The Brothers Ashkenazi

by I. J. Singer

  The local residents who had nowhere to go wandered around in a daze. Landlords evicted those who couldn’t pay their rent, and the homeless were forced to sleep in empty cellars and hang around bakeries, trying to warm their chilled bones by the glowing ovens. People went out into the woods and dug pits to protect themselves from the cold.

  Unemployed female workers sold their bodies for a crust of bread or a bed for the night. Poor Jewish mothers offered their children to employers for something to eat. Workers begged bosses for the chance to earn no wages but a plate of groats or a cup of chicory.

  In the poorer sections, typhus, diphtheria, and scarlet fever raged. The police doused the gutters with lime and carbolic acid to keep the epidemics from spreading, but to no avail.

  Flederbaum Hospital worked day and night, but it couldn’t keep pace with the cemetery. The Jewish industrialists responded to the challenge. Flederbaum invited the wealthiest people to his palace and organized a committee in behalf of Balut’s poor. Soup kitchens were set up for those still able to eat; doctors and barber-surgeons were sent to attend the ailing; shrouds were provided for corpses.

  Flederbaum came each day to Balut in his carriage. He flung mounds of change to urchins and visited the homes of the most severely deprived to whom he personally dispensed one-, five-, even ten-ruble notes. He even rolled up the sleeve of his frock coat and helped members of the Aid to the Ill Society rub down with alcohol the belly of a sick worker. He also helped the members of the Burial Society prepare the corpse of a dead weaver for burial. News of these acts of mercy swiftly spread through Lodz, and in the synagogues and the bathhouses of Balut, Jews felt as exalted as if their personal angel of mercy had come to aid them in their hour of need.

  They forgave Flederbaum his gentile ways and even his daughters’ conversions. They felt that he had earned his golden throne in paradise, and he agreed with them. The only house where his sainthood wasn’t acknowledged was the dark cellar room of Tevye the World Isn’t Lawless. Like all the weavers, Tevye was out of work. His wife stood in the street all day with a basket of homemade pickles and came home at night with a tiny handful of groschen and a large mouthful of imprecations and curses. The smaller children hawked boxes of candy, while the older ones roamed about on their own, seeking food and a place to rest their heads. Inside the cellar it was damp, smoky, and barren, but Tevye was oblivious to it all. There weren’t enough hours in the day for what he had to do.

  Ragged, freezing, the Russian bashlyk wound around his throat and a fur hat on his head, Tevye raced around all day, exhorting the workers, blazing with the righteousness of his cause, distributing proclamations he and Nissan had composed, which revealed the causes of the crisis, calling for a struggle against the manufacturers and merchants, the rabbis and clerics, the police and the military, the governor and the tsar himself.

  Elderly weavers laughed at him; women made indelicate gestures to indicate that he was touched in the head.

  “Tevye is displeased with the tsar—well, what do you think about that?” people jested.

  His own wife cursed him and vilified him as if he were lower than slime. “Community billy goat!” she shrieked. “Jailbird! Burned-out torch!”

  He didn’t even hear her. Pale, emaciated, sharp Adam’s apple bobbing within the bashlyk, eyes burning, he was everywhere at once, his nose thrust into every gathering, his ear alert for every remark. His words poured out sharp and angry and full of conviction. He concentrated most of his effort in the very soup kitchens Flederbaum had set up in Balut for starving workers.

  As people sat around the bare tables, eating the black bread and groats from earthenware bowls, he harangued them mercilessly. When the elderly weavers blessed Flederbaum for the meager lunches they were enjoying, Tevye went nearly berserk.

  Like seeds dropped into black, rich soil, his words fell upon the armies of Balut’s poor and suffering Jews. Not only the workers but laid-off shop clerks, bookkeepers, cutters, and designers—who had always held themselves above the others—now listened to him with mixed emotions.

  They realized that the paper notes for which they had sweated and bled had been nothing but a sham and a delusion. They had been cast out into the street alongside the common laborers, and the words of the agitators found a warm reception within their affronted souls.

  More and more proclamations blossomed upon the peeling walls of Lodz. In synagogues, markets, train stations, offices, even on the walls of police stations revolutionary posters sprouted in the nights. People gathered before them until the policemen and janitors tore them down.

  In the midst of eating, people leaped up to heap invective on the industrialists, the police, and the tsar. The wealthy ladies distributing the free meals were outraged and called the police to restore order.

  On the outskirts of town, in Konstantin Forest, swarms of people gathered to argue and sing revolutionary songs. Hunger and need assumed a meaning, a justification. Out of the bitterness of deprivation, the people nurtured the sweet flavor of hope, which lent them the strength to endure the bad times.

  “More literature, more, more!” Tevye demanded of Nissan. “The masses are finally waking up.…”

  Nissan couldn’t keep up with the demand. He translated, reworked, transformed the material into simple Lodz Yiddish so that the context would touch the heart and move the spirit. Everything had to be rewritten by hand. His disciples, the yeshiva students, couldn’t work fast enough to keep up.

  In the evenings Nissan dropped whatever he was doing and went to the German beer halls, where the weavers sat in their velvet trousers, drinking huge steins of beer and puffing on cheap cigars. Following Bismarck’s persecution of the enlightened adherents of the Lassalle socialist movement, many German workers had fled the country. Some had gone to Amerca; others had settled in Poland. They were good workers, exacting and honest, and they promptly found employment in the Lodz mills. Some had even become bosses.

  Corpulent, amiable, devoted to their beer and cigars, they spent their evenings in the taverns alongside their long-settled compatriots. But unlike the older generation, they didn’t attend church, didn’t join glee clubs, but kept together, read contraband books that they received from Germany, and sang revolutionary songs at their private get-togethers. Just as they had in Germany, they maintained their small Lassalle societies and stayed true to their socialist ideals.

  It was to these weavers that Nissan now turned. In the broken German that he had taught himself from Moses Dessauer’s commentaries and from philosophy books, he called on the weavers to join in the struggle, and although his manner of speaking was alien, his conclusions agreed with their own. “True, true,” they acknowledged, draining the last of their beer.

  Along with his former classmate Simha Meir (now Max) Ashkenazi, Nissan favored steam over handweaving. He knew that the manual loom had no future and had to give way to the machine, forcing the handworkers out of work and out of the proletarian class. He himself worked among the Balut Jews and incited them against their bosses, but he didn’t deceive himself that this was a class struggle, a fight between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. More accurately, it was a domestic quarrel between pauper and pauper.

  He knew that most handweavers weren’t workers in the true sense of the word. Each of them yearned to become a boss or a subcontractor. He saw what a bittter life the subcontractors themselves led, how they, too, were oppressed and exploited. The true proletariat was the workers in the steam factories, where no Jews were employed. Seeing them by the thousands, hurrying to work, carrying their lunch pails, he envisioned them as the cadres of the inevitable revolution predicted by the implacable laws of Marxism—the shock troops in the coming struggle for freedom. Let the factories proliferate for now; let the manufacturers thrive, build, grow rich. The future belonged to those who raced in the predawns to beat the siren’s wails. In the tread of their wooden clogs he heard the echo of the liberation. It was for them that the industrialists built up and con
centrated their capital so that when it grew huge, bloated, and overripe, it would burst like a balloon and pass over to the workers.

  Balut, on the other hand, demonstrated poverty. Here there was no concentration, but decentralization, a deterioration which was unwholesome, unpromising.

  No, he didn’t believe in Balut. He was drawn to the chimneys, the smoke, the pounding of the machines, the call of the sirens. It was from there that the redemption would come. All that was needed was to educate the masses, to make them aware, and he met daily with the German refugees from Bismarck in their broad velvet trousers, haranguing them through the difficult days of the crisis to join in the struggle which was theirs by the nature of Marxist dogma.

  The person entrusted with the task of transporting the illicit material between Nissan and the German weavers was Tevye’s daughter Bashke, the only member of the household who didn’t encourage her mother’s diatribes against her father and hung on his every word. A spinner for a subcontractor, for whom she worked long hours without earning enough even to buy herself a decent dress or a pair of shoes, she understood her father’s passionate call for justice and equality, although she was only fifteen.

  “Mama,” she defended him each time her mother vilified him anew, “you should be proud to have such a husband.”

  “Such pride will break me in little pieces,” the mother mocked. “Remember, Bashke, don’t let yourself be led astray by your loon of a father, or you’ll end up in shackles next to him.…”

  Bashke mended her father’s clothes, patched his shirts, and cooked his meals while her mother was out hawking her pickles. When he finally came home nights weary and worn, she made up his bed.

  Her father held her close. “You understand me, Bashke, you alone do. You don’t consider me a madman, do you, daughter of mine?”

  “Daddy,” she replied tenderly, pressing her dark head to his breast, “I will always be with you.”

  In the murky cellar room, amid the gloom, hunger, and deprivation, Bashke was Tevye’s only consolation. After the days of ferment against the unjust world, the swarthy girl with the green, mysterious eyes was his beacon, his only happiness.

  “Bashke, come to Daddy’s bed,” he urged her. “You’re still a little girl, after all; don’t be ashamed to lie next to your daddy.”

  “Yes, Daddy,” Bashke cooed, settling herself in happily beside him and kissing him quietly so that her mother shouldn’t wake up and scream about the “honeymoon,” as she indelicately described it.

  Inside the room, it was moist, cold. Rats scurried and squealed out of a rage evoked by hunger. Often they leaped right over the sleepers. But the father and daughter didn’t see or hear them. They were too caught up in mutual tenderness and affection.

  No less than her love for her father was her love for Nissan, the frequent visitor at her house. For hours on end she lay awake on her bench bed and watched the tall young man sitting at the table and writing the subversive literature with her father. Never in her deprived life had she imagined that she would be brought in contact with such an intelligent, educated man. An ignorant girl barely able to sign her name, she didn’t ever permit herself to think of herself in the same breath with Nissan. She only felt happy and warm that when lying on her bench bed next to a sister, she was privileged to watch him for hours on end as he scribbled away, handsome and romantic as any poet.

  Now she came often to his room on her errands to pick up the subversive pamphlets and she was so thrilled that she prayed to God that the crisis should never end. With pounding heart she sat on the edge of the chair, unable to indulge herself the whole seat, and gazed at Nissan’s bony, expressive hands as they flew swiftly over the paper. And as he placed the papers in her basket, she trembled with rapture when their hands accidentally touched.

  “Be careful, Bashke,” he cautioned her. “In the event you are caught, don’t say where you got the material.”

  She yearned to tell him that she would let them strip the flesh from her bones before she’d do anything to cause him a moment’s harm, but she couldn’t bring herself to speak, and with head bowed, she left the house, clutching the basket to her breast.

  Thirty-One

  IN THE ROOM OF former veterinary student Marcin Kuczinski, who had been expelled from the institute for his membership in the Polish Social Revolutionary party, Proletariat, the illicit printing press worked with swift efficiency.

  “How goes it, Felix?” Kuczinski asked, flipping back the strands of flaxen hair that had a habit of falling down into his eyes.

  “The first copies are smudging,” replied Felix, a tall young Jew with a pince-nez clamped over his sharp beak of a nose. “But the subsequent ones will be fine. Hand me the paper, Marcin.”

  Off to the side by the kitchen sat two girls. The fair-haired one with the small cross around her throat was the teacher Wanda Chmiel, who lived with Kuczinski. Next to her on a small stool sat the biologist Maria Licht, dark-eyed, dark-haired, and swarthy as a gypsy. Together they dried the damp, poorly printed proclamations at the stove, then stacked them in even piles.

  “Say what you will, Felix,” Marcin said, shaking the hair from his gray eyes, “but I don’t care for these proclamations. They won’t grab the workers by the throat.”

  “That’s what the Tsay-ee-kah has put together,” Felix replied, coating the rubber roller with ink.

  “The Tsay-ee-kah, the Tsay-ee-kah,” Marcin mocked. “I don’t like the Tsay-ee-kah’s style. Soft and intellectual. Not for workers.”

  Felix put down the roller a moment and looked at his friend evenly. “How can you say this of the Tsay-ee-kah?” he asked in a shocked voice.

  “You remind me altogether of a Talmudist.” Marcin laughed. “You speak of the Tsay-ee-kah in the same pious tone Jews speak of their lawmakers. If it were up to me, I’d write proclamations that would make the workers drool with pleasure. Something so gory that—”

  “With you it’s always blood, Marcin,” Felix said, and grimaced, “carnage and murder. That’s not the way. You must appeal to man’s reason, not his instinct.”

  “That’s because I’m a veterinarian and I know that a dead horse must be skinned without ceremony, while you’re a lawyer who deals only in words and papers.”

  “I believe in the power of the word,” Felix said, applying the wet roller to paper.

  “Above all, you’re a Jew who’s afraid of blood,” Marcin added, laughing. “With such appeals you might reach the anemic tailors and weavers of Balut, but not our crowd. To them, you have to talk their language … something really gory. The whole Tsay-ee-kah is made up of Jews and intellectuals. They don’t know our workers. They preach morality to them like in a synagogue.…”

  Felix put down the roller and wiped his hands on a sheet of paper. “Marcin,” he said uneasily, “it’s not the first time you’ve brought up the same thing already. I don’t care for this kind of talk. It stinks of anti-Semitism, which has no place in our ranks.”

  “Oho!” Marcin sneered. “And in you the Jew is always ready to pop out. When it really comes down to it, you’re like any sensitive Semite.… Well, you’d better print up some more of that crap, moralist of mine. It’s getting late, and we still have lots to do. You give me the roller, and you do the setting!”

  Felix stationed himself by the small tray of type, where he searched with unskilled fingers for each letter separately.

  He wasn’t an experienced typesetter. He was an ex-law student who, unlike his friend, Marcin, had given up his studies of his own free will, since like all the revolutionary-minded students at Russian universities, he considered it a sin to devote his time to studies and to prepare for a personal career at a time when the working classes were enslaved.

  Even though his father was a rich man and the owner of several glassworks and brick factories, Felix Feldblum had set himself on the side of the poor. He stirred up the workers of his own father’s factories to demand higher wages and shorter hours. He even led them i
n a strike against his father. After his father died and left his entire fortune to him, his only son, Felix, liquidated everything and turned all the proceeds over to the Proletariat party to be used in the task of liberating the Polish peasant and worker from the shackles of the tsar and his exploiters.

  Although Felix Feldblum was the son of a Jew and he knew that Jews were even more terribly oppressed than the Polish peasants and workers, he chose to devote his life to the Christian poor.

  Even as he was growing up, he had been alienated from Jews, from their language and way of life. Everything in the village where his father’s glassworks and brick factories were located was gentile—the maids in his house, his governesses, his teachers, all his father’s visitors and friends. Even the parish priest was a frequent guest at the house. His father considered himself a full-fledged Pole, and the only Jews who entered his home were the merchants and brokers from the surrounding cities and towns or village peddlers, who came to buy raw goods from the peasants. And Felix felt no kinship toward these queer, black-garbed strangers, who stood with hats humbly in hand and who spoke such a fractured Polish.

  When he grew older, his father sent him to his brother’s place in Moscow to be educated first at the Gymnasium, then at the university. Just as everything at home had been Polish, everything at his uncle’s house was Russian.

  At the Gymnasium and later at the university, he was always among Christians. He knew that he was a Jew—the others often reminded him of this defect—but his Jewishness was like a plague or proud flesh that insinuates itself into the body and must be tolerated as some loathsome burden and nuisance.

  The only thing that linked him with Jews was the inscription in his passport designating him as of the Jewish faith, but he had never believed in any religion, much less the one to which he was assigned. As soon as he was drawn into revolutionary circles, he lost whatever Jewish feelings might still have lingered within his consciousness.