by I. J. Singer
The teacher’s wife would be sitting absentmindedly darning a sock drawn over a glass and wouldn’t notice the little rogue, who by then was already back in the courtyard piously intoning the words of the blessing. Hearing the crash, she would wring her hands and race into the kitchen to try to rescue the pot before her husband heard the commotion.
“Beat it, may an unnatural death befall you!” she would curse the cat, blaming it for the damage.
But the teacher, deep in some obtuse commentary, had already heard that his meal had been ruined, and he would launch a tirade. “A beggar you’ll make of me yet, you booby! You’ll drive me out of house and home!”
From fear and the urge to set things straight, she would smash a clay pot that shattered with a dull thud. The teacher would go completely berserk. Now she would no longer be able to contain her tears and would erupt in a wail. Baruch Wolf would pound the pipestem against the table and shriek, “Boys, go home! I’m no longer a teacher!”
For hours the youths wandered through the streets of Lodz. They raced down side streets and alleys, exulting in their freedom. They visited marketplaces where peasants milled among wagons, horses, cattle, swine, poultry, sacks of grain. Jewish housewives in bonnets over shaved skulls wandered among the wagons. They tested the chickens by blowing into their behinds, even poked their fingers inside their cloacas to see if they were carrying eggs. Jews slapped gentile palms to seal bargains, haggled, chewed kernels of grain.
From there the boys headed for construction sites where masons slaked lime and toted bricks in hods. Lodz was still growing street by street, and new stores, bazaars, and warehouses were always going up.
They proceeded to Balut with its narrow alleyways where from all sides, looms and sewing machines clacked and the songs of the workers filled the air. They bought sticky almonds in tiny stores thick with flies, as well as all kinds of cloying cookies and candies.
Simha Meir collected the groschens from the boys and entered the shop of the Turk with the red skullcap to buy a slice of raisin bread. The boys hesitated to taste it since it was probably not kosher, but Simha Meir had no such compunctions, and he chewed with relish. Each raisin he found sparked a light in his darting eyes.
They proceeded to the cropped fields where goats grazed. They stretched out on the grass and played cards. As always, Simha Meir won all the money.
The day was long, but for the boys it was never long enough. They crawled over the sand flats where dragoons drilled while noncoms pounded their legs with their scabbards. They assembled in the marketplaces where the town crier beat his drum and reported all manner of official tidings: who had been the victim of a burglary, who had lost a pig, who had been sentenced to prison, whose candlesticks or bedding were being sold in lieu of taxes.
Finally, they entered the red-light district—a narrow street where only recently brothels had sprung up. Prior to that, people had gathered here from all over to fulfill their natural functions under the open sky. Now small flimsy shacks with slanted attics and low windows stood here. If someone came to urinate or defecate out of old habit, the pimps and brothel owners would beat him up.
The brothels were staffed by cheap whores to accommodate soldiers and peasants who had left wives behind to work in the city. They also serviced the young Jewish journeymen who manned the city’s handlooms.
The boys knew that this street was out of bounds to them, and this very fact drew them here. They ran through the narrow little street, stole covert glances at the bedraggled Jewish and gentile wenches sitting on the thresholds, cracking seeds. Not that they had any intentions of coming close to these girls, God forbid. Still they loved to hear the girls’ entreaties: “Come on in, boys, you’ll enjoy it.…”
And they raced home at dusk in time to say the afternoon prayers, when across the poorly paved streets, lamplighters, dressed all in black and carrying long poles, lit the streetlights scattered sparsely through the city. It was miraculous the way the lamplighters used their long poles to hook the ropes holding the lamps, pull them down, and ignite them with their torches. The boys looked on enraptured as the men cleaned the sooty chimneys, poured out kerosene from their cans, turned the wicks, and hauled the lamps back into place with the ropes.
“A good week!” the boys exclaimed in Yiddish when the lanterns were lit. “A good week!”
The lamplighter was vexed. He thought that the Yids were making fun of him and chased after them. He seized the slowest and hauled him to the top of a lamppost.
The boys fled, the skirts of their gabardines and the fringes of their ritual garments fluttering behind them.
“Bat!” they hooted at the pursuing lamplighter. “Angel of Death!”
And in the midst of the teenaged youths raced the flushed, tiny ten-year-old Simha Meir.
At home, he would find Jacob Bunem down on all fours, giving his sisters piggyback rides. Little Dinele was there, too. She no longer lived nearby, but she still came to visit her girlfriends and, more important, Jacob Bunem. Although he was already a big boy, he enjoyed playing with his sisters. He ignored the fact that it didn’t behoove a boy his age to be with girls. He would get down on all fours when his mother wasn’t looking and play the horse. He would tell all his sisters and Dinele to climb on his back, and he would gallop across the floor, supporting the whole crew. He would even rear like a real horse until the girls squealed in fear. Dinele would tighten her plump little arms around his neck to keep from falling and cling to him, laughing till tears came. Jacob Bunem gamboled with enthusiasm and whinnied like a colt.
“Jacob Bunem,” Dinele asked, “are you afraid of a lion?”
“No,” Jacob Bunem said resolutely.
When Simha Meir came in and saw his brother with the girls, he would try to shame him. “Jackass, I’ll tell Father.… Dunce, you’ll forget all your lessons!”
Jacob Bunem blushed. He was mortified to be called a dunce before Dinele, especially since it happened to be true. “You’ll hang by your tongue in the other world, tattletale!” he warned Simha Meir.
But he was afraid to have their father find out, and he dickered with his brother, offering him anything he wanted if he would only keep silent. But Simha Meir wouldn’t be bribed with mere objects, and he offered to play cards with Jacob Bunem. Naturally he quickly won all of his brother’s cash, while his sisters, and Dinele most of all, glared at him and chanted as they once had in the courtyard:
Simha Meir is a liar,
Watch him jump into the fire.…
Seven
ABRAHAM HERSH ASHKENAZI GOT HIS WAY.
Heinz Huntze ranted, raved, and stamped his feet, vowing that he would sooner go begging than take in that swine and snotnose Fritz Goetzke, but in the end, Abraham Hersh prevailed. He shuttled between Huntze and Goetzke, reasoning, appeasing, quoting parables from the holy books, until he arranged the partnership linking the two houses into one mighty firm bearing the name Huntze and Goetzke.
On account of this billing, the partnership almost ran aground at the last minute. Each partner was adamant that his name should come first, and Abraham Hersh had to employ all his tact and diplomacy to get Goetzke to yield the honor to Huntze.
His reward was his appointment as sales representative of the combined firm.
In a section of Wilki previously barred to Jews, on a street named Piotrkow, Huntze built a big stone house with iron-barred windows and massive metal doors for his representative. It contained deep cellars, vaults, and high lofts and was crammed from ceiling to floor with bales of goods produced by the Huntze and Goetzke plant. The sign outside featured all the gold, silver, and bronze medals the factory had won, along with the names of the partners and of its new representative. The sign painter even included the factory’s emblem—two bearded Teutons nude except for fig leaves and spears—but Abraham Hersh made him remove it since it violated the second commandment. For him, his name and the medals sufficed.
For a long time Huntze’s daughters, who wouldn’t
allow their father to speak Low German, had been wrinkling their noses at the Jewish scum scurrying around the factory courtyard and their father’s offices. They made too much noise, these Yids; they talked Yiddish to their father, seized him familiarly by the lapels, or tugged at his buttons. You couldn’t put a foot out of the palace—which adjoined the factory—without stepping into a pack of them in their long gabardines, jabbering their jargon.
For years now the daughters had been badgering their father to appoint a sales representative so as to spare himself such filthy company, but the old man had resisted. Beside being able to save the commissions he would have had to shell out, he relished the give-and-take of business, the haggling and excitement. Nothing pleased him more than outfoxing the sharp Jews.
He was beyond salvation, Old Man Huntze. You couldn’t get him to appreciate the fine things of life. He preferred a stein of beer with a friend to champagne, a stinking clay pipe to imported cigars. He even used Yiddish for sparring with the merchants.
But when the business grew and the Jew Ashkenazi had to be compensated for arranging the partnership and saving the business from ruin, Huntze relented and appointed him the sales representative.
The great warehouse on Piotrkow Street now hummed with activity. Jews milled around the bales of goods stacked from floor to ceiling in every corner of the building. They converged upon the office where Abraham Hersh sat, skullcap on head, poring over heavy ledgers reminiscent of volumes of the Gemara. “Reb Abraham Hersh,” they pleaded, “when will you give us a few minutes already? Time is money!”
The clerks, young men in swallow-tailed gabardines and pencils tucked behind ears, tried to serve the lesser merchants themselves. “The boss is busy,” they would say. “We’ll take care of you personally.”
“What do I need with a tail when I can have the head?” the merchants countered.
Occasionally an out-of-town merchant remembered that he had neglected to say the mourner’s prayer after a departed parent, and right then and there he would rub his hands in the dry dust and recite the prayer along with a hastily assembled quorum mumbling impatient “amens,” eager to get back to business. The clerks grumbled, but they dared not voice their displeasure since upon such occasions Abraham Hersh himself set the books aside, quickly made the ablution, and joined in with thunderous “amens.” Only Goldlust the bookkeeper growled in Germanized Yiddish, “A place of business isn’t a Hasidic clubhouse, you pack of rustic beasts.…”
* * *
Abraham Hersh’s home was always filled with strangers—Russian and Lithuanian Jewish salesmen, merchants, factors, and agents who converged by the hundreds upon Lodz to buy up goods at cheap prices which they then sold from China to Persia—wherever the Russian flag flew.
Dressed to modern garb, with beards trimmed or totally shaved, so indifferent to their faith that they didn’t mind skipping a prayer or a blessing, or even taking a ride on the Sabbath, they despised the Polish Jews with their long gabardines, narrow caps, drawn-out Yiddish, and piety, just as the Polish Jews loathed them as schemers, connivers, and near gentiles. But when it came to business, all such distinctions were laid aside.
There were few hotels in Lodz, only some ratty inns and boardinghouses, so most of the strangers stayed with the merchants with whom they were dealing.
There was always a crowd for lunch at Abraham Hersh’s table. Jews in derbies smacked their lips over the fat Polish roast geese and the sweet gefilte fish few could afford in Lithuania. Out of deference to their host, they made their ablutions, mumbled the benedictions, dipped bread in salt, and even interposed snatches of Judaic wisdom, mostly passages from the Scriptures with which they were quite conversant.
But mainly they talked business—about the legendary Russian merchant princes, about remote cities, exotic peoples and customs. At night, sofas were set up in all the rooms to accommodate the horde of visitors.
Abraham Hersh was most anxious to guard his sons from half-assimilated strangers, and he dismissed the boys from the table early. Jacob Bunem went off to his games, from which he still hadn’t weaned himself despite his age, but Simha Meir lingered, his ears cocked like a hare’s, drinking in every word.
“Simha!” his father exclaimed, employing the boy’s first name only out of respect for the memory of the Przysucha Rabbi. “Go study! Don’t waste your time on idleness!”
But Simha Meir was in no hurry to leave the table. He used various pretexts and excuses, at which he was so adept, to gain a little more time with the fascinating strangers. Without his father’s knowledge, he guided the guests about the city, giving directions to streets, marketplaces, and stores, for which the strangers pinched his cheek and tipped him a half or even a whole ruble. They also encouraged him to acquire a secular education and to become a man of the world.
“The only thing that counts is prosveshtchenie—education,” they told him, “you hear, lad?”
The boy didn’t fully grasp the difficult Russian word, but he gathered its meaning and the message stuck in his head.
He also made it a point to visit his father’s place of business, even though the father had strictly forbidden it. Under various pretexts, he kept dropping in and winking at the clerks to keep his secret.
Abraham Hersh warned his employees not to let his son in, but Simha Meir pleaded with them not to betray him, and they hid him among the bales of goods, where he sat happily reading the labels attached to the bolts. He tore off the seals, studied the various patterns and colors, and absorbed the smell, sight, and din of business, relishing them more than the raisins in the Turk’s raisin bread.
When his father was away, he would steal into his office, glance into the thick ledgers, question Goldlust, the bookkeeper, about everything, badger the clerks to explain this or that. Nothing escaped his attention. He envied the grown-ups who didn’t have to attend school and who were free to do as they pleased.
“The boy will get me with calf with all those questions,” Goldlust, the bookkeeper, would complain as the youngster pored over the books.
“He’s growing up a regular smart-aleck,” the clerks remarked, pursing their lips. “Hoo-hah!”
Simha Meir’s thoughts were years in the future. When he was grown, he would sit in an office just like Father’s, but without a skullcap—bareheaded like the German merchants across the street. He would not admit the kind of riffraff his father did, either. They would have to doff their caps to him first and address him in German, not Yiddish.
Eight
THE LARGE DINING ROOM of the manufacturer of women’s kerchiefs, Haim Alter, was bright and warm. It was late Saturday—actually long past the appearance of the three stars signifying the end of the Sabbath—but Haim Alter was only now conducting the ceremony of ushering out the holy day. He liked to linger in the Hasidic prayerhouse over the Sabbath meals. He had a yen for music, and he enjoyed singing chants in front of an audience. He was also eager to say the benediction, and he constantly bid for the honor with bottles of beer. Afterward, he said the evening prayers before the pulpit so that by the time he ushered out the Sabbath, it was already late in the day.
“A good week, a good week,” he would say expansively, smiling sweetly at his wife, his daughter, and his sons gathered in the large, overstuffed dining room, which was brightly illuminated by the many candles in the silver holders and the large copper lamp suspended by heavy chains above the enormous oak dining table.
He filled a large carved silver goblet with wine, letting some spill over into the saucer as a symbol of the overflowing prosperity and abundance he had been enjoying. Humming a chant under his breath, he took out of the sideboard the tall carved silver spice box with its green turret and silver flags and bells. He folded back the sleeves of his silk gabardine over the hairy, plump, pampered hands, to protect the garment from spilled wine, and told his only daughter, Dinele, to hold up the twisted Sabbath candle.
“Higher, Dinele,” he said to the thirteen-year-old girl with th
e chestnut braids, “this will bring you a tall bridegroom.”
A blush suffused the girl’s soft cheeks, and she made a face at her father, but she lifted the candle higher. Haim Alter raised the goblet high. He looked over the room to see if everyone, including Hadassah, the maid, was present. Satisfied, he launched into the ceremony in a loud chant, enunciating each word so that its sweetness permeated everywhere. The flickering candle illuminated his soft, fleshy hands as he praised the Almighty for having created fire. He shook the spice box at length to extract more flavor from the spices, and he inhaled with relish the sweet scents that exuded from the opened lid.
“Oh, ah!” he exulted, praising God for having created such redolent spices. He passed the spice box to his wife and children, so they, too might sniff, and waited until he had heard everyone make the blessing.
“Well now.” He lightly rebuked his daughter for mumbling the benediction too quickly and merely going through the motions. “Blessed be He who has created fragrant plants,” he intoned pointedly for her benefit.
Even the maid was handed the spice box to sniff after everyone had had his turn. But Hadassah invariably grew rattled and forgot how to poke her nose inside the silver lid, and this made them all laugh.
Haim Alter himself barely refrained from smiling as he concluded the ceremony. He folded back a corner of the tablecloth, spilled a quantity of wine over the table, doused the flickering candle, then dipped both hands into the wine and touched the wet fingers to every pocket of his gabardine, velvet vest, and broadcloth trousers as an invitation to a prosperous good week, portending a generous inflow of cash into the pockets, with God’s help. He touched his olive eyes with the wine and crooned; “A good week, a joyous week, a pleasureful week, a prosperous week, a lucky week.”