He, She and It (54 page)

“When will we finish here?”

“Some more negotiations, and then it’s up to the Town Council to figure out how to use the link we create.”

“While you sleep tonight, I will think tactically about our problem. By morning, I should have enumerated our options, evaluated them and come up with a plan of action. First you must describe as exactly as possible the Y-S enclave in Nebraska.”

“I will. But are we being too reckless? They want you, and we’re about to deliver you to them.”

“I will destroy myself before permitting that. Now describe the enclave in detail. Start with all possible approaches and entrances.”

THIRTY-SIX

The Maharal Embattled

In the classic golem tales of my childhood, a pogrom rips at the ghetto. Actually Rabbi Loew managed to stave off disaster his entire life. If you consult your memory banks for the period, you will discover no pogroms. After Judah came the Thirty Years’ War, in which those peasants and townspeople not hacked or burned or bludgeoned or raped to death got the opportunity to starve. Before him there had been a massacre every generation. Therefore that there had been a golden age of peace for the embattled Jews of Prague, when only the ordinary pricks and prods of anti-Semitism exposed them to injury, seemed to require a supernatural agency. Pogroms were a part of the basic fabric of diaspora experience; our own vulnerability drives me to tell you this tale of a battle when your predecessor rose to defend.

A people in trouble are perceived as a troublesome people. The word that comes that morning to the Maharal in the ghetto is that the emperor is doing what he can; that he hopes to weaken the blow; but that he cannot stop Father Thaddeus
from leading a procession today, Good Friday, to the gates of the ghetto. The emperor will send soldiers to discourage the mob if they begin to storm the gates, but he cannot ask them to fire on a religious procession, even if it gets out of hand. The soldiers will remove some number of the less respectable and rowdier, if they can do so without risking a violent response from the mob. The emperor waffles.

This is how the friendly rulers usually act when faced with a threat to Jews. They regret, they temporize, they mitigate, and then they stand aside. So it was the century before. So it will be a century later.

What do you do when you are a peaceable people, vastly outnumbered and living as islands in the sea of people far more numerous, more aggressive and better armed? What can you do but pray a lot? Joseph goes with a party of men to survey the walls and the gates, the strengths, the weaknesses. They will carry stones and lumber and bolts of iron to the boundaries of the ghetto. Joseph calls for whoever has any sort of weapons to form an impromptu militia. He expects the attack to come through the main gates of the ghetto. That had been the idea discussed in the tavern up near the castle. The planners anticipate no serious resistance. The gates are an obvious target, for it would be easy to assemble a mob outside and charge them.

He calls for whoever will help. “It is I, Joseph the Shamash, who patrols the streets of the ghetto every night for the Maharal. I call on you to stand and protect your families. Fight for your lives and the lives of your mothers, your fathers, your children, your wives, your friends. Come and fight with me, Joseph the Shamash, for the evil are coming to kill us today.”

Joseph bellows in the streets. He calls the wares of his defense as if he were selling apples from the country or a load of firewood. His voice echoes off the grimy stones, the rough logs and the pastel stucco. Some shut their windows. Some creep into bed and pretend they hear nothing. Some curse him as the bearer of bad news. Some begin to daven and pray. But many men and not a few women and children come out to the streets, bringing an ax or a hoe or a club or nothing at all but their fists.

The Maharal stands in the street, his beard stirring in the crisp wind that whips this morning even through the twisted narrow alleys of the ghetto. “They will attack through the main gates. Thaddeus will rely on oratory to stir the crowd. He will harangue them by the river. We must guard the other gates, but only with a few people to keep watch.”

Most of the women who have volunteered the Maharal sends
up to the roofs overlooking the main gates. They are to arm themselves with rocks, boiling water, cutlery, old furniture, anything they can throw down. By his authority as the spiritual and temporal leader of the ghetto, he commandeers every roof that is useful, regardless of whose house it belongs to, mercantile splendor or rooming house of narrow slots shared with nine others on pallets.

The young, the old, the middle-aged, he divides into two parties. One group he sends rummaging through the ghetto for anything that can be used as a weapon or as part of the barricade that the remaining volunteers are building. Many who will not fight are willing to work on the barricades.

Itzak, Chava’s father, will not fight. A substantial portion of the population does not believe in violence. The liturgy constantly praises those who work for and those who seek after peace. “Look at us, Joseph, a little remnant, a sliver of a people floating on a sea of the others. Since as a small minority we could never win a war, the less our harsh neighbors love peace, the more must we clasp it.” Still, building a barricade to prevent violence is acceptable even to those who will not touch a weapon. Itzak puffs and shuffles along under the weight of paving stones. Chava’s most recent suitor, the scholar Horowitz, bends his skinny frame under a load and works on the barricade. He, too, declines to take up weapons.

“If we become as violent as they are, we are no longer the people of the book and the people of the name,” he says, staggering along almost blue in the face with effort.

But Chava’s other suitor, Yakov, is eager to fight. He has produced an old sword from the secondhand store and is sharpening it, flourishing it in the air in a manner that looks more dangerous to himself than any enemy. It turns out that Bad Yefes the Gambler knows how to use a sword. He gives a fast class for the few who have found some manner of long knife or sword, including the butcher and his assistant. In the street between the barricade and the houses, the pudgy butcher and his knock-kneed assistant parry each other’s blows with sharpened sticks, lest they kill each other in practice. Bad Yefes the Gambler shouts encouragement and pointers. Yakov practices with Samuel the old-clothes man, who has produced a hidden army sword brought to him in a bundle of dead man’s clothes.

Chava has volunteered herself as a messenger to run to the different parts of the line, to carry news and instructions. “I always won footraces when I was a girl,” she boasts. “I know
every part of the ghetto. I know almost as many people as my grandfather.”

Joseph is fascinated by the Maharal. As busy as Joseph is, piling up paving stones as a barricade, giving brief instruction in the use of the club, waving his own spiked homemade mace, he cannot help staring at Rabbi Loew, commanding like a general. The old man has never fought in his life, never been in an army, never watched a battle, let alone taken part in one. Neither has Joseph. Where did the Maharal find the fighter in Joseph? Out of what was Joseph shaped, if not out of the Maharal? Like father, like son, he thinks ironically, aware of how angry his saying that would make Judah.

The Maharal abhors violence. Joseph has heard his despisal of war, for he says no nation has a right to dominate or rule another. Each people has their own road, their own destiny to fulfill. The world is imperfect and requires repair so long as any people is under the rule of any other. The Maharal bases these ideas on the kabbalah, Joseph knows, although the Golem’s Hebrew is barely adequate to the prayer book, the siddur.

Judah’s is one of the first voices to argue for self-determination as an important principle among nations, this lean spiky old man commanding the street with a wave of his long arm. Yet Joseph can see that Judah has the makings of a fine general, for he possesses the instinctive power to command, the ability to inspire people to follow and obey gladly, the rhetoric to rouse others to effort, and a clear original mind with which to confront the situation, brainstorm strategy, work out a choice of tactics.

The Maharal has made a decision to collect all those who cannot or will not fight into the synagogues, where they can be more easily defended than if they are scattered in every cubbyhole in every warren of the ghetto. Chava is sent with her mother, Vogele, and her father, Itzak, to spread the word, and as they go they commission others as messengers. The people will be collected. If they are to be massacred, then they will die together, as before. It is understood that if they are not burned to death, if the mob does not set the synagogues on fire, the women will kill themselves when the doors fall. It is standard operating procedure, a kind of death every Jewish woman has heard about in stories since childhood. Chava thinks briefly of her son, Aaron, who is with her husband’s family. She is glad he is safe, but frequently she misses him. Giving him over to them was the price of her escape.

She wants to go to Eretz Israel more than anything in the
world. It is a passion. Women never make this aliyah, but she will, she will, she swears it to herself every Shabbat. If she dies today in a quick pool of blood on the beautiful old floor of the Altneushul, she will never see Israel. She decides she will stay with the fighters. She would rather die here than with the weeping women, the screaming or silent children, the davening old men.

Someone has already taken the ax from the shed in the cemetery, but in the kitchen of her grandfather’s house there is a sharpened spit. She pauses to sharpen it more, puts in her belt the best carving knife, and returns to the spot where Bad Yefes the Gambler is teaching swordsmanship. She does not expect him to teach her. It would be improper for him to teach a woman. But she can watch and learn and practice. She believes in choosing her death, if given the opportunity. Perhaps, Chava thinks, I am not brave but a bigger coward than the other women. I fear death by fire more than death by steel. The idea of burning alive makes her shudder; Judah himself has had nightmares since he heard of the auto-da-fé of Bruno. She clutches her sharpened spit tightly and practices parries and attacks.

Joseph keeps an eye on her. He cannot decide if he wishes she would go back and hide with the other women or if he prefers to have her nearby, where he can kill anybody who goes within ten feet of her. He must protect Chava, and he must protect the Maharal. He must save the community. These are his commandments. Today he fulfills his deepest duty, that for which he was created from clay and breathed into life.

Yakov brandishes his old sword a little less awkwardly. He is learning. “Why don’t they come? It’s agonizing to wait.”

Joseph is puzzled. Why hope for what will kill and maim? He has been created for this battle, yet he would not mind if it never came, and he is in no hurry—not to fight, not to die. The wan April sunlight breaks watery through scudding clouds. When the sun disentangles, it is warm on his face. Then the clouds wrap it around again, and the wind glides damp from the river. He realizes he has no idea if he can die. He can be injured, yes, he has been in enough fights and sustained enough cuts and blows. But he heals quickly. Can he die? He is the only combatant today who has such a doubt. He would like to ask the Maharal, but Joseph suspects that Judah would not care for his asking such a question. In any event, Chava and the Maharal are quite mortal, and so is everybody else whom it is his duty to protect—with his life? With whatever he has been given—if
not life, then energy, breath, strength; it does not matter finally. What he has he will spend today.

In spite of the fear that leaks like a smell from them all, when the bells toll noon and they break bread together on the barricade they have thrown up, they share a common spirit. They are cracking jokes; here and there someone is singing. This is one day when everyone in the ghetto says
we
and means it, when they are truly a people together. All the petty rivalries and old feuds are swept away; Samuel the tailor shares his wine with his rival Wolf Karpeles the peddler, to whom he has not spoken all year. People smile at each other, they smile at Joseph. It is only a moment’s pleasure, because soon the sound of the procession drifts toward them. The women on the roofs cry out, for they can see over the ghetto wall.

“They are coming with crosses and torches. Hundreds of them,” Chava’s mother, Vogele, calls down. Itzak is in the Altneushul, but Vogele has taken to the rooftop. “They have pikes and swords and clubs.”

A younger woman shouts, “They’re carrying an enormous cross. They’re singing hymns. I see musketeers too!”

They can hear that for themselves now, loud ragged singing in Latin. Joseph has no idea what they sing, but it sounds both sad and menacing.

“The emperor has stationed a few soldiers outside the gate,” Vogele calls. “Perhaps fifty in a row.”

Through a crack in the gates, still chained together, Joseph peers out. So much for our begging help of our dear father the emperor, the revered protector and constant milker of my people. Fifty soldiers to contain a mob of five hundred. Thanks a lot. Joseph exchanges looks with Chava, who shrugs. I might as well have kept the emerald and given it to her. What would she want with it? Nothing, to be truthful. She is a woman who sets store by jewels of the mind, not trinkets. I hope that the prince is murdered for that jewel by some even more mercenary relative. I hope that green stones grow in his bladder and his hard heart. May he piss emeralds the size of hens’ eggs and die.