Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  ‘I don’t think I find this way of conducting political debates very correct,’ said Pinchas.

  ‘Me neither. I am, as I said, a peaceful man. That’s why I came to apologise again. To Frau Pomeranz and to her lovely daughter.’

  ‘She isn’t my daughter.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Zalman Kamionker and took a hand from his pocket to strike himself on the forehead. ‘Where is my seichel? You’re far too young to have such a grown-up daughter.’

  ‘Il fait des compliments,’ Mimi said, but was still flattered.

  ‘This is our niece,’ Pinchas explained, although strictly speaking it wasn’t true. ‘Fräulein Hinda Meijer from Baden.’

  ‘Fräulein Hinda,’ said Zalman Kamionker. He put a hand on his heart in an old-fashioned gesture and bowed. ‘Will you accept my apology?’

  ‘Nothing happened,’ Hinda said dismissively, feeling her face suddenly becoming very hot. ‘I’m not going to blush,’ she thought. ‘I’m not Arthur.’

  Kamionker seemed not to have noticed anything. He turned to Mimi with the same formal gesture – he had the quality of only ever paying his full attention to one person at a time, as if that person were at that moment the only one in the world – and asked: ‘And you, Frau Pomeranz? Are you moichel too?’

  ‘You tore her dress,’ Aunt Mimi said, trying to look severe.

  ‘It can’t have been a really good stitch.’ The young man laughed, showing big teeth. ‘But never mind. Give me the dress and I’ll do a double cap stitch, an elephant could pull on it and it wouldn’t tear.’

  ‘You’re a tailor?’ Mimi asked with surprise.

  ‘What else?’ said Zalman Kamionker. ‘Did you take me for a street-sweeper?’ He wasn’t very well brought up, that much was clear to Mimi very quickly. If you burst into someone’s house at an impossible time of day when people are having their dinner, and the lady of the house asks you purely out of politeness whether you might perhaps be hungry, you have to say no, even if your stomach is rumbling. You certainly don’t just say thank you, push your cap back on your head and just plonk yourself down at the table. And if you do, then you wait politely until you’re offered something, you don’t just reach into the bread basket and then grab a piece of cold meat before the lady of the house has time to call the maid and set a fourth place.

  But on the other hand, if a young man is hungry . . . And he praised everything, the cold meat and the bread and even the tea, which he sipped in the Russian way through a lump of sugar. He knew himself that he was eating greedily, and apologised for it. ‘The people from my union put together the money for the “Eintracht”. But as for food . . . I’m the ox who’s doing the threshing, and whose mouth has therefore been bound.’ And for a while he said nothing more, although silence, and this was now clear to anyone, was certainly not his way.

  ‘He doesn’t look like a tailor,’ Pinchas thought. ‘Herr Oggenfuss, who lived next door to the Meijers in Endingen, he was a proper tailor, narrow-chested and thin as a reed. This Kamionker is far too strong for the job, his suit fits so tightly over his muscles that you could imagine him as a bricklayer or furniture packer, if they weren’t such goyish professions. And his shirt is a worker’s shirt too, out of that thick, not quite white fabric – what’s it called again? – that farm labourers wear. But one can be mistaken. Perhaps practices are very different where he comes from, over there in the East.’

  ‘He doesn’t really have green eyes,’ Hinda thought. ‘Not in this light. Where did I get that idea? He has brown eyes. Brown with little light specks. Or are they green, in fact? One would have to look at them from close to. He has a little scar on his forehead. Maybe he gets into fights a lot, this peaceful man. No, he has too friendly a face for that. A sweet face. One might imagine . . .’ And then she pulled herself together, sat up quite straight and was fully resolved not to imagine anything at all.

  Mimi saw Hinda looking and looking away and looking again, and was reminded of another young man who had once stood simply outside a door, had just sat down at a table, who had also been hungry and also knew how to talk, someone who even read novels out loud, and in the end it had been nothing but empty words. No, she didn’t like this Zalman Kamionker after all. He just took his knife and cut off a piece of bread for himself! ‘I’m glad you like it,’ she said sharply.

  Pinchas heard the undertone and smiled to himself.

  ‘The smoked meat,’ Zalman Kamionker said, before he had even swallowed down the last mouthful. ‘The smoked meat is excellent. In my country we don’t get things like that any more. When the people come off the boat the first thing they do is to cut off their payos, and the second thing is to forget how to eat respectably. But that’s just how things are in America.’

  ‘America?’ Pinchas said in amazement. ‘But you said . . .’

  ‘I’m an American from Kolomea who speaks German like a Swabian. A muddle, as befits a Jew. A Galician Yankee with an Austrian passport. I only came to New York two years ago. Some people say I’m still a greenhorn.’

  ‘A green what?’

  ‘He does have green eyes,’ thought Hinda.

  ‘A greenhorn is someone who’s only just arrived in America. Who doesn’t yet know his way around. Who thinks there’s money in the street in the golden medina, and you just have to bend down and pick it up. But bending down is the biggest mistake you can make. You have to defend yourself. Hence the union. Hence the Congress.’

  ‘I’m interested in this Congress,’ Pinchas said. ‘You’ll have to tell me more about it. How did you end up there?’ And Zalman Kamionker, who was now full and content, was not the man to need cajoling when offered a challenge such as this.

  So he told them about Kolomea, that little town in the Imperial Crown Land of Galicia, where every second inhabitant was a Jew, where there had even been a Jewish mayor – there had been dancing in the street when Dr Trachtenberg was elected – and where the nationalities were all mixed up together as if in a big pot, the Austrians and the Ukrainians, the Huzules and the gypsies, there were even Tartars, and in Mariahilf the Swabians from whom he had learned his German. He described the chaos of churches and synagogues, where the various religions lived together in a great whole – ‘Although sometimes we had to fight, what are you going to do?’ – where there weren’t even any real tensions after the pogrom in Kiev, which wasn’t all that long ago, where it was only difficult to find a parnassah, unless it was in Simon Heller’s tallis weaving mill, where he too had worked, but not for long – but, he said, that was all part of it, if you wanted to understand why he was no taking part in his Congress.

  Because this man Simon Heller was a Jew, a very pious one, in fact, with a seat right against the eastern wall of the synagogue, but also a capitalist, and therefore paid wages that weren’t real wages but a joke. In the end they had to found a union – ‘not a real union, we didn’t even know what that was’ – and because no one else wanted to do it, they had appointed him, the young Zalman Kamionker, as their spokesman. He had tried to negotiate at first, quite peacefully, but old Heller had had him thrown out of his office, twice and three times, and so in the end they had called their strike, the famous strike of Kolomea, they must have heard of it, even here?

  No, no one here had heard of it.

  ‘That’s how it is,’ said Zalman Kamionker, and laughed, showing his teeth, ‘you think you’re shaking the world, but the world can’t be shaken so easily.’ He was used to talking in front of other people, it was obvious. He had the sort of calm that people only have when they’re sure no one is going to interrupt them.

  They actually won their strike – ‘To tell the truth, we hadn’t really believed we would’ – and old Heller had to grit his teeth and pay every weaver and every tailor a few more Kreuzer for the working day, but they weren’t a real union, not the kind they had in America, everyone thought only of himself, of his own little advantage, and when the strike-leaders were fired a short time later and couldn’t fin
d work anywhere else, no one fought for them. Still – ‘He who has a bad conscience gives tzdoke’ – enough money was raised for a crossing to New York, and eventually he had disembarked in Castle Gardens, a total greenhorn, and had looked for work and found it – ‘You take what you get, what are you supposed to do?’

  So he had – ‘Beggars can’t be choosers’ – learned to sew coats, by hand and with the machine, he had even had a talent for it, but it hadn’t made him rich, he’d come just too late for that. ‘The coat factories all belong to the German Jews who have been in the country already for twenty years; the Russians and the Galicians can only sit at the machines.’

  He was a good storyteller, and when it was already getting dark outside and they had had to call in Regula to light the gas lamps in the room, they were still listening. He told them about the two seasons that existed in the coat-making world, two months of winter in the summer, and one month of summer in winter, and laughed at their uncomprehending faces. ‘In the summer you sew coats for the winter season, two months’ work, that’s when the orders are issued, and the manufacturer doesn’t need any more cutters or stitchers or finishers. When it’s hot, fewer coats are sold, so in the winter there’s only half as much work, and during those three crucial months, two in summer and one in winter, you have to earn enough money to live off for the whole year. But I’m boring you with stories.’

  ‘You’re not boring us at all,’ said Pinchas.

  ‘Not at all,’ thought Hinda.

  ‘So they had founded a union in New York as well, but this time a real one, the Jewish Cloak Workers Union, and because all the stitchers were in it, whether they wanted to be or not – ‘We weren’t friendly to scabs!’ – because everyone was pulling together, they didn’t even have to strike, just threaten to strike – ‘which I preferred, I’m a peaceful person.’ Because of his experiences in Kolomea he was elected onto the committee, and then when the International Socialist Workers’ Conference was called in Zurich, the Jewish cloak makers had chosen him as their delegate. They were proud because of their victory, and they wanted to have a say. ‘I didn’t push to come,’ said Zalman Kamionker, ‘but what are you going to do?’

  Pinchas nodded. The community kept making similar demands on him.

  The Congress itself, Kamionker said, getting more and more into his swing, the whole event so far had been a big disappointment. Even the room where they met was far too elegant. As solemn as a church. There was even an organ on the stage – ‘What do we need an organ for? Have we come to pray?’ Although on the walls in sixteen different languages – ‘Even in Yiddish!’ – was the motto of the proletarians of the world about how they should unite, ‘but they don’t want to unite, they just want to be right, each one individually, like in a little shtetl, where there are three different prayer rooms and each one has a different minhag, and each one is broyges with all the others, and even if Khmelnitzky in person came riding in with his Cossacks, they would all go on arguing, instead of pulling together and defending themselves.’

  The German delegates above all, Kamionker said contemptuously, had nothing in their heads but debates about first principles and amendments to the rules of procedure. For a whole day, and this was just one example among many, for a whole long day they had argued only about the admission of delegates, who they wanted to have there and who not, and in the end only the majority socialists had been allowed to stay, the decent, orderly ones, and the independents, who were all a bit meshuga, but who at least wanted to do something – ‘There don’t need to be barricades in all the streets’ – had been sent home, as had the anarchists. But they wouldn’t accept it, so the first fights of the Congress had broken out, and they hadn’t been the last. ‘They could ban them from the big hall, but the Palm Garden is a public place, they’re still sitting there every day.’

  Meanwhile everything at the Congress was running like clockwork, but it was a soup without pepper, they all delivered their well-phrased speeches and applauded one another, they had even taken – ‘Typical!’ – the big cowbell from the chairman, the one he had had the beginning, to drown out any dissent, and instead given him a delicate little bell that tinkled so delicately that no one could hear it, and the whole Congress was like that! Now the only people who had the floor were the ones who always had the same opinion anyway and admired one another; if Friedrich Engels walked past – yes, he was there too – they were inches away from falling on their knees and crossing themselves like goyim when they carry the Yossel Pendrik through the streets on his cross. Engels, of all people, who was a manufacturer and not even a worker! And anyway, if you asked him, they were none of them socialists anyway, they were all bourgeois in disguise, who wouldn’t last a season in New York, twelve or fourteen hours at the sewing machine and then a mattress that you had to share with two others in shifts! August Bebel even had a villa on Lake Zurich! Need he say more? With gas heating!

  Nothing would come out of this Congress, said Zalmon Kamionker, nothing at all, apart from a pile of resolutions and decisions. All just paper. ‘You are a shochet, Herr Pomeranz, are you not? If you go to the slaughterhouse and stand beside a cow and say, “Dear cow, we have democratically decided that you are to give up your meat for the Shabbos roast” – will you then have anything to eat? Will you hell! You have to take the knife and slaughter the cow, it’s the only way. I am a peaceful man, but all that talking brings up my bile!’

  ‘When he gets worked up, there’s something of the hero about him,’ thought Hinda. And she had never thought before about what a hero might look like.

  ‘What I’d really like to do is let the Congress be the Congress. But that wouldn’t be the decent thing. I’ve been sent here at great expense, so I sit on my seat every day. I listen to the speeches, and they go in one ear and out the other. If someone has any money, I allow him to buy me a beer . . .’

  ‘And then do you fight there?’ It wasn’t a reproach, just something that interested Pinchas.

  ‘What are you going to do? For example today—’

  But he didn’t get round to saying what had happened today, because the Neuenberg clock that hung on the wall beside the misrach panel was already striking half past nine. Zalman Kamionker glanced at the fine timepiece, not because he was shocked by the lateness of the hour, just matter-of-factly, as if he wanted to buy the clock – ‘Or steal it,’ thought Hinda – and quickly stuffed another slice of smoked meat in his mouth, he really did have no manners, wiped his moustache, just like that, with the back of his hand, even though there was a napkin beside his plate, and explained, as he got up, that the door of the ‘Eintracht’ was unfortunately open only until ten o’clock; and that if you wanted to get into the dormitory after that you had to pay five rappen key money. He thanked them for the food, not extravagantly, but with a certain formality, a guest of state who knows the importance of etiquette, even though he is entitled to the most generous hospitality, and then said to Pinchas, ‘If you’re really interested in the Congress, I’m happy to give you a guided tour. The session doesn’t start till two the day after tomorrow. The committees meet in the morning and decide what’s to be voted on in the afternoon. Most delegates will be there at about twelve. We can meet in the Palm Garden if you like, and I’d like you to meet a few people.’

  ‘That would be very kind of you.’

  ‘I even know which delegates I have to introduce you to. You’ll have loads to talk about, since you’re a shochet. Dr Stern from Stuttgart.’

  ‘Is he a Jew as well?’

  Kamionker spread his arms and moved his torso back and forth as if trying to keep his balance on a narrow plank. ‘Ask him yourself,’ he said. ‘He will give you such a thorough answer that you won’t get a word in for an hour. He likes the sound of his own voice.’

  He turned to the two women and held out his hand to them. ‘So, Fräulein Hinda Meijer, are you moichel?’

  ‘If it matters so much to you.’

  ‘It matters a great dea
l.’

  ‘Well then, if you wish.’

  ‘Fine, then that’s everything sorted out.’ He took Hinda’s hand and held it tightly for a long time. And then, before he let go of it again, he said quite surprisingly, ‘Yis’chadesh!’, the blessing for a new dress or a new flat, which seemed totally out of place.

  ‘And you, Frau Pomeranz?’

  ‘Alors je vous pardonne.’

  Kamionker laughed at Mimi – an impudent laugh, in fact – and said, ‘Don’t talk French to me. Otherwise I’ll talk English to you, and then you won’t understand.’

  Mimi raised a threatening finger, but then she said, ‘I forgive you.’ She held out her hand so that he had no option but to bend down and press his moustache to it.

  ‘He didn’t kiss my hand,’ thought Hinda.

  ‘It’s time for the maid to finish work,’ Mimi thought out loud, ‘and the front door will be locked. Pinchas, would you . . .?’

  ‘Of course. More than happy.’

  ‘Don’t stir yourself, Uncle Pinchas,’ Hinda said quickly, and if anyone suspected anything more than simple helpfulness behind her words, then that wasn’t her problem.

  Zalman Kamionker just stopped in the open doorway and looked at her expectantly.

  Just stopped.

  ‘Is there anything else?’ Hinda asked at last.

  ‘I’m waiting for the dress. So that I can sew the sleeve back on.’

  ‘That’s out of the question.’

  ‘I’m a good stitcher.’

  ‘Be that as it may.’

  ‘The best double cap stitch in New York.’

  ‘No, I said.’

  ‘I’m a peaceful person and I will not argue with you. But if you give me the dress now, I can come by tomorrow and bring it back to you.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘As you wish,’ said Zalman Kamionker. ‘I’ll come by tomorrow anyway.’ And he laughed with big white teeth and went into the night, with his hands in his pockets.