The Brothers Ashkenazi

by I. J. Singer

  From inside the house she heard a piano and a child’s laughter. These two sounds served only to dampen the old woman’s spirits, and she gazed with impatience at the door leading off the foyer. After what seemed an excessive wait, the door opened, and Yakub Ashkenazi came out, smiling graciously. “It’s a pleasure to have you visit my home,” he said, pressing her hand warmly.

  She was touched and taken aback by his attitude. She didn’t know what to do with the umbrella that suddenly seemed so superfluous. Yakub resolved her indecision by taking it from her. He helped her off with her coat despite her reluctance.

  “I don’t wish to take up too much of your time, Mr. Ashkenazi,” she mumbled. “I only want your advice.…”

  Yakub pooh-poohed her. “What can you be thinking of, Sister-in-law?” he said, and taking her arm, he led her not into his office, but into his dining room. “You’ll rest up a while and have some tea with us.”

  When she saw the two women approaching, Madam Ashkenazi froze in her tracks, but Yakub gently steered her forward. “This is Sister-in-law Ashkenazi,” he announced.

  The women came forward with hands extended. “Our pleasure,” they said. They asked her to sit down and rang for the maid to bring tea.

  In their rather insistent demand for the tea, they sought relief from the strained situation. For a moment the three women studied one another. Looking at the mother and daughter, Madam Ashkenazi felt her age and grossness as never before.

  Dinele and Gertrud, in turn, gazed at the woman who had usurped their home and position. Dinele flushed and felt a sudden chill. Yakub sought to relieve the tension with small talk, but his words hung in the air.

  It was the child who finally did what the adults couldn’t. Little Priveh burst into the room and immediately ran up to the strange lady. Totally uninhibited, saucy, gay, she boasted about her new doll.

  “This is my little Mimi,” she lisped, showing off the doll in her blue silk dress and red hair ribbon. “And I have a new bear, too. He’s very fierce, and his name is Boomboo.…”

  Madam Ashkenazi hugged the little girl. “My angel,” she crooned, kissing the child’s plump hands. “You are gold, a treasure.… You light up the house.…”

  The women commenced to fuss over the little girl as Yakub beamed proudly.

  Madam Ashkenazi was no longer so anxious to leave. Her in-laws inquired about her well-being, invited her to visit them often. Gertrud went so far as to call her Auntie. Presently and without anyone’s being aware of it, the conversation turned to the one who was on everyone’s mind.

  “God alone knows what’s become of him,” Madam Ashkenazi despaired as tears filled the eyes of the other women. By mutual agreement, they decided to launch a search for Max Ashkenazi.

  First, Yakub would go to Berlin, the only city where Russia still maintained an embassy, to learn what he could about his brother.

  It wasn’t so easy to go to Berlin those days. The trains were packed with demobilized soldiers, and foreign passports were hard to obtain, but Yakub managed it. He had always known how to circumvent regulations, to cut through red tape. His erect, towering figure exuded such presence and assurance that the guards, flunkies, and underlings unlocked all doors for him.

  He was received very graciously at the Soviet embassy in Berlin. They took down his brother’s name and promised to let him know the moment an answer came back from Petrograd. But when after two weeks he still hadn’t heard anything, Yakub decided to go back to Lodz, then proceed to Russia to pursue the search on his own.

  People tried to dissuade him. They pointed out all the dangers associated with a country torn by unrest and civil war. But Yakub was determined. He packed his bags, sewed money into his clothes, took along all kinds of documents and certificates to prove that Simha Meir had been born in Lodz, and made ready to depart.

  Madam Ashkenazi embraced her brother-in-law and kissed his hands out of gratitude. She stripped off her jewelry and stuffed it into his pocket.

  “Take it, Brother-in-law. It might come in handy,” she urged him. “Jewelry has value everywhere.”

  Yakub protested, but she insisted. She removed an amulet from around her neck and hung it around his.

  “This comes from the Rabbi of Karlin himself,” she said. “It will protect you from every harm. Wear it for me.”

  Gertrud and Dinele were as effusive in their farewells. “My hero, my knight,” Gertrud whispered tenderly as she had on their honeymoon and kissed his face, lips, eyes, even his beard.

  Dinele prepared all kinds of things for the journey—food, underwear for him and for Simha Meir. She blushed like a bride and looked up bashfully at her son-in-law. “Go in safety, and come back with Simha Meir,” she murmured shyly. “Godspeed.…”

  Equipped with valises, containers of food, addresses, currencies, jewelry, and the Rabbi of Karlin’s amulet, Yakub left on his mission.

  The trains resembled a multinational fair. Demobilized soldiers and civilian refugees clung to all the wagons. Hirsute, starved, pale from years of detention, wearing wooden clogs instead of shoes and leggings of rags tied with string or telegraph wire, with sacks and bags slung over their shoulders, they had to beg a little food to stay alive. There were White Russians, Caucasians, Chuvashes, Kalmucks, Yakuts, Uzbeks, Kirghiz, Jews and Ukrainians, Tatars, Circassians, Cossacks, Georgians, and Armenians.

  Disillusioned by the patriotic slogans with which they had been lured into battle for tsar, God, and country, embittered by the years away from their homes and families, brutalized by the pain, the hunger, the bloodshed and degradation, duped, swindled, and deprived by their officers, they streamed aimlessly like stampeded cattle. And ever present among them were the human vermin, the scavengers who in every time and every place nourish themselves on their fellow man’s misery.

  “Now I’ll have lots of land and life will be good,” a peasant said to no one in particular.

  “They say the Reds are starting a new war,” a second veteran said. “This time we’ll have to fight our own kind.”

  “The landowners are back in power in the Ukraine,” a third reported. “They say the peasants are being flogged just like during the socage.…”

  “Not true! The Ukrainians want the bread for themselves. They don’t want to share with the White Russians, who want to grab everything for themselves. That’s why they’re being flogged. All the Ukrainians should get together,” a fourth veteran commented sanctimoniously.

  “I won’t fight no more. Had enough. Now I’ll do for myself and for the wife. So long since I’ve seen her! … I miss her so, such a young, fresh woman,” a rangy youth said nostalgically.

  “You fool, she’s got someone else by now,” an older man observed slyly.

  “Shut up before I smash your jaw, son of a bitch! Don’t talk about things you don’t know,” the youth cried, seizing the other by the throat.

  “Easy, brother,” a broad-shouldered, pockmarked ex-soldier intervened. “You ain’t been standing by her bed either. Any woman would be a fool to wait so long. A woman is like a bitch in heat. If it ain’t one dog, it’s another.”

  “That’s so. My folks wrote me the very thing about my old lady,” a bearded soldier interjected. “She tied up with another, and she’s already got two bastards by him.”

  “What will you do when you get home?” the others wanted to know.

  “I don’t know,” the bearded soldier said. “Maybe I’ll forgive her, and maybe I’ll kill her.”

  From personal matters the conversation drifted to more general topics.

  “They’re burning the churches,” someone in the corner said abruptly. “They’ve outlawed praying, those Red devils.”

  “Yes, the Jews have all the power now. They say even the new tsar is a Jew.…”

  “He’s got horns like the devil,” an elderly gentile said. “Someone told me the papers said so.…”

  “Yes, true. It’s all the Jews’ fault. They started the war to make money.…”


  “They ought to be beaten.”

  “We Ukrainians know how to handle Jews,” a lame soldier interposed. “The rope is the only cure for a Jew.”

  The others nodded in solemn agreement.

  The wagon seemed to throb with blind hatred, ignorance, animal passions. It choked Yakub like a poison gas, but it didn’t deter him from his mission. The train crawled along like a snail. Whole days were lost standing on some forsaken siding. But gradually, circuitously, it neared the Red capital.

  Sixty-Five

  FROM THE DAY MAX ASHKENAZI had been snatched from the brink of salvation and flung into a dark dungeon, he had lost his will to live. His cellmates tried to draw him into a conversation, but he wouldn’t answer. Out of sheer boredom the Red guards questioned him about his past, but he kept his lips sealed despite insults, beatings, and general abuse. Each night someone was taken from the cell, never to be seen again. Each time the lock creaked open, Max was sure his turn had come. He had made his confession to God, and he was ready to die.

  The guards laughed at him. “Not yet, Little Father. Others got to take their turn first.”

  “No bullet for you,” his cellmates assured him. “They don’t shoot speculators, only politicals.”

  But he didn’t believe them. He repeated the psalms he still recalled from his childhood and awaited his end. The other prisoners never shut up. They boasted of exploits, cursed, quarreled, fashioned dough into chess pieces. One elderly man in a tsarist uniform did calisthenics without a rest. Max only squatted on his cot with his feet drawn under him and waited.

  The men in the leather coats told him nothing. When convicts were executed was not their concern. They only took him upstairs for interrogation, beat him when ordered, then brought him down again.

  Max died not once but a thousand times. And being a corpse, he severed all connection with life. He didn’t bother to comb his hair or beard; he didn’t tend to the clothing which stuck to his body. The other prisoners waged an implacable war against mice and vermin. They squashed the bedbugs against the walls, but the bugs merely regrouped on the ceiling and dropped down onto their sleeping bodies.

  Max didn’t even bother to brush them away. The guards jeered at him. “That’s what happens to them what no longer has servants to do their dirty work.… They end up like stinking garbage bins.…”

  Max didn’t respond.

  Some of the men took pity on him and urged him to take himself in hand, but he no longer cared about anything. He was immune to pain, dirt, insults, sympathy. His only sense that remained acute was that of hearing. He was alert to every scrape and rustle, to the lightest step of the leather-clad men coming for him for the last time. And as the weeks and months went by, this sense grew ever keener. It reached such a degree that he could no longer sleep nights. The merest sound from the other side of the door roused him. He fell into a state of perpetual expectancy. He was bereft of all fear but filled with the anticipation of his end.

  When a guard suddenly burst in on him after many months of waiting and told him to follow, Max sprang from his cot eagerly. That which he had been expecting for so long had finally come. He walked mechanically, not knowing or caring if it was day or night. When his escort led him inside a bright room and pointed to the person awaiting him, Max didn’t understand the simple words spoken in a clear tone.

  With glassy eyes unaccustomed to bright light he stared at the towering figure without recognition.

  For a long while the two men confronted each other silently. Finally, the stranger came up and put his lips to Max’s face. “Simha Meir,” he whispered, pressing the bundle of rags to him.

  The two all-but-forgotten names pierced like a knife through the prisoner’s apathy and cleared his brain. At first, his arms drooped like frozen limbs seeking warmth and life; then they began to tremble violently within the other’s crushing grip. The cracked, scaly lips opened slightly. “Jacob Bunem?”

  He sank to his knees and commenced to kiss his brother’s hands like a beggar acknowledging a generous benefactor.

  Yakub recoiled: “Simha Meir, what are you doing? God in heaven!”

  Max groveled at his brother’s feet like an old dog allowed into the house on a rainy night. “You won’t leave me here anymore,” he sobbed like a child. “You’ll take me home with you, won’t you, Jacob Bunem? Tell me you will!”

  Yakub caught the terrible stench rising up from his brother’s body, the stupefying odor of mold and decay. Consumed by pity and revulsion, he grasped Max by his ragged jacket and lifted him to his feet as the tears ran down his cheeks and into the dyed beard.

  Sixty-Six

  THE JOURNEY HOME WENT MORE SMOOTHLY than the brothers Ashkenazi might have expected. For a healthy bribe, Yakub obtained seats in the wagon. For a bottle of cognac that he gave the conductor, the latter even took the weakened Max into his cubicle and treated him to a glass of tea from his samovar. The train proceeded slowly. In Orsha, the border city between Russian and German territory, the men in the leather coats and red stars on their breasts passed the brothers through without a hitch. The only problem was that there would be a wait of several weeks before a new train was assembled to Minsk.

  Max was afraid to linger in the rough border city, and Yakub asked to see the commissar in charge of evacuation. With his usual aplomb and brass he got past the guards, and in no time he was on a first-name basis with the commissar. Instead of weeks, the brothers had only a few days’ wait till a military train was assembled.

  Max plucked nervously at his beard when Yakub brought him the good news at the inn where they were staying. “Nothing seems too hard for you, Jacob Bunem,” he said in admiration. “You make me feel so inadequate.…”

  Max felt deeply ashamed. For years he had considered Jacob Bunem a worthless idler and a dunce when, in fact, he was a dynamic man of action. He saw now that blood was thicker than water. When he was in deepest trouble, who had risked his life to save him? … But things would be different from now on. He, Max, would know how to appreciate his only brother’s love. They would be like one. They would live together, work together, help each other, go hand in hand in everything—in business, in joy, and, God forbid, in sorrow. He, Max, would make it up to Jacob Bunem for all his rancor and hate over the years.

  He would also be a father to his children. The moment he rested up and got back his strength, he would go to France and seek out his son. He would bring him home, take him into the business, and help him establish himself. This way there would be an heir, someone to perpetuate the House of Ashkenazi. Nor would he let Gertrud out of his sight again. She was a sweet child, a good daughter. Even though he had abandoned her, she hadn’t forgotten her father. She had personally urged Yakub to come to his rescue. She had even sent him presents.

  Now he would be a real father to her. He would rectify all his past sins. And the fact that she had married Jacob Bunem was all to the good. He saw for himself what a dear, sweet person his brother was, far superior to all the young men of Lodz. And he had a sweet little granddaughter now, too. Jacob Bunem had shown him her picture. A little treasure and with a good Jewish name—Priveh.…

  Recalling his mother-in-law’s name, he felt a pang of remorse. He hadn’t been much of a son-in-law to her. Because of his greed for money, he had harmed her and everyone close to him. If only it were possible to undo all the wrongs he had committed against Priveh and Haim Alter.…

  But Dinele, their daughter, was still alive. She had sent him her best wishes through Jacob Bunem; she had forgiven him everything.

  How different things might have been if he had had the sense to understand what life was all about! But he had been blind, deluded. All he had ever wanted was money, power. Because of money, he had ruined his life and the lives of others. As ancient Jews had sacrificed their firstborn to Moloch, he had sacrificed himself on the altar of money, had worshiped the golden calf.…

  Max felt a sense of gratitude toward his present wife, too. Yakub spoke of
her with admiration. He praised her business sense, her devotion in guarding his, Max’s, property in the face of fearful obstacles. But much as he appreciated his wife’s qualities, Max was overcome with feelings of tenderness for Dinele, the first and only love of his life, the mother of his children. How good it would be to spend the last years of his life knowing that Dinele no longer resented him.… It would be impossible now, after all he had been through, to resume his empty life in the great palace with only the old woman for company. He would see to it that his loved ones never grew apart again.

  A few times he started to discuss this with Yakub, but he held back. Yakub sensed his inner torment and tried to cheer him, but Max felt no joy inside—only vague misgiving and apprehensions.

  The ride went faster now. In Minsk, which was still under German rule, the brothers spent only one night. They paid a bundle for a room in a hotel. For the first time in months Max reveled in a soft, comfortable bed. The train to Vilna was jammed, but again Yakub managed. As usual, gold opened all doors for him. From Vilna, the brothers sought permits to take them directly home, but the German officials stamped their travel cards only as far as Lapy.

  “Lapy is Polish territory now,” they said. “There you will be home already.”

  In the train heading for Poland, the brothers Ashkenazi detected their proximity to “home.”

  “Hey, quit pushing, you damned sheenies,” the Polish passengers screamed at the Jews. “Get out of here.… Go to Palestine!”

  Blind hate and animosity permeated the wagon.

  “Just wait till we get you on Polish soil,” young men in scouting attire threatened. “We’ll do you just as we done Lemberg.…”

  “Hey, give us a shears and we’ll snip us a few beards!” a heavily mustached Pole laughed, ostensibly feeling around in his pockets.

  The farther the train moved from Vilna and the closer it neared the Polish frontier, the bolder the gentiles grew. The Jews cowered in the corners. Max gazed with frightened eyes at his brother, who sat silent, his fierce black eyes glaring defiance.