Jewels and Ashes Read online

  Yet throughout that voyage, even as she succumbed to the adventure, to the breath of unlimited freedom that wafted across open seas, and to that special bond that develops between immigrants thrown together by chance to become ship brothers and sisters with a common destiny, my mother could not shake off her vision of Reb Aron Yankev, running frantically along the platform of the Bialystok station, desperate to make one last contact with his estranged daughter. He had paused for a moment when he reached her, to steady his voice, before he said, somewhat hesitantly, ‘I wish you a safe journey and a successful future in your new home. And I forgive you’.

  When she recalls this moment, mother invariably adds, ‘And how could I have known that I would never see them again? Not only my father, but almost everyone who stood there on the Bialystok station farewelling me?’.

  His parents were not informed. Her father had no idea at the time, although Chane Esther the matriarch knew, and one of her brothers was a witness. From father’s family there were no witnesses. The minyan of ten males required by traditional law had to be rounded up; there were always people on hand to make an extra zloty as witnesses on such occasions. The rabbi performed the ceremony quickly. Bishke Zabludowski happened to pass by the marriage bureau soon after.

  ‘Mazel-tov’, the office workers exclaimed. And why should I be congratulated?’, he replied. ‘Don’t you know?’, came the shocked answer. ‘Your son Meier has just been married.’

  ‘We didn’t confide in our parents’, father has told me. ‘We never discussed our personal affairs with them. In the pride of our youth we saw ourselves as being far in advance of previous generations. We were freethinkers, breaking away from stifling traditions; at least, this is what we thought at the time. Many of us didn’t bother getting married. The major problem was finding a room. Once you found one, you could begin “married” life.’

  They were officially married because, they hoped, the papers would enable him to receive a permit to the New World after his wife had settled there. They didn’t require a room because she went home immediately after the ceremony to pack. She had received a permit from a sister who had migrated several years previously. The newly-weds were not to see each other for over three years.

  My father loves words. It is a passion that still grips him at the onset of his ninth decade. The discovery of a new word — its origins, precise meaning, nuances, and variations — can make his day. Father’s most prized possessions are his dictionaries, among which are the rare ones he took with him on the sea voyage from Europe half a century ago. Instead of clothes he packed books and dictionaries: Polish-Yiddish, English-Polish, RussianYiddish, German-Russian, Hebrew-English; all the permutations of the six languages he has mastered over a long lifetime.

  Father claims he knows what his first words were, his first naming of things, the earliest labels he attached to the world. It is 1907. A two-year-old boy dressed in a sailor’s suit runs beside his mother through a town square. Above him looms the clock-tower of Bialystok. He points to the tower and at an object moving through the streets. He names them, and his naming becomes a refrain he repeats over and over again:

  A zeiger, a konke

  A zeiger, a konke.

  The zeiger is the town clock, and the konke is a horse-drawn tram that ferries passengers within the city and beyond it as far as the Zwierziniec forest. ‘You see’, father remarks triumphantly, ‘even then I was already a philosopher, and my first poem was about time and space.’

  They lived on the edge of time and space, my ancestors, always on the verge of moving on, continually faced with the decision: do we stay, persist, take root within this kingdom, or do we take to the road again? Perhaps it is safer, greener, beyond the next river, over the next mountain-range, across yet another border? Often enough the choice was made for them, and they fled for their lives in the wake of expulsions, inquisitions, and massacres to seek a new place of refuge. At other times they were welcomed, initially, for the skills they had accumulated as wanderers; centuries on the move had made them masters of the ephemeral. They knew how to serve as middlemen, entrepreneurs, navigators and astronomers, court advisers and healers; even though their hearts longed for some soil to till.

  So it was in Eastern Europe one millennium ago, when they began to arrive in flight from the Crusades. Later they came as guests of noblemen, who invited them to settle in their fiefdoms to become conduits between aristocrat and peasant, town and countryside. They traded as pedlars and merchants, transformed forests into slabs of timber, and shaped the timber into expanding towns, where they could set up workshops to weave, sew, hammer, cut, and shape future destinies.

  Towns and villages sprang up like mushrooms after rain. Over the centuries they expanded in all directions: north to the shores of the Baltic Sea; south into the Carpathian Ranges and towards the Black Sea; west into obscure pockets of the Austro-Hungarian empire; and east, deep into Czarist Russia, beyond the banks of the River Dnieper. Settlements emerged as far and wide as the horizon and shifting foreign borders would permit them.

  Yet at no time were these communities entirely secure. Arbitrarily, a charter or privileges they had been granted could be repealed, and their function, place of residence, and status redefined. There was always the threat of a sudden whirlwind, a madman on the rampage full of drink and misdirected rage, inciting the mob to join in and take out its frenzy on these peculiar people who had settled among them with their private God and the countless prayer-houses in which they worshipped Him.

  So they maintained their talent for movement, travelling within the prescribed boundaries as itinerants, eking out a living from limited opportunities. Foremost among them, or at least this is how I once loved to imagine it, were the troubadours, storytellers, cantors, and bands of Klesmorim who toured obscure hamlets trading tales for a meal, songs for a drink. Wandering preachers, scribes, scholars, and wonder workers exchanged Hebrew and Aramaic scriptures, amulets, and talismans for precious roubles and zlotys to send home to their impoverished families. Their gifts and messages were borne along dusty roads and country paths by horse-drawn wagons. ‘We will return soon’, they wrote, ‘by spring, in time for Passover; or by autumn, for Rosh Hashonah and the Days of Awe.’ Sometimes they would break beyond the limits completely to steal over the horizon, murmuring: ‘Enough! It is time to find a new haven with greener pastures and the possibility of redemption.’

  When, as a child, I had my first intimations of these ancestral wanderings, I saw them initially as a romance. I imagined myself the descendant of Gypsies and nomads. I tried to retrace their steps. I would catch glimpses of footprints and hooves etched in mud and dust within the pages of Yiddish novels that I read voraciously. My interest waxed and waned, and sometimes the footprints would peter out. Old volumes I found in the recesses of forgotten corners in our house would revive my flagging interest with an unexpected photograph of a forefather walking absentmindedly through a village, crooked cottages visible in the background, cobblestones underfoot. They drew me, these volumes, in spite of myself, back to the search.

  One particular page stood out. In the wake of the Annihilation, the survivors had assembled photos, snatches of history, glimpses of what had been until so recently their beloved hometown. They did it in haste, as if building a moat against the ravages of memory loss. Within six years it was published, in New York: a massive volume encased between hard covers of dark crimson on which were embossed, in gold lettering, in Yiddish on the right-hand side and English on the left, the words, ‘Bialystok — Photo Album of a Renowned City and Its Jews the World Over’. Copies were sent to countries around the entire globe, to every corner where Bialystoker had fled and recreated their lives.

  A random flip of the pages revealed scenes of a thriving metropolis and its citizens, both prominent and obscure. Other more faded photos and paintings depicted an era when Bialystok was merely a village enclosed by field and forest. But the pages could just as easily fall upon images of ruin and des
olation, with buildings aflame or reduced to rubble. Then there was one particular page: after I discovered it I would always turn to it first, skimming over the ruins, not quite seeing or allowing myself to focus fully upon them. Recently I returned to that page which had once held me so captivated; and even though it was years since I had last seen them, the images retained their haunting quality and hinted at mysteries I had not quite penetrated.

  There are five photos under the heading, ‘Memorable Bialystoker Characters’. Above, to the left, stands Yankel the Organ-Grinder, holding aloft a wooden box from which a parrot is drawing out a lucky envelope with its beak. They are in a market-square surrounded by a crowd watching this poor man’s lottery. Yankel’s hair is white, as too are his ample beard and moustache. He has the bearing of a fierce patriarch, a communal elder rather than a pedlar of cheap dreams.

  Alongside Yankel, to the right, is a photo with the caption: A Bialystoker urchin from the Chanaykes’. Wrapped in a ragged overcoat, he leans against a timber door, clutching a cigarette to his mouth. He squints at the camera defiantly from beneath a peaked cap that perches crookedly on his head — a little rascal from the alleys of the neighbourhood where my mother once lived.

  On the lower half of the page there are three passport-size photos. One of them remains as sinister today as it appeared when I first saw it and began to realise that, at a certain point, the romance wore thin and there were darker forces that could obliterate it. On the face of the ‘Boy Layser’, we are informed, the anti-Semite Dr Granowski had burned the words ‘ganev’, ‘dieb’, and ‘wor’ — all meaning ‘thief’. The words can be seen clearly, tattooed several inches high, one plastered across the forehead, one etched into each cheek. This incident took place in 1888. Almost a century later the face of Layser stares out, frozen and trapped within a square-inch prison that bears witness to the day he had been irreversibly branded and bound to his fate.

  For relief from the intensity of Layser’s gaze, I would turn my attention to the photo of Faivel Lilliput. A turban wrapped around his head, a white robe draped over his shoulders, a hand held against his chest in a Napoleonic gesture — Faivel was a dwarf, a circus performer, and a distributor of theatre placards throughout Bialystok.

  I knew Faivel. In the 1950s he resurfaced in Melbourne. His inflated head, muscular shoulders, and rolling gait were a familiar sight. He seemed to be everywhere: a jester at weddings; a guest at circumcisions; a mourner at funerals; an odd-job man in the run-down houses of newly arrived immigrants. He loved to play pranks and always put aside time to play with us, the children, as we darted about the communal functions that our parents often attended. He played with the abandon of someone who had long ago resigned himself to having no children of his own. And besides, he was our size, and saw the world from our perspective. He taught us how to mimic the gestures and antics of the grown-ups who towered above us, and to caricature their endless speeches. As my father used to say of him: even where he is not sown, he also manages to grow.

  The fifth image is of an elderly man, balding at the temples, his beard neatly trimmed. He wears a white shirt, tie, and black jacket. The most striking family resemblance can be seen in the ears. I hated having the short-back-and-sides haircuts that were forced upon me as a child, because they exposed my big ears and made me look like a monkey. The fifth ‘memorable character’ in the honoured company of Yankel the Organ-Grinder, the Urchin from the Slums, Faivel Lilliput the Circus Dwarf, and the Tattooed Boy Layser, is my paternal grandfather, Bishke Zabludowski — who, as the caption informs us, was the first newsboy in Bialystok and ‘disseminated culture for over forty years’.

  When Bialystoker gathered at parties and concerts I would be introduced as the grandson of Bishke Zabludowski. ‘We all knew him’, they would say. ‘A small man, with a red beard. He stood under the clock-tower, with piles of newspapers and journals. He was a familiar sight, trotting to and from his news-stand bent under the latest edition, his big ears sticking out to the sides.’ And they would lean over to tweak my ears, while I squirmed and wriggled to get away from my tormentors.

  Bishke Zabludowski: the bearer of news, town crier, raconteur, contact man, his big ears tuned in to gossip both local and from abroad, a familiar figure, one of the most memorable sights in the streets of Bialystok. In the grand tradition, he was a true master of the ephemeral.

  In the weeks before my departure I have a recurring dream, the same fragments repeated with slight variations, each one suffused with a similar feeling of unease.

  I am travelling through a town. Friends who live there have invited me to inspect the offices of the security police. When we reach the entrance of the towering grey building I become anxious, and refuse to enter with them. After they emerge from the building some time later, they tell me it has been an interesting experience and that there is nothing to fear. Since the doors are still open I cannot resist the temptation and I enter.

  There appears to be no one in sight as I descend the stairs. In the basement there is a man seated behind a desk. ‘You have come too late’, he informs me. There is still time for me to leave as easily as I have entered, and to ascend the stairs back into daylight. Yet I linger on, my curiosity aroused.

  Unexpectedly, I am approached by several burly men who exude a sense of menace and brute strength. They escort me to a lower basement in which there are a number of interrogators seated behind a long table. Opened out in front of them are files within folders. They seem to know who I am. I realise now there is no escape; I am trapped in a cellar, hemmed in by guards. My inquisitors ask questions without a trace of feeling. They are clinical, detached. They want to know why I have come here, and it is clear they are not about to let me go.

  Later I find myself in a prison cell. The guard is harsh and hostile. I envy him because, when he finishes work, he can go out into the sunlight while I will still be confined in a dark cell. I am overcome by a feeling of panic. Yet there is one saving grace. 1 have in my possession a large volume of stories about the Tzaddikim, the early Hasidic masters who, in the darkest of times, counselled their communities and tried to show them a way back to the light, to the source of Creation. I look forward to immersing myself in this book as a means of passing time and deriving some comfort while I am imprisoned. But on closer inspection I realise the book is moth-eaten, and that some of my fellow inmates have ripped out pages to use as cigarette paper.

  I become aware that someone has smuggled themselves into the cell. It is a man who, in childhood, I used to know as the Partisan. He was a family friend who often visited us on Sunday afternoons. During the war years he had roamed the forests near Bialystok and fought in the Resistance. Many times he had narrowly escaped death and, eventually, in the wake of the Annihilation, he had made his way to Australia.

  He passes me a note on which there are instructions about how to escape. But I cannot quite decipher the scribbled message.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE BEIJING-MOSCOW EXPRESS hurtles northwards across the plains of Manchuria. Villages of clay cottages give way to grasslands grazing sheep, cattle, and horses. The cities of Harbin and Shenyang loom above swamps and flooded fields; high-rise complexes emerge from barren wastelands. As we cross a river that threads through central Harbin I glimpse a solitary strip of sand, an inland beach basking under a mild sun. Hundreds of bathers cling to this patch of sand: some spill out into the shallows and others burst beyond the pack, as if freeing themselves to swim alone and undisturbed. Waves ripple back to the shores from the wake of boats, while in the distance burn the flames of industry, modern-day infernos, fuelling a city that has for centuries oscillated between rival empires.

  As we move I read a photocopy of my father’s life story. It is handwritten in Yiddish, a lifetime telescoped into twenty pages of foolscap, eighty years at a glimpse, lived out in two halves, within two continents on opposite sides of the globe. Father had written it at my request, just days before my departure:

  I was bo
rn in the city of Bialystok, Poland, although at that time, December 4th, 1905, it was a part of Czarist Russia. On the Jewish calendar it was the 23rd of Kislev, the 3rd day of Channukah in the year 5666. Bialystok began as a village which stood beside a rivulet called the Biale. The village belonged to a Count Branitski, and indeed, there was a Palace Branitski set within lavish gardens enclosed behind walls of stone and gates of steel…

  Bialystok is thousands of miles to the west, a journey of eight days and nights by Trans-Siberian train. I read father’s manuscript carefully — not only because I am on the way to the landscapes of his youth, but also because tomorrow at dawn we are scheduled to arrive at the Soviet border. Travellers I met in Beijing had warned me of the thorough searches that take place at this border. The territory we are approaching is linked within me to a deeply rooted suspicion; only now, on the eve of arrival, do I realise how strongly ingrained it is. Word associations emerge and impose themselves on the countryside rushing towards me — exile, prison camp, pogrom, interrogation: fragments of family legends and communal remembrances. It is an ancient fear, handed down through many generations, lying dormant and liable to be triggered off unexpectedly. Perhaps the Yiddish script of father’s writing will arouse the suspicions of border police.

  Towards evening we move past wetlands. Herons, coots, ducks, and rowing boats glide between thick clumps of wild grass and emerge occasionally into clearings where boatmen are harvesting reeds. Horses wade through muddy streams; a boy leads a bull along a dirt track; men on horseback drive a flock of sheep.