by I. J. Singer
Short, quick-moving, with a greasy derby upon his curly, dusty head; with shining eyes peering out of a merry, puckered face; with tufts of hair and lint clinging to his curly beard; beleaguered by his workers, the teamsters, and merchants, he still managed to find time to travel for miles in search of a new heretic book.
In his large house, strewn with daughters, papers, promissory notes, and bedding, stood bookcases filled with books for which he had paid fortunes. Others lay stacked on all the tables, in closets, cabinets, and on shelves.
His pious wife and blowsy daughters burned and discarded the books, which they despised as much as they did Feivel himself. But as fast as they threw them out or destroyed them, he bought new ones. In the midst of a profitable transaction he would drop everything and race off to some book peddler who had a rare find for him. His eyes would gleam out of his dusty face as his gnarled, stained hands fingered the pages of the new acquisition.
In the same way, he always found time to convert a Hasidic youth, to yank him out of the studyhouse and plant within him the seeds of heresy and Enlightenment.
In the evenings, on Sabbaths and on holidays, Hasidic youths sat in Feivel’s house, reading forbidden literature. Feivel would roam from studyhouse to studyhouse, from house of prayer to house of prayer, recruiting youths, proselytizing, displaying erudition in both the Torah and in worldly knowledge. He gave the youths money; he fed them; he let them sleep in his house; he literally offered them the shirt off his back in his quest to set them against God and transform them into unbelievers.
He was unable to keep his mind on his rags; he kept running inside to check on his disciples. “Are you reading? Are you absorbing?” he asked with satisfaction. “Good, fine.…”
Exulting in his mission, he called to his wife and daughters to bring the boys a glass of tea, a bite to eat. But since they weren’t about to listen to him, he dashed into the kitchen himself and brought out slices of bread with chicken fat with the same joy of service with which pious Jewesses fed poor yeshiva students dining on their husbands’ charity.
Often Feivel sat down with the boys and studied the more complex texts with them, interpreting the philosophical systems and doctrines. Eyes shining, shoulders swaying, voice chanting, he preached heresy with the fervor of a pious teacher exalting the Torah.
On Sabbaths, his house filled with youths wearing silk gabardines, velvet hats, and skullcaps. Since Feivel’s wife and daughters were observers of the Law and wouldn’t think of cooking on the Sabbath, they all partook of the warmed-over Sabbath meal with Sabbath tea.
Feivel sat at the head of the large table in his greasy suit and, eyes flashing out of the withered face, expounded on philosophy, mathematics, history, astronomy, geography, and exegesis. He interpreted obtuse portions of the Scriptures, explained the difficult points in the Gemara, and encouraged his audience to pursue worldly education, accept Enlightenment, and renounce the ways of their fathers. “Education, logic, and work. That’s the only way, my children,” he proclaimed again and again.
Drawing the curtains and bolting the door on his own wife, of whom he was afraid, he lit a cigar and passed out cigarettes to the boys. Not all of them were yet ready to smoke on the Sabbath, but when those who were lit up and blew rings of smoke at the Sabbath candelabrum, Feivel’s curly beard bristled with satisfaction. Gazing around at the smokers, he was convinced that their souls had been saved.
Among the youths sat Nissan, son of Nuske the rabbi, who haunted Feivel the ragmaker’s house, digesting book after illicit book.
Instinct had guided Feivel to the rabbi’s son, who displayed symptoms of unrest, a curiosity for something outside the house, the need to broaden his horizons. Feivel hadn’t been wrong, and the youngster had taken to his reeducation with the zeal of a dog attacking a bone. He raced through the forbidden books under Feivel’s enthusiastic tutelage. Feivel realized that his new protégé was a genius. Before a single word was uttered, Nissan grasped the meaning of the next ten. Feivel treasured him as he would a costly gem. He taught the boy, encouraged him, spent hours talking to him and praising his intellect. “Nissan, next to you I am like nothing—a dunce.”
Nissan’s father remained, as always, completely oblivious to all this. Preoccupied and removed from the world, he didn’t notice his son’s gradual estrangement, didn’t notice him disappearing for hours at a time, reading heretic literature under his very nose.
“Nissan,” he mumbled often, “fear the Almighty, you hear?”
“I hear,” Nissan replied mockingly, turning the page of a forbidden book. Duping and betraying his father provided him enormous satisfaction.
He read for hours on end. He lay awake nights on his narrow bench bed, and by the light of candle stumps that he stole from the house of prayer, he digested the books. He read everything without system or order, whatever was available at Feivel’s house. He studied German from Moses Mendelssohn’s Bible commentary printed in transliterated Hebrew, and he struggled over Maimonides’s Guide to the Perplexed. He read the articles in the Hebrew monthly Ha-Shahar. He reveled in the nationalistic stories and poems by Smolenskin, Mapu, Gordon, along with the articles of Krochmal and stories in the Kuzari, fantastic travel accounts, books on astronomy and higher mathematics. In German—which was still alien to him—he read the philosophers Mendelssohn and Maimón,. Spinoza, Kant, and Schopenhauer. His brain was as chaotic as Feivel’s bookcases, which Feivel’s wife and daughters were constantly disrupting.
For all that, he still managed to learn the weekly lesson from his father, and he repeated it to the students whose minds were fixed on Shillem the baker’s entertainments.
There was instant friction between his father’s pupils and Nissan, the teacher’s son. The pupils envied Nissan his intellect, the fact that he always knew his lesson, that he didn’t subtilize and could explain everything clearly and succinctly, making them appear dense. Simha Meir, most of all, hated and envied Nissan, who had shown him up before the others and diminished his reputation.
From his side, Nissan couldn’t forgive the pupils their handsome gabardines, their silk hats and neckerchiefs, their soft, smooth boots and gold watches. He was the only one in the class forced to go about in garments that were patched and outgrown and a hat with the cotton lining showing. Their elegance accentuated his poverty. Most of all, he was disturbed that they mocked his father, duped and tormented him. And that his father was oblivious to it all compounded his vexation.
At first, the boys tried to draw Nissan into their circle so that he wouldn’t snitch on them. But Nissan had no desire for gambling or carousing. He even tried to sway them to his ways. Just as unswervingly as his father was devoted to the holy studies, so was Nissan totally addicted to his newfound faith. Its every word was gospel to him, not to be deviated from by even a hair. And with the same fervor that his father preached the holy Torah, Nissan tried to convert his classmates to heresy.
He did this surreptitiously and with the total support of a delighted Feivel. But the wealthy youths merely glanced at the forbidden books and promptly threw them aside. As far as they were concerned, they represented as much bother as the Torah. They much preferred to play cards at Shillem’s.
Only Simha Meir took an apparent interest.
One day in the midst of a lesson, he asked the teacher, “Rabbi, is it true that the Torah was given by God on Mount Sinai?”
Nuske blanched in fear. “What kind of question is that?” he asked in alarm.
“I only asked it because Nissan says that Moses made it all up himself out of his own head,” Simha Meir replied with complete innocence.
A hush fell over the classroom.
Nuske sat there as if stricken by lightning. After a long while, he regained his speech. “Is this true, Nissan?”
Nissan would neither admit nor deny it.
His father gripped the edge of the table to keep from toppling. “Jeroboam, son of Nebat,” he thundered. “You may not be in the same room wit
h Jews!”
Nissan got up and left the house for good.
He apprenticed himself to a master weaver. At first, the man wouldn’t agree without the father’s signature on the contract and a fee, but Nissan offered to teach his daughters Hebrew and how to sign their betrothal papers and his sons a little arithmetic and writing, and the weaver agreed to take him on for a period of three years.
Nissan wasn’t allowed near the loom. Like all apprentices, he was given cotton to wind. The mistress made him sit on a three-legged stool and rock her baby, which squirmed in its cradle from the heat and dampness.
In the long, low-ceilinged room crammed with looms and bench beds, a number of journeymen sat in only their pants and skullcaps, weaving and chanting cantorial hymns. The boss, a man in a greasy skullcap and a tattered cotton jerkin that he wore winter and summer, cast his bloodshot eyes everywhere to make sure the work was proceeding properly and no pilferage was taking place. If one of the men stopped to mop a brow or roll a cigarette, he promptly intervened. “Keep those hands moving! Every minute you loaf is like stealing bread from my mouth!”
The mistress of the house sat by the stove in a mangy black wig through which poked red tufts of her natural hair. A gang of black- and red-haired wenches sat around her on low stools, peeling potatoes with sharp knives. The acrid smell of frying fat, oil, and onions blended with the dense steam issuing from a huge iron kettle.
“Mistress, what’s for dinner today?” shouted a journeyman, emerging from his tangle of thread like a spider from its web.
“Keep your eyes on your work, black tomcat!” she replied from out of the steam. “The pot is none of your business.…”
The “black tomcat” suddenly began to quote from the Book of Esther: “That shrew, Zeresh, wife of Haman—” he chanted in a Purim-like trill. The other workers quickly grasped the allusion and burst into laughter.
The mistress scraped with the sharp knife and hurled the half-peeled potatoes into the pot, splashing the water all around.
“Like fun you’ll get dumplings and beans out of me!” she shrieked at the howling youths. “Potatoes and oil you’ll eat till it comes out of your ears.… Then you’ll know what Zeresh can do.…”
In her rage, she cut her finger and promptly went wild. With the black wig askew on her saffron head, she ran to the bench beds lined against the wall and stripped them of the stained bare pillows. “Father in heaven, may I not live to lead my daughters under the canopy if I give you my pillows tonight! The bare floor is good enough for the likes of you hooligans!”
His foot rocking the baby his mistress had borne in her late years, one hand tangled in cotton, Nissan sat winding away. The journeymen made fun of him, called him by nicknames, sent him to the store for a piece of bread or herring. The mistress scolded him, the baby screamed at him, but he stuck to it. Day after day he sat observing the work, watching the looms, confining to memory every rod and shaft in order to understand their function. At the same time he thought about his books.
His mother came to see him and wrung her hands to find him in such surroundings. “Nissan,” she wept. “Is this what I’ve lived to see? You, a common worker? … Come home with me!”
But he didn’t go with her. He learned the trade, he tutored his boss’s children, and whatever spare time he had, he raced to Feivel’s house to bone up on the latest heretic books. At night, lying on his filthy pallet in the corner, his blanket a yard of finished goods, he studied by the light of a forbidden candle and prepared himself for some goal of which he was yet uncertain.
In all the synagogues and studyhouses in Balut, parents held up Nissan as an example to their children. “That is the fate of all those who would stray from God’s path.… Neither this world nor the world to come will they enjoy.…”
“Nissan the depraved,” his coworkers dubbed him, since it was the custom for every worker to have a nickname.
The wealthy youths sat in Nuske’s classroom and played cards under the table. Their teacher was more depressed than ever. He envisioned the flaming Gehenna already awaiting him for the sins of his son, who had abandoned God. “Boys, be good Jews,” he admonished his students just as he had Nissam. “Fear the Almighty, you hear?”
“We hear,” Simha Meir grunted, skillfully palming a card. He was again the leader, the prodigy among his classmates.
Twelve
FOLLOWING A NUMBER OF PASSOVERS AND SUCCOTHS, on which the groom-to-be was invited to his prospective bride’s home and she to his, the eighteen-year-old couple was joined in matrimony.
The half-French, half-German Mademoiselle Antoinette, who made clothes for the Huntze girls themselves, sewed Dinele’s wedding gown. When his wife, Priveh, told him how much money the woman demanded for the trousseau, Haim Alter opened his olive eyes wide. “What’s the matter with you, Privehshe?” he asked in alarm, tugging a coal black beard with fleshy hands. “I never heard of paying such a fortune to some seamstress!”
Priveh promptly assumed the expression of an irate queen. “Mademoiselle Antoinette is no seamstress,” she corrected him. “She is only the finest dressmaker in Lodz, and it’s a privilege to have her prepare your trousseau.”
Haim Alter grew so distraught by the amount he’d have to shell out for the supposed privilege that for once he lost his fear of his wife. “She’d be grateful to take a third of the amount, the shiksa!” he said. “She isn’t the only dressmaker in Lodz, you know. Such bargains I don’t need.…”
Priveh’s china-blue eyes began to gush tears. “Mama!” she lamented to her long-departed parent. “I’ll never live through this!”
During the long years of the engagement she had persuaded herself that no one but Mademoiselle Antoinette would do to prepare her Dinele’s trousseau. It wasn’t so much the quality of the work—she knew full well from her own experience that the precious silks, satins, velvets, and laces prepared for a bride’s trousseau seldom saw the light of day and molded away in closets once the wedding was over. What did concern her was to show all Lodz that the haughty Mademoiselle Antoinette, who refused to kowtow even to the wealthiest ladies and who sewed for the Huntze girls themselves, would deign to prepare her Dinele’s trousseau. Wouldn’t that turn all Lodz green!
What she had gone through to arrange this! What devious devices, intrigues, and machinations to make the connection! It was a secret she had confided to only half the women in Lodz. And now her Haim proposed haggling over the price and he dismissed all her efforts with a wave of the hand!
“Mama!” she weepingly implored her mother in the other world. “I’ll never bear the disgrace! I won’t live to see my only daughter stand under the canopy!”
Haim Alter grew so unnerved by his wife’s words that he almost started crying himself. “Bite your tongue!” he said in a quavering voice. “How can you say such things on such a festive occasion? May they be scattered over all the distant forests and over all the empty wastes.…”
This time she didn’t pout and bristle as usual. She was so elated that he had given in so quickly that she fell on his breast and showered him with kisses in full sight of Samuel Leibush.
“Privehshe.” Her husband blushed. “In front of the servants?”
Samuel Leibush grew so flustered that he forgot himself enough to say “It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.…”
With the same lavish disregard for extravagance, the bride was outfitted with dozen upon dozen of silks, satins, lace, furs, hats, silverware, jewelry, and pieces of furniture, for which there wasn’t even room in the house. Haim Alter rented the biggest wedding hall, hired the finest band, wedding jesters, and caterers. Hundreds of invitations were sent out. He wanted his daughter’s wedding to be the talk of Lodz—of all Poland—and he invited the cream of Lodz’s wealth, religious society, and aristocracy.
Not to be outdone, the groom’s side presented to Haim Alter a staggering list of its own guests.
In the huge wedding hall, with its gilt mirrors, red plush, gol
d chairs and magnificent chandeliers gathered the mélange that was Lodz.
There were great-bearded magnates; wealthy Hasidim in gleaming silk gabardines and shiny boots; clean-shaven double-chinned manufacturers in black top hats and white gloves; distinguished rabbis in sweeping satin gabardines and fur caps; Lithuanian traveling salesmen in derbies and elegant frock coats; ultrapietists in broad-brimmed velvet hats, shirts undone at the necks and ritual garments dangling; blond German industrialists in starched shirts and high stiff collars; and even a bewildered Russian police commissioner with sweeping muttonchops and a chestful of medals over a colorful dress uniform.
The same exotic mix existed among the women. There were stout, bustling female relatives in tightly waved wigs, vivid silk gowns with trains and bustles, heavy gold chains, and diamond rings and earrings; ancient crones in satin bonnets and outmoded dresses still saved from their own trousseaus; décolleté young matrons in stylish white gowns; gawky German ladies with long blond braids and lots of rouge over pale cheeks. Yiddish, Polish, German, and Russian blended in a deafening cacophony. Female eyes took measure, diamonds and gold flashed, silks shimmered, fans fluttered, mutual compliments flew back and forth as ladies teased, jibed, needled, scored conversational points.
Carriages drawn by teams of white horses came cantering across the narrow, ill-paved streets of Lodz to disgorge a steady stream of guests. The bride sat enthroned amid garlands of flowers. The groom’s sisters had woven a wreath of roses for her chestnut hair that would be shorn the next day. The bride’s brothers in their new gabardines and satin hats seated themselves next to the top-hatted coachman as he picked up party after party of guests. Although they were themselves old enough to marry, they couldn’t pass up the opportunity to ride in a fancy carriage, and on the coachman’s box at that.