Jewels and Ashes Read online

  Father’s memory unravels like the scrolls that were paraded on Simchas Torah. He recalls the monthly sanctification of the moon, when orthodox Jews gathered outside, on the first Sabbath night after the New Moon, to bless the renewal of its light. The Hasidim of Nieronies Lane prayed with such fervour that, whenever they came to the ‘amens’, their voices resounded throughout the neighbourhood with an emotional force which seemed to spring from the depths of the earth.

  1918. Europe is falling apart. Bialystok is a battleground for rival armies. Father would make his way from Nieronies Lane to the cottage of his grandfather Reb Moishe Beinish Liberman and his grandmother Breine. She was a small, plump woman, with a creased forehead poking out from under her wig; and she was extremely pious, alert to the most minute transgression of ritual law. As soon as father entered the house she would ask: ‘Nu? Have you said your prayers?’ In contrast, Moshe Beinish was far softer; a kindly man, straight backed, with a long beard. He was always dressed in a black caftan, with a peaked cap beneath which his eyes were constantly downcast. Yet, no matter how hard times were, he maintained his dignified bearing and would urge: ‘Have faith. Always maintain faith and all troubles will be overcome.’

  Moishe Beinish had taken on the task of preparing father for his bar mitzvah. For three months they would meet weekly and walk together to the nearby house of prayer, of which grandfather was the caretaker. They sat in the empty prayer-hall, where Moishe Beinish showed his grandson how to wind on phylacteries and pronounce the portion of Torah he was to recite on the day of initiation.

  Yet it was at this time, as Moishe Beinish was inducting him into the basic procedures of adult religious life, that father was being drawn towards a quite different God. This religion too had its many sects and factions, rival schools of thought and preachers, each proclaiming the greatness of their particular brand of socialism. Since the news of the Czar’s overthrow had swept Bialystok, the streets had been alight with longing for a new form of redemption. A higher truth was about to be born out of the wreckage of the old order. Father’s elder brother Zachariah had become a convert to Bolshevism and, with his furtive comings and goings, the dilapidated cottage on Nieronies Lane became, like so many others, permeated by a sense of conspiracy and agitation.

  According to father’s freehand maps, this is where Nieronies Lane was located, more or less. At any rate it fits the description, a neighbourhood of narrow alleys that I follow randomly until I meander into a cul-de-sac of cottages which look as though they have stood here since well before the turn of the century.

  An elderly woman pokes her head out of a doorway. She is stout, with fully-rounded hips, thick muscular arms softened by a cushion of fat, and a jovial moon face above which arctic white hair sweeps up into a bun. She exudes the raw health of a peasant, and she gazes at me with a curiosity that gives way to an invitation issued with the wave of a hand. I follow her through the front entrance, which leads directly into a cramped kitchen dominated by a wood stove cluttered with kettles, pots, and pans, some of which sizzle and jump among others which remain mute beneath their charcoal coats.

  She ushers me into an adjacent room. Rarely have I seen so much crammed into such a confined space. There are two large beds, a circular table, and an old Singer sewing machine, all of which are strewn with clothes and materials. Everywhere there are dolls: some sit on the window-sill, others lie naked on the floor, while a large company lie huddled on pillows. Clay pots sprout jungles of ferns; a television set squats on the floor beneath carvings of herons and ducks, and the walls are covered with pictures of kittens, ancestors, saints, and dogs. Several live cats lie curled up on piles of material. Dominating all else is an altar crammed with framed photographs of the Pope, an army of Christs adorned with crowns of thorns, the Virgin Mother in various guises, and mountains of flowers: plastic flowers, fresh flowers in vases and jars, paintings and posters of flowers. ‘A wonderful mess’, the babushka says cheerfully, as she catches me scanning the room. She serves cups of tea, and biscuits on stained and cracked plates which she places on the table, after clearing it with one sweep of the hand.

  A second elderly woman enters, carrying a plate of stale bread rolls. Her face is thin, her complexion waxen, and her smile fixed but kindly. ‘My dearest comrade’, she murmurs, pointing towards my hostess. She is her partner in a sewing business , and the companion with whom she shares this room.

  As we sip tea an agile dwarf of a man darts into the cottage. His face glows a drinker’s scarlet, his bloodshot eyes shift nervously from person to person. The old ladies wink at me. Watch your bag, they indicate in sign language, this man has nimble fingers. Within ten minutes, with a deft hop and a skip, he is gone. We remain in the darkening room in silence, two babushkas munching bread rolls with their unexpected guest from abroad, in a disintegrating house, within a neighbourhood that was once childhood home to my father. They take delight in feeding me, continually bringing more food to the circular table, as if they wish to welcome back a son who has returned after an absence of many years.

  The German war effort is on the brink of collapse. The commandant of Bialystok, a celebrated general, shoots himself, unable to bear the humiliation of defeat. Posters circulate with the news that workers’ and soldiers’ councils have been formed in Berlin. After over a century of oppression, Polish nationalists seize the opportunity to declare an independent republic. They set fire to German-controlled warehouses and grab ammunition, clothes, and food. Polish youths with guns slung over their shoulders organise themselves into legions to drive out the remaining troops of the Kaiser’s army. In the streets of Bialystok, German soldiers are thrown to the ground. Their coats and boots are torn off, and the soldiers sent on their way. In December 1918 the Poles take over the city. Resurgent Polish nationalism has, however, a darker aspect. There are those, especially among the troops of General Haller’s ‘Blue Army’, who drag Jews from trains on the Bialystok-Warsaw line, to beat and rob them, and shear off their beards.

  Red Army, White Army, Blue Army — armies and ideas of all colours and persuasions are running rampant in 1918, 1919, and 1920. Europe is sorting itself out. Bialystok becomes a key railroad depot for unloading and maintaining arms. Its factories churn out uniforms and blankets for Polish troops. Reb Aron Yankev is again able to support his family from work in the textile industry. Chane Esther and her children return from Grodek. As for Bishke Zabludowski, he is back on the streets near the clock-tower, selling Polish and Yiddish newspapers; while to the east, the Bolsheviks are on the march.

  On July 20, 1920, with the Polish authorities having deserted the city, the Bolsheviks entered a Bialystok decked out in red banners and flags. The Revolution had arrived in town. A rag-tag army of Russians, Cossacks, Ukrainians, Jews, and Tartars, accompanied by Polish communists released from Siberian exile, marched through the streets. ‘We thought our liberators had arrived at long last’, father recalls. ‘After all, among the soldiers in this hybrid army there were some who spoke Yiddish!’

  Yet these Red Messiahs were a worn-out and somewhat frayed band of saviours. They struggled by on emaciated nags and rickety wagons. They wore torn boots and ragged uniforms. Their faces were unshaven and caked with dust; their artillery held together with pieces of string. It was an army reduced to skin and bones, craving water and bread: The heroes of a pauper’s Republic’, the town wags sneered.

  Soon the picnic began in earnest. Bialystok sprang to life with revolutionary fervour; and, at first, even the traders thought their liberators had come. Red Army soldiers crowded shops and stores, their pockets stuffed with crisp, newly printed Bolshevik roubles. Sales of shirts, silks, socks, and leather goods soared. Never mind that the money was useless, or that the liberators had confiscated sacks of flour and sugar stored in cellars and back-rooms. ‘You must expect excesses’, defenders of the Revolution argued. And besides, the news had spread, through the alleys of Chanaykes and Piaskes: ‘The Bolsheviks have opened the palace gates! Com
e and take what you like! Branitski’s palace belongs to the people!’

  Mother tagged along with her brothers and sisters as they streamed with the crowds towards the abandoned palace. The hordes surged through the unguarded entrance, along broad asphalt paths that wound between flower beds, towards the three-storey replica of Versailles, with its hundreds of windows, balconies, and arched doorways. They swept up a flight of steps flanked by stone sculptures: on one side, a naked bearded Prince holding a bow, with the arrow aimed at the heart of a naked woman posed on the opposite side. For the first time, the people of Bialystok laid eyes upon details they had barely glimpsed through holes in fences set several hundred metres back from the buildings.

  The crowds burst through the doors into a grand hall supported by six fat marble columns. They swarmed all over the palace, through ornately decorated rooms, penetrating every corner, from the cellars to the garrets, looting everything that could be detached, in a frenzy that was contagious. Like an army of ants they emerged back out onto the paths, lugging their booty: chairs, mirrors, household utensils, tables, royal robes, and servants’ boots. One group pushed and dragged a grand piano; another carried a double bed on which, it was said, Czar Nicholas himself had slept.

  The Probutski children had grabbed their share of the spoils — a white porcelain bowl which glows with a pristine freshness in the dreams of an elderly woman in a Melbourne house many years later. ‘What did you dream about last night?’, I ask mother. ‘My brothers and sisters,’ she answers. ‘They were waving goodbye at the Bialystok station, and they were holding aloft the white porcelain bowl we carried through the palace gates on the day the Bolsheviks came to town.’

  The new authorities set up headquarters in the Hotel Ritz, opposite the gates of Branitski’s palace. Commissars of the Red Army strolled around the city in knee-high boots, three-quarter-length jackets, and with revolvers tucked into holsters. Factory workers seized the opportunity to settle accounts with bosses who had underpaid them for years. The most hated were denounced and imprisoned in the infamous remand centre on Nikolaievska Street. The palace gardens were converted into a Red fairground, where thousands thronged to hear the fiery speeches of revolutionary orators. They stood on the grand balcony of the palace, surrounded by red flags, and proclaimed a new order. Land would be handed over to the peasants, they thundered. The workers would overthrow their blood-sucking employers; and children would be eternally well-fed, clothed, and educated. Bolshevik armies were marching triumphantly forward, the speakers declared. Already they were on the outskirts of Warsaw. Red flags would soon be hanging in Paris, Berlin, and London, they prophesied. Poland, Germany, and Russia were to be united in a grand Bolshevik federation.

  All over Bialystok mass meetings were taking place. Father ran from gathering to gathering — from the palace grounds to the town square; from the clock-tower to circus tents that stood on the banks of the Biale. Everywhere speakers were mounting soap boxes to add their interpretations and predictions. The Poles were trying to decide between Moscow and Warsaw. Jewish speakers argued and debated: some supported the Reds; others claimed that only in mass migration to Palestine would they finally obtain redemption. Zachariah and his comrades commandeered the Great Synagogue for their meetings. It was rumoured that he had profaned the sacred Ark of the Laws. Religion was the opiate of the masses, he claimed, with a passion that shook cobwebs beneath the synagogue dome. No place was immune from the fever burning in Bialystok.

  For father it was the poetry of the speeches that mattered, far more than the content, and I suspect it has remained like that ever since. ‘When poetry disappears from a movement, the evil of the demagogue triumphs’, he has often asserted. Inspired by the fiery debates, he would gather with his teenage friends in the abandoned rooms of a factory where they would play at oratory. They formed their own groups, elected leaders, read each other books on socialist theory, recited Bundist and Zionist tracts, and aped their older brothers and sisters. As for Bishke Zabludowski, he now sold Yiddish and Russian newspapers produced by Bolshevik sympathisers, and wondered how long it would be before he sold newspapers of another persuasion.

  For one long month the Red interlude lasted. And just as suddenly as it had erupted, it fizzled out. Towards the end of August artillery fire could again be heard on the outskirts of Bialystok. The tide had turned in Warsaw, at a battle that would long be remembered as the ‘Miracle of the Vistula’. The independent Polish Republic was again on the ascendancy, driving out the Red Army from town after town as it swept towards Bialystok. There were rumours that hundreds of Jews, accused of collaboration, had been beaten and imprisoned, or left hanging from trees by mobs on the rampage.

  The road to Minsk was crowded with soldiers, party cadres, and townsfolk who had decided to make a run for the east. In the city gardens young Jews were assembled, issued with guns and ammunition, and told to fight a rearguard action as they fled. On the streets the fighting was fierce. My mother stood by the third-floor window in a tenement on Ulitza Kievska, with a bird’s-eye view of the skirmishes. She recalls the panic, the screams of neighbours as their homes were attacked and looted. Another of mother’s recurring stories emerges: she had descended the stairs and ventured onto the streets, having volunteered to acquire food for the Probutski family as they sheltered from the battles raging below.

  From Kievska she turned into Ulitza Grunwaldzka; she recalls the name of the street, and indeed I have now traced the route, a distance of about fifty metres from where she lived. As she rounded the corner she saw, at first, a rifle abandoned against a fence; then she saw the body, its head split open, brains exposed on the pavement. Whether it was a Russian or Pole, Bolshevik or Republican, Jew or Gentile, Red or White, she would never know. But the image was to remain embedded in her psyche. And in years to come she would describe it many times, with a weary and quiet detachment.

  Father stood on the pavement in Ulitza Kupietzka, in front of the apartment block to which his family had recently shifted from Nieronies Lane. He listened intently to the sound of sporadic gunfire that resounded throughout Bialystok. A soldier of the Red Army dashed around a nearby corner. When he saw father he begged him for a place where he could hide. Father led the fugitive inside: ‘He was a rebel, a hero from a world of idealists and revolutionaries whom I had so admired and envied.’

  Bishke and Sheine were frightened and angry. ‘Don’t meddle in such affairs. It always ends badly for Jews. We will be caught in the crossfire.’ But father was insistent. ‘Let him stay for a few hours’ he said. And besides, he was already firmly inside.

  The soldier washed, shaved, tore into the food that was set in front of him, impatient to alleviate his burning hunger. After the meal he fell immediately into a deep sleep. In the evening father accompanied his hero to the door. The soldier was refreshed, his senses fully revived. As he stepped outside with his adolescent saviour, he asked him the way to the establishment of Zlatke the widow. This was the last father saw of his Red Messiah — disappearing into the maze of lanes over which Zlatke reigned supreme. And whenever he tells me this story, father adds his familiar words of advice: ‘Do not be overly idealistic. Revolutions and wars come and go, but our inner drives and obsessions remain forever the same.’

  Father’s monologue seems endless. Stories beget more stories and multiply late into the night A fourteen-year-old boy wanders through battle-torn streets and comes across a funeral procession. It is led by a band of musicians: fiddlers, flautists, drummers. A coffin sits upon a wagon drawn by a team of horses. Behind the wagon there stretches a long line of mourners, among whom there are weeping prostitutes veiled in black. Father imitates them as he tells the story, shaking his head in mock mourning from side to side, and swaying vigorously like a penitent at prayer.

  The Bialystok Jewish underworld had turned out in force for the last journey of their Yanketchke, their small-time crime boss, pimp, and card sharp. He had been a ruffian, no doubt, a larrikin with a grim sense
of humour and a cunning that befitted the times. A man of frenetic energy, he had darted about town for decades, doing deals with a succession of occupying armies while keeping firm control over his troops of ‘sugar boxes’ and the houses of pleasure in which they plied their trade. Yanketchke’s associates and dependants accompanied him to the grave in style. After all he had, in his fashion, helped them survive.

  Father is a survivor. Initially he was rescued by his wife, who had preceded him to the New World. That was not so long before the news began to filter through. The Old World was burning. Bialystok was in flames. And then, silence; an ominous silence, broken just occasionally by a rumour, a garbled report, a fragment of news, nothing ever quite definite. Something inconceivable was taking place, ‘over there’, in that distant city that had once been home.

  Names began to appear in newspapers: lists compiled by the Red Cross and welfare agencies. There were survivors; people seeking to make contact from refugee camps. Displaced persons, they were called. And the realisation seeped through that what had taken place was a Shoah, an annihilation. Of the Zabludowski family, there were no survivors. Mother too had lost all those she had left behind over a decade earlier. ‘After the Great War a higher truth should have been born’, father repeats. ‘And at the end of the second War there emerged the annihilation of all that had been near and dear.’

  As I retreat from the cul-de-sac I glimpse behind me the two babushkas out for a walk. In the open they seem so much smaller, more stooped. They cling to each other and support themselves with walking sticks. They move very slowly, followed by a gang of cats that glide alongside a row of crumbling cottages.

  It is a shadow play that I am engaged in, on this journey in pursuit of ancestral myths. Only when I stop do the shadows become still. And from that stillness there emerges the refrain of an ageing sceptic warning his offspring: Beware of being overly idealistic Revolutions and wars come and go, but man’s inner drives and obsessions remain forever the same.