The Glatstein Chronicles (53 page)
I tried to protest, but the man had an answer to all my objections. He assured me that I’d be able to nap a little in his carriage, for the highway was straight and smooth. It would be like riding on butter, he said.
A few minutes later, I was on my way downstairs to the waiting vehicle. A door opened on the second floor, and a silvery head stuck out from it. “Why are you making so much noise, waking everybody up? Don’t you know people are still asleep?” The door opened a bit wider, and I saw it was Steinman grinning at me.
His face was sallow and dried out, as if he had been fighting death all night and conquered it, but at a heavy cost. Only his smile seemed alive.
When I told him how I happened to be going to Kazimierz, he laughed heartily. “You see, it’s fate. A man has to visit Kazimierz sooner or later, so what difference does it make when you go? When you come back, we’ll talk about the place for three days and three nights running.”
He had something more to say, but his face became clouded. He kissed me on both cheeks in a very formal, fatherly way. Standing there in the doorway he bore a strong resemblance to portraits of Anatole France. His features were a trifle livelier than before. He looked like a man who had to generate his own energy to get through the day because his natural organisms would not suffice to carry him through.
The driver gave a smart crack of his whip when he saw me. I got into the carriage and the horse set off at a trot.
My fellow passenger seemed a very cheerful type. He kept looking at me and smiling. He was about forty, with a pockmarked face, but this did not give him an unpleasant appearance. He was dark, sturdy, and broad. He took up about three-quarters of the carriage, but he was aware of his bulk and saw to it that I was comfortable.
“I imagine that you are not going to Kazimierz of your own free will any more than I am,” he said, holding out his hand.
He had a warm handshake and said that his name was Neifeld.
The road led through a little woods, after which we came out on a highway with open fields on both sides. The sky was not too clear, and the air was damp.
“If only it doesn’t rain,” Neifeld said, “this may turn out to have been a good idea. The driver thinks he took me in, but it was really I who took him in. I’ve been to Kazimierz more than a dozen times, and if you woke me up any morning and said ‘Kazimierz,’ I’d be ready to go again. How many times have you been there?”
When he learned that this was to be my first visit to his beloved little town, he said that he envied me. To be sure, he went on, Kazimierz is always Kazimierz, but there’s nothing like the first time. That’s an unforgettable experience. It’s a physical sensation, something you feel in the marrow of your bones. “But I shall not go on raving about it because if I overdo it you’ll be disappointed.”
When he learned that I was a foreigner, he showered me with questions. How did I like Poland? What were my impressions of Polish Jewry?
“You understand, politically speaking you’ve come at a peculiar moment,” he said. “Polish Jewry is still rubbing its cheek, thanking God that it wasn’t really slapped. Not so long ago there was real danger of serious trouble—pogroms were very much in the air. When the prime minister was shot, the Endeks immediately started agitating against the Jews as responsible for the assassination plot. The government lost its head, and there was great fear among the Jews. Then it was discovered that the murderer was a Ukrainian, and the Jews were safe again. But it makes every Jew wonder what would have happened if the slander had not been disproven. It’s not always easy to dispose of slander so quickly. When will the next time be?”
Neifeld said that he was a lawyer—or rather, that he had been a lawyer. He had made quite enough money, he said, out of Jewish troubles, Jewish fears, and Jewish helplessness. He was retired now. Though only forty-three, he was well enough off to live quite well, he said. So he had given up his practice.
“Believe it or not, I was once an ardent Polish patriot. In fact there was a time when all the Jewish youth was patriotic. When Poland gained its independence, we became confident and held our heads high. The Polish soil of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers seemed doubly dear to us. But we soon saw our mistake. We began to be persecuted at every step, pushed and kicked around, hard enough to make us realize that Poland was not freed for us, that Polish independence did not include ours. Equality before the law turned out to be no more than a paper promise. But I scarcely have to tell you all this, the facts are well known. We are being impoverished here in body and spirit—and Polish Jewry has spirit. It is a burning bush.
“What makes it so bad is that our children have no future here. The conditions are such that they simply cannot get ahead, but the reason they are doomed is that love has died out among them. Our young people are becoming terribly unromantic and practical, it’s almost frightening. The dowry system is going to destroy Polish Jewry in the end. We are chained, fettered, bound, and tied. Since the young people have no future, material security comes before everything else. The young men set a price on themselves, sell themselves for so many złotys. And you can’t blame them: they have no choice. With a bit of money it is at least possible to get started in a business—never mind that most such businesses end up bankrupt. But to try to make a start without money condemns a man, and his wife and children as well, to starvation. As a result people are afraid to fall in love. No young man makes close friends with a girl unless he knows in advance what her dowry will amount to. To be sure, the very young ones still play the silly boy-and-girl game, but in just a few years they have learned to demand of love that it be profitable.
“That’s the situation. We are becoming stunted because there is no love among us. There is adultery and fornication, and the sacredness of the family is no longer absolute. Real love, love beyond price, which is the foundation of a healthy people, is dying among us. The institution of the dowry is an old one among the Jews, but we were not afraid of poverty in the past. Today we have been so terrorized by all sorts of persecution, and our economic life has been so undermined by every kind of official and unofficial discrimination, by boycotts both open and hidden, that our youth is haunted by the specter of poverty as never before. In the end, dowry or no dowry, they end up poor, but now without even having known the marvelous comfort and compensation of love.
“So what’s it all come to? To this: that many a poor girl embraces the Christian religion. Rather than become old maids, they throw themselves into the arms of a Gentile. Gentile young men enjoy greater material security, for they can always become government officials at least. Also, Gentiles don’t put so much emphasis on the dowry.
“The epidemic of conversions today is the more alarming because people are getting used to it, taking it for granted. Indifference on this score saps our vital strength. It isn’t generally realized that we are too poor and weak to afford the luxury of tolerating converts.”
Our driver turned around, smiling and yawning at the same time. “Didn’t I tell you that once you were riding with me, you couldn’t be sorry you were going to Kazimierz?” he said. “To the contrary, you’ll like it.” He yawned again.
“The problem of conversion is quite interesting,” Neifeld went on. “In the course of my practice I ran into many people who had changed their faith. They were ambitious to get ahead, to climb, to obtain posts as judges. Many embraced Christianity even after they had been appointed judges, merely because their friends urged them to do so, with an encouraging tap on the shoulder, ‘Why don’t you do it and get it over with?’ This is good-natured social pressure. Others were pushed to it by their wives. Women can be more ambitious than men, and they know that once you’ve been sprinkled with a bit of holy water, advancement is much easier. Such women become devout Catholics, having soberly calculated that they want their children to be integrated people, and integration, for them, is inseparable from the Church.
“There are converts who are very unhappy afterward, and they dream only of getting back to the fold. In some rare cases they move to a new town and give up their new religion. Poland is theoretically a free country, and you can go back to Judaism if you like. But this doesn’t happen very often. As a rule such converts put off returning to the fold until it is too late. And once you’ve given up the ghost, you get a funeral with all the Catholic trappings. At such funerals you will find a brother of the deceased who has not yet become a convert, an enlightened uncle, so enlightened, indeed, that he doesn’t care whether he is a Jew or not, and an aunt who has become a Catholic and married a Gentile. The priest may well have a Jewish nose for all that he sounds as though Latin were his mother tongue. Believe me, if the dead man only could, he’d get up and run! For although a convert may get used to living with Gentiles, the thought of having to lie next to dead Gentiles forever after terrifies him. It’s an alien world, and their cemeteries are alien too. My guess is that every convert comes to his senses when he realizes that he is stuck with the alien company of his fellow dead. But then it’s too late.
“I must warn you, however, to discount what I say on this matter of converts. I have a morbid prejudice against the whole tribe. In the exercise of my profession I occasionally had to deal with them, and after all you’ve got to be civilized, but God knows it was a strain for me. To me, a convert’s hand is always dirty. I’d keep telling myself that I mustn’t be unfair, that I must respect other people’s convictions, but it didn’t work. The whole business of passing over to another flock has always been hard for me to understand. Often I’d find myself investigating the circumstances of a given conversion, trying to discover why a man had made up his mind to change his faith, and whether it had been easy for him. I would go into the circumstances of childhood, the kind of parents and grandparents, trying to find out why people take such a step.
“Many so-called ‘progressives’ are motivated by love for their children. They are eager for their children to make their way in the world and don’t want them to suffer as Jews. So they sacrifice themselves for their children and cross over. Many fathers of this type keep up their Jewish contacts, eat in Jewish restaurants, and still buy kosher meat (for they couldn’t touch any other), but they do it secretly. What sustains them is the thought that they have provided for their children.
“I know a grandfather of that kind, whose Gentile grandsons and granddaughters love him dearly, but as soon as he opens his mouth and talks Polish with a Lithuanian Jewish accent, they beg him to stop. They love their grandfather as long as he keeps quiet and they can call him by the anti-Semitic pet names. No, the grandfather hasn’t become a Christian, but he is happy at the thought that his offspring will not have to bear the Jewish burden.
“Nowadays there are too many contacts between the renegades and the Jews. Much of this may be explained, on the part of the Jews, as awareness that converts could be dangerous if not watched, for after all, what is a convert if not a rotten Jew? Poland is a Catholic country, and the Jews fear that should they boycott the converts or show them hostility, they’d be charged with offenses against the state religion. This is why many people keep quiet. And in many Jewish restaurants you’d be sitting next to Jews eating real Jewish dishes—stuffed chicken necks, gefilte fish, cholent—and discussing Jewish problems, with all the usual sighs and jokes and puns, but these same Jews have Gentile wives and Gentile children at home. They themselves live entirely among Jews, all their business is with Jews, and all their friends are Jews. They haven’t even begun to enter the alien world.
“I once knew a convert who even flaunted his Yiddish. He let himself be baptized in order to marry a Gentile girl, but his wife left him a year after the marriage because she was an anti-Semite and her husband was still too Jewish for her. She had thought that baptism would change his appearance, his gestures, his habits. But when he went to church with his wife, he liked to hum tunes from the Jewish liturgy, as though he were bent on spiting himself.
“He was a failure, but after his conversion he got a minor government post. He worked among Gentiles, but his best friend was a Gentile who spoke Yiddish fluently. And what a Yiddish—rich, with the most genuine idioms and intonations. This Gentile was a drunkard, and the convert too took to drinking. They often sat in Jewish restaurants and sang ‘God and His judgment are just.’ The Gentile had inherited his Yiddish from his mother, who blessed the candles every Friday and was quite capable of reciting the Saturday evening prayer from memory. She would often beg her son’s friend, the converted Jew, to go back to his old faith lest he lose both this world and the next. When he was drunk, he often thought about this threat. ‘You know,’ he would say to his Gentile friend, ‘your mother is one hell of a clever woman. She says I’m neither fish nor fowl and she’s right.’ Recently he began to worry a great deal about the sufferings of the Jews. When the Jews are prosperous, he told me, you don’t mind being a convert, but when the Jews are in trouble, you feel rotten about having left them. He told his Gentile friend that the sufferings of the Jews would drive him to his grave. Well, a few weeks ago he jumped off a roof into the street and died instantly. He had come back to the flock those last few months at least.”
The sky had cleared. A peasant driving his cart in the opposite direction exchanged yawns with our driver. The road was not as smooth and level as he had promised. There were a good number of hills, and quite often I felt as if I had better put my hand over my heart so as not to have it jostled out of my body when the carriage bumped over holes in the road, stones, and deep puddles. But there were many good stretches. These were dirt roads. The fields on either side were monotonous and haphazard in their layout, but nonetheless a joy to look at. The pleasantest moments were when we drove down narrow, well-trodden lanes through woods fragrant with the vintage wine of fermented leaves.