Too Many Men

by Lily Brett

  “Would you live here?” Ruth said. Edek didn’t answer.

  “We are looking for Jews who are already here,” the director said.

  “Where are they?” said Ruth.

  “They do not know they are Jews,” he said.

  “Well, what’s the point of telling them?” Ruth said. “It’s not all that wonderful to be a Jew.”

  “They want to be Jews,” the director said.

  “The ones who don’t know they’re Jewish?” said Ruth.

  “The ones who have already come forward,” he said.

  “Why?” Ruth said. “So they can experience the antagonism and the anti-Semitism that they’re missing out on?”

  “She has got a point,” said Edek.

  “They want to be Jews,” the director said. “Some of them have gone to a lot of trouble to establish that there was Jewish blood in the family.”

  “Don’t they know that Jewish blood is still suspect in Poland?” Ruth said.

  “They know that,” he said. “Some of their families will not admit to any Jewishness.”

  “So they are estranged from their families and living in Poland as Jews?” Ruth said. “That doesn’t sound great.”

  “At least they are not living a lie,” the director said.

  “Lies are not necessarily all that bad,” Ruth said.

  “Now you are being stupid,” said Edek.

  “Why don’t you ship those Poles who are desperate to be Jews off to Israel?” Ruth said to the director.

  “They are not Poles, they are Jews,” he said.

  “Well, still, why don’t you help them to get to Israel?” Ruth said. “Or ask Mr. Lauder to help them get visas to America. No Jew in his right mind would want to stay here.” Ruth shook her head. What was she trying to

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  achieve here? Was she just being argumentative? Taking out her frustra-tions on this poor lone young Jew. Edek shuffled his feet and cleared his throat.

  “I didn’t know I was a Jew myself, until I was a young adult,” the director said.

  Ruth felt bad. “Do you want to stay in Poland?” she said.

  “I hope to go to Israel,” he said. There was an uncomfortable silence.

  “I do not feel so comfortable in Israel myself,” Edek said.

  “That’s a whole other story,” Ruth said to the director.

  “Israel is very important for the Jews,” Edek said. “But for me the Jews what are there are not the same Jews what I grew up with.”

  “The Jews you grew up with are gone,” Ruth said. “Anyway, you don’t like being in crowds of Jews.”

  “That is true,” said Edek. “But I do give money to Israel,” he said to the director, “and so does my daughter.”

  “Having Jews in Poland is a sign that Hitler did not win,” the director said.

  Ruth was speechless. Hitler didn’t win? What would Hitler have had to do to be considered to have won in this man’s eyes? Ruth opened her mouth to reply, but nothing came out. There was too much to say, and the words were all jammed and backed up in her in astonishment at this man’s proposition.

  “I think Hitler did win,” she said quietly. Edek looked at her. She couldn’t tell if he was about to admonish her not to continue this discussion, or whether he was sending her an expression of solidarity. Edek rolled his eyes slightly at her. Ruth was grateful to know that her father agreed with her.

  “Ronald Lauder is restoring synagogues in Poland,” the man said. “He is giving undiscovered Jews back their Judaism. People who did not know they were Jewish now know.”

  “Does it help them?” Ruth said.

  “Of course,” he said.

  “They’re not experiencing any more anti-Semitism as Jews than they did when they thought they were Poles?” she said.

  The man thought for a second. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he said.

  It was absurd to renovate synagogues in Poland, Ruth thought, and think that that was restoring Jewish life. The existence of the synagogues, she thought, underlined the fact that the Poles and the Germans had very T O O M A N Y M E N

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  successfully gotten rid of the Jews. The synagogues stood there alone and unattended except for a handful of mostly elderly people in some of the larger cities. And a stray tourist or two.

  Ruth wanted to leave. The smell of cabbage felt as though it had permeated her skin and her hair and all of the rest of her. She felt that her lungs were expelling the scent of boiled cabbage.

  “Thank you very much for organizing the guide for us,” Ruth said to the director. She put on her coat.

  “Thank you very very much,” Edek said to the director. “I hope that you do manage to get to Israel.”

  “Should I mail you a brochure of our activities here?” the director said to Ruth.

  “Of course,” Ruth said.

  “Send me one, too,” Edek said. He nudged Ruth. “Ruthie, we should leave a donation now. Give the gentleman something.”

  The director looked uncomfortable. “You can send a check when you receive our brochures,” he said.

  “My daughter can give you something now,” Edek said. Ruth opened her wallet and took out a thousand zlotys. Edek looked at the money. “My daughter is a good girl,” he said.

  “Thank you very much,” the director said. They all shook hands.

  “I’m never going to be able to get rid of this cabbage smell,” Ruth said to Edek, on their way down the stairs.

  “It is a terrible bad stink,” Edek said.

  Ruth laughed. “It sure is,” she said.

  “You want something to eat?” Edek said.

  “No, I’m not really hungry,” Ruth said. “That cabbage made me feel sick. It didn’t even smell as though they’d added fried onions or some meat. It smelled like plain boiled cabbage.”

  “I am also not hungry,” Edek said. “When I have a good breakfast I do not need nothing else.”

  “Would you like to stop and have a cup of coffee and a piece of cake?”

  Ruth said.

  “I did tell you I am not hungry,” Edek said.

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  L I L Y B R E T T

  “What about a bowl of soup?” she said.

  “If you have some soup, I will have some soup, too,” Edek said.

  They walked along Zachodnia Street.

  “I think you got a point,” Edek said.

  “About what?” Ruth said.

  “About the spending money to find the Jews what is in Poland,” Edek said. “If they do not know that they are Jewish, how Jewish can they be?”

  “You think people are only what they’re brought up to be?” Ruth said.

  “Of course,” said Edek. “If I was brought up Italian, I would be Italian.”

  “Maybe,” Ruth said.

  “What for do they want to make Jews out of the Poles?” Edek said. “It is not so easy for a Jew to be a good Jew. I do not think it will be so easy for a Pole who thinks he is a Jew, to be a good Jew.”

  “Especially in Poland,” Ruth said.

  “Still, I got conscience bites,” Edek said.

  Ruth loved the phrase “conscience bites.” It was Edek’s own phrase. He had been having conscience bites since Ruth was a small girl.

  “What have you got a bad conscience about?” she said.

  “We was not so nice to the man from the Jewish Center,” Edek said.

  “I wasn’t rude to him,” Ruth said. “I just genuinely wanted to know what they thought they were doing.”

  “Why do you not ask this Mr. Lauder?” Edek said.

  “Ask Ronald Lauder?” Ruth said. “For a start, I don’t know him.”

  “Did you speak to him when you was in his house?” said Edek.

  “For one and a half minutes,” Ruth said. “He greeted all of the guests.

  Anyway, you don’t ask people with his degree of wealth real questions. You try to behave yourse
lf in their houses. Eat the right food with the right piece of cutlery. Be charming, and be glad you were invited so you can tell other people that you were in his house.”

  “You cannot ask a question?” Edek said.

  “You can’t question what they do,” Ruth said. “Your job is not to question them, your job is to admire their acquisitions and achievements. Do you know what acquisitions are?”

  “Of course I know,” said Edek. “Acquisitions is stuff you did buy.”

  “That’s right,” said Ruth.

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  “I would speak to this Mr. Lauder if I was in New York,” Edek said.

  “I’m sure you would,” Ruth said. She shuddered at the thought of what Edek might say to Ronald Lauder.

  “I’d like to walk for a while and see if I can clear some of that boiled cabbage out of my head,” Ruth said.

  “In that case I will go back to the hotel,” Edek said. “I got a couple of phone calls to make.”

  “Who are you going to call?” Ruth said.

  “Stefan,” said Edek.

  “Who is Stefan?” Ruth said.

  “You did ask me just before this same question,” Edek said. “Stefan is the driver what is from Warsaw.”

  “Sorry,” she said, “I forgot. Okay, you call Stefan and see whether he wants to do the job.”

  “I did tell you before that he will do it,” Edek said.

  “You can’t just assume he is available,” Ruth said.

  “You think that Stefan is Mr. Lauder?” Edek said. “Of course Stefan will be available. How many jobs is he going to get like this?”

  “Depends on how many Jews like us keep trekking through Poland,”

  Ruth said.

  “Trekking?” Edek said. “What is trekking?”

  “Trekking is to travel with difficulty,” Ruth said.

  “I did think that you did say that we are drecking through Poland.”

  Dreck was Yiddish for shit. Ruth laughed. “That’s very funny,” she said.

  In a way Edek was right. They were drecking though Poland. Having to deal with a lot of shit.

  “I’ll walk you back to the hotel,” she said to Edek.

  “What for?” he said. “I’ll go back and you walk where you want to walk.”

  “I want to walk past the places where the synagogues used to be,”

  Ruth said.

  “There is nothing there,” said Edek.

  “I know,” said Ruth.

  The map, published by the Our Roots company, that she had of Jewish Lódz before the war was marked with synagogues. Underneath each synagogue was, in brackets, the word “nonexisting.” So the places she wanted

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  to walk by were sites. Former sites of synagogues. There was the site of the Great Synagogue on Zielona Street. The Great Synagogue was considered by some to have been the most impressive synagogue in Poland. She wanted to visit the “nonexisting” synagogues on Wólczanska Street and Wolborska Street. The Nazis had destroyed all the synagogues except one.

  There was one synagogue left in Lódz. A small synagogue at 28 Rewolucji 1905 Street.

  The synagogue at 28 Rewolucji 1905 Street had survived partly because it was used as a storehouse for salt by the Nazis. And also possibly because it was tucked away in a corner at the back of the second of two courtyards.

  And it was very small.

  “You want to walk to something that is not there?” Edek said.

  “Yes, if you insist on putting it that way, that’s what I want to do,” said Ruth.

  “Are you crazy?” said Edek.

  “I hope not,” she said.

  “Is there something left where there was synagogues?” Edek said.

  “Nothing,” Ruth said. “There’s not a trace of the existence of any of the synagogues that are gone.”

  “What are you going to see?” asked Edek.

  “I don’t know,” Ruth said, “Do you want to come with me?”

  “I have to ring Stefan,” Edek said.

  “That’s true, you have to give him some notice,” she said.

  Edek looked at Ruth as though he was examining her for signs of mental deterioration. He was frowning.

  “You do not go to a synagogue what is there,” he said. “You do not go to the synagogues what are in New York, you do not go to the synagogues what are in Melbourne. Why do you go to a synagogue what is not there?”

  Edek had a point, Ruth thought. She was never interested in synagogues. She avoided them. Why was she so drawn to these synagogues? To these absent synagogues.

  “I don’t know why I want to go, Dad,” she said. “I just want to feel the air there. To stand and listen.”

  “To what?” Edek said.

  “To nothing, to my thoughts,” Ruth said.

  “You can listen to your thoughts in a synagogue in New York, or in MelT O O M A N Y M E N

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  bourne,” Edek said. “Or you can listen to your thoughts in the hotel room, in Lódz.”

  She was not interested in the Jews in New York, she thought. Or in the Jews of Melbourne. It was just the Jews of Poland. The dead Jews.

  “You do not like so much the Jews what are alive,” Edek said.

  “I’ve got nothing against them,” Ruth said. “I don’t dislike them. Some of my best friends are Jewish,” she said, and laughed out loud at the cliché.

  Edek didn’t laugh.

  “This trip is too much for you,” he said. “You was worried about me being in Poland. I am fine. You are not so fine.”

  Was there really something wrong with aligning herself with dead Jews?

  Ruth wondered. She felt most at home with the dead Jews. The dead Jews were her Jews. Her family. She understood their suffering. She mourned for them and their way of life. She tried to re-create some aspects of the life she imagined they had led in her own life. When she ate sauerkraut she pretended that it was straight out of a barrel, preserved and marinated for the winter in a basement in Lódz. She bought cans of sauerkraut and repackaged it in bottling jars with rubber bands and vacuum-sealed lids. She bought rye bread in Dean & Deluca on Broadway, and let it go stale in her kitchen. When it was hard and brittle enough she ate it. Edek had told her that in the ghetto stale bread was prized far more than fresher bread. The stale bread took longer to chew.

  Rooshka could never throw bread out. She kept uneaten bread for weeks. Eventually Edek or Ruth would throw out the moldy crusts and ends and slices that Rooshka had accumulated. Rooshka had lived for too long without bread to be able to discard any. Bread had meant the difference between life and death.

  “Let me walk you back to the hotel,” Ruth said to Edek again.

  “I don’t need someone to look after me,” he said. “You are the one who should be careful.”

  “Are you sure you know the way?” she said.

  “I am in Lódz,” he said. “I know the way.”

  Ruth kissed Edek good-bye. “I’ll be back well before we have to leave for the cemetery,” she said.

  “We have to go to the cemetery?” he said.

  “I think you’ll love it,” she said. “It’s the biggest Jewish cemetery in

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  Europe. It’s where the Jews are.” The Jews Ruth was referring to were the Jews of Lódz who were lucky enough to be buried in the cemetery on Bracka Street. The Jews who were lucky enough to die before they were murdered.

  “It is where the dead Jews are,” Edek said.

  “The dead Jews are the only Jews in Lódz,” Ruth said. “So we have to visit them.”

  She was looking forward to going to the cemetery. She planned to get back to the hotel in enough time to change her clothes and freshen up. She felt as though she was planning a visit to the home of relatives. This cemetery was probably the closest she would get to feeling surrounded by relatives, she realized. She
wished that the dead were not quite so dead. She also wished that the dead were not quite so alive to her. She thought that dead people should feel more dead.

  Ruth kissed Edek good-bye again. She watched him walk away. His hands were in his pockets. And he was looking at the ground. He was walking quite slowly. He looked so alone, in the street. As alone as a small child.

  Ruth started to cry. She had to pull herself together, she thought. She couldn’t walk through the streets of Lódz in tears. She wanted to look tough in Lódz. A tough Jew.

  A greasy-looking man wearing a leather jacket and torn jeans leered at her. Ruth glared at him. He made a series of kissing noises at her. She glared at him again. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t feel scared. It was in the middle of the day. But there were not many people around and a lot of dark doorways. It was strange that she felt less frightened in Lódz than she did in most places. She was always careful in New York, despite the dramatic drop in the city’s crime rate. She always triple-bolted her apartment and armed her security system. But here in Lódz, she felt free of that fear. The man started making hissing noises at her. She decided she had better get a move on. She sped up. “Asshole,” she shouted back at the man. What was she doing, shouting at dodgy-looking men in the street? She was losing her grip. This trip had unhinged her, she thought.

  Ruth walked briskly. She felt good walking. She had skipped her run too many of the mornings she had been in Poland. Skipped her run. That was a pun. She smiled to herself.

  Some of the most beautiful buildings in Lódz, possibly the only beauti-T O O M A N Y M E N

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  ful buildings in Lódz, were built by Jews. Ruth was outside the Poznanski Palace at 17 Ogrodowa Street. Israel Poznanski was one of the greatest industrialists in Poland. He had built this palace in the early 1880s. Ruth liked the palace. It was impressive without being overly ornamental. It was one of four palaces built by Israel Poznanski. It was very large. Or was it? It seemed large to Ruth but then she didn’t know much about the sizes of palaces. She had no idea how big the average palace was.

  Ruth had wanted to call Martina Schmidt that morning. Martina had probably already left for Berlin. It was strange how you could become attached to a stranger. It was probably easier to form an instant attachment to someone you didn’t know, Ruth thought. You weren’t hindered by who the person really was. Strangers were probably comprised of more of your own making and less of themselves. Maybe she and Martina Schmidt really had very little in common. That thought seemed to soothe her. She had inadvertently slowed down. She picked up her pace. This exploration of Lódz might as well double as exercise, she thought.