East of Time (2 page)

There were no flowers in our secular schoolyard, no greenery in its vicinity. Amid a forest of red chimneys, with their luscious curly grey wigs of smoke, in a rented chain of rooms on the third floor, under a lease of constant eviction, we feasted on magic gardens planted by devoted scribes in the singing pages of our Yiddish books.

My teachers, scholars in their own right, banned from universities for being Jewish, wore battered shoes and tattered shirts in our unheated rooms as they released Prometheus from his shackles, conquered the Sisyphean nightmare, then led us upon excursions to the heights of Kilimanjaro and the depths of the human soul.

Our unemployed fathers, whose days were too long and nights too short to bespeak and plan the glorious world to come, kept the school alive with their meagre earnings. Our down-to-earth mothers, serving hot barley soup for breakfast at break of dawn, hummed with all their heart Yitzhak Katzenelson's sunset songs:

My sun sinks into flames

On a dying beam;

Such is my hope,

My dream.

And my pale-faced companions with dark storytelling eyes readily confided, ‘In our house, bread never gets the chance to go stale.'

Bałuty, where we lived, was the poorest quarter in our city. In this world of meek rebellious shoeless cobblers, coatless tailors and coughing miners, we were taught that there is no God. But that one ought to live one's life as if there is.

 

 
My Father
 

I'm no psychologist, but I would dare to guess that the path leading to a simple man's mind and heart is a straight one. My father Gershon was no simple man, perhaps because there were too many struggles and disappointments in his formative years. These made him the hopeful doubter, the optimistic pessimist that he was.

At the age of fourteen he was forced to leave his parents' home, his yeshiva life, the shtetl of his birth, and he arrived unexpected in the big city of the waterless river, where his older brother Avraham had established a textile factory in his dining-room. Father quickly learnt the trade, and after one year was already earning a rouble a week — which was collected for him by his sister-in-law, for ‘safekeeping'.

The year 1905 was one of great proletarian ferment; strikes broke out, barricades were erected. The Russian masses had awoken, and Jewish workers, too, under the banner of the illegal Bund (of which my father was a leader), took to the streets with red flags, songs and placards demanding freedom, justice and better pay.

The ill-advised Tsar answered with bullets, and with persecution and pogroms against the Jews. My father was in the midst of it all. It was the spring of his life, he was young, a smallish but handsome man, with a song in his bones.

O brothers, we are united

Of life and death one band

Arm in arm dedicated

The red flag fast in our hand.

Should a bullet hit you, my true one

A bullet from our foe the hound

I'll carry you out from the fire

And heal with kisses your wound.

But if you fall in battle, my true one

And the light in your eyes is no more

I'll enfold you in our flag, the red one

And together we'll fight our war.

Two years later, in 1907, one evening just before dinner, there was a knock on the door of my father's unlit room. He opened it, and there they stood: two members of the notorious Ochrana, the Tsarist secret police. ‘Gershon,' they said, ‘you come with us.'

Gershon was sentenced to life in the freezing snows of Siberia. But the party hadn't forgotten him. Eighteen months later he escaped, having received false papers that entitled him to enter America. He got as far as Berlin, but here he began to doubt. If people like him started taking off, who would be left to make the revolution?

In 1913, Gershon married my beautiful hardworking mother, Masha. Were they suited? Were they happy? I don't know. Children, especially when their parents are long dead, like to think that everything in their mother and father's life together was smooth sailing. But Gershon was too restless a man to be fully satisfied with domestic bliss; he was still much involved in politics and the camaraderie of party life.

Yet when our world crumbled, when our springs arrived in a vortex of snow, and our summers walked about the earth in a mantle of dull dust, Gershon stood fast by his wife. Hand in hand he went with her, through the bleakest tunnel and to its very end, to the night that awaited them there.

 

 
My Mother
 

There was once a man of great piety, very few words, and many good deeds. His name was Aba and he fathered five daughters. One of them was my mother. Though she had a religious upbringing, she married a man who had totally abandoned all religious traditions. At first she still fostered some customs, such as candle-lighting, to which my father did not object; but since he was intellectually dominant, mother gradually fell under his spell. She joined his party, spoke his tongue, sang his songs, and began reading books, lots of books. Did this transformation bring happiness to her life? I don't know, it's hard to say — not because her son didn't often sense her resigned mood, her well-concealed melancholy, but because the phenomenon we call happiness is so difficult to define. In any case, all her qualities — including that of being physically stronger than father, and (because of her skill level) an earner he could never hope to be — made mother an equal partner in my parents' marriage.

I cannot remember my mother not singing, though again there was a sadness in her voice, a sadness that could transform even a simple folksong into a tender psalm:

Childhood, beautiful childhood years

In my memory forever you'll stay;

When I think of you my eyes fill with tears,

Oh, how quickly my childhood flew away.

These psalm-songs were my mother's cocoon, where she could hide, feel safe, and feel whole.

I knew that mother loved her husband deeply, but I doubt if her love was returned in the same measure. There was a disparity in my parents' life. Mother's world was her home; father's home was the world.

Mother was open with her children, especially with my sister Pola. One evening, when Pola was about twenty, mother said to her: ‘You were born at the outbreak of the Great War. When I had you I was quite alone. Father continued with all his activities as if still a bachelor — he often attended long party meetings and discussions, and on a Saturday or Sunday, after an all-day conference, he would go to the cinema with female comrades. I was hurt,' she confided, ‘though I knew he wasn't being unfaithful.'

‘
How
did you know, Mama?' asked my sister with tears in her eyes. ‘How did you know?'

‘Because when he came back, his lovemaking was always more intense than ever... Though even then,' mother added in a whisper, ‘he was selfish.'

‘Then why didn't you leave him?' her daughter cried.

‘Because I love him with every fibre of my being. Lovemaking, dear child, is not love. Love is much, much more. Much, much more,' she repeated.

As daylight began to wane, a serenity that almost glowed would settle on mother's face. Her moist brown eyes would glisten, and though she did not move her lips, I knew that everything in her was singing, singing its way back into her cocoon, where my mother's darkening horizon could succumb to the music of her inner light:

O little Sabbath candles,

Your flames an everlasting story;

My father's home,

My people's glory.

 

 
An Incident
 

One summer, mother and I went for a short vacation on a villager's farm, about ten kilometres from our city of the waterless river. On a sunny, still afternoon, mother, the most beautiful woman in the whole world (I was six at the time), wearing a pale-blue linen dress trimmed with gilded buttons, spread a chequered red woollen blanket on a lush patch of grass, sprinkled with wildflowers, not far from the farm. As we were about to sit down, a pleasant-looking man — one Mr Wolf, a friend from mother's younger years who happened to know that we had arrived — came over to say hello.