Trusting Calvin (2 page)

Two

The summer of his sixteenth year, the steamy final weeks before events would change everything, Moshe Edelman was unsettled. Life, he knew, would soon propel him toward the responsibilities of adulthood, as life always did in small-town Poland in the 1930s. And it was impossible to know just how all of that would unfold.

He was itching for some clarity.

Uncommonly handsome, with dark curly hair, fine features, and a slight build, he had just begun to feel the insistent stirrings of approaching manhood, and this, he thought, might lead to something as yet unfathomable. Equally tantalizing was the notion that sometime soon, arrangements might finally be formalized that would land him thousands of miles away, on another continent, to begin studying for a career.

“This path of mine, whatever it is, I want it to reveal itself soon,” Moshe declared abruptly, shattering the heavy silence of the afternoon. He and his best friend, David, had made their way to the bank of the Struzka, hoping to catch a breeze, and were idly studying the current as if the answer to some universal riddle was being carried along. “A man should not just drift.”

David snickered. Moshe's impatience in all matters was well known. He was always one foot or sentence in front of everyone else, and they all knew, all of his friends, that time-wasting and ambiguity annoyed him.

“You'll have to be like the rest of us this time,” David said, goading him a little, as best friends can, “and wait for what comes your way.”

Having finished his schooling at age fourteen, as was typical of those of his station, Moshe was apprenticing as a salesman in his brother-in-law's clothing shop, work he found tedious, mind-numbing. He fully understood, as his parents had taught, that the worth of work had nothing to do with the pleasure it might bring but rather with the honor that comes from doing something well and making a living. But this fetching of fabrics and adjusting of shoulder seams didn't suit his constitution.

Serious-minded and exceptionally bright, even as a young child, Moshe was, his mother, Sarah, believed, destined for something of significance. She had been pressing on his behalf for months, writing letters, tucking away cash, exploring every possible means to get this son, her youngest, across borders and seas to her sister in Colombia, where eventually he could enter medical school.

“Always I hope, every day, that the mail will bring the documents,” she said, as Moshe entered the family home that August evening, having found neither breezes nor answers at the river. “But again today, Moshe, they did not arrive.”

Sarah was seated, as she often was this time of day, at her little black sewing machine positioned near the window to catch the last of the waning light, her right hand working the silver wheel that caused the needle to stab into fabric, her left aiming the torn shirt beneath it, sure and true.

Moshe had caught a small twist of worry in her words, and he moved close to turn the wheel for her, the two of them doing the work together, well-practiced, content in their closeness. Theirs was not a family given to physical or verbal expressions of affection, but the love was deep and never doubted.

“I am praying to God every day to get you out of here,” she said.

The threat of war roiling over Europe—maybe only eighteen to twenty-four months away, most thought—made exiting Poland complicated, but Sarah clung to the hope that Colombian officials would grant the visa, that Moshe could leave before his eighteenth birthday, at which point he would be forced into mandatory military service.

“Well. There is enough to be done each day without thinking about things we cannot control,” Sarah said suddenly, pushing herself up from the chair. “The papers will come in their own good time.”

Again, the worry in her voice,
Moshe thought. It was there so often these days.

The vague underpinning of tension that had been part of his parents' being for as long as he could remember had been escalating, and he knew it wasn't just because of the distant war and his eighteenth birthday. Many of the elders in town, in fact, seemed preoccupied, often engaging in hushed, worried conversations, the content indecipherable but the tenor so intense he could almost smell the stench of fear that rose from the words like smoke from a wood fire.

But each morning, Moshe's parents arose before dawn, as always, fixed their faces into neutral expressions, left the small house on their well-kept cobblestone street, and walked the hard-packed path to their milling business a few yards away. There they spent the next ten or twelve hours grinding flour and the buckwheat cereal called
kasha.

It was important work. And the Edelmans were relied upon. Almost as much as they were reviled.

Jews in Krasnik, the Edelmans among them, had initiated and now conducted much of the town's commerce: the dry goods store, tailor shop, bakery, and pharmacy. But whatever small courtesies the townsfolk extended to Jewish merchants during the direct exchange of money for products were fleeting. At all other times, the Jews of Krasnik, all four thousand of them, were treated not so very differently from the vermin that arrived in waves from the nearby fields every autumn. Even from childhood, Jews and gentiles alike understood that.

Jewish boys learned while still in short pants to walk fast and purposefully through town after school to avoid being jumped and beaten. Jewish girls skirted doorways to avoid the young bullies who knotted menacingly to yank up their dresses, a practice intended to humiliate them in the rawest way an eight-year-old can contrive.

Even adult Jews walked with caution through the streets, though their precautions didn't always accomplish much. They were often spat upon, slapped, or beaten.

“I despise this place,” Moshe said to his two-years-older brother, Yankel, that summer after a venomous outburst from a Catholic neighbor. “They will never change, these people. We must leave this behind somehow.”

There was rarely more discussion than that, among the Edelmans or any of the Krasnik Jews, about the difficulties of their existence. Anti-Semitism had flourished in the town for every one of the fourteen generations reared there since Jews had received the official right to settle in that part of Poland in 1584. Discussing a truth as old and as tenacious as this accomplished nothing.

And the fact is, the Edelman family—father Abraham, a smallish man with chestnut hair, gray eyes, and the long, full beard of Orthodox Jews; Sarah, slim and dark-haired, ten years younger, an arranged-marriage bride; and the five children born to them from 1907 to 1922, when the last, Moshe, arrived—lived a somewhat better life than many Jews. They had their own home, inherited from Sarah's mother, and their mill, which provided a steady if modest income.

Life in Krasnik, situated in rural eastern Poland and surrounded by flatlands planted with rye, barley, and oats, moved more slowly than it did in some other towns. By the 1930s, however, the population had grown to 18,000 people, and most of what a person or a family required was available there. There were several brick municipal buildings, a hotel, clothing shops, cabinetmakers, a butcher, bakers, a synagogue, a Catholic church, an elementary school, and a Catholic high school.

Three townspeople owned cars—an army major, a doctor, and a Jewish entrepreneur who used it as a taxi to ferry people to outlying areas or to the train station. Once in a while an airplane flew overhead, a rare-enough event that nearly everyone dashed outside at the sound to look up and follow its progress across the sky.

Tuesday was market day in Krasnik, the day that farmers from miles around loaded their grain, chickens, cheese, and eggs into wagons and made the trip to town in the gray light of dawn. An especially busy day at the Edelman mill, it was the one afternoon that the Edelman children could escape their tightly regimented schedule of school, study, and religious instruction in order to help out.

Life was hard, and work was constant—not just at the mill, but at home. Water still had to be carried from a source quite distant from the house, and wood was cut at the end of every summer and stacked in the woodshed for the wood-burning stove, the only heat source during the brutal winters that inevitably shouldered autumn aside long before anyone was ready and then lingered stubbornly. The family spent long autumn evenings slicing apples from their orchard to dry in the oven and chopping cabbage to fill a fifty-gallon barrel with sauerkraut. Sarah put up huge stores of peas and beans that she raised in her garden and bought a six-month supply of potatoes and cabbage in September to cram into the stone cellar under the woodshed for the frigid months.

They lived a frugal existence, but whatever the sacrifices required, Abraham and Sarah arranged for each of their children to receive at least a basic education. Until 1925, public education wasn't compulsory in Poland, and was, therefore, all but inaccessible in remote areas. Illiteracy proliferated. The eldest two of the five children, Frieda and Zalmen, were into their teens before the mandatory-education law passed, so Abraham and Sarah engaged a private tutor for them and enrolled Zalmen in
chader
(religious school). Daughter Hennia, along with Yankel and Moshe, attended public school every day, and the two boys headed off to
chader
late every afternoon, removing the square, navy-blue hat with a Polish eagle emblem required at school and replacing it with the round, black yarmulke.

Sarah kept a kosher home, and their children accepted that they would devote many hours each week to abiding by and celebrating the ancient traditions. Shortcuts were never permitted in Abraham's home.

On Friday evenings when they returned from temple, the Sabbath dinner of gefilte fish, soup, potatoes, vegetables, and honeyed carrots lasted well over an hour, with much praying and singing. Every Sabbath day, from ten until noon, the family attended prayers at Krasnik's main synagogue, an impressive old building, lovingly tended. After service, Abraham, stern and exacting, quizzed the Edelman sons about the Torah and the Talmud.

The family approached the high holy days with great solemnity and uncompromising adherence to tradition. Before Passover, every drawer, cupboard, chair, and table in their five-room house was scrubbed, every corner behind each piece of furniture cleaned. All the everyday dishes were washed, packed, and taken to the attic, replaced with the Passover dishes. Each family member had a beautifully crafted seder wineglass, and the seder supper lasted at least four hours, as the family sang Passover songs and recited the Haggadah, the story of Passover, from cover to cover.

Moshe followed the religious traditions as expected, but by the time he had reached his early teens he had come to realize that the praying and singing didn't ignite in him the deep feeling that it did in many others. He was Jewish by heritage, and that was important to him, even if he wasn't as devout as some. And he was interested in having a safe way to spend time with others who shared his heritage, so he joined the Zionist Youth Organization when he turned fourteen, as his brothers before him had. Every Friday evening, he and his friends listened to lectures about Palestine and danced the hora under the watchful gaze of the portrait of Theodor Herzl, founder of political Zionism.

It was among these people that Moshe learned some of the details of the increasingly disturbing developments across Europe and across the oceans that had been stirring such anxiety in his parents and the rest of Krasnik's Jews.

Since the ascension in neighboring Germany of Adolf Hitler—as chancellor in 1933, and as head of state
(Führer)
the next year—the situation there had grown ever more alarming. Jewish property was confiscated, Jewish government workers were being dismissed in massive numbers, government decrees were pressing Jews further into the margins, and Jewish religious artifacts were being burned in public celebrations. Reports circulated that the Nazi rules-enforcers—the
Sturmabteilung
(SA) storm troopers, the smaller elite
Schutzstaffel
(SS), and the greatly feared Gestapo—were beating, imprisoning, or killing Jews. More than fifty thousand Jews had fled Germany as soon as Hitler came to power, understanding earlier than most that the man's anti-Semitic rantings were more than rhetoric. Among German Jews who remained, suicide was increasingly regarded as the only option.

Jews across Europe and across the globe were monitoring these reports with alarm, even as much of the rest of the non-Jewish world was ignoring them. There was a strong belief among most countries that interference in another nation's internal affairs was unacceptable. Just as important, a notion prevailed that Jews themselves had contributed much to the contempt and ill feeling leveled against them. They held entirely too many important positions in government, commerce, and other professions—not just in Germany but in other countries—than they should have, given their numbers and their abilities, it was said. They were clannish and had odd customs. Whatever recalibrating was going on in Germany was no doubt for the good, it was believed.

As the 1930s advanced, more and more Jews frantically angled to leave Germany and the countries sure to be overrun when Hitler triggered the war that everyone knew was coming. But the borders were blocked to Jews. No one wanted them. Immigration rules even in America and Canada became ever more strict.

Even before the Nazis came into power, all of the Edelman children and most of their friends had hoped to leave Poland someday, believing, as they had heard, that in some places Jews received better treatment. Many dreamed of reaching Palestine and helping to create the land of tolerance and promise spoken about by the Zionists. Establishing life there would require the backbreaking work of draining mosquito-infested swamps, clearing rocks from hillsides, and constructing something from nothing. Moshe had few of the necessary skills, but he often imagined himself arriving there, creating a life, and arranging for others in his family to join him.