The Glatstein Chronicles (55 page)

Later that day we stood in a dark apartment and looked at what purported to be the letter which Esther had addressed to her people. An old Jew carefully opened a cabinet and took out of it several Torah-scroll adornments—embroidered mantles, crowns, and silver pointers—which the Jewish maiden who had either left home or been abducted had sent back home. The old man told us that he had inherited the concession from his father, and his father had gotten it from his grandfather. The precious objects belonged to the community, but the community recognized his right to house the historical relics. He showed me lettering on the mantles embroidered in gold and silver, and told me that a famous Jewish writer used to stay in his house for days at a time, unable to tear himself away from the relics. The writer loved them so much—to be honest about it—he had to watch his hands lest he make off with something. He wasn’t a thief, it was just that he was possessed of a kind of passion—what do you call it, “sticky fingers”—and, indeed, how could anyone not feel tempted when he held in his own hands a mantle that Esther herself had touched with her royal fingers?

When I gave him a few złotys, he said that he was not yet through with us. He led us across several courtyards and took us into a synagogue that was older even than Esther. King Casimir had gone to this synagogue countless times—might we have as many thousands of złotys! Our guide apparently wanted us to be rich. He took us into the special room where the rites of circumcision used to be performed and showed us the oversized chair reserved for the man who had the privilege of holding the baby during the ceremony.

The main thing I mustn’t forget, our guide said, is that his father, who had also been the
shames
of the synagogue, was a famous man. The Jewish writer who had stayed here knew him well, often called on him and got him to tell him many stories, which he later published in newspapers, to the delectation of all. Had our guide read the stories? we asked. God forbid, he replied—he had a head full of worries, “and this is one of my greatest worries,” he added, as a girl with modest black eyes and short hair joined us.

“Father, may I have the key?” she said. “There are a few visitors who want to see the antiques.”

The shames stopped and slapped his trouser pocket melodramatically, as if he wanted the important key to be lost and create a commotion. But he found it at once and handed it to his daughter. “Open the cabinet, I’ll be back in a moment,” he said. “You can start showing them in the meantime.”

She left quietly. The father stood motionless a while then gave a sigh that came from the depths where are stored all the unrealized prayers of the Days of Awe.

“You have seen her—she is just as beautiful as Esther was,” he said. “And she has golden hands. I should show you her work—it’s as good as all the embroidered mantles. Occasionally, just to get another judgment, I throw in a piece she has embroidered among the relics, and it is admired more than the rest of the treasure. But it’s the other girls who get husbands, and why? Because she is too choosey. She has a bee in her bonnet. You would swear she was waiting for some king to come along and make her his concubine.”

Neifeld drew me away then and unexpectedly led me into a cobbler’s shop. The cobbler’s bench stood empty, and the shop was permeated with the smell of leather. From the back room emerged a man with a little brown beard and deep-set eyes. He had a proud bearing and replied to Neifeld’s greeting like an equal.

“Do you have any work at the moment?” Neifeld asked him.

“No, thank God,” the man answered with a smile.

Five children—three girls and two boys, roughly between the ages of three and ten—came over and stood around him. To an astonishing degree they looked like the man who stood there in the midst of them, the largest tree in the orchard.

“These children are all I’ve got to show for my work,” the shoemaker said, holding out his work-worn hands, with their stained fingers and black nails. “May they be preserved from the evil eye.”

“And what’s new in the art department, Reb Shmuel?”

“I can’t complain, thank God,” he replied, holding his noble head still higher.

He glanced at the silent Neifeld and without a word turned around and went into the back room. We followed him, I with curiosity greatly stirred. He dusted off several neatly stacked paintings, and the dim room lit up with misty sunrises and red-blue sunsets, curving streets and old brick facades, painted the colors that are only to be seen on very old houses in Europe—subdued yellows, watery pinks, and a gray that is the color of cobweb—houses that look to have been buried and dug up again many times. The quiet colors always seem darker just before it is going to rain.

He unrolled other pictures for us, painted on poor paper, of Jews with faces like old bricks. I had the impression of looking at some film documenting a bygone past. Where had I seen all this before? Had I really seen it? Yes and no. All the houses and all the people looked familiar, but they were not the houses I had been walking among and seeing with my ordinary eyes—they were the people and houses I had long ago looked at with the eyes of childhood. These were the same muddy walls seen in the waking sleep of a child who could hear songs even in the alleys perpetually damp and smelling of urine, only God knows for how many generations before.

The cobbler had seen and painted all this, but he had not lost the wonder of childhood vision. My mind began to run off into reflections on art and childhood, on the value of preserving one’s childhood vision as long as possible, and on art as the essence of the living present—anchored in memory, to be sure, a realistic art, clear and obvious but permeated by the melancholy longing for an eternally youthful past. It is this longing which can make of reality a miracle. Happy the man who sees reality as sad, not as a boring sadness, but as a childish sadness; it is the child who knows this optimistic sadness, capable for all its terror of death of moving forward proudly into the years of life ahead.

That was what Reb Shmuel’s paintings were saying to me. He himself now told us how he had become something like the second wonder of Kazimierz. The Polish newspapers had written dozens of articles about him, Shmuel the cobbler, painter of the ghetto. People had flocked to see the curiosity, judging him to be a very good artist for a cobbler, but buying very little from him. Mostly they left him their shoes to repair. On one occasion a Gentile became interested in him and supported him for a year, but God called the Gentile to Himself, and now his only hope was Palestine. There, he thought, a Jewish artist would not be abandoned, and might even be raised up from the mire and exalted.

The cobbler went back into the shop with us. He put on his apron, sat down on his bench, and began to drive nails into a sole. He did this with the air of someone trying to show us how low an artist can fall.

“God, may His name be blessed, will help me,” he said with a sigh. “Isn’t that so, Yankel?” he asked one of his children.

This one seemed to be the oldest, about ten. He closed his eyes and, sighing like an old man, spoke: “We have a God in heaven.” The sigh and the words had all the virtuosity of a child prodigy playing a Stradivarius.

“That’s what I say, too,” the cobbler said approvingly. “This is my eldest, may he live and prosper. I trust in the Lord.”

He put a few nails between his lips and kept them there for a while. Then, taking them out one by one, he drove each of them into the sole with two neat taps of the hammer.

“I must confess that I am a pious Jew,” he said. He pondered a while and then went on: “I shall also confess that I am pious out of fear. Not out of fear of the Lord but—I hope what I say is not sinful—but out of fear that I may cease being an artist. I feel that piety and art are one and the same thing. Were I to lose my piety, I should lose my art. The fact that I wield a brush has a great deal to do with my piety. Had I been an unbeliever, I’d never have been anything but a cobbler. My ability to paint is nourished by my faith in a Creator of the World, in a Providence, in the fact that the world is not chaos and accident. If I ever thought that the world is not ruled by its Maker, I shouldn’t be able to paint, should I, Yankel?”

“My father is right,” the son said, with a virtuoso frown.

When we left the shop, Neifeld said that we had already seen a good deal of Kazimierz. “Whenever I feel I must come back to this interesting little town,” he went on, “I don’t know whether it is that I am longing to see the town itself again or the few people here who are themselves legendary, who have absorbed in themselves the great miracle. This grimy street, with its little shops and its few just men, embodies the longing for the top of the hill where the legend itself stands naked, as though shivering from the cold. I’ll try to say it differently: up there it is always Sabbath, while down here it is a perpetual Friday evening, and the dark holiness is always just about to fall across the shutters of the shops, the lighted windows, the eyes of frightened little boys. Here one is always waiting for the blessing of the candles, here it is always Sabbath eve. There are many who have spent their whole lives here without ever climbing the hill. Let me suggest a banal allegory: up there stand the ruins of the Realized Ideal, while down here a dark yearning wanders about. Up there is the completed five- or seven-year plan, while down here the people are still whispering the mysterious word, ‘Revolution.’

“Take the cobbler, Reb Shmuel,” Neifeld went on. Is he not the embodiment of his yearning for the heights? A cobbler, saddled with a wife, children, and a talent for painting—absurd contrasts. And he does his duty as only a Jew can. No Bohemianism makes him desert his family for his art. He cobbles and paints and trusts in the Lord, like the anonymous just men who bear the weekdays on their shoulders with all their cares, yet go on longing for a miracle to save the people of Israel.

“For what has really gone on here in Kazimierz? I think I can help you to understand. The Jew had his own poor world, and the Gentile led his own separate life. We always walked as far as the city gates, beyond which death lies—a great cemetery full of ancestors. In other words, walk no farther than the gates and turn right back, for you can see only too clearly what lies in store. The grave. But the people created a legend in defiance of the limitations of this life, according to which one of our own daughters gets together with one of the others, a king, no less. There is not so much as a mention of marriage. Did Esther, the Jewish girl, marry the king, or did he possess her without the sacred vows? No Jew will touch upon the moral aspect directly. It is enough that we Jews have created the sense of its being possible somehow to become related to them, to the others—yet not with some ordinary Pole merely, but with the king, who, needless to say, thereby becomes a lover of Jews. We have given up a daughter, sent her out into the world like an ambassador, and we ask no questions. Really pious Jews are not at all eager to look into these matters thoroughly. It is enough for them that here in the valley is to be found the legend of a Jewish girl and a Polish king.”

As Neifeld led me out of the main street, I noticed that our horse was still standing by the water pump. The driver, installed on an overturned barrel, was talking with a water carrier, who stood there with his pole and pails filled to the brim. The streets which led away from the planetary system of the pump had no trace of squalor, although they were narrow and wound their way downward. Yet no matter how low-lying the streets actually were, the hill above them seemed part of the valley. Its cheerful greenness flooded the area below it with patches of sun and shadow on the graceful little houses and the gardens where tables were set and gay couples sat eating.

“It’s very beautiful here,” I said to Neifeld—the simplest thing I could have said.

“I’m afraid to keep on talking like this, lest I bore you like a professional guide, but I must tell you that I have traveled abroad and seen many summer resorts much more beautiful than this, and mountains both taller and more striking looking, but—well, here we have a different kind of beauty.”

Dozens of young men and women were passing up and down in the middle of the street, talking loudly. Several girls were smoking cigarettes expertly, like men. All of them carried bundles, but they walked briskly, as if it were easier to walk when carrying something.

“These are our artist pilgrims,” said Neifeld. “They come from all over Poland. Every painter in Poland, no matter what remote corner he hails from, comes to Kazimierz in the summer. Kazimierz can be painted from a thousand spots.”

After walking a stretch we saw a young man in his twenties with a well-groomed beard, a beret, and fashionable broad trousers, standing at an easel in the middle of the street. He was just starting a landscape, having chosen a tree that looked old and had sparse leaves. Gigantic branches were twisted like the arms of an arthritic woman. Next to him sat two girls on folding chairs. They silently followed the painter’s every brushstroke, smoking and spitting.

We next came out on a broad open space, dazzling in the sunshine.

“With this view of Queen Vistula, our excursion into the lower town comes to an end,” said Neifeld. “Now we are ready to climb up the hill. But there is no need to hurry, you may rest a while. The Vistula this year has not behaved as it should. As you may know we just had the greatest flood in a hundred years; it was in all the newspapers. You can still see traces of it. The regular banks are invisible, because everything has been flooded. The downpours caused great damage. The Vistula carried away houses, cattle, and even some people. Look where trees are sticking out above the water—you might think the Vistula always looked like this, but a great deal of land is still flooded and won’t emerge again for several days. In the meantime it isn’t safe to get too close to the river.”

Near us a number of people sat warming themselves in the sun.

“If you look carefully,” Neifeld went on, “you’ll see the flooded benches. They stood on the river bank and were entirely covered, but now the river is beginning to recede.”