The Brothers Ashkenazi

by I. J. Singer

  “You won’t regret this, Haim,” Samuel Zanvil said with his usual overfamiliarity. “Since you’re satisfied with Simha Meir, I seem to have done all right by you.”

  Samuel Zanvil took to the task with his customary energy, and he managed to find wives for the sons. In a matter of months they were engaged and married.

  Again the house filled with guests, in-laws, Hasidim. Again Priveh stretched her hands out to her husband for money, and again Haim Alter turned to Simha Meir. Simha Meir doled out whatever was asked and had his father-in-law sign for every groschen.

  Lodz was impressed with the magnificance of the double wedding. Haim Alter demanded only the best from his two sets of in-laws and more than matched their extravagance with his own. He spewed gifts and provided dowries, even though it wasn’t his obligation. What was money, after all, but to be spent?

  The weddings made up for the grief he had suffered on account of the maid. Now, with God’s help, all would be well, and he would enjoy nothing but satisfaction.

  With the coming of winter, the conscriptions began. Because so many of the Jewish youths were incorrectly entered in the municipal register, Haim Alter’s sons were listed as older than they actually were and were called to present themselves before the army commission.

  In Lodz, as in the other towns and cities, Jews went about with worried faces and bowed backs, gazing fearfully at sons who had reached twenty-one and who now had to serve a full five-year term of conscription in some far-flung outpost. Many of the prospective draftees already had wives and children. The Hasidic youths maimed themselves, fasted, drank salt water, and ate lots of herring in order to ruin their health and fail the physical examination. The rich bribed the doctors and other officials to reject their sons for some imagined defect. The only ones to be conscripted were the working-class youths.

  Resigned to their fate, they ordered wooden boxes from carpenters and had them painted green. Inside, they would store their possessions when they went to serve the tsar.

  Long before they were scheduled to report, the young workers quit their jobs and hung out in houses of prayer, where they allegedly prayed to God to keep them out of gentile hands. Actually they pelted each other with towels and prayer shawls and roasted potatoes in the huge prayerhouse ovens.

  They knew full well that prayers wouldn’t help, just as they hadn’t helped their friends before them. Nor would complaints to the military doctors about deformed hearts and weak eyes do any good. They knew that their fate was sealed, and unlike the scholars, who inflicted wounds on themselves, or the rich youths, who bought their way out, they knew that they would have to serve out the full five years of degradation and abuse.

  They drank whiskey, wrestled, marched with sticks substituting for rifles. Some took out the ram’s horn and blew blast after blast into the night. Some actually prayed. Others went to affluent and Hasidic households to rouse those who had dodged conscription and drag them along to the houses of worship.

  The terrified Hasidic youths hid themselves, but the workers pulled them out from under their beds and forced them to accompany them. The wealthy youths bought off the incensed workers with whiskey, with money and delicacies.

  Aroused, embittered, filled with the abandon of those who have nothing more to lose, the young workers paraded through the streets, crowing like roosters, rousing respectable householders, frightening young matrons, banging on shutters and singling with bravado:

  Better you should have been born without a head

  Than wear brass buttons, my lad.

  Woe is us, we are as good as gone,

  Better we had been never born.…

  Haim Alter had nothing to fear about his sons. Wealthy youths weren’t drafted, God forbid. Still, he worried. They were so big, so disgustingly healthy it would be a mockery to attribute weak lungs to them. For this reason, the members of the commission demanded a particularly fat bribe to reject the bruisers. In addition, the youths’ new fathers-in-law refused to contribute to the expense, leaving the entire burden to Haim Alter. He had promised them sons-in-law freed of their military obligations, and they held him to his word.

  Again he turned to Simha Meir for cash, and again he signed notes that he never even read.

  The doctors rejected the Alter boys and, in their place, conscripted two puny, undersized weavers. This called for a celebration, and Haim Alter threw another party.

  Infuriated by the fact that the rich youths had freed themselves through subterfuge and then added salt to the wounds by throwing banquets, the workers took up a collection and engaged Lippe Halfon to denounce the slackers to the governor. The result was that the Alter boys had to present themselves before a second military commission, this time in the provincial capital city of Piotrkow.

  The workers didn’t get their way since the new set of doctors again rejected the rich youths, but the effort cost Haim Alter additional sums of money.

  Right after Succoth came Simha Meir’s turn to stand for conscription. Of all the rich youths in Lodz, there were more complaints of chicanery lodged against Simha Meir than against all the others combined, and Lippe Halfon was kept busy composing petitions and denunciations against him. Simha Meir knew full well where these complaints originated. All three commissions that he faced found enough wrong with him to turn him down, but before he emerged with the red ticket signaling his rejection, much money passed under the table.

  Simha Meir insisted that Haim Alter bear part of the financial burden, as was the custom in wealthy Lodz households that boarded sons-in-law, Haim Alter had no option but to agree, and in lieu of cash he signed additional IOUs.

  The coming of Passover again brought joy to Haim Alter. As if by agreement, both daughters-in-law bore grandsons. This time the choice of names was strictly his, and he even managed to include the name of a grandfather in addition to that of his rabbi.

  Full of gratitude to God, Haim Alter felt that all his troubles were now behind him, and he settled down to the good life that a man who had done right by his children and grandchildren had earned.

  “Praised by the Almighty,” he said as he pressed a generous donation on his rabbi. “May the evil eye spare us, God forbid. I have, thank God, lived to enjoy satisfaction from my sons, my daughter, and my son-in-law.”

  But the ax fell soon enough.

  One, Saturday night as Haim Alter chanted the hymns ushering out the Sabbath, relishing the sweet taste of the wine, grain, and oil that God had bestowed upon His chosen people, Simha Meir came to him with a thick stack of papers in hand. “I would like Father-in-law to meet these notes,” he said. “I can’t wait any longer.”

  Haim Alter didn’t quite grasp what Simha Meir had in mind. “Notes? What notes is that?” he asked in a singsong.

  Simha Meir calmly spread out the IOUs, which he kept tied in ribbons, and began to read from them.

  “On the tenth of the first, Father-in-law took eight hundred forty-three rubles; on the eighteenth of the second, Father-in-law took—”

  Haim Alter was reluctant to listen to monetary matters, particularly at the conclusion of the Sabbath, but Simha Meir persisted. He read, and the stack of papers mounted.

  “Well, let’s hear the total already,” Haim Alter said with impatience. “Is there no end to it?”

  “It’s coming,” Simha Meir assured him.

  When he finished reading, he tied each bundle separately and came up with a total that was so mind-boggling that Haim Alter recoiled.

  “Lies!”

  “I have Father-in-law’s signature on every one,” Simha Meir responded calmly.

  Haim Alter extended a fat, hairy hand for the IOUs, but Simha Meir stuck them away in his breast pocket.

  “Does Father-in-law deny his signature?”

  Haim Alter paled. This was a new Simha Meir—a calm, composed, ominous stranger.

  “So you’ve trapped me, eh?”

  “I advanced Father-in-law money,” Simha Meir said evenly. “Now I want it back
.”

  “What if I don’t pay you? What will you do to me then?”

  “Father-in-law knows what’s done with IOUs.”

  “You want to ruin me? You know very well that I can’t pay you at this moment. You want to bankrupt your own father-in-law?”

  “Business and family don’t mix,” Simha Meir said.

  Haim Alter had no recourse but to rail. “Robber! … Highwayman!”

  Priveh came running, Dinele behind her with the infant at her breast. Even Hadassah rushed in, holding a dripping pot.

  Haim Alter pulled aside his velvet vest. “Go ahead! Take a knife and stab!”

  The three women clasped his arms and led him to the sofa. “What’s happened?” they asked. “God in heaven!”

  Simha Meir left the room. He didn’t go to the factory but headed for the studyhouse, where friends he hadn’t seen for a long time were enjoying their customary post-Sabbath banquet. He sat with them until dawn, chanting, telling stories, exchanging witticisms. He was in no hurry to go home.

  Together with the new week came the accusations, litigations, and denunciations between the two men. Haim Alter spent days running here and there, seeking redress against the son-in-law he had spent thousands to snare for his only daughter. The first one to whom he came crying was Simha Meir’s father.

  As was his custom, Abraham Hersh placed his bandanna between the pages of his Gemara to indicate that he was merely interrupting his studies momentarily and listened to his visitor’s complaints without a word.

  When he had finished, Abraham Hersh said coldly, “Who told you to take him in as a partner? I wanted him to study. Without my knowledge or consent you took him away from his books and drew him into a partnership. Now lie in the bed that you made yourself. I don’t want to know the boy any longer.”

  Haim Alter began to pound the table and demand justice, but Abraham Hersh removed the bandanna from the Gemara and turned back to his studies.

  Seeing that he was getting nowhere, Haim Alter dashed to the Alexander studyhouse to seek justice from Abraham Hersh’s Hasidic cronies. But none of them would get involved. Next, he went to the Alexander Rabbi himself, but it was the rabbi’s practice to keep out of money matters and concern himself only with affairs of the spirit.

  “Jewish law provides for such contingencies,” he said. “Convene a board of rabbis.”

  Haim Alter took the advice and sent a beadle to summon his son-in-law before a rabbinical court. Simha Meir appeared and resorted to his usual tricks. Just as he had done to his teachers in boyhood, he now outshouted and flustered the rabbis until they could no longer make sense of anything. Wise to the ways of Lodz lawsuits, he unloosed a flood of sophistry, offered precedents by the dozens, quoted a host of laws from the Breastplate of Judgment—a part of the Jewish codex, the Shulhan Arukh—and created such a morass that the rabbis couldn’t decide on anything.

  For months Simha Meir dragged his father-in-law from court to court, bullied and harassed him until he caved in and agreed to all his demands. Ultimately Haim Alter ended up with just the wooden looms, which were practically worthless anyway, while Simha Meir got everything else. The factory was now his, and Haim Alter was additionally obligated to pay off his debts to him for years to come. Haim Alter was left with a tiny percentage of the business and a small salary to live on.

  Simha Meir didn’t respond when Haim Alter cursed him or even when Priveh allowed herself to descend to the level of a marketwoman and doused him with a glass of tea. He only wiped his face and told himself that curses, childish acts of violence, even a slap were the impotent weapons of weaklings. A slap passed; money stayed.

  There was only one person before whom he felt uneasy, his wife, Dinele. He knew that her parents were maligning him to her, and he was eager to move out, leave the house, even though he was entitled to the full five years of board as specified in the articles of engagement. He felt uncomfortable here. Even Hadassah glared at him and served his meals with such resentment that the plates and glasses rattled. But Dinele’s parents wouldn’t let her move out.

  “That’ll be the day, when I let you go to that murderer,” Priveh said, pressing her daughter to her breast as if she were still a little girl. “Never mind, we can still afford to feed a son-in-law, even one like him. I’ll keep my child with me for the full five years, thank you!”

  Simha Meir wanted Dinele to take an interest in the dispute. After all, he wasn’t doing it for himself alone but for her as well, for their future. And she, his wife, should have taken his side. She was no longer a child clinging to her mother’s apron strings. A wife was supposed to stick up for her husband, no matter what. Her place was at his side. That’s what the Torah said—that was the reason a man left his parents and got married so that he and his wife could become like one. She should have learned from his, Simha Meir’s example. Even though his father had tried to tell him what to do, Simha Meir hadn’t listened. Once married, a person had to be for himself only. Business and family didn’t mix.

  But Dinele didn’t utter even a word. She kept silent as always and occupied herself with her child and her books.

  Simha Meir wanted to explain to her, to tell her about the dog-eat-dog philosophy that prevailed in the outside world, but she merely gazed at him with derision and wouldn’t listen. She wouldn’t even give him the child when he asked to hold it. “He needs his sleep. I don’t want you to keep him up,” she said.

  Simha Meir knew that her parents were inciting her against him, and he wanted to tell her his side of the story. Was it his fault that her father lived beyond his means? All he, Simha Meir, had asked for was what was legitimately due him. It was all legal and above board, correct down to the last groschen.

  But she wasn’t interested. “Let me read,” she interrupted the moment he started stating his position.

  He had hoped that she would plead with him on behalf of her parents, even though he wasn’t sure he could resist her and refuse to give up all he had gained with so much effort. At the same time he wanted her to approach him. More than ever these days he desired her.

  He found all kinds of childish pretexts to go to her—he needed a handkerchief; a button was loose—anything to lure her out of the dining room and into their bedroom. Like a dog sniffing around a bitch in heat, he nervously milled around his own wife.

  He waited for her to come to him on behalf of her parents. At first, he speculated that he wouldn’t yield to her entreaties. Soon, however, he feared that he would give in. He was sure that this was one way to win her over completely. All he had to do was show his magnanimity, and she would be his.

  Dinele knew that if she deigned to make the effort, her husband would do whatever she asked. But she couldn’t bring herself even to think about it. She couldn’t humiliate herself before such a boor. When her parents spoke to her about it, she burst into tears.

  Her mother couldn’t understand her attitude. Accustomed to using her charms to get what she wanted from her husband, she was puzzled by Dinele’s refusal to save her own parents.

  “You’re a silly little girl,” she complained. “Go and talk to him. After all that we’ve done for you—”

  “I can’t do it.…” Dinele sobbed. “I loathe him!”

  Her father interceded. “Imagine that you had to ransom your parents from some murderer.”

  “Take my jewelry, take my pearls.… I’ll work as a maid, but don’t make me go to him,” Dinele sobbed.

  But when her parents contended that it had been for her sake that they had gone into hock in the first place, she lost her customary apathy and began to scream. “It wasn’t for my sake but for yours! You did it to satisfy your own vanity and pride … to show everyone what a genius you snared, to show off to the world! I didn’t want him, but you forced him on me!”

  She knelt like a child before her parents. “I’ll do anything you ask but this. I can’t.…”

  They understood. “Let’s not talk any more about it.…”

/>   Their daughter’s pride restored their own and gave them back some self-respect.

  Simha Meir waited, but she remained as aloof as ever, as if nothing had happened between him and her parents. She brought him clean clothes, saw to it that his meals were on time, and performed all her wifely duties as the Law dictated.

  Simha Meir felt his resolution waver. Perhaps he would go to her and tell her that he was ready to make peace with her parents. Let her not think that he was the villain they made him out to be. Even though business and family didn’t mix, he was ready to surrender the IOUs and restore peace in the house. He knew that this would be an expensive gesture, but he was ready to make it.

  “Dinele,” he approached her, ready to tell her the good news, but she looked up at him with such a surly, disdainful expression that he caught himself on the edge of the abyss. “Nothing,” he mumbled. “I thought I didn’t have a handkerchief.” And he raced from the room with a sigh of relief at having nearly given up everything for some silly romantic notion.

  In the cafés and exchanges, the younger men spoke of him with awe. “He’s a man to watch,” they said. “He’s going places.”

  The older merchants were appalled. “To do such a thing to your own father-in-law? Where’s the justice therein?”

  “Idiots!” their younger counterparts sneered. “Justice isn’t a commodity in Lodz. It isn’t wool or cotton.”

  “Nor is it listed on the exchange,” the brokers confirmed as they doused their cigarette butts in the last of their beer.

  Twenty-One

  HEINZ HUNTZE’S PALACE, fenced in by heavy iron pickets and guarded by two huge watchdogs, rang with dissension between the old man and his sons and daughters.

  For all his seventy-odd years, Huntze was still a robust, vigorous man. He spent his days in his mill, wending his way among the machinery, peering into storerooms, sticking his nose into the ledgers he didn’t understand, testing dyes, probing and supervising every aspect of the operation.