by I. J. Singer
Where readers of Isaac Bashevis Singer yield themselves, conditionally, to fragments of a lost shtetl world, savoring the charms and values of traditionalism, the readers of Israel Joshua Singer are transported to the bracing vitality of the rising world of commerce, with all the energy and freedom it promises. The Brothers Ashkenazi gains much of its strength from Singer’s authoritative handling of the Jewish bourgeoisie in Poland; his sketching of the radicals seems a bit less certain, perhaps because they are shown at an early stage of development, not yet fully formed or politically ripe.
Outwardly, then, Singer follows the familiar curve of the social novel: the rise and fall of a house, an infatuation with worldliness and subsequent disenchantments, everything, in short, that is familiar from reading novels like Lost Illusions and Great Expectations and Buddenbrooks. But the peculiar tone of Singer’s novel derives first from his still-powerful ties to the East European Jewish culture and then from his own distancing sensibility. That sensibility is sharply at odds with the scheme of the novel. Passages of strong narrative, reflecting the rise of capitalism in the Polish cities, follow the rhythm of historical expansion, but only in part, never with full assent, does Singer yield himself to this narrative rhythm. His deepest persuasion emerges as a distrust of all classes and programs, a creeping suspicion of all worldly projects, a bleak skepticism about the very history he has brought into Yiddish literary consciousness. He is not at home in the world he writes about. He no longer possesses the faith of his fathers in its completeness or radiance, but he still keeps something of their critical judgment about the world. And it is this tension between the thrust of the story and the withholding of the author that gives the novel its bruising tone of inner conflict: an imagination fruitfully at war with itself.
* In an interview published in Encounter, February 1979, Isaac Bashevis Singer says:
When I began to write myself, my brother encouraged me and he gave me certain rules for writing. He said: when you write tell a story, and don’t try to explain the story. If you say that a boy fell in love with a girl you don’t have to explain to the reader why a boy falls in love, the reader knows just as much as you do or more so. You tell him the story, and the explanations and interpretations he will make himself, or critics will do it for him. He had two words which he used: images and sayings. Sayings were for him essays, interpretations. He called sayings, zugerts. It means you just talk, you just say things. You don’t paint a picture, or bring out an image. He said, leave the zugerts to the others. You tell them a story. Because you may know stories which they don’t know—but you don’t know more about life than they do. Although these rules were very simple it took me years to understand what he meant by image, what he meant by zugerts or sayings.
* The Yiddish literary critic B. Rivkin writes that I. J. Singer’s early fiction, because of its “excessively sober” realism, had the effect of “frightening” David Bergelson, the distinguished Soviet Yiddish novelist. Some withdrawal of affect, some clamming up or dryness of spirit, seems already to have been evident to Singer’s colleagues in the Yiddish literary world.
I
BIRTH
One
DOWN THE SANDY ROADS leading from Saxony and Silesia into Poland, through fields, forests, towns, and villages razed and ravaged by the Napoleonic Wars, rolled a strange procession of vehicles, people, animals, and objects.
Polish serfs stopped tilling the earth to shield pale eyes and gaze at the spectacle; women pushed back red headkerchiefs and leaned on hoes; flaxen-haired children raced with dogs out of mud huts and beyond thatched fences to point and stare.
Before Jewish country inns, boys with black earlocks and ritual garments dangling over ragged breeches gaped at the odd caravans rolling by and cried, “Come see, Mama.… Come see!”
Nothing like it had ever been seen in Poland. These weren’t the splendid coaches of the gentry, the long latticed carts of peasants, the patched covered wagons with dangling buckets of Jewish draymen, the stagecoaches with teams of four and trumpets blaring. Even the harness was different—full of odd straps, bands, and traces.
Some of the wagons were wide with high heavy wheels and drawn by sturdy horses. Some were like houses on wheels with the roofs and sides of circus wagons. Some were ribbed and canopied like gypsy wagons. There were carts drawn by big dogs and even by man-and-woman teams while children pushed behind. And in each case, the occupants matched their conveyances.
The sturdier wagons contained fat, pipe-smoking men, clean-shaven in front but with blond beards dangling behind their chins and watchchains straining across their bellies. Their equally fleshy women wore bonnets and clogs over red woolen stockings. The wagons were loaded with bedding, clothes, copperplates of kings and battles, Bibles and prayer books, crates of squawking fowl and rabbits scurrying in the hay. Fat, heavy-uddered cows brought up the rear.
Nags as lean as their masters limped as they strained to pull the poorer wagons, dragging their muzzles close to the ground. Only the smallest children rode inside, while the parents and older offspring trudged alongside, prodding a horse or freeing a wheel from ruts. It there was a cow, she was all alone and often emaciated and half dry.
The leanest, meanest lot were those with carts pulled by themselves or by dogs. They had plenty of children but no other animals, except for a rare goat. The women struggled alongside their men, heavy ropes cutting into their shoulders.
But prosperous or poor, they all shared one item—a polished wooden loom strapped to their cart or wagon.
The peasants called out, “Blessed be the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Where are you headed, strangers?”
The only response was a “Guten Tag.… Grüss Gott,” and the peasants spat and crossed themselves.
“Heathens! You can’t make out a proper Christian word.…”
The Jewish innkeepers made better contact with their Yiddish. They invited the strangers to wash down the dust from their throats with a pint of aquavit, but the travelers declined. They carried their own food, slept in their wagons, and didn’t spend a single groschen along the way.
They were weavers from Germany and Moravia coming to settle in Poland since there were too many people and not enough bread at home, while in Poland there was bread but no goods. The Polish peasants wore coarse linen clothes they wove of flax, but the city dwellers and the military had to rely on foreign imports brought in by Jews and usually shipped down the Vistula from Danzig. This created a drain of money out of the country. Agents were sent to Germany to induce German weavers to settle in Poland, where they were promised free land, exemption from military service, deferment of taxes in the initial years, and the freedom to follow their customs and to worship in the Protestant faith.
The weavers, who were essentially farmers, brought all their possessions with them, from livestock to household pets, from spindles to concertinas, from cat-o’nine-tails to plows. Among them were Lutheran pastors with their families who would guard the Protestant faith in this hotbed of popery and assure continued allegiance to the German God and to the kaiser.
The caravans headed for the lowland regions stretching from Zyrardow to Kalisz, from Pabjanice to Zgierz to Piotrkow. Some of the weavers settled around the town of Lodz, which lay beside a stagnant body of water called Ludka. On the outskirts of town, by a road leading to pine forests, they built houses, laid out gardens, dug wells, planted wheat and potatoes, and set up their wooden looms. The Poles called the community Wilki, Polish for wolves, which frequently roamed the area on cold days, and they forbade Jews from settling there.
The few dozen Jews who were permitted to live in Lodz were tailors whose services were essential to the gentile community. They had their own guild and a shack where they met to discuss the restrictions imposed upon them by their gentile neighbors. On a table inside this shack stood a plain wooden ark containing a scroll of Law, since the Jews also conducted their services there. They had no rabbi, ritual bath or cemetery. If a woman had to vi
sit a ritual bath, she was taken to a stream outside town and protected against the depradations of gentile youths. In winter, a hole was chopped in the ice, and the women immersed themselves. Jewish corpses were transported by peasant cart to the community of Leczyca, of which the Jews of Lodz were officially a part.
The Jews of Lodz were at odds with the Jews of Leczyca, who were mostly impoverished tailors. While the Lodz Jews were kept busy the year round sewing for the gentiles, the Leczyca Jews starved between the seasons when Jews order new gabardines. The Leczyca tailors, therefore, smuggled themselves into Lodz and agreed to work for lower fees. To protect their livelihood, the Lodz Jews denounced the interlopers to the authorities as bunglers and botchers who undercut legitimate guild members and taxpayers. Their humble petition also pledged a donation of tallow for the church and a prayer for the continued well-being of that illustrious sire the prefect.
The prefect’s subordinate, the subprefect, sent constables to round up the interlopers. They confiscated their shears and irons and ran them out of town. Those who tried to sneak back were hogtied and flogged.
The Leczyca Jews then refused to bury any more Lodz Jews until they received a ducat per corpse in tribute. The Lodz Jews responded by refusing to pay their communal levies. The Leczyca town elders struck back and persuaded the authorities to post a soldier in each Lodz Jewish household. The soldiers made themselves quite at home. They sliced their pork with kosher knives, talked smut, made free with the women and mocked the men at prayer. Passover, when it is forbidden for a gentile to be in a Jewish home lest he render it impure, was coming, and the Lodz Jews were forced to lay aside the work they had to finish for the gentiles’ Easter and to beg the Leczyca rabbi to have the soldiers removed from their homes.
The Leczyca elders forced the Lodz Jews to remove their boots and humble themselves before them in their stockinged feet. The Lodz Jews also paid an additional tribute and swore on the Torah never again to turn over a Leczyca citizen to gentile hands. The soldiers were duly withdrawn, and the Leczyca Jews began to settle unimpeded in Lodz.
But when a Jew occasionally stumbled into German Wilki, flaxen-haired youths pelted him with rocks and set their dogs on him with the ancient cry “Hep, hep Jude …!”
Two
THE LODZ MERCHANT AND COMMUNITY HEAD, Abraham Hersh Ashkenazi, known as Abraham Hersh Danziger for his frequent trips to Danzig, sat over a Tractate Zebahim, brooding and tugging at his long and thick black beard.
He wasn’t worried about making a living. Even after decades of exclusion from Wilki and the Weavers’ Guild a sizable Jewish community had managed to flourish in Lodz, complete with its own rabbi, assistant rabbis, ritual slaughterers, ritual bath, synagogues, and cemetery.
The reason the Jews prospered was that the German weavers produced a very inferior cloth that was disdained by the rich and the discriminating, who demanded the soft wools, fine silks, gleaming satins and velvets from abroad. To fill this need, the wealthier Jews took wagons and, later, the first trains to Danzig and Leipzig, while those less affluent conspired with border guards to smuggle in fabrics from Germany. At the same time barefoot Jewish peddlers and runners fanned out across sandy country lanes to buy wool from the peasants to sell to Lodz merchants, who in turn shipped it abroad to be spun into yarn. The peasants, who used to leave their sheep filthy and unshorn, now bathed them in streams to render the fleece white and clean. Speculators and leaseholders bought up entire future yields of flocks on landed estates.
The German master weavers of Lodz vilified the Jews for importing foreign goods from Germany at the expense of the local industry. They also resented the fact that Jewish merchants issued cotton to the poor German weavers, thus bringing down the price of the finished goods. These cotton merchants weren’t able to obtain credit at the banks, as were their German competitors, and they lacked the cash with which to pay the weavers. They therefore issued their own scrip to the weavers when they delivered the finished goods on Friday evenings, and the Jewish tailors, cobblers, and shopkeepers accepted the scrip in lieu of money.
When the German master weavers complained, the authorities outlawed the practice. They also sent a representative to England to buy up cotton, thus pushing the Jews out of business. But the cotton ended up being stolen by government officials. The authorities generally found it easier to accept bribes from the Jews, who continued issuing the scrip and doing business as usual.
Among the most respectable and affluent citizens of Lodz was Abraham Hersh Ashkenazi, who traveled to Danzig on buying trips several times a year. He had just returned from such a journey which had proved even more profitable than usual. He had fine presents for his wife and daughters and a handsome silver cup that he was saving to present to the Rabbi of Warka, whose disciple he was.
Things at home were going along splendidly, and Abraham Hersh was delighted. But as a leader of the community, a position he held despite his youth and as the result of his wealth, scholarship, and piety, he was disturbed by a number of problems that had cropped up during his absence.
First, funds were needed to provide Passover products for the town’s poor, not only the beggars but also those who worked but hadn’t managed to save up enough from a year’s toil to buy the necessary matzos, wine, eggs, meat, and cooking fat for the holiday. Upon his return, Abraham Hersh had taken his red kerchief and, accompanied by several other community leaders, had solicited the affluent households. It hadn’t sufficed, and the poor had stormed the communal house, demanding their due.
Second, there were Jewish prisoners to be ransomed. Throughout Poland, the tsar’s Cossacks were fighting the Polish gentry, who sought to restore a Polish king to the throne, and loyal Jewish leaseholders were engaged in smuggling gunpowder to their Polish masters hiding in the forests.
Just recently, a group of Jews had been caught smuggling a quantity of gunpowder in barrels of apples. At first, the Cossacks had found nothing by poking their lances into the barrels, but as they started appropriating the apples, they found the powder. Some of the Jews were hanged on the spot; others were thrown into prison. Those who were executed had to be given decent Jewish burials. Those in prison had to be ransomed or at least provided with matzos for the holiday.
Third, a group of newly rich, enlightened Jews who were anxious to shed the yoke of Jewishness had petitioned the government to allow them to put up a modern school where their children could learn the ways of the gentile. There were rumors that they also planned to build a German type of temple with an organ and a cantor who chanted like a priest. Although the authorities were slow to respond to this request, the parvenu Jews were tossing money about freely, and everyone knew what money could accomplish. Abraham Hersh and the other traditionalists considered such a temple far worse than a church since only Christians and converts attended the latter, while the former was liable to entice the poorer Jews away from the path of righteousness, which was the first step toward apostasy.
Fourth, Jewish runners who roamed the countryside buying up wool, hides, and hog bristles learned that a wayward Lodz youth, Naftali the Convert, who more than once had been driven from the synagogue courtyard for flouting the laws of Jewishness, had apprenticed himself to a German weaver, for whom he worked on the Sabbath and with whom he ate pork.
Abraham Hersh sent for the youth and warned that he would turn him over to the authorities for conscription, but the fellow remained recalcitrant. The authorities refused to conscript him despite the community’s pleas, and this helped encourage other Jewish youths to make overtures to the gentiles. One, Mendel Flederbaum, who employed several gentile weavers, learned the trade from his workers and applied to the gentile guild to accept him as a master weaver. He was helped in this by the authorities after he had shaved his beard, renounced the traditional garb, and learned to speak and write Russian.
Following this, several others of shaky faith got the urge to emulate the renegades. At this time an epidemic swept the town, and children died of t
he scarlet fever. This was seen as a clear sign of God’s punishment upon Lodz for the sins of its heretics.
Another thorn in Abraham Hersh’s side was his wife’s objections to his visiting his rabbi on the holiday. He was accustomed to going to Warka not only on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Shevuot but also on Passover, despite his wife’s annual complaints that she would be forced to celebrate the Seder at her father’s, the assistant rabbi of Ozorkow, like some widow, God forbid.
Not that Abraham Hersh was one to be moved by female tears. A woman was only a woman, after all. But this time things were somewhat different. His wife was due at any time now, and since the child kicked on her right side she expected a boy.
“I’ll kill myself if you’re not here for the circumcision! I’ll never endure the shame of it …” she bleated.
Nor were the roads to Warka safe, people warned him. The Cossacks were scouring the countryside and harassing travelers. Innocent people had been flogged and even hanged.
But Abraham Hersh had urgent reasons to go. On his last visit he had mentioned that his wife was pregnant, to which the rabbi had commented, “Your generations shall be men of wealth.”
This had disturbed Abraham Hersh, and he had quickly said, “I would prefer them to be God-fearing men, Rabbi.”
But the rabbi hadn’t responded, and Abraham Hersh hadn’t pressed the issue. Still, the remark had sounded ominous, and Abraham Hersh was anxious to resolve it before it was too late.