Just outside the city, Tadeusz slowed to avoid a farmer in a horse-drawn wooden wagon. But for the rubber tires, Nathan thought, the wagons probably looked much the same in Pop’s day. He again wondered anxiously about Zokof. As long as he could remember, the town had stood between him and Pop in a way that seemed different from other immigrant fathers and their sons. Other fathers placed proud hands on their American sons’ shoulders and enchanted them with stories of hometowns whose names stuck in the throat. These men didn’t become enraged at the mention of Poland, as Pop did.
It wasn’t that Pop was cold or unloving. But Nathan always knew that some part of him was so distracted he couldn’t seem to pay sufficient attention to America. And that distraction was felt most deeply by Nathan, his American son. It made him feel helpless and invisible. As a boy, he’d tried to get Pop’s attention by working to make the highest grades in his class. He’d even made president of the debate club, shy as he was. But his successes never made much of an impression. Long after Nathan had become an internationally acclaimed professor of constitutional law at Harvard, Pop still referred to him as “mine son the meshuggener law teacher.” When Nathan received a MacArthur Grant he’d said, “Feh! We had plenty of hair-splitters like you in Zokof. Teachers and rabbis, a choleria on them all! Not one knows from how to earn an honest day’s living.”
Nathan had gulped with humiliation and fury. He hadn’t even bothered to tell his father that the grant came with a significant monetary award. “How can you compare me to a rabbi?” he’d snapped, blaming Zokof for his father’s peculiar craziness.
But other times, Pop’s passion about his hometown invited Nathan to come a little closer. In those magical, suspended encounters, the boy’s questions and the father’s answers felt like a tentative embrace.
“What was it like there in Poland?” the boy, Nathan, would begin.
“Slavery. It was slavery.”
“Tell me about your town, Pop.”
“What’s to tell? It was a town. A few people, some buildings, the dogs the Polacks set on us. It was a town from nothing. A town you should never have to see. That’s all I know.”
“Did you have enough to eat there?”
“Eat? Bread and onions we ate. Soup.”
“Chicken soup, like Mom makes?”
“Agh! What are you talking? If a poor man ate chicken in Zokof, one of them must have been sick.”
“How was it when you came to America?”
“It was slavery.”
“But better than Poland, right? In America, you had freedom.”
“In America, Rockefeller has freedom. A worker like me has slavery. Capitalism is capitalism the whole world around,” Pop would instruct with a twisted smile and a gentle, almost rabbinical wave of his hand that seemed intended, to young Nathan, as a gesture of fatherly love.
They were heading southeast on a two-lane highway out of Warsaw. “Are you from the Big Apple?” Tadeusz asked, lighting the first of a chain of cigarettes in a hand-cupping, one-eye-squinting, Marlboro Man style.
“I’m from Cambridge, Massachusetts,” Nathan said, sniffing, irked by Tadeusz’s slang because it reminded him that he could not converse without embarrassment in a foreign language. He smoothed his hair and caught sight of Tadeusz studying him in the rearview mirror. “What part of the country are you from?” Nathan said mildly.
“My family is near Katowice.”
“What do they do there?”
“They’re farmers, since the time of King Zygmunt II. You know, the great Polish king?”
Nathan stroked his chin thoughtfully and nodded, although he hadn’t any idea of what King Zygmunt II’s claim to fame had been. “What brought you to Warsaw?”
Tadeusz hissed a mouthful of smoke from between his teeth. “I wanted an education, to be a civil engineer. So my father let me go.”
“He didn’t want you to be a farmer like him?”
Tadeusz turned and gave Nathan a smile. “No. He said, ‘Get educated.’ He used to read books he took from a man he worked for. He didn’t want me to sneak around like that.”
Nathan gazed at a couple of black-and-white cows grazing in a field and thought it refreshing to hear of a farmer who hadn’t been afraid to embrace his son’s intellect.
“My father says sneaking is for Gypsies and Jews.”
Nathan’s hand dropped stiffly onto the door handle as if it had been knocked from his chin.
“But I don’t know Jews,” Tadeusz continued matter-of-factly. “There aren’t many of them anymore. At least, not ones who call themselves Jews.”
Nathan coughed nervously but couldn’t resist asking, “What else would they call themselves?”
“They hide, like they did in the war. We don’t know how many there really are. There could be thousands, maybe even millions. Our parents say they recognize them. A lot of them are in the Party, the Communist Party, yes? But mostly they’re capitalists. My father always said, the Poles own the land but the Jews own the houses. It’s a shame, really, but we never mixed well.”
Nathan stared at the back of Tadeusz’s head, stupefied, unsure how to, or even if he should, argue. The opinions being offered as fact were like deadly viruses that would simply mutate if he revealed himself as a Jew. He thought briefly of Załuski and said nothing.
“There’s a lot of strange stories the old people tell about Jews,” Tadeusz said, apparently oblivious to Nathan’s discomfort. “My grandmother used to say they killed Christian children for their Easter bread.”
“Jews don’t kill Christian children,” Nathan said, hoping to at least convey annoyance.
Tadeusz turned around and offered him a friendly look. “I don’t say they do. She said it was in their religion. My grandmother said that when the Nazis came to our town, the Jews cried out, ‘Let Christ’s blood fall on our heads and on our sons’ heads,’ and they accepted their punishment.”
Nathan tensed from his neck through his shoulders and down his back. He studied his reflection in the window, disgusted at his gratitude that his looks had always allowed him to hide. He yearned to know the strength of a man who could say to Tadeusz, “Here now, fellow. I am a Jew.”
They were on Highway 7, the road to Radom. Neither driver nor passenger spoke. The flat Polish landscape, with its thin-striped fields of potatoes, cabbage, and corn plowed by horses and men in caps, rolled on mile after mile. In the early morning sun, the soft willows and poplars, forsythia and white-blossomed apple trees that crowded along the unfenced boundaries blew in unison. They passed a group of peasants gathered in the middle of a field. Nathan wondered, as he watched the village priest bless the earth, if the Christians realized they were following an ancient pagan rite.
14
NATHAN! WE ARE HERE! THESE FIELDS WHERE I CROSSED WITH your father on our flight to Radom. Here, we saw Nahum and his horse. There, your father slept beneath the trees and I had a vision of our town, of every man awakening to pray, generations I saw though not, God forgive me, the pogrom they had made in the night. Nathan, look! This is your Zokof!
When at last Tadeusz’s car passed the black-and-white road sign to Zokof, Nathan rolled down the window and craned his neck for a fuller view of the town. The road was lined with willows and apple trees. A warm breeze, laden with the sweet smell of spring grass, rushed into the car and tousled his hair like the fingers of a fond old aunt.
Zokof began with a small white shed and a blue-gray wooden house at the edge of a field. After that, the two-lane highway narrowed to a main street of two- and three-story postwar houses, their casement windows hung with white curtain sheers. Each story, being constructed of different building materials—stone, brick, cinder block, or stucco—gave the impression that these houses had been built over a period of years.
They passed a man in a horse-drawn cart, a couple on foot, a young girl on a bicycle. From the shabbiness of their clothing, Nathan guessed the town had not enjoyed much prosperity in the new capitalist era. Nea
r the main square, the already decaying postwar apartments rose to four stories, their balconies hung with plants and laundry. Tiny automobiles buzzed across the main street from narrow side lanes, but the town did not have a traffic light or even a stop sign.
“Where do you want to park?” Tadeusz asked.
Nathan pointed at the town’s main square, with its war memorial in the center. “Over there.” Decorative black chains trimmed each of the square’s corners, but it seemed uncared-for, no more than a large patch of land cut diagonally with footpaths and dotted with small trees and trodden grass. From the far side of the square, the brick church’s spire, a stiletto point atop an onion bulb, accented the town’s otherwise flat skyline. Nathan wondered what Pop would have recognized about this place.
Tadeusz pulled the car onto the curb and turned off the motor. “Would you like me to come with you, to translate?”
Nathan got out of the car. “Perhaps a little later,” he said, tired of coping with the tension the young man provoked in him. “Why don’t you get an early lunch and meet me back here in an hour.”
“Sure,” said Tadeusz, locking the car door with one hand, searching for the extra pack of cigarettes in his pocket with the other.
Nathan crossed the street to get a closer look at the older buildings that lined the square, all of which had shops at street level. He wondered how much of the town had survived from Pop’s era. At the corner, just before heading down a side street, he glanced back at Tadeusz, leaning against the car fender, smoking with the offhanded assurance of a native son.
For a quarter of an hour he wandered, not knowing what he was looking for. The stares of passersby made him feel his strangeness in their midst. Was it the stranger or the American they saw? he wondered. Or was it the Jew?
He walked on, scanning the street for clues about the past. A crow cawed from a nearby tree, then swooped crazily close to him and flew down a curved lane. The lane, with its low-slung sheds and shacks, was the only one that didn’t conform to the town’s gridlike streets.
Curious, he followed it until he came upon a small wooden house with a weathered, overhung roof. Moss crept unevenly up its unpainted walls, as if nature were already reclaiming it. Above the windows, the remains of a fiery red-orange paint peeled and furled.
A grass-scented breeze again blew against Nathan’s face, surprising him. As he stared at the old house, certain that it dated from Pop’s time, the front door opened. From the shadows of the doorway, a small, thin, quite elderly man slowly stepped out into the late-morning sun. His beard and long hair were the color of smoke, and the deep wrinkles around his enormous sagging eyes framed his face like barbed wire.
Nathan saw the yarmulke and the long gabardine coat. His heart began to hammer. Part of him wanted to draw back, repelled by such an extravagant show of religiosity.
Years ago, the mere sight of his niece, Laura, with a Star of David around her neck had had almost the same effect on him. “Since when have you felt the need to wear your religion around your neck?” he’d admonished her at a family dinner. His sister, Gertie, had given him a murderous look.
“I bought it because I’m proud of being Jewish,” Laura had said, with all the pomposity that adolescence is capable of mustering.
Pop had been there. He’d laughed, cackled actually. “You think the world won’t remind you you’re a Jew?”
“Yeah, sure,” Laura had said, seemingly impervious to the cut. But the next time he’d seen her, the Star of David was gone, although whether it was because of Pop or because she’d found another cause to make her proud of herself, Nathan never knew.
He studied the figure in the doorway. What kind of madman would dress like this in Poland? He was within feet of him now, about to pass by the house, when it occurred to him this might be the only remnant of Pop’s world he would find in Zokof. It was a take-it-or-leave-it opportunity. But if he took it, how could they communicate? If the man spoke to him in Yiddish, he wouldn’t be able to answer, even if he understood.
Then he remembered his regret at not having spoken with the men at the Noyk Synagogue in Warsaw, and in a moment of inspired unselfconsciousness, he said the only word that came to him. “Landsman.”
Because the word, with its connotations of tribal kinsmanship, was such an odd and difficult choice, Nathan pronounced it as softly as a confession. He’d always used a soft voice to dull whatever traces remained of his Brooklyn Jewish accent. Still, he felt out of character, alien to himself for having said it.
The old man regarded him carefully and nodded. Nathan nodded back, his equilibrium off again, as it had been in the lecture hall and in the Holy Cross Church in Warsaw. The man remained rooted to his place in the doorway.
“Bist a Yid? Are you a Jew?” The voice had a gruff quality that suggested impatience.
Nathan cringed at that word, Yid. He could barely stand to answer in the affirmative, to call himself the equivalent of a spic, a nigger, a wop. But the man seemed to require some kind of confirmation before he would go on.
“Yes,” he said tightly. “Do you speak English?”
“A bissel, yeh.”
Nathan was deeply relieved. “That’s wonderful,” he said. “Where did you learn it? Here? I would think German, Russian, perhaps, but not English.”
“I learned what I had to learn,” the old man said impatiently. “We have Voice of America, BBC. I read lots of books, yeh? What else is for me to do? You from America?”
Nathan was glad for the opportunity to explain himself. “Yes, I am,” he said, with unaccustomed eagerness. “I’m a professor of constitutional law at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Actually, I was invited here to lecture at Warsaw University. They gave me a car and a driver so that I could see a little of the country.”
“The government sent you?”
“I’m working with your government to develop a constitution,” Nathan said, surprised that his account seemed to anger the old man.
“Government,” he scoffed. “I have no government. What for did they send you here?”
“They didn’t send me.”
“Then why do you come to a town like this?”
Nathan was taken aback by the man’s coldness, by his suspicion. But then, he had never spoken to a religious Jew before. He’d always assumed such men—other than the violent zealots who lived in Israel’s West Bank settlements—were docile because they kept to themselves, because they never looked up to meet the eyes of strangers. He took this as a sign of weakness, that they must live in fear of the next assault.
“Nu?” the Jew said impatiently.
“I don’t understand.”
“What’s to understand? I asked a simple question. Why have you come here?” The old man glared at him like an angry teacher who had been given the wrong response and resented having to repeat the question.
Nathan’s chest contracted in alarm at the man’s tone, and at his own inability to articulate his thoughts or the seriousness of his purpose, much less to impress the man with his credentials. He gave it another shot. “I thought I’d try to get some feeling of my roots.”
“Feeling? Gottenu! What’s wrong with you? What does feeling got to do with it? Feel you’re a Jew? You’re a Jew or you’re not a Jew. That’s that.”
The old man spoke with such force, Nathan was afraid to question him further. He waited a moment, hoping the man’s anger would abate.
“I suppose I also came to see my father’s birthplace,” he offered.
“Who is your father?”
“Isaac Leiber.”
The old man seemed to take offense. “Isaac? What is Isaac? Itzik!”
“Yes,” Nathan said, recalling the name his mother used when her husband displeased her. “My grandfather was a rag peddler,” he added, frustrated that he didn’t know his own grandfather’s name.
But the old man showed no sign of recognizing the name Leiber, which gave Nathan the numb, disorienting sense that he was an o
rphan, that his lineage began in Brooklyn. “Maybe they were here and you just didn’t know them,” he suggested hopefully. “My father left in 1906, when he was fourteen years old.”
A few crows cawed from a distance. The old man seemed to sag a little. He looked down at his feet and took a deep breath. “I know who was your father. You been to the cemetery?”
Nathan shook his head, no longer knowing what to expect from this man.
“A Jewish grave is a sacred trust,” the old man said. “‘Generation to generation,’ it is written in the holy books. You must honor our cemetery. Come with me.” Stepping from the doorsill, he grabbed Nathan roughly by the forearm and began to lead him out of the alley.
“Where are we going?”
“To visit the graves. That’s what you came here for, isn’t it?”
Nathan wrested his arm from the old man’s tight grip. He resented being made to feel like a truant schoolboy, and he hated cemeteries. He’d never even been back to his father’s grave after the funeral. “Look, I’d rather meet the living than the dead. I’d rather see a bit of the town,” he said.
The old man scowled. “Living? Who’s left living here? They’re all gone. Who’s left is in the cemetery.” He pulled again at Nathan’s arm, but Nathan resisted so much he had to let go.
“Why are you here?” the man demanded. “You want to collect the names of the last Jews of Zokof to give to the government? That’s what they asked you to do?”
“Why would they ask me to do that?”
The old man was simply furious. “To erase us from the ledger, like they erased three million. Don’t you know, Leiber? The Poles are worse than the Germans. They’ve never settled their accounts with us.” He shot Nathan a piercing look and raised his hand to his beard.
Stunned, Nathan watched the fingers, curled and thickened with age and arthritis, disappear into the smoky strands.
A Day of Small Beginnings Page 10