AL DOESN’T REMEMBER precisely when his mother took him and his three brothers to Zarasai, only that he was six years old. He recalls something about being “shlepped on a very hot, steamy, southern day on some public conveyance to have our pictures taken, probably to get a passport.” What he does remember emphatically was that he did not want to leave Savannah. “I was in a semi-hysterical state. I know I carried on, alternately crying and yelling at my father, asking him questions I cannot answer to this day. ‘Why are you letting her take us? Why are we leaving? Why are you sending us away? Why aren’t you coming with us?’
“He probably tried to reassure us. He must have picked us up individually and hugged us good-bye. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Everything will be fine. Your mother is coming back in a short while.’ But what does ‘a short while’ mean to a six-year-old boy?’ I was livid with rage.”
Al could not have known that this visit to a place called zarasai would separate him for years from his happy, ritualized 1920s American childhood, the comfort of his home, and the protection of his father. What he did know was that he couldn’t imagine life without the funnies. As he said good-bye to his father, Al managed to impress him with a single, desperate plea: no matter what, he must not miss the installments. “ ‘If you don’t send us the comics, I will never speak to you again, I won’t love you again, I’ll never talk to you again.’ All my carrying-on must have broken his heart. He didn’t want us to go either.”
Nevertheless, they left. And in spite of his anger and sorrow, Al’s sense of adventure reasserted itself. “I was a free spirit on the boat. I don’t even think Harry trailed around with me. I knew every part of that steamship. I went down to the engine room on my own. I went on deck. I sat on deck chairs next to people and chatted them up. I stuck my nose into everything.” He was missing so often that search parties were sent out to find him. “One day, when I was killing time, shpatziring* the ship, I walked past a deck chair on which an older gentleman was resting. There was a book underneath the chair, and on top of the book lay an orange Parker pen. I think I circled the deck five times, trying to figure out how to get my hands on that thing. Eventually I determined from the funny noises he was making that the man was fast asleep. I got down on my knees, grabbed the pen, and took off.
“I guess I must have had pangs of guilt, because I never used the pen. Ever. Maybe I was troubled by my mother’s admonitions about ‘Thou shalt not steal’—although that didn’t seem to bother me when I was stealing fruit in zarasai just a few weeks later—but the pen was somehow tainted. I put it away among my treasures, promising myself that I’d someday make magic with it, but I never did. I have no recollection of putting ink into it or using it. Eventually the pen just disappeared from my life. I think by stealing the pen I was sticking it to my father. ‘You always promised that someday I’d get that pen. Well, now I’m going away and I’m never coming back, and you’ll never get it for me, so I’ll get it for myself.’”
2
WOLVES, BEDBUGS, AND LICE
“We were hungry all the time.”
THE JOURNEY FROM SAVANNAH to the Port of New York, to
Hamburg, to Berlin, to Memel to Kaunas to zarasai, covered more than six thousand miles on sea and land and consumed more than three weeks, but effectively it transported Al, his mother, and his brothers from the twentieth century back into the nineteenth. The last leg of the trip—184 kilometers in a boxy, rickety bus on a gravel road, took them from the capital, Kaunas (Kovno in Russian), to zarasai, a town just four kilometers south of the Latvian border and fourteen kilometers from what Lithuanians preferred to call “Polish-occupied Lithuania.” Al remembers the trip as “an endless and fearsome journey.”
At the time of his traumatic arrival in the spring of 1927, Al was in no mood to appreciate the evident beauties of Zarasai. The town sits on a hill plateau, surrounded by two lakes and a stunning topography of hills and valleys covered by dense forests of virgin pines and white birch. There is snow on the ground from October to April.
Present-day Eastern Europeans think of the town, with its current population of about eight thousand, as a spa destination. The 1939 Baltic Winter Olympics were held in Zarasai. Tourists call the town “the Switzerland of Lithuania.” The locals call it “the Siberia of Lithuania” because of its remote extreme northern location, where the temperature often reaches minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit. “Freezing to death” was more than a vain threat in Zarasai. Often a drunken peasant, returning home from market day across the frozen lake, would fall asleep and be found dead in the morning. But both tourists and locals agree that the region is spectacularly beautiful. So did Czar Nicholas I, who, in 1836, was so impressed by Zarasai that he ordered its name changed to Novo-Aleksandrovsk in honor of his son Alexander. That little bit of imperial presto change-o mattered little to the Jewish population, who continued to call the town by the name Ezerenai, linguistically derived from the word lake. It wasn’t until 1929, two years after Al, his mother, and his brothers arrived, that the town’s original Lithuanian name, Zarasai, was restored.
Centuries of warfare and shifting alliances in the region—dominated primarily by Russian influence—had taken their toll. The Poles still hated the Lithuanians, and the Russians still hated the Lithuanians and the Poles, which might be why, for the most part, they left the Jews alone. That relative détente would change with breathtaking speed in 1941 when the Nazis marched into Lithuania and found the Lithuanian partisans rabidly eager to participate in making Lithuania, by the war’s end, a near record 95 percent Judenrein*
Mildred had left a czarist Russia and returned to what would be a brief “golden age” of Lithuania. Prospects for Jews, who had been strong supporters of Lithuanian independence, had never been better, but independence had not done much for commerce or modernity in Zarasai, since its eastern and northeastern neighbors were annexed by Latvia and Poland, and Zarasai was left without its business and trading partners. In between the two wars, the population of the town (Jewish and non-Jewish) had decreased more than 50 percent, from roughly 9,000 to 4,200, one-third of them Jewish, most of them poor, as many of the residents abandoned Zarasai and moved deeper into Russia. Some never returned.
Although there was no formal ghetto, except for a few friendships between gentile and Jew, segregation was total. Some of the streets in Zarasai were Polish, some German, Jewish, or Lithuanian. Al would soon learn that he was a second-class citizen, much as the Negroes were in his native Savannah. He had to be careful when he ventured into the wooded areas of town. “We never knew when a group of gentile kids would clobber us over the head with a stick, and there was nothing we could do about it. Even as kids we knew we couldn’t complain to the police. For me that was a stunning realization. In Savannah the police were my friends. I used to seek them out and chat with them. In Zarasai, when we saw a policeman, we went the other way.”
Still, in 1927, when Al and his mother and brothers arrived, anti-Semitism in Lithuania was benign compared with that of its neighbor Poland. But politics didn’t much interest Mildred Jaffee.
It was near nightfall by the time Mildred wrestled her ragged, exhausted, and bewildered brood off the bus, along with their battered baggage, and into the vast marketplace of Zarasai. Here she stood at last, on the main commercial street, called the chaussee. (The Russian aristocracy’s passion for the French language had made its impression even in remote zarasai.)
What she saw was that, in spite of the tumult of the recent past, not much had changed since she’d left thirteen years earlier. Cobblestones the size of bread loaves, painful to walk on unless you were wearing shoes, still paved the square. She and her friends had preferred to play on the dirt streets during the brief summer months.
The arrival of the Kaunas-zarasai bus was a big event that drew a large crowd of townspeople. Some were curious to see who was arriving; others gathered to bid farewell to those who were departing.
Even though it wasn’t a market day, a
n enterprising merchant or two had set up stands, while children played and animals scampered about. Off in the distance Mildred could hear the once familiar lowing of cows as they wandered freely through the marketplace on their return from pasture.
The two white spires of the Lithuanian church created a monumental contrast with the primarily humble, darkly weathered wooden houses of Zarasai. The clapboard buildings with their steep mansard roofs, the better to shed the snow, lined one side of the marketplace, punctuated by the occasional brick or stone structure of the wealthier citizens. Before she left for America, most of these buildings were owned by Jewish merchants who lived above their stores. The poorer Jews lived down the hill, near the lakes. The Lithuanians, most of them peasants, owned the vast farmlands that surrounded the town. They cleared portions of the forested, sloping hillsides for their orchards, flax, wheat, and corn. During the daylight hours, a mill ground flour for the local merchants and farmers. The mill was powered by a waterwheel, turned by water cascading twenty feet from the lake.
In the dying light, Mildred Jaffee could read the crude signage on the hardware store, the apothecary, the liquor store, the seed store, Botwinik’s photography studio, the grocery, the bottle shop, and Chavke die shmate’s (Chavke the ragpicker’s) used-goods emporium. She noticed that the wealthy widow Broiman’s galoshes-and-refreshment store had a new tin roof, an indication in a town of many thatched roofs that she must be doing very well for herself. There was the hospital, the park, and the promenade, with its double row of shade trees, where she remembered as a young girl watching couples stroll on Sundays. Near the promenade was a row of white cement civic buildings, including the jail and the police station, where every morning several policemen in Napoleonic scarlet-and-blue uniforms, carrying sabers and wearing plumed top hats, would march and drill. Weary as she was, it felt good to be home.
The children had not bathed or had a decent meal since they’d stayed with a clutch of relatives on the Lower East Side in New York City while waiting for the boat that would take them to Hamburg. Nor had the Jaffee children changed their clothes. Al was anachro-nistically if shabbily dressed in the current young American boys’ fashion of the 1920s, what Al called his “little-darling outfit”—velvet Lord Fauntleroy short pants with matching jacket, a once-white blouse, and a wool tam-o’-shanter hat.
Mildred Jaffee, true to her chaotic nature, had not bothered to inform her father, Chaim (Hyman) Gordon, that she and her four children were returning to zarasai or, furthermore, that they were planning to stay with him until they could find permanent lodgings.
As a result, there was no one to meet them, but she had counted on the fact that one of the drovers with their horses and wagons would meet the bus, in the hope of picking up some business, and soon enough one happened by. Al gripped the back of the wagon’s wooden seat as it lurched and bumped out of the marketplace and onto a dirt road that would take them half a kilometer to the house of a man he had never met, called Grandfather. He watched as the primitive, sharp-roofed buildings that lined the marketplace grew ever more gaunt and cheerless in the fading light and then disappeared from view. He heard strange, plaintive cries in the distance and asked his mother what they were. She told him they were wolves.
“Like the wolf in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, only lots of them?”
“If you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you,” she answered.
Al was not reassured.
Chaim Gordon was surprised and not pleased when he saw his daughter, seated next to a drover holding a baby, and, in the back of the wagon, three little boys slumped over their luggage. Mildred’s father lived in what Al would come to understand was, at least by Lithuanian shtetl standards, a mansion. That meant, for instance, that one entered the front yard through a tall, covered wooden gate, beneath which the horses and carriages of the local gentry stopped to let off their passengers. The portico protected visitors and residents alike from the elements.
Mildred’s father was a wealthy and respected man, a member of the town’s intelligentsia. The politically powerful Jews of zarasai assembled frequently around his large dining room table. His position in town was due in part to his relative wealth and his status as a multilingual scholar that allowed him to act as a kind of unofficial advocate, representing the interests of both Yiddish-speaking Jews and Polish-speaking peasants in Lithuanian courts. Chaim Gordon may have been a bona fide lawyer—Al isn’t sure—but even during Lithuania’s relatively benign interregnum golden period, quotas limited the number of Jews who could practice law. In 1926, just a year earlier, Jewish enrollment in university faculties of medicine and law had been restricted. By contrast, Al’s father’s relatives were decidedly lower-class. They were teamsters who transported goods by horse and wagon. Soon, however, Al would discover, much to his delight, one distant Jaffee cousin in town who owned a record shop and a gramophone.
Al was at least as unhappy to meet his grandfather as his grandfather was to meet him. To an already terrified six-year-old, Chaim Gordon, with his bushy gray beard, his black clothing, and his walking stick, was an imposing and scary figure. “I had a funny feeling about this long, creepy house,” Al recalls. Irinka, the Gordon family’s Russian-peasant servant, took one look at the boys’ fithy faces, dirty hands, and matted hair and hustled them off to the kitchen. Al had never seen a kitchen like that one. It had a rough wooden worktable, a galvanized pail of well water for cooking, and another pail for washing dishes. Where was the icebox, the kitchen sink? And why was the floor made of dirt? Bins held fresh vegetables and fruits. A concrete-masonry stove was stoked with wood and connected to a chimney. Nothing so sophisticated as an icebox or a stove had yet found its way to Zarasai. By the end of the Jaffees’ stay in Zarasai, water power was used to generate electricity during the evening hours; the Jaffees had one electric bulb that hung from the ceiling on a cord and functioned from 5 to 9 pm.
Al watched in amazement as Irinka filled a large black kettle with water from a bucket and set it over the open fire. When the water was hot enough, she poured out a bowlful for each child, and with Mildred’s help, they did their best to wipe away weeks of grime. Later, Al was taken on a tour of the house, which was lit only by candles. His grandfather pointed out where each of them would sleep. All of the bedrooms had embroidered bedding, curtains, and a fireplace. There were so many rooms! How would he ever find his way? Later, Al’s grandfather showed the new arrivals the backyard, which was the size of half a football field and filled with lumber. Moise (My-say), his grandfather’s son-in-law, was a lumber merchant. (The fact that both the father and the son-in-law shared the surname Gordon was probably due to the fact that Chaim Gordon, who had no living sons, intended his son-in-law to inherit his estate.) In addition to a large vegetable garden, a well, and a barnlike shed for the horse and wagon, the tour of the compound included a visit to the outhouse. Al was bowled over by the stench. “That was the worst. When that smell hits you, you never forget it. You want to have your nose amputated.”
At dinnertime the entire Gordon clan gathered in the dining room, around a long, polished wooden table. This room was elegant by zarasai standards. The walls were decorated with paintings and had large windows hung with curtains. Unlike the kitchen, the dining room had floors made of shiny pine planks. Members of the Gordon family bought most of their household furnishings in Kaunas. The intelligentsia of Lithuania liked to think of Kaunas as their own little Paris. Some of the Gordons even spoke French. A large object, which Al would later learn was a samovar, stood surrounded by glasses on its own table at the end of the room.
Irinka bustled around serving what was to Al an unrecognizable dinner of fried herring mashed with potatoes and carrots. Chaim Gordon, wearing a double-breasted dark blue jacket and a white shirt, presided at the head of the table. Al’s mother sat in a chair near her father, holding baby David in her arms. On a bench next to her the three other children sat in ascending age order: Bernard, Harry, and finally Al. Moise, L
ifa, his wife, and Danke (Daniel), their son, sat facing the newcomers. Nobody was wearing a hat or yarmulke, an indication of what Al would come to call “Reformed Judaism, zarasai-style.” Al sat mute and mournful, across from Danke, trying to make sense of the bewildering Babel of conversation swirling about him. In the sophisticated Gordon household, it was not unusual for conversations to be conducted in several languages. “Arriving in zarasai,” Al recalls, “was like a moon shot.”
While his mother and the relatives tucked into their meal, Al, who was ravenous, picked up his fork and allowed a bit into his mouth. He shuddered involuntarily at the intense, oily saltiness of what he would soon come to appreciate was standard zarasai fare, if he was lucky.
Chaim Gordon’s wife, Sora, had died in 1924, but he did not live alone. Moise Gordon, his wife, Lifa, the only Gordon daughter who didn’t emigrate, and Daniel, a somber, scholarly boy who seemed to Al to be about his age, shared the mansion. Lifa was a slender, sensitive, pretty woman who suffered from consumption and was confined to the indoors most of the time. She occupied herself by painting biblical scenes in oil colors on velvet, decorated with glass beads. Looking back, Al realizes that her technique was pure glitz, “the kind of stuff they sell to tourists in the Caribbean,” but as a child, he was wowed by her talent. She was one of the relatives who would be kind to him, providing Al with hard-to-find watercolor paints and paper. And while other relatives, his grandfather in particular, did what they could to suppress Al’s high spirits, Lifa always took Al’s side. “Lifa admired my spunk; she made me feel good when she said to my cousin Danke, ‘Why can’t you be more like Al?’ meaning ‘Why do you hang around the house with your nose in a book? Why not go outside and tear things down?’”
Al Jaffee's Mad Life Page 3