Isaac's Torah

by Angel Wagenstein

  I still went through Odessa to reach Berdichev, but tell me, brother, can you change what is given to one by God and is, so to speak, in one’s blood? Can you make the tiger eat grass or the fish build itself a nest in that poplar over there, let alone keep a Jew from going off the straight path of his story, here and there—once to pick a little yellow flower, another time just to look around, breathe in the fresh air, share with you how beautiful God’s wide world is, and tell you in relation to this or that either a joke or a khokhma?! Or a Jew stops to watch a herd of cows and to give valuable advice to the herder, even though he hasn’t milked even a single cow in his entire life. He likes to give advice, he’s crazy about it, this is also in his blood, and in this regard the ancient Talmudists from the Babylonian Sanhedrin have an interpretation of the mystery of why God only at the end, on the sixth day, created man and woman. The answer of the wise men couldn’t be clearer: had Adam and Eve, who were Jews, been created in the beginning, they would’ve driven the Creator insane with all their advice. It’s even said, I don’t know if it’s true, that during the Sinai operation, in front of every Israeli soldier in the trenches, there was a sign saying: “During attacks, it is strictly forbidden for soldiers to give advice to the ranking officers!”

  So I was talking about the new table of the carpenter Goldstein. Well, one Shabbos night we were all gathered around that same table and the candles were lit. My father hadn’t yet read the festive brokhe, when my brother-in-law showed up, Sarah’s brother Rabbi Ben-David. But he didn’t come alone; with him was—guess who?—Esther Katz, the lawyer from Warsaw, who, once, a very long time ago, had brought into the barracks the inflammatory leaflets, because of which I had to stand stark naked and miserable in front of our lined-up company. Throughout the whole evening she was reserved and silent—I told you that she spoke all languages, as if she had invented them herself, so she didn’t have any problems with Yiddish, but she would respond briefly and politely, constantly casting glances at the rabbi. There was some tension about her, and I was left with the impression that this fragile and valiant woman was in fact quite a shy person, committed entirely to a cause that I didn’t really comprehend well. When we moved to the pumpkin seeds and exhausted the topic of the comet, Uncle Chaimle, who was a little bit informed about everything, directly addressed her, to my disbelief, as “Comrade Katz,” even though in my opinion neither at that time nor later had he anything to do with all that business, and was only showing off how up he was on everything. Anyway, he addressed her with the usual questions about the situation in Soviet Russia. She answered reluctantly and briefly, said only that great deeds were being done there, that the newspapers in aristocratic Poland were lying, cast a glance at Rabbi Ben-David again and became silent.

  Then Ben-David carefully started: “Could Esther stay with you tonight? You understand that with me, in the synagogue, it’s inconvenient. Moreover, I’m an old bachelor…”

  He laughed a little dryly and artificially, my mother and father shared a brief worried look, then my father said brightly, “Of course, Itzik’s room,”—he meant me—“is free. Of course!”

  “Not that there’s anything…,” the rabbi started casually again, “but there’s no reason to make noise about her spending a night here. You know what I mean?”

  My father and Uncle Chaimle nodded conspiratorially, even though they hardly knew what it was all about.

  In the morning when I went to work at the shop, the guest had already left and my father said that Shmuel Ben-David had come when it was still dark and taken her away.

  Much later, when I had already eaten enough herring heads, if you know what I mean, it occurred to me that on that night she had either come illegally from Russia or was going to Russia. But this thought, I repeat, came to my mind much later, when the Bolsheviks shot Esther Katz.

  Another old acquaintance of ours stopped by at Kolodetz—Liova Weissmann, you remember, the one whose unconquerable Austro-Hungarian army was always irresistibly advancing. He was discreetly whispering to people that he was holding a meeting for Jews only, with a very important agenda, at the coffee shop of David Leibovitch, but I hope you won’t be surprised if I tell you that only seven people showed up, including myself and the rabbi Ben-David. The others had either caught a whiff of politics, or at just that moment the damn tooth had started to ache, or the cow was calving, or the roof tiles had cracked, or rain was coming, or there was simply no one to mind the little dairy store. I don’t think the ones who didn’t turn up missed very much, because Liova Weissmann announced what all of us already knew, namely, that the storm clouds over Europe were getting darker, that in Germany the harassment of our Jewish brothers had intensified and that Hitler, that same Schicklgruber, had announced in Linz the annexation of our former motherland Austria to the thousand year Third Reich and other things like that. He spoke about the necessity of unifying the Jewish social democrats, and the rabbi nervously objected to such Zionist leanings, as he called them, that we should not separate the Jewish proletariat from their brothers in fate, and so on. I don’t know who was right—maybe both, and maybe neither. You know that story about the rabbi who was sought by Mendel and Berkovitch to settle their dispute. The rabbi listened to Mendel and said: “You’re right!” Then he listened to Berkovitch and said: “You’re right, too!” His wife cried out from the kitchen: “It can’t be that one is right and the other right, too!” And the rabbi replied: “And you’re right, too!”

  In any case, the dispute that was threatening to deepen the separation among us seven people did not flare up, because the mayor Pan Voitek entered the coffee shop. He politely said hello, sat down, and ordered a glass of tea with three spoonfuls of sugar.

  Then he said, “You haven’t shown films for a long while, Pan Weissmann. It’s a useful entertainment and in every respect worthy of support, while for political meetings permission is first to be requested from the mayor’s office. Not that I have anything against your Jewish organizations, Pan Weissmann, but laws are to be kept and respected.”

  Clearly the government was not particularly worried about such social democratic unifying or separating initiatives, they were scared of others, but it’s not my job to meddle in politics. All of us sneaked out one after the other, only Rabbi Ben-David stayed behind and also ordered tea with three spoonfuls of sugar.

  Because of the above-mentioned reasons, the social democratic union of the Jews from Kolodetz by Drogobych didn’t happen, but this didn’t affect in any way the development of events in the world.

  * Goldberg—“Golden Mountain,” Zilberstein—“Silver Stone,” etc. [Mr. Blumenfeld’s note]

  FIVE

  And in the meantime events in the world were flowing and rumors were getting more and more confusing and alarming. We already knew by heart where Teruel was and what had happened at Khalkin Gol between Soviet and Japanese military units, and what the problem with Alsace and Lotharingia was, and we also knew that the Mannerheim Line was hardly just an ordinary line on the map. Just at that time a German family came to Kolodetz out of the blue, Fritz and Else Schneider. The last name sounded quite Jewish, but they were not one of ours, just the opposite, they were pure Aryans. They didn’t talk much, moreover they couldn’t even say their names in any one of the Slavic languages, but with us they somehow found understanding, because as I’ve already told you, our Yiddish is a precious mixture of different languages with a predominant presence of German scraps. The Schneiders had nothing to do with tailoring, it was just their family name that meant “tailor,” and they opened a small shop for the repair of bicycles and all kinds of motors. A little later, when our good neighborly relations grew stronger and they were even paid a visit by the rabbi, with whom they chatted in a friendly manner and in the purest German, it became clear that they’d fled to our part of the world because of their insurmountable dislike of the Führer, with whom they had some kind of disagreement on basic matters of exist
ence.

  Our rabbi adored them and insisted that the Brown Shirts would manage to survive only another couple of months or so, because they were a pack of barbarians who’d encountered united resistance from the German people, who’d given the world this thing and that person. Just how far from the truth my brother-in-law was there’s no need for me to explain. I suppose you’ve got insights of your own into Human History as not just the cherished memory of great men; you’ve also got some ideas about nations that have given the world this and that, but are capable of pulling such mean tricks on you that you’d probably curse even your mother’s milk. I remembered Nahum Weiss, the plumber from Dresden, who was still managing to keep his head above water, but was expecting at any moment to be sent away with five pounds of personal belongings as a person of non-Aryan, that is, Jewish origin. When his still un-disconnected phone rang up and a rude voice asked: “Am I speaking with Obergruppensturmfürhrer Otto Shultz?” poor Nahum Weiss sadly replied, “Oh, my dear sir, have you ever got the wrong number!” In the same way our otherwise deeply learned rabbi, who could follow the path not only through the labyrinths of Hasidism and its first great elder, the Baal Shem Tov, but also Karl Marx, was also wrong about the number in connection with the impending collapse of Hitler, as unfortunately we could never even imagine at that time.

  I don’t want to tell you a long story about the events that followed. You can simply take a look in any booklet to learn about the rapid speed of that festering boil again swelling in the womb of Europe, which could not help bursting at even the lightest prick of the thorns of the slightest conflict between countries. This time it wasn’t at all about a banana peel in Stockholm, neither was it about the murder of some archduke, because, I repeat, when a war has to explode, it explodes, and what triggers it loses any meaning whatsoever. In this case I think it was about the Germans who were requesting something from Poland and the allies of Poland didn’t want to give it, after they had already given Austria, and the Sudetenland, and whatever else had been requested of them—both in front and behind—and after that idiot Chamberlain was pledging in Germany eternal friendship with the Nazis, and Molotov and Ribbentrop were kissing each other like two old feygelahs. Please don’t think that these are reflections of mine from that time, I was too ignorant to have them then, but time imposes its transparent layers one after the other, bringing closer or taking further away the events as if seen through binoculars—first from one side, then from the other—and then things that used to be unclear to you in the past are covered with thoughts of today or, if you’d rather call them, delusions of today.

  So the whole affair ended up—or better to say, started again—with the quite aged military analyst from the Russian-Turkish war, the postman Avramchik, who again brought me a yellow piece of paper with more or less the same text, something like “Within seven days of receipt of this…” and so on, as you’ve guessed by now. And so, my dear mother Poland, holy land of the ancestors and so on, was summoning me Under the Flags.

  This time a lot of us were called up—Jews, and Ukrainians, and Poles. It’s neither a literary caprice nor some amazing set of circumstances, but summoned again was my brother-in-law, the wise rabbi Shmuel Ben-David. I won’t tell you how Sarah cried and how I stroked her hair, explaining that this time the war would be brief, without even suspecting how close I was to the truth. And so, on the next day we were supposed to leave for the West, to the German border, where the fearsome war had already flared up.

  On September 17, 1939, already outfitted by my unit in Drogobych with a complete set of military gear, at seven o’clock sharp in the morning, I showed up at the small square next to the bazaar—the same place where Golda Zilber met the demise of the Alexandrian library and where those mobilized from Kolodetz were assembling. This time the spiritual rank of Rabbi Ben-David was not, God knows why, taken into consideration by the military field officers and he looked a little strange, even funny—his face shaven and his hair cut short—in soldiers’ clothes. The women were gathering at the side, some were crying; Sarah was quietly weeping too. She’d come with the children, and my mother and father were there as well. There was no military music, but to make up for it Pan Voitek, the mayor, came to see us off personally, full of epic sentiments and completely aware of the historic moment that our motherland was experiencing.

  And now, hold tight to your chair so you don’t fall off: despite the overall pathos of the moment, I was not destined to bring victory at the point of my bayonet, or at least to lay my bones in the Pantheon of the motherland, because for me personally, as well as for my dear brother-in-law Rabbi Ben-David, and also, by the way, for all the men who were gathering at the little square in Kolodetz, once again the war was over before it started.

  The whole point is that Sarah and the children and I, Rabbi Shmuel Ben-David, Mama and Dad, and also all of my dear neighbors—Pan Voitek, the Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, and even the German family Fritz and Else Schneider—all of us, including the Roman Catholic priest and the Orthodox priest, saw the realization of our next national ideal that exact same morning. Or, as the political commissar Nikanor Skidanenko announced from the top of the T-34 Russian tank, we were released from the yoke of feudal-aristocratic Poland and annexed to our workers-and-peasants’ fatherland, the great Soviet Union.

  And so, my dear brother, the dream, which I never imagined having, came true, as they say in the labor union reports, 100 percent, and I was already a conscious citizen, living in the Soviet miastechko of Kolodetz, the once-upon-a-time Austrian-Hungarian province of Lemberg, the former Polish voevodstvo of Lvov, and now, suddenly, an outpost of the world revolution.

  ISAAC’S THIRD BOOK

  The Red Front, or the Five-Year Plan Speeded-Up

  ONE

  Excuse me, please, for starting with a khokhma, you know, an Hasidic fable that’s not even funny—but maybe with some effort you’ll figure out the moral. It’s about the blind man Yossel, whom even the children, otherwise capable of making fun of any unfortunate soul, respectfully help across the street. So one time this Yossel goes to the rabbi, feeling the way with his cane, and asks him, “Rabbi, what are you doing now?”

  “I’m drinking milk.”

  “What does milk look like, Rabbi?”

  “Well, it’s a kind of white liquid.”

  “What does ‘white’ mean?”

  “Well…white like a swan.”

  “And what does ‘swan’ mean?”

  “This kind of bird with a curved neck.”

  “What does ‘curved’ mean, Rabbi?”

  The rabbi bent his arm at the elbow. “Touch here and you will know what ‘curved’ means.”

  The blind Yossel carefully felt the arm and eventually said, gratefully, “Thank you, Rabbi. Now I know what milk looks like.”

  In the same way, my dear and patient reader, don’t be fooled by either the curve of my arm, which is writing these lines, or by my modest attempts to explain things to you. Don’t be fooled into thinking that you’ll understand, just like the blind man Yossel, what milk looks like or, for instance, my new motherland the U.S.S.R., for I never learned whether what was happening in Kolodetz by Drogobych looked like what was happening, say, in Tambov or Novosibirsk, and if the term “Soviet” had the same meaning here, there, or for the Yurts somewhere in the Kara Kum desert. That is why to this day I get irritated when some little journalist from abroad passes through Moscow for three days and then, according to his political affiliation, starts explaining, with an expert’s tone, to the ignorant and blind world what milk looks like, without realizing that he’s only felt the curved arm of Moscow and that the seemingly good and the just can be fake, and the seemingly bad, which we are in a big rush to get rid of, could be a misunderstood or unappreciated good. Especially if you think about the immense size of this newly acquired motherland of mine—so immense that there are places from which it’s closer to go over to Japan and
buy half a kilo of meat than to reach the next Soviet town. Let alone that problems with meat aren’t only related to the close proximity of Japan, since it was exactly from those distant Siberian lands that there came to us all the way down to Kolodetz the case of the citizen who entered a Soviet butcher shop and asked: “Could you weigh half a kilo of meat for me?” He got a polite answer: “Sure, bring it in.”

  Because of the above reason, don’t expect from me head-spinning generalizations, because, on the one hand, I’m not the kind of person who thinks that way—you remember the rabbi once described me as a little slow—and on the other hand, because I simply didn’t understand many things, which even to this day, in my old age, have still got me scratching my head. Don’t expect either, that following the fashion, I will jump and start spitting on this third motherland of mine, because, if you’ve noticed, I may have unconsciously made a harsh or critical comment about the first two, for which I apologize, but I never allowed myself to talk against them, or to speak of them with disrespect. So don’t think that now, in my capacity as a Soviet citizen, and hence a fighter in the avant-garde of progressive mankind, I have suddenly changed so much that you won’t recognize me. Don’t be like that fool Mendel who saw someone in the street and exclaimed, “How different you are, Moishe, without a beard and mustache!”