Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life (40 page)

“This is a day that compares to the Day of Atonement. This day, O bride, is your most beautiful day, as well as the bitterest, for on this day you stand before the Almighty, like a soldier before his king. And how does a soldier stand before his king? Filled with virtue and good deeds, humbly. That is why you must do penance today and pray to the Almighty, to find favor and grace in His eyes.”

In the middle of his address, the short Jew started to cough. His hairy face reddened, as if he were choking. Everyone waited until he caught his breath, wiped the sweat off his brow, and was ready to resume.

“This day,” he continued his charge to the bride, “you are like a tree which has just sprung up from the ground and not yet begun to bear fruit. But once the sun starts warming the roots of the tree, tiny leaves begin to sprout, tiny buds appear, and only later do the buds become fruit. O bride, that is what you are now. Today you are nothing, a speck of dust, mere chaff, but if God, may His name be blessed, so wills it, your leaves will begin to sprout and the buds will bear fruit.”

Toybe’s shoulders shuddered quietly. Mother wept, a handkerchief over her eyes.

The address to the bridegroom was shorter. The bridegroom himself, dressed in a cotton
kapote,
looking even smaller than usual, sat at the head of the table, his face hunched over the cloth. He was surrounded by Jews with heavy, thick, knotted beards, wearing their weekday garments.

The short, bushy-bearded Jew recited the
El molei rahamim
memorial prayer for the bridegroom’s late, sainted mother, and praised his father, the yeshiva head, to the sky.

“And, although you yourself,” he intoned, “are only a shoemaker, you are dearer to the Master of the Universe than the richest man, for the ancient Rabbi Yohanan was also a shoemaker. Therefore, bridegroom, take as your example Rabbi Yohanan the sandal-maker, and you will prosper—and a redeemer cometh to Zion. Amen.”

However, when the time arrived for the marital blessings, before stepping under the wedding canopy, while Father laid his large hands on Toybe’s head, there was no one to bless the little, scrawny shoemaker.

He stood, looking crushed, under the four poles of the canopy, in a borrowed overcoat thrown over his white, linen wedding robe. He pronounced the vows—“Be thou consecrated unto me …”—in a clear, eager voice, but at the conclusion of the ceremony managed to break the glass that was placed underfoot only after several attempts. His withered, hollow-cheeked face turned a sickly green.

The musicians struck up a congratulatory march. Mother danced in from the vestibule, holding a large, brown, braided
hallah
high in her hands. She waved the loaf back and forth over everyone’s head, in a movement such as one might make when dancing with a young child.

Everyone was taken with Mother. She no longer appeared haughty or aristocratic, but caring and generous, a kindhearted woman come to bring joy to the poor groom and bride, thus earning for herself a
mitzvah
, a good deed.

That was also how she appeared in the customary
mitzvah
dance with the bride. Holding a white handkerchief by one corner, and with Toybe holding it by another, Mother and she dipped their heads forward, like into a basin of water. With heads bent, they turned each other around and then, abruptly, straightened up, as if coming up from the water.

Mother’s actions indicated that she was acting in good faith on Toybe’s behalf, with a full heart, not as Toybe’s stepmother, but as if she were her actual mother.

Father’s performance of the
mitzvah
dance with his beautiful daughter Toybe was altogether different. He didn’t look at her, he didn’t dip his head but, bending slightly, held his corner of the handkerchief tentatively. With heavy steps, slowly and wearily, he turned himself around a few times, shuffling uncertainly in obvious embarrassment. It seemed to me that if Father hadn’t felt so ashamed, he probably would have said: “Toybe, my daughter, if I have ever caused you any pain, please forgive me. I am, after all, your father and I only sought your well-being. Nothing more. But you are the one who has sinned.”

If he didn’t say this, the fiddle said it for him. I don’t know how, but the young fiddler expressed the words that were in my heart and might have been on Father’s tongue.

Toybe was weeping. Her white bridal dress was spotted with large, moist stains. Maybe she also heard the words unreeling from the fiddle of the young musician, or maybe she didn’t feel well.

It was beginning to get light outside. A delicate blue tinge appeared on the windowpanes. The women and the girls sat with drooping lids, yawning loudly. The promised gifts for the couple had already been called out and the after-meal blessings were in progress, when there was a sudden commotion. The bridegroom—it shouldn’t happen to us!—had fainted.

Mother, even though she was in the other room, was the first to leap from her seat. Holding her silk skirt, she rushed into the room where the men were. The women and the girls pushed after her like a flock of sheep, crowding the two doorways. People kept shouting over each other’s heads, “Water! Somebody go get a doctor!”

But nobody went to find a doctor and nobody brought any water. Word was quickly passed that the bridegroom had been smoking cigarette after cigarette during the meal, and those sitting close by had seen him turn green, very green.

Somebody, it was reported, was about to ask him what was wrong, when the cigarette dropped from his mouth, and he slid off his chair to the floor, face up. Somebody shouted into his deathly, green face. Somebody else, in a short
kapote
, pressed his temples, tried to wrench open his mouth, but to no avail.

But it wasn’t the smoking that had caused him to faint. It was something else. Both his upturned knees were shaking, his arms stretched out, like a crucifix. His head kept turning back and forth, and his mouth was frothing, spewing white foam.

“Don’t,” said a man, grabbing hold of the hand of the person who finally had come running with water. “Can’t you see that it’s that terrible affliction? Put a key under his head.”

It was Father who placed the key. He bent over his son-in-law as if seeking his forgiveness. To me it seemed that from that day on, Father would never be able to raise his head again and look people in the face.

Mother’s shoulders also slumped. She shuffled outside. It was daylight. From the whitewashed room, where they had danced all night long, now came the sound of Toybe’s weeping and wailing. She tore off her veil, buried her lovely, black head in both hands, and began to rock from side to side.

“What did you want from me?” she called out to Father, to Mother, to all who had gathered. “Why do I deserve such shame? An epileptic for a husband! I’d rather be a servant again, and scrub floors, but I’m not going to live with him …”

But Toybe didn’t go back into service. Hadn’t she scrubbed enough floors in her life, cooked and baked for refined, Hasidic Jews with ivory-knobbed canes? She remained in the town.

Wolf, her husband, suffered his epileptic fits from time to time, and Toybe placed keys under his head. She brought into the world a son with a large head of blond hair, and another with a large head of black hair. After that, she bore a daughter, whose eyes were blue by day and green by night. These used to be Toybe’s eyes, which lost their color over all the time that she spent placing keys under her husband’s head.

In the days following Toybe’s wedding, it came time to cut the second crop of hay. By now the sun, cold and yellow, was beginning to set early in the afternoons. The smell of wet, rotting stubble rose up from the ground. The barns and granaries were filled to bursting with the harvested grain. What was there left for us to do in Lenive? So we packed up our bit of bedding and the pots and the pans, and, sun-browned and well-rested, drove back to the city.

Along the way, the peasants were already turning over the soil, readying it for the next year. Flocks of black crows trailed after the plows, like dark clouds. There was a smell in the air of ripe apples, of pickled cabbage and warm bran.

Again we stopped at the inn run by the tall Lozer, who congratulated Father on his return, inquired as to how we had fared, and asked whether there had been any profit. He also remarked, incidentally, that when Leybke came home from the Russian army, under no circumstances should Father forget to let him know.

Lozer’s daughter Sore, whose face had grown brighter over the summer, and her hips broader, served us bowls of garlic-flavored borsht with mashed potatoes, slices of rich cake, and, as a special treat, cherry brandy that she had made herself.

After the refreshment and when we were already seated back on the cart, Mother had a word to say about the innkeeper and his daughter. Sore, she allowed, appeared to be a great housekeeper, a wonderful mistress of the household, and Lozer must certainly have a pocketbook full of money. Leybke, when he returned from the Russian army, should maybe have a talk with him …

Father didn’t answer. He seemed despondent. I was sad myself. Missing from our company was Toybe. I could still see her husband lying on the floor, with foam on his lips. The horse was dragging itself against its will. Ravens screeched down from the poplar trees. This time, we didn’t stop by the bridge to feed the horse. We pushed on, aware, even here on the country road, of the approaching High Holidays, the Days of Awe, with all their dread and melancholy.

In the city, Jews were already walking about looking distracted. Theirs were the faces of people insufficiently slept out, people who had spent late nights in the synagogue reciting
slikhes
, the penitential prayers said during the days preceding the High Holidays through Yom Kippur, and who rose early the next morning to recite the prayers again. This was the season, soon to be upon us, of the Ten Days of Repentance, an anxious, preoccupied time.

I didn’t look forward to those particular days. I knew that Father would be shaking me awake early in the mornings and dragging me off to the dark synagogue alley for the
slikhes
, and that Moshke the cantor’s voice would grate on my ears. At home, everybody would be looking worried. I would be expected at the
besmedresh
, for early morning prayers, to hear the daily blowing of the
shofar
, the cold, weekday blasts of the ram’s horn, which always reminded me of death.

Whom would it have disturbed, I thought, if the summer were to last all year round? Wouldn’t it be more agreeable to recite the
slikhes
prayers when the wheat still waved in the fields? And wouldn’t the Almighty have preferred a young cantor with a pleasant voice leading the prayers, rather than Moshke with his croaks that sounded like the rasps of a blunt saw? Why did Jews altogether choose to have such sad, gloomy holidays?

By now we had driven into our big courtyard. Yarme the coachman’s omnibus wasn’t there, it must have been away in Warsaw. Nobody came out to greet us.

The orchard glistened wetly. When we opened our door, we were assaulted by a smell of mice and spiders. Worms crawled out from every corner, black worms, yellow worms, fattened up from who knows what. Mother, together with a hired Gentile woman, both with rolled-up sleeves, attacked the rooms with feather dusters and mops, cleaning and scrubbing in preparation for the holiday.

Meanwhile, I idled away my time. There was no
kheyder
in the period before the High Holidays, and besides, my teacher Sime-Yoysef had died while we were still in Lenive.

Yarme’s wife told us that not only did the town rabbi follow the funeral procession, but also Reb Aron of the religious court. No one knew that Sime-Yoysef had been so virtuous and respected. His body, she said, was taken to the synagogue, where the rabbi himself delivered the eulogy. The weeping and wailing had reached almost to heaven. Only his pupils, those good-for-nothing boys, didn’t shed any tears.

I probably would not have shed any tears, either. For Sime-Yoysef, that virtuous Jew, in life had a habit of pinching the soft flesh of his pupils’ bottoms. Sime-Yoysef, that respected Jew, also made it a habit to drive us out of the
kheyder
in the middle of the week with his handkerchief, the way one shoos chickens out of a coop, and then locking the door. Velvele goy, Velvele the Gentile, a fellow pupil who earned his nickname for already having eaten pork, said that the reason Sime-Yoysef chased us outside was because he wanted to go to bed with his wife. Velvele had seen this with his own eyes. And Sime-Yoysef had other habits. He would take his pupils’ lunches, also borrow money from them and never repay it.

Be all that as it may, Sime-Yoysef was now in the world beyond, and respect was due him. He was, after all, a Jew, and a pauper at that.

I still didn’t know which
kheyder
I would be attending. I myself would have preferred a Russian-Jewish school, particularly the Pomerants
shkole
, but only rich boys went there. Aunt Naomi’s Mendl was one of its students.

Meanwhile, I was just whiling away my time. Yankl was gone. No one ever spoke about him. Yarme the coachman’s wife walked around with a swollen belly.

“She must be pregnant,” Mother said. “At her age … can you believe it?”

The chief prison guard’s wife had also changed. She was now aloof and reserved, with a face full of yellow blotches. Mother never looked her way, and the Russian woman, for her part, turned her head away from Mother. The guard’s wife no longer chatted with any of the tenants in the courtyard. Her husband strode about, rattling his saber and never returning a “Good morning.”

That was unfortunate, for I would have liked to ask him about what was happening in the jail, how Szcepka and Sherman, the two murderers, were getting on, and had they already been sent to Siberia? I would also have liked to talk with the chief prison guard’s young daughter, Janinka. She had grown over the summer. Her eyes had turned dark blue, and her long, flaxen hair was braided with a blue silk ribbon.

But there was now no getting close to Janinka, sedately clad in a navy-blue dress with a black apron. Yarme the coachman’s wife said that Janinka was already attending the girls’ gymnasium. She had become a student in a school uniform.