The Brothers Ashkenazi

by I. J. Singer

  Since then his factory had earned a peck of gold, silver and bronze medals for its superior output and consistently high quality.

  The factory attendant, the corpulent red-haired Melchior, fiercely mustached and side-whiskered, his vast bulk encased in forest green livery complete with stripes along the seams of his breeches, fourragères, brass buttons, and patent-leather boots with silver tassels dangling from the high-fitted tops, stood at ramrod attention just outside the door to respond to Huntze’s every beck and call, just as if he, Huntze, were royalty.

  The fact was that here, in his huge plant, Heinz Huntze was king of his domain. The fate of thousands—men, their wives, and children—rested in his hands. If he chose, he dismissed them early so that they could go to the taverns for a beer or stretch out on the grass beside the factory or go to their choral societies to harmonize their beloved old-country songs and church hymns. If a young man got a girl pregnant, it was within Huntze’s province to decide whether or not they should marry. It was entirely up to him, too, to decide whether the mill kept going day and night so that the workers could earn a whole extra ruble a week and their wives could fatten their soup with lard instead of plain oil or whether it shut down until the workers walked about with tongues hanging and their wives had to sell their bodies for a loaf of bread.

  It was to him that expectant mothers came, asking him to be godfather to their unborn children, and he was the only one with the power to grant raises to workers with growing families.

  It was his alone—the plant, the workers’ red cabins resembling barracks, the surrounding fields where his employees planted potatoes and cabbage, the forests where their wives gathered bark and fallen twigs for firewood, the church where they worshiped, the infirmary where they were taken when a machine lopped off their fingers, the cemetery where they were buried, the choral societies where they sang of home.

  Here he was the absolute ruler, more despot than the emperors whose portraits dominated his. Toothless weavers recalled the days when he was one of them, when he gossiped with them and even joined them for a beer. Now his every step, gesture, and word was discussed in hushed, reverent tones.

  Like every monarch, he despised those who dared be his equal. He seethed with rage at mention of Fritz Goetzke, a former employee who had erected a mill as imposing as his. Each new number or style Huntze produced, Goetzke immediately pirated. What was worse, Goetzke wouldn’t let himself be intimidated. Huntze had already squandered a small fortune trying to push him out. He had lowered his prices to where he was selling below cost, but the bastard managed to hang on, the devil take him.…

  Huntze trembled with rage at the thought of it. “I’ll beat him to death!” he shouted in the Saxon dialect that his daughters had forbidden him to use. “Things can’t go on this way!”

  Sitting next to him, his sales representative, Abraham Hersh Ashkenazi, shook his head. “Herr Huntze, enough,” he pleaded. “The most practical thing is to make up with him. It is written that sholom, peace, is the foundation of the world.”

  Huntze nearly sprang from his chair.

  “You want me to make sholom with that shithead, that louse? I’d sooner croak, Reb Abraham Hersh.…”

  Abraham Hersh was touched that the German had employed the Hebrew word for peace and even more by the fact that he had addressed him as Reb, which was a mark of respect among Jews. But he disagreed with the old man’s approach to the problem, and he sat there stroking his beard and trying to mollify his employer.

  He fully understood why Huntze was so irked that some upstart, a former employee, would dare compete with him, but business was business. Money talks, and Goetzke had the money to do lots of talking. Besides, he had backers ready to extend him unlimited credit. He wouldn’t be undersold, and a price war would benefit only the buyers. The one result would be that both factories would go broke. It would make much more sense to get together, to form a partnership and join forces—Huntze and Goetzke.

  This time Huntze did spring from his chair. “I won’t hear of such crap!” he roared, pounding the table and switching over to an earthy Lodz Yiddish. “Not another word, Reb Abraham Hersh,” he said, stopping up his employee’s mouth. “I’ll never go partners with that swine.…”

  Abraham Hersh smoothed his beard and went to the door. He lingered for a moment. He wanted to quote yet another parable to the German to the effect that rage spelled only destruction. He felt moved to tell him the story of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza whose enmity caused the desolation of Jerusalem. But he couldn’t put these things into German, and he doubted he could make the gentile understand in Yiddish. He shrugged and merely uttered a few parting words in an intimate tone. “Herr Huntze, when you have calmed down, think over what I’ve said. Only this can save the business.”

  Old man Huntze was so aroused that he couldn’t fill his own pipe. “You,” he called to his attendant, “fill my pipe and make it quick, you snot!”

  His rage had caused him to revert to expressions he had used in the days when he worked a handloom.

  Six

  ABRAHAM HERSH ENROLLED his twin sons in separate Hebrew schools.

  Although they were but minutes apart in age, they were years apart in intellect. Jacob Bunem was normal for his age, an average student who showed no exceptional promise. He learned his lessons by sheer effort and by rote so that he could display his progress when his father examined him after his Sabbath nap.

  “Well, so be it,” Abraham Hersh grunted, not overly gratified by the boy’s efforts. “Tell your mother to give you a piece of fruit and try to do better next time.”

  Jacob Bunem saw that he had disappointed his father, and a shadow fell over his merry face, but only for an instant. As soon as his mother served him his cookies and prune stew, he reverted to his normal self. He even felt like laughing for no reason whatever.

  It was different with Simha Meir. He was a prodigy, and when his teacher failed to keep up with him, the father took him out of heder, the elementary Hebrew school, and turned him over to Baruch Wolf of Leczyca who taught boys of confirmation age and even older—youths already engaged to be married.

  Every Sabbath Baruch Wolf came to Abraham Hersh’s house to test his pupil. He drank gallons of blazing tea, poured from a stone jug kept warm by a wrapping of rags, and tried to trip up Simha Meir with tricky questions and pitfalls that the youngster easily parried. Baruch Wolf sweated rivers from the hot tea and from the boy’s scholarship.

  “Reb Abraham Hersh,” he whispered in the father’s ear in a tone the youngster easily heard, “you’re raising a genius, a prodigy!”

  Abraham Hersh was delighted, but he wouldn’t allow himself to show it. “See to it he’s God-fearing, Reb Baruch Wolf,” he adjoined the teacher. “A decent Jew.”

  He never forgot what the Warka Rabbi had predicted, that his seed would be men of wealth, without adding that they would be God-fearing Jews as well. He was uneasy about this, more so about Simha Meir than Jacob Bunem. The very fact that the boy was such a genius frightened him. He showed traits that made the father apprehensive. He wanted to know everything; he stuck his nose everywhere; he was inquisitive, demanding, restless. Abraham Hersh knew that all prodigies tended to be this way, but this didn’t reassure him. He knew that it was more important to obey God than to be a good student, better to be dull but pious than learned and lax in one’s faith.

  And he sent Simha Meir into the kitchen for his Sabbath treat while he had another word with the teacher. “Don’t forget to make the benediction,” he cautioned his son. “And don’t rush through it—recite every word clearly!”

  He turned to Baruch Wolf with a sigh. “Don’t spare the rod with the boy; he needs a firm hand.”

  He had enrolled Simha Meir with Baruch Wolf of Leczyca for a reason. His wife had been strongly opposed to it since the teacher was known throughout Lodz as a martinet who maimed his pupils even as he pounded the learning into them. Also, he kept them at it for hours, from early dawn until l
ate at night. On Thursdays they got no sleep at all but studied through the night until morning. Nor did he teach them the Gemara and exegesis alone, but commentaries as well—those of others and, even more important, his own.

  But as usual, Abraham Hersh disregarded what a woman said. He was anxious that the boy be broken to the yoke of Jewishness, and no one was better at this than Baruch Wolf of Leczyca.

  Although the teacher was nearly seventy, his powers were far from waning. He was lean, rangy; his fingers were like pincers, and his face was slightly twisted as a result of a chill suffered during a freezing journey on foot from Leczyca to his rabbi in Kotzk. This had caused the right side of his face to be somewhat elevated so that one pointed brow tilted up and the other down; one side of a mustache jutted up with abandon, while the other drooped angrily.

  And Baruch Wolf’s brain was as twisted as his face. He never taught his pupils the legends found in the Gemara since he considered these fit only for women. The Scriptures, the Pentateuch, and the lighthearted treatises dealing with customs and holidays he regarded as fluff. He preferred the more solemn treatises concerning business, promissory notes, reparations, contamination and purity, both in the land of Israel and outside it. That, and ritual slaughter, and questions dealing with the conduct of priests, the burnt offerings of cattle and sheep, and the rendering of fat and tallow constituted his curriculum.

  His ever-present pipe emitted acrid smoke which permeated the pupils’ eyes and throats and reminded them of the debate about burnt offerings that they were studying.

  His method of teaching matched the dryness, spareness, and paucity of his person. He never approached a problem head-on as logic would dictate, but by some devious route. He never spelled out what he meant since he contended that a bright youngster should perceive his meaning from a hint, an insinuation. He mumbled half words that were further obscured by the tangle of smoke, beard, and mustache. He threw out snares, loaded questions, contradictions. He entangled himself so in his own webs that often he couldn’t climb out of them. And he pounded the heavy pipestem on the table or on the boys’ shoulders like a coachman straining to free his team from mud.

  “Gentile-heads,” he would shriek, grinding the few remaining yellow fangs in his mouth, “market peasants, Polacks, Esaus, may the plague consume you!”

  He dealt out merciless punishment with the heavy pipestem. He didn’t differentiate, as did other teachers, between boys of distinguished and commonplace families, between rich and poor students, didn’t make allowances even if his victims were engaged young men already sporting gold watches presented by prospective fathers-in-law.

  And the youths swayed over the books, rubbed their brows, and strained like exhausted horses trying to escape the coachman’s whistling whip upon their scarred haunches.

  But it was to no avail. For the umpteenth time they began anew: “The earth outside of Israel renders one impure.… Tosefot, therefore, asks—”

  Baruch Wolf brandished his pipestem, but the “gentile-heads” still didn’t catch on. It was then that he turned to Simha Meir, the prodigy who needed no whipping.

  He squinted at him slyly with the elevated right eye and said, “Tell them, Simha Meir. Show the Polacks!”

  Simha Meir was the youngest in the class. He was still three years short of his Bar Mitzvah, but he was the star pupil upon whom the teacher had placed all his hopes.

  Simha Meir didn’t even know the place in the text they were studying because he had been playing cards under the table. Swaying sanctimoniously over the great torn Gemara, his curly flaxen earlocks bobbing beneath his silk hat, he had been busy dealing the cards with swift, agile fingers and winning pot after pot from the other boys. Although he was the youngest and was known as a conniver, a cheat, and a liar, he dominated the game, and the others deferred to him, for reasons unknown to themselves. They knew that he cheated, but he was never caught at it. And just as he duped his classmates at cards, he duped the teacher and always emerged with his hide and reputation intact.

  Baruch Wolf loved to catch a pupil who had lost his place. He would suddenly pounce, seize a youngster’s shoulder, and demand ominously, “Where are we, eh?”

  With joy supreme he would stretch his twisted face when the youth pointed to the wrong spot and would crack his finger with the pipestem. He was particularly anxious to catch Simha Meir, but he never could. No matter how much the boy was absorbed in the cards he somehow always kept one eye on the text, and one glance sufficed to orient him to the right word.

  Baruch Wolf had a whole bag of tricks with which to trap the unwary student. He would lead him like a blind nag into a ditch and play the Good Samaritan.

  “It therefore follows,” he would chant guilelessly, “that Reuben is guil—”

  “Guilty!” the boy would finish triumphantly, taking the bait.

  “Wrong, gentile-head!” the teacher would shout, and crack the miscreant’s hand. “The answer is not guilty, you numskull!”

  The next time the boy would be prewarned to avoid the teacher’s trap. But this time the teacher would hint at the correct answer, knowing full well that the youth would respond with the opposite and thus would be caught again.

  But Simha Meir wouldn’t be deceived. Without knowing a word of the text, he would fathom the teacher’s devious intentions and, avoiding every pitfall, manage to slither out of the trap. When things looked especially ominous, he would go on the attack and at the same time raise his voice and create such a diversion that the old man grew confused.

  Baruch Wolf’s right eye then began to rise so high that it nearly vanished under the green velvet skullcap, and the stiffened side of his mustache bristled like that of a tomcat that has just lost his grip on a fat mouse. He was ashamed before his students that such a little snot as Simha Meir had made a fool of him; he tried to back off with his pride intact, but Simha Meir wouldn’t let him.

  Like a spider, the youngster wove his web tighter around his teacher. He toyed with him, tightened, then released the network of sophistry he had fashioned about him. He posed a series of questions that he answered himself, then challenged his own answers. He forced the old man to squirm, stammer, and clutch at straws like a drowning man, and finally he discredited him altogether.

  The boys strained not to laugh at the old man’s discomfiture.

  For the next few days Simha Meir was free to play cards without even bothering to hide them from the teacher. “Fat and a whole offering shall be rendered—” he chanted from the text, then continued in the same singsong: “I got thirty-one.…”

  The other students were older, and they didn’t like him. It was beneath them to associate with such a little punk, and they envied him his quick mind, about which their fathers were forever reproaching them. Nevertheless, every Thursday they came to him to be tutored in the weekly portion that they would need to recite at home.

  He helped them, but he demanded payment. He didn’t believe in free favors. So they bought him ice cream from the Russian who toted a barrel of the stuff balanced on his head like Melchizedek bringing the wine to Abraham. Whoever among them had a watch had to allow Simha Meir to open the lid and tinker with the works to learn what made it tick—something about which he was very curious. Poor youths who had nothing material to offer had to explain the ways of sex to him. He cocked his pointed ears when the boys described how their fathers, who shared their beds, crawled out at night while they, the sons, were feigning sleep.

  Sometimes Simha Meir even played a trick on his classmates. He purposely gave a boy a false interpretation of a page of the Gemara and beamed with joy when the victim got soundly smacked for his error. Even then, the boys didn’t retaliate. They strongly suspected that he had duped them, but they couldn’t prove it. They bore all kinds of resentments against the little imp, but no one else could so befuddle the teacher, no one else could so skillfully deal the cards under the table, no one else could cause such spats between the teacher and his wife as could Simha Meir. />
  The teacher was married to his second wife, one much younger than he. She was clumsy, sloppy, and barren, the reason her first husband had divorced her. She didn’t see or hear well; she spilled and dropped everything she touched and tripped over every straw. Baruch Wolf couldn’t stand her. She didn’t grasp his ironic subtleties, which annoyed him considerably, and whatever she said to him raised his hackles.

  “Baruch Wolf,” she whined in her singsong, drawing out each word as if it were rubber, “Baruch Wolf, will you come eat?”

  “What then, you cow, the food will come to me?” he rejoined.

  “Baruch Wolf, what would you like?”

  “Chicken soup with noodles,” he said.

  “Where would I get chicken soup in the middle of the week?” she countered.

  “Then why do you ask, jackass?” he raged.

  “Baruch Wolf, will you wash up for dinner?”

  “What then, ox, I’ll wash the food instead?”

  She didn’t respond. She knew that he could never give a straight answer to anything. But when he really lost his temper at her, she burst into tears and dabbed her eyes with a corner of her apron, driving Baruch Wolf into a towering rage. Nothing irked him more than tears. Even his pupils dared not cry when he whipped them. He pounded his pipestem on the table, swept aside the Gemara, and dismissed the pupils.

  “I don’t want to be a teacher anymore!” he screamed. “Why should I break my back for you—so that you should drown me with your tears? I’ll stay at the studyhouse, and Jews will feed me already.… Boys, go home!”

  Before he could even get the words out, the boys were sliding down the banisters of the two-story winding staircase. They were anxious to get out before he changed his mind.

  Even when Baruch Wolf’s wife made every effort to avoid irritating her husband, Simha Meir helped things go wrong. When he was excused to go down to the water barrel in the courtyard to wash up and say a blessing after a bowel movement, he would first sneak into the kitchen and spill a pitcher of borscht or knock over the little iron cooking pot on the lopsided tripod.