The Brothers Ashkenazi

by I. J. Singer

  His legs buckled and he fell. The men picked him up and tossed him in the truck like a trussed-up steer, his bundles on top of him.

  “Floor it, Vanya!” they urged the driver. “It’s getting late, and we’ve got lots to do yet this night.”

  The truck lumbered along the shore. The waves charged, then retreated as they had been doing for millions of years under all regimes and governments. The wind forced the trees to bow to its authority and whistled through their branches.

  Sixty-Two

  TEVYE THE WORLD ISN’T LAWLESS lived to see his prophecy come true as Baron Colonel von Heidel-Heidellau was forced to slink from Lodz with his tail between his legs.

  When the baron received the news of the collapse of the Hindenburg Line, the uprisings in Berlin and the kaiser’s flight to Holland, he first flushed, then blanched, then finally turned yellow as a corpse.

  “Quatsch!” he roared at his rosy-cheeked adjutant. “Read it again, Lieutenant, I can’t see a thing anymore!”

  When the lieutenant reread the telegram in an exceptionally firm voice, the baron began to slobber like a hysterical old woman and pound his temples with his fists. “No! No! No!” he wailed. “I won’t have it!”

  He suddenly resembled an old rooster who had lost his feathers to a younger challenger. Age and infirmity marked his sallow, deeply creased face. His adjutant tried to comfort him, but to no avail. Tears ran from all of the baron’s orifices at once—the eyes, the nose, the mouth.

  The adjutant dabbed at his superior’s flecked uniform. “Colonel, you must pull yourself together. This is the time to be strong.…”

  “All that’s left is a bullet in the temple, Lieutenant.” The baron sighed. “It’s the only honorable way.…”

  But instead of harming himself, he turned his rage against the world. After all, it wasn’t his fault. He had carried out his assignment with honor, glory, courage. As yet no orders had come down from the general staff, and the baron decided to keep the news secret for as long as possible. No one, not even the officers, was to be told a thing. The press was to be closely censored. Life in the city would proceed in normal fashion.

  “Absolute discipline is to be maintained,” the baron warned sternly. “If any new reports come in, I’m to be informed directly.”

  The lieutenant followed the orders to the letter, yet rumors began to circulate through the city. The Polish legionnaires stopped saluting German officers. Students donned legionnaire caps and marched through the streets, singing patriotic songs and carrying flags displaying the white Polish eagle. Despite the stringent regulations, people converged in the streets, talking, arguing, exchanging rumors, and the Polish militiamen no longer made any effort to disperse them. Polish proclamations suddenly sprouted everywhere, reporting the German collapse and calling for an independent Poland.

  The Polish soldiers from Posen who had been drafted into the Austrian Army read these proclamations with pride. “We’ll be joining the Polish Army now.… We’ll be fighting for our own country.”

  The German soldiers’ authority evaporated completely. They were no longer conquerors, but a bunch of weary, confused peasants. They loosened their belts, unbuttoned their collars, and abandoned the erect posture into which they had been pounded and prodded. They began carrying their rifles butt up and milled about like a mob, ignoring their officers. “We’ll be going home at last,” they said with yearning.

  Baron Colonel von Heidel-Heidellau’s decision to maintain the status quo became a joke. Armed Poles stopped German soldiers in the street and demanded their weapons. The officers resisted, but the enlisted men had no such compunctions. The same home guards who had evoked such terror that one soldier was able to cow an entire village now surrendered their rifles to any schoolboy who demanded them.

  Alongside the patriotic proclamations other placards appeared. They began with the phrase “Proletarians of the world, unite!” and called for solidarity among the workers and for a continuing struggle for justice and freedom.

  Tevye swept like a wraith through the feverish city, watching the old order crumbling before his eyes. First it was Russia; now it was Germany and Austria. The other nations would shortly fall in line as well. The disillusioned masses whom the capitalists had so thoughtlessly armed would turn their guns against their true enemies. The old world was reeling under all the assaults upon it. The crowned heads were being deposed; history was following its inevitable course. Germany, the epitome of capitalistic power, was falling to the Reds. The whole globe was ablaze. Like fire on a hot day, the flames of revolution would sweep the world. Soon the backward nations—India, China—would rise up as well, all the colonies ruled and exploited by the imperialists.…

  No, he hadn’t been deceiving himself, even though he had been jeered at, mocked, considered a madman. His own faith had already wavered. In the bitter days of the war he had nearly given in to doubt and despair, but he had always revived his courage and maintained his resolve. Now he saw that he had been right all along.

  But the old world wasn’t going to yield gracefully. Like a wounded beast, it still snarled, bit, and showed its claws. In Poland the reactionaries crawled out of their holes. Church bells rang, and synagogues offered up blessings to the new rulers just as they had to the old.

  From his command post in the soup kitchen, Tevye inveighed against the rising surge of Polish chauvinism. The Zionists, on their part, did their best to influence the Jewish masses. Under the Germans they had been afraid to proclaim the Balfour Declaration openly, but their newspapers now carried detailed accounts of the land the English had promised to the Jews, and in synagogues, prayers were offered to that English lord. There was even a demonstration planned, complete with scrolls of Law, Jewish flags, and Zionist hymns.

  Tevye knew and feared the power of such propaganda; he knew how easily the masses could be bedazzled by nationalistic songs and pageantry. He no longer bothered to go home but slept on a bench in the soup kitchen and grabbed a bite whenever he could. He used all his waking hours to counter the appeal of the Polish patriots and the Zionists. Besides, it was still necessary to work on the German soldiers before they left the city for good—to urge them to form soldiers’ councils and ignore the orders of their officers.

  Alongside their Iron Crosses, German soldiers’ breasts began to sprout red ribbons. From the commandant’s palace, a red flag suddenly began to flutter in place of the imperial standard. German soldiers tore off their epaulets and held speeches, reporting to their comrades the latest developments in Berlin.

  One day Tevye himself addressed the German soldiers’ council. In the broken German he had picked up from German weavers in Lodz, he poured out his passionate appeal. The men didn’t catch his every word, but his zeal and feeling struck a responsive chord and evoked a mighty cheer from them.

  The baron rolled up his shade to see what had roused the men to such fervor. With complete incredulity he studied the figure spellbinding his troops. Apparently this was the king of the Socialists, who had given him so much trouble in the past. His first impulse was to draw his pistol and dispatch the Jewish swine, but he held back. In the prevailing mood his men might easily tear him to pieces. He rolled down the shade and surrendered himself to dark brooding. This kind of scum was ruling Germany now. Its regent was an ex-saddlemaker. And who knew what was happening to his, the baron’s estate? The lousy serfs were probably stripping it acre by acre. East Prussia itself would possibly be absorbed into an independent Poland.…

  He felt his eyes fill with tears, and the corners of his slack mouth quivered. Below, Tevye stood on top of a truck while hundreds of German soldiers cheered his every word.

  His wife, Keila, looked on dumbfounded. She turned to her daughters and sighed. “If I wasn’t seeing it with my own eyes, no power on earth could make me believe it. The world has gone stark raving mad!”

  Sixty-Three

  FELIX FELDBLUM, WHO HAD GIVEN his whole life for a free Poland which would serve as a
model of justice and morality to the world, had lived to see part of his dream fulfilled. Poland was now an independent nation. The crown of thorns that fate had placed upon its head had been lifted. The royal castle on top of a mountain in Krakow, where the bones of Polish kings and poets were interred, no longer served as a barrack for Austrian cavalrymen and a stable for their mounts. The Polish flag fluttered over Krakow, as it did over all Poland.

  The Krakow legionnaires, who had nicknamed themselves the Crocuses, were now headed for Lemberg with fire and sword to liberate that Galician city from the local Ukrainians, who had claimed it for themselves. Included among the regiments in this army was Feldblum’s. He strode heroically forward, leading his men into battle as they bawled their regimental hymn:

  General Roja at our head,

  We Crocuses forge ahead.

  The Russkies we will slay,

  And celebrate all day,

  As the sheenies cry “Oy-veh!”

  By the thousands and tens of thousands, demobilized soldiers of various armies now roamed the land. They clung to the sides and tops of trains in an effort to get back to their homes in the Ukraine, in Crimea, Podolia, Volhynia, and White Russia.

  Chaos and confusion reigned among the troops of the shattered Austrian Army as that multinational, polyglot empire unraveled like a poorly patched garment. The wanton, undisciplined soldiers plundered their military stores, robbed their regimental paymasters, and ran wild through the towns and villages of Poland, killing, raping, plundering.

  Ethnic and nationalistic urges, long stifled by dominating masters, now surfaced. Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Rumanians, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Slovenes, and Ruthenians suddenly discovered their national identities. Alsatians replaced German insignia with French. Poles from Austrian-occupied regions displayed the Polish eagle and bedazzled the Polish girls. Veterans with revolutionary sympathies affixed red ribbons to their breasts.

  The only ones with no homeland to return to were the Jews. Hooligans of all persuasions daubed their homes and shops with obscene and threatening slogans. The sounds of nationalistic and religious songs were accompanied by the tinkle of shattered Jewish windowpanes.

  The ones to suffer worst were the Jews of eastern Galicia. First, the Cossacks swept through the area, then the famines and epidemics. The younger Jewish soldiers returning to their homes pinned Stars of David to their uniforms. Their gentile comrades jeered them. “Why don’t you go back to Palestine?…”

  The older Jewish veterans were anxious to shed their uniforms and resume their lives. They let their beards and side-locks grow and thought about rebuilding their homes, reopening their shops, marrying off single daughters. But the ancient feuds and rivalries that had ruled the region for centuries hadn’t abated, and each group demanded the Jews’ total loyalty and obeisance.

  In Lemberg the warring factions took up positions and opened fire at each other, with the Jews in the middle, as usual. Jewish veterans organized a defense corps, and in order not to antagonize either side, they declared themselves neutral. The local Poles signed a pact with the Jews, but they seethed with resentment at what they considered an act of treason. “Just wait till our lads get here,” they warned. “We’ll teach you sheenies what it is to be neutral.…”

  When the Crocuses arrived and drove off the Ukrainians, the Jewish quarter was offered to them as a prize. A mob of priests, clerks, streetwalkers, nuns, housewives, criminals, teachers, monks, nurses, and assorted civilians gathered to egg on the conquerors. “Get the sheenies!” they howled. “Hang them by their beards! Smoke them out like rats!”

  The legionnaires formed into squads of ten men, each led by an officer and a noncommissioned officer. They quickly disarmed the outnumbered Jewish defense corpsmen and hanged their leaders. They surrounded the quarter and settled down for the night to launch the next phase of the exercise.

  At precisely seven the next morning, machine guns were set up at Krakow Square, Onion Street, Synagogue Street, Zhulkiew Street, and all strategic corners. Not even a worm could escape the blockade. When all was in readiness, the order was given to open fire. The machine guns commenced their deadly rattle while infantrymen lobbed grenades into the houses.

  Screams rent the crisp November air. After long minutes a cease-fire was ordered, and patrols were sent out to conduct a house-to-house assault. A command post was set up in the municipal theater, where messengers arrived with orders and brought back reports from the field.

  The legionnaires battered down doors and shutters and dealt with the occupants as ordered, while their officers and noncoms searched for valuables. They tucked the jewelry and money into their field packs and rolled the less valuable items into blankets that they stripped off the beds.

  In some of the houses Jewish veterans of Polish regiments put on their uniforms, hoping thus to blunt the fury of their attackers, but this didn’t impress the legionnaires. “A Jew is a Jew!” they said. “No exceptions.”

  Young women were raped in front of their loved ones. Husbands were forced to watch as their wives were repeatedly ravaged. Older women were beaten mercilessly, pregnant women were trampled, and babies were bayoneted in their cribs.

  “Let no Jewish seed remain in Christian Poland!” the officers cried.

  The booty was thrown into army trucks and carted off to collection points, where it was sorted and distributed among the civilians. Ladies in furs wrestled peasant women in babushkas for trinkets. People came in cabs to haul away the loot.

  On the second night of the exercise an order came down to burn the Jewish quarter. Trucks brought barrels of kerosene stolen from Jewish-owned stores. Straw mattresses and feather beds were dragged outside and doused down. All exits to the quarter were sealed off, and the torches were applied.

  The screams of anguished men, women, and children rose up to the heavens along with long tongues of fire and coils of smoke. The eyes of the onlookers reflected the hungry flames. “Fry in your own fat, Jews!” they shrieked.

  Those who tried to escape from their houses were picked off by sharpshooters.

  Next, the soldiers turned their attention to the houses of worship. First they stripped them of all their gold and silver crowns, fescues, and handles, then tossed the scrolls of Law outside. When two teenagers risked their lives to rescue the sacred objects, they were shot down. Several of the officers fashioned turbans out of the velvet and satin mantles from holy arks and mimicked Jews swaying at prayer while their men trampled and urinated upon the scrolls. The synagogues were then set on fire.

  Inside, a number of the Jews wrapped themselves in their prayer shawls and white linen robes and made their confessions, beating their breasts with their fists. An officer more sensitive than the rest had the doors opened so that the Jews could escape the inferno, but it was too late.

  For three days and nights the carnage continued, while looters ran through the quarter, picking through the rubble. On the fourth day the survivors crept out of the smoldering ruins. They dragged away the charred corpses of their loved ones, whose remaining bones would be buried in earthen jars according to Jewish law. The remnants of the scrolls of Law were buried in the same fashion.

  The bodies that were more or less whole were draped in prayer shawls and laid out in rows for idenification by relatives. The liberation of Lemberg was reported in all the Polish newspapers as a stunning victory against Bolshevik insurgents. The spirit of independence spread from Lemberg to the other cities of Poland. Jews were dismissed from all jobs even distantly related to governmental concern. Polish soldiers seized elderly Jews in the streets and tore out their beards, flesh and all. Jewish merchants were dragged out of shops and cafés and forced to sweep streets and dig ditches. In churches, priests offered prayers to God and His son who had redeemed the nation destined to serve as a model of morality and justice to the Christian world.

  In Lemberg a mass funeral was held for the victims of the pogrom. Among the black-clad thousands, one figure stood out boldly in i
ts light blue uniform of the Polish Legion—that of Felix Feldblum, socialist, champion of the oppressed, Polish patriot.

  Sixty-Four

  FROM ALL OVER RUSSIA people drifted back to Lodz, but Max Ashkenazi wasn’t among them. Each day his elderly wife dragged herself to the railroad station on swollen, half-paralyzed legs to ask the arriving passengers if they had any word of her husband’s whereabouts, but no one had seen him or heard of him.

  Except for her maid, Madam Ashkenazi was alone. But she had never stopped fighting to protect her husband’s interests. First it had been the Germans; now it was the Poles. With her rolled umbrella in hand, speaking in a broken Polish, she raced from office to office, demanding the return of her lawful property. The clerks laughed at her and ignored her, but she persisted. The workers, incited by anti-Semitic propaganda, demanded that she reopen the factory. They besieged her apartment and kept food from being brought to her, but she wouldn’t give in. She no longer expected anything out of life, but she was determined to live long enough to finish the task she felt was incumbent upon her. When the keys to his home and factory were back in her husband’s hands, she could die in peace.

  All the letters and telegrams she sent to Max through the Red Cross were for naught. Finally, she decided to turn to the only person in Lodz who might help her, her husband’s brother. She knew that he was on bad terms with Max. She knew that Max’s first wife was living at the house and that the door might be slammed in her face, but she swallowed her pride and took the gamble. She would do anything to find her husband.

  She rang the doorbell of the mansion, and when a maid opened the door, she took all her anxiety and embarrassment out on the girl. “Don’t stand there like a ninny!” she boomed in her mannish voice. “Tell your master that Madam Ashkenazi wishes to see him! Do as I tell you, girl!”