“Then they’d be fools, like your grandfather,” Rafael retorted. “Listen to me, Leiber, pride in piety is a sin in the eyes of God. A Jew’s obligation to his fellow man is higher than his obligation even to God! God is not diminished by your failure to observe His Sabbath or to keep a kosher home. If a man sins against his children, who is made unholy? God?”
“That’s a Jewish belief?” Nathan asked. He’d never given much thought to the relationship a man was supposed to have with God.
Rafael nodded. “There is a proverb. Proverb twenty two. It says, ‘Teach a child in the way he should go, and even when he grows old he will not depart from it.’”
Four or five caws echoed overhead. Rafael stroked his beard. “Mordechai Leiber practiced the worst kind of impiety,” he said. “He made his son hate God. A child learns more from deeds than words.”
“Actually, he made Pop an atheist,” Nathan said.
“Your father was no atheist, Leiber. He was angry. His father was a hypocrite. But he didn’t deny God.”
Nathan was incensed. “How do you know? He was my father. As long as I can remember he always said there is no God.” Of this, he was certain. But he was no longer sure what Pop may have secretly believed. The image of him slumped tearfully at the Seder table haunted him now. He put his finger on the bridge of his nose and adjusted his glasses, trying to ward off the sense that he had been dragged into a slow-motion, underwater world that was fissuring and crumbling the pillars of his life. He opened his mouth and tried to pull more air into his lungs. Deeds, not words, he thought. The word hypocrite kept coming back to him. When he was young, Pop used it so often he’d assumed it was Yiddish.
“What are you, a hypocrite rabbi?” Pop would say when he found the young Nathan lazing around the house on Saturdays.
“What’s wrong with a day of rest?” his son would say, defending himself. “You had one when you were a kid.”
“Rest? What rest? You think my father let me rest on that day? My father dragged me to the shul to sit with the alter kockers with garlic on their breath and chicken bones in their mouths. Even on Yom Kippur they ate the chicken bones.”
“Weren’t they supposed to fast on Yom Kippur, Pop?” Nathan would tease, knowing Pop would go for the bait.
“Of course they were supposed to fast. And the rabbis, the hypocrites, were supposed to love God. They davened plenty. A regular show they made with their praying. But while they were carrying on, they had their hands in hardworking people’s pockets.” Pop would slide his hand into Nathan’s pocket and grab his leg until he screeched, delighted at the unexpected attention. “Took money for schnapps, money to build shuls, to make themselves important. Bah!” And with that, Pop would retrieve his hand, snatch up his newspaper, and drop into the old brown upholstered chair by the window.
The lesson Nathan learned from these encounters was that making fun of rabbis was a sure way to please his father.
“I’m no hypocrite,” Pop had said a few years later, when his wife had insisted Nathan be called to the Torah as a Bar Mitzvah.
“Don’t you argue socialism with me,” she’d said. “This has got nothing to do with you and your ideas. A tradition is a tradition, and I’m not going to be the shame of the whole neighborhood just for Mr. Marx’s sake.”
So week after week Nathan toiled over his Torah portion, without comprehension. To his every question about the text, the sour Rabbi Menken would respond, “Your job is to recite, not interpret.” Filled with a newfound sense of solidarity with his father about rabbis, Nathan had pleaded, “Pop, do I have to become a Bar Mitzvah?”
“It’s important to your mother. So you do it. That’s all,” Pop had answered, cutting short a rebuttal with the flick of his open newspaper.
On the day Nathan was recognized as a man before the whole community, it was Pop’s face he looked for in vain among the congregation as he plodded flawlessly through the Hebrew. But Pop had stayed home in protest, just as he’d promised. “I’m no hypocrite,” he’d said.
Rafael squinted at him. “What do any of us know about what goes on in the privacy of a man’s heart? But one thing I know is your father was a believer. Not because of what he said, but because of what he did.”
“What did he do?” Nathan wanted to know.
“The Jews said that on his last night in Zokof, he scrambled on all fours through this cemetery, in fear for his life. His cries were so terrible they could be heard even by the souls of the dead. Next to the walls that used to surround this cemetery, the souls of suicides and criminals heard him. Itzik’s cries were hard as rock, flint. They lit a holy spark in him.”
“Why did he come here in the first place?” Nathan asked, barely able to contain his shock, to reconcile the boy in the story with the man he’d known all his life, a man who moved with the slowness of pulled dough, a man who avoided the troubles of others if at all possible. This Polish Itzik Leiber and the man he knew as Pop didn’t match.
Rafael held up his hand, signaling that he would not be moved off course. “That holy spark lit Itzik’s way to the grave of a woman named Freidl Alterman, aleha ha sholem—may she rest in peace.” He turned his head and looked off into the cemetery for a moment. “Itzik held on to her gravestone. It was a new one, unsteady in the earth, you understand? And in his terror, it was to God that Itzik the Faithless One turned to plead for mercy.”
Nathan was so overcome with this strange image of Pop that everything slowed. His world became very quiet and heavy. Lifting his hand was an effort; he felt as if he were being carried away, unable to control where the story of his father’s childhood was going, much less what its consequences might mean for him. “Why did he have to plead for mercy?” he asked.
“Because that night he had committed a sin so great he knew he had to repent immediately and with complete sincerity. Without excuse. Without anger at his father or the rabbis.” Rafael brushed some bark from his coat. “The story is told that Itzik the Faithless One prayed so hard for mercy, he pulled Freidl’s stone over. Broke it in two.” Rafael gestured with his hands as if breaking something. “They were after him that night. They chased him all the way here. But she protected him. She scared them away.”
“The menacing old Jewess spirit?”
Rafael nodded. “Freidl. She left her grave for him and became a wandering soul. She knew he needed her, and she, a childless woman, needed him.”
A tractor made its way down the road outside the cemetery.
“But what sin did my father commit?” Nathan asked. He ached with frustration at having to interpret the facts of his father’s life through the superstitious prism of a religious imagination.
He asks what sin his father committed? He knows nothing, the past is blotted out? I flew from tree to tree, upsetting the crows.
17
RAFAEL WAITED FOR THE CAWING BIRDS TO SETTLE. HE SEEMED PERPLEXED by Nathan’s question.”Itzik never told you why he left Poland?”
Nathan shrugged. “I always thought it was because he wanted a better life.” He ran his fingers through his hair, searching for more of an answer. “My father said he’d been like a slave here, that he’d worked sixteen hours a day.”
“Ptuh! That had nothing to do with it. He left because of Jan Nowak.”
Nathan was aghast. “You mean to tell me there really was a Jan Nowak?”
Rafael narrowed his eyes, assessing the effect the name Jan Nowak had had. “Yeh, Leiber, those stories I told you don’t lie. There was a Jan Nowak in our town. The night your father left us, Jan and his wife were in their wagon, on the road where your driver is parked.” Rafael indicated the entrance of the cemetery with his head.
“They saw three of our kinderlach on their way home from cheder, and Jan started in with that crazy laugh of his. The children were so afraid of him they didn’t move. Then it was too late to run. He brought the whip down on their feet to make them jump. His wife yelled he should do it faster, and he did, laughing with the blow
s, I tell you.”
He shook his head with a heavy sadness that made Nathan wonder why in the world this man had remained in Zokof.
“Your father was coming home at that time, and he saw what Jan Nowak was doing to those children. He ran to the wagon, grabbed Jan by the arm—a chutzpah for a skinny stick of a boy when the peasant was two heads taller than him and strong as an ox.”
Nathan flushed, surprised and impressed that daring had once accompanied Pop’s rage. “How can you know that this happened? What proof is there?”
Rafael raised his palms upward and shook them meaningfully. “I know what I know. It’s not often that God intervenes in the lives of men, Leiber. But that night, God intervened. Jan Nowak slipped on a handful of grass and fell from his wagon. His horse went meshuggeh. That’s what killed him. The wagon rolled over his head.”
Nathan could not think of a way he could combat Rafael’s certainty. Instead, he became alarmed. “But the man’s death was an accident, wasn’t it? No one could accuse my father of murder.”
“Ptuh! This is Poland, Leiber! In Poland, a Jew who gets caught in such a business, they call a murderer.”
Horrified, Nathan tried to imagine the scene. “What about the children?”
“The youngest one recognized your father. He called out, ‘It’s Itzik Leiber!’ A terrible mistake. Terrible!” Rafael grimaced. “The wife heard. ‘Itzik Leiber is the devil himself!’ she shouted. What could Itzik do? The Poles would come after him now, not the children. All three kinderlach were holding tight to his legs. ‘Run home safe,’ he told them. But they wouldn’t let go of him. The wife took hold of Jan’s whip. No one waited for the blows. The children ran. Itzik ran. He jumped over the cemetery wall.”
Nathan looked around for a wall, trying to imagine his slow, round Pop jumping over it like a hunted animal. But except for the remnant on which Rafael had sat, there was no wall.
“He crawled on all fours over the graves, until he came to Freidl’s resting place over there.” Rafael pointed. “What made him stop, I’m sure he himself couldn’t have said. He wrapped himself around her gravestone like he was trying to climb into her arms.”
Nathan looked at the pile of stones to which Rafael pointed, intrigued but skeptical. “Couldn’t he just have been out of breath and didn’t know where else to go?”
“Exactly, Leiber. Out of breath,” Rafael commended him, although Nathan didn’t know why.
Rafael placed his hands on his knees, much as Nathan himself placed his hands on a lectern. “In the Torah,” he began, “the word breath is connected with the soul, with God Himself.” He smiled. “You are right. You could say he was out of soul, out of God, when he came to Freidl. He didn’t know where to go. So he stopped.”
Nathan recognized the teacher in Rafael appealing to him. But he couldn’t grasp what he was being expected to learn.
Rafael pouted slightly. “I will admit, it was not such a wonder that her stone fell over when Itzik put his arms around it. A stone, newly unveiled and not so steady in the earth. Of course it fell. Broke in two pieces, as I said.”
Nathan fought not to show his disbelief. “Are you telling me the broken stone is a historical fact?”
“That’s right.” Rafael nodded with satisfaction. “After it broke, the Poles ran from the cemetery. Who knows, maybe they saw a ghost?” His eyes widened with mock amazement, and his laugh was deep, gravelly as his voice, but oddly pleasing.
Nathan smiled, reassured that Rafael’s metaphysical beliefs had limits.
“Later, Itzik crept like a thief back to town. He went to the house of his employer, a rich miller who bought wheat from Jan Nowak. Avrum Kollek was his name.” Rafael shook his head. “Avrum Kollek made your father beg for every zloty he gave him. As if it weren’t a sin to shame the poor.”
Nathan took the studio photograph from his jacket, of his father as a boy. He tried to imagine all this. Begging took a willingness to be vulnerable, an attitude wholly absent in Pop’s familiar defiant expression. Only fear for his family could have made him bend so far against his nature. He looked down at his feet, ashamed for Pop.
A horn blasted twice from outside the cemetery. A moment later, it blasted again, then again.
Rafael looked over in the general direction of the noise. “It is your driver. He wants to go.”
“Well, he’ll have to wait. I’m not ready to go yet.” Nathan was surprised at his own vehemence. They waited for the horn to stop. He could not get it out of his mind that Pop had really crawled on all fours in this cemetery. “You said he begged for money?”
“For his mother, Sarah,” Rafael nodded. “Sarah, mother of Itzik. Strange, no? Another Sarah. Another Itzik. Another sacrificial lamb. Poor woman, half dead already from hunger and overwork. And because of what happened that night, she had to leave Zokof too.”
“With him?”
“No.”
“He left alone?”
Rafael nodded. By then, Nathan’s shoulder muscles were knotted so tightly they were causing him the kind of pain only Marion’s massages could undo. He was gripped by the thought of his father losing his home and his family at the age of fourteen.
Rafael looked toward the car. Nathan looked at the old man’s worn shoes and realized that he needed the ride back to town. He stood up. “I’ll go talk to him.”
“Nah. He’ll wait,” Rafael said brusquely. He picked up a dead leaf and rolled it gently between his fingers. “Sarah left Zokof at dawn. By then, her other children were in danger. In those days, Leiber, Poland wasn’t so bad as Russia. They didn’t push Jews into a Pale of Settlement and let them starve to death. But it was bad enough. It wasn’t safe for her to stay.”
Why the hell didn’t Pop tell me any of this? Nathan wondered. He rolled his shoulders, trying to stretch his tight back muscles. “What about his employer, the miller? Couldn’t he have done something?” he asked irritably.
“I’m coming to that. After he sent Itzik off, Avrum Kollek went to the Russian magistrate and offered him gold, that he should protect the Jews of Zokof. But there were sensitive matters involved with a local nobleman, and the Russian refused to send a detachment of soldiers. The Poles knew what that meant. They made a pogrom like the Jews hadn’t seen for years. For his trouble, Avrum Kollek himself fell under their boots. It took five men at least to hold him down while they pulled out his beard, tied him up like a chicken, and put a trayf sausage in his mouth. They hung him, in front of his daughter, Shuli. Ach! The things that were done here, you don’t know. You can’t imagine.”
Nathan got nauseous. “Did my father know what happened?”
“Nah, not until later. He heard there was trouble when he was already in Radom. How many details he got, I don’t know. All night he’d been walking, hiding in ditches along the road, sleeping through the morning with his head on the bundle his mother, may she rest in peace, packed for him. In his pocket he had a red ribbon his sister Hindeleh gave him from her hair.”
This last bit of information startled Nathan. “I found a ribbon in the strongbox where my father kept all his important papers. It was tied around the photograph I just showed you. It was more pink than red. It must have faded. How did you know about that ribbon? How do you know about any of this?”
“There are things I know, Leiber. Let’s leave it like that, for now,” Rafael said.
Overcome, and still grateful for all this information, Nathan was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, for now. “How old was Pop’s sister Hindeleh?” he asked.
“Four. A little beauty. Thick red curls. And her face, a perfect oval. Light-brown eyes.”
“A Modigliani girl.” Nathan blurted one of his pet names for his Ellen.
Rafael shrugged. “The only Leiber who returned to Zokof after the pogrom was Gershom, the eldest boy. But that was years later.”
Nathan stared, literally open-mouthed, at Rafael. “Did you know my father’s brother?”
“Of course I knew hi
m. A sickly man. A bachelor. He showed up around 1930 and went to work for Chaim the Baker’s son. Kept to himself. Slept on the flour sacks at the bakery. Spent all his spare time in shul, though his beard was always covered with flour. The families took turns inviting him to Shabbos dinner.”
This wasn’t enough for Nathan. “What else do you remember about him?”
Rafael brushed a fallen leaf from his shoulder. “It is written, the less a man talks, the nearer he is to holiness. If so, your uncle Gershom was a holy man.” He raised his bushy eyebrows ironically. “He was the last Jewish baker in Zokof. Bread like his will never be made again here—pumpernickel, rye.... Oy, for a taste of one of Gershom’s challahs. The Poles don’t know from making egg bread.”
Nathan vowed he’d find a way to get Rafael a challah. “My father used to say no one in America knows how to make bread either.”
Rafael smiled. A squirrel chattered and scampered through the underbrush.
“You were saying, about Gershom?” Nathan prompted.
“From Gershom we learned what happened to Itzik Leiber’s family.”
“So Gershom was the one who told you what happened to my father that night?” This made sense to Nathan, and he was relieved at the logical explanation.
“Nah, from Gershom I know what happened to Itzik’s family. They went through forests and towns. They hid from the authorities who were looking for Itzik. In Lublin, he said, they went to the Old Cemetery, the one that’s high on the hill. They pushed kvitls under stones around the Seer of Lublin’s grave. You’ve heard of him, maybe. They called him ‘the Iron Head.’”
Nathan shook his head, no.
“They called him that because he had the Gemara, the whole thing, in his head, like an encyclopedia. Gershom wrote the kvitls on thin slips of paper he found along the road, all their prayers for Itzik’s safety, for some shelter and food. About this, he was poetic. He said the kvitls fluttered like butterfly wings until the rain came and pinned them down, erasing the letters drop by drop.”
A Day of Small Beginnings Page 13