The Brothers Ashkenazi

by I. J. Singer

  Simha Meir sent Samuel Leibush out into the streets to recruit replacements, but all he could come up with were several elderly German women, who moved at a snail’s pace, and a drunk or two, who were totally inadequate.

  On the Sabbath, Simha Meir sent for the teacher his father-in-law maintained for his workers’ synagogue and ordered him to convince the weavers to return. He was to tell them that if they went back to their jobs immediately, no reprisals would be taken against them.

  But the weavers wouldn’t listen to the teacher’s preachings. Instead of the “Ethics of the Fathers,” Tevye treated them to a sermon urging solidarity until victory was theirs.

  “I pawned my pillows for a piece of bread,” a weaver moaned.

  “I bartered my copper candelabrum for potatoes,” complained a second.

  “I hocked my prayer shawl and phylacteries to prepare for the Sabbath,” said a third.

  “With solidarity, we shall overcome,” Tevye exhorted. “Let a few more days go by, and they’ll send for us. Mark my words. They’re going broke with their factories standing idle.”

  He knew his Lodz. Even better, he knew Simha Meir.

  For days Simha Meir sat calculating, totaling his daily losses at a time when orders were pouring in. It was maddening. True, he had never believed in handlooms. At the first opportunity he would switch to steam. But in the meantime, he had to save every groschen he could lay his hands on. A factory standing idle was intolerable, particularly now that people were clamoring for goods, and Simha Meir didn’t cease wetting the tip of his pencil and scribbling figures on every scrap of paper, every tablecloth before him.

  From the other side, if he gave in now, it would cost him dearly. Outside of the 1,200 rubles (not counting the interest) he would be losing annually, the nervy beggars demanded a shorter workweek, free candles, and all kinds of other preposterous concessions. Besides, eating only intensified the appetite. Once they got a finger, they would demand the hand. True, he was suffering financial losses, but once they came crawling back, these losses would be more than made up. He would get his revenge. Then, after a few more years of hustling, he would switch over to steam and throw them all out on their behinds.

  “I can bide my time,” he told the other merchants in the taverns, sipping beer and chewing on peppered chick-peas. “Let them get a sniff of hard times.…”

  And hard times they sniffed in Balut. Each day Samuel Leibush reported the latest news to Simha Meir.

  In the small Balut groceries with the swarms of flies buzzing about the bins of candy, the grocers wouldn’t issue so much as a slice of bread on credit.

  “The account books are already swollen from credit,” they cried, pointing to the stained, greasy pages. “No more bread on account. The bakers don’t extend us credit.”

  The weavers dug up articles to be pawned—a torn pillowcase, an old-fashioned wedding gown, a winter shawl, even a woman’s prayer book. But soon they ran out of pawnable items. The days stretched seemingly without end and the children kept tugging at their aprons: “Mama, bread!”

  The men milled through the narrow streets in their Sabbath gabardines that they no longer bothered to remove. Excitement ran high. Groups assembled on every corner to wrangle, debate, gesticulate.

  “Tevye is right,” the younger weavers said. “If we don’t give in, we will overcome.”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” the middle-aged workers complained. “You don’t have kids crying for bread. If you were in our shoes, you might think different. Simha Meir will replace us with scabs, and we’ll be left high and dry.”

  The old men were even more concerned. “We must go to him and say we had nothing to do with it … that it was all Tevye and Nissan’s doing. If not, we’ll end up begging from door to door in our old age.…”

  “But we took an oath,” others pointed out.

  “Any rabbi will absolve us from it. We’re dealing with a life-and-death matter, after all.”

  Without their husbands’ knowledge, women began coming to Simha Meir, begging the loan of a few guldens to tide them over the crisis.

  “My old man will work it out,” they said. “The children are starving for a crust of bread. To whom then shall we turn if not to you? You are like a father to us, after all!”

  Simha Meir gave them neither sympathy nor cash. Money was like a bird, he knew. Once it left the hand, it seldom came back. But he was more than generous with advice.

  “Those outcasts, Tevye and the rabbi’s whelp, will be your husbands’ death,” he said with feeling. “They’ll rob them not only of this world but of the world to come.”

  “May their mouths be twisted around to their backsides for the cunning words with which they duped our men,” the women cursed.

  “Next thing they’ll do is persuade them to convert,” Simha Meir predicted, trying to keep from laughing. “They’ll convince them to desert their wives and children, wait and see.”

  “Woe is us!” the women lamented, wringing their hands just as if their husbands had already left them. “Those reprobates should be run out of town. One leprous sheep infects the whole flock.…”

  The aroused housewives began to trail Tevye and Nissan through the narrow streets and belabored them with curses. The most vociferous of all was Tevye’s own wife, Keila. Accompanied by her brood of children, an infant nursing at her flapping breast, she dragged herself through the hot, dusty streets, pelting her husband with sulfur and fire.

  “Communal billy goat!” she screamed. “May the blood drain from your throat! Alien broom that sweeps out all the corners, then is chucked out into the street, may they fling you as high as the rooftops! Why must you worry about the world when your own wife and children are starving before your eyes, you filthy animal?”

  Her children launched a chorus of heartrending shrieks.

  She was no more sparing of Nissan. “It’s all your doing, too! I’ll douse you with boiling water if you ever dare cross my threshold again, devil’s imp!”

  But Tevye ignored her and kept talking, persuading, cajoling, urging solidarity.

  The second Thursday rolled around, and still no one reported for work.

  By the third week Simha Meir began to knit his brow and pluck at his beard nervously. His losses were enormous. Customers threatened to switch over to other manufacturers. He began to wonder whether he had gambled and lost. In such cases, the best course was to cut your losses and wait for a better opportunity. But at the last moment he got a sudden flash of inspiration, one so clear and obvious that he almost laughed aloud.

  “Samuel Leibush,” he called to his man. “Run and fetch me Lippe Halfon. Tell him I need him right now. Very important.”

  Lippe Halfon was a Litvak with a trimmed pointed beard, a Russian accent, and great ingenuity. He had arrived from Lithuania with a teapot in one hand and an umbrella in the other and had promptly launched his personal conquest of Lodz.

  He began by peddling shoelaces, paper collars, needles, and pins in the street. He subsisted on dry bread and herring and hot water that he brewed in his teapot. Gradually he came to perform errands for storekeepers—matters dealing with the post office, with the railroads. He had the knack of getting along with Russian officials, and he rented a flat where he could pursue his affairs. In no time he hung out a shingle listing his accomplishments, which entailed writing petitions to courts and to other official Russian bodies. Few people in Lodz knew Russian, and Lippe Halfon prospered.

  He soon became a confidant of the police and of all the functionaries. Whoever had dealings with the authorities came to Halfon with the bribes, which he then channeled to the proper official. He gave satisfactory service and spared his clients needless time and bother. He dressed like a man of the world and was never seen without a thick portfolio stuffed with all kinds of official-looking documents. He greeted all the officials in the street, even the police commissioner himself.

  Although the lawyers looked at him askance and made fun of his
ungrammatical speech, they couldn’t do a thing to stop him. He had a larger practice than any of them. What they couldn’t accomplish with their beautifully composed petitions, he managed with his, errors and all.

  “I’ve got the police right here,” he boasted, pointing to his pocket. “What good are all those shysters? For nothing with nothing.…”

  His area of expertise encompassed a broad range of interests. He discounted bad IOUs, collected delinquent debts, advanced cash on pawn tickets, called the railroads to task for failing to provide services, represented clients in court without the official right to do so, lent money at high interest, and, if necessary, even trumped up charges against a client’s enemies.

  “The world is founded on just three things,” he liked to say, “money, money, and money.”

  It was this man Simha Meir sent for and eagerly awaited now.

  The Litvak patiently heard out the nature of Simha Meir’s problem and didn’t interrupt with a single word except to correct Simha Meir when he called him Reb Lippe instead of Gospodin Halfon.

  When Simha Meir finished, Lippe Halfon reached inside his portfolio for a sheet of paper, and in Russian, he carefully noted down the names of the troublemakers. “They’re as good as out of your hair already, Gospodin Ashkenazi. Now, as to the matter of the fee—”

  Simha Meir drew a wallet from his pocket and counted out several crisp banknotes. The Litvak scooped them up without argument.

  “This is clearly a violation of Article One Hundred Eighty-One of the Imperial Criminal Code,” he announced. “You no longer need bother your head about those two.”

  “Naturally no one must know about this,” Simha Meir said, escorting the Litvak out.

  “Naturally,” Lippe Halfon agreed. “Mum’s the word.”

  Late that same night policemen dragged Tevye and Nissan out of their beds. Although it was late, the news of the arrest spread through Balut. People congregated in the streets, and the policemen scattered them with their curved swords.

  Tevye’s wife, wearing only her shift and surrounded by the brood of crying children, accompanied her husband as if he were being taken to the cemetery. “Jews take pity!” she cried, wringing her hands. “Who will take care of my little worms now?”

  The prisoners were thrown into a cell among drunks, thieves, and men without proper papers. “Why did they shove you in stir?” the thieves asked Tevye and Nissan.

  “We don’t know. We haven’t done anything,” the two men replied.

  “Jerks.” The thieves laughed. They flung rags at the two new prisoners’ heads and made them take out the slops.

  After two days Tevye and Nissan were led to the office of the police chief himself.

  “ ’Tention!” that worthy cried. “Don’t you dare twitch even a whisker!”

  They didn’t understand and tried to mumble something about being innocent, but the policemen expedited their chief’s order with whacks to the ribs. “Like this!” they taught the terrified men, pounding their chins and bellies with fists.

  The chief fingercombed his bristling side-whiskers and came up so close to the men that he nearly trod on their toes. “So, that’s how things are?” he asked with the air of a cat toying with a mouse. “Rebels, is it? Rising up against the authority, eh?”

  They tried to explain, but this only exacerbated the chief’s rage. “Silence, sons of bitches!” he roared. “You’ll rot in chains! I’ll strip the hide from your backs for trying to overthrow a peaceful government!”

  At a gesture from him, an elderly hunchbacked policeman sat down at a table and began to fill a sheet of paper with complex Russian characters as the chief dictated, pacing through the room.

  When he was through, the correspondent read the charges to the prisoners, enunciating the difficult Russian words in a nasal snort. The prisoners understood none of it except the word rebels, which was repeated every third sentence or so.

  “Sign!” the police chief thundered. “If you can’t write, make an X.”

  The prisoners exchanged glances, but the policemen slammed their legs with their scabbards.

  “Sign as His Excellency told you!” they grunted. “Move it!”

  One after the other, they signed.

  “ ‘Toviah Melech Mendeliev Meirev Buchbinder; Nissan Nusiniev Shliomovich Eibeshutz,’ ” the police chief read with difficulty. “Take them back to their cell.”

  The very same day the police chief wrote to the governor in Piotrkow describing the two dangerous rebels who had been inciting the peaceful workers of the industrial city of Lodz to riot and clearly posed a danger to the populace. He begged His Excellency to petition Petersburg to have the two rebels exiled for a period of time outside the ten provinces constituting the Polish kingdom and to do this without benefit of trial but as an executive order. Until such directive arrived from Petersburg, he would keep the two men under temporary detention.

  “By the time an answer comes from Petersburg, they will have served a year, if not more. They’ll think twice before they’ll start up with the police again,” Lippe Halfon assured Simha Meir.

  The Balut weavers ran from synagogue to synagogue, calling on rabbis to speak out against the injustice, but no one would get involved. “For something like theft, we might possibly pay a ransom to free them,” the community leaders told them. “But sedition is a dangerous business. All you can do is get yourself in trouble.”

  Within a few days Simha Meir’s factory was back in full swing. The starved workers worked with such zeal that they quickly made up for the losses incurred during the strike. Not one of them so much as sighed when he received the reduced wages. They were grateful to be getting anything. To effect further savings, Simha Meir fired the teacher Haim Alter had engaged for the weavers’ synagogue.

  All Lodz spoke of Simha Meir’s victory. “Shrewd as they come … smart as salt in a wound. The guts of a pickpocket!” people said.

  In Lodz this was the highest possible compliment.

  Twenty

  NEVER IN HIS LIFE had Haim Alter suffered so much grief and joy in a single year as he did that year.

  It began with joy. His only daughter provided him with his first grandchild, and a boy at that. As usual, Haim Alter went overboard and spent a fortune on the party celebrating the circumcision.

  “Haimshe, money, more money,” Priveh crooned, extending bejeweled fingers.

  “Simha Meir, darling, money, more money!” Haim Alter crooned, extending fat, hairy hands to his son-in-law, the business manager.

  Simha Meir doled out the rubles, more even than his father-in-law asked for, and he had him sign for every last groschen. Because Simha Meir’s first child was a boy, his former friends from the studyhouse forgave him for having estranged himself from them and from the Torah.

  “You’re lucky it was a boy,” they said half in jest. “Had it been a girl, we would have laid you across the table and whipped your behind!”

  Even his father, who had ordered him out of the house, had agreed to a reconciliation on account of the grandson and had come, wearing his fur-edged cap.

  Predictably a controversy erupted between the grandfathers concerning the naming of the child. Each wanted the infant named after his own rabbi. Haim Alter raved and whined, but Abraham Hersh wouldn’t give an inch.

  “Because yours was the mother, you can name the girls,” he argued. “When it comes to boys, I’ll have the say!”

  Haim Alter proposed a compromise—one name for each faction—but Abraham Hersh was adamant. He wouldn’t stand for the name of any rabbi but his own. And it ended up with the boy receiving a single name after the Rabbi of Warka—Isaac. Abraham Hersh personally circumcised the boy and danced so violently with his cronies that Priveh stopped up her ears.

  “Reb Abraham, the mother is still weak.… She can’t stand this,” she objected.

  “Livelier, Jews, faster!” Abraham Hersh encouraged the Hasidim, ignoring her.

  Lying pale and frightened in her bed,
Dinele pressed the crying infant closer and drenched him with her tears. “Murderers!” she wailed. “The poor little precious, pity upon him.…”

  “Hush, a Jewish daughter dare not say such things!” her mother-in-law chided. “They danced this way when your husband was circumcised, and it didn’t hurt him any.…”

  Pious women clucked. “May you live to enjoy your grandchildren, with God’s help.…”

  Haim Alter felt belittled in front of his friends, but the lavishness of the occasion made up for it to some degree.

  “When the second boy comes with God’s blessing, Abraham Hersh can stand on his head before he gets his way. I’ll show that pigheaded ass!” Haim Alter blustered.

  But soon after the joy a great mishap befell the household. Hadassah, with her experienced eye, noticed that the new maid who had been hired a few months before seemed to be hiding something under her apron. What’s more, she often got a yen for some delicacy and would reach right into the pot to keep from getting nauseated.

  Hadassah tried to question the girl, but she resisted, whereupon the older woman felt her belly and started screaming. “Fie! Me, a mother of nine children—five living and four dead—me you’d try to fool, you slut? Say this minute who gave it to you, whore that you are!”

  “The young masters!” the girl whined. “They kept harassing me.…”

  The pimply louts, naturally, denied everything, but their parents knew that the girl was telling the truth, even though they wouldn’t admit it.

  “You can’t take the word of some slut!” Haim Alter protested. “No one would believe such a thing about my boys.…”

  “Leave the house this minute, you baggage!” Priveh ordered the girl.

  But since they were deathly afraid that she would make a scandal, they gave her 100 rubles and sent her back with Samuel Leibush to her uncle, a tenant farmer in her native village.

  Haim Alter sent for Samuel Zanvil and ordered him to find wives for his sons. “I want to wash my hands of those bums,” he said. “And the fact that they haven’t been rejected from conscription need not be an impediment. For another hundred rubles or so, this can be easily arranged.”