The Warsaw Anagrams (39 page)
Read The Warsaw Anagrams Online
Authors: Richard Zimler
My most recent find is Jaśmin Makinska. Only three months ago, I learned that she was living in England, where she had emigrated shortly after the war. To my great joy, I received a reply to my letter to her about a month ago. She told me that she was living near Weymouth, in a
two-room
cottage by the sea.
Jaśmin confirmed that she drove Erik and Izzy to Liza’s farm in March 1941, and that her sister was murdered by the SS when Erik was captured on 7 July.
Izzy fled on foot late that same afternoon, she told me. He managed to telephone her from a nearby town and give her the terrible news about Liza.
Jaśmin received one letter from Izzy, mailed three months later from Istanbul. He had made it there by freighter from Odessa, just as he and Erik had planned, and he would soon be on his way to Marseille. He was in excellent spirits and had already received a friendly letter from his old friend Louis, though he was full of remorse over Liza’s death and without much hope for Erik.
‘Izzy told me that he would write again when he was settled in the south of France, but I never received another word from him. The war had spread by then, and I suspect that his letters simply never made it to Warsaw.
After I moved to England, he had no way of finding me – and there was no way I could locate him either.’
I expect that Izzy, his sons and Louis may be living in or around Marseille. I shall do my best to find them.
Jaśmin promises not to give up searching for him, as well, though she also says that she’ll never set foot in Continental Europe again.
*
On the way home from Izmir, I stopped in Lublin and said a kaddish for Erik outside the Lipowa Street camp. And for all the other heroic friends of ours who were long gone, especially Johann, who had given up his life for me.
Seeing the muddy clearing where Erik had been hanged and hearing my trembling voice undid me, however. I felt as if I were pulling my existence out of an emptiness so great that everything I saw and felt was only an illusion.
I stayed just long enough to intone an
‘El Male Rachamim’
for Erik’s soul and then fled, though turning away from where he’d been murdered made me feel as though I was leaving behind the best part of myself.
I think of Erik every day of my life. I try to remember the dead in all their uniqueness, as he would have wanted.
The autobiography of the Jews is still being written. That is our victory. And I believe now that Erik’s deepest hope was for
The Warsaw Anagrams
to serve as his contribution to it. I am convinced, in fact, that that was why he returned as an
ibbur.
Heniek Corben
Warsaw, 3 Kislev, 5715 (28 November 1954)
(all words are in Yiddish except where otherwise indicated)
Alter kacker
– Literally, ‘old shitter’, but with the meaning of ‘old fart’.
Brenen zol er!
– ‘May he burn in hell’; a common curse.
Challah
– A yeast-leavened egg bread, usually braided, traditionally eaten on the Sabbath.
Der shoyte ben pikholtz
– ‘The idiot son of a woodpecker’; a traditional epithet.
Dreidl
– a four-sided top inscribed with the Hebrew letters 
and, 
which together form the acronym for
(a great miracle happened there).
Ech
– A groan or exclamation of displeasure or disparagement.
‘El Male Rachamim’
– Hebrew prayer for the repose of the soul of the departed.
Festina lente
– Latin for ‘hurry slowly’.
Flor
– German word for the gauze or crepe used in women’s clothing and in veils.
Gehenna
– Hebrew word for hell, used commonly in Jewish folktales and kabbalistic literature.
– Polish for stuffed cabbage leaves; part of the country’s traditional cuisine.
Golem
– Hebrew:
In Jewish folklore and mystical traditions, a golem is an animated being created entirely from inanimate matter. The most famous story of such a creature involves Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, who was said to have created a golem to defend the Jewish ghetto from anti-Semitic attacks.
Gottenyu
– My God!
Goy
– Non-Jewish person, gentile.
Goyim
– The plural of Goy.
Hak mir nisht ken tshaynik!
– Literally, ‘Don’t knock me a teakettle,’ but with the meaning, ‘Stop rattling on and on with that endless chatter!’
Hänschen klein
– Little Hans in German.
Hatikvah
– An anthem written by Naphtali Herz Imber, a Galician Jew, who moved to Palestine in the 1880s. The Hebrew title means ‘The Hope’.
Hilfe
– ‘Help’ in German.
Ibbur
– Hebrew word for ghost, spirit or spectre.
Kaddish
– The Jewish prayer of mourning.
Katshkele
– Little duck.
Levone
– Moon.
Linka
– ‘String’ in Polish.
Macher
– Important person or big shot.
Mazel tov
– Of Hebrew origin, an expression that means ‘I’m thrilled for your good fortune’, ‘Good for you’ or simply ‘Congratulations!’
Meshugene
– Crazy.
Meiskeit
– Very ugly person, sometimes used with affection, as when applied to a child so ugly only its mother could love it.
Mitzvah
– Hebrew word for commandment. It generally refers any one to the 613 duties of each and every Jew, as enumerated in the Torah. By extension, any good deed.
Noc
– ‘Night’ in Polish.
Noc die Zweite
– Night the Second (as the name of a dog in the text).
Payot
– The sidelocks of hair (often ringlets by the temple) worn by Hasidic Jews and others.
Petzl
– pee-pee, as in a young boy’s penis. From
putz
, a vulgar term for penis.
Piskorz
– ‘Small fish’ or ‘minnow’ in Polish.
Reb Yid
– A traditional and polite form of address.
Schmaltz
– Chicken fat used in cooking.
Schul
– School and, by extension, synagogue services.
Sheygets
– An elongated pastry stuffed with poppy seeds and glazed with honey. From its resemblance to the uncircumcised member of a
sheygets
– a gentile boy.
Sheyn Vi Di Levone
– ‘Beautiful is the Moon’ (the name of a Yiddish lullaby).
Shiva
– The week of mourning for the dead prescribed by Jewish law.
Shmekele
– Little penis.
Shtetl
– A small Jewish town or village.
Sitra Ahra
– The Other Side (from the Aramaic term used in kabbalistic literature to designate the demonic sphere or domain of evil).
Tsibele
– Onion.
Tzitzit
– Hebrew word for the tassels or fringes at the corners of a prayer shawl. They are to remind us of the commandments of Deuteronomy 22:12 and Numbers 15:37–41.
Ver mir di kapore
– Literally, ‘become my sacrificial hen’ and by extension, ‘drop dead!’ An expression taken from the religious practice in which a sacrificial chicken (
kapore-hun
) is waved around the head of a Jew on the eve of
Yom Kippur
(the Day of Atonement) and then slaughtered as a ‘scapegoat’ for the sins of the chicken’s owner.
Źydóweczka
– Little Jew-girl in Polish.
Richard Zimler
was born in New York. After gaining degrees from Duke University and Stanford University, he worked as a journalist in San Francisco for nearly a decade. He is the author of seven other novels, including
The Search for Sana, The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon
and
The Seventh Gate
. He has won many prizes for his writing and has lectured on Sephardic Jewish culture all over the world. He lives in Porto, Portugal.
The Seventh Gate
The Search for Sana
Guardian of the Dawn
Hunting Midnight
The Angelic Darkness
The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon
Unholy Ghosts
Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.comFirst published in the UK by Corsair, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2011
Copyright © Richard Zimler 2009
The right of Richard Zimler to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978–1–84901–854–8