Jewels and Ashes Read online

  It was almost entirely a clan of women that had assembled in Grodek to see through the war years, a matriarchy skilled in the arts of survival. They were firmly grounded in a way that many of their men, who had spent their youth bent over holy books in cheders and yeshivas, were not. In orthodox families the woman’s domain was the household, and often they controlled the purse strings and ran small businesses.

  At the head of the Malamud clan was the grand matriarch, Freidel Shapiro Malamud. Since the death of Vigdor she had expanded the dairy she ran from home. She also dealt in poultry. She would purchase fowl from local peasants and take them to the ritual slaughterer. Mother often accompanied her on such errands. While the shochet performed his task, Freidel talked to him about this and that. Mother can recall snatches of conversation about battles that were raging nearby, abductions of menfolk for enforced labour, occasional raids on local homes; yet life still went on, praised be the One Above. Freidel would carve the kosher chickens into pieces that she sold and bartered. But to those who could not afford it, Jews and gentiles alike, she lent money, or gave away chicken and cheeses. For such deeds she had acquired the name, Freidel the Angel.

  As she ages, mother’s memory of distant times grows sharper, and that of more recent events vaguer. Memory has a momentum of its own. As mother advances deeper into herself, time dissolves into details, and she can see it clearly — the timber cottage she descended upon with her sisters and brothers, as they balanced precariously on an overloaded wagon in the early hours of a winter’s day in 1915. She enters a room in which a solitary kerosene lamp is burning. In a corner there rises a mountain of potatoes, beside a smaller one of corn, gathered from the abandoned fields of White Russian peasants who had fled east with the advance of the Kaiser’s armies. The walls are whitewashed with lime. Twice a year a fresh coat would be applied: on the eve of Passover, when houses were thoroughly cleaned and every crumb of unleavened bread removed; and before the New Year, in preparation for the Days of Awe and the annual cleansing of the soul.

  At night mother sleeps in a small room outside which stands a solitary oak. In winter, full moons hover above a river of ice upon which children skate and drive their makeshift sleds. Distant sounds of peasants singing drift over the ice; nearby, Malka the goat bleats, Sheva the cow yawns, and Freidel’s gaggle of geese punctuate the night with an occasional chorus of shrieks.

  Freidel had also given each goose a personal name, and they certainly earned their keep. Mother would help her aunt Rivke pluck the feathers. Peasant women brought jobs to Rivke, and they wandered around the house gossiping while she sewed their sheets, pillowslips, and quilts, which she stuffed with goose feathers.

  Apart from one or two small rooms, the cottage consisted of a larger room that was part sewing-workshop, dairy, grocery, nursery, bakery, kitchen, sleeping quarters, and dining area. Fresh milk from the udders of Malka and Sheva glistened in clay jugs. Freidel had taught her daughters and grand-daughters how to churn cream into butter and make cheese from sour milk. The corn was picked off the cob and ground between two stones. Chane Esther was expert at mixing and shaping the corn flour into loaves which she placed in a deep oven. For a treat she would sometimes bake sweet chalahs.

  As the war dragged on the townsfolk had to scavenge for food. The younger Probutski children, Hershel and Tzivie, would be left at home in the care of their eldest sister Liebe; Chane Esther, aunts Rivke and Tsore, mother, and her sisters Sheindel and Chaie, would take to the forests to gather blackberries, gooseberries, mushrooms, and leaves that were used as a salad or mashed with potatoes into a stew. ‘Mmmm. The stew was delicious’, mother tells me. They would leave at dawn, the residents of Grodek, in large groups, throughout spring, summer, and well into autumn. They wandered forever further afield, so that at times they became lost in forests they had never seen before. For lunch they gathered in clearings to eat blackberry jam, and they returned well after dark, lighting their way with kerosene lamps as the streets of Grodek came back into view.

  Another sister, Feigl, worked as a cleaner and cook for German officers at the Grodek station. Ybshua and Motl, the older brothers, the two men among a company of women, were forced to labour for the occupying army. They cut down trees for lumber, and extracted resin from conifers to be stored in barrels and transported to Germany. When they returned late at night Yoshua and Motl would slump down, and that was it; there they would remain, exhausted, to be fed and allowed to fall asleep. The scent of resin and fresh wood they exuded was sweet, says mother. She was a girl of eight, nine. She does not recall these as hard times. She loved the expeditions to the forests. Everyone worked, everyone contributed. The years have softened the memory, so that what remains is the sweet smell of resin and the enticing aroma of potatoes and leaves simmering on a stove.

  Among the German soldiers were Jewish officers who paid visits to the women and courted the older girls of Grodek. One officer declared his love for Tsore, the youngest daughter of Vigdor and Freidel. He would come for her after the war was over, he claimed. There was another officer who would ride into town to inspect the houses. He had a particular fetish for clean windows. Just one speck of dust on a window, he warned, could result in severe punishment.

  War years in a town called Grodek: the soldiers strutted, the women were wary, the food was in short supply, homes could be raided at any time, an officer could be bribed, another might rail at a speck of dust — while just beyond the horizon the fighting continued with unabated fury. And as I recreate the story, I must make do with snippets of information gathered from kitchen conversations in which the silences grow longer, and mother seems increasingly lost in an inaccessible world of her own.

  A sandy side street comes to a dead end at a ramshackle two-storey dwelling, its weathered boards flaking like fish scales. ‘Probutski? Malamud?’ replies an old man, who sits beside a child asleep in a pram. He shakes his head as he rocks the pram. These names are unfamiliar, but his face brightens when he recalls: ‘Ah yes! A doctor Zimmerman once lived in this house. He was taken away with his wife and daughter. They were shot in the forests, not far from here. It must have been about 1941. A son of his survived. He lives now in America. He also came to Grodek several years ago. Like you he wanted to see the place he was born in.’

  While the old man talks I am overcome by an uncanny feeling that there are many of us at this moment — sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, grandchildren — wandering country roads and city streets, or picking our way through forest undergrowth to uncover mould-encrusted tombstones. Perhaps this is how it has always been for descendants of lost families: we search within a tangle of aborted memories, while stumbling towards a mythical home which seems to elude us as it recedes into false turns and dead ends.

  In the centre of town there is a park with flower beds, paths that weave between expanses of well-kept lawns, and a monument honouring ‘Polish martyrs’. It could be for any one of the many conflicts that have erupted over the centuries in this part of the world. A young man wearing jeans and a leather jacket approaches me. He asks for my name, and I am pleased to have come across someone I can converse with in English. It takes me a while to register that the card he has uncovered in the palm of his hand bears his photo and the word, ‘Police’.

  He is joined by a middle-aged man in a drab blue suit. ‘Just routine questions’, they say. ‘Why have you been taking so many photographs this afternoon?’ The tone is neutral, almost friendly. They are obviously aware of every place I have been to since I arrived in Grodek.

  They seem to accept my explanations, and leave me after writing the details in a notebook. Yet with this incident the scales have tipped. I had planned to stay in Grodek overnight, or perhaps for several days. But I am, after all, a stranger here, and there are eyes on the alert, watching my every move.

  Within the hour I am on a bus returning to Bialystok. An evening chill has settled as we move into the countryside, and I recall the warnings of my parents and family friend
s of their generation who now live in Melbourne. ‘Why embark on such a journey?’, they had asked. ‘What do you think you will find?’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘AFTER THE GREAT WAR a higher truth should have been born’, father exclaims. He is racing full-steam ahead on one of his extended monologues. One question of mine is enough to set him in motion. Anecdotes, memories, philosophical asides fly from his lips. The locomotive hisses and gathers speed. It stops unexpectedly at unknown stations, or jumps tracks to charge off in a new direction. Occasionally a signal is required to gently steer him back to the main track: After the Great War a higher truth should have been born’.

  Summer, 1917. In Bialystok wild rumours are circulating, embellished with exaggerations and fantasies. Revolution has broken out in Russia. Palaces are burning. Soldiers are shooting their officers and deserting the front. The rumours grow more fantastic. The Czar’s crown is rolling in the gutters. Rasputin has been found strangled in the Czarina’s boudoir. In the streets of St Petersburg people are dancing for joy. Towns and cities are being decked out in red. A new order is being created to the east, beyond the borders. Centuries of oppression are going to vanish overnight.

  When the Zabludowski home was bombed at the outset of the Great War, reporters who came to survey the damage were able to note the exact time the shrapnel had struck, from clocks that had stopped at the moment of impact. The Zabludowskis moved to Nieronies Lane, within a neighbourhood of derelict cottages and tenements near the Bialystok fish market. Father depicts it as a world of snarling cats, skirmishes between rival gangs over control of territory, police raids, and nightly gatherings of unemployed youths who sang bawdy ditties and traded jokes and insults. It was a great spectacle, a theatre of poverty. The young rascals had talent. They were artists in their own fashion, says father, and their songs had rhyme and rhythm, a poetry of sorts; they were bards of the Jewish underworld in a time of hunger and desperation.

  Father has now warmed to the subject. He draws me with him to Nieronies Lane. Just several doors away lived the prostitute Feigele. She would receive her clients at home, rather than on the streets as did those lower on the social ladder. Not so far distant, in the Chanaykes, the widow Zlatke presided over a brothel which included girls of White Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish origin. ‘But they all spoke a common language of caresses and sighs’, father emphasizes. There was always a light shining at Zlatke’s, regardless of the wars, pogroms, revolutions, and rebellions that regularly swept by.

  Apart from small-time crooks, there were chronically unemployed weavers, factory workers, and artisans who continued to eke out a living from their crammed workshops. Ah yes, father recalls. Next door lived Zeidel, the master wood-carver. He had bloodshot eyes, and a wry smile that seemed to mock the absurdity of existence. For hours on end he would engrave flowers, biblical scenes, geometrical shapes, and folk symbols on building ornaments and furniture. His workshop was littered with timber shavings and a fantastic array of carving implements.

  An assortment of characters wandered the neighbourhood. They strutted their obsessions in full view and left themselves open to taunts and barbs. In a world gone mad, says father, it was difficult to know the boundaries between ‘normal’ and ‘insane’. Take, for instance, Moishe Shloimele. He would dress as a woman, and walk unsteadily and bow-legged on high-heeled shoes so worn down on the sides that his ankles seemed to be forever falling flat on the pavement. He looked like a crippled chicken, and bands of children followed him shouting obscenities while imitating his awkward movements. Yet he was a harmless soul, gentle in manner and bearing, always drawn towards the domain of women. He made a meagre living by cleaning kitchens, and had become expert in removing stains from pots and pans, and putting larders in order. The neighbourhood prostitutes were far gentler towards him than were the hoodlums. He loved to be treated like a lady; and they obliged by taking him into their houses of pleasure, where they sat drinking tea and gossiping between stints with clients.

  Father makes a distinction between born crazies and those who became so due to the circumstances of their lives. Whereas Moishe Shloimele was a ‘geborene’, of those who had been born to their peculiar fate, Chane Yolkeshe was a ‘gevorene’. Little rhymes pepper father’s monologues, and he recites them with the delight of a child, repeating them over and over as if reluctant to let go of their simple musicality:

  Moishe Shloimele was a geborene;

  Chane Yolkeshe, a gevorene.

  Chane Yolkeshe came from a family of porters and wagon drivers. She had a brother, a murderer, who was nicknamed ‘Yolke’. Since she also displayed wayward tendencies, she was called ‘Yolkeshe’. She would roam the streets and approach women to demand a few coins. If they refused she lifted their dresses to shame them. This was her technique, and it often proved successful. She had a masculine build, a deep voice, and there were those who claimed she had been possessed by an evil spirit, a dybbuk. Thereafter it was common in Bialystok to call an aggressive woman a ‘Chane Yolkeshe’. ‘But I never made fun of her’, father claims. ‘To this day I can clearly see the desperation that lurked on her face with increasing intensity as the Great War dragged on.’

  Yet, through it all, communal life continued. When he wasn’t scavenging for food, father attended a succession of cheders and Talmud Torahs, where he was initiated into the mysteries of orthodox Jewish life. It had begun several years before the War. His first tutor was Reb Eli, a tall man with a long black beard who would threaten his five-year-old pupils with a kanchik, a whip of dangling leather strips with a calf’s-bone handle. Reb Eli’s task was to teach the alphabet, and the most basic of prayers. ‘Baruch ato adonai aluheinu, Blessed be thee oh Lord’, he intoned with the toddlers in his charge. One way or another, by stealth, smiles, threats, and bribes, he beat this knowledge into their young heads.

  When Reb Eli had accomplished his task, father attended Lubelski’s cheder where he learned to read prayer books; and since the cheder had reformist tendencies, he was also taught some Russian and Hebrew. Lubelski was a thin man with an emaciated face from which there sprouted a blond goatee. He had developed a unique method of teaching languages to youngsters. He would stroll by the desks, and confiscate toys and playthings — pen knives, slingshots, chestnut marbles, whistles made of plum stones — which were added to those he had stored in a large wooden trunk. He would take some of them out daily and ask the class: ‘Well, my friends, what have we here?’ And his pupils would have to describe the objects in Hebrew or Russian. They quickly came to know, of course, that it was unwise to take any toys with them to cheder. But soon enough they moved on, and a fresh batch of youngsters would contribute their toys to Lubelski’s growing collection.

  Whereas Lubelski had been mild mannered, with a perpetual grin on his face, even as he snatched away toys, father’s next teacher, Kabatchnik, was perpetually angry. He not only threatened pupils with his kanchik, but he used it, especially on such carefree and undisciplined students as father. ‘To tell the truth’, he confides, ‘I wasn’t very interested in my studies. I preferred to be outside, on the streets or roaming the forests.’

  When the Zabludowski family moved to Nieronies Lane, elementary school assumed an entirely different appeal. In time of war it was a relief to get out of home for any reason, including school. In even the poorest neighbourhoods there were Talmud Torahs and cheders, sponsored by rich philanthropists for the children of unemployed workers and artisans.

  Reb Mendel from Orly was a melancholy man who spoke in a monotone, as if to himself, while he introduced his students to the five books of Moses, the Pentateuch. There was no place for discussion in his classroom. Everything was dictated, copied, learned by heart, while Reb Mendel paced around and lectured to the walls and ceiling. But he would suddenly come to life, pounce upon a student, tweak him by the ear, and ask the stunned boy to recite a portion of Torah or answer an obscure question on a text. ‘Ignoramus!’, Reb Mendel would exclaim in mock despair
when the wrong answer was stuttered nervously; then he would resume his pacing and his colourless explication of the scriptures.

  By 1917 father had graduated to the classes of Reb Chaim, who taught Gemara — the commentaries — and the finer points of biblical interpretation. Reb Chaim was a learned man, with a huge reservoir of traditional knowledge. He taught in the ancient manner, in a sing-song voice, while swaying at the pulpit. He laced his sermons with parables, anecdotes, digressions, and sharp insights. He initiated his pupils into a private universe of Jewish lore that had survived two thousand years of exile, to be recreated again and again, even in mud-splattered alleys such as Nieronies Lane. There was virtually no street without a synagogue or house of study, where devotees prayed three times a day and studied in their spare time — regardless of the upheavals taking place in the outside world.

  Late night was the time to penetrate the mysteries. Study groups gathered to contemplate the scriptures. They sat around tables, eyes riveted on their Gemaras, and kept themselves awake until dawn with sweet tea and cigarettes. There were those, father tells me, who awoke at midnight to chant the psalms of King Solomon, or to delve into the Kabbala and the Zohar, the Book of Splendour — the writings of mystics who had sought to experience the very core of Creation.

  On Simchas Torah the many houses of prayer in Bialystok came to life with celebration. The Torah scrolls were taken from the Ark of the Law and paraded around the bima, the pulpit where the last chapter of the annual cycle of readings had just been completed. Groups of congregants filed from house to house, where they were treated to delicacies such as cabbage soaked in honey and butter. Father tagged along with the boys of Nieronies Lane, even though, during the Great War, the feasts had been reduced to a pittance.