“Well, it’s gorgeous,” Ellen said, looking around. “The sign outside says it’s a museum. It’s not used for worship anymore?”
The woman eyed Ellen carefully and shook her head no. “During the war, the Nazis used it as a warehouse. Later it was torn apart and looted.”
Ellen found the woman’s calm demeanor jarring. “Really?” she said, unable to think of a fitting response. She noticed that in various places the whitewashed walls had been gouged, exposing the brick beneath.
“Eventually, the building was restored and became a museum,” the woman continued. She motioned for Ellen to follow her as she walked toward the birdcage structure. “Please,” she said when Ellen hesitated. “This is the bimah.” Again, she gave Ellen a careful look. “That is the Hebrew word for the platform used for ritual observance and for reading from the Torah. Over there, on the eastern side of the room, facing Jerusalem, is the original Aron Kodesh, or the Ark of the Covenant, the ornamented cupboard where the Torah scrolls are kept. That wall,” she said, pointing to grilled windows on the entry side of the room, “is the mechitzah, the divider between the men and women’s sections. As you can see, the eternal light is located above the Aron Kodesh.” Her tone remained polite but distant. She paused, as if testing for some reaction.
But Ellen, utterly unfamiliar with the terms the woman was using for the ceremonial objects in the sanctuary, could only comment on their beauty.
“Over there, to the side of the Aron Kodesh, is a chapel that also served as a kiddush room.”
Ellen noticed the woman did not translate this word, and she was embarrassed to ask what it meant.
“Today, the kiddush room is used to display Jewish artifacts. For example, there are silver cups that used to contain salt for sanctifying the bread before a meal. In the next room,” she continued briskly, “we have many ritual objects and Jewish decorative art on display.” Again, she assumed her cupped hands position. “I think it is unfortunate, really, that we have placed them under glass,” she said, almost confidentially. “When the Nazis planned their Museum of the Extinct Jewish Race in Prague, this is exactly how they intended to display Torahs, kiddush cups, and prayer shawls. Under glass.”
Ellen’s skin crawled. “A Museum of the Extinct Jewish Race?”
“Yes.” The woman’s expression did not change.
The whole hushed, whitewashed atmosphere of the synagogue now gave Ellen the chilling impression that Jews were extinct. “How long have you worked at the museum?” she asked, assuming now that the woman was a docent.
“I don’t work here, but I am from Kraków,” the woman said. “Today I am leading a group from Canada. They should be here any minute. I only thought you might be interested in more information about...our past.”
Ellen realized she had just been asked if she was Jewish. She smiled awkwardly, troubled that the woman had not felt she could be direct. “I appreciate it. Thanks,” she said.
“Not at all. Forgive me, but you are what my father, of blessed memory, would call a shayna maidel.” She smiled, more warmly.
Ellen remembered her grandma Sadie calling her that—a beautiful girl. But now the words made her feel odd, somewhat exposed actually, as if the genetic Jewish remnant that linked her to Poland was so obvious, like a naked body through a sheer dress.
“I always think of my father when I come to this shul, this synagogue,” the woman continued. “He used to daven, to pray, here. Now I give people tours in his name.”
Ellen shivered, remembering how her father had told her he’d prayed in Zokof’s cemetery, for Rafael’s sake. She felt tears coming on again. Uncertain of her ability to maintain her composure, she walked over to the Aron Kodesh. In front of it was the biggest menorah she had ever seen. She forced herself to focus on the eagle that stood poised at its center, its powerful spread wings conveying to her a disturbingly misplaced sense of entrenchment and authority.
A group of English speaking people threw open the door of the synagogue. The woman smiled. “Those must be my Canadians. There is an upstairs exhibit. You must see it before you go.”
“I will,” Ellen promised. “Thanks again.”
The woman nodded graciously.
Ellen moved on to the adjoining room, where she admired the engraved ritual cups, the collection of old Torahs, the pointers and shofars. Although she wasn’t exactly sure how they were used, she was impressed that these objects represented the work of hundreds of hands over hundreds of years.
In the upstairs gallery that the woman had said she must see was a horrifying display of Holocaust photographs. Ellen was unprepared for this. So much so, she was tempted to leave, angry somehow at not having been warned.
But a large picture of a pretty young woman, about her own age, with a stylish pageboy caught her eye. The photograph had been taken in the midst of chaos in Szeroka Square. What Ellen found most disturbing about it was that the young woman, clutching a bundle to her chest and clearly frightened, was wearing beautiful black suede pumps. The shoes, so like a pair she’d once rescued from her mother’s Goodwill pile, drew her into the room.
She approached the photograph, curious to know where the young woman had walked after it had been taken, where she’d slept that night, and what had happened to her, and to the shoes. Her jaw ached. She realized she was grinding her teeth.
After several minutes, she moved on to the next photograph, identified as having been taken at the Podgórski Market in Kraków. In this, and in every photograph after it, she found the odd human details the most painful—the bent old man hiding a handful of bread and a pair of scissors, the woman on Krakowska Street who had chosen to take only an empty bookshelf into the ghetto, the child with the adultsize hat covering most of his face, with only one weary eye staring into the camera.
When at last she arrived at the end of the exhibit, Ellen felt the need to place her hands against the sturdy walls of the synagogue and to offer comfort. She was keenly aware of the presumptuous grandiosity of this gesture, that she was not the kind of Jew who would make the former congregants of this synagogue feel secure about the future of their faith. But she felt a powerful impulse to comfort them, to assure them they at least had descendants.
She thought of Marek, of how much she wanted to talk to him about this place, until she realized he wouldn’t have had much patience with her being so upset. Marek, who had no use for Jews who came to Poland to cry. This incensed her. How dare he pretend he could love Jewish music without loving the people who wrote it? Ellen’s legs shook as she descended the stairs. She held tight to the banister, alarmed at the intensity of her own fury.
As she left the Old Synagogue a few minutes later, a mass of sparrows took off from the roofs into the now-gray but rainless sky, as if swept away by an impatient arm. She stopped and watched them scatter, still waiting for her legs to steady.
She heard a tune, the “For-a-GirlTune,” but slightly different than Marek’s, coming from a battered brick building at the other end of the square. She began to walk toward it, her pace quickening every few steps, until she was practically running. She passed several people, but no one seemed to notice the music.
The tune brought her to a tiny bookstore behind an arched stone doorway, then faded away. Above the shop, she thought she recognized the window where the old woman in her dream had sat.
The shop was empty of customers. Its proprietor was arranging books on a long table.
“Were you just playing some music?” she asked.
The man, shabbily dressed, looked at her questioningly over his bifocals. “This isn’t a music store,” he said in Polish-accented English. “We have books here.”
“But did you hear music playing in the square?” Ellen persisted.
He looked at her but didn’t respond.
Embarrassed and confused, Ellen scanned the titles on the long table. They were mostly in Polish and English. A few had Hebrew writing, maybe Yiddish, she wasn’t sure. She picked up a book of Y
iddish proverbs, one about Kazimierz, and another about the synagogues and Jewish cemeteries of Poland. By the time she left the bookshop, with an uncomfortable good bye to the owner, she had purchased a small library of Holocaust literature as well.
That evening, in her room, she didn’t give a single tormented thought to her choreography, or to Marek. She called downstairs and made arrangements through the hotel concierge for a driver to Zokof. Fired by her experience at the Old Synagogue, she opened one of the new books and began to read the chapter titled “The Zenith of Polish Jewry (1556α648)”:
The royal authority, weakened by conflicts with the gentry, could not always prevent the hostile legislation of the city magistracies. Thus at Posen the limits of the ghetto were strictly defined; only forty-nine houses were allowed to the Jews, so that it became necessary to raise the height of many dwellings by additional stories. The magistracy of Warsaw refused to admit Jewish settlers, and Jewish merchants, visiting the city on business, could not tarry longer than two or three days.
The warfare of the Catholic clergy against Reformers and Anti-Trinitarians, led by the bigoted Nuncio Ludovico Lippomano, incidentally resulted in turning the battle against the Jews. The usual weapon was seized upon. A rumor was set afloat that Jews of Sochaczev had procured a sacred wafer and desecrated it by stabbing it until it bled. Before the king could intervene, three Jews and their supposed accomplice, a Christian woman, were burned at the stake. The Jewish martyrs stoutly professed their innocence, protesting that the Jews do not believe that the host is the divine body nor that God has either body or blood (1556).
Ellen put down the book and stared at the wall, stunned by the thought that Jewish ghettos had existed in Poland so long before the Nazis. As for desecrating the host, she couldn’t understand what this was all about. That Jews could be killed for a Christian ritual that had no meaning to them seemed to her more a sign of a Christian need to assert power and dominion. But to what end she could not imagine. Why did they care so much about Jews? Why go through such irrational religious posturing? This bothered her so much, she found it difficult to fall asleep. People who don’t think things through logically are dangerous, her father always said.
“Dad, I miss you,” she whispered.
In the night I came to her, covered with my plaid blanket. I sat in the big chair by her bed, like a living person; and knew I had to speak to her, to strengthen her nerve.
“My eyesight is not so good,” I began. “These days, twos and threes I see of everything. But a shayna maidel, a beautiful girl, I can recognize.” My voice was not my own, a clatter of high and low pitches, but I thought she could hear me. She had opened her eyes.
I pointed at the book of history on the table by her bed, the one she had been reading. “A lot of narrishkeit the goyim have said about us,” I told her. “No one can deny it. But, shayna, better you should fill your head with the words of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, than your heart with such an anger. Rabbi Nachman said you should put your anger in your pocket and take it out only when you need it. What do you need with such anger? All of life is a struggle. So?”
She was looking at me, a little bewildered, I thought. “I am here,” I said. “Yes, your eyes do not trick you.” She said nothing. I suggested it wouldn’t hurt that she study a little Talmud and Torah, like I did at my father’s knee, may the Almighty preserve his name.
She seemed to smile. “My father studied with me,” she said in a child’s voice, not her own.
But I did not care to speak of Nathan Linden, who had betrayed my trust.
“I understand,” I said. “A terrible loss, your father.”
“Can you talk to him?” Again, the child’s voice. The girl could break my heart.
“Talk to him? I am talking to you. That is all I can do.”
But I could not ignore her obvious unhappiness at my answer. “Your father is not here,” I explained. “Maybe others are together, but I am alone. That is my share.”
“You never see anyone else?” she asked, not without sympathy.
“Once,” I told her. “My father came to tell me I should be vigilant.” I did not know what more to tell her than this. “Stop torturing yourself already,” I said. “I saw you at the shul. That girl with the shoes. I saw.”
She looked off, sad but thoughtful.
I wanted she should understand me. I said, “Who knows, even when life is past us, what it was God intended? I myself might have been a mother in my lifetime. I took my regret at my childlessness with me to the grave. And yet, had I children, as God had commanded, the Smoke and Fire would have been their fate. That girl with the shoes could have been my yiches, my legacy. What am I to think of this? I will tell you. I think at the end of tragedy, there is a story, and a story needs a storyteller. Maybe someone like you, from the outside, can tell it best.”
Her mind was elsewhere, I could tell. I said, “He’s a langer loksh, this Marek of yours.”
“What?” she said.
Now I had her attention. “A long noodle, what we call a tall, thin person. But I will admit this is a good looking boy, a kind face. About him you shouldn’t worry. Of course, it would be better for us both if he was frum.”
“Frum?”
She never heard this word? What kind of Jewish girl does not know even that much? “Frum, what you call observant, religious,” I said.
She seemed to understand me. I said, “Also with your grandfather I had this problem, to find a frummer mensch to take him under his wing. I said then, and I say now, if you can’t have both, take the mensch. This boy Marek is a mensch, like Hillel was a mensch.” I gave her a nod. “Another day he’ll take you to Zokof,” I said. But she stopped me there.
“Were you the one who sang the tune to Marek?”
It seemed she did not know what was what at all. I tried not to worry myself. I said, “I sing the tune always. Your langer loksh heard it, that is all.”
“But why a tune, why not speak to him?” she insisted.
“With what word, what language?” I asked her. “Polish? Jewish? A tune everyone understands. A tune is like the apple your old bubbe cut for you in pieces just the size of your mouth. It makes you cry, because she is gone and you miss her.”
I gave her time to think about this. “A tune touches the heart.” I put my hand to where my breast had once been flesh. The lantern appeared between us. Its brightness grew, until the white light blotted us out to each other. I knew she was trying to see my face again, to look around the light. But it was impossible. I was being drawn back into the blue.
Quick, a last word, I thought. “Ellen, you should understand, before the Smoke and Fire most of the Jewish people in the world lived in this country.” My voice sounded thick to me now. It echoed in the room.
She looked alarmed. I wanted to calm her, but I did not know how much longer I would be able to remain with her.
Ellen awoke with a start and lay rigid for some time. She had had a dream, that much she knew. There was a voice, a woman, or an idea of a woman in a blanket. There had been conversation, snatches of which she began to recall. She was sure Freidl, the gravestone Freidl, was the woman. But she couldn’t piece it together. In frustration, she half rose and reached for the telephone to call her father. When she remembered that he too was gone, she rolled over and wept.
31
AT NINE THE NEXT MORNING, A MIDDLE AGED MAN WITH A RECEDED chin and a sallow complexion introduced himself to Ellen in the hotel lobby. “I am Krzysztof, your driver,” he said. He pointed to the small Renault outside the window, as if to offer proof of his profession.
She shook his hand, told him she appreciated his being on time, having by now observed that punctuality was not a Polish trait, and asked him a few questions about the route to Zokof. “I need to be back here by late afternoon,” she said, heeding her mother’s warning to leave the town before dark. “No problem,” Krzysztof assured her. Ellen wondered why Europeans found this phrase so attractive.
> She slipped into the front seat of the Renault. Within ten minutes they were out of the city. The light-green hills and meadows, the scattered, sunken thatched huts, would have enchanted her had the car not been permeated with the sour smell of Polish cigarettes and Krzysztof’s sweat. She rolled down her window. There was no point in trying to make conversation. It had soon become apparent that Krzysztof’s English was limited, and in any case, he seemed rather withdrawn.
Squinting into the wind, she remembered Freidl’s advice not to focus so much on the Smoke and Fire, but she couldn’t resist imagining Nazis streaming across the sunny striped fields. The phrase Smoke and Fire lent her a comfortable sense of insulation between the past and the bright, normal looking present.
Twenty minutes after they’d passed the tall cement high-rises of Radom, the sight of Zokof township’s black-and-white road sign made her nervous to be entering her grandfather’s hometown and finally meeting Rafael.
When they arrived minutes later, Zokof was not the charming hamlet she had hoped for. Even the onion dome and the long, graceful spire of the church on the town square could not soften the dilapidated impression made by the surrounding uncut, haphazard grass and the cement apartment buildings, with their raggedy laundry hanging from the balconies. She wondered if the town had been this depressing in her grandfather’s day.
Krzysztof parked in front of a pharmacy on the square. Ellen pulled her bulky backpack onto her shoulder and then unfolded the rough map to Rafael’s house that her father had sent her the week before he died. “I don’t know how long I’ll be,” she said as she got out of the car. Krzysztof nodded with the amiable indifference of a man whose services had been hired for the day.
Her English attracted the attention of one of the pharmacy’s customers, an ill shaven man in a threadbare jacket, who came outside, right up to the car’s front bumper, to stare at the newcomers. Ellen evaded him, but as she proceeded around the square, she became increasingly aware of other people’s stares—some sidelong, others with a certain lack of expression, which, to her, seemed excessively cold. She remembered how she had mocked her father when he had told her how in China, surrounded by hundreds of people craning to see his Occidental face, he had not experienced the sense of threat he’d felt in Zokof.
A Day of Small Beginnings Page 27