by I. J. Singer
The dangers of the road didn’t concern him at all—he was accustomed to dealing with such things. The only thing that held him back was leaving his wife alone during the labor and delivery, and later, at the circumcision if, with God’s help, the baby turned out to be a boy.
But there were other considerations. A number of impoverished Warka Hasidim were looking forward to a trip at his expense, and they would jeer at him for letting a woman dissuade him. It wasn’t fair to deprive Jews of a holiday at their rabbi’s table. Besides, how would it look if he presented the rabbi the silver Elijah’s cup on Shevuot instead of on Passover? …
Had his wife been a sensible person instead of a woman, she would have urged him to go and resolve the question of their child’s future with the rabbi. But he, being a man, couldn’t allow her tears to sway him.
He went to the closet, got down the large leather valise that he always took with him to Danzig, and packed his phylacteries, prayer shawl, a satin gabardine, some shirts, the silver cup, and some holy books to study along the way. Being a good Warka Hasid, he remembered to include several bottles of Passover aquavit and sent the maid, Sarah Leah, for the coachman.
Belly jutting, his wife erupted with her usual complaints, but Abraham Hersh didn’t even blink an eye. He kissed the doorpost amulet, and as he already stood on the threshold, he wished her an easy delivery. He suddenly reminded himself.
“If, with God’s help, it’s a boy, he is to be named Simha Bunem after the Przysucha Rabbi, blessed be his memory. That’s the way I want it, you hear?” he shouted into the room.
Three
MISTRESS ASHKENAZI HADN’T BEEN WRONG — the signs presaging the birth of a boy proved true. But instead of one son there were two.
After a night of anguish which coincided with the first Seder, a child was born at dawn. The neighbor women in attendance slapped the infant’s rump to make it cry and held it up to the lamp.
“Congratulations, it’s a boy!” they announced to the mother.
But she didn’t stop screaming. The women stroked her sweating face. “Enough already. It’s all over.”
Sarah Leah, who was an experienced midwife, saw that it was far from over. “Grab hold of the headboard, mistress darling,” she advised. “It’ll make things easier.”
After a number of minutes another infant emerged, a big, heavy baby that needed no slap to make it bawl.
Sarah Leah took it and held it to the light. “Another boy! A real buster this time, the evil eye spare him.”
The women found two different colored ribbons to tie around the boys’ wrists, but it wasn’t necessary since only a fool could have mistaken the two. The elder was slight, scrawny, with sparse fair hair over a narrow skull, while the younger was long and robust with a huge head of black curly hair. The elder piped in a shrill wail, while the younger bellowed like a bullock.
“One just like the mistress and the other a spitting image of the master,” Sarah Leah said, handing the cleansed, dressed infants to their mother, who quickly clasped the elder twin to her breast.
“Hush, don’t carry on so,” she chided the younger twin, who howled as if out of jealousy.
She sprayed a few drops of milk into the mouths of the boys to teach them how to suckle. The younger took to the nipple without a sound, but the elder could only scream in frustration.
For the whole eight days preceding the circumcision the mother fretted against her mound of pillows about the problem of naming the babies. She had mentioned to her husband that if it turned out a boy, she would have liked to name it after her grandfather Jacob Meir, the Rabbi of Wodzislaw, but Abraham Hersh wouldn’t hear of it. He insisted it be called Simha Bunem after the Przysucha Rabbi.
“You can name girls after whomever you want, but the boys belong to me,” he told her.
Now that he was away, the responsibility lay upon her. Having had twins, she had the latitude of apportioning four names, but for all that, she was uneasy. She knew how unreasonable her husband could be, and she knew that whatever she decided would displease him—he wouldn’t tolerate even one name from her side of the family.
Women advised her to send a messenger to her husband asking him to come home, but she wouldn’t. She was furious with him. She hadn’t enjoyed a happy moment since their wedding. He was either away on business or at his rabbi’s. When he was home, he was either with his Hasidic cronies at the studyhouse or poring over the books in his study.
Not that she demanded much. She herself came from a Hasidic family, her own father behaved no differently, and she knew that a learned Jew had nothing to say to a female, who wasn’t even allowed to make her presence known in her own home when strange men came to call. That was the woman’s lot, and she accepted it. Each morning she thanked God for having created her a female according to His will. Still, she chafed under the conditions.
True, she was well-off and fecund, providing her husband with a child each year, and bright, healthy children at that, for which she was envied. He brought her gifts from Danzig—a Turkish shawl or a piece of jewelry—but he paid no attention to her. They couldn’t even share a Sabbath meal together since he always brought some pauper home and she was forced to eat in the kitchen with the maid after a single sip of the benediction wine and a slice of the ceremonial Sabbath loaf.
Nor could they go anywhere together since neither was allowed to mix with the opposite sex. On the rare occasions when they visited relatives, he always walked in front while she followed a few paces behind. The moment they entered the house, they quickly parted, each to his own gender. On Sabbaths, he lingered so long at the services that she almost fainted from hunger until the meal could be served.
But what irked her most was the air of superiority he adopted toward her. He never asked her advice, never reported how his business affairs were going, never confided in her when he was troubled. He would open his heavy purse and dole out the money she needed for household expenses, and that was the extent of their relationship. He never even addressed her by name but called her “thou” in the manner of the fanatics. When he came home from a trip, he never told her about it but merely kissed the doorpost amulet and grunted, “How are things in the house?” while he held out her present. If she took it from his hand, it was a sign that she was available for marital relations. If not, he only glanced at her darkly and went off to his Hasidim to hear news of their rabbi.
She feared him, his brooding silences, his booming chant as he studied the Gemara, his burly masculinity, his grim face. She didn’t ask much—a kind word or a loving smile as compensation for her empty existence that was little better than a servant’s, but even this he denied her. If he loved her in his own fashion, he showed it only in their bed, as the Law prescribed. Otherwise, he was quite rigid about a woman’s role in life. She was to bear children, rear them, observe the laws of Jewishness, run a household, and obey her husband blindly. If his friends chose to drop in for a late get-together, he expected her to serve them refreshments regardless of the hour. “Woman,” he shouted into the kitchen, where she had to sit with the maid, “whip up a mess of groats for us men!” And she had to stay up preparing the food.
He was away on all holidays, even on Passover when the humblest Jewish women joined their husbands and families at the table, while she had to be alone like some widow, God forbid. All these indignities she had borne in silence, but this time he had gone too far. She had begged and pleaded with him to be with her for the birth, but as usual he had ignored her, and a sense of deep outrage, built up over years of gray, unfulfilled existence, consumed her. She disregarded the women’s advice and determined not to send a messenger after him. Actually she wasn’t all that sure that he would heed her plea.
All the female pride that her husband had so long trampled underfoot now emerged full-blown. She lay in her bed, cordoned off with sheets and draped with amulets to guard against the evil forces. Responding with firm “amens” to the traditional prayers recited by heder boys on
the other side of the sheets, bolstered by a sense of pride in her maternal accomplishments, she took it upon herself to arrange for the circumcision. Issuing orders like any imperious male, she decided on the names she would give her sons in defiance of her husband’s wishes. She didn’t feel bold enough to cross him completely, and she effected a kind of compromise. She named the elder twin Simha after the Przysucha Rabbi, but added Meir after her grandfather, and gave the remaining two names to the younger—Jacob Bunem.
The moment Abraham Hersh returned from Warka, he asked to see his newborn son. He was amazed to learn that there were two, and he gazed in bewilderment at the tightly swaddled infants.
“Which is the older?” he asked brusquely.
“The smaller one,” his wife said, lowering her eyes under his burning gaze.
“What’s he called?”
“Simha.”
“Just one name?”
“No. Meir, too. After my grandfather, the Wodzislaw Rabbi, blessed be his memory,” she whispered, trembling at her audacity.
“Here, take him!” Abraham Hersh growled.
Sarah Leah brought the other infant.
“Go to your daddy, Jacob Bunem,” she crooned with sly innocence.
Abraham Hersh glared at the infant, who looked back at him with open, shining eyes, and some of his anger dissipated. The knowledge that both of the Przysucha’s Rabbi’s names had been used mollified him somewhat, but the fact that they had been joined with that of some worthless nobody was hard to swallow.
“The image of the master … a shining light, may the evil eye spare him,” Sarah Leah said.
“Pshaw! Take him away,” the father growled in a fit of pique.
Eyes tearing, the mother clapped a son to each breast. “Suck, Meir darling,” she urged the older, omitting the child’s other name that her husband had forced upon her, but he only clamped his gums around her nipple and held it in a fierce grip.
She screamed in pain, and Sarah Leah came running. She plucked the infant from the breast and regarded him angrily. “Rascal, a baby mustn’t pinch his mother’s breast. Nurse like Jacob Bunem … so.…”
The baby emitted a howl of such indignation that Abraham Hersh shouted from his study, “Close the door! How can a man concentrate in all this tumult?”
He gathered scant joy from his sons’ birth. He envisioned the time when he would present them to his rabbi and his shame would become public knowledge. He tried saying their names aloud, but they rang false to him. He wouldn’t forgive his wife for defiling the rabbi’s name, and he didn’t go in to see her, even though she was still not fully recovered. To muffle the disgrace, he threw himself into his work. He no longer planned to go to Danzig since there was sufficient local business to keep him busy.
The town of Lodz grew from day to day. The first Jews to be granted the right to open weaving workshops had achieved this by adopting gentile ways and toadying to the authorities. But inevitably, ordinary observant Jews followed suit. The Russian officials who descended upon the country following the suppression of the Polish uprising were most eager for the bribes and gifts of Jews who sought permission to live and do business in prohibited areas, and soon Jewish looms clacked away in the old section of Lodz, even though the Germans still barred Jews from their guild.
At first, the Jews confined themselves to their own quarter. Seemingly overnight the houses already standing sprouted additional stories, annexes, wings, extensions, ells, attics, and garrets to accommodate the flow of newcomers converging upon Lodz from surrounding areas. Lacking legitimate sanction and permits, the construction was effected at night and proceeded helter-skelter, without order or plan. Buildings came down; buildings went up; buildings emerged slanted, top-heavy, leaning this way or that—all symmetry sacrificed to expediency. There was no time to do otherwise as the town grew by leaps and bounds.
Gradually the Jews began to spill out of their congested area into Wilki, which was officially closed to them. The first to stick a toe inside the restricted area were the more affluent, audacious Jews; presently the more timorous followed.
Then, like a torrent overflowing its banks, the Jews smashed down all barriers set up to exclude them. Thousands of rural leaseholders and innkeepers who had been dependent on the Polish nobility were now forced to seek their livelihoods in towns and cities. They opened dry goods stores by the hundred, but since the liberated serfs were starving, there were no customers, and the Jews turned to weaving. They set up their wooden handlooms wherever they could, but mostly they flocked to the city of Lodz. Having endured the irrational cruelty of their blueblooded former masters, they wouldn’t be turned back by mere bans or decrees fashioned against them; they opened their workshops just as the German immigrants had done before them.
At first, they hired German weavers who couldn’t afford to go out on their own and who preferred a Jewish master to a German, who would force them to kiss his hand twice a day. If a Jewish boss caught them with a snippet of wool in their pocket, he didn’t beat them but merely reclaimed the wool and threw it back in the pile. As the Sabbath drew to a close, the German workers sat in their employers’ kitchens, smoking pipes and conversing with their bosses’ wives and daughters in flawless Yiddish.
“Hey, boss,” they ragged their masters, who were reluctant to let go of the waning Sabbath, “let’s have the few guldens already before the taverns close.…”
Gradually young Jewish men, both married and single, began to learn the trade. Down the sandy roads leading to Lodz, fathers accompanied by sons who had no heads for books walked barefoot and waved sticks to keep off the village dogs. On the outskirts of town they put on their boots and admonished their sons before apprenticing them for three years to Jewish master weavers.
“Act like an adult, obey your employer, be kind to God and man, be honest and respectful, and you will reap the benefits of this world and the world to come.”
They dug down deep into the pockets of their sheepskins and took out purses, from which they drew the greasy, hard-earned bills with which to pay the master weavers for agreeing to feed and board their sons while they taught them their trade.
The skullcapped youths stood before the looms with ritual garments dangling over grimy trousers, lint clinging to curly thatches and sprouting beards, fingers deftly weaving wool and cotton cloth or ladies’ kerchiefs from dawn to midnight. As they worked, they chanted cantorial pieces, trilling and quavering over selected passages. The bosses passed to and fro, making sure nothing was stolen, checking the output and prodding the worker who paused to wipe his brow or roll a cigarette.
The bosses’ wives and daughters peeled potatoes, fried onions, and stirred soups in huge kettles while apprentices wound yarn onto spools, rocking cradles with their feet.
In the marketplaces Jews bought and sold piece goods and remnants. Ragpickers brought in all kinds of waste, which they sold to dealers, who reclaimed it into reusable material. Women and girls wound thread onto red wooden bobbins. Hosiers knitted coarse colorful stockings for women. Wherever one turned, machines clacked and clattered, accompanied by the tailors’ cantorial chants and the seamstresses’ love ballads.
Eventually the city grew too congested to contain its rapidly growing population. As the wealthy and enterprising leaseholder Solomon David Preiss, who had made his fortune importing wheat and rye to Prussia, lay awake one night, it suddenly struck him that a suburb might be built on the infertile flats of Baluty, the Kanarski brothers’ estate just outside the city. The land was too sandy even to pasture livestock, and the only people living on it were the liberated serfs who had nowhere else to go.
The following morning after services, Preiss ordered his servant to hitch up the britska and drive him to the Kanarski estate. His ostensible reason for calling on the steward was to consider a purchase of rye. As he chewed on the kernels, allegedly to test the quality of the grain, he casually asked the steward how things were going. The Pole tugged his long mustache and spat out the
expected tale of woe. The masters were in debt over their heads, but their solution was to go to Paris on sprees while the burden of maintaining the estate fell entirely upon him. Before leaving, Preiss hinted that he was examining sites where sand was plentiful for a possible glass plant. If he found such a property at a cheap enough price, he might consider its purchase.
Within days he was summoned to meet with the brothers at their manor. Forgetting the fact that a Polish nobleman was obliged to address a Jew by his first name only, the Kanarskis abjured protocol and were almost civil to their visitor.
“Mr. Solomon, there is enough sand in Baluty for ten glass plants, not one,” they gushed, eyes glinting with greed.
Solomon David Preiss bargained shrewdly and eventually bought the huge expanse of land for a mere 20,000 rubles cash.
When the brothers, who had gone to Paris to squander their bonanza, learned from their steward that the Jew planned to build a suburb rather than a glass plant on their former property, they rushed back in an attempt to nullify the deal on the ground that they had been duped. The local judges and assessors, who were their friends, began to pore through the lawbooks, seeking some technicality that would void the sale.
Solomon David Preiss had no manor in which to entertain these gentlemen and their wives, but he had an even more persuasive argument—gold imperials of which the local functionaries were consummate connoisseurs. And it happened that instead of finding for their fellow Pole and social equal, the judges found for the Jew.
When the Kanarskis saw how things were going, they appealed to the higher powers for a strict enforcement of the prohibition against Jews residing outside their appointed areas. Dignitary after dignitary arrived in splendid coaches at the Kanarski manor house. They drank the brothers’ wine, danced with their daughters, hunted their game, and promised a swift and fair resolution of the dispute. Briefs, precedents, writs, arguments, and interpretations began to flow back and forth between Lodz and Warsaw until no one could make sense of anything anymore.