The Brothers Ashkenazi

by I. J. Singer

  He didn’t quite know how to address Nissan—whether to use the first person singular—and he solved the problem by mumbling the word inaudibly. But Nissan maintained a cool reserve, and Max decided on the more formal salutation instead of the familiar “thou.”

  “Albeit much time has already gone by since we studied together in your father’s classroom, I can still recall the last lesson we studied together, the one dealing with the laws concerning the color blue. I still remember it by heart.…”

  He glanced at the visitors and launched into the passage, twirling his thumb in the air as he did so.

  “Do you remember, Nissan?” he asked nostalgically.

  “I no longer devote myself to such things,” Nissan replied coldly.

  “What a pity” Ashkenazi clucked. “And I, despite my busy schedule, still like to glance into a holy book now and then. Why be ashamed to admit it? I even enjoy writing commentaries and innovations. Whenever I get a free moment, I jot down one or two. After all, man does not live by bread alone.…”

  He glanced at the visitors, hoping for a glimpse of admiration for a director of the city’s largest factory who still found time to write commentaries, but there was none apparent.

  He turned to Nissan’s companions. “You two gentlemen obviously aren’t familiar with the holy books. You must excuse the depth of my feeling.…”

  “We don’t feel at all offended,” the men replied airily.

  “But you, Nissan—once a scholar, always a scholar,” Ashkenazi said with conviction. “Whoever has once tasted the flavor of halakic controversy remains forever devoted to the Gemara, no matter how much he may resist. That’s something that’s rooted in the blood already.”

  He even related the amusing little anecdote of how he had responded to the barons’ query with the reply that he had attended the Academy of Talmud under the Professors Abbayeh and Raba.

  This put him into such a good mood that he went so far as familiarly to touch Nissan’s knee, but Nissan withdrew coldly. At this, Ashkenazi abruptly dropped his jolly pose and reverted to his position as director of the Huntze mill.

  “Well, to business,” he said in the German he had temporarily abandoned for the more homey Yiddish. “As you gentlemen well know, the factory is on strike.”

  “We know,” they said.

  “The demands the workers have presented are surely not to be taken seriously,” he went on. “These, we both know, are negotiating tactics. After all, an eight-hour day?”

  “That’s long enough for a person to work,” Nissan countered.

  Ashkenazi regarded him with a smile for a few moments. “Will the agreement apply to me as well? Everyone knows that I work twice that, and longer.”

  “But you work for yourself, Mr. Ashkenazi.”

  “No, I work for the factory, for all its employees. If I didn’t put in so many hours, this factory would have closed down, along with all the others, and thousands of people would be out of work. But thanks to the fact I’m not a clock watcher, thousands are being kept working not one shift, but two. We’re all merely cogs in one great machine.”

  “But you earn more in one day than a worker does in six months, Mr. Ashkenazi.”

  “Each according to his worth—based on what he brings in. I’m not here because of my looks, gentlemen. Not on account of my Jewishness either.”

  He bent closer to the men and said in an intimate Lodz Yiddish, “It wasn’t for nothing that I, a Jew, became director of a huge plant, overseeing thousands of gentiles. Do you think they love me here? They hate the sight of me, but they need me. Without me, the whole place would go to pieces. That’s why they pay me what they do. Each according to his worth. Whoever turns out a yard of goods gets paid for a yard of goods. Whoever brings in millions gets compensated accordingly.”

  “That’s exactly what we’re fighting against,” Nissan said.

  Ashkenazi grasped the tip of his beard and plucked several hairs from it. “If gentiles utter such foolishness, I accept it,” he observed in a singsong. “I showed them the facts and figures. I proved to them in black and white that if we acceded to even half their demands, the factory would have to shut down. Everything has its limitations. Even if a machine is worked beyond its capacity, it breaks down. But you are Jews. You are able to add and subtract. I am told some of your people have even studied economics. Look at this account I’ve prepared. It’s correct down to the very last groschen. So tell me, how can we agree to such preposterous demands?”

  “We have a different way of reckoning,” Nissan said. “We eliminate the huge dividends paid the owners and the huge salaries paid the director and the managers.”

  Ashkenazi rose from his chair. “Hear me out, gentlemen,” he said. “We don’t operate a business for the fun of it. If no profits accrued, we would shut down the plant. That would put thousands of people out into the street. Is this what you want?”

  “Is that all you had to say to us?” Nissan asked. “You didn’t have to call us in for that.”

  Ashkenazi began to pace through his office. “I didn’t send for you to discuss the factory,” he said with some heat. “Because, let’s not fool ourselves, you have no say when it comes to this plant. Your domain is Balut and the handworkers, while we operate on steam with exclusive gentile help. But even a mouse can make trouble, and you’ve been stirring up plenty of trouble. You’re inciting the gentiles and—”

  “We know nothing of gentiles and Jews, only of workers and exploiters,” Nissan interrupted.

  “But the Christians know of gentiles and Jews,” Ashkenazi replied mockingly. “You talk of solidarity, unity, but try to put just one Jew in this factory, and the gentiles would carry him out on three stretchers!”

  Nissan flushed. This was the weakest point of his argument, and he knew it. “That’s your fault,” he mumbled. “It was you and your kind that confined the Jewish workers to Balut—”

  This time Ashkenazi interrupted him. “We’re not talking like a director and workers now. We’re talking like fellow Jews. Danger lurks over the city—terrible danger! Jewish blood will flow!”

  “We have a defense corps organized, and we also have the goodwill of the working class. You can’t scare us with such bugaboos, Mr. Ashkenazi.”

  Ashkenazi struck the table in anger. “Bugaboos, are they? At the meetings your gang organizes, the gentiles make threats against me not as Ashkenazi the director of the factory, but as Ashkenazi the Jew. The gentile speakers mock my broken Polish, my Jewish accent, and the workers laugh. The little Jewish shopkeepers shiver in their boots. The gentiles come in and tell them that when things get bad, they’ll come back and rob them. It always ends up with Jewish heads being cracked. Do you remember the last time you called a workers’ demonstration? What happened? Jews died! And now you Jews are again feeding the fires!”

  The three men rose simultaneously.

  “We didn’t come here to listen to chauvinistic sermons,” Nissan said.

  “Bourgeois gall!” one of his companions erupted. “I didn’t want to come here in the first place. Let’s go, Comrade Nissan.”

  Nissan and the others left and took a droshky. The night was windy, rainy, chilly. The grimy city lay soaked under mud. The few scattered trees resembled so many worn brooms. The driver didn’t cease whipping his decrepit nag and abusing him for making such poor time. “Gee up, you carcass! Move it, you mangy nag!” he croaked.

  The same gloom and misery filled Nissan’s heart. Ashkenazi’s bitter but accurate conclusion cut into him like a knife.

  “We’ll have to organize a defense corps immediately,” he observed to his companions. “Tomorrow the question must be placed on the agenda.”

  “First thing tomorrow,” the others mumbled, drawing their overcoats closer around them to guard against the cold and dampness.

  Forty

  EVEN BEFORE THE STRIKE Max had been coming home less and less and spending more nights in the bachelor quarters of the late director Alb
recht. At the same time he cut his wife’s allowance for the household expenses.

  Dinele felt deeply mortified. She was no longer a young woman. Even though, like her mother, she maintained the illusion of youth, her copper hair was now sprinkled with gray. The skin around her eyes had loosened and erupted into networks of fine, minute wrinkles. From carrying and delivering, she developed folds in her abdomen and broken blood vessels in her legs. She began to suffer all kinds of ailments, particularly female troubles. Men still looked at her in the streets since she was very skilled at disguising her defects, but when she came home and shed her corsets and stays, the first symptoms of age were unmistakably there, and she gazed anxiously at her husband’s bed, which now stood empty more often than not.

  The children were no longer with her. The elder, Ignatz, lived abroad. Introspective, moody, estranged, he had been a source of much grief to his mother. Just as the father was a bundle of energy and zeal, the son was a lazy, unambitious lout. He did badly at school and was forever at odds with his contemporaries. He couldn’t maintain friendships since he always insisted on being the leader and bossed the others around. But where his father displayed the Ashkenazi will and energy, he was an Alter through and through. His was an unfortunate combination of genes, and it led to eternal family conflict. The result was that Ignatz went about in a constant sulk, seething with an anger and malice he himself couldn’t define. He hated everything and everyone, but, most of all, his father, whom he considered his worst enemy. In his father’s success he saw a reflection of his own inadequacies. He also sensed his father’s derision when he examined his notebooks and report cards.

  “Remarkable how the boy has inherited nothing from me,” Max remarked on each such occasion.

  The son would have been overjoyed to see his father a bleeding mess.

  He did love his mother, but with a perverse, insalubrious kind of love. From earliest childhood he enjoyed tormenting her, being spiteful, refusing to obey. She was too wishy-washy to take stern measures with him—this was a job she felt belonged to a father. But Max was rarely home, and when he did show up, she couldn’t bring herself to inform on the boy. Of the two, she much preferred her son. The only thing she could do when the boy pushed her over the brink was to cry, and this promptly made him contrite. He would kiss and fondle his mother and beg her forgiveness for being naughty.

  But the moment she stopped crying, he reverted to his bullying ways. He played hooky, avoided people, hung around the house all day, half dressed, reading detective stories.

  Bitter quarrels erupted when the father came home from business trips. Max Ashkenazi yearned for a son who would be a prodigy, a youth people would envy. But he didn’t know how to communicate his feelings to his son in a diplomatic fashion; all he could do was shout and bark orders. But the louder he yelled, the more obstinate the boy grew, and it always ended with the father’s wondering aloud how he could have sired such a dunce and the son’s mimicking his father’s general untidiness, his Jewish accent, and his pretensions.

  One time, when Max left the house with his fly unbuttoned, the boy didn’t alert him, only chortled with spiteful glee.

  As soon as Ignatz managed somehow to get through the Gymnasium, he refused to stay in Lodz another second and promptly left for Paris, allegedly to pursue his studies, but he never even stuck his nose inside the university. Instead, he took up the life of a Left Bank bohemian, consorted with all kinds of depraved people, and constantly wrote home for money. The mother took out what she could from her household expenses or had the maid pawn some of her jewelry so that she could send Ignatz money without her husband’s knowledge. Max seldom asked about their son.

  “Write him to study hard, Diana,” he would instruct his wife, and hand her the small check for the youth’s monthly expenses.

  “Why don’t you add a few words of your own?” she castigated him. “You’re his father, after all.”

  “Frightfully busy,” he answered, and bustled out.

  If it happened that his mother didn’t send him what he considered was enough money, Ignatz threatened to kill himself. She, therefore, went about constantly short of cash and couldn’t even tell her husband of her problem.

  Nor was her daughter, Gertrud, at home much. Slim and blue-eyed like her mother, she, too, was drawn to wealth and gentility. Unlike her mother, though, she wasn’t content to live in that world vicariously but elected instead to realize her fantasies.

  She despised Lodz, the city of smoke, grime, and noise, and hated her home, which was lonely and desolate despite the elaborate decor. The furniture was heavy and ponderous, long outmoded. The illumination was dim, gloomy. Rarely were there any visitors. Her father was always preoccupied, seldom home. He would bolt his meals and dash out again. Her mother was totally absorbed in her novels. The Sabbaths and holidays were drab, lacking all joy and festivity. And there was that eternal void between her parents, an angry silence that cast a pall over the household.

  When she was a little girl, she used to love going to her grandfather Haim’s. There it was jolly. Her grandfather would dandle her on his knee, tickle her cheeks with his beard, and play so nicely with her. “Say the blessing, Gitele,” he urged her each time anew as he stuffed her with chocolate.

  Even though he addressed her by that strange name, she preferred being there to home. There were all kinds of pretty things—candlesticks, candelabra, snuffboxes. It was always gay there, especially on Sabbaths and holidays. Haim Alter still celebrated the holy days, as he had in the good old days. He still drew out the benedictions, sang the chants, invited paupers to share his table.

  Little Gertrud waited impatiently each year for Hanukah to come around when her grandfather lit the candles; for Simhat Torah, when the Hasidim gathered at his house to dance and skip so comically; for the Days of Awe, when Grandfather Haim donned a white linen robe and a silver-embroidered skullcap and prayed with his hands held aloft. She even preferred to celebrate the Passover Seder away from the home in which her father raced through quickly so that he could get back to his papers. At her grandfather’s house the Seder dragged on for hours. The candles flickered merrily on the table, Grandfather Haim sprawled expansively against his cushion, and all the rites, chants, and prayers enraptured the little girl.

  “Grandpa,” she cooed as she kissed him, “I love you so.…”

  Because of her grandfather, she even grew temporarily pious and recited her prayers and blessings, greatly irking her father. “He’ll make a rebbetzin out of her yet!” he complained to his wife. “Why is she always there?”

  When she grew older, she stopped going to her grandfather’s so often; still, she couldn’t bring herself to stay at home. She yearned for company, parties, balls, salons, games, and dances—the things her girlfriends enjoyed in their homes.

  She felt estranged from her father and pitied her mother. She saw that her mother didn’t love her father, and this fact both disturbed and puzzled her. She couldn’t conceive how her mother could live with a man she didn’t love for so many years. Why hadn’t she left him? More important, why had she married him in the first place?

  “Mama, did you ever love Father?” she asked her often.

  “Do your homework,” was her mother’s response.

  “Oh, how strange people used to be!” the girl said with feeling. “I would never marry a man I didn’t love, not even if they tore pieces from me.…”

  When Gertrud was graduated from boarding school, her mother began to think of the girl’s future. She wanted to refurnish the house, invite company, get Gertrud involved with young people of proper breeding and background. Dinele knew that her own life was just about over. Although she had retained her good looks, she had missed the boat, and her life was slipping rapidly downward. She often decried her lost youth and wept into her pillow, but like any devoted mother, she wanted to assure a better life for her daughter.

  Besides, the years had transformed her feelings toward her husband. She still
didn’t love him, but she had come to respect his strength, his energy, his leadership. This little man walked with the stride of a giant. During the years that she had estranged herself from him, with her children and her books, he had evolved into a man of knowledge and sophistication.

  “Max,” she implored him, “Gertrud is all grown up. We must think of her future. We must make a home for her.”

  She no longer resisted calling him by his adopted name. She only wanted to restore a state of harmony between them. But now it was Max who didn’t respond to her overtures. He spent more nights away from home than not. Even on Sundays, when the factory was closed, he didn’t show his face at home. “Frightfully busy,” he told Dinele on the phone.

  For the first time in their marriage, Dinele grew uneasy. She became convinced that her husband was having an affair.

  At first, the notion of Simha Meir’s running around with women struck her as ludicrous. But on thinking it over, it no longer seemed so funny. Why not, indeed? She knew that he wouldn’t take up with cheap streetwalkers. It would have to be one of his office girls or some dancer or actress, of whom there were hundreds in Lodz. Or maybe it was a real love affair and not a financial arrangement? Everything was possible now that women had grown as wanton as men.…

  Dinele went to the mirror and studied herself with critical objectivity. The wrinkles around her eyes and the slackness of her skin stared back at her from the mirror. The gray in her hair was unmistakable. She felt unwanted and unattractive. During the time that she had been aging, Max had grown, if not handsome, at least distinguished. Strangest of all, he had retained his youthful appearance. He hadn’t a wrinkle, a single strand of gray hair. If he were a touch more careful with his appearance, he wouldn’t have been considered at all unattractive. His eyes in particular had remained bright and alert, burning with the fire of youth. Her friends had commented on it, but she had always scoffed at it, dismissed it. The truth of their observation came back now with particular sharpness.