The Glatstein Chronicles (37 page)

A few more men joined us. By now Steinman was in the center of a group of seven or eight rocking chairs.

“The yeshiva where I studied was moved to Bzhezin because of the pogrom. A short time later, Dr. Israel Hildesheimer came to Poland. He went to łódź to collect funds for his rabbinical seminary in Berlin. Ostensibly, the purpose of his trip was to enroll students in the seminary.

“Now, this Hildesheimer—it’s easy to say the name, but it’s a long jump back into the past for an old man! Hildesheimer is a chapter in himself, more than a chapter, a whole book.” Steinman paused for a moment, then went on to recount what a stir the German Jew’s arrival caused in Poland.

“People flocked to hear his sermons. He dressed like a real German, but he was strict about religious observances, to the point of mania. He was stately, you couldn’t take your eyes off him. To see such a face at that time was like seeing a member of the Lost Tribes. And then, the eloquent sermons he preached in the synagogues! They were something! The people couldn’t get over this newfangled preacher, who did not threaten them with the barrels of pitch in hell, but instead talked about the Jew’s higher duties to the Creator of the Universe.

“Needless to say, he elevated God into Master of the Universe,
ribono shel olam.
The Polish Jews did not have much confidence in this Germanized God, but they loved the sermons, which Hildesheimer delivered in real German, not a Germanized Yiddish. His sermons always built up to a big climax, and then there was a summary. Even before he got to the end, the people felt that he had gotten the last drop out of the well. It was the first time the Polish Jews had ever heard the Jewish God discussed in a foreign language they only half understood. This God was not the kindly Father to whom the Berdichev Rabbi poured out his heart; this one was aloof, remote, spiffed up, thoroughly Germanized. Young people began to play with the idea of a secular God, and Doctor Hildesheimer talked to them about “the philosophy of religion.” In their section of the synagogue, the women did not understand a word of all this, but they wept at his words as they did at Kol Nidre. As a rule, they burst out sobbing at the first word they could pick out from the surging tide of German. It might be some perfectly innocent word, but the women clutched at it as if it were some distant relative who had been lost a long time among the Germans.

“Dr. Israel Hildesheimer’s well-sounding name was on everyone’s lips. Everyone knew that he had come to enroll pupils in his seminary.

“Well, the upshot of all this was that I registered along with several of my friends to study at his seminary,” Steinman went on. “By that time, my mind had been poisoned by the literature of the Enlightenment. I had absorbed the
Sages of Israel, Chronicles of Creation,
the
Sins of the Samaritans, The Hypocrite,
and the gentle pastoral novel
Love for Zion.
I was nursing a dream that sounded very important—no more or less than to reform the spiritual life of Polish Jewry.” Steinman paused. The new arrivals were drinking in his every word.

“Believe it or not,” he said, “but we all went to Berlin on foot. We walked filled with the most beautiful, the purest hopes, longing to drink at the fountainhead of knowledge. But the welcome we received when we got there was something else again.

“Whether because Doctor Hildesheimer’s mission to Poland had ended in failure, or because by temperament he hated Polish Jews, the fact is that when at last we arrived in Berlin, ready to drink at the famous spring, he didn’t pay the slightest attention to us. He just ignored the boys from Poland. So there we were in a foreign city, penniless. We had to beg for bread. The Jewish community was ashamed of our caftans and wanted to get rid of us as soon as possible.

“The weaker among us let themselves be persuaded and made the trip back home. But the stubborn ones, and I was among the latter, stayed on, to the dismay of the German Jews. We lived on charity, and all of us passionately studied German. I devoured books on literature, geography, history. I managed to get permission to attend courses at the university without matriculating. Some Gentile professors took pity on our honest thirst for knowledge and enrolled us without fee, and from their high chairs talked down to us because they knew that we drank in every word they said.

“I don’t know what we’d have done without the Jewish servant girls and cooks from Galicia—may they be blessed. It was the food they gave us that kept our bodies going, while the Christian professors tended to our spiritual needs. The Jewish cooks, with their warm hearts, looked after us. In their eyes we were yeshiva students. They found places for us to stay in Jewish homes. They slipped us the word when it was safe to sneak into the kitchen for a hot meal. Many of them had thoughts of marriage; and some of our boys were lucky enough to arouse interest in the young ladies of the house themselves—those boys really did well for themselves. In no time at all they were fat and had nice red cheeks. Yes, those chaps lived in clover. Not only did they have board and lodgings, they even got pocket money.

“As for myself, I confess that I was unlucky as can be.” Here Steinman stopped and looked at us with his young eyes. “No servant girl fell in love with me, let alone a lady of the house. You may take my word for it that I was a handsome young man, but I was so skinny that no one could see this. I impressed only ugly old cooks, who, while feeding me, looked at me with such mooncalf eyes and uttered such heartrending sighs that I felt that my bread was buttered with the hopes of old maids. Such bread was not to my liking, it stuck in my throat.

“At that time I had not entirely given up the idea of becoming a rabbi, although the Christian kind of Jewishness they taught in Germany repelled me. Hunger finally drove me from Berlin. I went to Breslau hoping to fare better there. Professor Graetz was in Breslau at that time, and I made an effort to see him. It was not easy. To achieve that honor took some time and many letters of introduction, until finally the professor relented and asked me to come to his house. He too hated Polish Jews, like a real anti-Semite: The term
Polnischer Jude
was for him synonymous with
Lump
and
Schacherjude.
It was odd to hear such lovely compliments from old Graetz, who wore a skullcap and observed all the Jewish rites. He liked to have two men to dinner every Friday night so as to have the requisite quorum for the blessings. When he recited the Kiddush he made the most of it, chanting every word and pronouncing the Hebrew in the German manner. He chided me for reciting the blessings too fast, explaining that the Kiddush was a solemn rite, and that it must be recited with great deliberation, not the way the Polish Jews did it. The Polish Jews had no feeling for ceremonial, he said, they were either obscurantist, superstitious, dirty Hasidim—to Graetz the Hasidim were the lowest of the low—or heretics and atheists who deny the divine Providence.

“After the Kiddush the professor never failed to mention that his silver goblet had been given him by old Moses Montefiore in person. He cherished this goblet, and when he showed it around, he always managed to keep a finger or two on it, to make sure it wouldn’t evaporate in someone else’s hands.

“Very often Professor Graetz invited a Christian clergyman to his house on Friday night. The clergyman knew a few Hebrew words, which he pronounced with a distinct Christian accent. The conversation usually led to an argument, and there were comparisons among the various religions, a la
Nathan the Wise.
The clergyman usually called the professor ‘Nathan the Wise,’ but the old man was not impressed by such compliments. His eyes would blaze whenever he suspected that the clergyman was criticizing Judaism. At such moments Graetz would launch into a lofty speech about the sublimity of Jewish ethics, about our moral mission, about the ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ which was proclaimed on Mount Sinai to a heathen world.

“He was a fine Jew and a great scholar, Professor Graetz. His instruction to me, as a future rabbi, emphasized that I was to implant the Jewish faith not in people’s hearts, he insisted, but in their minds. The heart can be easily converted, he said, but the head is higher than the heart, and the clear Jewish religion spoke to the head.

“I was ashamed of my poverty in front of the professor, and whenever he questioned me as to my means of support, reminding me of the saying that a man who doesn’t eat can’t study, I gave evasive answers. Often he would slip a few coins in my coat pocket. But this verging on hunger turned out to be my dumb luck. I clung to the shriveling religion that was beginning to turn more primitive and coarse. What remained was an apprehensive Jewishness, so I supported myself by selling wall hangings of Psalms that were supposed to ward off the evil eye from women in childbirth. I removed crumbs of leavened bread in Jewish homes on the eve of Passover, and I shook the lulav for family after family during the Feast of Tabernacles. Even if they never went to synagogue services, still they were afraid to begin the meal without ‘shaking the lulav.’ German Jews had lost all inner understanding of Judaism; all that remained was the hardened crust of ritual and the old Jewish fears.

“On the eve of Yom Kippur, I was particularly busy. The long caftan I wore was bulging because underneath it I held a cock and a hen. I went from house to house performing the rite of atonement. Before I went into a house, I always made sure that my birds who earned my bread for me were still alive, that they hadn’t choked to death. Even Gentile servants wouldn’t let me go before I had whirled a squawking fowl around their heads. I performed the rite of redeeming the firstborn after circumcision. I supplied willow branches for the Hoshana Raba festival, observed anniversaries of death. I could usually be found in the synagogue, and my customers would look me up there. ‘Herr Prediger, Mr. Preacher, they would say, tomorrow is the anniversary of my mother’s death, so please come to recite the prayer. And they would squeeze a few coins into my hand. Incidentally, many German Jews were so poorly informed about Jewish rites that they also observed their parents’ birthdays in this manner; I was paid for saying the commemorative prayers for mothers who were still alive before I realized this. And on Rosh Hashanah, your Herr Prediger visited women in confinement to blow the shofar for them.

“For a short period, I got along so well that I even had a roof over my head, a little attic room at Jozefa Kubi’s.” Steinman smiled broadly, and it was like a gentle breeze that brought smiles on the faces of all his listeners.

“Jozefa Kubi was a Hungarian Jewess. She must have been in her nineties. She hired me not to do housework, God forbid, but to tell her a story every night before she fell asleep. Jozefa’s husband, who had died several years earlier, in his lifetime earned his bread as a
shames,
a sexton, in a synagogue. His widow still kept the concession in the synagogue, and every new shames had to pay her a percentage on his earnings, including his fees for blessing the ethrog, anniversary prayers, and so on. The office was hers for life, and she lived quite a long time. In fact she survived several shameses.

“Out of my daily earnings I made enough to buy myself a salt roll, which cost fifteen pfennigs, and then nervously set out for my attic room. On the way I had to think up a good story for Jozefa.

“The old woman was difficult to please. The stories I was to tell her, she had made clear, must invariably depict the scene in Paradise when she is reunited with her husband, who is impatiently waiting for her. But before getting to this invariable climax, the story must go through a number of complications. Jozefa Kubi had a phenomenal memory. If I ever happened to repeat a detail from a previous story, she would scream at me, denouncing me for trying to sell her secondhand merchandise for new.

“I really wore myself out inventing those stories. When I got to the end, she was usually ready to fall asleep, and for having so vividly pictured the corner in Paradise where she was sure to be, she would sigh with pleasure, then I was rewarded with a
yarmush,
a soup made of flour and water with salt and garlic. When Jozefa Kubi had fallen asleep on her four pillows—she slept in an almost sitting position—I at last had a chance to chew my salt roll and sip the yarmush. I really earned it, too, for I had to wrack my brain to the point of exhaustion to manage those stories. And my tears fell into the soup bowl.

“Often the old hag would make me go to bed hungry when she didn’t like the story. On one occasion I was led to tell a story that was the exact opposite of what she wanted. You remember, every story had to evoke her shames; apart from that, I was free to embroider as I liked. But that night I happened to glance at the sour face of the Hungarian witch, and instead of a husband I gave her a pain in the neck. She repaid me in kind, giving me a pain in the neck instead of the thin yarmush. I was ravenous, but I took some comfort from my show of independence, saying to myself that after all I had not sold my soul altogether so long as I would rather starve than give Jozefa Kubi her licorice-sweet shames pining for her in the hereafter.”

Suddenly we heard a thin little voice, gentle as a May wind, but to all of us, for some unknown reason, as piercing as a knife. In fact, the voice was not unmelodious, but somehow it had a quality of sharpness, an unpleasant edge.

“Mr. Finkel, Mr. Fin-kel!”

All of us had been transported by Steinman to other worlds, and now this little voice dragged us back. We suddenly looked at Steinman—we had not really been looking at him, only listening—and the more clearly we saw him, the more distinctly we heard the shrill little voice that seemed intent on making us get up. “Mr. Finkel! Mr. Fin-kel!”

When we came back to ourselves, we realized that the voice was that of Finkel’s wife, who was still sitting against the wall, smoking. The piercing call had a note of panic in it, as though she were in need of help immediately, if only to get up. Then it was clear that there was a good deal of affectation in that voice, even malice. Surprisingly enough, Mr. Finkel did not budge. He did not say a word. To emphasize his utter unconcern, he turned his cap to one side, like some young tough, so that the visor was over his right ear. Moreover, he began to rock comfortably, demonstrating that he did not give a hoot for this musical summons.