Odessa, Odessa

by Barbara Artson

  “Don’t you see,” Shimshon continued, his voice softening, “it will take more than prayers to halt the pogroms against the Jews? What will it take to convince you of that? Look, I gladly and willingly give you my birthright. But it would be better for you to read the other Moses—Moses Mendelssohn—and learn something about reality rather than this rubbish of the tongue-tied Moses. Like my namesake—Shimshon, the dumb, strong guy who tore down the temple—my lot is to take my enemies down even if I have to go along with them.” Through eyes filled with tears, Shimshon beseeched, “Mendel, come with me. Give up these illusions.”

  At that moment, the old rabbi stepped up to Shimshon and slapped him hard across his face. “Get out of my house. You are no longer my son. You are dead. You are dead.”

  With those stinging words, Shimshon stormed out of the house, shouting, “I am not my brother’s keeper.” He never returned, nor was he heard from again. At least neither by his father nor his brothers.

  Standing just under six feet tall and sporting a curly red beard and head of hair, Samson, as he began to call himself, was a giant of a man, taller, by far, than any man in the shtetl. After his departure, even at that young age, he used his power of persuasion and his reputation as a fearless fighter and inspiring orator to gather a small band of followers around him who would burst from the nearby woods when threats of violence menaced their community.

  And there were many such occasions for him and his comrades to exhibit their strength, their bravery, and their brutality and to use their growing cache of unorthodox weapons—sticks, rocks, scythes, fists, knives, and arms—stolen from downed Cossacks and peasant farmers.

  With his innate leadership skills, Samson quickly took command of his growing militia of adolescent boys. He was the first to act against the daunting edicts, evictions, and restrictions limiting the Jews’ freedom.

  Convinced that the restrictions were permanent, Samson warned his cohort that they would more than likely worsen. He’d read the lessons of history and knew that the past repeated itself unless action was taken to break the cycle. He knew that from medieval times and before, the Jews had been convenient scapegoats. Sitting in the library, he read of the Khmelnytsky Uprising in 1648, when Jews were murdered and kicked out of the Ukraine, then butchered by the thousands in 1654 by the Russian and Swedish armies and once again in 1768 in the Uman Massacre, when Jews were slaughtered by the thousands.

  “When anything goes wrong,” Samson alerted his compatriots with bitter irony, “‘blame the Jews. Keep the peasants’ hands and minds busy so they won’t know that their stomachs are empty. Make them feel powerful when they use their fists so they won’t know how powerless they really are. Not only is the government instigating these fights but they are supplying the peasants with arms. They let them do their dirty work. They let them sacrifice their blood—after all, their lives, like the Jews’ lives, are worthless.”

  The authorities’ objective, voiced by a high Russian Orthodox Church official, was to have patience: the Jews will solve the church’s problem because “one-third of the Jews will convert to Christianity, one-third will flee the country, and the last third will die.” Problem solved!

  Several members of Samson’s unit slowly advanced to Moscow, some 822 miles’ distance, where, they believed, the real action was. Samson spent his time reading newspaper clippings, which he looted from the Moscow Library by posing as a soldier in a “borrowed” army uniform in order to gain entrance. Clever Samson had a way of “finding” useful items to support their cause. There he read of The Edict of Expulsion and the banishment in 1886 of Kiev’s Jews. He read of the events of 1881 following the murder of Czar Alexander II, which held the Jews responsible, the result of which were the shameful 1881 pogroms in Elizavetgrad, Kiev, and Odessa and the Jews’ banishment from Moscow, except for those Jews who remained useful to the functionaries—those with money to lend or with skills that were in scarce supply.

  Banished too was Samson’s dream of becoming a lawyer when, in 1889, the government made it difficult for Jews to enter schools of law, medicine, or, for that matter, any professional endeavor.

  Step by step, edict by edict, Samson registered the removal of the few liberties that had been grudgingly granted the Jews. In 1882, Alexander III passed the May Laws banning Jews from all rural areas and towns of less than ten thousand and proscribing them from voting in local elections

  He collected articles that revealed the beating and stoning and looting and burning of homes in Elizavetgrad. In 1905, he found a document invented by the regime, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document revealing the discovery of a secret Jewish cabal plotting to overtake the world.

  “It’s no coincidence that they publish this lie in 1905,” Meir, Samson’s good friend, suggested. “Come up with a tactic so that the masses forget the real reason the revolution began. Forget their empty stomachs, forget their breaking backs, and forget their dying kids. The Jews are first-rate scapegoats.”

  Samson and his friends quarreled into the night about how best to stem the rising tide of repression. Some insisted that they remain hidden but close to home, at the ready for immediate reprisals when their villages were attacked. Others argued that the brutality was spreading—that it was a national problem, not just a local one.

  Samson argued that they must spread out and join forces with other groups. Still others contended that the fight for equality, for liberty, for justice was not to happen in Russia and that it was time to move to the land of their forefathers. “We must return to Palestine, to tilling the soil, to farming, and to true equality—men and women alike, no rich or poor. All equal. We must return to being the people of the earth, not the book—to growing grapes for wine and olives for oil and to speaking the language of the Bible, Hebrew, not Russian, not Yiddish,” he insisted.

  Adding to Samson’s sense of urgency was the rumor that the cantonists—a contingency of Jewish men ordered by the czar to recruit Jewish soldiers for the Russian Army—were now turning against their own people. No longer were they casting a blind eye to a neighbor’s son or son-in-law, to fathers who refused to join the Russian Army. All were cannon fodder for the czar and Mother Russia.

  At first the cantonists were viewed as pawns of the authorities—victims themselves. They had no choice but to serve as recruiters, reluctant to conscript the youth of the shtetl, their own sons, nephews, and cousins. But as they began to glory in the power and privilege the role yielded—with more food, better quarters, clothing, and protection for their own families—the influence they wielded perverted their sense of integrity and tribal loyalty.

  When the shtetl residents learned about the payback the cantonists derived from exerting their power, and when they witnessed the fervor of their actions, their compassion for their brethren transformed into rage and the need to retaliate. Every so often a recruiter, sometimes a brother or a cousin or a father, mysteriously disappeared, to be found weeks or even months later at the bottom of a ravine, or perhaps a body bloated beyond recognition was found floating in a lake miles from home. The family silently retrieved the body and buried it, typically in the dark of the night, without fanfare or ritual.

  “It’s only a matter of time before our mothers and sisters will be raped,” Samson raged. “It’s only a matter of time before our fathers are humiliated at the hands of these dogs, or worse, maimed or murdered. It’s only a matter of time before our brothers are conscripted into the enemy’s army. Twenty-five years fighting for our enemies. They think that over time we’ll convert to goyim. One way to get rid of the Jews—convert them to Russian Orthodox believers in Christ. Not me. I’ll die first.”

  When Samson learned of a secular socialist labor movement forming in Vilna, he convinced the majority of his troops that the time was ripe to leave Moscow. Most joined Samson and packed what few belongings and equipment they’d collected over the months and, in the middle of the night, took their leave of the city.

  When Samson
wasn’t heard from for over six months, Rabbi Yonkel Israel knew his son was not going to repudiate his decision to betray him, his family, and his religion, as he had hoped. He was unaware his wife had been in contact with him when he infrequently returned to Odessa. He publicly declared his son dead and began sitting shiva, the ritual of mourning. He placed a basin of water by the doorpost of his home for visitors to wash their hands. He covered the one mirror they owned with a cloth to keep trapped spirits from escaping and lit a large shiva candle. Then he and his family sat on hard wooden boxes for the required seven days of mourning and waited to receive condolence calls accompanied by gifts of food. At the end of the seventh day, Samson’s father recited Kaddish, the prayer for the dead.

  “Yisgaddal v’yiskadash sh’mei rabbo B’ol’mo di v’ro khirusai . . .”

  He then removed the covering from the mirror and instructed his wife to restore order to their home, with the charge to his family never again to mention his son’s name.

  “Shimshon is dead! Do you hear? I have only two sons, Mendel and Moishe,” he announced.

  But for Mendel, Samson is never dead. Even to this day, every evening before he falls asleep, he says a prayer for his brother’s safety.

  Years will pass before the family learns of Samson’s feats of bravery and his reputation as one of the leaders of the Jewish Bund movement. Not with the jawbone of an ass did he smite his enemies, as did his namesake, but with clubs, stones, knives, axes, shovels, bombs, oratory, and a great deal of cunning and courage.

  “Never again” was Samson’s constant refrain, one that will be repeated years later when six million Jews are murdered.

  Chapter 3

  THE NEW WORLD: AND THERE, I WAS A SOMEBODY

  1934

  Stripped of his dignity and with little to occupy his once agile mind, Mendel, now sixty-nine, sits at the window of his street-level apartment on Neptune Avenue in Brighton Beach, watching the world of commerce pass: horse-drawn wagons delivering twenty-five pound blocks of ice to those with money enough to have purchased an ice box, trailed by scampering kids hoping to catch the flakes flying from the iceman’s pick as he chips at his precious payload with a pickaxe; women toting beheaded, feathered chickens in their shopping bags, still warm and quivering, trailing blood—the makings of the evening meal; vendors schlepping grindstones on jerry-rigged pushcarts to sharpen household implements, repetitively imploring potential customers: “Knives! I sharpen knives. Scissors. Razors, knives. I sharpen knives.”

  Other aspiring capitalists carry their threadbare wares in burlap sacks secured on their backs, like downtrodden beasts of burden, wailing, “Clothes. I cash clothes. Cash for clothes.”

  Competition is fierce among the twenty-five thousand immigrant peddlers in Brighton Beach, pushing carts and hawking fish, “fresh” meat, fruit, vegetables, rags, shoestrings, and men’s collars.

  Weekly, an Italian organ grinder stops by Mendel’s open apartment window to entertain with his ring-tailed monkey, paw extended to snatch pennies from the outstretched hands of the gathering crowd of delighted children. They greet each other by name in their heavily accented mélange of language.

  “Buon giorno, rabbi.”

  “Gutn morgn, Mister Alonso.”

  Only early in the morning, when Mendel crosses the street to go to shul to meet with his morning minyan, is his sense of integrity, honor, intelligence, and competence restored. Momentarily. There, the humiliation of having failed at his brief and futile attempt to make a living from selling shmatas is stilled, as is the bitter sense of outrage that occasionally erupts like pus from a rancid boil.

  There, once again, he is the scholar, respected for his knowledge of Halacha, the laws of his faith, and for the wisdom garnered from years of studying Torah, Talmud, and Mishnah. Mendel recalls his father’s admonition to love and respect the holy book. He feels relieved that his papa isn’t alive to see him in this diminished state. Not only is he a failed rabbi but worse, a poor husband and father who can’t support his family. And takes handouts from his children. The shame is unbearable.

  He also recalls what he now refers to as “my meshuga fantasy,” his thought that he could get a job as a rabbi, or at least a gabbai, a rabbi’s assistant. Daily, when he returns from shul to the small apartment he shares with Henya and Marya, he longs for the time when he felt passionate about his daily routine of teaching young boys their Hebrew lessons or settling arguments among his shtetl neighbors or consoling members of his small synagogue—of studying midrash and philosophy, particularly the thirteenth-century rabbinic commentary of Moses Maimonides. Without money in America you’re a nobody. No better then that organ grinder over there picking up pennies. Or his monkey. At least he doesn’t take handouts from his children. “Papa, Papa, look at your grand rabbi now,” he mutters. “Look at what’s become of me.”

  From time to time, mostly before falling asleep, his thoughts lead to Shimshon, his maverick brother. Often he dreams of him, usually wandering, forlorn and lost, like Moses in the desert. But I’m the one who’s lost, he thinks. He recalls the Bible story of Joseph, the youngest son of the prophet Jacob. Like me, Joseph was his father’s favorite; his brothers envied him so much, they left him to die in a pit. I was to blame for getting Shimshon banished, sitting there by Papa’s side for hours, saying what I knew he wanted to hear. I left Shimshon in a pit. And then I left. Mama. Papa. Cold in their graves with no one to visit them.

  Since his father’s rejection of his brother, Mendel has not once mentioned his name to his children, who know nothing of their uncle’s existence; nor has he ever spoken of his own past. But Mendel has never forgotten. When overcome with grief, he confides in his wife.

  “It’s like he disappeared from the face of the earth. I got word once or twice—someone with a message from him—asking me to join in his fight. I never answered. I was a coward. But I can understand he was mad at Papa, who sat shiva for him, but me? What did I do? I was a kid and he took it out on me.”

  “There was no other way, Mendel,” Henya answers. “Maybe he got hurt. Maybe he did come back looking for you after we left. Who knows? Maybe, God forbid, he’s dead.”

  “I think of him more now than ever as we get closer to the end. He’d be seventy-one, seventy-two. An old man, like me. I do wonder if he’s alive. I wonder if he married or had children. They could be living in America, maybe next door, and we wouldn’t even know them if we bumped into them on the street. No, it wasn’t right.”

  Henya pats Mendel’s shoulder in a gesture of compassion.

  “Papa shouldn’t have banished him. Or sat shiva for him or said Kaddish. I mean, should a father cut his child off forever? And he punished Mama and me too, not just . . .” He pauses. “Shimshon. I can barely say his name. But what offense could be so bad?”

  “Well, you told me how he disobeyed your Papa and that he rejected God. And fought with him and used bad words. Your Papa was hurt. Nowadays, it’s different. Children just do what they want, but that was the way things were done in those days.”

  “Okay, okay,” Mendel continues, “so my brother didn’t believe, but you keep telling me that good Jews drive and work on Shabbos, even our own children. And eat traif, like Saul. Do I reject them? No, although it hurts me plenty. Shimshon didn’t steal; he didn’t murder anyone. He tried to protect us, and he was just a kid himself. Sixteen. Stubborn. Like Papa. You know, I think maybe they were a lot like each other. Maybe that’s why Papa couldn’t stomach it. Still, I think I could have done more to get Papa to change his mind.”

  “Now you’re blaming yourself, Mendel. Your Papa ruled the house with a giant fist, and as you said, you were only a boy,” Henya whispers; then, directing her words to Mendel’s bad ear, “You’re a little stubborn yourself, you know.”

  “I know, I know, Papa wouldn’t have listened. Henya, I shouldn’t say this, may God cut out my tongue, but sometimes I even wonder if there is a Holy One.”

  “Don’t even think t
hat, Mendel!”

  “Every day I think about our Marya and why she was born the way she was. What kind of a life does she have working in a laundry, cleaning rich peoples’ sheets? And she couldn’t have gotten that job if Shmuel weren’t the boss. People making fun of her. No husband. No children to take care of her in her old age? And Marya, twenty-five with no friends even. I worry about what she’ll do when we’re gone. You see how our Dora takes care of us?”

  Henya thinks but doesn’t say, My Disha will take care of her too. Not the rest. Well, maybe Leib or Shmuel.

  “You know, Mendel, I think about Shimshon and what you said he said about Mirium. You said he asked ‘Why did she have to die? Maybe you forget that Shimshon wanted to be a lawyer, and you said he would have been good, with his mouth and mind. He spoke of the way we Jews were treated in Russia and always treated. You said he told stories about how Jews lived under the tyranny of the czars, the violence of the bigoted peasants, the pogroms, and the massacres. ‘Why, I ask you?’ he’d say. ‘Why, if there’s a God and we are his chosen people, why would he let that happen to us?’”

  “You think he has time to think of us? But why are you bothering your head like this? We don’t have enough tsuris to deal with?” whispered Henya.

  A waft of smoke invades his nostrils, the residue of a passing smoker, and brings Mendel back to the present.

  “Hey, paskudnyak, you with the cigarette! It’s Shabbos. Don’t you know it’s forbidden to smoke on the Sabbath? Shame, shame on you.”

  “Oy, Mendel. You don’t even know if he’s a Jew,” reproaches Henya. “If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times. This is America, not Russia. It’s a free country. Here, everyone smokes, even on Shabbos, even Jews. What, you think your own sons don’t smoke on the Sabbath? Avram, I mean Abe, runs in, leaves his motor running out front, cigarette in his mouth. Puts it out before he comes in so you won’t see. Comes in smelling of smoke. And what do you think Saul is doing when he goes for his walks when he comes with Dora and the kinderlach? What, you think he’s sightseeing when he walks on the boardwalk?”