“I’m not Moishe,” said the other one, “but Aaron.”
“Look at you! Even your name is different.”
My name remained unchanged, but in Russian fashion I am now citizen Isaac Yakobovich Blumenfeld—a fact that, I swear to God, in no way makes me different.
Otherwise things in general changed quite substantially. To put it in other words, our transition from Austria-Hungary to Poland was somehow easier and smoother, with no major calamities, just David Leibovitch taking down the portrait of Franz-Joseph in his café and sometime later, when the situation got clearer, putting up Pilsudski in his place, and Pan Voitek going from policeman to mayor. For greater vividness and clarity we could say that my father, Aaron Blumenfeld, had stuck his needle in one side of the caftan as an Austro-Hungarian, and pulled out the thread on the other side as a Pole. Well, there were some minor mishaps, like the assassination of President Narutovich, or, say, the Krakow uprising, but that one didn’t knock us out and passed like a spring cold. Whereas things were now changing radically, we could even say at a revolutionary pace, otherwise there wouldn’t be any sense in any of this shot-swapping October 1917, and Lenin could have quite calmly ridden in the first class compartment of the Berlin-Petrograd train, and not, as they say, in a sealed freight car, and then he could quite as easily have gotten a cab, instead of climbing onto an armored personnel carrier. I would give you as an example of such a radical, or if you prefer, revolutionary change, the taking down of the Mode Parisienne sign. This French fashion seemed to the new bosses, who had come either from the inner part of the country, or from the Polish prisons, quite decadent and incompatible with workers-and-peasants’ fashion trends, and we—that is my father and I—became simple workers at Artel #6 of the Headindprodunit. Don’t be amazed at this difficult-to-pronounce abbreviation; I don’t remember if it sounded this way or something like it, but it’s just a kid’s toy in comparison to some other considerably more complicated and more revolutionary blends of nine or even twenty-three words, that after you try to pronounce them, it takes you half an hour to untangle the sailor’s knots your tongue’s been twisted into. What is inexplicable in this case is that sometimes a similar Soviet abbreviation is longer than the word that it’s made out of—a phenomenon that was researched by the Institute on Paranormal Physical Phenomena in Leningrad. A similar phenomenon was discovered by Shimon Finkelstein, who claims he saw a snake one meter and twenty centimeters long from head to tail, and two meters long from tail to head. To the objection of Mendel that such a phenomenon is impossible, Finkelstein replied: “Well, how then in your opinion is it possible that from Monday to Wednesday there are two days, and from Wednesday to Monday, five?”
The change in name and status of our atelier also brought about as a natural consequence the taking down from the window, which, if you remember, was at the level of the sidewalk, of the by now quite weathered ladies in pink and gentlemen in tuxedos, and their replacement with the slogan “THE FIVE-YEAR PLAN SPEEDED UP!” And in that case, as with the ladies and gentlemen from the damned bourgeois past, something enduring and eternal was put up—and thank God for that, because there was no indication of which five years it was all about, or in what way my father and I had to implement it.
Of course, it would be naive of you to think that this was the only change that the new Soviet reality lavished on the modest life of our forgotten little province. It might seem a little exaggerated, but even though our life from one point of view became harder, especially with regard to provisions, from another our confidence grew, and we were filled with the sense that we were part—a small, perhaps, but important screw—in a great, not quite completely incomprehensible mechanism, something like a time machine, and I do mean future time, with its own place or role in the gigantic historic khokhma that was playing on the world stage. Believe me, it’s true, and most people believed in the Soviet power or wanted to believe in it, even when it dawned on them that it was an illusion and they realized they were being plain lied to. Only if you’re religious will you understand what I mean, because the Holy God, glory to His name, has more than once deluded you and promised things that He might have intended to fulfill, but was then distracted by other things and forgot. But you haven’t even for a second come to doubt His glory, you’ve searched for extenuating reasons or consolations of the God-delays-but-doesn’t-forget or God’s-mills-grind-slow variety. Or don’t you think so?
And while we’re on the subject of God, I can solemnly announce to you that the unreasonable action of the Polish military authorities, who cut the hair and shaved the beard of the wise Shmuel Ben-David, speeded up the process of his final choice: he became chairman of the Club of Militant Atheists, which was situated in a corner of the Culture House “October Fireworks.” If you’re wondering from where these fireworks popped up in our Kolodetz, I’ll give you a simple answer: this was the former café of David Leibovitch, who was appointed culture commissar with a fixed Soviet salary. Pan Voitek, or more precisely Comrade Voitek, was arrested and questioned for only two hours in his capacity as former mayor, but the loyal citizens of Kolodetz gave favorable references for him and he was appointed the Director of ZAGS, which was the Office of Citizen Registration. He noted down in the Kolodetz council records the weddings and the divorces, the newly born and the deceased, may their souls rest in peace—the deceased, that is.
Don’t ask me about the other common acquaintances of ours—every one took surprisingly fast to his frontline post in the generally clumsy, forgive the expression, system of Soviet bureaucracy, but still we have to spare some time for Comrade Lev Sabetaevich—you remember Liova Weissmann with the films?—because he became the editor in chief of the Red Galicia newspaper and his case turned out to be not so simple. Because, if you remember, he wanted to unite the Jewish social democrats, and this last word, especially in combination with the last but one, enraged the Bolsheviks like the red bullfighter’s cape enrages the bull. Poor Liova Weissmann, at a meeting in front of the comrades, including the representative of the Center, Comrade Esther Katz, had to criticize himself elaborately and honestly. If you’re wondering what “the Center” might mean, I’ll give you a hint that this was a very foggy Soviet definition, which was simply intended to create respect and it could mean anything, from the local committee in neighboring Truskovetz to the higher institutions of the endless party or state ladder from Lvov, Minsk, and Kiev to distant Moscow. I hope you know what self-criticism means: it means butchering yourself with your own hands, skinning yourself and presenting your skin stretched on a rack, or to put it in biblical terms, covering your head with ashes, tearing your shirt, and only then will the convened panel make a great effort to prevent you from plucking out all your hair. I would give you a piece of advice for a similar case in life: in no way try to prolong and take the guilt as a bitter medicine, spoon by spoon, but jump courageously into the ocean of regret and confess at once all your sins and mistakes since the time of the First and the Second International till the present day, and if in the silence you hear the tapping of a pencil on the table, and the Russian “malo, malo” (“insufficient, insufficient”), just go straight ahead and without any petty bourgeois run-around, place upon the scales of compassion also your personal guilt for the death of Herculaneum and Pompei. Then you’ll be saved, and your career for the next two or three five-year plans secured, because the Russian as a rule has a sensitive and emotional nature and if he’s touched by the sincerity of your repentance, he may even invite you to his house for tea, though you’ll hardly get any, because this is the code name for a different beverage, and after one bottle of this stuff, he’ll kiss you on the forehead and announce that he not only loves you but also respects you.
I wasn’t present at the rehabilitation, because I’m neither a party man nor an activist like my brother-in-law Ben-David, but he told me that Esther Katz was silent most of the time, because she could hardly stand the fools, and she meant not the poor
well-intended Liova Weissmann but the comrades, who came from the Center to investigate him.
In general, our transition from petty bourgeois, class-unconscious slaves of Capital, I mean that capital in the safe of Rothschild and not Das Kapital of Karl Marx, to the avant-garde of workers from all over the world, happened without special histrionics. With one exception that I don’t understand to this day and whose logic I continue to search for without success: the German family Fritz and Else Schneider was most politely asked by the Soviet authorities to pack their bags, and, as we learned later, accompanied to the border and handed over, against a written receipt, to Hitler’s authorities. This was done, they say, according to some Soviet-German agreement but—forgive my rude expression—I piss on an agreement that renders back the refugees of one regime into the hands of that same regime, so that they could be sent to camps and maybe even executed. As my parents used to say: “God’s deeds have neither length nor depth, neither is it given to us to comprehend them.”
Even Esther Katz shrugged her shoulders helplessly. “I don’t know…maybe they’re agents from Hitler?”
“And so they return defective merchandise to the producer?” asked Rabbi Ben-David skeptically.
Esther Katz swallowed her ready answer, which, as it seemed, wasn’t convincing even to herself.
TWO
One magnificent silvery lock of hair mischievously curled itself, just like our Kolodetz river, through the raven black Galilean locks of my Sarah, who continued to look at me with love and faithfulness in her big gray-green eyes and despite my irritation kept on stubbornly putting the best piece of meat in my bowl of borscht, though it was due, according to Jewish patriarchal tradition, to my father. Our eldest son, Ilyusha, was studying law in Kiev and this also was part—together with music and medicine—of the Jewish tradition, and please don’t believe the myth that commerce is the Jews’ element. Maybe once upon a time in Phoenician antiquity it might’ve been true, but today any average Armenian, Syrian, or Greek will three times over buy and sell the Jewish merchant, who won’t even have a clue. If it were any other way, then Kolodetz would have been a center of world trade, though even you could have made the counterargument from the doubtless fact that we were not exactly brimming over with David Oistrakhs or Doctor Wassermanns! Our younger son Yeshua seemed as if he’d been rocked to sleep with the “Internationale” since he was in his cradle, because he was entirely dedicated to his membership in the Komsomol, including in DOSAAF—a society for the support of the army, air force, and navy, and he was crazy about—imagine that!—flying gliders. Both Sarah and my mother—old Rebekha—were terrified by these doings, until I forbade them to meddle in the young people’s lives, and in this plural number I include his sister Susannah too, who, in her turn, deluded by her brother, was jumping with parachutes and even won some kind of a sports medal.
My father was already quite aged and couldn’t see well, which not only prevented him from gloriously continuing his tailor’s artful craft of turning old caftans inside out, but even kept him from knowing where he had stuck his needle. Despite my insisting that he take more time to rest, he continued to come early to the atelier and to leave it when we were locking up, perhaps by habit, or in full belief that he maybe needed to give me a piece of professional advice. Moreover, some of the old men naturally withdrew from “October Fireworks,” that is, the former café of David Leibovitch, and gradually moved over to our place, in this way creating a second Jewish cultural sanctuary. There they weren’t involved with discussing the role of the Jewish proletariat in the global revolutionary process but mainly with the family of Baron Rothschild and their not insignificant problems, and also with forecasts about the coming defeat of Hitler and what Churchill said about that—an area in which the main expert was the postman Avramchik, already retired and proudly wearing the honorary badge of the Commissariat of the Post and Communications. The old men loved Churchill and the English, some unexplainable magnetism drew their thoughts all the time in that direction; and at the same time, because of a quite understandable reaction, inherent to the Jews since the times of the Spanish Isabella and the Great Inquisitor Torquemada, they delicately avoided making any comments on the economic situation of the Soviet Union or, say, the most recent interview of Stalin with a Times reporter, regarding Soviet-German relations. Such interviews and all kinds of announcements by TASS or articles in Pravda, diligently reprinted by Liova Weissmann in Red Galicia, monotonously repeated the same thing over and over again, namely that our relations with the Krauts are getting better and better, and there’s no massing of troops at any borders, which the wise old men of Kolodetz allowed to pass with no comment, closing the issue with an exchange of glances and a quick transition to the always relevant topic of Baron Rothschild.
Believe me, the attractive power of that baron and his relatively important place in the life of Kolodetz was not an accident. He provided hope and faith, and strengthened the invincible Jewish optimism and belief in the fully realistic chance of getting rich and becoming a millionaire—a belief comparable to the unquestionable fact that any vendor of popcorn in the United States has a chance of becoming president. Kolodetz by Drogobych, naturally, was quite a way from America and such expectations could have hardly referred, for example, to Golda Zilber, the vendor of pumpkin seeds, not only because women cannot become president of the USA, but because of many other reasons too, including the skill of the old men of Kolodetz in distinguishing the probable and the possible from the improbable and the impossible, and not getting carried away with fantasies. Just like one time Kaplan said excitedly to Mendel: “Do you know who I saw yesterday in the subway in Berdichev? You won’t believe it: Karl Marx himself!” To which Mendel, skeptical in principle of any kind of fantasy, replied: “You’re talking nonsense, there’s no subway in Berdichev!”
On Fridays before dusk the workshop would suddenly become deserted and everyone would hurry home, because the Soviet authorities at least so far were being tolerant of local traditions and the labor unions were not preventing the Jews from celebrating Shabbos the way it should be. Then Mama and Sarah would lay a white tablecloth on the table once made by the carpenter Goldstein, and my mother would light the candles with a trembling hand, getting at the wicks with difficulty, then say the prayer in Hebrew like a mechanical riddle. My two newly hatched Komsomol activists, with hands tangled in prayer fashion, would try to snicker and wink, but having encountered the stern look of their mother Sarah, they would stifle their atheist inclinations.
To you it might seem strange—this mix of Soviet power with Hasidism, but I don’t exclude the possibility that Karl Marx himself, whom Kaplan saw in Berdichev, used to light up a menorah when on Friday nights he had dinner with Jenny. The faint religious-mystical mist surrounding this night, sacred to the Jews, has long ago been blown away and it’s become a popular ritual, something like the Easter painting of eggs in the dynastic communist families who have serious doubts on the topic of the Resurrection, or, say, the enormous drinking-to-unconsciousness on May 1, another Soviet tradition, also exciting, that has long lost any trace of the religious.
Every Shabbos night we were visited—sometimes with a package of meat, sometimes with a huge carp of unknown origins, or even with a bag of Georgian mandarin oranges, rare for our part of the world—by my dear brother-in-law Shmuel Ben-David, now registered, who knows why, as Samuel Davidovich Zvassmann—maybe because of that heroic endeavor of prisoners, exiled in Siberia from the times of the czar, to make their names sound less Jewish and if possible more Russian revolutionary, an endeavor that renamed Leib Bronstein as Leo Trotsky. And maybe it was all done because of conspiracy reasons, which hardly explains the transformation of my brother-in-law from Ben-David to Davidovich, or Weiss to Belov, or Zilberstein to Serebrov, or Moishe Perlmann to Ivan Ivanich. Apparently there’s some other reason here, but it’s not my business to decipher it. And if you weren’t constantly diverting me from the
path of my story, I’d add that the former rabbi visited quite often accompanied by Comrade Esther Katz, who was always shyly apologizing for her unannounced appearance. I would tenderly look at them—these two not-so-young-anymore people, who had dedicated to others the best years of their lives and the most valuable part of themselves, who with a messianic passion had scattered their youth in roaming around the vast earthly and heavenly chasms, looking for the big truths, while they, the truths, so often turn out to be, unfortunately, illusory and deceiving shimmers of water in the desert or fake golden coins that rust after the first humid winter. And maybe in this there’s also some kind of meaning from God—in the searching and not in the finding, and maybe their youth was not all wasted in vain, but generously planted in the field of the future for distant rich harvests. I don’t know. I would observe them and it seemed to me that these two truth-diggers, she dedicated completely to a new religion, he trying painfully to marry an old one to Das Kapital, had finally lit upon happiness—if not the communal one, at least the small, personal one. They were not indifferent to each other and maybe had something even bigger than that. But the two converging directions of their souls were not meant to come together and become one; you’ll get a report on this a little later.
The Shabbos candles were burning. We were sitting around the table and enjoying the peace that was resting over Soviet Kolodetz as a blessing from God, and somewhere in the distance a record player was flooding the area with the song of the three tank crewmen—three joyful comrades in the war machine. This was at the time a very popular song, because things with the Japanese in the Far East were not going well, and the song was telling how the samurai crossed the border at the river and how we smashed their faces. This, by the way, is an important thread in my story and I will go back to it a little later, when my Soviet motherland summons me Under the Flags and sends me into holy battle with the above-mentioned Japanese samurai.
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