The Brothers Ashkenazi

by I. J. Singer

  A Jew’s weapon was money. Money was his sword, his shield. And he would use this weapon to pay his enemies back for his degradation and for his brother’s murder. But to do this, he would have to keep his head. One rash, irrational act of temper, and the battle was lost, and he, Max Ashkenazi, wasn’t about to give his enemies an advantage.

  On the eighth day following the period of mourning Max Ashkenazi shaved, put on a fresh suit, and went out to reconquer the city that had once been his.

  Sixty-Eight

  WITH THE ENERGY AND ZEST of a young man, Max Ashkenazi launched the campaign to regain his usurped kingdom. As always, he approached the task with purpose, single-mindedness, and unswerving tenacity.

  He began with his palace, which had been assigned as the residence for the new magistrate of Lodz, Puncz Panczewski. A man of his standing could hardly occupy the official residence house, which was little more than a barrack and which had once been used by the Russian chief of police because even though the title was no longer used in republican Poland, Puncz Panczewski was a prince of the bluest blood.

  Ashkenazi insisted on the return of his legal property, but the magistrate didn’t respond to his letters, whereupon Ashkenazi engaged a team of Poland’s finest lawyers and sued. The judges pulled every trick in the book to drag out the case and cause the Jew to grow so disgusted that he’d drop the suit, but the Jew wouldn’t be put off that easily. He threw all his resources into the effort, bribed whomever necessary, and got the case heard before the highest court of the land. Eventually he won his suit and forced the Honorable Puncz Panczewski to vacate the palace.

  The dour, heavy-mustached magistrate fumed over the fact that good Polish judges would find in favor of a Jew over a Christian. He offered to pay rent to stay on, but Ashkenazi wouldn’t hear of it. If he was going to be King of Lodz, he needed the palace as a symbol of his royalty. Besides, it was a matter of pride and revenge. The gentiles had made him eat dirt, and now he would return the favor. This wasn’t a railroad depot in some forsaken village. Here he had been king, and so long as laws still prevailed, no power on earth would rob him, Max Ashkenazi, of what was his.

  Magistrate Panczewski made sure that the palace was thoroughly vandalized before turning it over to the Jew. His servants smashed furniture, defaced walls. What they didn’t destroy, they stole. But Max Ashkenazi did get his palace back, and all Lodz buzzed about his triumph.

  “He’s the same feisty scoundrel as ever.” People chortled. “You can’t keep a good man down.…”

  Next, Max turned his attentions to the factory, now shuttered and half dismantled. It was in even worse condition than the palace. The Germans had removed most of the machinery, all the transmission belts, and boilers. It would take a fortune to restore the plant to operating level, and Ashkenazi was short of capital. In fact, he was virtually broke.

  First, he tried to obtain credit at the State Bank. Dressed in his most elegant outfit and smoking an expensive Havana so that he appeared to exude an air of affluence and total self-assurance, he approached the bank director. The latter, who had been a bank officer under the Russians and who knew Max Ashkenazi from the old days, received the request with a show of sincere sympathy.

  It surely was a most praiseworthy, even a patriotic gesture to seek to rebuild the industry in New Poland. It would undoubtedly help assuage the problem of unemployment, which was unfortunately very troubling since idle workers tended to demonstrate and bait the police. Unfortunately, however, the director’s hands were tied. All of the bank’s assets had been allocated to the promotion of agricultural ventures. Perhaps when the nation got back on its feet—

  Ashkenazi understood perfectly. The new masters of Poland had no intention of restoring a Jewish Lodz, a Jerusalem on Polish soil.

  Magistrate Puncz Panczewski had special reason to despise the city. Even though he held a high rank in New Poland, leadership of its second largest city, he was disappointed. He would have preferred an ambassadorship to Paris or Rome, where he could have associated with persons of his own station rather than with a pack of garlic-eating sheenies. But in New Poland it wasn’t the aristocrats who got the plum jobs, but all kinds of shysters, party hacks, and ex-convicts. Only a few members of the nobility had been appointed to high posts, and even they weren’t permitted to use their titles on the official papers. His own superior, the minister of the interior, had been imprisoned under the Russians, and he, Panczewski, a scion of one of Poland’s noblest families, had to take orders from a common jailbird.

  But the worst affront of all had been his appointment to a filthy Jewish pigsty, where he had to mingle with all kinds of herring snappers, to treat them as equals, and even to invite some of them to his balls and receptions. He also had to be nice to correspondents from foreign newspapers, usually sheenies who questioned him closely about the lot of the Jews in his area of jurisdiction. He had to entertain these scribblers and convince them of his tolerance toward Jews.

  Lately he had been assigned a particularly loathsome task. An important diplomat had arrived from abroad to investigate the persecution of the Jews in Poland, particularly at the hands of the army. The diplomat had been accompanied by several high-ranking officials from Warsaw, who ordered him, Panczewski, to give this diplomat, who also happened to be a Jew (he even went to a synagogue on the Sabbath), the red-carpet treatment. The newspapers didn’t fail to mention that the diplomat was a native of Poland, a grandson of a Jewish tenant farmer.…

  Not that Puncz Panczewski was any more anti-Semitic than the average Pole. But he preferred the Jews to behave as they had in his childhood, when they groveled before the squire and kissed the hem of his cloak. What he didn’t like were Jews with the huge mustaches of the Polish gentry, Jewish bankers with their frock coats, Jewish intellectuals with all their pushy ways, Jewish magnates with their palaces and splendid carriages. So long as the Russians had ruled, he could do nothing about such upstarts. The Russian governor-general himself preferred their company to that of the impoverished Polish gentry. But now that Poland was independent, things had to be restored to normal—the squire had to return to his mansion, the peasant to his manure pile, the Jew to his long gabardine and peddler’s sack.

  Fortunately many of the ministers shared his views and vowed to turn Polish industry over to Christian hands, particularly in Lodz, the Jewish stronghold. And he, the magistrate, made it his business to expedite this effort in every possible way. He ordered the director of the State Bank to withhold credit from Jews and to issue loans at low interest and long terms to any Pole who opened a new factory or bought an established one from a Jew. He also supported the Polish Manufacturing Corporation founded by the Christian Unity Party for the purpose of developing its own textile factories and spinneries in the Judaic city. He brought down ministers from the capital to the opening of the first Unity factory, as well as bishops and priests, who sprinkled the new buildings with holy water. He called in the representatives of the National Christian Labor Union and persuaded them to grant a special contract to the new factory in which its workers agreed to a no-strike clause and to submit their grievances to arbitration. He extended the Unity factories all kinds of credits and subsidies. He himself, along with several ministers and leading deputies, held large portions of the firm’s stock, and they did everything they could to make the venture grow and prosper.

  The Jews sent delegations to Warsaw to point out that by withholding credit from Jewish manufacturers, the government was actually promoting unemployment, but Panczewski persuaded the prime minister that Poland’s most valuable resource and prime priority was its land—the vast estates, forests, and farmlands. If Poland was to have industry, it should be one controlled by Christian gentry and capitalists. Naturally, none of this policy was ever officially declared since the Poles knew what an international fuss Jews could kick up when they felt discriminated against.

  The one Jew the magistrate really had it in for was Max Ashkenazi. It wasn’t only on acco
unt of the humiliating experience with the palace. It was mainly due to Ashkenazi’s gall in seeking to reestablish himself as King of Lodz. He would let Ashkenazi squirm in vain, trying to raise credit for rebuilding his factory. When it all came to naught, the Unity Party would buy it up at auction for a song. And following Ashkenazi’s failure, the other Jews would vacate their palaces and go back to their gabardines and their peddler’s sacks.

  For several weeks Ashkenazi made every effort to obtain credit in Poland. He went to Warsaw, talked to various persons of influence. Some promised to introduce him to private bankers; others suggested that he take in a Pole as a front man, as other Jews were doing, and thus obtain a loan from the Polish banks. The very editors of anti-Semitic newspapers which piously deplored such marriages of convenience entered into these secret arrangements with Jews.

  Ashkenazi was offered a very distinguished Pole for a “partner.” The factory would be extended all the credit it needed, and the magistrate would be brought down a peg or two. But Max wouldn’t go along with such a scheme. He had always maintained that a man had to make his way alone in the world, and he couldn’t bring himself to surrender a fortune to some idler just for his fancy name. He was quite proud of his own name. The name of Ashkenazi represented achievement, intellect, authority. The name might be repugnant to the Poles, but there was a big world out there where it was known and respected. He would go to London and have a talk with the English industrialists. He would convince them to invest in the rebuilding of his factory, which would be a valuable market for their raw materials.

  As always when in pursuit of a goal, he dressed impeccably, and without knowing more than a word or two of English, he set out for Manchester and London. At a meeting held in one of London’s biggest hotels, Max Ashkenazi made his proposal. The English didn’t care if his name was Jewish or Turkish. All they wanted to know was how they could profit from the deal. And Max Ashkenazi convinced them.

  Following his triumph, Max went to a nearby synagogue to thank God for His grace, then enjoyed a delicious meal at one of the kosher restaurants of Whitechapel.

  He came back from England accompanied by a specialist his backers had assigned to keep an eye on their investment. Max put the Englishman up in his palace and kept him out of everyone’s sight like some precious gem. The red-haired Englishman had some trouble keeping up with Max’s German, but he didn’t miss a trick when it came to matters dealing with the factory. With the funds he obtained from his new associates, Max not only restored the factory but also imported from England the very latest machinery, which was many times more efficient than that known in Lodz. Everything was geared to the very latest techniques, which were so ingenious and innovative as to astound the local engineers.

  Predictably the anti-Semitic press castigated the Jewish “king” for bringing foreign capital into the New Poland in order to enslave the nation to outsiders rather than developing its own industry. The caricaturists had a field day depicting Ashkenazi with crown askew over dangling earlocks. They drew his thin lips thick and pendulous and made a beak of his straight nose.

  Ashkenazi relished it all. Nothing gave him more pleasure than spiting the people he despised. Again his name was on everyone’s lips; again he was a force to reckon with. Again he sat in his office while a servant in uniform—no longer the aged Melchior—stood ready to fulfill his every wish. Polish engineers, managers, designers, and architects groveled before him, awaiting his pleasure. “Yes, Mr. President!” they chorused again and again.

  All kinds of fallen princes, dukes, and barons waited outside his door with letters of recommendation hoping for a job, no matter how humble. Thousands of workers were lined up outside the factory gates with caps in hand. Many still wore their uniform jackets. Ashkenazi gazed out at them through the high windows of his office. For all he knew, they included the murderers of Jacob Bunem.… Now they stood for days, hoping and praying for work from a Jew.

  Even as the subsidized Unity factories stood idle, Max’s plant worked three shifts. Puncz Panczewski himself, wearing a stiff collar and a black tie with a gold cross pinned to it, came to the opening of the plant and lauded its owner for bringing jobs to the depressed city.

  Afterward the two men shook hands. Each felt as if he were clasping a handful of thorns.

  The towering stacks of the Ashkenazi mill, which for so long had seemed to gaze down upon the city with senile impotence, again spurted foul smoke into the sooty skies. Again the whistles blew, rousing the city’s inhabitants from sleep. Again merchants, brokers, and agents crowded Ashkenazi’s office. Again his salesmen fanned out across Eastern Europe, reestablishing old contacts, opening new markets, attending trade fairs, shows, and exhibitions.

  Again Max Ashkenazi rode down Piotrkow Street, no longer in a carriage, but in a touring car driven by a uniformed chauffeur, who blew the car’s distinctive horn to warn the other vehicles to make way for the King of Lodz.

  The people followed the wispy figure huddled within the car and mumured in awe, “It’s the same old Ashkenazi. Nothing can keep him down.…”

  Sixty-Nine

  LIKE A GLUTTON RELEASED from an enforced diet, the long-starved city went wild, trying to make up for its years of deprivation. Again the police chased pedestrians congregating on Piotrkow Street, and again they were ignored. The jobbers, brokers, and agents were back in their element—scribbling, bickering, haggling, gripping each other’s lapels, testing thread over match flames, unraveling fabrics, shouting, jostling, gesticulating—as if nothing had intervened.

  Lodz was Lodz again. The cafés and restaurants were crowded with patrons buying, selling, bragging, telling smutty jokes. Cabbies whipped starved nags to rush merchants to banks, stock exchanges, countinghouses. Newsboys screamed headlines. Loaded drays rumbled over cobblestoned streets. Chimneys draped a heavy veil of stinking smoke over every house and courtyard. The hobbled soles of workers’ shoes echoed against the cracked sidewalks, and whistles and sirens rent the air with their deranged shrieks.

  The poorly printed marks issued by the fledgling Polish treasury dropped in value from day to day, even from morning to evening of the same day. People couldn’t wait to rid themselves of them as if they were tainted. Housewives tried to shop as early as possible before their money grew even more worthless. Merchants changed prices even as they weighed out the goods. Some closed altogether to open later when their goods brought higher prices. Peasants wouldn’t sell the food they brought in from the country, preferring to let it rot before accepting worthless cash for products they had sweated to grow.

  The factories worked around the clock, and everything they turned out was snatched up by merchants the moment it came off the line. The city and the nation were overcome by a fever of consumption. Manufacturers took loans from banks regardless of the rate of interest. By the time these loans fell due their actual value was a hundredth of what it had been at their inception. Customers lined up at stores to buy valuable goods for worthless money. Bank officials were on the phone all day, taking quotations. Curbstone brokers raced around, buying and selling money.

  The newspapers put out edition after edition listing the latest currency rates. The treasury issued new money, simply tacking on new zeros to the banknotes. Beggars flung bills in denominations of hundreds of thousands into the faces of their benefactors. Professors and economists wrote doomsday articles predicting the coming crash. Anti-Semitic newspapers blamed the inflation on the Jews. On walls, in marketplaces and bazaars, placards sprang up depicting hook-nosed, blubber-lipped Jewish bankers trampling on Polish currency. Here and there a Jewish secondhand clothes dealer paid with a cracked skull for the perfidy of his co-religionists. Policemen did their bit for the economy by chasing money lenders, who tossed the worthless bills into the gutter to avoid arrest. The landed gentry, the ministers, and the deputies of the Polish parliament, the Sejm, took enormous loans from the State Bank to buy up land, tracts of forests and estates.

  In the meantime
, people went on with their lives. They married, had children, married off their offspring. Like flies caught in spider webs, the men, women, and children of Balut sat glued to their looms, working until they dropped. But all the millions they earned weren’t enough to prepare for the Sabbath.

  The chimneys of Ashkenazi’s plant belched black smoke into the sky, and its whistles blew shriller than ever as the English machines spit out goods at a blinding rate. But none of this brought Max any satisfaction. He saw the direction in which Lodz and the nation were heading. He knew that the paper chain holding everything together must soon break. And who would suffer from the tragedy? Not the profiteers and speculators, but the innocent, the ethical. Soon the suppliers would demand payment for their raw materials not with the Polish mark, but with stable foreign currency. But there was no foreign currency available in Lodz.

  His own position was precarious. He had gone into heavy debt on the basis of expectations fashioned of logic. But in a time of madness, logic became absurdity, and absurdity, logic.

  He sat in his large office surrounded by turmoil and excitement but unable to shake off his melancholy. He knew that the best solution would be to withdraw from the collective madness and shut down the factory, which now drifted like a rudderless ship toward its own destruction.

  The best course in such instance was to drop anchor and wait for the storm to subside, but this he could not do. If he threw his thousands of employees out of work now, they would blow up the factory with him in it. Nor would Panczewski do anything to protect him. He would catch it from all sides—from the unions, from the press, even from the Jewish revolutionaries, although he employed no Jews. The government might even decide to seize his factory on some pretext or other. There was no such thing as justice anymore under the new regime. A man was no more a master of his own property here than he was across the border under the Soviets. But rather than steal from everybody, as the Soviets did, the Poles stole only from the Jews. They only awaited the slightest excuse to rob him blind. Even though the law was on his side, by the time he was through with the lawyers and judges they would have picked his holdings to pieces.