by Peter Martin
to Aaron — or was it a favor you granted to yourself? Come now, little pious one, answer me.” But I could only moan.
He giggled again. “Isn’t God the protector of the truly pious?” He leaned down close to me until we were beard to beard. “Now if you won’t answer me, I’ll have to answer for you . . . right into your teeth, Yeersel. Aaron died thinking you wanted to help him, but you lent him the horse and wagon so you wouldn’t have it to lend to the Squire ... just simply because you didn’t like to dirty your piety on Holy Week, and perhaps anger God, and perhaps get crossed off the list of the pious-enough-to-live-in-heaven!” He tickled my beard with his fingers, laughing meanwhile. “Oh, little pious animal, little beaver, aren’t you ashamed? And God sees all, you know! And oh, oh, isn’t He angry with you!”
Still laughing, Mottel loosened his hold on my arm, gave my beard a last obscene tickle, and pushed me toward the door. I ran out and down the stairs, still hearing his laughing, and when I found myself outdoors I began to shake with a great tremble. Mottel had been having himself a good long drunken joke of a time with me. Yet the joke had an underside with a terrible meaning; both of us, he and I, the atheist and the dedicated son of Israel, still had something in common, something I couldn’t bear to think about. He and I had been joined into one sinful soul, for together we had accomplished two innocent deaths, and what had to be his end had also to be mine.
I flew to the synagogue, took out the prayer book for the Day of Atonement, and turned to the section listing the fifty-three separate divisions of sins for which there was forgiveness. There was no mention, no hint, of the sin of vain piety. Convinced that for this sin I could not be forgiven, a great sob sat down in my throat; it would not be moved; in the years to come, the years of my daughter Rochel marrying Shim and traveling to America, the years of Mottel’s disappearance and unbroken absence, the years of my wife’s death and my children’s dispersal and my own decline, the weight of this unforgiven sin of mine grew somewhat lighter, and it became an invisible wen to which I gradually accommodated myself. Still, each year on the Day of Atone-
ment when we came to the list of the fifty-three divisions of sins for which there was forgiveness, MottePs laughing began again to fall upon my ears. I would cry, and as I cried I would try to fight my tears with the psalm, “The Lord is my refuge and my fortress, in Him will I trust. For He shall deliver me from the snare of the fowler,” but the words stood only hazily in my head; I had been my own snare, I would tell myself, and my own fowler.
Thus it was with me in Golinsk, when my hands moved and my eyes saw. But my hands moved only the needle, and my eyes saw only the cloth. My needle was fear. My thimble was prayer. The cloth I tailored was a weave of circumstance twisted together haphazardly. The Squires had proclaimed the necessary weave of my life-goods, and I accepted this lie of the Squires as a blind man accommodates himself to the absence of light.
Who knew I had been driven and hungered into sustaining myself with contemplations of the joys of The Next World? Who dreamed I had fed my piety because only my piety had fed me ? Who was there to tell me that the vanity in my piety was no more than a splinter under my fingernail, placed there by the Squires of my time?
To know these things I had first to die.
2 - Nlaisha
(1815-1887)
For fifty-six of my seventy-two years i was called a teacher and gave learning to the children of Golinsk. I sat with them at the learning-table in the synagogue and taught the alphabet, the Law, the Books, the Commentaries, and the Commentaries on the Commentaries — all in the form of my own commentaries on these holy subjects.
The synagogue was a large hut of logs chinked with tar and clay. We had a floor of split logs, windows, a stove, and in a corner near the altar, the learning-table. I would sit there all day massaging Hebrew learning into little Jewish heads, freezing in the winter and fainting in the summer, suffering chills in the spring and asthma all the time.
Now if you multiply my fifty-six teaching years by the twenty or so children at my learning-table in the ordinary year (with the exception of my first twenty teaching years, when the army and other accursed things took children away from the village earlier), you get some eleven hundred souls who should have passed through my hands and some seven hundred who did. Many died after me, some even before; some stayed in Golinsk, many tried new places both known and unknown to me; some but not many, like Shim and Laib, went to America; more moved only to other similar villages like Pukop or Svutz or Shnavka in our Minsk Province; and too many were taken into the army, of course, never to return, remaining unaccounted for; and some just went away, like Laib’s Uncle Mottel. Yet, in my later years I seemed surrounded by the faces of men I had known from their childhood, faces I had seen annoyed by me at the learning-table, faces that would later grow beards and become landsmen . . . faces that often came to sadden me on certain occasions. Take, for example, the
face of Laib-Shmul, our meat slaughterer in ’85, the year Aaron and Leah died. I need to dwell upon him and I shall, but I didn’t sit down only to squeeze a lemon.
Yes, we are now doing something a little more important . . . looking at a certain Maisha. . . .
Ay, hiba, hiba! He’s born, he’s born! Three years after Napoleon wriggles home on his cut-up belly, a soul decides it’s wonderful to be born in Russia! Maisha-son-of-Haim, a genius child, hiba, hiba! Look where he maneuvers to get himself born in 1815, in Karlin, Karlin near Pinsk, a bit of a hamlet only, as it seems to people! But the infant-to-be knows better! Yes, he knows what is happening nine months before his birth and he approves; did you ever hear of such a thing? A genius! He observes the process of his physical conception, approves of his father Haim the saloonkeeper, falls immediately in love with his sweet and warm-chambered mother, Melka, and works furiously at being born because he knows he is not only going to be a Karliner but a nephew of Mendel, a true Karliner, O blessed joy! Ay, first he sang, the child Maisha, and then talked, and then walked . . . and like other little boys he learned the joys of running in the streets, of chasing the gentiles’ cruising pigs out of the Jewish side of the town . . . and every day he sat at Uncle Mendel’s learning-table until the age of nine, and then on a day not long after the Passover, Uncle Mendel took him by the hand and walked with him in the new-blossoming fields, and said good-by.
“Maisha, Maisha, dear little joy-child, I must tell you something.”
“Then tell, Uncle Mendel.”
“From the hour of your birth you have shown me the soul of a Tzaddik. Four years you have sat at my learning-table and I have seen only the love of God in you. Now, before I go, I want to give you my last words.”
“Where are you going, Uncle Mendel?”
“Over the world, my dear. First to study at the table of the aged Lazer of Ladi, himself a Tzaddik from the learning-table of the Master of the Good Name.”
“And will I never see you again?”
“As I will see you — in every strange hut, on all roads, and in the life of night.”
Uncle Mendel took my hand in his and began his chant as we walked the long line through the apple-tree field on a carpet of new grass, the blossoms hanging above and straining their heads down to hear his every intonation, we passing under and away:
Why is the Hasid the Hasid? [sang Uncle Mendel]
And the Misnagid only the Misnagid ?
(Ay, chie-dee-die-die, ay, chie-dee-die-die,
Only a Misnagid?)
The Hasid, the Hasid, the Hasid,
What carries he in his Jewish heart?
He carries not the Law, but the Lord,
And fears not the Law, but the Lord,
And loves not the Law, but the Lord,
Enjoys not the Law, but the Lord,
And lives, lives-lives,
In the Lord!
Ay . . . chie-dee-die-die . . . chie-die-dee-die-die-die . . .
Love him, O Lord, the Misnagid!
Ay, Uncle Mendel, how
we jumped and skipped at every chie-dee- die-die that spring day in the apple-tree field, and how we danced to your chanting! And how afterwards we flung ourselves all breathless on the cool green of the ground, tired and panting and hum- min g!
I said then to you, “Before we return to the village you must tell me something.”
“I cannot teach you further, Maisha.” (And you patted my head.) “You know everything I know.”
“I am nine now. For a very long time I have not spoken as it is said I used to speak, with the tongue of The One Above. These talkings I do not remember, and they puzzle me.”
“And why shouldn’t one be puzzled when he has spoken like a Tzaddik before the age of four? And if, as you have, why shouldn’t you be further puzzled now that you are nine and speak thusly no more?” (And you patted my head.) “Ay, little Maisha, it’s only a s- slight puzzle. You see,” (and you patted my head), “at the moment of ! birth, one is closest to the Lord in the time that one is on this earth. Each minute here is a million years removed from Him. And the older we get the further we fall from the bosom of The Highest One.”
I began to cry. “Then how will I ever get near again to Him!”
“You are nearer to Him now at this moment, as you cry out in fear of being distant from Him, than the others at the moment of their birth. Be rested, of joyful faith. Yours is a clean dear Jewish soul. You shall truly know and love Him forever.”
And you patted my head, and then you left Karlin and threw yourself upon the world and I never saw your Karliner face again. In my later years. Uncle Mendel, faint whispers of you reached me in Golinsk where I had settled in ’31, in my seventeenth year; and when I would hear a news of you from some wandering Hasid — that you had been seen in Podolia, that in Vilna you had disputed with strong Misnagdim, that in Kovno they had stoned you — I would sit in meditation and remember all your sayings and repeatings, and what I felt I could no longer remember I then wrote down. In this way I made myself a short Book of Mendel, which I always treasured. And whenever I wished to make a good learning child very happy, I would always remember our last day in the apple-tree field and pat him gently upon his head.
In my twelfth year (I had begun by then to sit in the chair at the head of the learning-table when our official teacher would be indisposed), the town became terrified because of the new Conscription Law. It decreed a term of military service for Jews of twenty-five years in addition to the years to be served as military students in the Russian military schools to the age of eighteen. The new articles of conscription allowed recruits, on paper, to be taken from the age of twelve up. But
six months less or a year and even two years less was not disallowed. We Karliners had deep reason to be alarmed. Our governor had long looked to find some means of shattering the Hasidic fortress of Karlin.
“No question,” was the word in my father’s saloon. “The new laws give Jewish soldiers a twenty-five-year chance to become Christians.”
“It’ll help like cupping-glasses on a corpse,” my father would say.
“Yes. Exactly. There will be mountains of Christian corpses produced in the army for the next twenty-five to fifty years. Corpses that used to be living Jews.”
In our house there was no need to explain the effect of the Conscription Law. Did I not have two brothers who had been taken away to the army before my birth, brothers who never knew me because they had never lived to come home? The official letters, in each case, stated that “your son met a brave end on the field of battle,” but from other sources, from fellow Jewish soldiers, we learned of their murders by their own officers, not on any field of battle but in the course of efforts to convert them. Hertz, the older one, had starved to death in solitary confinement after refusing to eat pig’s meat. The other one, Shnepsel, had been forced to sit on a cake of ice in the winter, under guard and with his pants off, for neglecting to appear one Sunday at the military chapel. The joke ended with a chill from which Shnepsel did not recover.
One afternoon in the summer of the year of the new Conscription Law I came home from my learning to find a huge pot of water boiling on the stove. My mother said nothing to me but went through the door that led to the saloon and came back with my father, whose usually longish and noncommittal mien now moved with a certain quick twitching. I remembered this happened to my father’s face whenever he had sudden trouble. I said immediately, “What happened?”
My father said, “Ask rather what must happen,” and turned to my mother, who had fallen into tears.
“Who is dying, Mother?” I cried. “And you mustn’t cry so, you
mustn't! What is the life of the flesh if not simply the clothing we wear as we walk the short corridor into the house of eternity?’'
“Nobody is dying, yet,” my father replied shortly. “You’re a little early with the holy words of comfort.”
Out of her tears my mother wailed. “They were here today, the men with the lists.”
My father spat on the stove so that it made a very loud hiss, and the sound of it, quick and hot, was sufficient commentary upon my father’s feeling for our Jewish committee through which the civil authorities dealt with us in such a matter as conscription. In older days the Committee had finely and heartfully attempted to represent the entire community of Karliner Jews. But in my boyhood, the Committee kept raising the hilt of its possibilities. They were merchants and Misnagdim, needing to represent themselves more than the whole lot of us; so when the government assigned them to select Jewish recruits to fill the new quota, they turned to the less mercantile, to the plain Karliner Hasids.
“The men from the Committee,” I repeated, realizing my mother had meant that they had come about me, to put me in the army. “Well . . .”
“Quickly,” my father said, “they come to twelve-year-olds, and with such fine logics! If he goes now, he’ll be all through with the army by the time he is forty-three; he’ll have half his life all to himself . . . the older he is when they take him, the worse it will be.”
“Fat pigs!” my mother screamed. “The Satan plays in them but they won’t carry anything out! Not in this house!”
“Of course they are fat pigs, what else?” I said loftily. “Has not the holy Yerachmiel told us that merchants are willing to undergo all trials, all hardships, in order to make a living? These perspirers move on the world without the joy of The Highest One within them, without being able to accept the hardships of life with total indifference. What can we feel for them if not pity?”
“Pity today, pity tomorrow,” my father said, turning to my mother. “Is the water hot enough?”
“Soon, soon,” she choked out, her head buried in her apron, her body shaking with her sobbing. So that was the plan. . . . With the hot water I would be, so to speak, made ineligible for army service.
Look here, I won’t shock you. After all, was it really so terrible ? The feet thrust into boiling water long enough to make a good scald, and then two strong hits across the toes with the back end of an axe, and it was over. My father and mother thus spared me thirty-one years of living under the thumbs of uniformed Satans bent on capturing and strangling me forever. The difficult part was not the pain, or the limp you got, or the less fingers or bent-over back (for do you think I was_ the only boy who had such an “accident?”). No, the really dangerous thing was making the “accident” seem uncontrived, something our Committee could easily explain to the authorities. The Committee, let’s give it a due, did not object to “accidents” but only required plausibility in them; and being a saloonkeeper my father had many opportunities to listen and consider, and make use of a certain steady drinker in debt to him. He was one Yalkinn, a serf with a hatred for his master deep enough to keep him in my father’s saloon at every possible hour. Yalkinn had made the saloon his real home, and had come to the point of surrendering everything to drink. There were many like him but my father chose Yalkinn for the excellent reason of Yalkinn’s total disgust with Jews. This coupled with his debt to m
y father and his willingness to do anything for drink made him the most dependable one to go to the Committee and say, “I ran Maisha over with my wagon or my horse kicked him. I know not which, I was drunk at the time — so drunk that to relieve him of the pains in his feet, I plunged them into the pot of boiling water I found on the stove in the Jew’s kitchen. Or I might have done it because he had no right to be walking in the middle of the road in the first place!”
Seeing such a statement in writing the military authorities forgot about me. True, the bones never healed correctly and walking became the one real ordeal of my life . . . yet my two poor brothers had had good feet and walked without thinking, and where were they and where was I ? I was still on the earth — in a position, I believed, to com-
pare its bitterness, injustice, and shame with the gladsomeness and perfection of my certain Paradise.
So it went, with the little Hasid.
I go back to Yalkinn, the peasant who lied for me. In the several months thereafter it became clearer and clearer that the price of his lie would ruin my father unless something could be thought of to stop Yalkinn from dragging great numbers of vodka bottles out of my father without paying for them, and also to throttle his drunken boasting in the saloon about his “having the Jews in my power for life.”
One night I lay on my bed-shelf over the stove and heard my parents whispering in their corner. “Be his friend, Haim,” my mother urged, “let him drink until he drops dead from it!”
“Him alone wouldn’t be terrible,” I heard my father say in a strained sad croak, lying in the far corner of their bed. “But he’s beginning to cost me fifteen-twenty bottles a week with his friends together!”
“Shh,” my mother said. “God will help, you’ll see. Now bend yourself in and sleep.”