The Brothers Ashkenazi

by I. J. Singer

  They collected funds for poor refugees from Lodz and held meetings presided over by Max Ashkenazi, who was ever ready with a clever word, an apt suggestion, a brilliant innovation.

  He rarely thought about Lodz. Here he had everything he wanted—money, power, respect. As far as he was concerned, Lodz—all Poland—was a closed phase in his life.

  Fifty

  WITH A VENGEANCE bordering on the fanatic, Baron Colonel von Heidel-Heidellau undertook the task of purging the Polish-Jewish pesthole he had loathed ever since he first came there to marry the daughter of that upstart Heinz Huntze.

  As befitted a German colony, he ordered the streets cleansed of all animate and inanimate filth. Polish militiamen, entrusted only with truncheons, carried out his commands with great glee. They chased the Jews off the sidewalks where people had always gathered to gossip, socialize, and do business. When the crowds didn’t disperse quickly enough, they were clubbed and doused with fire hoses. The new laws also made it a crime to throw a cigarette butt or paper on the street and to spit. The gutters had to be doused with lime, and the garbage bins in the courtyard smeared with tar and kept free of all obnoxious waste.

  Militiamen seized bearded men and bewigged women in Balut and dragged them forcibly to the municipal baths, where the men’s beards and the women’s skulls were shaved. Their clothes were boiled in disinfecting vats, and their flesh was scoured till it bled. But the more the baron’s myrmidons scrubbed and scoured, the more the epidemics flourished.

  Baron Colonel von Heidel-Heidellau not only cleansed the city of filth and grime but also purged it of food, employment, and everything else of value. The factories stood idle; the chimneys no longer polluted the clear blue skies; the sirens and whistles no longer roused people but let them sleep as long as they wanted.

  Immediately after assuming command of the city, the baron sent his men to strip all the factories of their thick leather transmission belts. The manufacturers elected a delegation to petition the colonel to spare these belts, without which the factories couldn’t operate. Dressed in their snowiest linen and gleaming frock coats, the members of the delegation called at the palace. Among them was Yakub Ashkenazi, his gray beard now dyed an ebony black. It was the first time he had glimpsed his brother’s new home.

  The baron received the delegation sprawled in an easy chair. “The answer is no,” he said, his monocle glinting.

  The men appealed to the commandant’s conscience. If the workers were deprived of their jobs, thousands of men, women, and children would starve. When the men’s tone turned slightly insistent, the baron slammed his fist against the table.

  “Who gives a damn about your workers?” he snarled. “I have my own people to think of!”

  The thick belts made of the finest leather would make excellent soles for German soldiers’ boots, and the baron had them shipped to Germany.

  The next commodity to be appropriated was copper. It was collected from vats and boilers, from church steeples and doorpost amulets, from door latches and frying pans.

  Each day thereafter the baron thought up new ways to plunder the Lodz economy. He began, naturally enough, with the Ashkenazi plant. Down the subterranean passages leading directly to the railway line flowed an endless stream of metal, leather, raw cotton, silk, wool, and finished goods.

  Madam Ashkenazi raised a protest each time. Brandishing her rolled umbrella as if it were a sword, she stormed the doors of her palace, only to be repulsed.

  For every item requisitioned, the punctilious Germans issued vouchers which would be redeemable once glorious victory was achieved.

  Madam Ashkenazi sat all day in her husband’s large office, even though there was nothing to do there. She guarded the mill and agitated over every appropriated article. She locked the German vouchers away in the safe, hung the key around her neck, perused old ledgers. When night came, she retired to Albrecht’s old bachelor quarters. She lay in his wide bed unable to sleep and waited for morning and another empty day. Of all her staff, she had kept only one maid, who cooked her meals and arranged her sparse gray hair into short braids tied with silk ribbons as before.

  In Balut the handlooms were silent now, too. They stood draped in white sheets like so many corpses in shrouds.

  The city, which had always thrived on turmoil, movement, and clutter, had become a ghost town. Its spotless streets brought to mind the paths of a cemetery. The Polish workers went back to their farms; the Jews walked around dazed and demoralized. German sentries at every corner kept the people confined to their own streets. The Germans searched every cart, every person, for contraband food. They didn’t hesitate to lift women’s dresses or tap their bosoms and crotches, searching for smuggled items.

  Every stalk of wheat, every potato in the cellar, every newborn chick, calf, and piglet had to be reported. The fruit was plucked from orchards, the grass from pastures, the fleece from sheep. Hunters were stripped of guns, and fishermen of nets, so that all the game and catch were left for the victors. Even stray dogs and cats were rounded up and rendered for their fat. Their flesh would feed the animals in German zoos.

  Along with the military spoilers came a horde of stout civilians in forest green mountaineer costumes with feathers in their hats. Wearing yellow gaiters to protect their boots from Polish mud, they swept through the countryside like a swarm of locust, ravaging the land.

  Bakers, millers, butchers, grocers, street vendors, and artisans were placed under strict surveillance. The population was issued ration cards for bread that wasn’t made of flour but from an abomination of chestnuts and potato peelings. It stuck to the gums and ruined the digestion. The rich bought food from the army of smugglers that had proliferated since the occupation, but the poor dropped like flies from malnutrition and disease.

  Baron Colonel von Heidel-Heidellau had the Polish militiamen seal off the houses of the sick and spray Balut down with carbolic acid. Hordes of paupers were hauled off to disinfecting stations to be doused, scrubbed, and shaved. The gentile soldiers were amused by the elderly Jews’ desperate efforts to avoid the razor. They leered at their daughters’ effort to conceal their nakedness and jeered at their wives’ sagging breasts, flabby bellies, and spindly legs.

  But the epidemics raged on. The hearses couldn’t keep up with the demand, and the corpses, minus even shrouds, were taken to their rest in handcarts.

  To keep the population docile, the baron ordered military bands to entertain them with German victory marches. He stood on the balcony of his palace, contemplating the city lying submissive at his feet, and mumbled to himself, “That’s what the scum need—baths and entertainment.…”

  Fifty-One

  NEVER HAD KEILA, the wife of Tevye the World Isn’t Lawless, had it so good as she did under the German occupation. In these, her elder years, she was being compensated for a lifetime of toil, deprivation, and worry. She cooked huge pots of meat even on weekdays so that the savory aroma of fried livers, sautéed onions, and stews permeated all Feiffer Lane. The neighbors came to “borrow” a pinch of flour, a potato, a crust of bread, and she turned no one away.

  It wasn’t Tevye who was rewarding her for her years of privation. He hadn’t changed a bit and still sought to save the world while neglecting his own family. Even in good times they had lived on the brink of starvation because he wouldn’t listen to her, open his own shop, and hire a few employees. “I wouldn’t become an exploiter even if you tore pieces from me!” he raged.

  Keila had flayed him with scalding curses, but he wouldn’t give in. He hired himself out to subcontractors, who often as not went bankrupt and didn’t pay him. He raced around with unionists and stayed away whole nights at a time. Keila had to endure deep shame and humiliation during his periods of incarceration. Along with the wives of common thieves, she had to stand at the prison gates, waiting to deliver food packages to her husband. She had never enjoyed a moment of happiness with him. When all Lodz was swimming in money, her children went about ragged and hungry.


  When Lodz was occupied and Tevye no longer even brought in the little that he used to, Keila was left with two choices—starve to death or suffer the humiliation of begging in the streets.

  But someone in heaven had interceded in her behalf. Even though her madman of a husband had assured her that there was no God, she had never doubted. She had never stopped keeping a kosher household, lighting the Sabbath candles, heeding the rabbi’s advice to discard a dish if some milk accidentally spilled into chicken soup. Tevye raged, snickered, vilified the rabbi for wasting their money, but Keila poured the tainted food into the garbage.

  True, she couldn’t make him say the benediction and had to spend Sabbaths at a neighbor’s like some widow, but the kitchen was her domain, and she trained her daughters to be good Jewish daughters. Bashke hadn’t listened to her and had come to a bad end, but the other children had been guarded from their father’s crazy ways. Some had emigrated to America, but the youngest ones had remained in Lodz. They had nothing to do with their father, whom they considered a lunatic and an irresponsible idler with time for everything but his own family.

  Now, during Lodz’s darkest hour, Tevye’s daughters were doing extremely well. They had become smugglers, and good children that they were, they brought all their earnings home. They bought their mother a fashionable wavy wig, which sat very incongruously on her lumpy gray head, and a new wardrobe of weekday and Sabbath dresses. They brought home all kinds of good things from the road—flour, groats, meat, butter, cheese, eggs.

  They took a new flat on Feiffer Lane with gas illumination and indoor plumbing, bought new beds, nailed shelves to the walls to hold their photographs, and hung pictures of Nubian eunuchs bringing a nude blond slave girl to a swarthy sultan and of King Solomon settling the question of a child’s parentage by ordering it cut in half.

  Yes, God had taken pity on Keila for her devotion to Him over the years and for defending Him before her corrupt husband, and she praised the Lord, even though she didn’t know how to pray properly; was generous to her neighbors; and dropped coins into the collection box hanging next to the greasy doorpost amulet. As often as Tevye tore down the collection box, so often she replaced it, fed it, and through her thick lips prayed to God to continue lavishing His favors upon her house, to guard her daughters from harm in their dangerous work, and to soften the heart of her husband and drive out the madness that had blinded him for so long and had forfeited him both this world and the world to come.

  She had good reason to pray. The Germans conducted frequent searches for illicit goods. The first time they only commandeered the contraband, but if the offense was repeated, they jailed the perpetrators, and Keila’s house was full of contraband. It reposed in her high beds under green blankets embroidered with lions, tigers, parrots, and flowers. Whole slabs of meat packed in straw lay between pillows. Sacks of potatoes, heads of cabbage, and beets were stored under the beds. In the old wardrobe, hidden away among the dresses, there was flour in small sacks and all kinds of grain. Inside the pillowcases, sugar was stored in little pouches. Even behind the picture frames—at the very foot of King Solomon’s throne guarded by two lions—lay packages of saccharin used in indigent houses in place of sugar.

  And even though everything was carefully hidden, there was no assurance that it wouldn’t be found. The German home guards were good at unearthing hidden goods. Even better were the military police, who used bayonets to pierce pillows and who didn’t hesitate to make people strip to their skin in their zeal to find contraband.

  And Keila kept dropping coins in the collection box and praying that she and hers be kept from all harm.

  During the week her daughters were away. With kerchiefs over their heads, in stout boots that could stand up to any terrain, with sacks draped over their shoulders, they slogged through the villages, buying up from the peasants a bit of flour, a chunk of butter wrapped in linen, a half gross of eggs, a cheese—whatever was available.

  They kept off the highways, which were patrolled by the Germans, and stuck to back roads and paths that sometimes led through ditches and bogs. From village to village they slunk, bent under the weight of their sacks, eager to please their mother.

  They endured all kinds of hardships along the way. They had to sleep in barns or under the open sky. Gentile youths harassed them. Sometimes the Germans caught them and had to be paid off with a few marks or with other means adversity had taught the girls.

  But their compensation for this difficult, often debasing grind was the Sabbaths and holidays at home. Keila prepared trays of Sabbath loaves and cakes and fat stews. The girls swept and dusted the house, scrubbed the floors and sprinkled them with yellow sand, buffed the iron hoops of the buckets, and polished the tin candlesticks that replaced the brass ones the Germans had requisitioned.

  All the pots, pans, and kettles were scoured until they gleamed. The finest glassware was put out. Flowers and laces cut out of paper were affixed to curtains, cupboards, and shelves. The pictures on the walls glistened; the blue-flowered plates gleamed. A velvet cloth embroidered with gilt letters and a Star of David was laid over the twisted loaves. Tevye refused to make the benediction or to slice the Sabbath loaves, but Keila did what she could to set a proper Jewish table. She even managed to strain out some wine from cooked raisins through a cloth. The girls bathed, washed their hair, perfumed themselves, put on filmy underwear and dresses of the latest style.

  Keila thanked God that she no longer had to go to strangers’ houses to celebrate the Sabbaths. Her home was now filled with men—her daughters’ fiancés, who spent their Sabbaths and other free days in the house, eating, drinking, singing.

  These were no pale, undernourished weavers in greasy ill-fitting suits, but lusty, broad-shouldered youths in high-topped boots and short jackets—smugglers one and all, good earners, free with their money and perfectly content with their lives.

  Although far from saintly—they were clean-shaven and not averse to a quick smoke on the holy days—still, they didn’t refuse when Keila asked them to make the benediction over a beaker of raisin wine or to start off the Sabbath loaf with a blessing. Their simplistic attitude was that God earned His due just as man earned his.

  The candles flickered; the tablecloth gleamed; the girls smiled radiantly; the youths laughed and told funny stories about the road and the smuggling game. There was much boasting and tales of bravado.

  In her high-riding Sabbath wig and a wide apron, Keila bustled happily in the kitchen. She served heaping portions to one and all, took pride in her daughters’ beauty and talents, cast maternal glances at their fiancés, and through her thick lips prayed to God for successful marriages for her girls and many grandchildren and a serene old age for herself.

  Even merrier than the Friday evenings were the Sabbath days. Friends of the girls and of their young men came to visit, and there was dancing, singing, and games of fantan. Sometimes there would be a German present, a soldier who worked hand-in-hand with the youths. He would sing German songs, vilify his officers, and let his friends try on his uniform.

  Keila knew that it would be best if she left the house on such occasions, and she visited with a neighbor to listen to the reading of the Pentateuch that she herself couldn’t read or to gossip about the shortage of potatoes.

  Wandering all by himself through the house as if he were a stranger was Tevye. His wife and daughters gazed at him with contempt. He was of no further use to them, and all they demanded of him was that he conduct himself as a human being, join the family at the Sabbath table, make the benediction, slice the Sabbath loaf, and act like a proper father to his daughters since young men respected their fiancées more when their father behaved like the head of the household.

  But Tevye wouldn’t cooperate. He wouldn’t even attend his own daughters’ engagement parties owing to the presence of a rabbi. His daughters pleaded, Keila wept, but he wouldn’t yield. “I won’t share a table with a cleric!” he raged.

  He seldom ca
me home except for a few hours’ sleep. He couldn’t stand his bourgeois house with the pictures, the doorpost amulets, the coin box, the visitors, the German soldiers, and the sacks of contraband.

  He despised the tasty dishes Keila served him out of pity. The only thing in the house he treasured was the yellowed photograph of his beloved Bashke. He was ashamed to invite his companions to his house. He would sneak in like a pauper, doze off for a few hours in a corner room since his daughters occupied the bedrooms, and rise with the dawn to get back to his labor exchanges and soup kitchens.

  Following the Sabbaths, the house was in a shambles. Nut shells, apple cores, cigarette butts, half-filled glasses lay scattered amid stockings, underwear, dresses. Sometimes a youth who had stayed late would be sleeping on an improvised bed in the parlor.

  The girls sprawled in their beds, all disheveled, legs and arms akimbo. With their hairpins, combs, camisoles, and various female paraphernalia, they seemed strange to their own father, and he was ashamed to glance at his own offspring.

  He dressed quickly, stuffed his pockets with the books and pamphlets he was forever carrying, washed his face, and left.

  “Lunatic, where are you off to now?” Keila called out to him with a blend of pity and mockery. “Wait up, and I’ll get you at least a sip of coffee for your empty stomach.”

  “I’ll eat at the soup kitchen already,” he grunted, and ran out.

  Keila gazed after him, watching his spare, bowed form and shook her head with its white nightcap and red ribbons. “God Almighty,” she pleaded. “Why don’t you fix his brain already? Sweet Father in heaven, do something for the poor madman.…”