The Brothers Ashkenazi
Page 53
The city gentiles stood before the gates of their houses, watching the exodus of Jews from the land their ancestors had occupied for a millennium. They didn’t know whether to cheer or mourn.
Peasants shielded their eyes to watch the crowded trains rush by. Their wives listened to the exotic songs chanted by the Jewish pioneers, and their flaxen-haired children ran out from behind thatched fences with their dogs to scream and bark at the trains and hurl rocks at the windows.
Lodz was like a limb torn from a body that no longer sustained it. It quivered momentarily in its death throes as maggots crawled over it, draining its remaining juices.
And as the city succumbed, so did its king, Max Ashkenazi. Without the smoky air to breathe, without the hum of machinery to lull him, he languished. He lay awake nights, reviewing his life. The images of those he had known and wronged passed before his eyes—his parents, his in-laws, but especially Jacob Bunem. He could see the trickle of blood run down into the beard and congeal there, and his own blood chilled. He put on his robe and slippers and wandered through the palace. He went to the window and looked out at the deserted factory, at the stacks looking like huge extended tongues thrust into the sky.
He went to the bookcase and glanced over the books. He stopped where the Jewish holy volumes were kept somewhat out of sight and took down a worn copy of the Scriptures. He took it back to bed and switched on his night lamp. He leafed through the pages, scanning the moralistic exhortations in Ecclesiastes and Proverbs. They no longer struck him as preposterous ravings of fatuous dotards but as observations rife with truth and perception. He came to a folded page. It was the Book of Job, which he had been reading during the period of mourning for his brother. Eagerly he began to read half aloud:
So Satan went forth from the presence of the Lord, and smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot even unto his crown. And he took him a potsherd to scrape himself therewith; and he sat among the ashes.… Now when Job’s three friends heard of all this evil that was come upon him, they came every one from his own place, Eliphaz the Temanite, and Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite; and they made an appointment together to come to bemoan him and to comfort him. And when they lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him not, they lifted up their voice, and wept; and they rent every one his mantle, and threw dust upon their heads toward heaven. So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spoke a word unto him; for they saw that his grief was very great. After this opened Job his mouth and cursed his day—
From the adjoining rooms the clocks tolled the hour. Max Ashkenazi put down the book to listen. Just then he felt his chest tighten as if gripped by steel pincers. He cried and reached for the bellpull, but by the time the servant came his master was already dead. His head had fallen upon the opened Bible, and his fingers still clutched the cord.
Seventy-Two
ALL LODZ TURNED OUT for the funeral of Max Ashkenazi. Piotrkow Street was black with people, droshkies, carriages, and cars. Wild-bearded Hasidim walked next to top-hatted bankers, grimy vendors, clerks, brokers, heder students, beggars, thieves, workers. In Max Ashkenazi’s passing they saw the demise of Lodz itself. His funeral was its funeral. And they trudged along, mourning not his passing, but that of their own existence.
Three women in black walked just behind the coffin, one widow supporting the other.
The gravediggers had already prepared a grave small enough for a child for the King of Lodz. A stranger recited the mourner’s prayer. Men stooped to throw handfuls of dirt upon the coffin.
“Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return,” they mumbled over their shoulders.
A dense cloud settled overhead. The wind blew dust into the people’s faces. With feet as heavy as the leaden sky, they turned back to the sullen, desolate city.
“Sand,” they complained, shielding their eyes from the pursuing dust. “Everything we built here we built on sand.…”
In the swiftly falling dusk, a flock of birds formed in the shape of a crescent and cawed against the ominous sky.
(Warsaw-New York, 1933–1935)
ISRAEL JOSHUA SINGER, the older brother of Nobel Prize–winner Isaac Bashevis Singer, was born in 1893 in Bilgoraji, Poland, the second of four children of a rabbi. At the age of two, he moved with his family to Leoncin, the scene of his memoir, Of a World That Is No More. In 1916 he contributed to Yiddish newspapers in Warsaw and then in Kiev, and in the latter city his short story “Pearls” was published, which brought him immediate recognition.
In 1921 I. J. Singer was hired as a correspondent for the Jewish Daily Forward. This association lasted until the author’s death, and his articles were compiled in the book New Russia. In 1927 he wrote his first novel, Steel and Iron, which was followed, five years later, by Yoshe Kalb. I. J. Singer came to the United States in 1934. He died in New York on February 10, 1944.
IRVING HOWE was born in New York City and graduated from the City College of New York. He is author of numerous works of literary criticism and social history, including Politics and the Novel (1963), The Decline of the New (1969), and World of Our Fathers (1976), which won the National Book Award.
REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN, a novelist and philosopher, is the author of nine books, of both fiction and nonfiction. Her most recent book is 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction. She has received many prizes for her fiction and scholarship, including two National Jewish Book Awards, a Koret International Award for Jewish Thought, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and Guggenheim and Radcliffe Institute fellowships. In 1996 she was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Prize for her ability to “dramatize the concerns of philosophy without sacrificing the demands of imaginative storytelling.” She has been designated a Humanist Laureate and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.