves live entirely among Jews, all their business is with Jews, and all their friends are Jews. They haven’t even begun to enter the alien world.
“I once knew a convert who even flaunted his Yiddish. He let himself be baptized in order to marry a Gentil
e girl, but his wife left him a year after the marriage because she was an anti-Semite and her husband was still too Jewish for her. She had thought that baptism would change his appearance, his gestures, his habits. But when he went to church with his wife, he liked to hum tunes from the Jewish liturgy, as though he were bent on spiting himself.
“He was a failure, but after his conversion he got a minor government post. He worked among Gentiles, but his best friend was a Gentile who spoke Yiddish fluently. And what a Yiddish—rich, with the most genuine idioms and intonations. This Gentile was a drunkard, and the convert too took to drinking. They often sat in Jewish restaurants and sang ‘God and His judgment are just.’ The Gentile had inherited his Yiddish from his mother, who blessed the candles every Friday and was quite capable of reciting the Saturday evening prayer from memory. She would often beg her son’s friend, the converted Jew, to go back to his old faith lest he lose both this world and the next. When he was drunk, he often thought about this threat. ‘You know,’ he would say to his Gentile friend, ‘your mother is one hell of a clever woman. She says I’m neither fish nor fowl and she’s right.’ Recently he began to worry a great deal about the sufferings of the Jews. When the Jews are prosperous, he told me, you don’t mind being a convert, but when the Jews are in trouble, you feel rotten about having left them. He told his Gentile friend that the sufferings of the Jews would drive him to his grave. Well, a few weeks ago he jumped off a roof into the street and died instantly. He had come back to the flock those last few months at least.”
The sky had cleared. A peasant driving his cart in the opposite direction exchanged yawns with our driver. The road was not as smooth and level as he had promised. There were a good number of hills, and quite often I felt as if I had better put my hand over my heart so as not to have it jostled out of my body when the carriage bumped over holes in the road, stones, and deep puddles. But there were many good stretches. These were dirt roads. The fields on either side were monotonous and haphazard in their layout, but nonetheless a joy to look at. The pleasantest moments were when we drove down narrow, well-trodden lanes through woods fragrant with the vintage wine of fermented leaves.
“Take deep breaths,” Neifeld said. “Polish woods can cure the sickest heart.”
The morning was well advanced, but the woods were cool and quiet. One felt that in them the light and stillness were constant over the days and the years, as if the woods were some ancient dynasty intent upon preserving a traditional amount of light and stillness appropriate to them. Somewhere a bird was testing its voice.
Neifeld quietly ordered the driver to stop. “I want to hear this,” he said, “this is the real thing.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“What else but the world-famous nightingale! Ssh … ”
Crisply it gave us a few short trills, repeated as though the singer wanted to stress the theme, but soon it went on to elaborate on the theme in lengthy embellishments. I was struck by the utterly unsentimental quality of the song. How did so cerebral an artist ever come to be praised by sentimental poets? The song of this nightingale was a recitative with many rests; each phrase was longer and more complicated than the previous one, and after each phrase the singer stopped to catch its musical breath or, perhaps, to study the impression it had just made. While the nightingale was singing, the surrounding stillness seemed more intense; the hushed silence seemed to form a guard around the precious bit of song. The singing itself was part of the primeval light and stillness of the forest, it was as if the mossy stillness had begun to speak its own language, as if the bird were giving voice to the awesome silence of the forest. There was no trace of degrading sweetness in the nightingale’s song, no concession to debased popular taste. To the contrary, this was the perfection of musical expression. It was outrageous to think that this bird should have the reputation of a “sweet” singer when its musical language was so intellectual, so sophisticated.
The nightingale repeated two phrases, but on repetition the second had pointedly become a question. After this, the bird stopped abruptly, waiting for an answer. No answer came, and the singer fell silent.
“This is a late bird,” Neifeld said quietly. “Usually they sing until the middle of June, and mostly at night. We have had the privilege of hearing a rare exception.”
“It was a nice song of praise to the Creator of the world,” the driver said curtly. “Giddy up!” He maneuvered the reins, and the horse set off at a brisk trot as though filled with new strength.
“Maybe it was a song in your honor,” Neifeld said to me, smiling.
I said that in America we had no nightingales but other, far more sentimental birds. Neifeld was pleased that like him I had perceived the absence of sentimentality in the nightingale’s song.
“That rusty-brown bird is as far as you can get from the pathetic in music,” he observed. “Very often when I listen to it I have the feeling that its songs have been written on a special typewriter. Only the coloratura touches seem to come from a vibration of the wings. The short, abrupt notes suggest that it ponders each of them and chooses the melody very carefully. Only the trills have the charm of a genuine impromptu.”
The driver cracked his whip when we came out of the forest. Under the influence of the private concert we had just heard, he honored us with a cantorial selection, imitating all the voices in the choir, from the bass to the little boy with a piercing treble.
“Believe it or not,” he said turning his head around, “but years ago we had a cantor whose name was Slowik—Polish for nightingale. Well, the bird we’ve just heard was just good enough to shine that man Slowik’s shoes. I was just a little boy then, and the cantor is long since dead and buried, but I’ll never forget the way he sang his showpiece on Rosh Hashanah. That cantor had a throat that was like a flute. He came to us from Lithuania, and it all ended sadly—he was caught with a married woman, and he vanished, swallowed up without a trace. You never hear anyone like him today—unless you mistake today’s cantors with their priests’ voices for singers.”
He tried the Rosh Hashanah piece for himself, beating time with his whip, but he sang it quietly, as though hesitating to let strangers share his childhood memory. When he turned to us to say that in half an hour we’d be in Kazimierz, there were tears in his eyes, his own singing had moved him so.
Neifeld was silent. His sallow face was covered with a thin film of seriousness, a momentary cloud over a wistful smile. Whether because he had talked so much before, or because he was caught up in private thoughts, he did not utter a word. Perhaps he was solemnly preparing himself for the entry into Kazimierz.
Along the road we began to encounter Jews with visored caps, which looked like specially chosen Jewish crowns of thorns. Their whole pride and nobility seemed to lie in their finely combed beards. Impoverished kings must, unfortunately, try to make a living. They followed us with sad eyes, which probed our carriage deeply to discover who we might be and what might be expected from us. They walked at a leisurely gait—their whole manner seemed to say that neither their poverty nor their great opportunities would run away. The shepherds of the Bible must have walked like that when they went to the well to draw water for their camels.
“These are our spinners of gold, our international bankers,” Neifeld said when he noticed that I was looking at them. “Here are the Rothschilds of farm and dairy, coming to town to sell a cheese, perhaps, or maybe aiming still higher—perhaps two or three are pooling their resources to buy a calf in common. The Poles are after their wealth too. They are systematically driven from the villages, not by laws but by terrorist acts. Their ramshackle houses are set on fire, in the hope that they will go up in smoke. Agitators inflame the peasants against them, and sometimes these quiet Jews are set upon with sticks and stones. Where can they run to? Only to the bigger cities, where opportunity waits to welcome great capitalists like them. Even the territories for begging are already staked out—there is no room left for newcomers.
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p; “The fact is that a real war is being waged against us, a war of attrition,” Neifeld went on passionately. “There’s no escaping it: all the countries have imposed a siege and try to starve us out by all kinds of restrictions. Here in Poland records are kept, so they can tell just how many Jewish businesses have been taken over by Poles, just how many Jewish mouths have had the bread snatched out of them. Believe me, the Poles are much cleverer than Hitler. They don’t rant and rave, they just pass over our bodies with a steamroller and drive us right into the ground. A war of attrition is supposedly a slow process, but for all its slowness it nevertheless causes real suffering. Tens of thousands of Jews go through the agonies of starvation with their wives and children. Formerly you could escape by emigrating, and American relatives would send you the fare. Today our people are staring death in the eyes.
“Meanwhile the Jews of Poland have been given a bad name all over the world. What is needed is to sound the alarm, to explain to the world that Polish Jews have passion, have faith, have a treasure of faith beyond anything the world dreams. We are intelligent children, we still have a God in our hearts, and we have faith, a marvelous optimistic faith—not just a religious faith, but a faith that nourishes the soul and sustains it even in a starved, emaciated body. The Polish Jews have been slandered before the world, and we have become undesirable emigrants everywhere. The German Jews who preserved only an anemic Judaism are lucky. This is not the time to berate them. Of course they must be rescued now. But how can they be compared with the Polish Jews, whose warmth and spirituality uphold the divine image of Jewishness?”
The driver turned around as though to say something, but Neifeld waved to him vigorously to be silent. He probably feared that the driver would spoil or simplify his argument. He leaned forward and began to look around us.
The Glatstein Chronicles Page 42