The Brothers Ashkenazi

by I. J. Singer

  In a low, squat shack in Balut, among weavers, tailors, street magicians, coachmen, and beggars, lived the scholar Nuske, to whom rich men sent their sons to be instructed in the Jewish Law. He was actually a rabbi, not a teacher, but he was temperamentally unsuited for the rabbinate and for Lodz.

  In the ferment of the growing city, rabbis did very well for themselves. There were constant lawsuits, disputes to be settled, moneys to be held in escrow, partnerships to be formed or dissolved.

  Jews traditionally turned to rabbis rather than to Christian courts to settle their disagreements. A Lodz rabbi needed to know more about promissory notes than about the Torah. He had to be knowledgeable in all the complexities of mercantile affairs, in contracts, in the ins and outs of wool and cotton, and Nuske neither knew nor wanted to know such things. His only interest lay in the holy Torah.

  Although of Polish origin, he was a Misnagid, or opponent of Hasidism. He lived only for God and His wisdom and wouldn’t stray from His laws by even a hair, hewing to the absolute and not accepting any compromise or diversion. Within his long, bony skull there was no room for anything but the Torah, the thousands of commentaries and annotations he had committed to memory and in which he immersed himself. He knew that there was only right or wrong, no in between, for to be partly wrong was to be totally wrong. All the smoke screens and sophistries put forward by the litigants in lawsuits didn’t even penetrate his consciousness.

  “Reuben is guilty, therefore, Simon is innocent, and there’s no deviating from that,” he would declare firmly. Those against whom he found shouted, raged, and screamed for justice, but Nuske remained unmoved and turned back to his sacking-bound volumes.

  The merchants quickly perceived that Nuske wasn’t attuned to the ways of Lodz, and they turned to rabbis who knew more about bankruptcy than God’s laws. The women who came to him with questions regarding religious law abandoned him as well.

  The Torah clearly stated that if a dairy dish somehow became mixed with a meat dish, the meat dish remained pure only if the ratio of meat to milk didn’t drop below sixty to one. But since Nuske couldn’t rely on the word of the women who were anxious to save the dish, he invariably judged the dish tref, impure, not even fit to feed a dog.

  The women were sad, but no more so than Nuske himself, who knew that he was costing poor Jews money, a sin punishable in Gehenna, and he couldn’t put his mind at rest. After a while the women stopped coming to him and consulted rabbis who were known to shut an eye to such things.

  The Lodz rabbis made money arranging spurious sales by Jewish bosses to gentile employers so that their factories could operate on the Sabbath, but Nuske wouldn’t take part in a subterfuge designed to circumvent the teachings of the Torah. The Law was the Law, not something to be trifled with.

  His wife, whose wealthy father had laid out a fortune to acquire such a paragon for a son-in-law, sneered at and derided her husband. A sprightly, capable, mannish woman, she listened to the lawsuits presented to her husband and grasped every nuance of the complicated disputes. In her mind, she even worked out compromises that would have satisfied both parties, but she was helpless to do anything about it. A woman’s place, she knew, was in the kitchen. Business and Torah were the province of men.

  But her husband knew nothing of the first and too much of the latter.

  The dowry had long since been used up, and the household suffered a privation that was particularly hard for her, a rich man’s daughter. The landlord of their house in Old City wouldn’t wait for the rent, and Nuske had been forced to vacate the big house in the city and move to a tiny shack in Balut, among the workers and coachmen. His wife bewailed her lot among paupers, but Nuske found peace here. No one in the deprived neighborhood disturbed him at his task of serving God and studying His Torah. The men were away all day at work; the women were so poor that they seldom interrupted him with questions concerning the purity of meat. The only time they came to him was to question the presence of a drop of blood in an egg or to have him fix the date of a mourning period. If a master weaver consulted him about a contract with an apprentice, he would pay a mere pittance, and Nuske wouldn’t even take notice of it.

  “Put it on the table,” he’d say, keeping his eyes averted and calling to his wife to take the abomination away since he was reluctant to handle such a filthy thing as money.

  Cranky and haggard from years of poverty, she would sweep the few coins from the table and fling them at her husband’s feet.

  “Idler!” she scolded. “Fool! Do you expect me to feed the children on this?”

  He didn’t respond. He knew that the study of Torah could be conducted only in a state of poverty. A Torah scholar was obliged to subsist on bread and salt, sleep on the ground, and live in dire need. Life on earth was nothing more than a brief prelude, a vestibule leading to the true life. What did it matter how destitute a vestibule was? …

  He bore no resentments against his wife, for he knew that women were immersed in the material world and were blind to the Truth. And he accepted all her abuse, scorn, and mockery with forbearance, not responding with even a word, which served only to fire her temper.

  “Say something at least, dummy!” she shrieked hysterically. “Don’t you even know when you’re being insulted?”

  He kept his silence. He wanted her to debase him as punishment for the sins in which he wallowed and which would surely earn him a place in Gehenna. And when his wife grew tired of abusing him, he went to his room, bolted his door, and immersed himself in the great sacking-bound volumes in the margins of which he wrote commentaries in a tiny script. Full of allusions and abbreviations, they would have required a genius to grasp their meaning.

  The household was destitute. The children whined for a new dress, a pair of shoes. Tradesmen pounded on the door for money owed them and threatened to cut off further credit. Nuske heard and saw nothing. He sat secluded in his tiny room with only God and His Torah for company. The only time he left the house was to go to services and to the bath. But since he didn’t pursue the duties of a rabbi, he gave in to his wife on one point and consented to tutor wealthy youths, offspring of men who were eager to transform their sons into scholars.

  From the very first day Simha Meir felt an aversion to Nuske. At first, he tried outshouting him and employing sophistry, as he had with his other teachers, but Nuske wasn’t as easily duped. Although of Polish descent, he didn’t believe in the Polish method of study just as he disclaimed Hasidism and wonder rabbis. He never argued. He rarely spoke since speech was a sin. The mouth had been created only to serve God and for studying, not for idle chatter. And the moment Simha Meir commenced his verbal pyrotechnics, Nuske silenced him. “Enough! The Torah must be explored straightforwardly, not casuistically.”

  Simha Meir wouldn’t back off. “On the other hand, one can say—” he began, reversing his contention, but Nuske interrupted him again.

  “The Torah is truth, and truth can’t be batted back and forth. There is only one truth.”

  Simha Meir quickly formed a deep resentment for his teacher. “A crackpot,” he whispered to his prospective brothers-in-law, irked that he had been prevented from demonstrating his erudition.

  He saw that he wouldn’t be able to dupe the teacher with specious arguments, but that it would be possible to avoid studying altogether since Nuske was innocent of guile and never checked to see if the students were following the text. Also, he would abruptly stop in mid-lesson to preach morality, something done only in Lithuanian yeshivas.

  Simha Meir drew a deck of cards from his pocket and dealt out hands to the other students. They were mostly sated, pampered sons of the rich, considerably older than Simha Meir. They promptly recognized a kindred spirit in him and took him along to hidden pockets of Lodz where one could enjoy illicit pleasure. Haim Alter’s sons inevitably tagged along.

  Lodz seethed in ferment as the city grew day by day, hour by hour. Strangers converged from all over: German engineers and master weavers;
English chemists, designers, and patternmakers; Russian merchant princes in blue coats and wide trousers over short patent-leather boots; Jewish traveling salesmen and commission agents—gay, lusty young men who descended upon Lodz to make money and to have fun.

  The youth of Lodz began to shave their beards and don worldly attire. Restaurants, cabarets, and gambling casinos opened and drew huge crowds. Hungarian dancers came to further their careers and fatten their purses. Circuses and carnivals arrived from Warsaw and Petersburg, from Berlin and Budapest. Russian functionaries and officers accepted bribes and kickbacks which they squandered on wine, women, and cards. Lodz drank, sang, danced, attended theaters, caroused in brothels, gambled. Wealthy Hasidim were caught up in the mood of revelry. They lingered in kosher restaurants, where waiters in silk skullcaps brought fat goose thighs and plump waitresses served dried chick-peas and foamy beer. Wastrel Hasidic youths, living on the largess of their fathers-in-law, ceased studying the Torah and surreptitiously played cards in studyhouses.

  Business in the city was excellent, and orders kept pouring in. The prodigal Russian merchants didn’t haggle and paid whatever prices were asked. Plants, factories, and workshops ran overtime, draining the workers’ energy.

  The affluent youths in their gleaming alpaca gabardines, kid boots, and heavy gold watches learned the meaning of fun. In illicit houses of pleasure they gambled, dined on roast goose and rolls, drank, and bedded the compliant servant girls who waited on tables.

  A favorite of the idle youth was one Shillem the Sharper, a baker by trade who went about with flour in his beard, a paper cone on his head, and ritual garment dangling over long underdrawers. He spent little time in his bakery, which he left to his wife, children, and assistants, while he devoted himself to his main passion—gambling.

  Just above the cellar bakery of his one-story wooden house, a game was constantly in progress. Hasidic youths feverishly slammed cards against the table and wagered heavily as their host swept away pot after pot. But the more they lost, the more they came back, for Shillem was an amiable fellow, merry, a jokester, and always ready to extend credit. He taught the youths how to sneak into their father’s tills and make a score. He also lent money at high interest which could be repaid when the youths collected their dowries.

  His large room, its walls hung with samplers of biblical scenes, was always crowded. At the head of the table sat Shillem with the paper cone on his head and in his underdrawers, and he swiftly dealt the cards as he fingered the one-, three-, and five-ruble banknotes that turned white from his floury hands.

  His daughters, fleshy wenches, brought refreshments to the table—roast goslings, tripe, crisp cracklings, rolls, soft strudel, and mugs of beer. Cigarette smoke, clinking coins, Hasidic chants, gambling jargon, double entendre jokes, exclamations, and arguments formed a backdrop to the game. A youth sat at the window to guard against the sudden appearance of one of the players’ fathers.

  The two gentile servant girls already knew how to arrange a secret assignation with the youths. They would lead them to a cubicle in the cellar and give themselves on the sacks of flour.

  Nuske’s pupils were frequent visitors here. They spent more time with the baker than with their teacher. Haim Alter’s lecherous sons, with their pimpled cheeks sprouting the first stubble of beard, had become more expert at stealing from their father than at anything Nuske might have taught them. They always had lots of money since their father left it around uncounted, and all of it passed into the baker’s floury fingers. They also visited the dark cellar cubicle with alarming frequency.

  As bad as was their luck at cards, so good was Simha Meir’s. He quickly caught on to all of Shillem’s tricks and manipulations, and he matched him card for card. The elder cardsharp came to respect the cunning youngster, and he dealt him straight hands as he would a contemporary. Within a short time Simha Meir had accumulated a roll of several hundred rubles that he promptly lent out at interest, actually to his prospective brothers-in-law, who promptly lost it all back to him.

  Nuske sat over his Gemaras and didn’t even notice who was or wasn’t present. Only on Thursdays, the last day of the week assigned to study, when a student was obliged to learn a portion of the lesson in case a father tested him on the Sabbath day, did the boys begin to apply themselves. As usual, Simha Meir sought to show off his erudition, and he raised his voice to confuse and outshout Nuske. But the teacher cut him short. “Recite the lesson, Nissan,” he ordered his son, “and explain it all to them.”

  Nissan, a thirteen-year-old as lean, brown-skinned and dark-eyed as his father, opened to the proper page and in a loud, clear voice repeated the lesson for all the boys.

  Out of vexation, Simha Meir kicked Nissan under the table. Nothing enraged him so much as having someone outdo him at anything.

  Eleven

  EVEN AS HIS PUPILS DECEIVED NUSKE, his own son, Nissan, did the same.

  He wasn’t fond of his father; he held him in great contempt. He couldn’t forgive him for the fact that his mother went about forever weeping and with a rag wound around her aching head or that his sisters never had a new dress or a pair of shoes. Nor could he forgive him for the life he had imposed upon him, Nissan—a life lacking a shred of joy. All his father knew was the Torah, moralizing, and gloom.

  From the time Nissan could reason—he could do so while other boys his age were still playing tag—the burden of supporting the household had fallen upon his shoulders. He had grown up listening to his mother and sisters railing and grumbling against the father. His mother, raised in the lap of luxury, could never endure the housework, their coarse neighbors with their earthy ways, the whole bitter lot that impoverished women bear so patiently.

  She laid blame on her own father for selecting a son-in-law destined to ruin her life. But mostly she vented her rage on her bungler of a husband who was fit for nothing, who avoided people, and who disdained money. She maligned him before her own children, mocked him, held him up to ridicule. Most of all, she belittled him before their son, Nissan.

  “There he goes, the good-for-nothing.… Stark, raving mad!”

  From earliest childhood he had heard the threats and laments of the tradesmen demanding payment and vowing to cut off the family’s credit. Whenever it was time to celebrate the Sabbath, to pay rent, to buy a child a dress, tears and accusations ensued. But his father simply turned his back on it all. He sat in his room with the door bolted and studied or wrote commentaries on the margins of the Torah in his tiny, cramped script.

  And the whole burden of supporting the family fell upon the only male in the house, him, Nissan. He had to go with head bowed to his rich, spiteful uncles and beg for money. He had to scrounge firewood for the house. He had to call in a handyman when something went wrong, pound a nail into a wall, fix a falling board, push a wardrobe away from a wall, do all the work of which there was always a surfeit in an impoverished household.

  No one ever visited the house beside the few ragged women with questions concerning religious law. No one ever laughed; no joy was ever displayed. The father spoke only of the Torah, of the vanity of this world, the transience of human life, the folly of pleasure. Each sigh he issued was like a knife in Nissan’s heart.

  “Fear God!” Nuske would enjoin him in the midst of a lesson. “You hear, Nissan?”

  Even more dismal were the Sabbaths. Nuske found quantities of prayers to recite, countless books to study. He read the weekly portion of the Pentateuch for hours on end, recited portions of the Zohar, swayed over the ancient volumes. With Nissan at his side, he paced through the house of prayer, mumbling the words in a mournful, monotonous tone. The boy felt hungry and oppressed by the bleakness of the deserted house of worship, but the father went on long after the other Jews had eaten their noonday meals and taken their naps.

  The mother and daughters couldn’t wait, and they ate the Sabbath meal without hearing the benediction. By the time Nissan and his father sat down the food was cold, unappetizing. Just
as unsatisfactory were the hymns that followed. The father grunted rather than sang. As soon as he had eaten and recited the blessings, he lay down for his nap with a holy book on his chest to dream of the Sabbath as the Law directed.

  “Nissan,” he said, “you take a book in hand and nap, too. A Jew must sleep on the Sabbath.”

  Yes, he hated his father, and along with his father, he hated his holy books that spoke only of pain and were steeped in morals and melancholy; his Torah, so complex and convoluted that it defied all understanding; his whole Jewishness that oppressed the human soul and loaded it down with guilt and remorse. But most of all, Nissan hated his father’s God, that cruel and vengeful being who demanded total obeisance, eternal service, mental and physical self-torture and privation, and the surrender of all choice and will. No matter what you did for Him, it wasn’t enough. He was never satisfied, and He punished, condemned, and raked man over the coals.

  It was because of God who demanded so much that their house was so dark and decrepit. It was because of God that his mother was sick and prematurely aged. It was because of God that he and his sisters went barefoot and hungry. It was because of God that there was only worry, gloom, and despair in the house. And he hated God even more than he hated his father. Out of this rage at the Almighty, he intentionally jumbled the prayers, tore paper on the Sabbath, glanced at the cross on the church, ate dairy without waiting the required six hours after meat, didn’t observe the fasts, and read heretic books at Feivel the rag dealer’s.

  Feivel lived on the edge of town. Pits had been dug in his courtyard and girls sat there sorting and grading rags, using iron combs to rake through the huge piles of rags that were constantly being brought in on carts. These rags were washed and cleaned before Feivel sold them back to cheap factories, which transformed them into inferior yarn. But just as Feivel’s hands were immersed in rags, his head was immersed in heresy and Enlightenment.