The Brothers Ashkenazi

by I. J. Singer

  She walked barefoot on her heavy legs into the kitchen to scatter the cockroaches which had occupied the empty pots during the night, and she mumbled her morning prayers, making all kinds of errors and transposing words and phrases.

  A rooster crowed, his hoarse cry echoing across the silent city, where factory whistles no longer roused people to work.

  Fifty-Two

  THE ONLY ONE IN LODZ who wouldn’t yield to the commandant was Tevye, the leader of the unionists and chairman of their executive committee. Each order the baron issued, Tevye countermanded. In the middle of the night his cohorts fanned out with buckets of paste and rolls of proclamations, which they proceeded to glue over those signed by the baron.

  Baron Colonel von Heidel-Heidellau flushed an apoplectic scarlet when he learned of the nocturnal depredations. “Wipe them out without a trace!” he frothed at Police Commissioner Schwanecke. “Crush the Jewish vermin responsible for this!”

  The lame commissioner marshaled all his men to lie in ambush for the perpetrators. He also sent out spies and agents to trap them. A few were collared, and he personally kicked them in the belly, venting all the rage and humiliation he had been forced to endure from the baron.

  He used all his policeman’s wiles to learn the names of the group’s leaders, but the prisoners wouldn’t talk even when he starved them. Schwanecke then proposed they spy for him, but they wouldn’t go along. Finally, he sent them into forced labor in Germany.

  He had proclamations posted explicitly defining the punishment meted out for covering or defacing official German orders, but the same night the executive committee managed to cover all these proclamations with their own calling for an ongoing struggle against the army of the occupation and its lackeys the police.

  The war between the baron and Tevye had been triggered by food. As one way to supply more food for the fatherland, the baron had turned to the workers’ soup kitchens. A committee of Lodz’s elite, including Yakub Ashkenazi, had maintained these soup kitchens, where the workers could get a bowl of thin gruel and a crust of bread. But even though the support for this effort came from the Lodz citizens themselves, the baron cast a covetous eye upon the enterprise.

  They consumed a lot of staples, these soup kitchens—mounds of potatoes, flour, and groats that might have better gone to Germany—and the baron summoned the leaders of the citizens’ committee to his palace and ordered them to add more chaff to the flour used for the bread.

  “Excellency, the bread is already falling apart from all the adulterants in it,” the leaders protested.

  “Add the ingredients my senior medical officer suggests, and the bread won’t fall apart,” the baron said. “I’m not allocating any more flour for your rabble, and that’s that.”

  When the men tried to explain that the substitute bread was making the population sick and spreading epidemics, the baron lost his temper. “There is plenty of ground to bury all the people of Lodz!” he roared. “Get out!”

  The men left humiliated and cowed, and the bread in the soup kitchens was baked according to the commandant’s orders. Once the baron got his way with the bread, he began to consider ways to conserve grain, potatoes, and fat. He ordered oil substituted for the fat in soups. The fat would be collected and shipped to Germany. Next, he cut down on the rations of groats. Finally, he came up with the brilliant idea of using potato peelings for the soup.

  The baron’s chief medical officer, who had discovered a substance to substitute for flour in bread, came up with the notion that potato peelings were healthful, appetizing, and nourishing. The baron called a press conference at which he ordered the newspapers to print this theory. The medical officer elaborated his findings with all kinds of scientific proofs. The baron listened approvingly and urged the editors to give the theory wide currency.

  The press wrote the stories, and the kitchens used the peelings. But Tevye and his crew wouldn’t take this lying down. He was now the leader of the city’s revolutionary circles. Nissan was in Russia, the other comrades were exiled or at the front, and the responsibility for sustaining the rebellion had fallen upon his bowed shoulders. He alone organized committees, recruited new members, supervised the soup kitchens, and kept the whole movement alive.

  Therefore, when the commandant’s latest edict came out, Tevye felt it incumbent upon him to issue a fiery proclamation against the military oppressors, who first deprived the workers of jobs, then forced them to eat potato peelings like swine. Tevye’s proclamations were posted right over the commandant’s and called for protests and resistance.

  The baron circumvented Schwanecke and personally took charge of disciplining the rebels. His men raided the soup kitchens, arrested the youngest and strongest among the workers, and shipped them off to forced labor in Germany, where the shortage of able-bodied men had grown acute.

  Orders had come down from the general staff that more civilians be drafted for work in Germany, but the Polish men refused to report as directed. They knew from those who had gone there before them that forced laborers weren’t fed, were domiciled in wet, unheated barracks, were guarded day and night, made to work without a break, and generally treated like convicts. Those who had gone there voluntarily weren’t permitted to return, and for all these reasons, the Polish civilian men didn’t respond to the conscription.

  Alongside the baron’s proclamations hung those of Tevye describing the conditions of forced laborers in Germany, and the people were more inclined to believe Tevye than the baron.

  The baron responded by arresting workers and sending them forcibly to Germany. German military police, militiamen, and home guards were everywhere, collaring able-bodied men in the streets for the slightest offense. For congregating, for lining up at the soup kitchens or for bread rations, men were rounded up, confronted with trumped-up charges, packed into freight cars, and shipped off to Germany.

  Polish militiamen arrested people who were less than clean or barefoot and took them to disinfecting stations. The elderly were allowed to go home, but the young were sent to Germany.

  The more people were arrested, the more the proclamations against the commandant proliferated. They spoke of his illegal acts, his cruelties. They included protests from families of the detained, condemning the baron for conscripting civilians, which defied international law.

  Tevye didn’t rest, even though he was barely keeping body and soul together in such trying days. He spent each night in a different hiding place and never ceased inciting against the baron. He even sent accusations against him to socialist deputies in Germany, which brought inquiries from Berlin.

  With the visor of his cracked cap pulled up onto his forehead, his bony Adam’s apple bobbing under the paper collar, his tattered jacket stuffed with newspapers, books, pamphlets, and brochures, his eyes angry and slightly insane behind the lenses of his wire-framed glasses, he was everywhere at once like a punishing wraith.

  It disturbed him that workers had been transformed into smugglers, beggars, vendors. He encountered them in the streets with their pails of pickles, baskets of candy, all kinds of junk that they were hawking, and they were ashamed to look him in the eye. Others went from courtyard to courtyard with sacks on their shoulders, buying up old clothes, even though no one was selling. Those less resolute gave up and turned to begging. The female workers sold themselves to German soldiers for a piece of bread. Others who had once worked for the party turned smuggler, opened illicit coffeehouses, conducted black-market transactions, and forgot their ideals. Many died, victims of starvation, exposure, consumption, and epidemics.

  Tevye agonized that proletarians had been forced into such physical and moral degradation. Everything he had been striving for now turned to dust, scattered like chaff in the wind.

  But his own faith held steadfast. He was firm in his conviction that a socialist world was inevitable. Out of blood and suffering and pain it would emerge like grain out of manure. But for now there was only darkness and despair. The whole world was drenc
hed in blood; the workers and peasants were lulled by patriotism; the bourgeoisie incited brother against brother and nation against nation in order to turn the anger of the masses away from their true enemy. The climate was such that formerly class-conscious workers in the Western lands rushed into uniform to kill fellow workers of other lands. Even the socialist leaders defended the war budgets in their native lands, joined hands with the bourgeoisie, donned officers’ epaulets, assumed ministerial rank. Some even fawned at the feet of bloody tyrants.

  All this was a terrible burden on the bowed shoulders of the old weaver. If at least he had Nissan to commiserate with or to explain it all to him.…

  The responsibility of redeeming the city was entirely his, and he avidly consumed the Marxist newspapers and brochures for guidance, but there was little he could do. He was too ignorant, too unprepared to show the way through the prevailing gloom.

  But for all his dejection, sparks of hope glowed here and there like fireflies in the dark. Young male and female workers gathered around him, hungry for his guidance and leadership. They had remained true to him and to the party. Even though they starved, they refused to compromise their ideals with bourgeois activities.

  They helped Tevye in his campaign, posted his proclamations, attended his meetings, recruited new adherents. They helped him set up a workers’ soup kitchen which served as a club in the evenings.

  In a brick building that a Lodz magnate had started to build for himself but that had never been finished as a result of the war, the kitchen was set up. There were no windows or doors installed yet, nor were the walls plastered, but the moment the Russians evacuated the city, the workers had commenced to make the place habitable. They whitewashed the bare bricks, hung portraits of Marx, Engels, and Lassalle. The girls enlivened the black ceiling with paper lanterns and decorations. Several of the youths who were carpenters nailed together benches and built a small stage draped with a red flag.

  Hundreds of unemployed workers, including those who now hawked sticky candy in the streets, gathered in the soup kitchen for a bowl of thin gruel, a slice of gummy bread and for meetings, lectures, and discussions held there in the evenings.

  Despite the bitter times, the youths and girls put on amateur plays, organized choirs, even had their own orchestra. And from this half-finished ruin, Tevye conducted his war against the commandant ensconced in his magnificent palace. Here he held secret meetings with committee members. Here he composed his proclamations. Here he planned his strategy.

  The commandant had the building watched and frequently sent his agents there, but Tevye’s people were on the alert, and the moment a suspicious person appeared, all he found were people eating soup. And even though soldiers often raided the kitchen, arrested some people, and drove others away, many came back in the evenings until the building was jammed wall to wall to hear the speeches and lectures.

  Tevye faced them from the wooden stage, and the words shot like poisoned arrows from his lips. “Your time will come!” he cried, pointing a gnarled finger like a biblical prophet. “For that is the inexorable law laid down by our mighty teachers!”

  And he gazed reverently up at the three faces hanging behind him.

  Fifty-Three

  THE ASHKENAZI MILLS on Vyborg Island ground to a halt. Along with the other workers in the city, the thousands of men and women employed in the textile plants were striking. Troops guarded all the factory entrances.

  Ashkenazi was livid with outrage and indignation.

  The Russian general staff was planning a new spring offensive calculated to strike a finishing blow at the German and Austrian forces occupying holy Russian soil. Reserves of the last age-group had been called up, millions of new soldiers would be mobilized, and uniforms, gauze, and blankets would be needed.

  Max Ashkenazi had worked like a slave to keep up his end of the effort, and business had been excellent. The bills were paid even before the goods were delivered. All payments were in cash, and the profits accumulated. Rather than deposit his money in banks, which he no longer trusted, Ashkenazi invested it in estates, buildings, factories, apartment houses. He had come to the realization that paper could become worthless, but buildings and land would always retain their value.

  All kinds of brokers and agents dogged his footsteps now, offering him choice parcels of real estate, lucrative business ventures. Again he rode in a coach drawn by a team of handsome horses and driven by a stout black-bearded coachman.

  In his broad sable coat and hat, carrying a portfolio stuffed with papers, he rode through the city, dashed in and out of banks, ministries, government bureaus, military offices. He also went out to check the buildings he had purchased or the factories into which he had bought.

  His plants worked around the clock, getting the goods ready for the military. But suddenly the workers shut off the machines and walked out.

  It started with bread. The local population wasn’t getting enough to eat. The railroads gave priority to munitions and other military supplies, and no food was being transported into the city. The grocers in their white aprons over sheepskins hoarded the remaining foodstuffs and sold them at black-market prices. The grocers swore before the Holy Mother that they had no food in stock.

  The poor housewives went home unable to feed their families, They gathered outside the municipal stores, stamped their feet on the frozen pavements, and cried to be served, but the stores remained closed. They, too, were out of bread. Elderly workers in sheepskins and fur hats joined the women. They grumbled, cursed, spit.

  “Some life, eh? Work a whole week, then come home to nothing to eat.…”

  “The stores should be torn down for hoarding food!”

  “What we ought to do is stop working. No food, no work.”

  “We want bread!”

  “Bread!”

  The sergeants sent out squads of police to disperse the angry people lined up in breadlines. “Break it up. Go home!” the policemen cried. “When there’ll be bread, you’ll be notified. Don’t congregate in the streets.”

  But the people wouldn’t disperse.

  “Give us bread now, you swine!” the women shrieked. “We can’t go home to our children empty-handed!”

  “Don’t push us around, you parasites!” the men growled. “You’re getting bread, but we ain’t, and we ain’t leaving!”

  The police began to lay about with scabbards, but the people resisted. Youths seized cobblestones, chunks of ice, and snowballs and threw them at the police. Others shattered the windows of the stores. At first, the police fired into the air, and then—directly into the crowds.

  A woman in a man’s sheepskin and boots fell to the ground and stained the snow crimson. The police assumed that this would suffice to scatter the crowd, but the sight of blood only served to inflame them.

  “Get the murderers! Tear off their heads!” people cried, and surged at the policemen. “Give us bread!”

  Instead of bread, Minister of the Interior Protopopov sent the people the crack Vohlynsky Regiment, which had already proved its loyalty to the tsar by suppressing the revolutionaries in Poland in 1905. Troops were stationed by every factory, office, and bridge with orders to shoot the rebels.

  Himself a craven toady and slightly deranged, Protopopov held the coward’s view that the only response to opposition was force. With the tsar away at army headquarters in Mogilev, Protopopov’s only wish was to serve the German-born empress at a time when all Russia despised her.

  He had always been fanatical about defending the honor of God’s Anointed. When people had seen photographs of her husband awarding the Order of St. George to the wounded, they joked that while the tsar was with George, his wife was with Gregory—which was to say, the monk Rasputin, who was rumored to be Aleksandra’s lover.

  Protopopov had issued strict orders to the gendarmerie to quell such blasphemy. It was she, the tsarina, who had been responsible for his appointment, and out of gratitude he spent his days at her feet, talking of saints,
sorcerers, and miracles and escorting her to the grave of the martyred Little Father, Rasputin.

  He knew nothing of the situation in the land or in the city, nor did he care to know. His response to unrest was to call out the troops and order them to fire at will.

  But the workers defied the patrols and filled the streets and squares of Petrograd, particularly the Nevsky Prospekt. Protopopov tried to close off the bridges to keep the workers from entering the city from the Vyborg Island side, but the workers made their way across the frozen Neva River and gathered by the thousands, demanding bread and freedom. Each time a new red flag rose above a cluster of people, and a speaker climbed to the shoulders of others to address the crowd.

  Someone draped a red flag over the statue of Alexander III, and voices cried hoarsely, “Long live the republic! Down with the monarchy!”

  Mounted officers with swords drawn lined up their men to face the mob. “Disperse, or we’ll fire!” they cried.

  The mob didn’t stir.

  The officers turned to the soldiers. “Ready!”

  The soldiers raised their rifles.

  The women thrust their breasts forward. “Lads, you wouldn’t shed the blood of mothers who only want bread for their children.… You wouldn’t shoot your mothers and sisters whose men are asked to die for their country while their children are being starved.…”

  The officers sensed hesitation in their troops and issued the order to fire, but the soldiers wavered, then lowered the rifles.

  The people responded with thunderous cheers. “Long live our comrades the soldiers!” the men cried, tossing their caps in the air. Women rushed forward to kiss the soldiers in their long gray greatcoats.

  From all gates, houses, factories, workshops, from every corner and nook, people came pouring like a swollen stream. As if by mutual consent, they headed for the Tauride Palace, where the Imperial Duma met. The deputies arrived from all over in carriages, in cars, and on foot. The mob stormed the palace and threw open its doors and gates.