Jewels and Ashes Page 6
In 1320 a village is founded on the banks of the Biale by a Lithuanian nobleman, Count Gedimin. When my father tells the story he loves to separate the syllables. Any chance to dissect a word, any chance to take it back to its origins, he seizes upon with relish; for in words, he claims, lies the essence of things. Biale means white. Stok is a Slavic word for river. The kingdom of the White River is where we come from, says father, with one of his Romantic flourishes.
The village of Bialystok is handed down through generations of Lithuanian families until 1542, when the Polish King Zygmund August marries the widowed and childless Lithuanian Princess Varvara, and the lands of the White River become his private fiefdom. Six years later the first Jews settle in the village.
We leap through the centuries. Bialystok becomes entrenched Polish territory and the property of the Branitski family. In 1703 Count Stefan Branitski erects a wooden palace by the White River. Under Branitski patronage a house of worship is built in 1718 and evolves into a synagogue court around which Jewish settlement expands.
Count Jan Klemens Branitski the Second inherits the village from Stefan. As a child I would often gaze at his portrait in the Bialystok photo album, fascinated by his globular head. The Count’s face is a fat full moon. A black toupee forms a perfect crescent on the uppermost rim. A formidable forehead descends beneath the crescent to thick but neatly trimmed brows arching over fiery black eyes. A handlebar moustache extends well past the extremities of the mouth, placed high above an enormous chin that collapses into several folds, rolling in waves across a bullish neck. A velvet cape is draped across a white blouse buttoned high onto the lower rim of the moon. The Count glows with the proud confidence of born rulers. The eyes, however, speak of something deeper, of cosmic visions and universes far beyond a mere village.
Jan Klemens propels Bialystok into the future. Anxious to expand, the Count invites Jews from nearby hamlets to settle and help build a town. In 1745 they are granted equal rights, and in the same year a wooden tower is erected over a municipal hall to be used as a prison for criminals on remand. Under the tower eighty shops are built and divided among Jewish families. Each family is given a key for which they must pay three gold coins — at least, this is how the story is told. We are in territory in which the boundaries between history and legend are thin.
In 1750 the entire settlement is destroyed by fire. Undaunted, the Count supervises the reconstruction of Bialystok. A more solid core of brick and stone emerges, with a new clock-tower — which is destined to become the first sight my father registers, as a two-year-old, dressed in a sailor suit, running beside his mother through the town square.
Count Jan Klemens Branitski dies in 1771 and bequeaths Bialystok to his third wife, Isabella, a sister of Stanislaw Poniatowski, the last of the Polish kings. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Bialystok’s fate is increasingly determined not so much by local nobility, as by decisions taken in distant palaces, in the courts of contending empires eager to feed their voracious appetites for more territory. The ancient Polish-Lithuanian kingdom is dismembered in a series of partitions. Austro-Hungary, Prussia, and czarist Russia scurry off like hungry wolves clutching their share of the spoils.
The pace is fast; the game played for high stakes. Prussia grabs control of Bialystok in the partition of 1795. Napoleonic armies on the march eastwards take over the city for a year. In 1807 it falls into Russian hands. Napoleon recaptures White River territory in 1812. Three years later Czar Alexander the First regains jurisdiction and, for the time being, the ferocious game comes to an end; during the next one hundred years Bialystok is firmly under Russian control.
An invasion of a different kind takes place. The Industrial Revolution finds its way to Bialystok. In 1850 Nachum Minc and Sender Bloch establish the first silk factories, and the city is spun into orbit around steam-driven machines churning out textiles that are exported throughout Eurasia. Bialystok is harnessed to the assembly line, with both Jewish and German entrepreneurs directing operations. A new class of workers emerge, their schedules dictated by machines that permeate the tempo of their lives. Soon after dawn, sirens shriek the start of another working day, a typical day which will last for decades, throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century. And thereafter’, adds father, ‘the Biale River was no longer white, but a dirty ribbon polluted by industrial waste.’
In the surrounding countryside there are hamlets and towns where the hand-loom, the craftsman, the peasant, and the shtetl community move at a slower pace. In these settlements there live the families Zabludowski, Probutski, Liberman, and Malamud. Aron Yankev Probutski of Orla marries Chane Esther of Grodek; Bishke Zabludowski of Orla marries Sheine Liberman of Bransk. They are drawn, like so many others of their generation, into an industrial vortex called Bialystok. The lure of the factory, of an expanding city, can no longer be resisted. A young family needs bread, work, prospects for a better life.
Bialystok bursts beyond its boundaries, its outer limits trailing off into wooden cottages. In the city centre, three- and four-storey buildings shoot up in a housing boom during the last decade of the nineteenth century. By 1900 there is a population of 70 000: communities of White Russians, Tartars, Ukrainians, Germans, Lithuanians, Cossacks, Gypsies, Poles, and 40 000 Jews.
Steam power is replaced by electricity. The machines spin faster. Boom is followed by economic bust. Bialystok is on the roller-coaster again. My father is born in the year of the first Russian Revolution. The czarist empire is shaken to its foundations, and in the aftermath there stream shock waves of reaction, pogroms, confusion, and false Messiahs. Floundering empires are again on the prowl, and Bialystok is yet again prey to the wolves. The Great War erupts. The armies of Kaiser Wilhelm capture a city set adrift in a no man’s land between past and future. There is fighting in the streets. Regimes come and go overnight. Europe is frantically sorting itself out. Red Army fights White Army. Poles, Tartars, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians flex their nationalist muscles. Each tribe wants its own territory, while Jews and Gypsies look on perplexed, not quite sure which way the wind is blowing. Mother and father run errands for their families in streets where armies sweep past them running east and west. At night they shelter at home to the sound of sporadic gunfire and artillery.
‘March, march Pilsudski’, is the cry of the hour. In the 1920s the veteran nationalist triumphs and consolidates a reborn Poland. For two decades the infant republic remains poised in an uneasy truce between wars. Bialystok appears to flourish. Schools, secular and religious; houses of worship and study; cinemas and theatres; cafes, choirs, orchestras, and political parties all overflow with patrons, supporters, and fellow travellers. And years later group photos will appear in the albums of a vanished city, portraits frozen into still lives within which, if one looks closely enough, it is possible to discern the tiny face of my mother as a member of the Morning Star gymnastics troupe, or my father on an outing in the forests, with comrades of a youth movement called Future.
It could be said that these are good years: the harvests quite abundant; communal life intimate; love affairs permeated by the scent of forests; couples strolling arm in arm along tree-lined Sienkiewicza Avenue. And yet there are those who are boarding trains for distant ports, slipping away to faraway corners of the earth with a healthy sense of premonition, or just plain luck in having received a visa moments before the city gates are closed. To the west, armies are again assembling, with a ferocious hunger for conquest and territory, and a calculating madman at the helm.
As I wander the streets of Bialystok for the first time I follow primitive maps drawn by my parents, indicating the various neighbourhoods they had lived in. A light rain falls incessantly. A damp veil hangs over the city and keeps me at a distance. A cat sits inside a cottage window in front of a white lace curtain. Pedestrians scurry by under umbrellas and newspapers. More than ever Bialystok seems ethereal, a dream whose texture eludes me.
A fair-haired boy appears at the window and edges in
beside the cat. He stares at me with cold suspicion, until I realise that I am confronting him with my sense of disorientation. When I smile, the boy instantly reflects my change of mood. He is joined by a girl of about three, a sister perhaps, and we are drawn, the four of us, into a sort of complicity, a bond of recognition between stranger, boy, girl, and cat. Someone calls from within the house. The children withdraw. The welcoming committee has retreated; but the veil has lifted, and I find myself in Ulitza Kievska, the street where my mother lived in the years immediately after World War 1.
The cobblestones of Kievska glisten under fresh coats of rain. The moisture has subdued their colours into sombre ochres and burgundies. Kievska is a mere hundred metres long, wedged between Ulitzas Grunwaldzka and Mlynowa. Mother had placed her house at number 14, perhaps 13. Number 13 is an abandoned weatherboard. The shutters are closed, except for one which swings in and out with the breeze. Through it I can see rooms scattered with debris, loose floorboards, and broken bottles. Directly opposite is a threestorey greystone building with an arched entrance: number 10. It fits mother’s description, but not the address. Numbers 12 to 16 are non existent. In their place a stone wall encloses a yard piled high with used tyres and car parts. Adjoining the yard is an unkempt garden in which vegetable patches merge with wild flowers, shrubs, and trees. Two Alsatians bark ferociously as I peer over the wall.
A horse-drawn cart turns into Kievska and pulls aside to make way for a car. An elderly couple walk along the pavement, where tufts of grass spring from gaps between the cobblestones. Kievska on this rain-soaked day seems so familiar; yet so downtrodden and desolate, empty of the souls it once housed. Judenrein. A gust of wind catches the shutter on number 13 and slams it back to a close.
Twenty-four hours later the sun soars above the city. The shutters on the cottages of Kievska are flung wide open. The windows frame displays of potplants. Several windowsills are a jungle of ferns and flowers which nestle together, vying like a crowd of eager spectators for a view of the street, where cobblestones smoulder under the sun, a muted blaze of faded reds and light browns.
Kievska is within the Chanaykes, a neighbourhood where impoverished Jewish families were concentrated in a whirl of alleys, narrow streets, and back lanes which still continue to snake and curve into each other like dancing dervishes. I am surprised at how intact it appears, as if history had somehow overlooked this forgotten corner of the world. On days like this, I imagine, the Probutski children, the six sisters and three brothers, would spill into the streets to play in vacant lots strewn with weeds and rubbish. Or perhaps it wasn’t like that at all, and I am merely imposing such a scene on empty sites scattered throughout the neighbourhood like gaps in rows of rotting teeth.
Ulitza Zolta is a dirt path which squeezes off Kievska between several cottages before opening out into a large clearing that resembles an abandoned town square. The Probutski family shifted house in 1920, from Kievska to somewhere in this vicinity; perhaps to the two-storey building which stands apart, overlooking the clearing.
As I enter, I catch the scent of dust and rotting timber. A flight of stairs leads to a balcony which overlooks the square, but I cannot climb up to the attic that I believe my mother may have lived in. The way is barred by an old man who sits in an armchair on the first-floor landing. When I try to speak to him he does not respond. I hand him a note which Witold has written in Polish, explaining that my parents and their families may have once lived here. I am from Australia, the note adds, and I am searching for their former homes. The old man stares blankly into the distance. His head occasionally falls limply to his chest and rolls from side to side while he mumbles incoherently to himself.
As I turn to leave I see a grey-haired lady clutching a shopping bag. She eyes me with suspicion as we pass each other on the stairs. I hand her the note, which she quickly scans. The old lady is unimpressed. I am an intruder.
His apartment is on the second floor of a six-storey tenement; one of several drab grey blocks built up from the ghetto ruins in the immediate post-war years. It is now run-down, cracking at the seams, joints wracked by arthritis. The stairs smell of fried onions and neglect. I am ushered into a sparsely furnished living-room with a single bed, table, and television set on a linoleum-covered floor.
He is rotund and squat, his substantial paunch offset by muscular shoulders that barely contain an outrageous energy which seems always on the verge of bursting beyond the confines of his tight body. He speaks to me with a conspiratorial air, while his hawk-like eyes, full of an ancient suspicion, dart from side to side, always alert, distracted. Buklinski, one of the very last of the Bialystoker Jews, has burst into my life.
Buklinski disappears into the kitchen and dashes back with plates of stewed potatoes and gefilte fish. ‘Imported from Hungary’, he announces triumphantly, jabbing his fingers at the fish. He runs back and forth from the kitchen, and soon the table is laden with bowls of herring, pickled onions, loaves of bread, cheeses, and several bottles of vodka. Buklinski seats himself opposite and commands, in a voice strewn with gravel, ‘Nu? Eat! Is anyone stopping you? Who are you waiting for? The Messiah?’ He speaks a rich colloquial Yiddish laced with earth, fire, and black humour. Looking at me, he muses: ‘A miracle! Our Bialystoker have wandered off to the very ends of the earth in all their dark years, and yet their sons speak Yiddish. A miracle! Nu? What are you waiting for? Eat!’
The vodka flows. Buklinski’s monologue accelerates. He weaves tall stories in a frenzy. ‘I was born on Krakowska, in the Chanaykes, in that very same neighbourhood your mother lived in. We were crammed on top of each other; slept three, four, sometimes more to a bed. We froze in winter, baked in summer, and roamed the streets in gangs of little scoundrels who hunted in packs, seeing with our own eyes everything the heart desired — swindlers and saints, devoted mothers and beggars, prostitutes and yeshiva boys scurrying home, their eyes glued to their sacred books as they bumped into lamp posts. Ah, what a treasure it was to live in Bialystok! Well, my friend, what else could we do but love it? You think we had a choice? Well? What are you waiting for? Eat! Drink! Don’t be shy!’
Whenever one dish is empty, Buklinski dashes back into the kitchen and emerges with reinforcements, plates piled high with cheese blintzes.
‘This is my specialty, which you must eat.’
‘You are like a Yiddishe mama’, I protest.
‘I’m better than a Yiddishe mama. No Yiddishe mama makes blintzes like mine.’
‘But I’m full. I can hold no more.’
‘Full. Shmul. There is always room for more. Eat! I cannot rest until I see you eat.’
Buklinski hovers around the table, restless, imploring, prodding, scolding: ‘Eat! I won’t sit down until you eat!’
Where have I heard these familiar words, the same pleas, this same script? Where have I seen that same intensity, and felt that same tinge of menace in the voice? I have known other Buklinskis. They stood in Melbourne homes, by tables overflowing with food and drink, and talked of hunger and mud.
‘In two things I am an expert’, Zalman would say. Zalman, the family friend, the Bialystoker, the survivor who had brought us tales from the kingdom of night. ‘About two things I know all there is to know. In these things I am a scholar, an expert, a professor. In all other things I may be an ignoramus, but on two subjects I can lecture for days on end and never come to the end of it: mud and hunger. We lived in mud. For six years we were soaked in it. We came to know its subtle changes in texture, from day to day, hour to hour, depending on the amount of rain, the number of wagons and dragging feet that churned it up, the number of work battalions that laboured through it. The ghetto was an empire of mud. And hunger. Hunger had so many nuances, so many symptoms. Sometimes you felt so light, so empty, you could fly. But always it was an infernal ache, a relentless yearning, a search for any possible thing that could be chewed and swallowed. And now I know that a kitchen must be full, and a man is a fool who does not seize a chance to eat…�
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But this is no time to philosophize. Buklinski has opened a second bottle of vodka. He is up on his feet, dancing around the table like a boxer between rounds. I try to break into his monologue from time to time, but Buklinski is a bulldozer who flattens me with his manic, domineering, frenzied, suspicious, yet affectionate energy. One moment he has his arms around me, and is kissing my cheeks with joy while exclaiming how good it is to have such a guest, a son of Bialystoker come half-way around the planet, the grandson of Bishke Zabludowski, no less, whom we all knew, and who didn’t know him as he stood under the town clock selling newspapers, telling us what was going on in this twisted world, and now, can you believe it, his grandson has come to us from the very ends of the earth, like manna falling from the heavens. A miracle!
And the next moment he is wheeling and dealing, and claiming all foreigners have a dollar to spare and that money grows on trees over there, while we are stuck here, in this black hole, our friends old or dead, the clever ones gone, scattered over lands of milk and honey, while we, may the devil have such luck, we languish here where there aren’t even enough Jews left for a quorum. So? What would it hurt to spare us a dollar? What harm would it do to give us a little something? And just as I think Buklinski has got me against the ropes he is suddenly off and running again, propelled into the kitchen by a burst of obsessive generosity to fetch a third bottle of vodka, another plate of pickled herring. Nu? What are you waiting for? Drink! Eat!
The room is bursting with heat and words. Buklinski jerks off his jacket. I see tattoos on both arms: a mermaid curls around one forearm, and on the other a muddy-blue clumsily applied number sprawls through a scattering of grey hair. ‘Two years’, he says quietly when he catches me looking. ‘For two years I was in Auschwitz.’ All words grind to an abrupt halt. Buklinski sits at the table, his head propped up on his elbows, his gaze extending beyond me, far beyond the confines of the apartment. Tears, just one or two, replace his torrent of words. They travel crookedly along paths that weave across a face engraved with furrows and troughs, the face of a member of an almost extinct tribe, one of the last Jews of Bialystok.