The Brothers Ashkenazi

by I. J. Singer

  “I’m deeply touched,” she said with her most seductive smile. “I would be delighted to receive the gentleman in my modest little apartment in the company of my close friends.”

  Through the blond lady, he was drawn into a very odd circle that included dissolute officers, elderly wealthy admirers of the lady’s talents, and the usual coterie of sots, gamblers, black sheep aristocrats, and roués.

  Barely keeping from retching, he spent several days cavorting with his new friends, who shattered crockery and mirrors in cabarets and restaurants and forever drew their revolvers in response to real or imagined insults. But he managed to get to the commandant.

  He came back to Lodz with heartburn and a headache, but in his pocket reposed an order for military goods which would bring enormous profits. And even as the rest of Lodz lay idle, the Huntze mill went on a round-the-clock schedule. Its stacks belched arrogant smoke; its red-brick walls vibrated with feverish impetus.

  Again Max Ashkenazi was the talk of Lodz. Again people gazed at him as he rode through the poorly paved streets in his carriage.

  “A regular ball of fire!” they exulted. “He could turn snow into cheese.…”

  “He’s found himself the right little war all right,” others said in envy. “A sweet little war of pure gold.…”

  Max didn’t mind sending his barons all the money they asked for now. With his own huge profits, he bought additional Huntze stock, which had dropped to a new low, thanks to the war.

  Down highways and byways, on sleighs and on trains, afoot and hidden under straw in peasant carts, another citizen of Lodz raced back from far-off Siberia to the city of his birth. He, too, had an important task to accomplish there.

  The time had never been more propitious. There were frequent strikes. Demonstrations erupted in the streets. Because of the war, there was serious unemployment—the workers were resentful and ripe for rebellion. The revolutionary cells that he, Nissan, and Tevye had sown had proliferated. The May Day debacle that had ended in such ugly fashion hadn’t eradicated the workers’ urge for unity, as had been assumed at that time. They frequently demonstrated now, singing revolutionary songs and displaying open resentment against the manufacturers and the police.

  Tevye had dispatched letter after veiled letter from which Nissan had gathered that his presence in Lodz was desperately needed. His comrades had even provided the money for his escape. And although his period of exile was nearly at an end, Nissan left before it was up.

  He had grown tired of Siberia. There was absolutely nothing to do in the godforsaken place. Whole days were squandered on fruitless debates and wrangling. The variety of political factions was unbelievable. There were narodniks and Polish socialists, Social Revolutionaries, Jewish Bundists, and anarchists, along with various offshoots of every party, each full of scorn, sarcasm, rage, and derision toward the others.

  Wretched, miserable, isolated from everything and everyone, they turned on one another with cannibalistic fury fed by enforced indolence. Each new arrival brought news of new parties, subparties, factions, and groups mushrooming in the nation—each complete with its own detailed and irreconcilable programs for Russia’s salvation.

  Along with the others, Nissan had given his tongue full rein. As an ex-yeshiva student he was inherently steeped in polemic and dialectic. For every occasion or reference, he had an apt quote, a flood of logic and documentation to douse anyone who dared question the absolutism of Marxist dogma.

  “Only the straight path—no deviations!” he lectured the quibblers and nitpickers, just as his father had admonished those who dared stray even a hair from the Torah.

  Black of eye, swarthy, with a small black beard and curly sideburns which brought to mind the traditional earlocks, he had retained the yeshiva student’s habit of twirling his thumb in the air in the heat of debate.

  He wasn’t popular with the gentile exiles, who couldn’t match his intellect and debating skills. They scorned his fanatic devotion to books, his refusal to take an occasional drink or join them on a hunting expedition.

  The only one with whom he was close was the Social Democrat Szczinski. Although a Pole and an ex-seminarian, he shared Nissan’s devotion to study and his aversion to all revisionists, particularly the Polish socialists, who sought to introduce nationalistic aspirations into pure Marxism. Like Nissan, he abjured the hunts and the drinking parties and elected the life of the ascetic. Even his blond beard took on the appearance of a Jewish Torah scholar’s.

  He enjoyed nothing more than studying with Nissan. He retained the zeal that had been instilled in him by the Jesuits and the conviction that the end justified the means. He sneered when discussing the enemies of the proletariat. He believed in the inexorable collapse of capitalism, but he lacked the patience to sit idly by while history dawdled toward this goal. He was determined, instead, to serve as the instrument of the cataclysm. Without the consent of his party, he had instituted a reign of terror in Lodz. Following his capture and imprisonment, he had been exiled to Siberia.

  “Root them out, root them out!” he kept muttering on his strolls with Nissan.

  It was in the company of this Szczinski that Nissan fled from Siberia. The moment he stepped off the train in Lodz, he could smell revolution in the air. It exuded from the walls of every building, hovered in the frosty air enveloping the sooty streets. The deeper he penetrated the poorer quarters, the more seditious the posters that greeted him from fences and walls. Two-man police teams, each accompanied by an armed soldier, patrolled the street corners.

  Nissan went looking for the forger who would provide him the false passport he would need. He gingerly made his way through the neighborhood until he came to the right address. The flower pot stood in the window, as it was supposed to, indicating that it was safe to enter.

  “How is Uncle?” he inquired of the young red-cheeked matron who answered his knock.

  “He is well, and he sends his regards,” she replied, flushing even deeper.

  Nissan stepped inside and exchanged kisses with the woman, who was a total stranger to him. “At last,” she said. “We were already worried about you. Are you hungry, Comrade?”

  “Before anything else, some hot water please! It’s been weeks already since I’ve had a bath.”

  That same evening a reception for Nissan was held at the young woman’s house, complete with whiskey, cake, sausage, beer, and all the trimmings. A young man dressed in his Sabbath best sat next to a girl in her best dress. They posed as an alleged bride and groom. This was to allay the suspicions of the janitor, who, like all of his kind, was a police informer.

  Tevye described the conditions in the city. “Lodz is ours!” he exulted. “You’ll rest up a few weeks; then we’ll put you to work. We need you here, Nissan.”

  “I don’t need a rest,” Nissan said. “I’m ready to start right in. I’ve idled away too many years already.”

  Within a few days he joined the revolutionary committee. His first appearance was in the Balut house of worship. An odd group had assembled for the combined afternoon-evening services. Most of them were young and dressed in modern style, the kinds of Jews rarely seen in a synagogue. The beadle, who was already familiar with the tricks of those who pushed solidarity, tried to thwart their efforts. The moment the cantor had recited the final words of the mourner’s prayer, he slammed his fist on the lectern and announced that the preacher would promptly commence his sermon, but the radicals had anticipated him.

  “Don’t make a move!” a broad-shouldered worker exclaimed, blocking the door. “The one to talk won’t be the preacher, but our representative. Comrade Nissan, the floor is yours!”

  Nissan mounted the pulpit and looked around. For a moment he had difficulty launching his speech. He had already grown unaccustomed to speaking Yiddish. But the large crowd, the boldness of his comrades, who no longer feared arrest, filled him with a sense of warmth and with confidence, and he exulted that his years of effort had not been in vain. The words cam
e with a passion that aroused his audience as well as himself.

  The candles before the lectern dripped and melted from the heat generated by so many bodies inside the jammed room.

  The streets of Balut didn’t seem the same to Nissan. All the walls were plastered with revolutionary proclamations that the police no longer bothered to tear down. On every corner men openly talked sedition without gazing fearfully over their shoulders. The labor exchanges seethed with activity. Weavers, spinners, hosiers, seamstresses, tailors, cobblers in modern garb and in long gabardines milled about while union representatives held meetings, planned strikes, distributed literature, collected dues, and from time to time mounted some elevation to launch fiery speeches.

  The common people of Lodz, from housemaids to indigent street vendors, came here to verbalize their complaints and seek redress. A huckster cited a landlord who had evicted him for nonpayment of rent; a housemaid had not been paid her wages; coachmen’s wives bewailed their husbands’ drinking up their pay; apprentices lodged complaints against masters who beat and starved them. Even couples who hadn’t been able to solve their marital problems at rabbis’ appealed to the unionists for assistance.

  The exchanges kept an eye on working conditions, agitated for reform, and acted against those who flouted their directives. Here delegates were elected to visit shops and factories and check that the workers’ hours and wages were being adhered to. From here goons were sent to discipline intransigent landlords and employers. Here lists were assembled of affluent citizens on whom levies would be imposed to support soup kitchens for the poor and to pay for the printing of revolutionary literature.

  Such was the strength of the workers that the orders of the exchanges were observed more carefully than those of the police. The union organizers couldn’t be bribed or taken to court for arbitration. They had their ways of punishing those who defied their directives.

  And the stern king and inflexible tsar of the exchanges was Tevye the World Isn’t Lawless. Urgent, inexhaustible, he was everywhere at once, his nose in every corner, his eye on everything. And constantly by his side ready to offer comfort and assistance was his daughter Bashke.

  By now a fully grown woman, good-looking and capable, she could have long since married and been a mother, but she wouldn’t leave her father, to whom she had been so closely attached since her childhood years. Her mother cursed her, predicted that she would end up in shackles, but Bashke lived only for her father even as she worshiped Nissan from afar.

  Just as in the old days, when she had come to his room to collect the illicit literature, she still gazed at him with adoration. She didn’t address a word to him, merely blushed when he came near her.

  Nissan strode through the streets of Balut with a triumphant Tevye. “As you see,” Tevye said, looking around the cramped streets, “it’s ours, all ours now.…”

  Thirty-Eight

  THE GOVERNOR OF THE PROVINCE, von Müller, summoned the chief rabbi of Lodz along with the leaders of the community to his headquarters in Piotrkow. The community leaders donned black suits and top hats, the rabbi put on his silk gabardine with the medal he had received from the imperial court, and they went to Piotrkow. But the governor wasn’t impressed with the finery or the medal, and he laid down law.

  “You Jews are revolting against me in Lodz!” he roared. “If you don’t discipline those hooligans of yours, I won’t be responsible when the people turn on them!”

  The leaders bowed their heads. “You must make the same distinction between us as you would between Germans and Poles, Excellency,” they said humbly. “We’re powerless against those elements among us that disobey the law.”

  “That’s your problem!” the governor shouted, pounding the table.

  The chief rabbi, who was a shrewd and pragmatic man, came up, as usual, with an inspired solution. “Would His Excellency be willing to inquire of his subordinates if even one of the rebels taken into custody wore ritual garments?”

  The governor looked puzzled.

  In his excellent Russian the rabbi explained that only those Jews who were true to their faith would wear a ritual garment, and therefore, those that did were uniformly loyal to the tsar.

  The governor took note of this information, and soon after, the police began to check the attire of arrested Jews. Those who wore ritual garments were immediately released, while the others were detained.

  News of the rabbi’s brilliant inspiration quickly spread through the city, and even his opponents lauded his wisdom, but the ploy was short-lived since the rebellious Jews quickly took to wearing ritual garments, too.

  In the meantime, the community leaders resolved to do something themselves about the radical element in their midst. They sent preachers to every house of worship to inveigh against rebellion and to promote Jewishness and submission to lawful authority. On the Sabbaths they sent teachers into the poorer synagogues to sway the young workers away from radical notions.

  When this, too, made no impact, the leaders turned to the underworld to discipline the rebels. Ill feeling between the two factions had already been brewing for a long time. Prior to the birth of the radical movement, the criminals had been the masters of Balut. They extorted money from servant girls for the privilege of strolling through the woods on the Sabbaths. If a worker tried to walk with a girl, he would be approached by a tough claiming that the girl was his fiancée and demanding payment of a ruble under threat of a beating.

  On Passover, when the workers showed up in their holiday best, they had to pay up, lest their new suits be doused with ink or slit with a knife.

  But since the unions had been formed, the workers refused to pay tribute and had even beaten several of the toughs. And the toughs couldn’t afford to lose face this way.

  Besides, the unionists had begun to foil them in other areas. They persuaded the servant girls to avoid the company of toughs and to attend union meetings instead. They dissuaded the men from patronizing brothels, thus diminishing the pimps’ income. Some of the whores had even been induced to leave the brothels and take up honest work.

  Another thorn in the side of the criminals was that it used to be they to whom the poor Jews would come in times of trouble. For a fee of a few guldens, the toughs would “persuade” a husband to return to his deserted wife. For a few drinks and some stewed goose stomachs, they would crack a mean boss’s ribs, slap around a straying wife, give a black eye to a girl who had dropped her fiancé for another man.

  But now the Jews of Balut turned to the exchanges for redress of their grievances, and the toughs were left with no outlet for their muscle and their authority. Even worse, some of the toughest among them, who with their strength and daring had brought honor to the fraternity, went over to the side of the unionists and refused to have anything to do with their former cohorts.

  All this rankled the criminal element of Balut and fired their rage against the unionists.

  The merchants and magnates of Lodz, who had endured so much grief from the unionists and had then been humiliated into contributing toward their support, were much happier to pay off the toughs to teach the radicals a lesson they would never forget. The toughs got together, armed themselves, and prepared for the showdown. They were joined by master teamsters, who held a similar grudge against the unionists for inciting their employees, the hired draymen, to demand shorter hours and higher wages. Besides, they, the unionists, denied the existence of God, mocked the rabbis, the saints, the synagogue, and the other pillars of Judaism.

  The incident that brought things to a head was the matter of the “electricity.”

  A young worker of Balut had died of tuberculosis, and the members of the Burial Society promptly came to prepare his body for interment. They even brought along a ritual garment for the corpse because even if he had neglected to wear such a garment in life, it was only right that he go properly attired into the other world.

  But the unionists claimed the body first and wouldn’t allow it to be washed, cl
ad in shrouds or the ritual garment. Instead, they wrapped it in a red flag and escorted it to the cemetery, singing revolutionary songs along the way.

  At the cemetery a female unionist in a red dress proclaimed that when a person died, it wasn’t his soul that departed his body, but his “electricity.” The members of the Burial Society and the gravediggers swiftly spread this choice morsel of news throughout the city, and things began to hum.

  “It’s the end of the world!” Traditional Jews sighed. “Even gentiles believe in a soul.…”

  “They’ll bring a misfortune down upon the city—a plague or what not, may it not happen.…”

  “They should be rooted out without mercy!”

  “They should be denounced to the police!”

  “They should rot in chains!”

  All the preachers and teachers spoke of the “electricity” in the prayerhouses. The chief rabbi himself proclaimed that according to Jewish law, the unionists had forfeited their right to life since the holy books stated that those who drown themselves deserve not to be rescued, but to be held underwater.

  Those who took the matter hardest were the master teamsters and the toughs of Feiffer Lane. The moment they caught a unionist alone, they beat him savagely. The unionists countered by striking back at the criminals. The police sided with the toughs. Tempers flared, and one night the war erupted.

  On Prevet Street, “Uncle” Zachariah Poontz, a keeper of several brothels, married off an orphan to a cobbler. Uncle Zachariah had no children of his own, and he had taken in the orphan girl, reared her, and married her off to a cobbler, not to one of his criminal cronies, so that she would remain a decent Jewish daughter.

  The wedding was a lavish one. Several bands played. Many guests gathered from both sides. The bride’s side was represented by the pimps and thieves; the groom’s, by cobblers, tanners, and saddlemakers, healthy and robust youths and unionists to the core.