Jewels and Ashes Read online

  CHAPTER NINE

  YEARS LATER, WHEN MOTHER FELL on a Melbourne street, the memory of another fall, in a time and place far removed, came flooding back. Rivke Malamud had been her favourite aunt. When the Probutski family first moved to Bialystok, soon after the turn of the century, Aunt Rivke often made the journey from Grodek to visit her sister Chane Esther. She would always bring sweets and the latest dolls she had sewed to distribute among her nieces and nephews.

  Soon after the Great War, Aunt Rivke married Chaim Berel Chilke. She left Grodek and moved to live with her husband on the few hectares of land he farmed on the outskirts of the provincial town Bielsk. Mother was with her at the time, picking cucumbers, when Rivke tripped and fell; and, as a result, Aunt Rivke miscarried.

  Mother lies curled up in bed, in a foetal position, as she recuperates from her own fall. ‘What are you thinking about?’, I ask her in the darkened room at the back of the house.

  ‘Nothing’, she replies, with a tinge of defiance.

  Her eyes are blackened, her nose bruised, perhaps broken; and she shields herself from any suggestion of pity. I have known her as a tough person at most times, hiding any sign of pain. She seemed always buried in work, as she brought up three sons in the New World. Memories of that other world she had known in her childhood were restricted; while those more painful were kept at bay, and only revealed themselves unexpectedly, triggered by something that would throw her off guard. Such as this sudden fall; or the disturbing dreams from which she would awaken, shouting, ‘Mama! Mama!’, unaware that 1 could hear her from the room next door where her cries had awoken me. In the moments that followed I would creep along the passage to my parents’ bedroom door, to gather snatches of whispered conversations between them as mother recounted her dream of towns on fire, and of her mother, father, brothers, and sisters running from the flames. In time, such dreams also became dreams of my own.

  She would take the night train from Bialystok station, for she loved watching the lights of villages emerging from the darkness. She looked forward to this journey every year, for she would spend the summer months with Aunt Rivke and Uncle Chaim Berel Chilke. On a day of incessant drizzle I set out on the same route, for the sixty kilometres south to Bielsk. The train moves slowly, stopping often in hamlets or isolated stations in the middle of open countryside. Passengers scurry out in the gloom, and make their way towards solitary homesteads or clusters of cottages.

  It is evening when I alight and make my way along the main street of Bielsk. The rain has stopped, the sky cleared. A pale full moon has begun its ascent over a forest of television antennae jutting from the red-tiled roofs of pre-war apartments. In the centre of town, as in Bialystok, there is a clock-tower. It rises above a row of poplars and, at the apex of the spire above the clock, a wind vane shifts erratically in the evening breezes.

  This is the terrain of the shtetl, where market gardens and farms clutch at the hems of townlets and villages. On the following afternoon, a Friday, I stroll through Bielsk along dirt roads lined with weatherboard cottages. In this neighbourhood there lives, I have been told, a coal dealer by the name of Kaminski. On the way I am drawn by the sound of chanting to a Russian Orthodox church, overflowing with townsfolk at prayer. Women in kerchiefs kneel outside the arched entrance, while others crowd in the vestibule and church hall. The air is thick with incense, the walls lined with icons of gold haloed saints, tapestries of biblical scenes, and portraits of Christ in his martyrdom. A bearded priest leads the chant, and a chorus of women echoes his resonant voice with a harmonising refrain.

  A cottage: its timber slabs recently painted light brown; the front garden in full bloom with chrysanthemums, daisies, marigolds, sunflowers — gold upon gold. The drive beside the cottage opens out into a back yard. Used tyres lie scattered among piles of wood. A battered truck, without wheels, its underbelly buried in dirt, sprawls behind an empty cart. A horse stands in a shed, quietly munching oats. A scrawny terrier leaps from a kennel and yelps furiously at the stranger in the yard.

  I knock on the front door; there is no response. Through an open window I can hear the drone of voices which seem to be coming from a television. I persist and, after ten minutes or so, the door is opened by an old man who has obviously just been aroused from sleep. He moves out onto the verandah with measured steps. His cheeks are sunbaked crimson, his hair a dishevelled mass of greys, while his shoulders emanate a strength that reflects a lifetime of physical labour. He speaks slowly, in a Yiddish that has retained its melodious softness. It is obviously mama loshen, his mother tongue, spoken with ease and fluency. I detect a similar cadence in the Polish as he calls on his wife, who has been visiting a next-door neighbour, to prepare a meal for this unexpected visitor from abroad.

  Kaminski the coal dealer: at dawn he harnesses his horse to a cart laden with coal, and plods through the streets of Bielsk selling fuel to householders. At night, on the verandah, Kaminski tells me his story in a Yiddish drawl that lapses occasionally into a reflective silence.

  He was born in the nearby shtetl of Orla. ‘My grandfathers, Bishke Zabludowski and Reb Aron Yankev, were born and raised in Orla’, I tell him. ‘There are no more Jews left in Orla, not a single one’, he replies.

  Kaminski had been raised in Orla, and had worked in his father’s bakery. At the outbreak of war, when Orla was occupied by the Soviets, he had joined the Red Army. In 1945 he had returned to a shtetl that was Judenrein. It was as if all those he had known had vanished overnight.

  Kaminski moved to Bielsk, married a Polish woman, and became wedded also to the streets of the town. Decade upon decade he had followed a familiar route, in horse and cart, delivering coal to a daily rhythm, to the turning of the seasons, to the unfolding of the years. Meanwhile, one by one, the few remaining Jews had left to begin life anew, in lands far removed.

  His two grown-up daughters had also moved. Their portraits stand on a mantelpiece in the dining room where we eat kasha and chicken. Our hastily assembled Shabbes meal continually expands as Zoshia, Kaminski’s wife, delivers yet another dish from the kitchen. One daughter lives in Israel, another in West Germany. Between them they have eight children. On the wall there hangs a painting of a young couple gazing over Jerusalem, ‘city of gold’. Nearby there is a framed portrait of a rabbi, prayer shawl draped around his shoulders, at worship in front of Torah scrolls.

  Shabbes in Bielsk: Kaminski plays Yiddish records, and one song in particular, which he plays over and over again. When it ends he lifts the needle, places it back on the same track, and settles in his chair. He listens with a bemused smile to the ‘Ballad of the Miller’, for whom the turning of the wheel, the grinding of yet another batch of grain, marks the passage of time in a shtetl of fading dreams.

  As we eat, Kaminski’s son Marek arrives. At first he seems distant, a touch wary, an awkward giant who towers over us with little trace of his father’s shtetl warmth and spontaneity. Marek has inherited the fairer features of Zoshia. His Yiddish is clumsy, unpractised. He relaxes only much later, as he drives us to the apartment of Moshe Berman, the one other pre-war Jew who still lives in Bielsk.

  Moshe is not at home. Marek suggests we look for him on the patch of land he farms just out of town. A dirt road leads us several kilometres from the lights of Bielsk, to a huddle of sheds. It is nine-thirty on a Friday night, long after the stars have ushered in the Sabbath, and Moshe is at work. The land around us appears barren and desolate under a shroud of darkness.

  Moshe seems surprised and bewildered to see us, although I soon realise that this sense of distraction is always with him. He is short and stout. When he laughs, his forehead splits across the centre and his eyebrows lift like the hoods of twin cobras. And his mind: it never ceases to twist and shift from thought to thought, abruptly changing direction midstream as he rushes from chore to chore.

  ‘The cows must be locked up for the night’, Moshe mutters. ‘They must be fed properly, made warm, comfortable, content. Only then can I
allow myself to go home.’

  He dashes towards the cowshed, suddenly stops, turns, and veers back to greet me again while apologising for not having welcomed his guest properly. This is, after all, a rare occasion, to have a compatriot visit from so far away. Moshe waves an arm in an arc to indicate the extent of his land.

  ‘My ten hectares, my cows, my wheat fields, my life. Do you know what it is for a Jew in Poland to own land? All my life, this was my dream. Who would have believed that in old age it would happen? And has it brought me happiness? Peace of mind? Prosperity? Look for yourself. A Shabbes night, and still I am working. I am a servant to this land, bound to the needs of animals, may my enemies have such luck.’

  Again Moshe runs off to round up a stray cow. He returns gasping for breath. A man of seventy, working on Shabbes. I always thought that to have land was to be secure, a man of substance. Instead I am a peasant, a slave, a fool.’

  Moshe dances from shed to shed, runs nervously here and there to attend to his duties, dashes back to tell me anecdotes, beams, frowns, blows his cheeks up into bloated balloons as he heaves in the night air, urges his cows homewards, berates his luck, and veers erratically from self mockery to vigorous handshakes. The last prewar Jews living in Bielsk stand in an open field on a Shabbes night, a full moon on the decline, as a chill descends. Both of them are captive to a land that has yielded a bitter harvest. And yet it is obvious that this terrain was their first, as it will be their last great love.

  Sometimes on a journey there is an unexpected symmetry to things, a moment in which all seems to be balanced on a fine point of harmony and stillness. Bielsk stands equidistant between the townlets of Bransk and Orla, which are about ten kilometres away on either side. Late on a Shabbes night, two ageing men are standing in an open field within sight of the lights of Bielsk. Kaminski the coal dealer is the last Jew from Orla; Moshe Berman the peasant is the last Jew from Bransk. Both of them returned to their beloved shtetlech in the wake of the Annihilation to find them razed, their loved ones gone. Both decided to move away, but did not have the heart to completely forsake the province of their childhood. So they settled in Bielsk, where a visitor from afar now stands between them, equidistant from Bransk, where his paternal grandmother Sheine Liberman was born, and Orla, where his grandfathers Reb Aron Yankev Probutski and Bishke Zabludowski were raised.

  This is a tale of three shtetlech, two old Jews, and a traveller in search of family lineages that have almost faded from existence. And at this moment, under a waning full moon, there is a touch of perfection and a hint that somewhere, very close, there hovers another realm in which can be found an understanding and acceptance of things that goes far beyond mere words.

  At 4 a.m. on summer days, throughout the 1920s, Chaim Berel Chilke, accompanied by a niece from Bialystok, would harness a pair of horses to a wagon loaded with cucumbers, beetroot, cabbages, and potatoes. In the pungent pre-dawn air they trotted through the streets of Bielsk onto the road to Bransk, past a necklace of villages lit up by lanterns that could be glimpsed through windows and doorways as peasants prepared for another day of harvest. The wagon would come to a halt in the town square of Bransk, where the market was teeming with early buyers hurrying between stalls to take their pick of the best vegetables. So many times I have heard the story of this journey, the most joyous of mother’s remembrances; and each time she tells it, she smiles with the reliving of it.

  On a summer morning in 1986 a bus ploughs through pools of water which are spreading under a persistent rain. The road is lined with poplars that have begun to shed their leaves. Every few kilometres there is a settlement: Kolnica, Grobowiez, Lubin, each a collection of cottages dripping rain. Just a few villagers can be seen scurrying by, rugged up in thick overcoats. Scarecrows lean at precarious angles over crops that bend under the storm. Cows stand against each other under solitary trees. Waterfowl forage in soggy swamps, and a man leads a horse across farmland.

  In these swamps and fields, they sought a place to hide — in barns, between reeds and long grass, or dug in beneath the ground. They crept towards the houses of Polish peasants and acquaintances, pleading for refuge — if not for themselves, for their children. Those that succumbed to hunger became fodder for foxes. To harbour a Jew was to risk execution. Eyes glanced furtively over shoulders. This was the season of hunter and hunted; the bonds of civility had been cut asunder and left to rot in the summer of 1942.

  Among the hunted was Moshe Berman. In the summer of 1942 he lived under the land, in a shelter burrowed deep into the earth. From time to time, under cover of night, the Polish farmer who had allowed him to stay in his fields would deliver food. And among the many Jews of Bransk who had remained trapped within the town were relatives of my father: uncles, aunts, cousins from the Liberman family; while in the towns of Bielsk and Orla dwelled Chaim Berel Chilke, Aunt Rivke, their daughter Freda, and Probutskis, and Zabludowskis. In the summer of 1942 they awaited their fate, within crowded ghettos, increasingly aware of what loomed ahead. Couriers and partisans had conveyed the rumours: not so far distant was a forest clearing called Treblinka, a journey by train of just a few hours …

  The bus lurches through the streets of Bransk to avoid flooded gutters. On arrival at the bus depot I set out immediately on a familiar errand, with always the same question to get things started: ‘Where is the Jewish cemetery?’ A drunkard points the way. A horse-drawn cart splashes past, sending up a spray of muddied water.

  The road leads out of town across a stream swollen by the rains. Floodwaters swirl beneath a bridge and spread across harvested fields. Everyone I meet seems to know where the burial ground lies. ‘Take the road until the grove of oaks. Turn left, and walk along the overgrown path until it peters out in the long grass.’ I find the headstones, hidden beneath shrubs, and wedded to roots of trees. The Hebraic characters are, as usual, almost indecipherable. A word here, a name there. No Libermans. And hardly any stones. This cemetery has long been abandoned; yet everyone in Bransk seems to know where it is, this gathering of stones just beyond the town limits.

  Moshe Berman sits at the table perplexed, his forehead split by deep furrows that ripple to the sides in smaller troughs. Gradually, as the night proceeds, the creases loosen, and his breath flows more easily. Occasionally, now, there is a flash of radiance, a look of triumph: Moshe Berman has recognised a nigun. He gropes for the words, drawing them from deep reserves of his memory, where they have lain dormant for years:

  Yidl with his fiddle,

  Berel keeping beat.

  Sing me a melody

  In the middle of the street.

  The hours of the night are being consumed one by one, gulped down with vodka and food. The spirits flow freely in the apartment of Zirel the widow. A table bulges with roast duck and potatoes, slices of beetroot soaked in oil, carrot stew, gefilte fish, salted herring, poppy-seed cake, apple compote, borscht, wine, and whisky.

  ‘My stomach is exploding’, gasps Kaminski, as he whirls around the room to refill glasses that are eagerly stretched out towards him. This is a special occasion, a celebration; and I comprehend, fully now, how it was in Yiddish shtetlech that stood defenceless on the flatlands of East Poland, wedged between imminent perils, dodging disasters, keeping heart and soul together with evenings such as this.

  Moshe hums snatches of melodies. He dredges up random verses like fragments of lost parchment, and flings them across the room:

  There’s a well in my garden with a bucket dangling

  And my lover comes to drink there every evening.

  ‘Moshe! Now you have many wells on your land!’, exclaims Kaminski.

  ‘But no lovers; just water for the cows’, laments Moshe. ‘Who would have thought it possible,’ he adds, ‘that in my old age I’d be an owner of fields and beasts, a man of property.’ Moshe Berman thumps the table with his fists: ‘Aron! A Jew must have a bit of land and a sword in his hand to defend it!’

  ‘The sword won’t do us any good’, r
etorts Kaminski. ‘No matter what we do, there will always be a black plague upon us sooner or later. What we need is a nigun and a glass of schnapps!’

  Tonight we have a rare quorum, almost, for there are nine of us in all; just one short of the required number. Let me introduce the company that has gathered in the apartment of Zirel the widow. Besides Moshe Berman and Kaminski there is Zoshia, Kaminski’s wife, ruddy faced, her shock of auburn hair beginning to grey at the edges. On marrying Kaminski she had converted to the Jewish faith. Their son, Marek, the fair-haired giant, had begun the evening with that same awkwardness he had displayed when we first met several days ago; but as the night progresses he loses his reserve and, for a time at least, relaxes in our company. Our hostess, Zirel, was born a daughter of Jews; but before her childhood was over her parents had said, ‘Enough of this curse; it brings us nothing but miseries!’. They had ripped the mezuzah off their door, and had never again mentioned their origins. Zirel’s young son and daughter have watched tonight’s antics with astonishment — shocked to see their mother find her way back to a tongue they had never heard her speak, and join in melodies they had never heard her sing. As the room spins with increasing abandon, the children give way and join us in our wild attempts to reawaken ancestral dreams.

  Towards midnight, Moshe’s son Romek arrives. He is a chubby man with a pale pink complexion and a large forehead which extends back to a receding hairline. His eyes, however, betray an enduring anxiety. Romek, it soon becomes apparent, is driven by a single obsession: how to find a way out of this provincial town. He clings to me with increasing tenacity. I am the one who possesses a foreign passport.

  ‘Can you obtain a permit, a visa? This country is no place for me. I am a fish out of water here.’