Eight Weeks in the Summer of Victoria's Jubilee

by Bob Biderman

  And what about this man Totakoski who Schmuss had arranged to meet at Schmidt’s on the morning of that fateful day? Lipski had needed only one more man – not two. Why had Totakoski planned to meet him there that morning?

  Schmuss had left Batty Street around eight thirty, according to his testimony, and had gone home for breakfast. Then, over three hours later, he turned up at Schmidt’s hardware shop, unaware of the murder. Where was he during that three hour period? McIntyre had never thought to ask Schmuss to account for his movements. And then, on Sunday, Schmuss had left for Birmingham. McIntyre had made much of that but Z didn’t find this information particularly suspicious. After all, Schmuss had found a job working in a slipper factory there. It was five days after the murder that Schmuss had left. He hadn’t tried to go into hiding. No, going to Birmingham seemed a reasonable option for a man with no work in London who had limited prospects. But why had Schmuss left Batty Street after waiting just a few minutes? And where did he go after that? These questions McIntyre had left unanswered.

  Then Leah Lipski had given evidence that she had last seen the accused, her young lodger, at about 8:30 when she went to fetch his coffee. It was then he had asked her to lend him five shillings. She had suggested that he try his future mother-in-law but he had replied that would be difficult since he had borrowed twenty-five shillings from her just the other night.

  The prosecution, Z, suspected had been trying to lay the ground for robbery as the motive for the murder, but McIntyre, cross-examining, had brought out the fact that it was common knowledge in the house the Angels hadn’t any money. Furthermore, the reason the landlady couldn’t lend Lipski five shillings is that Miriam Angel had borrowed that same amount from her only the day before in order that she could pay her rent.

  McIntyre also got the landlady to testify that the replacement lock in the Angels’ door had left a hole where the old lock had been large enough to stick her fingers through (though she admitted she couldn’t have reached the key on the other side well enough to turn it).

  Mrs Levy, another lodger, Dinah Angel, the murdered woman’s mother-in-law, and Mrs Rubenstein, the landlady’s mother, were all called to give evidence about the movements in and about the house that morning and the discovery of the body of Miriam Angel. Z found nothing in their testimony to give him further insight into the case.

  Another witness to the events was Harris Dywein, a friend of the Angels, whose shop was around the corner from Batty Street and who had come to the house shortly after the body had been discovered. He had gone into the Angels’ room before it had been sealed off and testified he had seen Miriam Angel lying on her back with her face toward the wall and her hair helter-skelter. He had covered the body up before Piper, Dr. Kay’s assistant, had come and he told how then Piper had cleared the room and had, with difficulty, taken the key from the inside of the door and had used it to lock the door from the outside until Dr. Kay arrived. Later he had accompanied Piper and Kay back into the room where Kay had him search for a bottle that might have contained the acid which had been forced upon the victim. Dywein had searched underneath the bed – pulling out first an old coat and after that an egg box which was used to store clothing. Once all that stuff had been cleared away, he had noticed something else, something too far to reach. Dr. Kay, he said, then jumped atop the bed and pulled away a pillow which was against the wall, and, through the crack, saw a man under the bed, pushed up against the corner. The bedstead was then pulled away and the man was recovered – he was found lying on his back, his shirt sleeves rolled up and his waistcoat unbuttoned. Dr. Kay had felt his pulse and, seeing he was alive, slapped his face in an attempt to bring him back to consciousness. Dywein was then told to call a constable. But going over to the window and trying to open it he found it was stuck. However, he was able to call out through the top of the window and two constables eventually came up to the room and helped prop the man up against a corner of the walls so as to hold him aloft while Dr Kay attempted to revive him.

  Dywein then assisted one of the constables in searching for the bottle which contained the aqua fortis which was finally discovered on the bed underneath the covers. Cross-examined by McIntyre, Dywein admitted there were other people in the room by then – one of whom was Simon Rosenbloom who had helped in the search for the bottle.

  Z wondered if Rosenbloom could have been that clever, that self-possessed to have assisted in the search if he had just moments before helped commit these brutal acts? Then, again, could Lipski have been able to stuff himself underneath the bed, behind an egg crate filled with old clothes and other odds and ends after having swallowed a quantity of acid? Dywein had testified there was an overcoat that had to be removed before the egg crate could be pulled out. Z couldn’t understand how that was possible. How could Lipski have pulled a large crate in after him and then have put an overcoat in front of it? But, if it wasn’t him, who was it?

  William Piper, Dr. Kay’s assistant, then gave evidence that he had been stopped in the street at about half past eleven, shortly after the body was found. When he arrived he had found several people in the room, including the three women, Dywein and Rosenbloom. He then had cleared the room, as Dywein had testified before, locking the door behind him. But Piper also indicated that he found the lock had a ‘queer look’ and finding himself unable to close the door properly had to go back inside and turn the key so that the bolt was retracted. Piper also gave evidence that it was Rosenbloom who pointed out the location of the bottle where it had been hidden in one of the folds of the feather bed. He also testified that there was still a little acid remaining in the vial.

  Piper was followed to the stand by Arthur Sack who was the first constable who had responded to Dywein’s shouts and had come up the stairs. He testified that after Lipski was carried from the room he was placed in a cab and then taken first to Dr. Kay’s and then to the police station and finally to London Hospital where he arrived about three quarters of an hour later.

  There were three other witnesses that afternoon. Alfred Inwood, another constable, who gave evidence that he found Lipski’s coat at the foot of the bed near the wall, underneath the bed on the floor with another coat, a newer one, over it. Then the leaseholder of the house, Charles Peters, told how he had put in a perfectly good, brand new lock as a replacement for the bad one in the door of the murdered woman’s room and that he was satisfied that it was in perfect working order. The final witness was a man who had been working in the house across from number 16 who testified he had noticed Lipski only once that morning at about a quarter to nine, wearing his hat and coat and going inside the house carrying a very small parcel. The man said he hadn’t seen him again after that.

  CHAPTER 17

  Z CUT HIMSELF a thick slice of black bread and placed on top a piece of cheese and a ring of raw onion. The cheese was English. The black bread was Russian. The raw onion was a habit picked up from his father who had come from the northern part of the Pale in what was once the Kingdom of Lithuania. His mother had come from Poland, or what had been Poland before it had been ripped apart by its land-greedy neighbours. Countries and borders were constantly changing, constantly in a state of flux. They always had been, he supposed, but there were times when things had been a bit more stable.

  Four hundred years before the Jews had first been invited to settle in that region by a Polish King anxious to have the great forests and empty fields of his realm populated and a moribund economy energised by trade. Z’s people, the Jews, even then were recognised as a cheap economic catalyst. And as the resource rich but cash poor countries of the Baltic North watched in envy while the countries of the South amassed greater and greater wealth from their voyages of plunder bringing ever more galleons of gold and silver back from mines dug deep into the far reaches of the world, the invited Jews – those useful intermediaries of commerce, whose trail led everywhere because nowhere were they allowed to stay for long – were gratefu
lly exploited.

  Their sojourn in the joint kingdom of Poland and Lithuania was a relatively happy one. Four hundred years is time enough to feel at home, to feel that sense of place so long denied them in their wanderings throughout the European heartlands. These Jews, of course, were a breed apart from those who had lived through that exquisite moment of grandeur in Moorish Iberia, whose ancestors found succour in the Empire of the Ottomans. Unlike the Ladino speaking Sephardim, the Ashkenazi, the Yiddish speaking Jews of Eastern Europe, were thought to have come up from the German Rhineland but, in truth, they were a strange and hearty mix of tribes – of peasants, traders, nomads and scholars – some whose forefathers travelled up from the Caucuses and ancient Khazaria others who began their journey as far west as Narbonne.

  But ingrained in all Jews, no matter where they may have originated from, was a sense that no place was really home – no place but one. And that place was not a place at all, not in the physical sense, at least. It was more an idea planted deep in their collective subconscious (as the young man who had recently returned to Vienna from the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris and who was also of these tribes might have said). That idea which resided in the head of those Jews who called themselves Jews, even though they might have looked differently, spoken differently and prayed differently – that idea was called ‘Israel’. For according to the most learned of the Rabbinical scholars, a Jew might live in Poland and, if he were devout enough, prayed enough and was patient enough, could at the same time reside in Israel. For Israel, in their way of thinking, was a state of mind.

  Now there were those who disputed this notion, saying that Israel was indeed a place locatable on the world map and that it was written the Jews would not find true peace and salvation until that physical space determined precisely in the Bible be re-populated again by them. But these people, who were beginning to be known as ‘Zionists’, were very small in number.

  Z, himself, had read the writings of Theodor Hertzl, and was much impressed by the man. But he also understood the enormous implications of having the Jews form a state of their own – especially in an area which was already populated by other tribes who prayed to a different god and had staked their own claim to that territory.

  Yet the quandary existed and there was no getting around it. Hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jews were being forced out of their ancestral homes with no place to go. As the crisis deepened, the pressures mounted. Those countries like England and America which had opened their doors to these impoverished refugees, were being overwhelmed with hungry bodies and, in the case of England, without work to provide for them.

  So what to do? What to do? Z only knew that left to the established order, groups like the Board of Guardians, tiny plasters would be used for massive haemorrhaging and the patients most in need would be allowed to bleed to death while the Guardians, wringing their guilt laden hands, would cry that they had really done their best.

  Z’s own father was one of those pious men who had found Israel both in his heart and in his head. A pedlar by trade, he would take the train each morning with his case of goods, travelling to the outlying districts where certain products were still rare and competition for selling them was minimal. One day Z’s father left for Jerusalem, giving up his family, his home and his worldly dreams (if any he still had) for a life of meditation, prayer and poverty. Z partly admired his father for his spiritual determination, but he also never forgave him.

  Educated, acculturated and, by now, becoming a writer of some repute admired by both Jews and Christians, Z was still trying to come to terms with his sense of self. Who was he, really? Where did he come from?

  Like most Jews, Z could trace his ancestors back to his grandfather and perhaps his great-grandfather. But after that, family genealogy became lost in the mists of time as personal histories were subsumed by stories of the tribes and of a ‘people’. Maggie, on the other hand, could have traced her own ancestry back for a number of generations through birth certificates, land grants, deeds and all the other paper records which the State maintained. But, of course, she too would reach the time, not too many hundreds of years before, when even that trail would peter out and lineage would resort back to tribal wanderings; for it is only the State and the Church that defines a pedigree just as long as the particular State and Church are ascendant.

  Z understood that lineage and power were intricately related. Slaves took on the name of their master and immigrants tended to adopt family names more congenial to the countries they were living in, thus severing forever that convenient link with their most direct line of ancestors (who, in fact, had done the same thing in their voyage from nation to nation). So, for the newly assimilated Jew, the question of who you were and where you came from could hardly be solved through tracing a family tree, for ancestral names meant nothing. The answer to this question could only be broached by looking not at individual family members but rather at one’s people in a wider sense – either that or by wiping the ancestral slate clean and starting afresh.

  This understanding, however, only created more intricate problems. For who defined the history of his people? Who were the keepers of the stories which gave him insight into his particular lineage? Who were the keepers of the collective memories? Was it the Board of Guardians? Was it the Rabbis? Was it the writers and the artists who passed on to the future a certain song or picture – artefacts which gave meaning to life in the past? Or was it the tales of his own father and mother (or, in his case, his grandmother) that were told and retold throughout the generations?

  It was simpler, Z realised, to re-invent oneself, especially in a place like London and in a time like his when different worlds were being created and old economies were being shifted to make room for the new. Z had adopted a language and a literature and had made it his own. He had even toyed around with a different vision of God – a God more suitable for this period of modernism and assimilation. But, try as he might to detach himself from his past, in the background lurked another language, another literature and another God, more austere, more primitive perhaps, but one he knew with an intimacy that the amalgam hardly could possess.

  Z’s thoughts drifted back to a time earlier in the year, in April when the Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition opened at the newly complete Albert Hall, where the Guardians, as part of the Jubilee celebration, proudly displayed the ancient artefacts of Jewish culture and civilisation dating back to the time of King David and spanning the great epochs from Nebuchadnezzar to the long sojourn in Moorish Spain. In its grandness and opulence, this exhibition was a statement by the richly cosseted Jews of England (those who had long been anglicised and had profited bountifully from Victoria’s reign through their participation in the running of Empire) of their glorious past displayed in Biblical magnificence, like jewels from an ancient crown, as if to say, ‘We, too, have royal blood and thus are worthy of your gracious trust and forbearance.’ There were no klizmere bands, nothing in Yiddish, no Hassidic dances or songs. All dirt was banished. The splendour of the past all pointed south; everything to the east was simply ignored as an embarrassment.

  For Z, the highlight of this exhibition had been an appearance by Heinrich Graetz, the noted Professor from Bresslau and Jewish historian, now old and feeble, who braved the hazards of the Channel to present a paper. Seeing this old man, this legend in the twilight of his years, was a moment of inspiration for Z. The paper, read haltingly, by this gentle man, was on the subject of the Wandering Jew, a myth which came into existence in Germany as late as Reformation times, when scepticism first made its appearance in European thought. The idea of the Wandering Jew, he said, was invented as a foil to this growth in rationalism. For if he existed and would bear witness to the crucifixion, Christian faith could be saved. In the German form he was a degraded outcast, but in the form in which it reached France the figure of the Wandering Jew was ennobled and began to symbolise the idea of wandering Judaism that stan
ds on a lofty turret, and from this position surveys the rising and falling billows of the world’s history. It speaks all tongues for it has been in all lands. It escapes, in a manner which must be regarded as a miracle, all dangers and terrors. It is the youngest brother of time. It has a mighty memory of all the events of the thousands of years which have passed before it. The historical memorials of Judaism are, therefore, the most extensive of all nations and its history forms a history of the world in miniature.

  This idea of Judaism as separate only by conception, but serving, because of its special historical path, as a reservoir of collective memories for all humanity, was something that quite appealed to Z. It was an outward looking notion which was nurtured in contemporary ideas of the brotherhood of man. It was a concept that could, once and for all, break down forever the gates of the ghetto by recognising the Jews as a people who represented the multifarious trials of humankind.

  Assimilation, after all, had brought its rewards and, as far as Z was concerned, there was no turning back. The difference Z had with the Board of Guardians, wasn’t on the idea of assimilation itself but how it would happen and whose interests it would serve. For, in Z’s interpretation of Graetz, the history of Judiasm wasn’t just the relics on display at the Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition; it also included the Eastern experience with all the cultural richness that brought forth. If one looked beyond the economic poverty of the Polish refugees there was a great spiritual wealth every bit as glorious as King Solomon’s temple, he would argue.

  For the Guardians – in Z’s mind, at least – assimilation meant a severance from those cultural roots; banishing Yiddish literature and theatre and the bitter-sweet stories of the shtetl. It meant the abandonment of the schuls, the tiny local prayer houses through which newly arrived immigrants maintained links with their former villages or towns, and the acceptance of the great temples of worship with its rabbinical hierarchy (called ‘ministers’ in deference to their British hosts) and, most of all, acceptable models of cleanliness, deportment and manners, which, along with a certain standard of language, would give them true entry into the English world. They would become English citizens – Anglicised Jews – gaining all the privileges that entailed.