by Noah Gordon
Clearly it was time for those who could to depart. Mendel told Isaac to take the money and go; the rest of the family could follow later. Isaac had other ideas. He was young and strong, and his father had taught him the blacksmith’s trade. He and Itta would remain in Kishinev and continue to save rubles toward the day they could leave. Meanwhile, Mendel, Sonya, and Dora could go to the United States and save money to help bring Isaac, Itta, and their child to the New World. When Mendel objected, Isaac reminded him that Dora was of a marriageable age. Did her father want her to marry a poor Jew of Kishinev and face the kind of life that went with such a marriage? She was a beautiful girl. In America a shidduch, a match, could be made that would give her a wonderful future—and even help the whole family.
Mendel agreed with reluctance; the necessary applications were filled out laboriously and forwarded with the help of the Jewish tax collector, who accepted with protest the six rubles Mendel forced into his hands, but who made no move to return the money. They were to leave on May 30. Long before the precious passports arrived, to be placed behind the brick with the freedom money, Sonya, Itta, and Dora set to work making feather beds and goose-down pillows, sorting through the few pieces of personal property again and again, trying to decide what should be taken and what should be left behind.
Early in April the men began to run out of charcoal with which to stoke the forges. Mendel obtained his wood in the forest twenty kilometers away from Kishinev, hard chestnut logs which he bought cheap from peasants clearing the woods for farming. He hauled, sawed, split, and burned the charcoal himself. It was an unending chore. Although Jews were confined to the ghetto, the government recognized the importance of keeping animals in working condition, and blacksmiths were given permits allowing them to leave the town to purchase wood. Since Isaac was to be the new head of the business, he decided that he should buy the wood this time. When she heard, Itta pleaded that she be allowed to go along. They left the next morning, sitting happy and proud on the high seat of the flat bed wagon behind the two old horses.
It was a marvelous trip. Spring was in the air. Isaac allowed the horses to set their own slow pace, and the couple enjoyed the scenery as it slowly rolled by. When they arrived at the woodland which was being cleared it was already afternoon. The peasants were happy at the prospect of unexpected extra money to help ease the debts they had incurred at Easter. They allowed Isaac to walk through the woods and mark the trees that would best suit his purpose. He chose young wood that would be easiest for him to saw up when he took it back home. That evening he and Itta ate sumptuously from the kosher lunch Sonya had packed for them. The peasants were accustomed to this, and understood. That night they slept in a small hut near the fields, excited and happy with the novelty of being away from home together, her head on his shoulder and his hand on her swollen belly. In the morning Isaac worked in his shirtsleeves with the peasants, chopping down the trees and trimming the branches, then loading the trunks onto his wagon. When they were through, the sun stood high in the sky. Isaac paid the farmer eight rubles for the wood, thanked him with warmth and received equally sincere thanks, and then sprang to the high seat next to Itta, clucking to start the horses pulling the heavy load.
The sun was setting as they approached Kishinev. They had realized that something was wrong while they were still miles from the town. A pig farmer who was a longtime customer at the blacksmith shop came riding toward them on a mare that wore shoes which Mendel’s hammer had fashioned only the week before. When Isaac hailed him gaily the man’s face became pale. He kicked his heels savagely into his horse’s flanks and pounded away over the fields.
As they drew closer they saw the first fires, the smoke smudging skyward in long columns that swirled purple in the setting sun. In a little while they heard the wailing. They didn’t speak to one another, but Isaac could hear his wife’s ragged breath, loud and terrified, a half-sobbing sound, as the horses pulled the loaded wagon down streets which on both sides were long rows of still-burning buildings.
At the blacksmith shop only the brick forges remained whole, blackened now outside as well as within. The house was three-quarters gone, a charred, roofless shell. Near it waited Itta’s brother, Solomon Melnikov. He gave a shout of joy when he saw them alive and safe. And then, like a child, he put his head on Isaac’s shoulder and began to cry.
Isaac and Itta stayed with the Melnikovs during the funeral and the seven days of mourning. All of Kishinev sat shiva. Forty-seven Jews had been killed in the pogrom. Almost six hundred were injured. Two thousand families had been utterly ruined by the crazed mob that had swept through the town, raping and mutilating before they had slit throats and crushed skulls. Seven hundred houses had been destroyed. Six hundred stores were pillaged.
On the last night of the mourning week Isaac walked alone to the ruined blacksmith shop through the dark streets, noting burned shells of houses like missing teeth in a jaw. The loose brick at the base of the forge came out almost too easily, and for a dull moment he was sure the passports and the money would be gone. But they were there. He put them in his pockets, for some reason replacing the brick so that it neatly closed the hole at the bottom of the forge.
He gave his mother’s passport to the Melnikovs; he never knew whether anyone used it to leave Kishinev. They said good-by only to the Melnikovs and to his father’s cousins, who had also survived the terror.
The Melnikov family was wiped out by the influenza epidemic which swept Bessarabia in 1915. But, as Michael’s zaydeh used to say, that is another story, all of the facts of which are not known.
His grandfather related these events time and time again, until his mother, who always squirmed throughout the more horrible portions of the tale and whose patience was worn thin by the presence in her home of an old and cantankerous man, would snap, “We know. You told us already. Oy, to the children he tells such things!” This is why most of the stories he heard from his zaydeh were in the confines of Rivkind’s Grocery Store, a place full of the wonderful smells of garlic and farmer’s cheese and smoked fish and half-sour pickles. His grandfather smelled good, too, when Michael crawled into his lap. His beard gave off a fragrance that was a mixture of Castile soap and the strong Prince Albert pipe tobacco he smoked six days a week, and his breath always carried faint traces of sugared ginger and rye whiskey, to both of which he was addicted. He was that rarity, a Jew who was a dedicated drinker of alcohol. Liquor was a luxury to which he had succumbed in his loneliness and single affluence following the death of his wife. He allowed himself a shot every couple of hours from the bottle of Canadian V.O., procured from a friendly Prohibition-hating druggist, which he believed he kept a secret in a barrel of lima beans.
Michael had no need for stimulation from paper-and-ink heroes. He had a living stalwart who was a combination of Don Quixote, Tom Swift, Robinson Crusoe carving a new life out of a strange world. “Tell me the meiseh about the border, Zaydey,” he would beg, burrowing his face into the soft beard and closing his eyes.
“Who has time for such foolishness,” Isaac would grumble, but they both knew that he had more than enough time. The old rocking chair that he kept behind the grocery counter would start to move back and forth, creaking like a cricket, and Michael would settle his face even deeper into the beard.
“When I left Kishinev with my Itta, aleha hasholom, she should rest in peace, we traveled by train northward, around the mountains. We had no trouble getting into Poland. It was part of Russia then. They didn’t even check your passport.
“I was nervous about my passport. It was my father’s, he should rest in peace. I knew they wouldn’t bother Itta. She had my dead sister’s papers. But I was a young man carrying an old man’s passport.
“Our troubles began when we got to the border between Poland and Germany. It was a time of tsorris between the two countries. There always is trouble between Poland and Germany. But this time the tsorris was worse. When we got to the border the train was stopped and everyone had
to get out. We were told that only a certain number of persons were allowed to cross, and that the quota had just been filled.”
At this point the rocking of the chair would cease, a signal that Michael should ask a question in order to build up the suspense. So he spoke into the beard, feeling its hairs tickling his lips and surrounding his nose. Every once in a while the beard into which he leaned his face would become damp from his breathing, forcing him to choose a dry spot. “What did you do, Zaydey?”
“We were not alone. There were perhaps a hundred others in the same trouble. Poles, Germans, Russians, Jews. Some Rumanians and a few Bohemians. Some of them went outside the railroad station, looking for a place where they could run across the border. There were people from the little town who approached us and told us that for money they would show a safe way across. But I didn’t like their looks, they looked like criminals. And besides, your grandmother, aleha hasholom, had a big belly. Like a watermelon. She was pregnant with your father. I was afraid to try a long trip by foot. So all day long we waited by the border gate. The sun was hot, like a fire, and I worried that your grandmother would become sick. We had some bread and cheese and we ate it, but a little later we became hungry. And we were very thirsty. There was nothing to drink. All day we waited. When the sun went down we stayed because we didn’t know where else to go.”
“Who saved you, Zaydeh?”
“Also waiting near the gate were two beautiful Yiddisheh girls. Shayneh maydlach. And behind the border gate were two red-faced German soldiers. The maydlach went to the soldiers and whispered and laughed with them. And they opened the gate to let the girls in. And then all of us, Jews and Poles and Germans and Russians and Bohemians and Rumanians, your grandmother and her big belly and I—all of us together, like the cattle that you see running in the moving pictures—we shoved and pushed through the gate until we were across the border, and then we kept mixing, mixing with the crowds in the station until we were lost to the soldiers. And in a little while a train came and we got on and it took us away.”
Michael wriggled, because the best part was yet to come. “And why did the soldiers open the gate for the girls, Zaydey?”
“Because they promised the soldiers something.”
The taste buds in his mouth began to manufacture saliva. “What? What did they promise the soldiers?”
“Something sweet and warm they promised them. Something the soldiers wanted very much.”
“What was it, Zaydey?”
His grandfather’s belly and chest would begin to tremble. The first time he had told the story Michael had asked the same question, and searching desperately for a suitable answer to give a small boy, he had hit upon exactly the right one. “Candy. Just like this!”
In his pocket he always carried a wrinkled brown paper sack, and in the sack, inevitably, was candied ginger. The fiery root was sugar-coated. Until you sucked through the sugar it was sweet, but then it was so strong it made your eyes water. Michael loved it as much as his grandfather did, but whenever he ate too much of it he suffered on the following morning, his tush burning so badly when he went to the bathroom that he sat there and wept in silence, afraid to let his mother hear lest she forbid Zaydeh to give him any more ginger.
As he ate the ginger in the store he would beg for another story. “Tell me about what happened after the train, Zaydey.”
And Isaac would tell him how the train had taken them only as far as Mannheim, where again they had waited, sitting in the hot spring sun. The railroad yard was on the Rhine River. Isaac had struck up a conversation with a Dutch bargeman who with his stout, broad-shouldered wife was loading his barge with bags of coal. The bargeman had refused when Isaac had asked to buy passage for two down the river. Itta, sitting on a tree stump nearby, her skirts dragging in the gritty mud, had burst into tears. The riverman’s wife had looked at the Jewish girl’s swollen belly and pale face. She had spoken sharply to her husband, and although his eyes were annoyed he had motioned them aboard with a silent movement of his coal-blackened thumb.
It was a strange way to travel, for them, but they found it very good. Despite the coal cargo, the living quarters were very clean. The bargeman’s mood changed as soon as he saw that Isaac was willing to work as well as pay for his passage. The days were sunny, the river flowed green and clean. Isaac saw color come back into Itta’s cheeks.
In the morning he would stand alone on the dew-covered deck next to the bags of coal with his tallis wrapped around his shoulders and his phylacteries on his forehead and bared arm, softly chanting, while the quiet barge floated past great stone castles that turreted into the blue-white sky, past gingerbread houses in which Germans slept, past villages and cliffs and rolling pasturelands. On the fourth morning he finished intoning the prayers and looked up to see the Dutchman leaning against the rail, watching him. The man smiled respectfully and filled his pipe. After that Isaac felt at home on the barge.
The castles of the middle Rhine disappeared. When they reached Bingen Isaac worked like a deckhand, obeying the bargeman’s shouted commands as the boat hurtled through the rapids. Then the river turned into a sluggish stream, and for two days they drifted slowly. On the ninth day the Rhine turned westward into the Netherlands. Presently the river became the Waal. Two days later it carried them to the waterfront of Rotterdam. The boatman and his wife went with them to the wharf where the transatlantic steamers docked. The Dutch customs man looked closely at the young emigrant when he saw the age—fifty-three—listed on his passport. Then he shrugged and stamped it quickly. Itta wept when the Dutch couple walked away. “They were like Jews,” Michael’s zaydeh told him every time he related the story.
Unless a customer came into the grocery, Isaac would next tell Michael the story of his father’s birth on the high seas during a wild Atlantic storm, with waves “high like the Chrysler Building,” and of how the doctor on the ship had selected that night to get sodden drunk, so that his trembling grandfather pulled the baby from Itta’s body with his own hands.
A customer during one of the stories was a catastrophe, but if the shopper were Italian or Irish and they were close to the end, Isaac kept him waiting and finished the narrative. The Borough Park section of Brooklyn was predominantly Jewish, but there were whole blocks of Irish and whole blocks of Italians. Their Jewish block was set between two such Christian nests. There was a market run by a man named Brady in the Irish block and Alfano’s Grocery in the Italian block, and for the most part each ethnic group traded with its own supplier. Occasionally, however, one of the groceries was out of an item, forcing the customer to go to one of the other two, where he was waited on politely but without warmth by a proprietor who knew that the custom was temporary and born of emergency.
Michael’s grandfather had bought his Borough Park grocery after his Itta had died, when the boy was three years old. Before that Isaac had owned and operated another tiny grocery in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where he and his wife had settled upon coming to the United States. The block in which he had lived in Williamsburg was a cockroach-infested slum, but it was as Orthodox as any European ghetto, and probably for that reason he loved it and didn’t want to leave. But to Michael’s father the thought of his aging parent living alone and untended had been intolerable. At Abe Rivkind’s insistence Isaac sold the Williamsburg store and came to live in Brooklyn with his son’s family. He brought with him his prayer books, four bottles of whiskey, a feather bed made by Itta’s own hands, and the great brass bed that had been their first purchase in America, and in whose gleaming surfaces, he convinced his grandchildren, they might see their souls if they were free from sin.
Isaac could have retired at that time, since Abe Rivkind was making a fine living as a small manufacturer of ladies’ corsets and girdles. But he wanted to buy his own whiskey and his son and daughter-in-law gave in before his fierce eyes; he bought the small grocery around the corner from their Borough Park apartment.
For Dorothy Rivkind, the da
y her father-in-law moved into her home must have been an unhappy one. She was a plump, peroxide-blonde woman with placid eyes. In theory she kept a kosher home, serving neither pork nor scaleless creatures of the sea, but her conscience never kept her awake nights if by mistake, while cleaning up after dinner, she slipped a meat dish into a pile of dairy china in the cupboard. Isaac, on the other hand, was a man to whom the Law was the law. Beneath the counters of his store he kept a stack of dog-eared and annotated commentaries, and he observed the religious statutes just as he breathed, slept, saw, and heard. His daughter-in-law’s infractions at first filled him with horror and then with wrath. None of the family was spared. The neighbors grew accustomed to the sound of his voice, thundering in righteous and indignant Yiddish. On the day he moved in with the family, Michael and his sister Ruthie came to the dinner table, on which lay a roast of beef, carrying pieces of bread-and-butter which hunger had dictated that they make for themselves in the kitchen.
“Goyim!” their grandfather screamed. “To a fleishig table you bring butter?” He turned to their mother, who was growing pale. “What kind of children are you raising?”
“Ruth, take the bread-and-butter from Michael and throw it away,” Dorothy said quietly.
But Michael was a little boy, and he liked what he was eating. He struggled as his sister tried to remove the bread from his grasp, and a lump of butter fell upon his plate at the table. It was a meat plate, and their grandfather’s fresh bellows sent Ruth racing with him to his room. They fearfully hugged one another and listened in fascination to the magnificence of their grandfather’s rage.