The Brothers Ashkenazi

by I. J. Singer

  What concern did he have with people and all their petty, vicious weaknesses and egomania, with all these worms devouring one another just as the vermin devoured them? He wouldn’t even look at them. He had given his life to an ideal, a dazzling ideal for which no effort or sacrifice was too great, and it was to that ideal, not to people, that he would dedicate himself.

  In the stifling, stinking wagon the men played Blind Cow. With each round of the game, a new victim would lie down with his head between his knees while the others beat him until he identified the one responsible.

  To Nissan, the men’s coarse voices and raw laughter were like the roars of savage beasts.

  Thirty-Six

  AT THE AUSTRIAN RESORT CARLSBAD, the cream of Lodz society gathered to take the waters. The crush this season wasn’t as intense as in past years. Many of the regulars had been ruined by the crisis, and those who had been able to make it strutted with particular pride and hauteur. The women trailed trains over the paved sidewalks, displaying gowns that couldn’t be worn in Lodz because of the filth and grime. The men, in their short jackets and tight trousers or in light, vented frock coats with high collars and pointed-toed patent-leather shoes, bowed and waved their handkerchiefs with disdain.

  “For the first time it’s possible to enjoy yourself in Carlsbad,” they observed. “So many upstarts gone, don’t you know?”

  “Yes, what a pleasure to be rid of the seamstresses and store clerks.…”

  They felt particularly gratified that Flederbaum himself along with his family deigned to visit Carlsbad this year. Even his daughters, who had previously avoided the resort because it had become too Jewish, were present.

  Among the others here was Dinele, the wife of Max Ashkenazi, accompanied by her mother. Haim Alter hadn’t been able to make it. Things were going especially badly for him following the crisis, and for the first time he had been forced to let his Priveh go abroad without him. She had grown even more alluring over the years, and he had been forced to go into debt to send her since she had emphatically told him that she simply wouldn’t have endured missing a season at Carlsbad.

  Dinele, too, was without her husband, although he could easily have accompanied her. His mounting prosperity was the talk of Lodz. It was said that he held the Barons Huntze in the palm of his hand.

  Still, he had elected to go to Russia on business. He couldn’t afford to waste time on idle pleasure. He begrudged every minute away from business. Even though Lodz gossiped that he controlled the Huntzes, the barons were still his employers, and his goal of being the actual master of Lodz was as distant as ever. He wasn’t content with half victories—it had to be everything or nothing, and he wouldn’t rest until he got what he wanted.

  He was busier than ever these days. Director Albrecht had never been the same since the workers had wheeled him around in a wheelbarrow with a broom in his hand. He had fallen as if into a stupor. He still came to the factory each day and sat in the huge chair that groaned beneath his bulk, but he no longer ran the factory. He didn’t hear what was said to him, he misplaced papers, and he often forgot to pull up the socks drooping down on his legs or to button his fly.

  The German secretaries with their smooth blond upsweeps chortled into their papers to keep from laughing out loud at his erratic behavior.

  “The old fart is through,” the barons agreed. And although they allowed him to come to the factory, they took away all his duties and assigned them to Ashkenazi.

  Albrecht made no objections. He found solace in the young girls Melchior provided him in ever-fresh supply. Ashkenazi knew that the old man’s end was near—his corpulence, his gargantuan appetites all pointed to an early collapse. But it was all academic in any case. He, Ashkenazi, was the actual, if unofficial, director of the factory. Not a single move was made without his knowledge and approval. He worked as hard as ever, kept a million details in his head, and wouldn’t allow himself the pleasure of dropping everything and going off with his wife to Carlsbad. He didn’t need resorts. He flourished in an atmosphere of dust, smoke, and tumult. It was only in times of idleness and quiet that he experienced pain and discomfort.

  He was back on top now, having long surpassed his brother. His importance and influence grew daily. He kept secretly buying up Huntze stock, which he piled in the vault until it resembled a flight of stairs that would lead him to his goal—to the very tops of the factory stacks.…

  But he often fretted during his numerous business trips. Dinele never came to see him off or met him when he returned. She saw to it only that he had sufficient underwear and other requisites for the journey. This disturbed him. He envied the couples who displayed so much love at their meetings at the station, kissing and whispering secrets. He was uneasy about his beautiful wife alone among the wanton playboys and gigolos who frequented the fashionable resorts. It wasn’t for nothing that his father-in-law fretted so about letting his own frisky wife go there alone and—until this year—had always made it a point to accompany her.

  He, Max, couldn’t take the time for such things, but his brother, Yakub, did. Not that he could afford to do so. Despite the crisis, he had continued his spendthrift ways; he had issued credit to one and all and had squandered money without a thought for the future. The crisis had dealt him some severe financial blows—a number of his debtors had gone bankrupt, and he was close to losing the tens of thousands of rubles he had deposited as a bond with Flederbaum. But at the last minute his wife had bailed him out, as usual.

  So long as he had been secure, she had stayed away from him. She refused to join him in Lodz and brooded in Warsaw with her pills and medicines. She knew about the dissolute life he was leading, but she refused to come to him.

  But the moment she heard that he was in financial difficulties, she responded promptly. She sold one of the buildings she had inherited from her mother and presented the proceeds of the sale to him. She joined him in Lodz, gave him the benefit of her business acumen, and helped him in every way until he was once more on his feet. They rented a magnificent apartment, furnished it luxuriously, entertained lavishly, and maintained a gracious existence.

  More than with anyone else, Perele established close relations with Priveh and even more so with her sister-in-law, Dinele. Their husbands didn’t speak, but the wives became close friends and visited each other often.

  But as soon as Yakub resumed his normal ways, Perele again began nagging him about the way he ate, slept, and relished all of life’s pleasures. She disliked his companions and was jealous of every woman he came near, from his sister-in-law to the lowliest housemaid.

  Again she fled back to Warsaw, and again Yakub drove his carriage through the streets of Lodz, tipping his hat to ladies. And even though his financial affairs were still shaky, he placed them in the hands of underlings and left the broiling city to go abroad for a few weeks.

  Not that he needed resorts since he had the constitution of a peasant. He merely wanted to enjoy the activities in Carlsbad. It was a good place to relax for a while, particularly when one was unencumbered by a wife’s company. So he packed his valises, booked a first-class compartment, and set out with his usual light heart.

  With customary aplomb he strolled through the long train, greeting acquaintances, treating the men to cigarettes and the ladies to chocolate, kissing hands, laughing, complimenting. He lingered longest in the compartment where Dinele and Priveh sat, surrounded by a mound of valises, hatboxes, traveling cases, cushions, and satchels. When the train stopped, he sprang down to the platform to buy fresh fruit for the ladies. He helped them get through customs at the borders.

  Priveh couldn’t stop praising him. She had been entranced with him ever since he had moved back to Lodz and had become one of the town’s leading playboys. Although she was already a woman of advanced years, she could still appreciate a dashing man’s attentions. More than once she inwardly deplored the fact that she hadn’t betrothed Dinele to him instead of to his brother. The more she came to despise
her son-in-law, the more she grew to adore his twin brother.

  While Perele was still living in Lodz, Priveh would frequently bring Dinele to his, Yakub’s, house. Now that they were traveling together to Carlsbad, she appreciated his doing what she was accustomed to having her Haim do for her. She was grateful that he was around to take care of all those bothersome little details for which men were so much better suited.

  “Yakub,” she gushed, “if I wasn’t such an old lady, I’d kiss you!”

  Yakub drew back her glove, and her daughter’s, then kissed their hands several times. “What a delightful surprise it was to run into you two,” he beamed.

  All three knew that the encounter had been no surprise. Just as he had waited for Dinele to show up as a boy, he had again made sure to check out which train she would be taking. But no one made reference to the subterfuge.

  Wherever Dinele went in Carlsbad he materialized as if out of the shadows. Dinele clung to her mother, afraid to be left alone with him, but Priveh did everything to throw them together. She wasn’t driven so much by a concern for her daughter’s happiness as by a feeling of revenge against her son-in-law.

  “Diana,” she said to her, “why don’t you take a ride with Yakub? It’ll cheer you up. I’ll stay here and listen to the music in the park.”

  By the glow of the milky moon shining down on placid fields, Dinele and Yakub held hands. “No, Yakub.” She resisted each time he tried to kiss her. “No!”

  Yakub took her hand and draped it around his neck. “Then let’s sit as we did when we were children,” he said. “Do you remember, Dinele?”

  “I remember,” she said, her heart beating faster. But she could go no further. She, too, was afraid of God and, even more, of her own passions that she had subdued for so many years, and she ran back to the safety of her mother’s arms.

  Thirty-Seven

  THROUGHOUT THE HUGE RUSSIAN EMPIRE from the Vistula in the west to the Amur in the east, men from the ages of twenty-one to the mid-forties were taken from fields, factories, and workshops and pressed into uniform. On walls, village fences, and city gates huge placards appeared displaying the two-headed eagle and proclaiming that the tsar Nikolai II, Autocrat of All the Russias, King of Poland, and Archduke of Finland, called upon his loyal subjects to defend the sacred Russian soil against the slant-eyed heathens who dared challenge the right of the empire to its Far Eastern territories. Whoever neglected to respond punctually to this call would be summarily court-martialed.

  Alongside these grand royal proclamations sprang up small, poorly printed ones put out by the various revolutionary parties. They called upon the peasants and workers to disobey the official decrees, to avoid the war that only concerned imperialists of different nationality but similarly corrupt motive.

  The more the police and the gendarmes tore down these notices, the more they proliferated. The people gathered before them and read their seditious comments. In cities and towns men of draft age raided government liquor stores, attacked soldiers, and avoided conscription.

  In Poland and Lithuania, in White Russia, and in the Baltic lands, revolutionary circles harangued soldiers with antiwar propaganda.

  The police and gendarmes countered by dispatching agents to agitate against the Jews, the enemies of Christ and of the motherland, and urged the loyal citizens to avenge themselves against the unbelievers. The patriotic call didn’t go unanswered as men launched bloody pogroms.

  The tattoo of drums and the priestly chants drowned out the laments of conscripts’ wives left behind and the cries of the Jewish victims. In working quarters, the flames of resentment, class hatred, and revolution blazed high. Strike followed strike. Trains and boats were jammed with men, horses, and arms bound for distant Amur.

  Along roads and tracks leading from Russia to Lodz, which despite the war remained tightly linked with the markets of the Far East, two men raced to get back home.

  Occupying his own first-class compartment on the Trans-Siberian Express sat Max Ashkenazi, sales representative of the Huntze Corporation. Huddled in his broad sable coat and caracul hat, his pockets stuffed with cash, IOUs, and contracts, he leaned against the plush seat, gazing out glumly at the desolate steppes and forests stretching for mile after mile, day in, day out, seemingly without end.

  The train was off schedule as it puffed its way over tracks piled high with drifts. “When will we be arriving?” Ashkenazi kept asking the conductor.

  “Hard to say, sir,” the conductor said defensively. “The snow is blocking all the roadbeds.”

  The outbreak of war had caught Max Ashkenazi thousands of miles from home. Frantic telegrams kept arriving from the mill. The Far East, in which Lodz had a fortune in goods invested and which represented one of its most lucrative markets, had been cut off by the war. The trains were now reserved exclusively for military purposes. Traveling salesmen had been stranded without money or orders. Factories had ground to a halt. Notes were being called in. Bankruptcies mounted. Lodz was in a flux, its course uncertain.

  As usual, the Barons Huntze weren’t there when they were most needed. They were vacationing on the Riviera and wiring requests for money. His underlings urged Max Ashkenazi to get back as quickly as possible. Vital decisions had to be made.

  He was by now official director of the factory, Albrecht having long since gone to his reward just as Max had predicted. He had suffered a series of heart attacks, culminating one evening as Melchior brought him a particularly fetching spinner. When Albrecht tried to service the fresh young thing, his legs collapsed under him, and he fell, lifeless.

  The factory gave him an elaborate funeral. Several pastors sang his praises, and Max Ashkenazi personally laid a wreath of white roses upon his grave. The very next day he took over the late director’s office. Melchior, who still recalled Ashkenazi from the days when he was a boy in his father’s warehouse, drew himself up erect before him and reported in a thunderous tone, “At your service, Mr. Director!”

  Along with Albrecht’s position, Max inherited his splendid carriage. Neither Melchior nor the coachman was overjoyed with his new master. Melchior tactfully dropped a hint about the young ladies who had attended the late director and inquired if the new director might be interested in the same service. Max fixed him with an ironic glance and remarked, “Spinners should do their spinning in the factory.”

  Melchior accepted the decision with bad grace. “Cheap sheeny swine,” he grumbled to the coachman, who concurred: “They’re all tightwads. A man can’t earn a decent tip anymore.…”

  The other factory employees shared these negative views, but no one dared voice his complaint. Max assumed his task with his usual energy, perception, and zeal. He was familiar with every aspect of the operation, with every machine, every worker, every bolt of goods. He introduced a sense of urgency and purpose into the mill. The managers despised him, but they acknowledged his competence. And as one gear drove the other, the plant began to hum with renewed vigor so that its every component—metal and human—danced to the new director’s tune.

  Despite all this activity, Max found time for extended sales trips to Russia, during which he concluded enormous transactions. But wherever he might be, he knew exactly what was happening at the mill. He received daily wires and sent daily wires detailing his precise instructions. Now that the war had erupted in the Far East, he squirmed restlessly in his compartment, which for all its spaciousness was too small for him in his eagerness to be back at work.

  It was largely so because he had a spectacular idea. At the very time when the rest of Lodz was slowing down production as a result of the loss of the Far East markets, he had found a way to pull off an enormous coup. He had concluded that a fortune could be made by turning out goods for the armed services. The military quartermasters made excellent customers. They were willing to let others earn a few rubles so long as they lined their own pockets. The factory was currently geared toward civilian goods, but the conversion could be easily accomplished.
The only urgency was to beat the other manufacturers to the punch.

  The one he feared most was Flederbaum. He, Flederbaum, had already demonstrated his influence with the governor in the railroad coup. Max couldn’t afford another such setback. The matter had to be expedited forthwith, and the only way to do this was to circumvent all underlings, go straight to the top man in charge of military procurement, and dangle a carrot before him. Then, while all Lodz stood idle, he would be operating double shifts!

  The very notion set Ashkenazi twitching. It was as if he were back in his factory now, listening to the hum of its machinery in an otherwise-stilled Lodz. At that moment the locomotive whistle blew in startling imitation of a Huntze factory whistle.

  Max’s carriage took him directly from the depot to the factory. He didn’t even stop at home to clean up after the long journey. He couldn’t afford the time.

  With remarkably disciplined urgency, he began to pull all available strings to get to the man in charge of procurement. He could have used his bosses’ help now since they had access to the highest places, but they were away as usual and the whole burden fell upon him. This didn’t concern him. Actually whatever he managed on his own was all the more gratifying. Besides, he had something better than social position; he had that great equalizer—cash.

  He began with a quiet trip to Warsaw. Once there he arranged through a go-between to meet with a certain operetta singer who was the mistress of an adjutant of the commandant. He went to see the lady and made his overtures.

  Revolted to the point of nausea by his own extravagant compliments, he placed a diamond ring on one of the singer’s plump fingers, which barely had room for any more rings. “May this be but a token of my deep admiration for your great art,” he said in his broken Polish. “It would give me the greatest pleasure once again to enjoy your divine company.”