Isaac's Torah

by Angel Wagenstein

  But I got carried away and now with God’s help I will try to turn and go back to the main path, from which I strayed like old man Noah, who fell asleep Between the Rivers and when he woke up, found he’d landed at the top of Ararat.

  And so, let’s come down from that distant peak of the Ark and go to our Kolodetz by Drogobych, where I’m standing, with a shy half-smile, the wooden footlocker at my feet.

  My mother broke into tears and did not stop covering my now manly face with kisses, my father was more severe and composed, and gave me a rather rough pat on the shoulder, but I noticed the moisture in his eyes.

  My mother said, “My dear boy! I can imagine what you’ve gone through, down there in the trenches. Such horrible things they say about the Senegalese!”

  “What Senegalese?” I asked.

  “The French, the black ones. They ate up the prisoners of war alive!”

  “Yes, sometimes…,” I mumbled. Not that it was vanity that prevented me from telling the whole, so to say, gray and prosaic truth; moreover, apart from me, our rabbi Ben-David was also familiar with it, but I just didn’t want to destroy, in the eyes of my dear parents, the invisible but heroic monument they’d erected for me.

  While Mama was bustling around preparing the food—doubtlessly a festive dinner with our famous stuffed, or gefilte, fish, which I have detested since childhood, though I was obliged to partake of this common, and, as they claim, world-famous glory or even triumph of Judaism—Uncle Chaimle and I went over to David Leibovich’s café. There my uncle bought for everyone who had the luck to share this historic moment a glass of marvelous wheat vodka and he did it with such a flourish it was as if we’d won the war, and won it mostly owing to my heroic deeds. They started asking me about one thing and another and I was ready to answer—including about the Senegalese!—but just then our rabbi entered the café and I instantly deflated like a French reconnaissance balloon shot down by a German Fokker. The interest of the Kolodetz military analysts, led by the postman Avramchik, who, if you haven’t forgotten, participated in the Russo-Turkish war as a signalman, was immediately transferred to the rabbi and he was literally bombarded with questions.

  I don’t want to say anything bad about the Jews, God forbid—you know I am one—but you’ve probably noticed that unusual passion, I would say obsession, with which they ask questions and are in no way, no way at all, interested in the answer, because they know it in advance or so it seems to them. And if your answer isn’t what they’d expected, hard luck for you: then they tumble you up and down inside an avalanche of arguments, smash you down under an iceberg of proof, and at the end finish you off by sticking you up against the wall like you were wallpaper, with a quote from either the Bible or Karl Marx. For a similar case in life I can give you the following advice: if Jews bombard you with questions, listen to them calmly and go smoke a cigarette in the room next door. They won’t notice your absence at all but will start arguing among themselves. There’s another way out: instantly, at that very moment, agree with them and in no way take up the catastrophic initiative of disagreeing with them. This option, by the way, is probably even wiser. Like this rabbi of whom they asked: “Rabbi, what in your opinion is the shape of the Earth?” “Round,” said the rabbi. “Why round? Can you prove it?” “Well, then, let it be a square, am I going to argue?”

  In our case, however, Rabbi Ben-David did something, to tell you the truth, a little mean: he calmly listened to the questions, accompanied by comments, references to historic sources and their respective quotes, and he neither answered nor agreed nor disagreed, but generously pointed to me with his hand: “Why are you asking me—a, so to say, rearguard rat—something like a mess supplier or a shopkeeper of God’s Word, who hasn’t even touched a weapon? Here, ask him—he’s the fighter, he’ll tell you how he protected the motherland with full army equipment, with a bayonet stuck on his gun and a gas mask gassed by the French in the pouring rain!”

  All faces, just as if obeying a command, turned to me, and in them I read admiration and respect, and if I am not exaggerating, even adoration. Thank God, at this hour in the café of David Leibovich there were only Jews and, as I told you, no one was interested in the answers to their questions.

  Please don’t think that I’m deliberately delaying my meeting with Sarah by using trite literary techniques to create suspense—suspense itself exists in the natural order of things. My soul was flying to Sarah, longing for her, I was telling her a hundred times in my thoughts everything that had built up in my heart. “My dear,” I would say, “my one and only little bird! Dream of my dreams and blooming peony, my quiet Saturday joy! Your two little bubbies—” Wait, this bit about the little bubbies is from King Solomon and does not refer to Sarah! I’m taking it out but I won’t start all over again, because no matter how I approach it, I’ll still slide down the ancient track and fall into the arms of Shulamit. And it wasn’t her that I loved, but Sarah, may the author of the Songs of Songs forgive me.

  Sarah and I met as soon as the next morning. I pretended to be strolling just by chance with Ben-David to the synagogue—or was it the other way around?—the rabbi pretended to invite me just by chance to walk with him. Then he casually suggested, “Why don’t you come in and have a glass of tea?”

  And I casually shrugged my shoulders in agreement and then I saw her: she was carrying a basket of laundry on her hip, her sleeves rolled up, bare feet in slippers, her wet shirt open and revealing a tiny part of what wouldn’t have escaped the eye of King Solomon either.

  We stared at each other like complete fools, and the rabbi, so it seemed to me, was enjoying our embarrassment. Eventually she said, first wiping her hand on her skirt and then shaking my hand, “How are you?”

  “Fine,” I said. “And you?”

  “I’m fine, too. Please, come in.”

  “All right,” I said.

  I had forgotten all about the little birds, and the blooming peonies, and my quiet Saturday joys. I don’t know why people are so shy about expressing openly in front of the world their longing for each other, the most powerful and tender natural attraction, but they pretend to be proud or indifferent and they don’t consider, especially if they’re young, that the sands of our life have been measured by God unto the last grain and that every carelessly wasted second of love sinks irreversibly into eternity. And the young, don’t they figure out that in this voice of the heart is hidden all the strength of humankind, all the divine meaning of its existence, with all its pyramids, Homers and Shakespeares, Ninth Symphonies and Rhapsodies in Blue, all the admirable beauty of the verse for Shulamits and Juliets, and the different Nefertitis, Mona Lisas, and Madonnas?!

  But one way or the other, we were sitting by the table in the little parlor of Ben-David; Sarah and I didn’t dare look at each other and now, while the dear rabbi is pouring the tea, I’ll show you by example how long a biblical phase is: exactly nine months and ten days from the moment I sank my spoon in the tea cup, the mohel was circumcising our little boy, to whom we proudly gave the name of my grandfather—may he rest in peace—Elia, Ilyusha for short. Or as they say: “A boy was born and God’s blessing came upon the earth.”

  All night I was playing, or if you’d rather call it, screeching on the violin, good Jewish men and women with heavy shoes were dancing and singing old songs, clapping hands to the rhythm, while I myself, my father and mama, then Uncle Chaimle and the already-graying Ben-David were dancing the Ukrainian gopak. Sarah was still exhausted from the delivery but boundlessly happy, and Mama wasn’t letting her do a drop of work—not even pour vodka for the guests. Pan Voitek came, he wasn’t a policeman anymore but the mayor of Kolodetz, and he brought a huge white round loaf of bread, covered with a white linen cloth. And other neighbors too—Polish and Ukrainian—came along to raise a glass to the health of little Ilyusha. The only people who didn’t come were the local Catholic priest, who was in any case a pure anti-Semit
e, and the Christian Orthodox priest Theodore, who kept to himself because of that old reason, which you already know, related to the misunderstanding that changed the faith of humankind, specifically that it wasn’t Christ who kissed Judas on the forehead, which is what I think happened, but the other way around. This is a separate story, it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism, and it’s purely our own internal issue whom we should crucify and whom we shouldn’t, as far as Yeshua is concerned; in other words, Christ and Judas are our own Jews, not from Kolodetz, of course, but this doesn’t change anything. Anyway, the priest didn’t come.

  So all through that wonderful day and during the following long night after the Eighth Day, when our rabbi Shmuel Ben-David laid on a pillow of purple velvet his little crying nephew by the name of Elia Blumenfeld, whom the mohel then carefully circumcised to bring him into the bosom of Abraham, and when neighbors were coming in one after the other, like the wise men to the Virgin at the cave outside Bet Lehem, or Bethlehem as you call it, then I, happily embracing Sarah, deeply understood that all people—it doesn’t matter who—the Jews, the Poles, or even if you take the Bushmen from the Kalahari desert—are created by God, glory to His name, to love each other, and not to wage war against each other. This was the real end of my war and the beginning of the profound peace that I concluded in my soul with all human beings, may they be blessed by His generosity with goodness and wisdom!

  There is one more circumcision coming up—my second son Joshua seems to have been hiding behind the door and came up right after his brother. I already told you that Joshua, or Yeshua, means Jesus (it’s the Greeks’ fault because they couldn’t pronounce a bunch of sounds and in this way misled humanity) but this is a different issue too. I don’t mean to offend anyone, I’m just reminding you that the Christian Son of God Yeshua was also circumcised on a purple velvet pillow and I’ll just use the occasion to be a nuisance to you with my old joke about Mordechai, who couldn’t figure out why his Polish neighbor would send his boy to a seminary:

  “Because,” said the neighbor, “he can become a priest.”

  “So what?” asked Mordechai, surprised.

  “Then he can become a cardinal!”

  “And, so?”

  “And one day he can even become pope!”

  “So?”

  The neighbor got upset. “What do you mean ‘so’? A pope! What do you want him to become—God?”

  “Why,” said Mordechai, “one of our boys did, didn’t he?”

  Sarah and the children and I had a little house with a little vegetable garden, not far from my father’s workshop, you remember, Mode Parisienne. I was of course working there, not as an apprentice anymore but as an equal, so to say, associate, and from the thought of hitting me with a wooden yardstick on the head, my father was very far. On the one hand, my heroic past from the war had changed his attitude toward me, and on the other, I was now really far from being that silly boy who would lose his mind over fiacres and ladies in pink.

  FOUR

  And so my life went on as a subject of the Zhech Pospolita, in other words, a Polish citizen—up and down, and up and down again along the gray, as I’ve already put it, hills of everyday life—turning old caftans inside out, and, with the craftsmanship of the Jewish tailor, from a piece of cloth barely enough even for one suit cutting not only the suit but an additional vest, with an occasional symbolic slap for Ilyusha, and also for Yeshu, whom everyone called “Schura”—the Russian nickname for cut-up—because the two of them literally, as we say, “crushed the onions in the garden,” in other words, were always up to some mischief or other, for which I in my turn would get a soft, mildly reproachful look from their mother, Sarah. Oh, Lord God, Sarah, how I loved her! How she filled my life to overflowing—it takes my breath away—the kind, the good, the silent, the faithful. And now, in my old age, when I’m writing these lines and she is long gone, my eyes fill up with bitter tears of remorse, because I never told her this, never—not even when she left for the mineral baths with the children…. No, this will come later, it is still early for the mineral baths and everything that followed! And as the stallions of my story impatiently and wildly gallop through time, I’ve almost missed that point in Sarah’s and my life—or if you’d rather call it, that milestone—behind which peeps a sweet face with freckles and reddish blond hair like mine, and grayish green eyes like Sarah’s: our child Susannah, our third in order of appearance.

  The family had gotten bigger. From the carpenter Goldstein we had to order a new, bigger table, because at the Shabbos dinner we were a bit too many—my father and my mother, and Uncle Chaimle, who never got married, Sarah and me, the children, and not too rarely—when he wasn’t engaged in his strange and somewhat secretive affairs—our dear rabbi Shmuel Ben-David. Sometimes my sister and her husband, the assistant pharmacist Shabtsi Krantz, from Lvov, would stop by. I mentioned the carpenter Goldstein, and don’t be surprised that in our modest, and sometimes even poor part of the world, there were mountains of Goldbergs,* and there were zillions of Goldsteins and the Zilbersteins, not to mention veins of more precious stones like rubies. And all this wealth was spread out in the lavish flower gardens of Rosenbaums, Blums, Krantzes, Lilienthals, and, excuse me, Blumenfelds. There was also one iceberg, Isidor Eisberg, but I swear, he had nothing to do with the fatal end of the Titanic. And maybe the poorest resident of Kolodetz was the widow Golda Zilber, this was her name—gold and silver—who for pennies at the market would sell roasted pumpkin seeds. Don’t think, please, that this time again, following an old Jewish habit, I’m making a detour from the story, taking a short cut through Odessa to Berdichev, but I was talking about our new Shabbos table. And on these Friday nights, after dinner and everything else that was due by ritual, people ate seeds—pumpkin seeds, not sunflower. Sunflower seeds were a specialty of the Ukrainian women, leaning over their fences, crunching seeds with fantastic speed, performing all sorts of technological operations with the tongue alone, and when spitting seeds, capable of hitting you with them on the forehead from a distance of two Russian versts. No, the Jews, sitting around the table, are eating pumpkin seeds on Shabbos evening—eating them slowly, with dignity, and intently talking about life. It’s hard for me to calculate the amount of information that was exchanged on one Shabbos night in Kolodetz around the festive tables, to the crunching of pumpkin seeds, with the rare seconds of silence filled by the quiet and pensive cracking of seeds between the teeth, like logs quietly crackling in the fireplace. Some call it the “Jewish newspaper,” but this, in my opinion, is simply a poor description, because the amount of news, rumor, gossip, and data of all sorts—starting with political news about Soviet Russia all the way to the comet, which, according to some clairvoyant, was rushing with insane speed toward Earth, and would supposedly lead to an inevitable catastrophe—they couldn’t fit into any one newspaper on the whole planet. And to this if you add the ever-present stories for boosting self-esteem that are as a rule decorated with fantastic and simply incredible details, fruit of the rich Kolodetz imagination, about the banker Rothschild and Lord Disraeli, and about Leon Blum also being a Jew, and then the reverse, for suppressing our growing pride—about that anti-Semite, equal to Nebuchadnezzar and all our ill-wishers put together, who seems to be about to grab power in Germany, even though he is an Austrian sergeant major or something—Adolf Schicklgruber—you’ll understand that I do not exaggerate when I compare this Shabbos exchange of thoughts and knowledge accompanied by the crunching of pumpkin seeds to the library of Alexandria, with all its papyruses, parchment scrolls, and cuneiform clay tablets. And a tragedy not less than the end of this library of Alexandria took place that Friday, when at the market some Polish pan from Tarnov kicked old Golda Zilber’s basket because she happened to be standing in his way, and the seeds spilled out all over the mud. This was the death, right in front of the eyes of the astonished residents of Kolodetz by Drogobych, of hundreds of papyruses with news, gossip,
and knowledge, thousands of rolls of parchment and handmade Arabian paper, tons of clay tablets with wise saws and jokes, kilometers of telegraph tickertape with reports from Soviet Russia, and news about the comet that keeps dashing toward Earth and Baron Rothschild and that evil fiend and philistine Adolf Schicklgruber—all of these, hidden in those seemingly miserable baked pumpkin seeds, so contemptuously called the “Jewish newspaper,” were now rolling in the mud in front of the weeping and desperate Golda.

  It isn’t good to brag about charity—it’s something spiritual and discreet—but let me tell you anyway that we collected money and paid for Golda’s pumpkin seeds, and even the mayor Pan Voitek produced a passionate curse in Russian, addressed to that idiot from Tarnov, and gave his share. By the way, I don’t know why, but all of us—Jews, and Ukrainians, and Russians—all cursed in Russian. Much, much later, after that other war, when I visited the country of Israel—both for work and just simply to see the land of my ancestors—I noticed again that phenomenon: Babylon is just a chirping kindergarten, compared to this Tower of Babel in that new country of ours, may Yahweh bless it with peace. Everyone there speaks the language he brought with his luggage, and everyone has his own specific opinion on all issues of politics, war, and existence, but once you get to swearing, there suddenly arises a national monolithic unity—everybody swears in Russian. Why this should be so, I can’t say. Maybe some linguist will decode this phenomenon, so unique in its glamour and richness of expression.