Bryna Kranzler
The Accidental Anarchist
From the Diaries of Jacob Marateck
Translated by Shimon Wincelberg and Anita Marateck Wincelberg
Portions of this book appeared in a slightly different form in: The Samurai of Vishigrod: The Notebooks of Jacob Marateck, Retold by Shimon and Anita Wincelberg, © 1976, 1st ed., Published by the Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia, PA;
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Published by Crosswalk Press at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 Bryna Kranzler
Visit: http://www.TheAccidentalAnarchist.com
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to my mother, Anita Marateck Wincelberg, who never
gave up her father’s dream of seeing his story told. By sharing her personal
memories of him, as well as his diaries, she has given his voice an ever-lasting resonance while making sure that his unique sense of humor was never lost.
It is also in loving memory of my late father, Shimon Wincelberg, who
spent many years working on his father-in-law's diaries, and published the first portion of them, but sadly was unable to see the project through to completion.
Above all, this book is my gift to Jacob Marateck, the grandfather I never met,
and an individual I wish I had known. His story is proof that it is not the circumstances of our lives that determine who we are, but rather the way we
choose to interpret them that defines our personalities and, to some extent, our destinies.
For Jay, who made it possible for me to write this book
And for Mike and Jesse, who amaze and inspire me daily. I hope you will cherish your legacy and, some day, share it with future generations
TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1 -- In The Beginning
Chapter 2 -- How to Become the Czar’s Son-in-Law
Chapter 3 -- A Small Cheer for Corruption
Chapter 4 -- The Fall of ‘Haman’
Chapter 5 -- Ministry of Misinformation
Chapter 6 -- The Lost and Found Battlefield
Chapter 7 -- The Phantom Synagogue
Chapter 8 -- Banzai!
Chapter 9 -- This Way to the Firing Squad
Chapter 10 -- The Second Road to the Left
Chapter 11 -- Walking Wounded
Chapter 12 -- The Loneliest Place on Earth
Chapter 13 -- The Great City of Harbin
Chapter 14 -- The Siberian ‘Queen Esther’
Chapter 15 -- A Bachelor in Vishigrod
Chapter 16 -- A Mess of Matchmakers
Chapter 17 -- An Amateur’s Guide to the Revolution
Chapter 18 -- The Interrogation
Chapter 19 -- Three Two Days Till the Firing Squad
Chapter 20 -- Farewell to Warsaw
Chapter 21 -- The “King of Thieves”
Chapter 22 -- A Gold Mine at the End of the Earth
Chapter 23 -- Which Way to the North Pole?
Chapter 24 -- Into the Woods
Chapter 25 -- Down and Out in Chelyabinsk
Chapter 26 -- Everyone Comes to Café Łódź
Chapter 27 -- Osip’s Table
Chapter 28 -- The ‘Paris’ of Siberia
Chapter 29 -- The Irkutsk Jewish Benevolent Society
Chapter 30 -- “BROTHER, WE ARE SAVED!”
Chapter 31 -- Lingering in the Lap of Luxury
Chapter 32 -- An Angel in Siberia
Chapter 33 -- The Price of Paper
Chapter 34 -- The Cost of Money
Chapter 35 -- Return to Warsaw
Chapter 36 -- The Redhead
Chapter 37 -- A Reformed Revolutionary
Epilogue: by Anita Marateck Wincelberg
Author’s Note by Bryna Kranzler
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Footnotes
Glossary
THE ACCIDENTAL ANARCHIST
From the Diaries of Jacob Marateck
Chapter 1: In the Beginning
I have no excuse, save for the ignorance of youth and a desire for grand adventure, which may have been one and the same thing. Consequently, the seemingly minor decision I made to end my education before the age of thirteen led me down a path from which each future choice was misdirected by the previous foolish one.
Not that I didn’t have a loving family to guide me, particularly my older brother, Mordechai, who had seen me risk my life repeatedly but was unable to convince me to make at least one sensible decision. There was simply too much fun to be had.
The result was that, in a little over ten years, I went from being a yeshiva student, a baker’s assistant, and labor organizer, to a corporal in the Russian army during the war in Manchuria (in which the men under my command wanted to kill me, simply for being a Jew, as much as the enemy did, simply for being in the way), to a revolutionary. For my efforts, I earned my first two death sentences, which was a little more excitement than I needed.
This limited my curiosity as to whether my end would come from freezing or starvation, from Japanese artillery or Chinese bandits, and whether it would be today or tomorrow. From my experiences with the comically inept Russian army (at least, it would have been comical had our lives not been at stake), I learned that, no matter how terrible it was for anyone to be in the midst of a war, it was a hundred times worse being on the losing side.
Still, I was slow to put into practice the lessons from my youth and, following the war, became a revolutionary who wanted to overthrow the Czar. This got me involved in amateur spy missions that would have gotten a Hollywood screenwriter fired, but got me sentenced to death for the third time.
As a result, I travelled the width of Russia, from Petersburg to Siberia, where my adventures were to have come to an end. But even if my record wasn’t clean, my conscience was; everything I did was done with the most honorable intentions.
And ultimately provided enough excitement to last a lifetime.
I grew up at a time when most of Russian-occupied Poland was living in poverty. Hence, it was not unusual for a child to leave home at the age of twelve to get a job to support the family. The only alternative was studying in a yeshiva.
Spending one’s days indoors, rocking over a book of the Talmud and arguing about the minutiae of Jewish law was never a profitable occupation, but it was the only “trade” in the Jewish community that really mattered. It also wasn’t entirely impractical. There were rich Jews who wanted their sons to study with learned men, and were willing to pay good salaries to have one as a private tutor. Sometimes, one even heard that the tutor had gotten to marry a rich man’s daughter.
When it was my turn, I looked at the professions being learned by my friends. None exactly made my mouth water. And since I wasn’t a fan of hard work, I decided to follow in my brother, Chayim’s, footsteps. He hadn’t been interested in learning a trade, either, but became possessed by the crazy idea that he would become a great scholar. Since our parents could not support him, he went off to another village where the boys survived on the generosity of the equally poor householders who had been shamed into providing meals for the boys. Under those circumstances, as you can imagine, some hosts ‘forgot’ their obligations.
I, too, wanted to become a sch
olar, but unlike Chayim, I was unable to adjust to eating only every other day; starving I could do from the comfort of home.
Which was why I ran away from the yeshiva after barely a week. Unfortunately, I had neglected to tell anyone about my plan to return home, which resulted in no small amount of confusion.
Shortly after I was discovered ‘missing’ from the yeshiva, a boy about my age was found to have drowned. Using good Polish logic, the authorities put the missing boy together with the dead boy, and wiped their hands of both cases with remarkable efficiency. Consequently, my parents were notified of my death, and they sat shiva for me for the first, but not the last, time.
One would think that, after my return from the dead, my parents would have been overjoyed to have me home. But it wasn’t long before they reminded me that, having closed the book on the life of the mind, I needed to find a job.
But the limited exposure I’d had to the outside world when I ventured beyond my small, provincial town of Vishogrod made me realize that there was a bigger world out there just waiting to be discovered.
Even at thirteen, the great world drew me like a magnet with its promise of new experiences. I wanted to go far away, perhaps as far as Warsaw, which I pictured as a vast, modern metropolis, glittering with golden opportunities. Conveniently, Warsaw was where my older brother, Mordechai, worked as a baker. When I told him that I was sick to death of Vishogrod, he said he could get me a job as a baker’s assistant. Coming from a state of perpetual hunger, the prospect of spending my days in a large, modern bakery, with its delectable smells and the unceasing availability of something to eat, gripped my imagination and wouldn’t let go.
In principle, my father had nothing against Warsaw, but he held to the belief that a boy’s only assurance of seizing his golden opportunity in life lay in having a skilled craft. So he arranged for me to work in a series of apprenticeships with various tradesmen in town. Why ‘a series’ of apprenticeships? Because I proved incompetent at even the simplest task. As a result, most jobs didn’t last a week; some didn’t last the day. At least one boss predicted that, before long, I would end up in front a firing squad, about which he wasn’t too far wrong.
Soon I found myself in Warsaw, working twenty to 22-hour days (and before yom tov, a full 24), something that Mordechai had neglected to mention in his infrequent letters. The only salvation was shabbos; without that one day of rest, none of us could have survived.
Having made such a fuss about needing to get out of Vishogrod, I could hardly turn around and go home. Nor did I have enough money to return, even if I wanted to. So, for the next seven or eight years, I worked as a baker’s assistant, and in a variety of other mindless jobs, not one of which had a future.
But what would have been the point of thinking about the future when, at the age of 21, I would be conscripted into the Czar’s army? In the meantime, work was simply a way to stay alive, and sometimes barely that. My sympathies, as I rolled from one deadening job to another, were with the exploited souls who were enslaved by their employers – not that the bosses had it much better.
Meanwhile, my young blood craved adventure. Aside from the revolution, which I personally felt in no position to start, I could try to improve the lot of the people around me. At the time there was no such thing as a “union.” Each worker was on his own. And merely talking about organizing workers was an engraved invitation to scrutiny by the secret police.
But by the time I was seventeen or eighteen, I was fed up with being powerless. So one day I went to the boss and told him that his three best clerks and I were quitting. The boss was furious. He accused me of being a Bolshevik, a hooligan, a nihilist, and a spoiled young man who’d never be satisfied with anything short of total chaos, anarchy, and the destruction of the social order.
I got angry, too, but instead of quitting, I called a strike, and demanded – and this was unheard of in Warsaw – a reduction of our working hours from twenty to twelve hours a day. I was in a position to do this because I didn’t have to worry about losing my job as I was approaching the age of mandatory army service. Which, after working 120-hour weeks and more, didn’t sound like such a bad alternative.
Our little strike spread throughout Warsaw as workers and apprentices began walking out and demanding a 72-hour week. Under the guidance of an experienced Bundist who showed me the ropes, I managed to “unionize” over 3,000 workers in less than a month. The police harassed me at every turn, arresting me several times, and beating me up once or twice. Although they had me on their list as some sort of political troublemaker, they never figured out exactly what I was up to.
After such a fine start, the strike went off like a ship without a rudder. No one had any idea of tactics or negotiating positions. While I had a knack for agitating, making speeches and signing up members, I had none at all for strategy or administration. We also didn’t bother our heads with theories and ideology. We simply wanted to support the cause of oppressed workers.
As a result, the strike dragged on until, gradually, each boss came to some sort of quiet arrangement with his workers. It was like a husband and wife deciding it was better to live together in hatred than to have their self-respect and lie in the street. So one morning I awoke to find myself a strike leader without a strike to lead.
But even though we hadn’t achieved our goal of a shorter work week, at least we had shaken Warsaw to its very foundation, and given thousands of workers a sense of revolutionary consciousness.
And it gave an ignorant boy who, once upon a time, had set out for Warsaw to conquer the world, a taste of what he could do.
Chapter 2: How to Become the Czar’s Son-in-Law
As summer dwindled to an end, a familiar pall of fear began to descend upon our village. Soon it would be the fifteenth of September, a date that struck terror even in the breasts of mothers who were still suckling their sons. For on that day, all young men of military age became subject to immediate conscription into the Russian army.
Do I need to paint a picture of what it meant in 1902, particularly for an Orthodox Jew, to be pitchforked into the Czar’s army? Our parents’ terror was due only in part to the knowledge that we would be exposed to the traditional dangers and discomforts of military service, but also that we would be subjected to the mercies and whims of superiors who would as soon torment a Jew as scratch themselves. (Such inconveniences were not exactly unknown, even in Vishigrod, among one’s own, good Polish neighbors.)
But what Jewish parents dreaded most was the prospect, amply shown to be true, of returning soldiers who, within less than four years, would come home coarsened, brutalized, Russianized and with scarcely a spark of human (that is, Jewish) feeling left in them. Thus, every home rang with heated family conferences, all dedicated to the search for some means by which an innocent child could be preserved from the fatal clutches of Vanya’s army.
For the rich, there was no problem: they bought their way out. For the poor, however, there was only one avenue of escape: self-mutilation. And since there were any number of equally frightful possibilities to choose from, long evenings of consultation took place.
My Aunt Tzivia strongly recommended a man who would draw out all my teeth. Feibush, the bath attendant, held that the surest remedy would be for me to blind myself in my right eye, without which one cannot aim a rifle. And my Uncle Yonah, never at a loss, knew a man skilled in the art of severing a tendon at the knee. Had I accepted even half the suggestions offered to me, I should not only have escaped military service, but would have ended up a cripple such as the world had never seen. None of these schemes, I am glad to say, found favor with my parents.
Although no one had bothered to ask me, I hadn’t the slightest intention of maiming myself. In fact, the prospect of becoming the Czar’s eydem oyf kest for three years and eight months did not strike me as the world coming to an end. I hadn’t spent but a short time back in Vishogrod before I became eager for more thrills. I longed only to be sent to the front lines and
earn my share of adventures and medals before it was all over and I was obliged to return to Vishogrod and put the humdrum remainder of my life into some matchmaker’s hands.
When we prepared to leave our home town – I, full of idiot enthusiasm, and my friend since boyhood, Chaim Glasnik, with a prophetically long face – his mother seized my arm in two trembling hands and pleaded with me to stay close to her son so that we might protect each other. She swore that, if anything happened to him, she would not survive him by even one minute. By the time she was done, my eyes were drowning in tears, while Glasnik merely stood to one side squirming, pretending that she was someone else’s mother.
Too tearful to speak, I simply nodded my agreement. When I felt comfortable exercising my voice again, Glasnik and I pledged to each other that, should either one of us not return from the war, we would take each other’s parents into our own home and “honor and support them all the days of their lives.” So inspired were we by our generosity that we went further, adding that, if either of us returned to find ourselves orphaned, “My father will be your father, and my home will be your home, for all the days of your life.”
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