Jewels and Ashes Read online

  But for the children this is a picnic. My father, then a boy of ten, runs with hordes of children after the soldiers, scuffling for the sweets they are throwing into the crowds. And mother, whenever I ask her to recall the day the Kaiser’s troops entered Bialystok, searches for a tune; it comes first as a humming, then glides into the words of a German marching song which resounded through the streets of the city on that July day:

  When the soldiers into town come marching in

  Girls open doors and windows to let them in.

  Marching songs, sweets, flags and banners: the initial flush of a new order. But all too soon the reality of occupation was apparent. Even as the Kaiser’s war machine was being paraded through the streets, Field Marshall Von Galvitz was issuing the first orders. He sent for the chief rabbi, the head priest of the Russian Orthodox church, and the Catholic archbishop of Bialystok, and imposed a fine of three hundred thousand roubles on their congregations, for ‘bad conduct’. The city was cordoned off, movement strictly controlled, and special passes and identity cards introduced.

  When the soldiers into town come marching in

  Girls open doors and windows to let them in.

  My father, the arch realist when it comes to talk of war, asks me, ‘What else could one do?’ When the soldiers came marching in, either you fled, assuming there was somewhere to flee to, or you opened up. The girls who opened up were called ‘sugar boxes’, he tells me. They were sent by pimps, go-betweens, even families who were desperate for something to eat. In return for sexual favours they received flour, salt, and sacks full of sugar. The pimps organised it well, father claims. It was a polite, well-run business. My father, a prince in the art of survival, rarely speaks of heroism when he discusses times of great upheaval. Instead, he focusses on the back alleys, the side-streets, the small-time wheeler-dealers who saw their families and friends through with a dash of cunning, a willingness to bend the knee, and much more than an ounce of luck. As for me, the deeper I journey into the terrain of his youth, the less judgemental I become, the less inclined to argue with him. And the arguments between us had been, at times, quite ferocious.

  While a few may have profited, the bulk of the populace was consumed by hunger. Bishke Zabludowski could no longer sell newspapers. Reb Aron Yankev could only find occasional work in textile factories requisitioned to make uniforms for the occupying army. The family matriarchs quickly saw what was what, and took charge.

  Sheine Liberman made regular trips to Polish villages in the surrounding countryside to barter safety-pins, needles, buttons, and salted herring for peas, potatoes, corn, and cucumbers. Father often accompanied her on these missions. For him they were great adventures. When he tells these stories he creates images of a small boy running beside his mother on errands of survival, through an autumnal countryside bathed in gold, through field and forest into villages with ramshackle peasant cottages.

  ‘Come in, come in’, the old widow beckoned. ‘You are welcome. Stay overnight. It’s getting dark. You can start back in the morning.’ She fed them borscht and toffee apples, and made up the beds. Sheine Liberman and her Meierke slept in the one big room with the old widow, her son, and daughter-in-law; and, late at night, father heard for the first time the sounds of love-making. He could just make out the movements of the bodies in the darkness, against the faintest outline of wooden crucifixes, dangling from the walls, in mute submission to the instinctive ways of the world.

  Sometimes, however, their trips could end on a bitter note. Gangs of bandits roamed the forests. They would attack and, with a few deft kicks and punches, seize Sheine’s food and trinkets, and run off with the loot. And even though many of Sheine’s missions were fruitful, gold turned eventually to snow, cool breezes to biting winds, and autumnal romances to the brute reality of desperate winters.

  As for Chane Esther Probutski, she surveyed the ice-laden streets of the city and decided upon a more radical course of action. With her customary precision she packed a wagon with bedding and furniture, and set out with her children, under the cover of a stormy night, towards the east, to a shtetl called Grodek.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A COUNTRY ROAD stretches between open fields interspersed with groves of pine trees. A cock crows, a town clock strikes ten and, as if awoken from a dream, I find myself approaching a small town. It appears in the midmorning sun like a mirage of shimmering jewels. The onion-shaped domes of a church rise above the mirage to dominate the skyline with silver spires that catch fire in the sun. On the outskirts of the town, clay paths peter out into fields where isolated cottages and shacks slant as if caught and frozen in the middle of a dance. Grodek, birthplace of my mother, stands motionless before me in one of those rare moments that hover on the edge of revelation.

  Nikolai Tomasewitz cycles along a road that leads away from the town. I wave to him, and when he dismounts I introduce myself and try to explain why I have come to Grodek. He is wearing a weathered black cap, a threadbare navy blue jacket, baggy grey trousers held up by braces, and a flannel shirt: clothes which match a worn and creased face. There is a softness in his features, however, an expression of childlike awe and wonder, which offsets the jagged edges. We communicate awkwardly at first, as I extend my Polish beyond its narrow limits; it is more effective when we give way to a language of signs and gestures.

  Nikolai reaches into his trouser pockets and extracts identity cards that indicate he was born in 1915. A glance through these tattered cards reveals that each one coincides with a different regime which had at one time or another ruled over these parts. It is as if he carries his various guises with him, just in case the pendulum swings yet again. For this is border country, where rival empires have fought ferociously over every centimetre of territory. Yet they do not seem, these contending armies, to have made a lasting impression on this rural backwater. Grodek, on this mild summer morning, lies outside history, a town that has managed to remain camouflaged by its pastoral quietude.

  And this is what Chane Esther may have thought and hoped for as she fled towards Grodek from war-torn and impoverished Bialystok in the year Nikolai Tomasewitz was born. Children, furniture, roosters, pots and pans swayed and rattled on a wagon drawn by two horses. For thirty kilometres they had trotted along ice-laden roads, beneath a canopy of falling snow, back towards the shtetl where for generations the Malamuds had been a prominent family. They travelled under cover of night to avoid patrols of the occupying army. As they neared the Jewish cemetery of Grodek the wheels slipped on ice, the horses reared high, and the wagon overturned. ‘Loift kinderlech, loift’, Chane Esther urged. ‘Run children, run!’

  Nikolai leads me away from the town along a dirt path through fallow fields that give way to a forest of pines. The old man indicates that somewhere within is the place I am looking for. We part company as I set out in search of an ancient burial ground. Recent rains have induced a strong aroma of resin. Thick layers of pine needles carpet the forest floor. What seem like stones from a distance are revealed, on closer sight, as tree stumps or the charcoaled remains of campsites strewn with empty vodka bottles.

  I move in circles for an hour before coming across the first stone, on a rise, where the forest thins into a clearing of brambles and wild flowers. Soon I have located about a dozen, slung between shrubs and long grass. There are no headstones, not a single Hebraic letter, merely body-length slabs: some uprooted from where they had covered corpses for many years, others lying like solidified slugs glistening in the sun. Lizards dash frantically into the undergrowth, disturbed by the unexpected intruder. Fungi and moss grow from layers of earth encrusted on the stones. Clusters of ferns are dying at the edges with the approach of autumn. A crow squawks, cicadas shriek and, from the distance, where the town stands hidden from view, bells chime midday.

  ‘Run children, run’, Chane Esther calls out in the night. ‘Don’t let the cold take hold of you!’ The children dart between wet graves and slippery paths. The snow is thick and soft, and it i
s hard to lift feet that sink deep with every step. ‘Master of the Universe, help!’, Chane Esther pleads; and just beyond the muffled thud of falling snow can be heard the cling, cling, cling of a sleigh. This is how mother has told the story many times: with the vision of a seven-year-old girl who will never forget the cling, cling, cling of a sleigh driven by two peasants towards an overturned wagon, and a horde of children running in circles among tombstones, shattered furniture, panicking roosters, and horses struggling to regain their footing on snow and ice. They were like messengers from heaven, mother tells me. With their timely help the wagon was set back on its wheels. Soon after, it trundled through the familiar streets of Grodek as the first light of day was beginning to dissolve the darkness.

  Mid afternoon I stroll through the streets of a town which never quite leaves the countryside. Fields eat into the very heart of Grodek; market gardens extend from the backyards of many houses, and a stream moves in and out of side alleys. On the main street a turkey sits on a wooden bench, sunning itself; rows of upturned buckets and porcelain jugs lie side by side, impaled on the pickets of a cottage fence. Nearby, a bucket dangles from a rusting chain over a water well … And over a century ago, great-grandfather Vigdor Malamud and his wife Freidel set out from these quiet streets to journey to the town of Slonim for an urgent meeting with the Rebbe of the Slonimer Hasidic dynasty, the one his disciples claimed was a saint who could work miracles.

  All his life Vigdor had been a Misnagged and had looked upon the Hasidim with disdain. An ancient quarrel still simmered in towns and hamlets of the Pale. In the 1700s, the Misnagdim, led by Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, the Sage of Vilna, the renowned scholar of his era, had condemned as heresy the practices of the newly emergent Hasidic movement. A man requires years of study, a sober and pious life, strict observance of the Laws, the Sage had argued, with the desperation of an outraged prophet fearful that his people were about to sink into apostasy. The Hasidim had chosen a dangerous path, he claimed, with their emphasis on devotion, dance, and wonder-workers. There were no short cuts to the Creator, no cheap miracles, he warned.

  The quarrel had split communities apart and cut deep schisms in shtetl life. There had been bans, book burnings, and family feuds. Denunciations to the czarist authorities had resulted in imprisonment. Rival houses of worship had ordered Hasidim to leave their congregations. They were not to be given even one night of lodging; and it was forbidden to marry them or assist at their burials.

  Vigdor Malamud seems to have inherited the stern outlook and attitudes of the Misnagdim. From the few anecdotes that have filtered down through the generations, he is depicted as a disciplinarian and a strict patriarch, in the mould of the legendary forefathers. At least, this is how I liked to picture him in those childhood years when my obsession with the family tree first began. I needed an ancestral elder. I had dreams of a patriarch with a long white beard around whom angels and seraphim whirled and floated. For many months I tried to redream him, night after night, until he faded and became impossible to recreate. When I heard talk of a great-grandfather who had been venerated in a shtetl called Grodek, I adopted him as the patriarch I could no longer bring to my dreams.

  Vigdor’s avid piety and stern adherence to his faith had not, however, averted a great misfortune: one by one, his first five children had died, each succumbing to illness in infancy. Vigdor and Freidel’s efforts to have new offspring, as they approached middle age, had failed. In Grodek there lived followers of the Slonimer Rebbe. They constantly sang the praises of the Tzaddik, their wonderworker. ‘Go to him’, they urged the despairing Vigdor and Freidel, and finally the couple relented. There was, after all, nothing to lose. Vigdor and Freidel returned from Slonim with the Rebbe’s blessing. Within a decade there were seven healthy children, and Vigdor had become the most fervent of Hasidim.

  Chane Esther was the fifth child born in the time of the miracles. She was raised in Grodek, and as a teenager she was betrothed, in the usual way, to Aron Yankev Probutski from the shtetl of Orla. What was the usual way? According to father, who certainly loves to embroider a story, the usual way was for a shadchen, a matchmaker, to be hired. In his notebook he kept lists of potential brides and grooms. ‘Ah’, muses the shadchen, ‘it is obvious!’ In Orla there is an Aron Yankev, son of Isaac Probutski and Rachel the Rebbetzin, pious God-fearing Jews and fervent devotees of the Slonimer Rebbe. The fast-talking matchmaker shuttles between the two families — quite a demanding task, if one considers that Grodek and Orla are many kilometres apart.

  Preliminary discussions over, Reb Isaac, Aron Yankev, and Rachel the Rebbetzin travel to Grodek to meet their potential in-laws. They are served afternoon tea by Chane Esther, and thereby the teenage Aron Yankev has a chance to observe his prospective bride: her appearance, her demeanour, how she performs domestic duties. He must decide at a glance. And did the bride have a choice?’, I ask father. ‘It wasn’t for her to make such decisions’, he replies. And judging by the number of failed marriages these days’, he adds, ‘perhaps this method was as good as any.’

  There is another possibility. Vigdor Malamud and Isaac Probutski may have become acquainted in Slonim during one of their pilgrimages to the Rebbe’s court. Perhaps they had arranged the marriage there on behalf of their children, without intermediaries and matchmakers. Years later my mother would see Aron Yankev depart on such pilgrimages. He would make his way to the Bialystok station to meet up with fellow devotees. As they travelled east, on a journey of several hundred kilometres, their numbers were swelled by groups of Slonimer Hasidim who clambered aboard at stations on the way.

  The whisky began to flow long before they reached their destination. If the Hasidim had a whole carriage to themselves and felt safe enough to let go, they would sing nigunim, songs of praise to their Rebbe, their link to the heavens, their passport to a kingdom of joy.

  A devotee could seek the advice or blessings of the Rebbe at any time. There were also special occasions when Hasidim came en masse, particularly for the Yomim Naroim, the ten Days of Awe between the New Year and the Day of Atonement. Throughout Eastern Europe pilgrims would be on the move at this time, converging upon the many shtetlech where courts of Hasidic dynasties flourished. They came on the miraculous trains that had recently been introduced, or by horse-drawn coach to more remote destinations. They travelled through forests and mountain passes, along highways and country roads, across rivers and streams. They journeyed together in large convoys with friends they had known all their lives; others moved alone, preferring the company of their own heartbeat. Many of them were men who had left families in the hands of wives and mothers to become wanderers again, released, for a while, from their worldly concerns. Chane Esther would stay at home with the children, while Aron Yankev, free of the textile mills of Bialystok, journeyed with his Hasidic brothers in a dream of God and Tzaddik.

  Disembarking at the Slonim station, they trudged into town carrying bundles of bedding, prayer books, and phylacteries. They crammed into taverns and inns, or boarded with local followers of the Rebbe. They slept on straw mats, in narrow cots and hammocks, in garrets, attics, barns, or houses of study, huddled against stoves for warmth during long nights that stretched towards winter. The town’s fortunes would leap overnight. Butchers, bakers, grocers, fishmongers, saloon-keepers, and blacksmiths scurried about all day to reap the whirlwind that had swept into their midst.

  Houses of worship were full to the limits. Some crowded into the tiny wooden prayer houses that could be found in almost every street and alley, while others prayed in the magnificent stone synagogue which had stood in Slonim since the 1600s. Pilgrims exchanged greetings, renewed friendships, accompanied each other to the ritual baths. They argued politics, gossiped about intrigues between rival Rebbes, and arranged marriages between their children.

  Late at night, long after the evening prayers were over, they gathered at the Rebbe’s court, to share a meal, to hear a few words of wisdom from their Tzaddik, and to dance until p
erhaps they did indeed draw out the divine sparks they believed resided in every object, in all beings and things, animate or inert. There were many who claimed that just a glance from a Tzaddik could fan the sparks into a blaze of all-consuming fervour that provided solace and release from all sorrows and struggles. And mother, as she tells the story, finds her way back to the nigunim she heard Reb Aron Yankev hum, wordless melodies that took flight, ascending slowly at first, occasionally dropping back and reascending, spinning a spiral of notes that urged themselves on to even greater heights, towards complete immersion in God and total forgetfulness.

  Whether arranged in the court of the Slonimer Rebbe, or by a matchmaker shuttling between Orla and Grodek, it is known that, after the marriage, Aron Yankev went to live with his in-laws. Vigdor Malamud took him on as an apprentice weaver and taught him to use the handloom. The first seven of Reb Aron Yankev’s and Chane Esther’s children were born in Grodek, before Reb Aron moved to Bialystok in search of work at looms now powered by steam.

  When Chane Esther and the children embarked on their flight to Grodek, Aron Yankev had remained in Bialystok. What was there for him to do in a shtetl? Vigdor had died a decade earlier. The weavers’ workshops had closed down when the armies of Kaiser Wilhelm had cut off markets in Russia. In Bialystok there was the possibility of an occasional job in factories which had been commandeered by German troops. Above all, there was a fine company of Slonimer Hasidim with whom to spend the idle hours. Indeed, Reb Aron Yankev moved into the cramped prayer-house of the Slonimer Hasidim, and lived there for a time with his companions, while Chane Esther and her brood fended for themselves elsewhere.