Jewels and Ashes (11 page)

There is another possibility. Vigdor Malamud and Isaac Probutski may have become acquainted in Slonim during one of their pilgrimages to the Rebbe's court. Perhaps they had arranged the marriage there on behalf of their children, without intermediaries and matchmakers. Years later my mother would see Aron Yankev depart on such pilgrimages. He would make his way to the Bialystok station to meet up with fellow devotees. As they travelled east, on a journey of several hundred kilometres, their numbers were swelled by groups of Slonimer Hasidim who clambered aboard at stations on the way.

The whisky began to flow long before they reached their destination. If the Hasidim had a whole carriage to themselves and felt safe enough to let go, they would sing nigunim, songs of praise to their Rebbe, their link to the heavens, their passport to a kingdom of joy.

A devotee could seek the advice or blessings of the Rebbe at any time. There were also special occasions when Hasidim came en masse, particularly for the Yomim Naroim, the ten Days of Awe between the New Year and the Day of Atonement. Throughout Eastern Europe pilgrims would be on the move at this time, converging upon the many shtetlech where courts of Hasidic dynasties flourished. They came on the miraculous trains that had recently been introduced, or by horse-drawn coach to more remote destinations. They travelled through forests and mountain passes, along highways and country roads, across rivers and streams. They journeyed together in large convoys with friends they had known all their lives; others moved alone, preferring the company of their own heartbeat. Many of them were men who had left families in the hands of wives and mothers to become wanderers again, released, for a while, from their worldly concerns. Chane Esther would stay at home with the children, while Aron Yankev, free of the textile mills of Bialystok, journeyed with his Hasidic brothers in a dream of God and Tzaddik.

Disembarking at the Slonim station, they trudged into town carrying bundles of bedding, prayer books, and phylacteries. They crammed into taverns and inns, or boarded with local followers of the Rebbe. They slept on straw mats, in narrow cots and hammocks, in garrets, attics, barns, or houses of study, huddled against stoves for warmth during long nights that stretched towards winter. The town's fortunes would leap overnight. Butchers, bakers, grocers, fishmongers, saloon-keepers, and blacksmiths scurried about all day to reap the whirlwind that had swept into their midst.

Houses of worship were full to the limits. Some crowded into the tiny wooden prayer houses that could be found in almost every street and alley, while others prayed in the magnificent stone synagogue which had stood in Slonim since the 1600s. Pilgrims exchanged greetings, renewed friendships, accompanied each other to the ritual baths. They argued politics, gossiped about intrigues between rival Rebbes, and arranged marriages between their children.

Late at night, long after the evening prayers were over, they gathered at the Rebbe's court, to share a meal, to hear a few words of wisdom from their Tzaddik, and to dance until perhaps they did indeed draw out the divine sparks they believed resided in every object, in all beings and things, animate or inert. There were many who claimed that just a glance from a Tzaddik could fan the sparks into a blaze of all-consuming fervour that provided solace and release from all sorrows and struggles. And mother, as she tells the story, finds her way back to the nigunim she heard Reb Aron Yankev hum, wordless melodies that took flight, ascending slowly at first, occasionally dropping back and reascending, spinning a spiral of notes that urged themselves on to even greater heights, towards complete immersion in God and total forgetfulness.

Whether arranged in the court of the Slonimer Rebbe, or by a matchmaker shuttling between Orla and Grodek, it is known that, after the marriage, Aron Yankev went to live with his in-laws. Vigdor Malamud took him on as an apprentice weaver and taught him to use the handloom. The first seven of Reb Aron Yankev's and Chane Esther's children were born in Grodek, before Reb Aron moved to Bialystok in search of work at looms now powered by steam.

When Chane Esther and the children embarked on their flight to Grodek, Aron Yankev had remained in Bialystok. What was there for him to do in a shtetl? Vigdor had died a decade earlier. The weavers' workshops had closed down when the armies of Kaiser Wilhelm had cut off markets in Russia. In Bialystok there was the possibility of an occasional job in factories which had been commandeered by German troops. Above all, there was a fine company of Slonimer Hasidim with whom to spend the idle hours. Indeed, Reb Aron Yankev moved into the cramped prayer-house of the Slonimer Hasidim, and lived there for a time with his companions, while Chane Esther and her brood fended for themselves elsewhere.

It was almost entirely a clan of women that had assembled in Grodek to see through the war years, a matriarchy skilled in the arts of survival. They were firmly grounded in a way that many of their men, who had spent their youth bent over holy books in cheders and yeshivas, were not. In orthodox families the woman's domain was the household, and often they controlled the purse strings and ran small businesses.

At the head of the Malamud clan was the grand matriarch, Freidel Shapiro Malamud. Since the death of Vigdor she had expanded the dairy she ran from home. She also dealt in poultry. She would purchase fowl from local peasants and take them to the ritual slaughterer. Mother often accompanied her on such errands. While the shochet performed his task, Freidel talked to him about this and that. Mother can recall snatches of conversation about battles that were raging nearby, abductions of menfolk for enforced labour, occasional raids on local homes; yet life still went on, praised be the One Above. Freidel would carve the kosher chickens into pieces that she sold and bartered. But to those who could not afford it, Jews and gentiles alike, she lent money, or gave away chicken and cheeses. For such deeds she had acquired the name, Freidel the Angel.

As she ages, mother's memory of distant times grows sharper, and that of more recent events vaguer. Memory has a momentum of its own. As mother advances deeper into herself, time dissolves into details, and she can see it clearly — the timber cottage she descended upon with her sisters and brothers, as they balanced precariously on an overloaded wagon in the early hours of a winter's day in 1915. She enters a room in which a solitary kerosene lamp is burning. In a corner there rises a mountain of potatoes, beside a smaller one of corn, gathered from the abandoned fields of White Russian peasants who had fled east with the advance of the Kaiser's armies. The walls are whitewashed with lime. Twice a year a fresh coat would be applied: on the eve of Passover, when houses were thoroughly cleaned and every crumb of unleavened bread removed; and before the New Year, in preparation for the Days of Awe and the annual cleansing of the soul.

At night mother sleeps in a small room outside which stands a solitary oak. In winter, full moons hover above a river of ice upon which children skate and drive their makeshift sleds. Distant sounds of peasants singing drift over the ice; nearby, Malka the goat bleats, Sheva the cow yawns, and Freidel's gaggle of geese punctuate the night with an occasional chorus of shrieks.

Freidel had also given each goose a personal name, and they certainly earned their keep. Mother would help her aunt Rivke pluck the feathers. Peasant women brought jobs to Rivke, and they wandered around the house gossiping while she sewed their sheets, pillowslips, and quilts, which she stuffed with goose feathers.

Apart from one or two small rooms, the cottage consisted of a larger room that was part sewing-workshop, dairy, grocery, nursery, bakery, kitchen, sleeping quarters, and dining area. Fresh milk from the udders of Malka and Sheva glistened in clay jugs. Freidel had taught her daughters and grand-daughters how to churn cream into butter and make cheese from sour milk. The corn was picked off the cob and ground between two stones. Chane Esther was expert at mixing and shaping the corn flour into loaves which she placed in a deep oven. For a treat she would sometimes bake sweet chalahs.

As the war dragged on the townsfolk had to scavenge for food. The younger Probutski children, Hershel and Tzivie, would be left at home in the care of their eldest sister Liebe; Chane Esther, aunts Rivke and Tsore, mother, and her sisters Sheindel and Chaie, would take to the forests to gather blackberries, gooseberries, mushrooms, and leaves that were used as a salad or mashed with potatoes into a stew. ‘Mmmm. The stew was delicious', mother tells me. They would leave at dawn, the residents of Grodek, in large groups, throughout spring, summer, and well into autumn. They wandered forever further afield, so that at times they became lost in forests they had never seen before. For lunch they gathered in clearings to eat blackberry jam, and they returned well after dark, lighting their way with kerosene lamps as the streets of Grodek came back into view.

Another sister, Feigl, worked as a cleaner and cook for German officers at the Grodek station. Ybshua and Motl, the older brothers, the two men among a company of women, were forced to labour for the occupying army. They cut down trees for lumber, and extracted resin from conifers to be stored in barrels and transported to Germany. When they returned late at night Yoshua and Motl would slump down, and that was it; there they would remain, exhausted, to be fed and allowed to fall asleep. The scent of resin and fresh wood they exuded was sweet, says mother. She was a girl of eight, nine. She does not recall these as hard times. She loved the expeditions to the forests. Everyone worked, everyone contributed. The years have softened the memory, so that what remains is the sweet smell of resin and the enticing aroma of potatoes and leaves simmering on a stove.

Among the German soldiers were Jewish officers who paid visits to the women and courted the older girls of Grodek. One officer declared his love for Tsore, the youngest daughter of Vigdor and Freidel. He would come for her after the war was over, he claimed. There was another officer who would ride into town to inspect the houses. He had a particular fetish for clean windows. Just one speck of dust on a window, he warned, could result in severe punishment.

War years in a town called Grodek: the soldiers strutted, the women were wary, the food was in short supply, homes could be raided at any time, an officer could be bribed, another might rail at a speck of dust — while just beyond the horizon the fighting continued with unabated fury. And as I recreate the story, I must make do with snippets of information gathered from kitchen conversations in which the silences grow longer, and mother seems increasingly lost in an inaccessible world of her own.

A sandy side street comes to a dead end at a ramshackle two-storey dwelling, its weathered boards flaking like fish scales. ‘Probutski? Malamud?' replies an old man, who sits beside a child asleep in a pram. He shakes his head as he rocks the pram. These names are unfamiliar, but his face brightens when he recalls: ‘Ah yes! A doctor Zimmerman once lived in this house. He was taken away with his wife and daughter. They were shot in the forests, not far from here. It must have been about 1941. A son of his survived. He lives now in America. He also came to Grodek several years ago. Like you he wanted to see the place he was born in.'

While the old man talks I am overcome by an uncanny feeling that there are many of us at this moment — sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, grandchildren — wandering country roads and city streets, or picking our way through forest undergrowth to uncover mould-encrusted tombstones. Perhaps this is how it has always been for descendants of lost families: we search within a tangle of aborted memories, while stumbling towards a mythical home which seems to elude us as it recedes into false turns and dead ends.

In the centre of town there is a park with flower beds, paths that weave between expanses of well-kept lawns, and a monument honouring ‘Polish martyrs'. It could be for any one of the many conflicts that have erupted over the centuries in this part of the world. A young man wearing jeans and a leather jacket approaches me. He asks for my name, and I am pleased to have come across someone I can converse with in English. It takes me a while to register that the card he has uncovered in the palm of his hand bears his photo and the word, ‘Police'.

He is joined by a middle-aged man in a drab blue suit. ‘Just routine questions', they say. ‘Why have you been taking so many photographs this afternoon?' The tone is neutral, almost friendly. They are obviously aware of every place I have been to since I arrived in Grodek.

They seem to accept my explanations, and leave me after writing the details in a notebook. Yet with this incident the scales have tipped. I had planned to stay in Grodek overnight, or perhaps for several days. But I am, after all, a stranger here, and there are eyes on the alert, watching my every move.

Within the hour I am on a bus returning to Bialystok. An evening chill has settled as we move into the countryside, and I recall the warnings of my parents and family friends of their generation who now live in Melbourne. ‘Why embark on such a journey?', they had asked. ‘What do you think you will find?'

CHAPTER EIGHT

‘AFTER THE GREAT WAR a higher truth should have been born', father exclaims. He is racing full-steam ahead on one of his extended monologues. One question of mine is enough to set him in motion. Anecdotes, memories, philosophical asides fly from his lips. The locomotive hisses and gathers speed. It stops unexpectedly at unknown stations, or jumps tracks to charge off in a new direction. Occasionally a signal is required to gently steer him back to the main track: After the Great War a higher truth should have been born'.

Summer, 1917. In Bialystok wild rumours are circulating, embellished with exaggerations and fantasies. Revolution has broken out in Russia. Palaces are burning. Soldiers are shooting their officers and deserting the front. The rumours grow more fantastic. The Czar's crown is rolling in the gutters. Rasputin has been found strangled in the Czarina's boudoir. In the streets of St Petersburg people are dancing for joy. Towns and cities are being decked out in red. A new order is being created to the east, beyond the borders. Centuries of oppression are going to vanish overnight.