The Brothers Ashkenazi

by I. J. Singer

  That befell the Jews of Balut.

  On the first day of Iyar,

  Gentiles came to rob and to loot.

  Like mad dogs off leashes, they ran wild,

  Biting and tearing night and day.

  Woe to any man, woman, or child

  Who happened to get in their way.

  Sweet God, whose mercy is so deep,

  Stretch out your divine hand.

  Gather up your stray, lost sheep,

  And lead us to the Holy Land.

  Thirty-Three

  SHAMEFACED, HORRIFIED, unable to look their fellow Jews in the eye, the strike agitators stumbled through the streets of Balut. Everything lay in ruins. Dazed, bloodied people staggered about, seeking their loved ones and their possessions.

  “It was our brothers, our fellow workers, who did this to us, not the police or the exploiter bosses.…” the weavers taunted their leaders.

  “A curse on you!” the women added spitefully. “You had nothing better to do than run around nights with secrets and plots? Didn’t you know it always ends up with Jewish heads bleeding?”

  The most depressed of all was Nissan, the rabbi’s son, known as Nissan the depraved. In the first days after the workers, his workers, had so foully desecrated the honored day of freedom, Nissan couldn’t get out of the bed on which he had thrown himself fully dressed. He wouldn’t eat, wash, shave. He wanted to die, to shut out the shame and horror of what he had seen. Along with Tevye and the other leaders, he had been out in the streets, trying to bring the inflamed workers to their senses, but they had pushed him aside, and one had even punched him in the face.

  His landlord, a Litvak, who had come to Lodz after the expulsion of Jews from Moscow, wanted to fetch a doctor for him, but he refused. The landlord brought him hot tea, but Nissan wouldn’t touch a thing.

  “To you, this is something new,” the landlord said, “but to us it’s ancient history. We had it in Russia; we have it here; we’ll have it wherever we go. It shall be ever so, so long as we live among the gentiles.…”

  Nissan sat up in a rage. “Not so! So long as we live among bosses and oppressors!”

  In his distress, he broke the rules of conspiracy and openly expressed his revolutionary views to a stranger.

  The landlord gazed at him sympathetically and shook his head. “You are young. I once thought the same way. But they will always beat us. When new machines were installed in Lodz, they beat us. When Russian students assassinated the tsar, they beat us. Now it’s the workers who beat us. Later it will be the revolutionaries. It will never change. Not as long as we are Jews and they are Christians.…”

  “Don’t say that!” Nissan screamed, pressing his hands against his ears. “Shut up!”

  “You’d do better to clear your room of the illicit material,” the landlord advised. “They’re conducting searches all over the city.”

  Nissan blanched. The landlord looked at him with knowing eyes. “Don’t look so alarmed. I know how to keep silent. But take my advice—don’t get mixed up in it as I once did. I, too, wanted to help the gentiles, but the first pogrom opened my eyes.”

  Nissan wanted to answer, but the man had left the room, and he was left alone with his pain and despair. From the courtyard echoed the dirges of beggars lamenting the pogrom. The landlord’s words weighed on Nissan’s breast like a heavy stone.

  No, he wouldn’t, he couldn’t believe it! He knew that the road to redemption was a hard one, lined with thorns, obstacles, and sharp rocks over which the freedom seekers would stumble more than once until they reached the summit. He knew from history that all revolutions were drenched in innocent blood, pain, and tears. He knew that the pogrom had been the result of agitation by agents, provocateurs, criminal elements, who had duped the ignorant workers and misdirected their ire against the Jews in order to draw them off from their true enemies. He knew this in his head, but not in his heart.

  The events of the frightful days passed before his eyes—the beatings, the maimings, the violations of women and children. It had been his proletariat that had perpetrated these crimes, and his landlord’s comments refused to leave his conscience.

  “To die … simply to die,” ran through his mind. “There’s nothing more to live for.…”

  He didn’t even bother to clear his room of the contraband material. He no longer cared what happened to him.

  Maybe man was essentially evil. Maybe it wasn’t the fault of economic circumstances, as he had been taught, but the deficiencies of human character. Maybe the Torah was right in its contention that man’s heart was rotten from birth. Maybe his former idol Schopenhauer had been right, not the idealistic Hegel or the pragmatic Marx.…

  He drifted off and suffered terrible nightmares replete with blood and carnage. Behind it all resounded his landlord’s words: “It shall be forever so.…”

  Ungroomed, fully dressed, he lay on his cot for a day and a night as if in a stupor. He was roused by the morning sun shining as brightly as it could through the polluted Lodz air and dingy windowpanes. He no longer felt the despair that had consumed him, the apathy and loss of purpose. Instead, there surged within him a will to live, to restore himself, to forge something positive out of the tragedy and disappointment. Like his pious father, whose faith in the Messiah nullified all contemporary suffering, Nissan reaffirmed his faith in the validity of his ideals and pushed aside all negative thought.

  He cleared his room of the compromising material, washed, dressed, and went to seek out his comrades in order to confer on future steps. But they were nowhere in evidence. They were hiding, unwilling to show themselves. The few he encountered wouldn’t talk to him.

  “Get away!” they said. “If you go near the workers now, they’ll skin you alive.…”

  He went to see Tevye, but he, too, was unavailable. “Papa is in the hospital,” Bashke told him through her tears. “A gentile hit him with a rock.… And don’t let Mother see you. She said she’d slap you silly if you dared show your face.…”

  Nissan went back to his room and composed a proclamation addressed to the Jewish workers of Balut. It was filled with bitter denunciations of the capitalists, who had so cynically turned brother against brother. It directed the responsibility for the outburst against the police agents and provocateurs. It urged the Jewish workers not to surrender to despair, but to renew their faith in the solidarity of the proletariat. It concluded with a long series of “down with”s and “long live”s.

  He spent a full day and night making copies of the proclamation, then waited until midnight to post them on the crooked walls and fences of Lodz. He had already posted a number of them and was taking a roundabout way home when two policemen slipped out of the shadows and seized him. They swiftly handcuffed him and drove him in a droshky to the station. Two rows of Cossacks with knouts in hand stood facing each other in the station courtyard. Nissan hesitated, but the policemen nudged him forward. “Move it, Moshe!”

  This alerted the Cossacks that the prisoner was a Jew and that they didn’t have to hold back. Nissan ran the gauntlet, trying to avoid the whistling thongs descending upon his head, arms, back, and shoulders. Policemen picked him up from the ground, where he lay bleeding, and led him before the night shift commander.

  “Caught him posting proclamations in Balut.”

  They displayed one of the posters they had peeled from the wall.

  “Search him!” the officer ordered.

  They did so.

  “You there, what’s your full name and address?” the officer asked.

  “Don’t call me ‘you’!” Nissan responded sharply.

  The officer regarded him through narrowed eyes. “So, an intellectual.” He laughed. “Your name and address?”

  Nissan didn’t answer. He wiped his bleeding face with a kerchief.

  “Well, all right. We have our own ways of finding out such things,” the officer said. “Throw him in the tank.”

  The large cell was filled with prisone
rs. There were thieves and men without proper papers, street brawlers and drunken cabbies, beggars and lunatics, and a mob of workers detained for rioting. New prisoners kept being brought in. The stench, noise, filth, and smoke were unbearable. The men yelled, cursed, laughed, cried. A tiny kerosene lamp barely illuminated the large room. A bunch of youths pounded on the cell door, calling for the jailer. They wanted to visit the latrine, but he had already been fooled too often by such requests.

  All the bunks were taken, and Nissan sought out a corner of the cell and stretched out on the bare, dirty floor. Men came over, demanding money for whiskey, but he ignored them.

  “Get the hell away from me!” he said curtly in the tough tone of the experienced jailbird.

  “That’s no fish,” the men grunted. “He’s done hard time already.” And they went off, looking for “fish.”

  Nissan lay on the cold floor, aching in body and spirit. The green light of morning shone in through the barred windows.

  After several days he was taken before the interrogator. In a brightly illuminated office a clean-shaven colonel of gendarmes wearing gold-rimmed glasses sat before a desk covered in green cloth.

  “Have a seat,” he said politely. “Is this your first time here? A Lodz citizen or a stranger?”

  “A native of Lodz,” Nissan replied.

  “I don’t know your name,” the colonel said with a smile. “You wouldn’t give it to the arresting officers.”

  “They beat me,” Nissan said angrily. “Look at my face.”

  “I’m very sorry,” the colonel said with an amiable smile. “But times are such that it’s hard for us to maintain proper discipline. Surely you know how hard it is to control Cossacks.… This wouldn’t have happened with gendarmes.”

  He pushed a box of cigarettes toward Nissan. “Would you care for a smoke?”

  “Thank you,” Nissan said, taking the proffered cigarette.

  The colonel began to clean some penpoints. “You speak a very fluent Russian for a native of Lodz,” he remarked. “Were you educated in Russia or in Poland?”

  “I was for some years under police supervision in Russia,” Nissan replied. “My name is Nissan Eibeshutz.”

  “Very nice to know you, Mr. Eibeshutz,” the colonel said, enunciating the Jewish name. “That’s the best way. We would have found it out anyway. You merely saved us needless effort.”

  In the same polite tone the colonel tried to ascertain from the prisoner to which party he belonged—the Proletariat, the Zwionzek, or perhaps some new offshoot? … “There’s no unity in your ranks,” he observed with a smile. “You keep splitting up into factions and making extra work for us. They say the Proletariat is on the verge of another split. What’s your opinion?”

  When Nissan offered no reply, the colonel turned his attention to the proclamation. He compared it with the Russian translation supplied him by the secretary of the Jewish communal society and went on to discuss the recent riot in the city.

  “Very deplorable”—he sighed—“truly regrettable.”

  “It was your doing,” Nissan said.

  “No, yours,” the colonel corrected him. “Jews have no business mixing into politics. You should stick to business, which is your specialty. This would be better both for you and for us. Think about what I’m saying.”

  “I have my own views on such matters,” Nissan said.

  “I hope that in prison, where you’ll have lots of time to think, you’ll muse some more on this and come to agree with me,” the colonel said paternally. “You’re tired now and sleepy, and I don’t want to burden you any more than I have to. We’ll talk again. In the meantime, is there anything I can get for you? Tell me, and if it’s at all possible, I’ll be happy to do it.”

  “One thing, Colonel. I don’t want to go back to that cell. Please send me to prison instead.”

  “I’ve already arranged for that,” the colonel replied, and rang for the guards.

  The policemen seated Nissan in a droshky and drove him to the prison on Dluga Street.

  “They keep sending and sending,” the warden raged, “and I don’t have any place to put them. What a mess!”

  Two sleepy guards stripped Nissan naked, made him stoop, and probed his orifices. They took away everything he had, including a pencil, cigarettes, matches, and loose change. They also took away his tie and suspenders.

  “Take it!” they ordered, handing him a tiny kerosene lamp and leading him down a long corridor. “You’ll be staying here for now. Later, we’ll see further.”

  They tossed him like a corpse onto a bunk covered with a coarse gray blanket. After the crowded jail cell, the prison cell with its bunk, table, and bench was to Nissan like a palace.

  Soon a message in prison code sounded from the adjoining cell. Nissan placed his ear to the wall.

  “Good evening. Who are you?” the message tapped out.

  Nissan gave his name.

  “What’s doing in the city?” the other asked, giving his own name.

  Soon he added the news that the prisoners wouldn’t be detained here too long. The trials would be held shortly, and the sentences would be stiff ones, up to eight or ten years.

  Nissan asked about the prison routine, food, exercise time, sleeping time, but especially about reading matter.

  The answer came that books were available in quantity, political literature along with a sizable library left by former prisoners.

  Nissan was delighted. He anticipated a long term, and he looked forward to many years of uninterrupted study.

  One day he was told that his bride had come to visit. He came out, puzzled, to find little Bashke with a package in hand. The guard took the package. “What’s in there?” he asked.

  “Food.”

  “We’ll give it back after we’ve gone through it,” the guard said. “In the meantime, you two can talk.”

  Nissan took the girl’s hand, and she blushed fiercely. “Don’t be angry,” she apologized. “But they only let family visit, so I said that we were married.”

  “I thank you, Bashke,” Nissan said, and stroked her head. He inquired about her father, about friends.

  “Papa is already home,” she said. “He’s back working, and so am I. He sends his regards.”

  She mused a moment, then added, “He’ll go on as before. Both of us will, even though Mother screams.”

  “You’re a good girl, Bashke,” Nissan said, “but be careful. And you mustn’t bring me packages. I have everything I need here.”

  Then girl gazed at him with grateful eyes, then burst out crying.

  “What is it, Bashke?” he asked, stroking her hair.

  “They’re so mean … so horrid …” she mumbled, averting her eyes.

  “Who, Bashke?”

  “During the search,” she said, her face deeply flushed. “I was so ashamed.…”

  Nissan nodded. He knew about prison searches of female visitors. “You shouldn’t come here. You’re only a child.”

  The guard cut the visit short. “Time to go,” he said, clanging his keys.

  Nissan kissed the girl’s head and said good-bye.

  Thirty-Four

  THE LODZ RAILROAD DEPOT was noisy and crowded. Around the third-class wagons, Jews and peasant men, women, and children milled and jostled one another. Although there was plenty of time until the train left, people scurried, shouted, pushed. Women fretted about their possessions. They didn’t understand the conductor’s Russian, and they wailed and lamented, pressing their bundles to their bosoms. They were on the first step of a journey to join their husbands in America. The only things they were taking with them were their bedding and their children, and they were terrified of losing one or the other. They shrieked each time the children left their sight anew. Besides, there were pickpockets about, ready to snatch whatever wasn’t tied or nailed down.

  “Help, my money!” female voices kept shattering the murky air.

  Many Lodz citizens were emigrating to America th
ese days. Following the crisis, many people had been left without a groschen. Others had been beaten and stripped clean during the pogrom, and they hoped to begin a new life in the New World.

  For the hundredth time, fathers said good-bye to sons and admonished them, “Remember to remain a Jew! Observe the Sabbath, wear your phylacteries, and don’t shave your beard, you hear?”

  “We hear,” the sons promised, counting their bundles yet another time.

  Peasant women carrying baskets of chickens tried to sneak into the train and wrangled with the conductors. Hasidim with bundles bound in red kerchiefs on their way to their rabbis’ courts traveled with their young sons, who were attired in long gabardines and looked like so many tiny old men. They chanted Hasidic songs even as they boarded. Litvak merchants, reeling under valises, teapots, and umbrellas, fought for berths so that they could sleep all the way home. They bickered with the Polish Jews, shouted through the windows at the porters, and consumed oceans of hot tea they had brought along.

  An uproar resounded through the wagons. People tossed bundles, argued, fought. Pious Jews donned prayer shawls and phylacteries and formed quorums. Women bared breasts and suckled screaming infants. Female Litvaks played cards. Hasidim offered toasts. Gentiles sliced pork sausages with jackknives, ate, spit, and laughed at the praying Jews. Children cried; hens clucked; a piglet in a sack squealed; a dog barked.

  Through it all moved the so-called Whipper, a red-bearded bully of a Jew in a yellow gabardine who unofficially but brazenly collected fares. “Hand it over, Jews, whoever hasn’t paid,” he cried. “Hand over the cash!”

  Not everyone bought regular tickets for the train. Some people sneaked aboard and hid under seats. But the Russian conductors didn’t mind. They employed bouncers to extract payment from the stowaways, then split the take with them.

  The red-bearded Whipper poked, prodded, crawled under benches to flush out hiding passengers, and shouted, “Make it snappy! Hand it over, or off you go!”

  The Russian conductor walked beside him and lent an official hand. “Will he come alone?” he asked in a Hebrew quote from the Torah as his accomplice had taught him.