“What do you want of me?” the poor doctor pleads.
“We want to eat!” say the emigrants.
“They’ve brought me something to eat. You eat it.” The doctor with the kind, smiling eyes points to the lunch they’ve brought him: coffee and white rolls. He really means it—he gives them his lunch. What can he do, one person alone? The emigrants thank him. They say they aren’t asking for themselves but for their poor children.
“Nu, bring the children here!” The doctor winks to us with his kind, smiling eyes. “What do you want?” he asks us.
C.
My mother tells him our story from the beginning, how she had a husband, a cantor, who was sick all his life. He died and left her a widow with two children, an older one and another barely an infant (she meant me). She married off the older one, who fell into a gold mine. The gold ran out, but the hole remained. His father-in-law went bankrupt, and her son will be conscripted.
“Mama, why are you rattling on like that?” My brother Elyahu starts to tell the same story but in his own way. “Conscription or no conscription—we’re going, you see, to America. These other people are coming with us.” He points to the rest of us. “We had to cross the border. Well, we did get to the border, you see, but without passports, because we’re both eligible for conscription—”
“Allow me!” Our friend Pinni shoves my brother Elyahu aside and tells the same story but in a slightly different way. Though Elyahu is my brother, I must admit that Pinni speaks a lot better. He doesn’t keep saying “you see,” like my brother Elyahu. And he knows Russian very well. Many of the words he uses are beautiful Russian words! Many of them I do not understand, but they are beautiful.
Our friend Pinni begins with many elegant Russian words: “I shall briefly outline the entire situation so that you will be able to formulate an opinion. We are going to America, not so much to avoid conscription as for the sake of independence and civilization, because we are stifled at home, not only by lack of progress but even by lack of air, as Turgenev says. The Jewish problems and pogroms, the constitution and so on, arose, as Buckle says in his History of Civilization . . .”
Our friend Pinni is only just warming up, but the doctor interrupts him, takes a sip of coffee, and says with a smile, “Tell me what you want.”
My brother Elyahu steps forward and says to Pinni, “Why don’t you ever get to the point?”
Our friend Pinni’s feelings are really hurt—he moves off to the side, gets tangled up in his own feet, and says resentfully, “Do you talk better? Go on, you talk!”
And my brother Elyahu goes up to the table and tells the story.
D.
“We got to the border, you see, and started negotiating with the agents, but as you know, they’re big bastards. They fought over us, scrambling, denouncing, playing tricks, you see, until a woman, a proper lady, honest, pious, and kosher, took us in hand. She set a price, you see, and undertook to move us all, first us and then our belongings. She provided us with two peasants as guards, you see.”
“So soon? Look how quick he got to the peasants,” my sister-in-law shoots out. She pushes my brother Elyahu aside and tells the story in a different way: how the woman told us to walk and walk till we saw a hill. There we were to turn left and walk and walk till we came to another hill. After a right turn we would reach a tavern. One of us should go in and find two peasants drinking brandy and say the word chaimove to them. They would know what we meant and would take us through the woods. Luckily I have a habit of fainting.
The doctor says, “My dear women, I also have a habit of fainting. Tell me, what do you want?”
My mother steps forward, and she and the doctor have the following conversation:
MAMA: I’ll tell you in a few words. They stole our things. DOCTOR: What things?
MAMA: The bedding—two feather quilts, four large pillows, and four more large pillows and three more small pillows.
DOCTOR: That’s all?
MAMA: And three blankets, two old ones, one new, some clothing and a silk head scarf and . . .
DOCTOR: I’m not asking about that. Nothing else bad happened to you?
MAMA: What more do you want?
DOCTOR: I mean, what else do you need?
MAMA: Bedding.
DOCTOR: Is that all?
MAMA: Isn’t that enough?
DOCTOR: Do you have tickets? Do you have money?
MAMA: I can’t complain, but we have steamship and train tickets.
DOCTOR: You should thank God! I envy you. Let’s change places. Don’t think I’m making a joke. I’m saying this seriously. Take my breakfast, take my emigrants, take my committee, and give me your tickets, and I will go to America this day. What can I accomplish here, one person with so many poor people?
We don’t know what to think! But we all agree not to waste any more time. “Too bad, a waste of expenses,” my brother Elyahu says. “Let’s better go to Cracow. Lots of emigrants are going to Cracow, so let’s imagine we’re also emigrants.”
“Since we’ve already seen Lemberg, we should also see Cracow,” agrees our friend Pinni.
“That way we’ll get to see both—Cracow and Lemberg,” says his wife Teibl.
Goodbye! We’re going to Cracow.
XVI
AMONG THE EMIGRANTS
A .
If you ever go to America, be sure you travel only with emigrants. Things will be easier. When you come to a city, you don’t need to look for an inn because a room has been reserved for you. That’s what a committee is created for. A committee sees to it that everything is ready for you.
When we arrive that first night in Cracow, we are herded into a large place called a dormitory. There we wait till morning, when someone comes from the committee and writes down all our names. My mother has misgivings about giving our names. She’s afraid it might have something to do with conscription. Who can tell? The emigrants make fun of her. What do Polish Jews have to do with Russian conscription? Then they bring us to a large hall in a big inn filled with many cots and many more emigrants. “It looks like our poorhouse,” my mother declares. And my sister-in-law Bruche says, “Mother-in-law, we’d better travel on.”
I once told you that the women never like anything, and find fault with everything. They take a dislike to Cracow from the first. Even my brother Elyahu is unhappy with Cracow. He says Cracow is not Lemberg. At least in Lemberg there are Jews, but in Cracow there are no Jews. Actually, there are Jews, but they’re very strange Jews, he says. “They’re half-breeds—half Jews and half Poles. They twist their mustaches and put on airs!” But our friend Pinni contradicts him. He says that there’s more “civilization” here. I’d like to know what this “civilization” is that our friend Pinni likes so much.
B.
Things are going well at the inn that the committee has arranged for us. What I mean is, it’s not that good, but it’s lively. You’re always meeting new emigrants. We sit together, we eat together, and we tell one another stories. Oh, what marvelous stories! Miracles and wonders—miracles about the pogroms, miracles about the conscription, and miracles about the border. Everyone tells a different story about agents. “Who was your agent at the border, a redhead or a brunette?” one asks. The other one answers, “Not a redhead or a brunette—just a plain thief!”
Naturally we tell them about our own miracle. They listen, shake their heads, and cluck. One tall emigrant with fierce eyes and cotton in his ears asks, “What did she look like, that woman? Was she pious and kosher, with a wig on her head?”
We tell him our woman was pious and kosher and wore a wig on her head. He leaps up and says to his wife, “Sarah! Do you hear that? It’s the same woman!”
“May she and all agents come down with the cholera, God in heaven!” His wife Sarah says, then tells us how the woman with the wig swindled them, robbed them from head to toe, and tried to sell them steamship tickets to America.
At these words a tailor, a handsome man with
dark eyes and a pale face, jumps up. “Steamship tickets? Let me tell you a story about steamship tickets,” he says.
The dark-eyed, pale-faced tailor is about to tell his story when another emigrant, named Topolinski, stands up and says he has a better story about steamship tickets. This ticket company in his town was selling tickets from Libaveh to America. They cheated a young man of some sixty rubles and handed him a fake ticket with a red eagle printed on it. The young man arrived in Libaveh, intending to board the ship. He showed his fake ticket with the red eagle on it. “What’s this? Forget about it! It’s not a steamship ticket, it’s a good-luck card.”
C .
The steamship ticket stories begin to bore me. I like emigrants but I’d rather be with this boy my age, the son of emigrants whom I met when we were riding in the wagon. His name is Kopl, and he has a split lip he got from a fall. He was climbing on a ladder and fell onto a woodpile. He swears it didn’t hurt at all but that it bled a lot. It wasn’t enough that he split his lip—he was beaten by his father. The tall man with the fierce eyes and cotton in his ears is his father, and the woman named Sarah is his mother. They were very rich not too long ago, before the pogrom. I ask him what a pogrom is. The emigrants are always talking about them, but what they are I do not know.
Kopl says to me, “You don’t know what a pogrom is? Then you’re just a little baby! Nowadays pogroms happen everywhere. A pogrom starts from nothing, but once it starts, it lasts three days.”
“What is it?” I say. “A fair?”
“Some fair! They shatter windows! They smash furniture! They rip pillows! Feathers fly like snow!”
“What for?”
“What for?! Because! A pogrom isn’t just on houses. They destroy shops! They throw the merchandise out onto the streets, they break everything up, scatter everything, pour kerosene over it all, and set it on fire.”
“Go on! Really?”
“Do you think I’m making it up? Afterward, when there’s nothing left to wreck, they go from house to house with axes, iron rods, and sticks while the police follow behind. They sing and whistle and shout, ‘Hey, fellows, let’s beat up the Jews!’ And they beat and kill and murder, stab with knives.”
“Who?”
“What do you mean who? Jews!”
“Why?”
“What a question! It’s a pogrom!”
“And if it’s a pogrom—what of it?”
“Go away! You’re a little calf! I don’t want to talk to you!” Kopl pushes me away and thrusts his hands into his pockets, like a grown-up. I’m upset because Kopl is acting so superior, but I keep quiet. Just wait, big shot, someday you’ll have to come to me! I’m thinking, and let a few minutes pass. Then I approach Kopl again and strike up a conversation, not about pogroms but about other things. Does he speak German? I ask him.
“Who can’t speak German?” He laughs. “German is Yiddish, after all.”
“It is? If you know German, then tell me how you say horseradish in German.”
Kopl laughs even harder. He can barely get out a word. “What do you mean, how do you say horseradish? Horseradish is horseradish!”
“That means you don’t know!”
“Then how do you say horseradish?”
Actually I’ve forgotten how you say horseradish in German. I used to know, but I forget. I ask my brother Elyahu, “How do you say horseradish in German?” He says he’ll give me a lesson that’ll make my teeth rattle. My brother Elyahu is obviously angry. Whenever he has to take money out of his pocket, he gets angry. Our friend Pinni laughs at him. They bicker. I find a spot on the ground among the bundles where I lie down and sleep.
D .
In Cracow we get nowhere. We didn’t even get to the committee. The emigrants told us it was a waste of time to go to the committee—they’d just give us the runaround. First they write down your ages, and then they send a doctor to examine you. Then they tell you to wait. Then they tell you to come back. You come back, and they ask you why you came. You say they told you to come. Then they ask you why you want to go to America. “Where else should we go?” you ask. “Where is it written that you must go at all?” they say. You tell them about the pogroms, and they say, “It’s your own fault.”
They give you an example: “Just yesterday a young boy, one of you emigrants, stole a roll from the market.” You say, “Maybe he was hungry.” They say, “Just the other day a man and his wife, emigrants, got into an argument in the middle of the street and they had to call the police.” You say, “The wife was right. She recognized her husband, who had thrown her out of the house and wanted to run away to America. By accident she spotted him and caught him.
He wanted to tear himself away and flee, so she made a loud fuss.” They say, “Why do you emigrants mostly go around in rags?” You say, “We’re poor. Give us clothing, and we won’t go around in rags.” In short, they give lectures, but not a penny.
So the emigrants complain to us. They say we’re lucky that till now we haven’t been at the mercy of the committee. My mother says she wouldn’t have gone to them if not for the bedding. If we hadn’t been robbed at the border, she’d feel like a queen, she says. I remember her yellow silk kerchief, in which she truly looked like a queen. My mother says nothing pains her as much as the loss of the bedding.
“What will we do in America without bedding?” She wrings her hands and cries. My brother Elyahu hears her and shouts, “Again? You’re crying again? We’re getting close to America—you have to take care of your eyes!”
Are we really close to America? Not at all! We still have a long way to go! I don’t exactly know where we’re going. The emigrants talk about cities like Hamburg, Vienna, Paris, London, and Liver-pool. Everybody says they wish Hamburg would burn down this very day. Hamburg, they say, is a Sodom. Jews are driven into bathhouses to be cleaned up and are treated worse than prisoners. Monsters such as they have in Hamburg, you won’t find anywhere else. Meanwhile we’re getting ready to go to Vienna. There, they say, we’ll find a real committee!
Committee or no committee, all I know is we’re going to Vienna. Have you ever heard of it? Wait till we get to Vienna, and I’ll tell you everything that’s going on there.
XVII
VIENNA IS A CITY AND GOD IS A FATHER
A.
“Vienna is a real city!” proclaims my brother Elyahu, and our friend Pinni chimes in, “And what a city! A city among cities!”
Even the women, who never like anything, allow that Vienna is a city. In honor of Vienna my mother dresses up in her holiday silk kerchief. My sister-in-law Bruche decks herself out as if for a wedding. She puts on her Shabbes dress, fancy wig, and long dangling earrings. When you add in her red-freckled face, she looks like a ginger cat in a black shawl.
Have you ever seen a ginger cat in a black shawl? I have. Our neighbor Pessi’s children love to play theater and dress the cat up in different costumes. The cat, as I once mentioned, has a funny nickname: Feige-Leah the Beadle’s Wife. They once dressed her up in a skullcap that they tied under her chin and then let her run loose. To add a touch of beauty, they attached a feather duster on her tail. The skullcap was too big and fell over her eyes, and she couldn’t tolerate the feather duster. Feige-Leah the Beadle’s Wife went crazy, scrambling up the walls and doing terrible damage to the neighbors’ property. Oh my, did those children get punished!
And worst of all, Vashti—that is, Hershl with the birthmark on his forehead. What a strange boy that Vashti is! No matter how much he’s beaten, it’s like beating a wall. I miss him more than anyone! Maybe we’ll see him in America. We’ve heard that our neighbor Pessi and her husband Moishe the bookbinder and their whole gang are leaving for America. At first she put us down for going to such a far-off place, and now she herself is going there.
Everyone is going to America. This is what our in-law Yoneh the baker writes us. He’s also going to America. He’s already at the border—not the border we stole across, but another border. Our bord
er isn’t safe. At our border they rob you of your bedding. At other borders they also take your bedding, but they don’t attack you with sharp knives in the woods as they did us. Emigrants tell us that at some borders they strip you bare and rob you of everything. But they don’t beat you. They didn’t beat us either, but they wanted to. We almost died of fright. Luckily someone fired that shot.
I already told you how we stole across the border, but we’ve long forgotten it. We hate to remember things like that. True, the women still to this day talk about the miracles we experienced then, but the men interrupt and don’t let them finish the story. They tell it much better. Our friend Pinni says he’s got to write an article for the newspapers. He even wrote a song about it. I think I once told you that Pinni writes songs. The song about the border starts like this:
Radzivil is a town made to order
For stealing across the border.
But first they’ll steal you blind,
Whatever you hide they’ll find.
They’ll promise to get you through
With help from a murderous crew.
You’re lucky to cross at all
Without a blow, a bruising fall,
A kick to remember to your butt.
That’s just the beginning, says Pinni. It gets even better! He wrote a piece about Brod too, he says, and about Cracow and Lemberg, and everything in rhyme. Pinni is a master of rhyme. He rhymes everything. He also wrote a song about his wife Teibl. I know it by heart:
My wife’s a beauty,
Her name is Teibl.
She’s quite a cutie,
I’ll swear on any Bible.
May what I say not be a bother—
One thing is wrong,
Tevye the Dairyman & Motl the Cantor's Son Page 31