The Glatstein Chronicles (12 page)

It was on a Purim night, when Jews were in the synagogue observing their ancestors’ deliverance from the evil Haman, that the Shirts invaded the premises, seized control, and bolted the door. Their leader, a youth with long black hair, mounted the rostrum and launched into his harangue: “Comrades and citizens, today is Purim. They want you to believe that on this day a miracle occurred, that God—in a pig’s eye!—saved the Jews from a pogrom … ”

“Get down from the pulpit, you infidel, you sinner, the devil take you. Get down!” The voice resounding throughout the synagogue was that of Moyshele Glisker, a
Kohen,
scion of the priestly line of Jews, a man with a hot temper and a forehead that turned red as a rooster’s comb when he was angered. “Get down from there,” he shouted, ignoring the threats of the Shirts, that they would knock him dead, that they would put a bullet in him—and to prove their point, they even aimed a gun at him. But he kept on shouting, as if in a burning blaze, “Down from there.”

I plead guilty that in this particular struggle, between the blasphemer against God and Moyshele Glisker, the unalterable opponent of revolution—and by “revolution” I meant against Tsar Nicholas for shedding Jewish blood—I sided with Moyshele. To me he was a hero, like Mattathias, father of the Maccabees, wielding a sword and shouting, “Who is for God, unto me!” I myself became a little Maccabee, and together we fought the Lord’s battle on His behalf, since He Himself had grown weak and tearful, too compassionate, a shadow wrapped in a prayer shawl, spending His days weeping.

To this day I cannot abide defiance against God. No matter how often I repeat the Marxist gospel, that religion is the opiate of the masses, it doesn’t help in the least. Whenever I see someone insulting the sheer, innate goodness that lies behind that mysterious misery we call life, I feel deeply offended by their confusion of the kernel with the husk. I know that my children will never be bothered by such concerns, having encountered neither Avremele Eiger nor his noble, gentle colleague, Rabbi Hillel Lifschitz, and thus denied the privilege of hearing the good Rabbi Lifschitz’s sigh-laden discourses on Rosh Hashanah prior to the blowing of the shofar, or his cracking voice calling out the sequence of staccato blasts to the shofar blower, my uncle Khiel-Osher, who executed the broken
Shvorim
sounds with a poignancy beyond compare.

Nonetheless, following the Purim incident, I began to sense the presence of a new force in town. Until now Jewish power had resided in the underworld, the toughs who were handy with a knife—Avreml the Torpedo, Mordkhele the Bastard, with his patent-leather boots, and other such gruff specimens. What they said they meant, what they threatened they carried out. When they beat a whore almost to death and she pleaded with passersby, “Jews, children of mercy, save me!” the merciful children hurried past, pretending it was not they who were being entreated, afraid they might be beaten up, too—you didn’t want to mess with those guys. But with the advent of the Shirts, the underworld lay low. I once saw some members of the Jewish Socialist Bund beating up a thief who had stolen a couple of rubles from a servant girl. “Give back the money!” They pummeled the miscreant until his blood streamed like red soup and he returned every last groschen, as the poor girl, her hands like frozen apples, cried, “Enough!”

This was a new form of power, exercised in the service of an ideal, though I became confused again when this new power pumped a few bullets into Elye Taub because he refused to give his employees a raise. Young and old wept at his funeral. Elye Taub had been a tailor and himself not a rich man. When I saw his black casket being carried through the streets of the Jewish quarter, it occurred to me that his transgression against his workers paled in comparison to his punishment. His wife tore her hair, his children wept, and the schoolboys following the coffin chanted the traditional verse from Psalms, “May righteousness go before him.” I weighed his sin and his punishment on my child’s scale of justice, and somehow the two didn’t balance.

Elye Taub’s death sent a shock throughout the community. For the first time, it began to feel as if the vaunted Jewish unity, as expressed in the precept “All Israel are brethren” and voiced so keenly in the New Year prayers for the collective well-being, no longer extended through the rest of the year. There were now two camps, workers and bosses. The first salvo had been fired in our town’s class warfare.

The workers sang their songs with growing pride and joy, and whenever eight or nine gathered, a tenth would invariably spring up from somewhere to preach to them, always beginning with, “Comrades and citizens.” Elderly Jews, passing such gatherings, would mutter disapprovingly under their breath, “If things don’t get better, they’ll surely get worse.”

Thus it was no great surprise to me when one day the new powers brought Shimen Berger over to our house. Reb Shimen, my father’s employer, was the owner of a large clothing store. He sported a broad, flaxen beard and lived in a beautiful home in the best part of town. Father would call on him on holidays to pay his respects, but it took the new powers to bring him down from his lofty perch to our lowly dwelling in the shadow of the jail, on an ordinary weekday.

Several young men whom I didn’t know were seated around our big table under the lamp. Their stern faces showed that they meant business. At the head of the table sat not Shimen Berger, as might be expected, mopping his brow, but my father, who had been assigned the heavy task of arbitrator. The new powers respected his decency and fairness, even if his class-consciousness was not yet fully developed.

Reb Shimen, it turned out, had slapped a clerk in the face, and the powers were demanding justice. The aggrieved party, who was among those present at the table, a youth with the piping voice of a choirboy, kept jumping up from his seat to shout into his boss’s face. Reb Shimen wiped the sweat from his forehead and tried to answer, but my father cut him short, saying, “Keep still, Reb Shimen. Have you forgotten Elye Taub?” That was enough to quiet him down for a while, until the young clerk again began leaping up like a bantam rooster and Father once more had to invoke the ghost of Elye Taub. As a sign of how peaceful class warfare could be, a revolver lay on the table, the weapon’s blue steel reflecting the flickers of the overhead lamp.

My father handed down his ruling: Shimen Berger must pay such and such a sum to the workers’ party, in compensation for damages. The young clerk was to be given a pay raise of half a ruble a week, plus cloth for a new suit of clothes. Furthermore, Reb Shimen was to promise henceforth to keep his hands to himself, because, as the young clerk had observed, “These days, you don’t go around smacking people!”

Reb Shimen accepted the judgment. The workers were satisfied and left. Reb Shimen remained sitting across from my father, a murderous look in his eye. After a moment, he rose and began pounding his head with his fists. “Itskhok,” he shouted at Father, “I’ll kill myself, I’ll hang myself. If you can no longer beat your own worker, then the world’s come to an end. If I can’t have the pleasure of slapping such a little snot-nose on both cheeks to show him who’s boss, then who needs this lousy life?”

Yes, long before Tsar Nicholas, Shimen Berger felt the heavy hand of revolution coming down on him, and submitted, never raising his head again. He went about stooped, gloomy as doom, giving the revolution its first sweet victory.

Days of unrest followed. The comrades, flush with success, next began a campaign against an offending janitor, no ordinary caretaker but a Cerberus of his courtyard, zealous in his eagerness to serve the tsar. He looked down on his broom and pail as merely incidental to his higher calling of informer, keeping a sharp eye out on the comings and goings in his building, constantly on the lookout for suspicious, illegal behavior. His own children went about in rags, begging for crusts from the Jewish children. In reverse of the usual pattern, in his case it was the wife who was a drunk, often to be found sprawled next to the garbage bin, cursing out her husband and children. The janitor himself was always sober. He suspected that schemers were plotting revolution right under his nose and he took his spying duties with the utmost seriousness. But early one morning, the career of this most loyal of the tsar’s local servitors was brought to an end.

After this promising beginning, more janitors, an occasional policeman, and even an assistant to the mayor met their fates. I remember once hearing on our street several dull claps, like the hasty raps of a stick against a shutter. A policeman, who had just bought a bag of flour, fell several feet from where I stood. The contents spilled across his face and soon dried clots of blood began to appear in the white, chalky mass, looking like chunks of raw liver and lung. The policeman lay there for a long time in his lifeless, polished boots, and Jews felt as if he had been thrown there as faked evidence in a blood libel, until the law arrived from its station on the other side of the clock tower, wrote up an official report, and took him away.

Then there was the affair of Abele Tsimring. No Jew in town sported a longer beard—it was a triumph of facial adornment. He always walked slowly, as if out for a stroll, his hands folded behind him, resting on his posterior, his large, black eyes peering out from under bushy, black eyebrows. He was already as gray as a dove, but his eyebrows refused to follow suit. As he looked around, from time to time he would remove his right hand from its resting place to give his gray beard a good stroking. His gaze was a form of inspection. As he continued on his way, he would call over to the first youngster whose eye caught his, saying: “Sonny, no one ever got anywhere by staring. Have you prayed today? Here’s a groschen, go buy yourself some candy.” No boy ever took up his offer. Abele’s benevolence sent a chill down the spine.

Abele was a Jew who had entrée to all the official sources of civic power—the courts, the town hall, the provincial government. He was in cahoots with the authorities, and it was no secret that he was an informer, whose unholy labors had already netted him several valuable properties. In his earlier days he had made a living from hunting down young men eligible for forced conscription, but later he moved on to informing on political offenders. People cursed his very being but shuddered before him, afraid that his ominous look might land on them, as he strolled about the Jewish streets in his long, satin caftan, spying.

But no bullet, it seemed, could fell him that easily. The first time he was shot he was only slightly wounded. Within a few days he was back on the job. A second time, he was wounded more seriously, but the Jewish hospital, where he was taken, soon issued the glad tidings that he was improving and would fully recover. For purposes of security, the authorities had him transferred to the Russian military hospital, which was surrounded by high, thick walls, and heavily guarded. Nevertheless, a few of the young comrades managed to sneak in and pay him a bedside visit, making sure that he would never rise from his sickbed.

Abele’s funeral was an occasion for cheer. All the Jewish schools closed in his honor. Although in his lifetime he was something of a government personage and a figure of fear, as a Jewish corpse Abele belonged entirely to us. His remains got a good shaking up on their way to the cemetery, as young and old threw stones at the passing casket. Abele, along with his formidable beard, was buried among the outcasts by the fence of the cemetery. For weeks thereafter, Jews took satisfaction in how things had worked out, quoting the biblical verse, “You shall extirpate the evil from your midst.”

It was then that the Russian authorities decided the time had come to show their full might, and scare us into thinking twice before embarking on any further antigovernment ventures. It wasn’t just a matter of who had one revolver more or one revolver less, because they were the real force, and to prove it, they pulled out all the stops, sending out an awesome parade. Leading the march were the drummers—boom, taraboom, boom, taraboom—calling the townspeople to witness what was obviously intended as a display of military might—artillery, infantry, grenadiers, and Cossack cavalry. The Cossack horses were so wild that they wouldn’t stay in step and broke ranks constantly, spinning round in circles. It was a wonder that the Cossacks, armed to the teeth with rifles, lances, swords, and whips, didn’t fall off and break their necks. Other riders on tamer mounts, fitted out with machine-guns, were followed by open-jawed cannons bumping along the unpaved streets, swaying every which way. The soldiers’ stern, cruel faces were directed at the darkened houses that lay swaddled in fear. Row after row of soldiers marched past in formation, interspersed with the drummers—boom, taraboom, boom, taraboom.

The townspeople, however, for whom this display had been intended, not only failed to line the streets but disappeared behind bolted doors. As the ominous drumming resounded, they knew instinctively that this was no ordinary exhibition. Already the nights were long and terrifying because of a military curfew and now, as people exclaimed, they were coming to poison the days as well! The Jewish shops immediately closed their doors—there was no business to be had anyway. The men scattered, the women collected their children, like mother hens rounding up their chicks. One gate after another slammed shut. The Jewish streets looked like an abandoned town.

I was the only one not quick enough to make it through the gate into the courtyard of my Hebrew school. The gate was quite high, and I must have looked like a small, frightened kitten, pressed against its length, shivering through the whole long while that it took for the parade to pass. I may have been the only living soul around from the entire Jewish neighborhood. Officers winked at me. Cossacks, the better to scare me, stuck out their tongues. Wise-guy soldiers pointed their rifles in my direction. As the drummers marched by, they beat out their boom, taraboom even louder, as if in my special honor, as the blood drained from my body.

When the last soldier was gone from view, all the gates began to open, slowly, stealthily, as if testing the safety of the streets. My teacher, Yankl Peiletz, ran over to me and hugged me as if I had been lost and was now found, tickling my face with his generous beard. My classmates surrounded me and begged me to tell them everything that had happened. Even the teacher’s assistant, who ordinarily ignored me, paid attention as I spun my—fantastic—account, not forgetting to mention how the soldiers had tried to take me captive, to turn me into a Cossack, and how I drove them off by reciting the
shma yisroel,
the declaration of faith—“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.”