A Day of Small Beginnings (9 page)

“What choice is there? We’re different from other people.”

“No we’re not, Itzik. If we become kindred to our fellow Poles, stop calling ourselves the chosen people, and insulting them
with our kosher eating, they’ll stop hating us for being different. We’ll be able to live like men in this country. That’s
how Piotr and I are brothers.”

Itzik nodded slowly. Then he began to smile. The color returned a little to his cheeks. “If socialism will get rid of the
thieving rabbis, then I’m for it.”

“Well,” said Hillel, giving Itzik a playful tap on the head, “then you’d better learn how to drink!”

Thwap!
I broke one of the strings on Hillel’s guitar and kept him turning around in confusion, looking for the cause. What was he
teaching my Itzik?
To be kindred to our fellow Poles?
Was he stupid or just willfully blind? When the Poles let us own land and live where and how we want, maybe we’ll be kindred
as two dignified peoples can be. Blame the rabbis and our traditions for the rules the Poles made for us? What kind of crazy
thinking was this? The best thing a Jew can aspire to, after five thousand years of survival, is to learn to drink like a
Pole? For shame!

A fog had rolled in, carrying with it the smell of horse manure and sewage, tar and smoke. I hovered over Hillel and Itzik
as the two made their way to Bonipart Street through a maze of tiny workshops that gave off their own smells of leather, yeast,
sour cabbage, and decayed herring.

We arrived at Pesha Goldman’s damp basement apartment.
“Sholem-aleichem,”
Pesha’s wife, Devora, welcomed us.
“Aleichem-sholem,”
Hillel answered. She put her hand on Itzik’s shoulder and ushered my exhausted boy in, even though Hillel had barely explained
his presence. “You look very tired,” Devora said to Itzik. “Lie down on that pallet. I’ll bring you a cup of tea.” Her hair
was not covered by a marriage cap, as would have been proper. But even so, I liked her and the care she took to make Itzik,
a stranger, comfortable.

Itzik mumbled his thanks and went immediately to the place Devora had indicated for him to lie down. He pulled out the red
ribbon his sister Hindeleh had given him and began to play with it, comforting himself by wrapping and rewrapping it first
around his fingers, then his wrists and forearms.

Almighty God,
I called out.
I think maybe You should take a look at what Itzik the Socialist, the one all of Zokof used to call Itzik the Faithless One,
has done with his little sister Hindeleh’s ribbon. You see? He can’t let go of You. Look how he wraps it, around his hand
like a pious Jew laying tefillin.

The door opened, and Pesha came in, stout but sturdy, squinting slightly through his glasses. “Ah, Hillel. Are Schimmel and
Gordon with you?” he asked, removing his coat and galoshes.

“No,” his wife answered. “They went to the printer for the leaflets.”

“Well, good. Good. They’ll be ready for distribution tomorrow then.” Pesha rubbed his hands together and nodded agreeably
at his wife. Then, noticing Itzik on the floor, he said, “A new student?”

Hillel smiled. “Yes, he’s just got off the train from Radom this afternoon, and he’s already become a socialist.”

Itzik sat up.

“Very impressive,” Pesha said warmly. Then, studying Itzik more closely, he said to him, “You have a good face. I wonder if
you’d mind posing for me tomorrow.”

Itzik stared up at Pesha, so drunk with fatigue he could not speak. Who could blame him, poor soul? In one day, he’d been
accused of killing a man, been forced to leave his home and family in terror, and traveled to a strange city, where he’d been
tossed from here to there like a dust rag.

Pesha nodded understandingly. “We can talk about this tomorrow. Rest, child.”

That night, long after Itzik had fallen into his deep sleep and Pesha’s students had reassembled under their teacher’s roof,
I listened as they ate pumpkin seeds from a paper bag and recounted stories of Jews whose beards had been ripped out from
the skin, of women raped and babies skewered on bayonets. What bothered me most was my certainty that they did not share these
stories with their Polish “brothers.”

I watched over Itzik, so small for his age, so alone. I wondered, could it be that our feeling for faith comes more from loyalty
to those who make us feel we belong than from an idea about, or even a need for, God? I knew what my beloved father would
say. He would point to Itzik’s bound forearm, crisscrossed with Hindeleh’s ribbon, ready for prayer.

8

A
FEW DAYS AFTER HE’D SETTLED IN AT
P
ESHA
G
OLDMAN’S
, Itzik went back to Plac Grzybowski to find work. Hillel went too. They were listening to a half smiling organ grinder when
all of a sudden Mendel the Blacksmith lunged out of nowhere, grabbed Itzik by the scruff of the neck, and dragged him, with
Hillel at his heels, into the darkness of a courtyard entryway.

“What are you crazy, walking around here in broad daylight?” Mendel said, pushing Itzik against the wall. “You want we should
all be arrested?”

Itzik, his breath knocked out of him, turned the color of paste. “What’s the matter?” he whispered.

“What’s the matter?
Gottenu!
You killed a man! The word is everywhere. You think you can just
disappear
in Warsaw?” His eyes narrowed. “Killed a man, you hear me? And not just any
farchadat
peasant, no. You had to pick one whose father saw the Virgin Mary over the Tatra Mountains. Now they got a bishop after you.”
He cuffed Itzik’s left ear with one hand and grabbed him at the chest with the other. But it was fear, not anger, I saw in
his eyes.

“You came to my house and let me think you were just another runaway kid I should return to his father. Made such a
tumult,
the whole building was talking about you and your friend there. If it gets out you’re the one they’re looking for, they’ll
come and take me in for questioning. And when they find
you,
they’re gonna hang you from the nearest tree, believe me.”

He shook a jagged finger in Itzik’s face, but to me it looked like the hand of the Almighty Himself, scolding me for being
so careless with Itzik’s safety. What was I thinking, letting him parade around in the open, maybe attracting dangerous attention?
I was making speeches to God against the socialists, but they were the only ones protecting him. Them and this louse Mendel.

May you live to be a hundred twenty—without teeth,
I cursed myself. Ten thousand times I must have said this in my life, but now that I was without a body to call my own, the
effect wasn’t so satisfying.
Ach!
Say it plain, you foolish old
yideneh.
If you didn’t have children, it’s because God knew better than to give them to you. You didn’t protect this precious boy,
not even from Mendel’s hand. You’ve broken your promise to his mother that you
would
protect him.

Itzik’s head hung to one side. He rubbed his bruised ear. “It was an accident with the peasant, Mendel. I swear on my mother’s
name!”

I felt a blow from inside, and then my sight was gone. I don’t know for how long I was like this, but after some time, the
pain disappeared and my sight returned, such as it was. Only, I couldn’t tell if what I saw was real. I saw Sarah, Itzik’s
mother, wearing all her clothes on top of each other, carrying her red-haired little girl, Hindeleh, down an empty road, who
knows where. I called to her,
I won’t leave him!
She didn’t hear. God forgive me, but I was grateful when she went away and I didn’t have to look at the pity of it. This
much I knew: Sarah and her other children were outside my power to save, and they were gone from Zokof. But I promised Sarah
again—what I could do for Itzik, I would.

Warsaw returned to my sight, and I humbled myself in gratitude to the Compassionate One.

“An accident? You killed a man!” Mendel scoffed at Itzik. “
Ptuh!
You think you got a city of refuge here? The
goyim
don’t care if you did it or if one of theirs did. Don’t you know yet they make it all up anyway?
Schlemiel!
” He smacked Itzik on the side of his head. “They make
us
up!”

I slammed a door inside the courtyard to get Mendel to his point.

He checked the courtyard then grabbed the outer door handle, ready to escape if he had to. “There are reports about a pogrom
in Zokof. It’s all over the Jewish press. Everyone’s talking, so now the authorities have to make a show of an investigation.
One thing’s for sure, you’re not going back to Zokof. Understand?”

Itzik’s eyes snapped open. “What happened to my family?”

“Do I know? The story is the Russian magistrate over there wouldn’t send a detachment of soldiers to stop it. Wouldn’t take
a bribe. Probably wasn’t big enough. Now some landowner named Milaszewski is saying his peasants had to defend themselves
from the Jewish devils who started up with them. People are dead, you little shit! All because you had to start up with the
only famous peasant in town. What a business!” Mendel waved his free hand above his head.

“Why wouldn’t the Russian magistrate send the detachment?” Itzik said helplessly. “Avrum Kollek said they’d come. He had enough
for a bribe.”

Hillel had been leaning against the wall, graceful but on guard. “It’s like I’ve been telling you, Itzik,” he said, pouncing
on the chance to make a socialist’s point. “The landowners and the Russians don’t mind letting things get stirred up now and
then. It gives the peasants a little distraction, so they don’t get ideas. A few Jews get hurt, maybe even killed, so what?
The country’s full of them. It keeps the bigger peace.” He smiled ironically, for Mendel’s benefit, I thought.

Mendel’s blackened hands fell to his sides. Encouraged, Hillel went on. “And if things get out of hand, they can always count
on the Church, the great Opiate of the People, to call us Christ killers from the pulpits and justify the bloodletting that
way. You understand now, Itzik?”

I looked into Itzik’s bewildered eyes, so like his mother’s. The story was as old as Moses. Every Pesach we tell the tale
of our redemption from bondage in Egypt. But if we were still being used for other people’s purposes, we were still slaves.
Still slaves.

“What should I do?” Itzik whispered.

Hillel sighed, the oratory suddenly gone out of him. “You have to leave the country, Itzik.”

No!
I cried.
Blessed God, please don’t make us leave Poland! He needs Polish soil to grow. I need it.

But Mendel agreed with Hillel. “Leave the country and things will die down. What else can they do? Kill more Jews?”

Itzik shrank to the stone floor in the shadows of the entryway, scared as a cornered mouse. “Things didn’t die down when they
found out I left Zokof. They made a pogrom,” he said, chin on his knee.

“They can’t make a pogrom against all the Jews in Poland,” Hillel argued. “Itzik, I have friends. I’ll book you passage to
America.”

“Just get him out of here fast,” Mendel said. “And when you get to America, you’d be smart to change your name, like my worthless
son Shima the
Gonif
—the Thief. Then no one will ever find you.” He sneered. “That’s what America’s for, a place to send our
dreck.
”

If he changes his name, not even
he
will find himself, Mendel!
I said. But of course, he didn’t hear me. No one heard me. The Golden Land, they call America. What could such a name mean
but that gold is all they value there? God help us, Itzik and I were going to a fool’s paradise. Then I cursed myself for
dreading it, for resisting God’s will. If that was the place where Itzik would be safe, that was where I should gladly go.

“
Zie gezunt
—good health,” Mendel said, and walked out the entry door, finished with Itzik forever.
Ach!
A pox on him.

An awkward moment passed before Hillel took Itzik by the arm and led him back into the crowded street to Pesha Goldman’s empty
apartment. He pointed to a chair by the kitchen table. “Sit down. I’ll pour you a cup of hot water,” he said.