Mr. Mani (41 page)

—I began to hem and haw. I promised to send him a contribution for his clinic as soon as we got home—I promised to take the matter up with you too, Father—but he would not take that for an answer. With a hopeless look he insisted that he needed some cash at once, for his trip to Damascus. He knew we had lots of money. Linka, who could only guess what all this was about, because we had spoken nothing but Hebrew since the morning, squeezed my arm hard, and out of my pockets I began to produce Turkish bishliks—Austrian thalers—spare change from Italy—all of which he took before heading with it to the ticket office. He was gloomy when he rejoined us. “We shall never meet again,” he proclaimed, “and you are to blame. Do you not see that you are to blame?” I was still shaking my head when it flashed through my mind that I had made a terrible mistake—that the curtain had already risen—that before me no longer stood a doctor from Jerusalem but an actor forced to recite a script that he could not revise—one drummed into him immemorial ages ago—which—although he was the director and the theater owner too—he was not at liberty to leave unperformed and must stage to the bitter end. His expression had changed. He was staring at us with a thunderstruck, faraway look, through the telescope of his own contempt ... and then he turned, slung the overcoat over his shoulders, and began to walk down the platform, alongside the crowded cars of Mohammedan pilgrims whose cigarette smoke spiraled out the windows like a first intimation of the locomotive that now could be heard whistling in the distance. Linka was overcome with horror. “Stop him!” she screamed in Yiddish. “Let's take him with us!” “But how?” I asked. “He is going to Damascus and we must return to the ship.” She would not listen to me, though. She began to pull me after her, as if she wished us to board the train for Damascus too, just as we were. Mani had reached the last car by now. He let his overcoat drop to the platform—the thought struck me that he did not want to bloody it—and then—with a gentle movement—lowered himself onto the tracks. A Turkish soldier started to shout at him. But Mani just turned away his face, which—in the reddish light that drifted in from the sea—looked hard and vanquished, and resumed walking along the tracks, wagging a reproving finger at the black locomotive that appeared around the bend as if it were a child home late from school. The locomotive tore him apart instantly, like a sword stroke. Father, aren't you listening?

—What?

—Yes. I hung on with all my might to Linka, who began running toward him along with the Mohammedans jumping out of the cars -—the news had reached every one of them in no time. As if I didn't know the common people's lust to stare at the dead and the maimed! The two Turkish soldiers began pushing the crowd back—striking out at it—striking at Linka—letting no one through but me—who was running with his overcoat, screaming and begging to cover the two halves of him before she could get to them ... Papa dear—Papa—ah, look!—it is dawn already ... I have been talking nonstop ... Papa?

—You fell asleep, old man. Look at me ... Papa, Papa, answer me ... don't scare me ... what is the matter?

—What is the matter? What did I say? Why are you crying?

—But I don't understand. Dearest Papa! You are crying. Why?

—But for whom?

—For him?
Him?
How can you? You ... what are ... oh, Papa...

—To blame? How? I told you we were just a pretext...

—How stayed with him? What are you talking about?

—By myself?

—Summoned you? From where? To where? You do not know what you are talking about...

—The master of what?

—But it
was
his own self. The demon inside him. You will drive me out of my senses ...
stayed with him?
I like that, ha ha...

—What kind of cynicism?

—Nihilism? No, I have said quite enough ... But what are you crying for? For whom? Can't you see that Mama is very ill? You are blind ... she is going to die ... if you must cry, cry for those you should cry for...

Supplement

 

Although
EFRAYIM SHAPIRO
left his parents' estate as he promised to, it took him a year because of the sudden deterioration in the health of his mother, who died a month after her children's return from Palestine. It was not until the late autumn of 1900 that Efrayim moved to Cracow, where he took a job as a pediatric physician in a hospital. Linka, who could not bear the loneliness of life on the estate, followed him there and found work as a volunteer nurse in the same hospital. Before long she fell in love with a Catholic doctor and—after a bitter quarrel with her father and brother, who were opposed to the match—became his wife. She converted to Catholicism, moved with her husband to Warsaw, and had a son and a daughter there.

The dramatic estrangement was exceedingly painful, and soon the family was reconciled. Indeed, since Efrayim Shapiro remained a bachelor, he grew greatly attached to his niece and nephew, whom he visited often in Warsaw and saw during summer vacations on his father's estate, to which Linka usually came without her husband.

After the death of Sholom Shapiro in 1918, Linka sold her share of the estate to local farmers, while Efrayim returned to Jelleny-Szad and settled on his half of the land, which was run by a steward. Although his income from it was not as great as his father's had been, it was still a respectable amount, enough for him to cut down on his medical practice and limit it to occasional house calls in Oświ[ecedil]cim. In effect, he led a leisurely life of early retirement, the happiest moments of which were the visits of his beloved sister and her children—who, despite their having been baptized, took a lively interest in their mother and uncle's Jewishness.

With the outbreak of World War II and the German blitzkrieg that overran Poland, Efrayim Shapiro, who was sixty-nine at the time, went to Warsaw to be with his sister. It did not take him long to realize, however, that her home was not a safe hiding place for him and that she, her children, and her grandchildren were in no less danger than he was. Soon he returned to his estate, where—with the help of some loyal servants—he constructed the perfect hideaway and “disappeared.” He remained there from 1939 to 1943, within sight of the nearby concentration camp, whose increasingly technologically advanced features the old doctor had more than an inkling of. When news reached him after the final liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto that his niece had been sent to Auschwitz, he became so distraught that he gave himself up to the Germans for no good reason, thereby spelling the doom of his servants as well. He never reached the camp itself, however. Collapsing at the entrance to it, he was shot and killed on the spot at the age of seventy-three.

 

SHOLOM SHAPIRO
did not have an easy time of it after his wife's death. Having learned to live with the fact of her poor health, he had never dreamed that she would die so quickly. After his son and daughter left Jelleny-Szad, he tried to cope with his loneliness by intensifying his Zionist activity. He did not attend the Fourth Zionist Congress in London because it was held during the year of mourning for his wife, but he was present at the Fifth Congress, which took place in Basel again, and in 1909 he visited Palestine with a group organized by him from the Zionist Club in Cracow. It was a highly successful tour that strengthened the Zionist convictions of its members. While in Jerusalem, Sholom Shapiro went off one day to look for the Manis, but he did not find any of them. Although he was able to locate the clinic in Kerem Avraham, by then converted into a cheap tourists' hostel, and to identify it by the faded remains of some mirrors in one of its ground-floor rooms, none of the Mani family lived there anymore. Young Yosef Mani, he was told, had departed two years previously to study in Turkey, had stopped on his way in Beirut, and had vanished there. His sister had married a Moroccan Jew and gone with her mother to live with him in Marseilles. The neighbors who told Shapiro all this remembered well the brother and sister from Poland who had been in Jerusalem in 1899 with catastrophic results for their beloved doctor.

Despite his disappointment at being unable to locate the Manis and offer them financial compensation, Sholom Shapiro was highly satisfied with his trip to Palestine. Although no longer a young man, he formed in the course of it a romantic attachment to a young lady from Cracow, a member of the tour group, which continued after his return to Jelleny-Szad.

Like Efrayim, Sholom was greatly attached to his “Christian” grandchildren. Since his daughter's home in Warsaw was not kosher, he did not often visit them there, but each year he waited impatiently for their summer excursion to the countryside, during which he taught them some Hebrew and Judaism. He died after a brief illness in 1918, at the age of seventy, having lived long enough to rejoice at the news of the Balfour Declaration.

An inn in Athens, on the corner of
Dioskoron and Lapolignoto Streets
Tuesday afternoon, December 12, 1848

AVRAHAM MANI
forty-nine years old, born in 1799 in Salonika, then part of Turkey, to his father Yosef Mani.

Avraham's grandfather, Eliyahu Mani, was a supplier of fodder to the horses of the Turkish Janissaries and followed behind the Turkish army with five large wagons that housed his large family, which included two wives and two young rabbis who tutored his sons. A shrewd merchant, he sensed immediately upon hearing of the outbreak of the French Revolution that Europe was in for a period of upheavals in which his services as a cavalry supplier would be in great demand. With this in mind, he began to move his activities westward. In 1793, as news reached him of the execution of Louis XVI, Eliyahu Mani crossed the Bosporus and proceeded as far as Salonika, where he found a flourishing Jewish community. And indeed, his gamble paid off and the political and military instability of the times proved a boon for his business. He was able to marry off his children to wealthy and prominent families, and these ties in turn enabled him to expand his affairs even more.

Eliyahu Mani dearly loved his eldest grandson Avraham, who was born at the very end of the eighteenth century. He did not, however, have many years of pleasure from the boy, because soon after the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807, he himself passed away. His concern was taken over by his son Yosef, who was born in 1776 in the Persian town of Ushniyya near Lake Shahi, then part of the Ottoman Empire too. Despite the many reversals suffered by the empire during the first decade of the nineteenth century, Yosef ran the business enterprisingly and did especially well during Napoleon's campaigns in Eastern Europe. At the same time, he did not neglect his children's education and sent his eldest son Avraham to study in Constantinople with one of the most profound and original rabbinical minds of the times, Shabbetai Hananiah Haddaya. Avraham Mani developed a great liking for this rabbi, who was wifeless and childless despite his over fifty years. Rabbi Haddaya, for his part, was fond of Avraham and decided to sponsor him for rabbinical ordination even though he was not a particularly keen student.

In 1815, however, Yosef Mani's business suddenly collapsed in the wake of both the Congress of Vienna peace agreements and the first signs of Greek war of independence against the Turks, which endangered transport and commercial shipments. In 1819 his son Avraham was summoned back to Salonika to help his father, who had lost everything and was reduced to eking out a living from a small spice shop in the port. Before long the brokenhearted man died, leaving the shop in Avraham's possession.

His forced separation from his rabbi weighed on Avraham greatly. Even though the war with the Greeks made travel perilous, whenever he was able to free himself of his business obligations he would take a week or two off and cross the Bosporus to visit Rabbi Haddaya. Although Avraham never received his ordination, the rabbi presented him with a certificate authorizing him to serve on a nonpaying basis as the spiritual leader of a small synagogue in the port that was frequented mainly by Jewish stevedores and sailors.

Despite his mother's urging him to marry, Avraham did not take a wife until 1825, when he wed the daughter of a petty merchant named Alfasi. The couple had a son and daughter: Yosef, born in 1826, and Tamar, born in 1829. In 1832 Avraham Mani's wife died of an unknown illness that was apparently transmitted by a sailor whom the Manis had put up in their home.

As Avraham's business began to prosper, he was able to travel to Constantinople more often. However, he did not always find his old teacher there, because Rabbi Haddaya, who had traveled widely as a young man, was again smitten by wanderlust and was often away on some journey. Generally, his trips took him south and east, and he once even spent a few months in Jerusalem. There he met a woman who several months later came to Salonika and became, to everyone's surprise, the wife of his old age.

After his son Yosefs bar-mitzvah, which took place in 1839, Avraham, who was still a widower with two children, decided to bring the boy to Rabbi Haddaya's school in Constantinople just as his father had brought him. In doing so, he wished both to obtain vicariously the ordination denied to himself and to strengthen his ties with his old rabbi, for whom his admiration had only grown with the years. Before setting out with Yosef, he even taught himself a few words of French, the mother tongue of the rabbi's wife, in order to help create a bond with her.

Rabbi Haddaya's wife, Flora Molkho, took a great liking to Yosef, a vivacious and imaginative youngster who was more intellectually gifted than his father. Having no children of her own, she treated him as her own son and made him her closest companion, since her husband was often away on his travels to the various Jewish communities that invited him to arbitrate legal disputes too knotty for others to unravel.