Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life (50 page)

The courtyard became a wasteland. In the evenings, I could no longer look through the windows into the tea shop.

I no longer had discussions with Oyzer, we never met anymore. But I did notice that he had grown taller, and it seemed to me that he was far too tall for his age. Any day now, he would have a hump, just like his father.

I had nowhere to go. After the misfortune with Khantshe, things also turned gloomy at home. Motl Straw, Father’s partner, stopped coming by for the weekly settling of accounts. There were no accounts to settle. The hay in the meadows had rotted. There was nothing to buy, and no one to sell it to.

Father, as usual, rose at daybreak. He took longer tending to his sore leg and lingered over his morning prayers. We subsisted on burnt soup and soldiers’ black bread.

For the Sabbath, Mother bought some cheap meat, and instead of our usual fish, she served herring.

Autumn set in cold and rainy. The small windowpanes wept day and night. The sound of dripping was heard continuously on the roof.

Mother, dark wrinkles around her mouth, moaned, “What sin did I commit that I should spend my years in this attic? Leyzer, how long do you intend to keep us here?”

I didn’t understand what Mother was saying. First of all, it was she herself who had rented this attic, and secondly, how could Father help it if all the hay in the whole region had rotted and the Russian army was now buying dried hay packed by Russia itself?

We were left without a means of livelihood. When Father went to ask Motl Straw for an interest-free loan, Motl Straw merely shrugged. Where did he have the money, when there was no business?

Father came home that night, crestfallen. Shreds of black padding peeked out from his coat. Mother wasn’t of a mind to mend it. Something kept driving her from the house. In any event, there was nothing to cook, so why should she stay put?

As for me, I was sent home from the
shkole
.

So Mother sat down and wrote a letter to her rich brother in Lodz. She wrote him that her young son could no longer attend the shkole because she had no money to pay his tuition, that we were freezing to death in the house, and that her husband, Leyzer, wasn’t earning anything. She was, therefore, begging him, her brother, to take pity and to help out in her hour of need.

There was no answer. The shadows in the house grew larger and colder. Sleighs were already out in the streets. Their bells tinkled merrily, calling me down. But I was ashamed to show myself in the street, lest anyone ask me why I was no longer attending the shkole.

On the last day of Hanukkah, before it was time to light the eighth and final candle, the door opened in the early afternoon and the mailman came in, a man with a white, Jewish-looking beard.

“
Pani
Leyzerova? Money,” he said in three languages, Russian, Yiddish, and Polish.

Mother’s face turned red. I felt something pressing on my chest. That white beard of the mailman could belong only to the prophet Elijah!

The mailman had brought notice, informing us that there was money waiting for us at the post office.

Mother, even though she wasn’t feeling well, rushed over immediately, but it was already too late. They weren’t paying out any more money that day. Nonetheless, Mother returned home in a cheerful mood. At once she lit the stove and prepared some borsht with potatoes, which smelled like wine. The lamp burned more brightly. The moon came to rest over the opposite roof, and the frost on the windowpanes slowly melted.

I could think of nothing else but the money that Mother would be collecting the next day at the post office. I was sure that we had become rich and that we would now be moving into a nicer dwelling. Mother herself had spoken about a new place and about buying me a new pair of boots.

As we sat down to supper, Father maintained his usual silence, eating slowly and staring out the windows.

Early the next morning, Mother hurried to the post office. I was waiting at home with a beating heart. Several times I opened the door and went down the stairs.

As it turned out, Mother’s rich brother in Lodz didn’t send us very much. He apologized, saying that this was a bad time, that he had a daughter to marry off.

Still, my old boots were repaired, the tuition was paid, and Mother bought Father a new overcoat.

“What for?” Father said, passing his tongue from one corner of his mouth to the other.

“You need a new overcoat,” Mother explained.

“But I’ve already got an overcoat.”

“Really! It’s falling apart.”

“N-n-a, I guess it is.”

He slowly laid down the new overcoat and later examined it from a distance, but didn’t put it on. It lay there for several days without anyone coming near it.

Not until the Sabbath morning, when we were changing our underwear, and after Mother had stowed the old, torn coat away, did Father pace back and forth for some time and finally put on the new overcoat.

Something new also happened to me at that time. I don’t mean my repaired boots, nor the paid tuition at the
shkole
, nor even my new woolen gloves, but something else, for which I had no name as yet.

It may have been Father’s quiet voice, which, ever since I could remember, had never been so quiet. Or it may have been Mother’s tear-filled eyes, when, on a certain weekday, Father helped me into my coat and went with me to the study house, where a pale Jew with green whiskers began to instruct me in the laws of
tefillin
, the donning of the phylacteries that would mark my entry into manhood.

p. 1
“between Father’s and Mother’s beds”: Jewish law proscribes men and women from sharing the same bed.

p. 11
“A small glass … stood on the window sill”: a
yortsayt
candle lit in Moyshe’s memory.

p. 14
“A real officer in the Tsar’s army!”: a naive comment. There were no Jewish officers in the tsarist army at the time.

p. 21
“Dobrele, who had just returned from Buenos Aires”: the center of the white-slave trade.

p. 24
“In the plowshare lies a blessing”: one of the earliest Yiddish songs of Zion, written in 1888 by the Yiddish folk bard Elyokum Zunser (1836–1913) in praise of doing agricultural work in Palestine.

p. 24
“My beauty, my life, pure as gold”: a standard Yiddish love song.

p. 25
“Tsar Alexander III”: (1845–1894) ascended to the throne following the assassination of his father in 1881.

p. 39
“she now had on a new wig”: married women were required to cover their hair.

p. 56
“Let’s be friends again”: from a folk song performed at weddings.

p. 57
“the feast day of Saint John, coinciding with … the Sabbath of Consolation”: Both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Church mark the beheading of John the Baptist on August 29 with a feast day. The Sabbath following the fast of the Ninth of Av is called the Sabbath of Consolation, so named because the
haftarah
(supplementary reading) begins with the words from Isa. 40:1, “Comfort, oh comfort My people.”

p. 57
“Tuesday—considered a lucky day”: Because on that day of creation, the Lord twice “saw that it was good” (Gen. 1:10, 12).

p. 69
“yellow sand, sprinkled on the floor”: this was routinely done on Friday afternoons, in honor of the Sabbath.

p. 69
“Old Pavlova”: a Christian peasant, here performing one of the several domestic chores forbidden to Jews on the Sabbath.

p. 101
“to pray at our usual place, that is, the
besmedresh
”: Jewish prayer in eastern Europe was decentralized. In Mendl’s town, the more well-to-do citizens prayed in the main synagogue, while the simple folk congregated in the study house.

p. 135
“they had come all the way out on foot”: because it is forbidden to travel on the Sabbath by carriage.

p. 136
“dating back to the days of King Sobieski”: meant both literally, as the reign of King Jan Sobieski III (1629–1696), and idiomatically, “from olden times.”

p. 140
“she had picked especially for me”: it is forbidden to pick flowers on the Sabbath.

p. 179
“Reb Jew”: An idiomatic honorific.

p. 187
“
A Son of Two Mothers
”:
Eyn zohn fun tsvey mames
(Vilna, 1890), a species of pulp fiction by Shomer [Nokhem-Meyer Shaykevitsh] (1846–1905). This particular novelette does not, however, feature the adventures of Rudolph and Carolina. Both in
Everyday Jews
and its sequel, Perle lavishes attention on the reading habits of Jewish women, a predilection for trashy novels that he himself had done much to cultivate.

p. 201
“
The Sale of Joseph
”: On Purim day, in and around the celebratory feast, Ashkenazic Jews instituted a one-day-of-the-year theater season. Young boys and men went house to house performing a
Purim-shpil
, a rhymed and chanted burlesque, initially of local events, then of the Purim story itself, of other biblical sagas, and, finally, of any popular plot. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth,
Mekhires Yoysef
,
The Sale of Joseph
, was performed more widely even than the Ahasuerus Play. Young Joseph’s aria in the snake pit and Mother Rachel’s lament were among the most popular set pieces.

p. 201
“She would be in the play, too, as Mother Rachel”: all roles in the
Purim-shpil
were traditionally played by men and boys. Perhaps the fact that the audience is required to pay admission and that the play is performed in a makeshift auditorium signals a first step toward modernization.

p. 201
“the Brody Singers”: the first professional troupe of Yiddish actors and performers in eastern Europe, founded by Berl Broder-Margulies in 1854.

p. 209
“a rose that fell by the wayside”: From “The Flower,” an allegorical song by the folk bard Elyokum Zunser, written in 1867.

p. 243
“the holy pictures on the wall”: For an observant Jewish household, “holy pictures” glaringly transgress the commandment against graven images.

p. 245
“By the sweat of your brow, shall ye eat bread”: Gen. 3:19.

p. 270
“overcoat thrown over his white, linen wedding robe”: the solemn white linen robe reminds the groom of his mortality. The overcoat thrown over the robe is a Hasidic custom.

p. 290
“an opera called
The Jewess
”: La Juive, a grand opera in five acts, the libretto by Eugène Scribe and music by Jacques Halévy, was first produced at the Académie in Paris on February 23, 1835.

p. 290
“Battistine”: Mattia Battistine.

p. 290
“Davidov”: tenor Alexander Davidov (1872–1944).

p. 296
“
Hatsefirah
”: (“The Dawn”), a Hebrew daily published in Warsaw and edited, at the time, by Nahum Sokolow.

p. 296
“Moses Montefiore”: Sir Moses Haim Montefiore (1784–1885) was one of the most famous British Jews in the nineteenth century. A financier, stockbroker, and philanthropist, he used his power and prestige to intervene on behalf of world Jewry. Montefiore visited Russia in 1846 and 1872.

p. 297
“Baron Hirsch”: Maurice de Hirsch (1831–1896), who founded the Jewish Colonization Association to settle Jews on the land. The center for this activity was Argentina.

p. 302
“the days of Poniatowski”: Stanislas Poniatowski, King of Poland between 1764 and 1795.

p. 308
“Justice goes before Him”: Psalm 85:14.

p. 316
“the
kohen
—priestly—class of Jews, ill-tempered”: a folk belief, based on Babylonian Talmud Kiddushin 70b, that considers all descendants of Aaron the Priest to be prone to anger.

p. 323
“Oleg the seer readies himself”: the opening lines of “The Song of Oleg the Seer,” by Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837). These lines and the ones that follow are cited in the original Russian.

p. 324
“Not for nothing was Moscow set ablaze”: patriotic lines from “On the Anniversary of Borodino,” by the poet and novelist Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841), which all Russian schoolchildren committed to memory.

FOOTNOTES

1
. These (in chronological order) are the major sources on Perle’s life: Zalmen R. Reyzen,
Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur
, 2d ed. (Vilna, 1929), 2:936–39; Melekh Ravitch,
Mayn leksikon 1
(Montreal, 1945): 168–70; Leo Finkelshteyn, introduction to Y. Perle,
Yidn fun a gants yor
(Buenos Aires: Dos poylishe yidntum, 1951); Yehoshue Lender, “Perle, der moler fun der poylisher landshaft,” in
Seyfer Radom
, ed. Isaac Perlow (Tel Aviv, 1961), 218–19; Khayim-Leyb Fuks’s biography in
Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur
9 (New York, 1968): 193–96; Rachel Auerbach,
Varshever tsavoes: bagegenishn, aktivitetn, goyroles
1933–1943 (Tel Aviv: Yisroelbukh, 1974), chap. 35 and passim; and Samuel D. Kassow,
Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). Finkelshteyn and Lender, both native to Radom, often contradict other biographical sources. This introduction should therefore be read as a goad—and guide—to future research.

2
. “By most accounts”: Lender in
Seyfer Radom
states that Perle’s father had two children from his first wife and four from his second. This of course contradicts Perle’s self-portrait as an only child growing up among half-brothers and sisters, which appears both in Reyzen’s
Lekison
(usually based on questionnaires filled out by the authors themselves) and in the novel. The episode of his mother leaving for Siberia to care for her grandchild is alluded to in Reyzen and is fictionalized in
Di gildene pave
. Finkelshteyn makes much of the fact that Perle never attended a Russian secondary school.

3
. This paragraph draws on Finkelshteyn and Ravitch.

4
. Finkelshteyn, iii–iv.

5
. Auerbach, chap. 35, who is our major source on Perle’s relationship with his son.