Leon Uris (35 page)

“I am glad you went too,” Simon said.

“Rabbi Lipzin wants me to sign up for ghetto defense,” Jossi said.

“Rabbi Lipzin departs from so many traditions I am beginning to wonder if he is a Jew,” Simon said.

“That is just the point, Father,” Jossi said. “You are afraid of the new ideas.” It was the first time Jossi had ever spoken thus to his father and he was immediately ashamed.

Simon walked around the counter and put his hands on his sons’ shoulders and led them into their alcove and bade them sit down on their beds. “Don’t you think I know what is going through your minds? New ideas, indeed. There was exactly the same talk about auto-emancipation and ghetto defense when I was a boy. You are only coming to a crisis that every Jew comes to ... to make your peace with the world ... to know your place. When I was a boy I even thought once of converting ... don’t you think I know how it feels?”

Jossi was astonished. His father had thought of conversion!

“Why is it wrong for us to want to defend ourselves? Why is it made a sin by our own people to want to better our conditions?” Yakov demanded.

“You are a Jew,” his father answered, “and being a Jew entails certain obligations.”

“To hide under my bed while people try to kill me?”

“Don’t raise your voice to Father,” Jossi admonished.

“No one said it is easy to be a Jew. We were not born on this earth to live from its fruits. We were put here to guard the laws of God. This is our mission. This is our purpose.”

“And this is our reward!” Yakov snapped back.

“The Messiah will come and take us back when He is good and ready,” Simon said, unruffled, “and I do not believe it is for Yakov Rabinsky to question His wisdom. I do believe it is for Yakov Rabinsky to live by the laws of the Holy Torah.”

There were tears of anger in Yakov’s eyes. “I do not question the laws of God,” he cried, “but I question the wisdom of some of the men who interpret those laws.”

There was a brief silence. Jossi swallowed. Never had anyone spoken so harshly to his father. Yet he silently applauded his brother’s courage, for Yakov was daring to ask the very questions he himself dared not ask.

“If we are created in the image of God,” Yakov continued, “then the Messiah is in all of us and the Messiah inside me keeps telling me to stand up and fight back. He keeps telling me to make my way back to the Promised Land with the Lovers of Zion. That is what the Messiah tells me, Father.”

Simon Rabinsky would not be shaken. “In our history we have been plagued with false messiahs. I fear you are listening to one of them now.”

“And how do I recognize the true Messiah?” Yakov challenged.

“The question is not whether Yakov Rabinsky recognizes the Messiah. The question is whether the Messiah will recognize Yakov Rabinsky. If Yakov Rabinsky begins to stray from His laws and listens to false prophets, then the Messiah will be quite certain that he is no longer a Jew. I suggest to Yakov Rabinsky that he continue to live as a Jew as his father and his people are doing.”

“K
ILL THE
J
EWS!”

A rock smashed through the seminary window. The rabbi hurried the students out through the back to the safety of the cellar. In the streets, Jews scampered wildly for cover ahead of a frenzied mob of over a thousand students and Cossacks.

“Kill the Jews!” they screamed. “Kill the Jews!”

It was another pogrom inspired by Andreev, the humpbacked headmaster of a local gymnasium—high school—and foremost Jew hater in Zhitomir. Andreev’s students swaggered down the streets of the ghetto, smashing up store fronts and dragging any Jews they could find into the streets and beating them mercilessly.

“Kill the Jews ... kill the Jews ... kill the Jews!”

Yakov and Jossi raced from the seminary. Using a route through back alleys, they sped over deserted cobblestone streets to reach their home and protect their parents. They ducked frequently for cover and worked away from the sounds of hoofbeats of Cossack horses and from the bloodcurdling screams of the students.

They turned the corner into their street and ran head on into a dozen hoodlums wearing university caps—disciples of Andreev.

“There go two of them!”

Yakov and Jossi turned around and fled, leading the pack of pursuers away from their own home. The students howled with glee as they sprinted after the brothers. For fifteen minutes they wove in and out of streets and alleys until the students trapped them against a dead-end wall. Jossi and Yakov stood with their backs to the wall, dripping sweat and panting for breath as the students formed a semicircle and closed in on them. His eyes gleaming, the leader stepped forward with an iron pipe and swung on Jossi!

Jossi blocked the blow and snatched up the student, spun him around, lifted him over his head, and hurled him at the rest of his companions. Yakov, whose pocket full of rocks was for just such occasions, bounced two stones off the heads of two students, sending them to the ground unconscious. The other students scattered in flight.

The boys dashed home and flung open the door of the shop.

“Mama! Papa!”

The shop was a shambles.

“Mama! Papa!”

They found their mother cowering in a corner in a state of hysteria. Jossi shook her hard. “Where is Papa?”

“The Torah!” she shrieked. “The Torah!”

At that instant, six blocks away, Simon Rabinsky staggered into his burning synagogue and fought his way gagging to the end of the room where the Holy Ark stood. He threw back the curtains with the Ten Commandments inscribed on them and pulled down the Sefer Torah, the Scroll of the Laws of God.

Simon pressed the holy parchment against his breast to protect it from the flames and staggered back to the door. He was badly burned and choking. He staggered outside and fell onto his knees.

Twenty of Andreev’s students were waiting for him.

“Kill the Jew!” Simon crawled a few yards and collapsed, covering the Sefer Torah with his body. Clubs smashed his skull. Hobnailed boots ripped his face....

“Kill the Jew!”

In mortal agony Simon Rabinsky screamed out ... “
Hear, O Israel ... the Lord is our God ... the Lord is one!
”

When they found Simon Rabinsky he was beyond recognition. The Sefer Torah, the laws which God had given Moses, had been burned by the mob.

The entire Zhitomir ghetto mourned his passing. He had died in the noblest way a Jew could meet death—protecting the Sefer Torah. Simon was put to rest along with a dozen others who had been murdered in Andreev’s pogrom.

For Rachel Rabinsky, the death of her husband was but another tragedy in a life which had known little else but sorrow. But this time her strength and will were gone. Even her sons could not comfort her. Rachel was taken off to live with relatives in another town.

Jossi and Yakov went to synagogue twice each day to say Kaddish for their father. Jossi remembered how his father had wanted to live as a Jew so that the Messiah would recognize him. His whole mission in life had been to protect God’s laws. Perhaps his father had been right—perhaps it was not theirs to live from the fruits of the earth but to serve as the guardians of God’s laws. In his sorrow Jossi probed to find a reason for his father’s brutal death.

Yakov was different. His heart was full of hatred. Even as he went to say the mourners’ prayers, his soul demanded revenge. He seethed and smoldered—he was restless and angry. He muttered time and again that he would avenge his father’s death.

Jossi, knowing his brother’s state of mind, barely let him out of his sight. He tried to soothe and comfort Yakov but Yakov was inconsolable.

A month after the death of Simon Rabinsky, Yakov slipped from the shop in the middle of the night as Jossi slept. He took from his father’s bench a long sharp knife and hid it in his belt and ventured from the ghetto toward the school where Andreev the Jew hater lived.

Jossi awoke instinctively a few minutes later. The instant he saw Yakov was gone he dressed hurriedly and ran after him. He knew where his brother would be going.

At four o’clock in the morning, Yakov Rabinsky pulled the brass knocker on the door of Andreev’s house. As the demented hunchback opened the door, Yakov sprang from the shadows and plunged the knife deep into his heart. Andreev emitted one short shriek and rolled to the ground, dead.

A few moments later Jossi rushed onto the scene to find his brother standing hypnotized over the body of the slain man. He pulled Yakov away and they fled.

All the next day and night they hid in the cellar of Rabbi Lipzin’s house. Word of Andreev’s murder spread quickly throughout Zhitomir. The elders of the ghetto met and came to a decision.

“We have reason to fear that you two were spotted,” the rabbi said when he returned. “Your red hair, Jossi, was seen by some students.”

Jossi bit his lip and did not reveal that he had only been trying to prevent the crime. Yakov showed no remorse for his deed. “I would do it again, gladly,” he said.

“Although we understand well what drove you to this deed,” said the rabbi, “it cannot be forgiven. You may well have started another pogrom. On the other hand ... we are Jews and there is no justice for us in a Russian court. We have reached a decision you are to abide by.”

“Yes, Rabbi,” Jossi said.

“You are to cut off your curls and dress like goyim. We will give you food and money enough to travel for a week. You must leave Zhitomir at once and never return.”

In 1884, Yakov and Jossi Rabinsky, aged fourteen and sixteen, became fugitives. They used the roads only by night and hid during the day, moving east to Lubny, a distance of a hundred-odd miles from Zhitomir. At Lubny they found the ghetto immediately and sought out the rabbi, only to learn that their notoriety had preceded them. The rabbi and the elders of Lubny met and agreed to give the boys enough food and money for another week’s travel. This time their destination was Kharkov, some two hundred miles away, where the search for them might not be so intense. Advance word was sent to the Kharkov rabbi that the Rabinsky boys were on the way.

The entire countryside was on the alert for the Rabinsky brothers. It took twenty days of cautious moving for them to get to Kharkov.

Their fame had spread throughout the Pale, and their capture was being turned into a holy mission. For two weeks they hid in the clammy basement beneath the synagogue in Kharkov, their presence known only to the rabbi and a few elders.

At last the Rabbi Solomon came to them. “It is not safe, even here,” he said. “It is only a matter of time until you boys are discovered. Already the police have been prowling around asking questions. But with winter coming on it will be near impossible to move.”

The rabbi sighed and shook his head. “We have also tried to get you papers to enable you to travel beyond the Pale, but I am afraid that is impossible. You are too well known by the police.”

He paced back and forth. “We have decided there is but one thing to do. There are some Jewish families in this district who have passed as gentiles and who own small farms. We feel it would be the safest plan for you to hide with one of them until spring at least.”

“Rabbi Solomon,” Jossi said, “we are very thankful for everything that has been done for us, but my brother and I have made a plan of our own.”

“What is that?”

“We are going to Palestine,” Yakov said.

The good rabbi looked stunned. “To Palestine? How?”

“We have a route in mind. God will help us.”

“No doubt God will help you but let us not press Him for a miracle. It is over three hundred hard cold miles to the port of Odessa. Even if and when you reach Odessa you cannot get a boat without papers.”

“We are not going by way of Odessa.”

“But there is no other way.”

“We intend to walk.”

Rabbi Solomon gasped.

“Moses walked for forty years,” Yakov said; “it will not take us that long.”

“Young man, I am well aware that Moses walked for forty years. That does not explain how you are going to walk to Palestine.”

“I’ll tell you our plan,” Jossi said. “We will go south. The police won’t be looking for us so strenuously in that direction. We will cross out of the Pale into Georgia and then over the Caucasus Mountains into Turkey.”

“Madness! Insanity! It cannot be done! Do you mean to tell me you will walk over two thousand miles, through the cold of winter, across strange lands and fifteen-thousand-foot mountain ranges without papers ... without knowledge of the country ... with the police after you? Why, you are but little more than children!”

Yakov’s eyes were burning with passion; he looked at the rabbi. “
Fear not for I am with thee. I will bring thy seed from the east and gather thee from the west. I will say to the north, give up and to the south, keep not back; bring my sons from far, and my daughters from the ends of the earth
.”

And so it came to pass that the Rabinsky brothers who were wanted for murder fled from Kharkov and moved to the east and to the south through an inhumanly bitter winter.

They trudged through waist-high snow during the night, bending their young bodies against howling winds and fighting off the numbness of frostbite. Their bellies rumbled with hunger. They stole from the countryside and in the hours of daylight they hid in the forests.

Through those tortured nights it was Yakov who filled Jossi with the spirit of their mission. It was Yakov who urged another step and another and yet another when all strength was gone. It was Jossi with his powerful body who held his younger brother up. Between their two strengths they somehow managed to keep alive and moving.

Many a night Jossi had to carry Yakov on his back for eight hours because the younger brother’s feet were raw and bleeding and he could not walk. Many a day Jossi had to sleep on top of Yakov to pass his warmth on to his weaker brother. Often they crawled the last few yards to a hiding place.

Over the ice and the snow they staggered south with but cloth wrappings around their feet—yard after yard—mile after mile—week after week.

In the spring they reached Rostov and collapsed.