by I. J. Singer
Just as he had waited for her as a boy, hoping to catch her coming or going to school, he now drove his carriage up and down Piotrkow Street, hoping for a glimpse of her. He still recalled her warm arms clasped around his neck as she rode him piggyback, still remembered her adoring laughter.
He couldn’t forgive his brother for robbing him of the one he had always thought of as his bride. He wasn’t happy with his own wife, who could neither live herself nor allow anyone else to live. He looked for Dinele so that he might somehow express his intense feelings for her with the tip of his hat. She, in turn, arranged to be there so that she might see him. He was every bit as handsome and dashing now as the heroes in her novels.
She now lived in her own apartment, which Max had leased following his break with her parents. Max had changed, too. He dressed like a worldly man, spoke to her in German, called her Diana instead of Dinele. But she still couldn’t stand him as he sat at the table dribbling food, calculating, figuring, mumbling to himself, unable to stay put a moment.
“Where are you off to now?” she asked when he rose from the table. “You haven’t had your dessert yet.”
She also tried to dissuade him from scribbling all over every tablecloth and napkin he could lay his hands on. “You might take a lesson from your children,” she chided him. “See their table manners?”
“Children?” Max Ashkenazi asked blankly.
He often forgot that he had children, a daughter in addition to a son. He rarely saw them, seldom spoke to them. If they asked him to dandle them on his knee or throw them in the air, he shooed them off to their mother. “Frightfully busy,” he mumbled.
He only wanted to know how they were doing in school, especially the boy, Isaac, whom he called Ignatz. “Well, show me your notebook, boy,” he said. “I’d like to see your marks.”
The boy brought the notebooks reluctantly. Max snatched them from his hands, glanced at them swiftly, and grimaced at the atrocious grades, particularly the one for mathematics, which was Ignatz’s poorest subject.
“I don’t understand how little he takes after me,” he said, glaring at his wife.
Gertrud, a carbon copy of her mother, was very happy to show her notebooks to her father. She was a capable child who painted very pretty flowers and butterflies. Such things, however, had barely any meaning to her father, who expected little from girls anyway.
“Very nice,” he said perfunctorily.
The children felt as alienated from him as he did from them. They laughed at the way he mumbled to himself, plucked his beard, scribbled on the tablecloth, noisily picked food out from between his teeth.
Dinele took offense. Even though she herself found him disgusting and comical, she resented it when others did so, too, since this was a reflection on her, Haim Alter’s daughter. She also made sure that he was presentable when he left the house.
“Simha Meir!” she scolded him. “Look at you, you’re a mess!”
Even though he despised the discarded Hasidic name—especially from the lips of his wife—he welcomed her concern. “Put me to rights, Diana. I can’t seem to knot my tie.”
She knotted his tie and brushed the ashes off his lapel, but when he tried to slip an arm around her waist, she recoiled and looked at him so coldly that his blood froze.
He dropped his hand, crushed by her contempt. She stubbornly refused to call him by his new name or to speak German. She insisted on speaking Yiddish even when there was company present, much to his distaste. He had literally forced everyone in the envy-filled city to respect him, except his own wife. She wasn’t impressed by his business acumen or by his rapid advance up the ladder. She never listened when he boasted of his latest accomplishment.
“Don’t throw your cigar butts on the floor,” she would interrupt him, “and don’t drop your ashes on the tablecloth.… Use the ashtray like a human being.”
Nor would she take any steps to become a Lodz society woman, as he strongly urged her to do. She wouldn’t even discard the traditional wig, although she had always despised it, and he couldn’t understand her attitude. “What is it, have you become so pious all of a sudden? It doesn’t suit you to wear it.”
“It suits me!” she replied spitefully.
Nor would she accompany him to the homes of his nouveau riche friends but kept herself busy with her children, with the running of the house, and, most of all, with her books.
She had never stopped living vicariously among her heroes and heroines. She exulted in their joys and commiserated with their sorrows. She spent more time in her parents’ home than in her own and took daily walks with her mother. There was little to differentiate between them, both elegant and trim. They might have been sisters, rather than mother and daughter.
Priveh had barely aged over the years. Men still turned to look at her, even though she was already a grandmother. As always, she couldn’t pass a store without buying something. She even dragged her daughter along to the confectionery for chocolate.
Max was irked by his wife’s devotion to her parents. He felt that they were robbing him of what was legally his. Each time she went to her parents, he said again, “Again to your mother’s? I wonder what there is there to draw you so urgently?”
He wasn’t entirely convinced that she wasn’t slipping money to her parents, but he was afraid to say anything to make her angry. He was anxious to wean her away from her mother and to befriend her with his new acquaintances. She was the wife of one of Lodz’s most important men, and it wouldn’t hurt him to be seen with a beauty other men envied.
But she wouldn’t agree, and he threw himself into his work with renewed zeal, coming home late and leaving long before daylight.
His fortune grew, but he found neither rest nor satisfaction. He was resentful of his in-laws, his sisters, and, most of all, Yakub, who again had become the talk of Lodz. Max couldn’t go anywhere without hearing of his brother’s excesses.
“He’ll end up begging door to door,” Max predicted darkly. “It’s only a matter of time.”
But Yakub’s phenomenal luck held out. Somehow he made contact with Maximilian Flederbaum himself, and between the card games, drinking bouts, and balls, he was appointed sales representative of the Flederbaum manufacturing firm.
Max turned pale as death when people gleefully brought him the news of his brother’s latest triumph. “A lie!” he shrieked, forgetting his German and reverting to homey Yiddish in his agitation.
Directly across from Max’s office, Yakub opened his own offices and warehouse. Sparing no expense, he had signs erected displaying the Flederbaum medals, citations, and trademark—an anchor and key intertwined. A uniformed flunky guarded the portals and leaped to attention when the new sales representative pulled up in his splendid carriage, which he drove himself in the latest Lodz fashion with his coachman beside him.
Max ordered all his windows draped in green curtains to block out the sight, but wherever he looked, huge advertisements carried the name of Yakub Ashkenazi.
“He’s turned the town on its ear!” people exulted to Max, recounting Yakub’s successes by day and conquests by night. But even more startling triumphs were in the offing.
Twenty-Eight
THE PALACE OF MAXIMILIAN FLEDERBAUM was alive with lights, brilliant company, and music. There was good reason to celebrate—the newly appointed governor, von Müller, had chosen to attend his first function in Lodz at the Flederbaum mansion instead of with the Barons Huntze.
For years the families had been waging a bitter feud for social and industrial supremacy. Just as elderly Germans recalled Heinz Huntze’s humble beginnings, elderly Jews remembered when Mendel Flederbaum first came to town—a powerful, lusty youth wearing metal-reinforced heels on his heavy boots and carrying a stick with which to beat off gentile dogs and shepherds who combined to harass any passing Jew. He had walked all the way from the village of Wulka to seek his fortune in Lodz.
His father, the village innkeeper, had lost his livelihood whe
n he had been outbid for the privilege of operating the tavern, granted by the local squire. Left without means of feeding his wife and dozen children, the father took his eldest son, Mendel, a cheese and a bottle of honey and went to Kazimierz to ask advice of the rabbi. The rabbi took the cheese and honey, invoked God’s blessing on the two, wished them luck in whatever they undertook, and gave each a three-kopeck coin to carry on them at all times except for the Sabbaths and holidays.
The father took to the road, buying up wool and flax from the peasants. He wanted Mendel to help him, but Mendel had bigger ambitions. Robust, broad-shouldered, able to lift the heaviest cask and eject the most obstreperous bully from the tavern, filled with a lust for life, he felt destined for bigger things than toting a peddler’s sack through villages.
From visiting Jews who stopped at the inn, he had heard tales of Lodz and its phenomenal growth, and his interest had been piqued. Into a bundle he packed a prayer shawl and phylacteries, several patched shirts, a loaf of bread, a hard cheese, some scallions, a pinch of salt, and a jackknife that a gentile had left in lieu of payment and that he, Mendel, had let stand point down in the ground for several days to render it pure.
Carrying this bundle, his gabardine cinched at the waist, thick pole in hand and several coins knotted in a corner of a red bandanna, he set out on his way. He roasted potatoes in fields, slept in barns or under the open sky, and directed his steps toward the alien, magnetic city where he would carve a life for himself. He was twenty years old, and he carried the rabbi’s good-luck piece in a little pouch around his neck.
That was how the Jews of Lodz remembered him.
Heinz Huntze never forgave him his success and addressed him by his Jewish name. “How goes it, Mendel?” he would ask when they passed each other in their carriages. “I’ve got some nice remnants to sell you, dirt cheap.…”
“And I can sell you my horses,” Flederbaum countered. “I’m buying a new team, and I can let you have the old ones at a bargain.”
They had been needling each other this way for years, playing tricks on one another, each doing his best to make the other look bad. But while Huntze surpassed Flederbaum in the volume of business he did, Flederbaum more than outdid him in the opulence of his life-style.
He, Flederbaum, could never aspire to a title because of his religion, but he did wear an Order of St. Anne next to the good-luck piece the Kazimierz Rabbi had given him so long ago. He also proudly bore the title Meritorious Citizen, which had been conferred upon him by the imperial court and which he could pass along to his heirs. Likewise, the gold and silver medals earned by his factory decorated all his stationery.
To make Huntze even more jealous, he frequently redecorated his palace, always had fancier teams of horses, bigger and better pedigreed dogs, costlier wines, and more distinguished guests at his balls and parties. Ever since childhood, when his father had taken him to the squire’s manor, Flederbaum had been drawn to wealth and luxury. He recalled how his father had bowed and kissed the skirt of the squire’s garment; now that he had the means, he indulged himself in every way to surpass them, the gentiles. He even grew a luxuriant mustache, the ends of which he curled up in true Polish fashion. And just like the gentry, he spent a fortune on horses, kept his own racing stables and an army of trainers and jockeys. It cost him plenty, but his horses were the finest in Poland, and they earned him great acclaim in the newspapers.
Despite his natural aversion to dogs, he ran the finest pack of hunting dogs in the area, buying up choice breeds from local squires. He also purchased estates of impoverished noblemen and invited the governor and high-ranking civilian and military officials on hunts.
Personally revolted by the sight of blood, he forced himself to become a good marksman and massacred hordes of hares, wild ducks, and foxes on his private hunting preserves. Afterward his gamekeepers in their forest green uniforms and with feathers in their hats sounded their horns, and servants roasted the slaughtered beasts over campfires so that the gentlemen could enjoy an outdoor feast.
In the winters, balls were frequently held at the Flederbaum palace. The host twirled his mustache and danced the mazurkas and polonaises with the aplomb of a genuine blueblood. Unlike Huntze, he slipped into his role without any traces of his humble beginnings. But for all his assimilation, Flederbaum lived in dread of the Jewish God and strove to redeem himself in His eyes for the many sins he had committed.
Despite all his wealth and awesome power, he felt that he owed all his success to the lucky three-kopeck coin given him by the Kazimierz Rabbi. He tormented himself with the fact that he wasn’t repaying this debt properly by shaving off his beard, desecrating the Sabbath, eating forbidden foods, committing adultery and countless other transgressions against God.
A superb businessman, he knew that books had to be balanced. God had bestowed so much good fortune upon him, and what had he done in return? He couldn’t live the life of the pious Jew—he loved luxury and material pleasure too much for that. To make up for it, he devoted himself to charity. But since he wished no contact with the fanatic fringe, he appointed a man versed in Jewish matters to distribute his largess in the right places.
Besides Jewish causes, he had other obligations. When the workers at his plant needed a new church, he himself laid the cornerstone, for which the archdiocese put up a tablet on the building honoring him and his wife. But since he knew that the Jewish God frowned on this, he compensated by paying for the construction of a new synagogue.
He still recalled his teacher’s lessons concerning the scale on which a man’s sins and good deeds were weighed against each other. Lately the sins had begun to tip heavily. Two of his daughters had married converts and had promptly converted themselves. Considering everything, he could hardly observe a period of mourning for them but could only twirl his mustache and give his paternal blessing. Yet he trembled with fear. He knew that God took revenge on parents for the sins of their children. He knew that the fires of Gehenna stood ready to consume sinners while devils hung them by their tongues and tossed them from one end of hell to the other.
In the nights he shook with dread in his French four-poster bed and a cold sweat doused him. He screamed in his sleep until his wife, Elzbieta—née Elke—forgot her Polish and roused him in the more intimate Yiddish: “Mendel, Mendel, wake up! You frightened me so.…”
As if this weren’t enough, his sons had turned out strange. Since childhood, their tutors and nannies had taken them to churches, taught them to genuflect, filled their heads with Jesus and Mary and tales of horror concerning Jewish ritual murders and such. At first, Flederbaum had thought nothing of this. He wanted the boys to grow up polite, inoffensive, presentable to the Polish world. But when he later asked them to accompany him to the synagogue on the Day of Atonement and to learn the mourner’s prayer, they were horrified. They told him that the Jews had crucified Jesus, and they refused to eat matzos since it contained Christian blood.
Flederbaum was in mortal dread. He knew that a son’s mourner’s prayer could save a dead parent from the flames of Gehenna. Now even that avenue of escape was denied him. And he worried, for even though his hair and mustache were still coal black, it wasn’t youth but the French barber’s dye that kept them that way. He, Flederbaum, was already at an age when one had to contemplate the final, terrible journey, and he redoubled his charitable efforts in the hopes of rebalancing the scale.
He concentrated his philanthropy among the poor Jewish workers of Balut. He didn’t hire them for his plant since they couldn’t work on the Sabbath. Nor would he pay them the higher salaries they required to observe the Sabbath and buy kosher meat. Nor were they as physically durable as the gentiles, who didn’t complain, weren’t envious or disrespectful to their superiors, as Jews were wont to be.
But to make up for it, he strove to provide for their spiritual needs—gave money for Hanukah candles, for free infirmaries, for burial societies. He sent wagonloads of flour for the Passover matzos, and during
periods of unemployment, he set up free soup kitchens.
Following his two daughters’ conversion, he felt the urge to perform some enormous and compensating good deed with which to weigh the scale in his favor. He built a hospital for poor Jews, a Jewish hospital, where the food was kosher, where no crosses or icons were displayed, where an amulet hung on every doorpost, and where the male patients could wear their ritual fringes without fear of rebuke. There was even a little synagogue attached to the hospital where a quorum could pray for the sick.
No expenses were spared in building and equipping the hospital. The opening ceremonies were attended by the most distinguished citizens of Lodz. Dignitaries came from as far away as Warsaw. The driveway swarmed with carriages. The new chief rabbi of Lodz officiated with his imperial medal prominent upon his satin gabardine. All the youngsters from the primary and talmudic schools played hooky to catch a glimpse of the rabbi’s legendary gold sword, which—although it was never seen—was a constant source of gossip.
The weavers of Balut left their looms and milled around their new hospital, where mounted police employed their trained horses to keep them at bay. A firemen’s band sponsored by Flederbaum and attired in brass helmets played stirring martial airs.
But all this paled in comparison with the fact that the new governor himself attended the ceremonies.
For weeks, the Huntzes and Flederbaum had contested for the honor of being the first to entertain the new governor. Being barons, it might have appeared that the Huntzes had the advantage, but Flederbaum came up with the brilliant notion of naming the new hospital after the tsar and tsarina, and this patriotic gesture wasn’t lost on the governor.
The Lodz Jews celebrated Flederbaum’s victory over the Huntzes as if it were their own. In marketplaces, studyhouses, and bathhouses, people gloated over the victory over the gentile.