The Brothers Ashkenazi

by I. J. Singer

  The policemen with their curved swords pushed, chased, and prodded the hundreds of indigent girls and women who assembled outside the wedding hall to gawk at the guests, listen to the music, and push to get a glimpse of the inside.

  As at most Jewish weddings, quarrels erupted at the last minute. Haim Alter had failed to hand over the 2,000 rubles due on the dowry, as had been agreed. He was short on money after the fortune he had paid out for the wedding, and he couldn’t lay his hands on the required amount.

  “Reb Abraham Hersh,” he implored, “I give you my word of honor that I’ll settle up directly after the wedding, so help me!”

  “With a dowry, there are no promises,” Abraham Hersh said. “Unless the two thousand is on the table, I’m taking the groom straight home.”

  Haim Alter took the groom aside and urged him to work on his father. “Simhele,” he cajoled, “you’re a man with heart, after all. You’re going to be my son. Do me the great favor so I can savor your goodness. The minute the wedding is over I’ll bring you the money without fail.”

  Simha Meir solemnly promised to speak with his father, but he never even approached him. He had lived long enough in Lodz to know that vows, pledges, and promises weren’t worth a groschen and that whatever wasn’t paid out in cash before the ceremony would never again be seen by human eyes.

  “I begged and begged Papa,” he lied to his prospective father-in-law, looking him straight in the eye, “but he won’t give an inch. What can I do? Honor thy father, you know.…”

  Samuel Leibush ran his feet off collecting the 2,000 rubles, which he brought back in various denominations of crinkled banknotes.

  When all seemed ready, new complications arose, this time not fiscal, but moral.

  From the start Abraham Hersh Ashkenazi had been looking askance at all the Germans and clean-shaven Jews Haim Alter had invited to the affair. He, Abraham Hersh, had brought the Alexander Rabbi himself, and he felt disgraced by the presence of infidels.

  The rabbi had been escorted by a palace guard of a hundred uninvited Hasidim. A ragged, uncouth crew, they lunged toward the tables and, before the distinguished and impeccable industrialists and bankers knew what was happening, began singing at the tops of their lungs.

  Haim Alter was beside himself. “Reb Abraham Hersh!” he wailed. “You’re killing me without a knife.… You’re driving away all my guests—the cream of Lodz’s society!”

  “I don’t need any beardless heathens,” Abraham Hersh replied vengefully. “Let them go straight to hell!”

  Soon after, he charged into the women’s hall, where he had heard mixed dancing was taking place. He snatched off his fur-edged cap, remaining in only his skullcap, and commenced to break up the couples.

  “Out, gentiles and reprobates!” he shouted. “This isn’t a German wedding!”

  The bride’s female relatives fainted; the bride suffered a fit; women shrieked; girls laughed. Priveh raised bejeweled arms to protect her guests, but Abraham Hersh was not to be denied. Towering, furious, beard ruffled, eyes shooting fire, he whipped the dancers with his cap. “Respect for the Alexander Rabbi!” he roared. “Reverence for an assembly of Jews!”

  The aroused Hasidim extinguished the lamps and doused the waxed floors with pitchers of water to render them unfit for mixed dancing. The crones in the bonnets clapped in approval. “That’s the way! Serves them right!” Brimming over with righteous joy, the Hasidim slid over the floor, making a shambles of the posh hall.

  When it came time to stand under the wedding canopy, Simha Meir raised himself on tiptoe to appear taller than his bride. Even though he had ordered the cobbler to put extra-high heels on his boots, she still towered over him. His lack of height vexed him greatly. Knowing this, Jacob Bunem made a point of standing next to his brother so that the difference between them was accentuated. Out of spite, Simha Meir made sure to step on his bride’s foot before she stepped on his, a sign that he would be master of the house.

  Later that night, when the two dotards escorted him to the wedding chamber, mumbling the secrets of marital relations, Simha Meir had to stuff his mouth with a kerchief to muffle his laughter.

  The next morning, when his two brothers-in-law and his friends from the classroom and from Shillem the baker’s came to him in a state of excitement to hear all about the wedding night, as they had arranged to do before, Simha Meir wouldn’t even speak to them. Like all Hasidic youth, he felt a deep disdain for bachelors.

  “I don’t mess around with snotnose boys,” he said, waving them away and tilting his hat rakishly to the side like a Cossack.

  Thirteen

  AMID ALL THE JOY AND CELEBRATION, Dinele suffered. She looked on in a daze as men congratulated her father and women wished each other the same good fortune that had befallen Priveh.

  Dinele couldn’t grasp what possible coup snaring the youth with the darting eyes represented. His erudition meant nothing to her. Jewishness in general bored her. When Hadassah, the maid, helped her put on her stockings in the morning and urged her to say the morning prayers, Dinele became hysterical at the comical way the maid extended her neck as she drew out the sacred words. It reminded her of a hen drinking.

  And just as silly and laughable was the Torah her father tried to teach her. He was forever nagging at her to observe the laws. “Dinele, you mustn’t comb your hair on the Sabbath! Dinele, you mustn’t eat milk chocolate until six hours after meat! Dinele, don’t drink without a benediction!”

  She loved her father. He was very good to her. Still, he was alien to her with his constant “you mustn’ts” and with his hearty renditions of the Sabbath hymns. And just as weird and exotic were the Hasidic banquets he conducted. She was appalled by the Hasidim, and she shared her elegant mother’s disdain for them. They made havoc of the waxed parquet with their muddy boots, and they spat on the floors.

  “The pack of animals is already gathered,” Priveh would quip with the forbearance of wives long inured to their husbands’ idiosyncrasies.

  “Hadassah,” she instructed the maid, “make an onion borscht for that gang. I’m leaving. I can’t stand their gabble.”

  And she was off shopping for bargains.

  Dinele gazed at the hirsute, disheveled, perfervid crew with loathing. They were rude, uncivilized, boorish. They danced like savages, howled like wolves, scampered through the room with unkempt beards and earlocks flying. She held her breath and recoiled when they passed by.

  Even less appealing were the pious spongers who were her father’s guests at mealtimes. They demanded cake, whiskey, delicacies. They spoke in loud voices; they told outlandish stories, blew their noses into their fingers even as they tore great chunks out of the Sabbath loaves. Despite their eternal ablutions, their hands and nails were filthy and nicotine-stained. They openly discussed prospective matches for her, Dinele, and she fled the table blushing with embarrassment.

  No better were the rabbis who stayed at the house from time to time. Her father would surrender the place of honor to the visitors and fawn over them as if he were a schoolboy. The mother would be barred from the room lest her sight defile the saints’ presence, and she, Dinele, would be brought in briefly to be blessed by them.

  It wasn’t that Dinele was an unbeliever, for she feared God who sat up in heaven and made a note in His fiery book each time she ate a piece of chocolate after meat or combed her hair on the Sabbath. She also feared his representatives on earth, the long-bearded saints at her father’s table. But she feared them as sorcerers capable of punishing and performing deeds of black magic, and she despised and avoided them.

  She much preferred her school, a place of decorum and gentility, where etiquette and social graces prevailed. There was as much emphasis there on manners as on mathematics. The French-speaking teachers were as polite and genteel as the subjects they taught, and despite her heritage, they all liked her.

  “Diana, you have nothing of the Semite about you. You’re as fair and blue-eyed as any Christian,” the
y assured her.

  Because she was quiet, gentle, and compliant, her classmates were drawn to her, too, particularly the strong, mannish girls. “Diana, why don’t you convert?” they urged her. “With your looks, you’d snare a count at the very least.”

  But she wouldn’t consider such a drastic move. She feared the wrathful Jewish God too much. Still, when her classmates invited her to accompany them to church, she went. Standing in the darkness of the cavernous chamber, she gazed wide-eyed at the stained glass and carved statues. She listened to the sonorous chords of the organ, marveled at the forest of candles and banners, the priestly vestments and rites, the genuflecting and the Latin, and tears came to her eyes before all this splendor and glory.

  It was so different from her father’s Hasidic prayerhouse with its grime, noise, chaos, and disorder. Women were allowed in there only once a year, on Simhat Torah. She was afraid of the scroll of Law that the men carried, just as she was afraid of the blast of the ram’s horn on Rosh Hashanah and the candles on the Day of Atonement. But accompanying the fear was a sense of the ridiculous, of something alien and repugnant that made her flee from it all as if it were infectious.

  Everything in her household was alien and strange to her—her father, his guests, her loutish brothers who regarded her as something inferior, good only to bully and tease.

  She felt ashamed before her schoolmates if they encountered her in the company of her parents in the street. She also made sure to avoid her brothers lest they recognize her and approach her. She envied her classmates, who could feel proud of their families. She was too embarrassed to invite any of her friends home.

  Like all pubescent girls, she lived in a state of constant turmoil. Each day she grew infatuated with someone else—now a French teacher, now her piano teacher, but mostly with her girlfriends, as did they with her. They constantly kissed, hugged, shared secrets, laughed, and cried together.

  When she turned thirteen and became engaged to the Hasidic youth with the particularly funny name, she was disconsolate. He was hardly the hero of her novels. But she wasn’t strong enough to resist her parents.

  During the years of the engagement she put the whole thing out of her mind. She kept going to school and continued her detached, dreamlike existence. She never exchanged a word with her fiancé. They saw each other only when they exchanged visits on the holidays. When he came to her house, she served him his meals, as her mother forced her to do, but they never spoke.

  Even more she hated to visit his family. They were a cold, solemn bunch. Her prospective mother-in-law prattled on about religion and stuffed her beyond satiety. The father was an awesome figure. One glance from him, and Dinele’s blood would freeze. The first chance she had, she fled from there as if from Gehenna.

  She retreated deeper and deeper into her fantasies and thought no more about the wedding than she did of her inevitable death. Just like her father, she enjoyed a fool’s paradise and avoided facing the future.

  Thus, when it finally came, it was a particular shock, and she felt deeply depressed on what should have been the happiest day of her life.

  She flushed with embarrassment over the wifely duties and obligations hammered into her. She was repelled by the ritual bath and the various attendants who blessed, poked, and prodded her.

  She was mortified by her father-in-law’s outlandish response to the mixed dancing. Most of all, she was terrified of her first encounter with her husband. She didn’t utter a word to him when they sat down to eat the so called gold consommé traditionally served to a newlywed couple.

  Simha Meir turned to her. “How did the fast affect you?” he asked in his singsong just for something to say.

  She didn’t respond. She had nothing to say to the skinny youth with the great fur hat falling down over his ears.

  When the women escorted her into the wedding chamber, whispering all kinds of advice into her ears, and then left her alone to await her groom, she became alarmed. She cowered on the edge of the bed as if to guard against an assault upon her body.

  “No,” she pleaded with the stranger approaching her, “no!”

  But he ignored her. He didn’t even make an effort to appease her, to establish some sort of intimacy. Like all Hasidim, he considered women inferior creatures put on earth to be wives and mothers, and he was deaf to her pleas. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked harshly. “Why are you carrying on this way?”

  Seeing that her words made no impact, Dinele tried to keep him at bay physically, but this served only to exacerbate his impatience. He hated to be thwarted, to be deprived of what was his. Most of all, he didn’t want to lose face. How would it look the next day if people found out that he had failed to take her? He would become the object of their derision.

  He therefore dismissed all her objections and took her by force, as befitted a good Jewish husband. He was crass, brutal, and she despised him. In the morning, when her mother came in to her and found her crying, Priveh burst into laughter. “Silly girl,” she said, stroking her daughter’s cheeks. “Don’t be such a ninny. You’ll grow to love him, just as I came to love your father.”

  But it didn’t happen as her mother predicted. This wasn’t the love of which she had dreamed from the day her friends at school had confided its secrets to her. This was a coarse, revolting experience that evoked only pain and shame, and she wallowed in her misery even as the others celebrated her joy.

  She was so shattered that she didn’t even resist when her mother-in-law came to her, accompanied by the woman who would snip off her long, shiny brown hair, as was the custom. But it was her mother now who took a stand.

  Her mother-in-law, a pious woman who kept her skull shaved, was determined to impose the same condition upon her daughter-in-law. She knew that her in-laws wouldn’t tolerate shaving the girl clean, but she did demand that the hair be cropped short enough so that not even a curl showed beneath the wig. But Priveh would have none of it.

  “Leave that to me,” she insisted, “I’ll take care of it myself already.”

  She had only her daughter’s braids shorn, leaving the rest of the hair untouched.

  The mother-in-law was horrified. “Such a thing is unheard of among Jews! You’ve left all her hair! I won’t stand for it. I want you to know that I’m the Ozorkow Rabbi’s daughter.…”

  “And I am the daughter of Reb Ansel of Warsaw!” Priveh responded with such vehemence that the other woman promptly retreated.

  With skilled fingers Priveh put up Dinele’s hair and set a small blond, wavy wig similar to her own on top of it. By the time she was done you couldn’t tell which was the real hair and which was the wig.

  She summoned her daughter to the large mirror. “Dinele, come see for yourself. I’ll be blessed if they won’t take it for a set straight from the hairdresser’s.”

  The mother-in-law sighed. “Better your own hair than such a mockery. That way, at least, you don’t fool anybody.… That the Ozorkow Rabbi’s daughter should live to experience such sacrilege …!”

  Her mother-in-law’s high satin bonnet bobbed in unison with her mother’s curly wig, but Dinele herself stayed out of the conflict. When her mother handed her the two shorn braids as a memento of her maidenhood, she accepted them with total indifference.

  With equal uninterest she listened to the long list of laws her mother-in-law recited passionately to her, but once again Priveh bristled at what she considered an incursion into her province.

  “See here, I don’t need any lessons in Jewishness,” she snapped, narrowing her lips, “even though I don’t sport a satin bonnet.…”

  And with a regal gesture she led her daughter away.

  Just as Simha Meir’s friends had done, Dinele’s girlfriends came to her with flushed faces to learn the secret of love. But Dinele wouldn’t say a word. She merely hugged them and sobbed. “Never, never marry without love!”

  She couldn’t stand to look at her husband or at her own father and brothers. More than ever s
he felt close to her girlfriends and was convinced that only toward them could she feel true love.

  Simha Meir tried a friendly approach, but she didn’t even look up from her book when he spoke to her. He felt rejected, and he snatched the book from her hand. He quickly scanned the few lines in German which revolved around some Alfred and Hildegarde.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  “A novel.”

  “Fairy tales … fabrications,” he mumbled under his breath, and threw the book back at her. He tried to say something else, but she looked away. He turned on his heel, his pride dented.

  “Are you so absorbed in that ‘Torah’ that you can’t even answer?” he asked, rubbing his palms together as if anxious to remove all traces of the abomination.

  After he left the room, she burst into tears. She realized that there could never be any intimacy between them, and this thought clamped her heart like a vise.

  She wanted someone in whom to confide, but there was no one. All the hundreds of people who had danced and rejoiced over her happiness had no thought whatever about her feelings. Her mother was busy with the hordes of guests and relatives who had descended upon her from all over Poland. She dashed about with keys jangling, making arrangements, showing off, preening herself, making sure that the affair would be the talk of Lodz for years to come, that news of it would spread to Warsaw and other cities until the name of Alter became a household word throughout Poland.

  As for her father, he was too involved with his own matters, Dinele knew, to listen to her. Right now he had worries enough of his own.

  Fourteen

  THE HARROWING WEEK OF FESTIVITIES, visits, parties, banquets, and celebrations left the Alter family exhausted and misanthropic. All the congratulations, kisses, blessings, and handshakes evoked within them an enormous aversion toward people, felt most of all by the head of the household, Haim Alter himself.