East of Time (36 page)

Before long the Adversary presented himself in heaven. ‘Well, what do you say now?' remarked the Almighty with some satisfaction. ‘Have you noticed my people's fidelity, their resolute integrity in the face of suffering and hardship?'

The Adversary was quick to respond. ‘Sir, let me probe them deeper,' he urged, ‘and You'll soon get a taste of their wicked, blasphemous nature.'

‘They are in your hands,' said God with a confident smile.

So the Adversary incited his humourless offsider to herd God's chosen into ghettos, and he appointed cruel taskmasters
who tortured the people and worked them to death. Yet still the members of the condemned community stood fast. ‘Should we accept only good from God,' they cried in unison, ‘and reject all pain, misfortune and evil?'

Suspecting at last that he could not make these stiffnecked Jews turn against their Almighty after all, the Adversary angrily summoned his unhappy henchman once more. ‘Make soap of them,' he commanded, ‘and let them vanish into thin air like bubbles on a windy day.'

When the people learnt of their impending fate, they gathered in what was left of their little houses, rent their clothes, and with ash on their heads chanted:

Perish the day when we were chosen,

and the night it was announced

that a holy nation had been conceived!

...And God, on hearing such terrible words (our reader concluded), will
break down
, and will utter a heart-wrenching
lament
, and will be ready to
resign
from His heavenly seat. But to His great amazement, the remnant of this wretched, illtreated people can not,
will
not, accept His resignation. Falling on their faces, they will implore him: ‘O Lord, master of the universe, do not abandon us. Don't leave us completely alone in a world gone mad.'

 

 
Yiddish Lullaby
 

What a marvellous mother she was. Even those who despised her had to admit it. And if one had the privilege of looking into her large dark eyes, one was reminded of God's light. I last saw her sitting on the shore of a silent lake, enveloped in
sunset while it was still day. She sat beneath a willow tree, humming ‘Raisins and Almonds', dreaming her bygone bliss and then, with trembling lips, the song of her life — which I understood so well because it was also mine:

By the lake stands a tree

The tree of a thousand sighs;

On the tree sits a bird

With sad, storytelling eyes.

Suddenly we heard footsteps, a phantom braving the dark. His voice, like bowstrokes on a violin, resounded in the dusk. ‘How close to my heart is your song,' he cried. ‘How close, wise minstrel. When you sing I hear the breeze rustle the desert sands, the song of Miriam, the steps of our forefathers walking into eternity, the murmur of the letters, the whisper of time itself.'

She turned towards the voice. ‘Then come to me, prince of the golden verse. I am tired, and my lids are like lead. Come, tuck your mother in, for old times' sake, and cradle her to sleep with your half-forgotten lullaby.'

And so he did. ‘There was once a king,' he began. ‘His queen had a garden, and the garden a tree, and the tree a nest, and the nest a little bird I loved.
Aili lili-lu, aili lili-lu.
Then came the wind and destroyed the nest and broke the little bird's wings. I have no home in the east, no home in the west.
Aili lili-lu, aili lili-lu.'

As she closed here eyes I heard her say: ‘And I have no more fears but one. A time is coming when a famine will descend upon the land. Not hunger for bread, not thirst for water, but hunger and thirst for the hearing of a Yiddish word. And men shall wander from sea to sea, to seek the word, but they shall not find it...'

 

 
Ghetto Poets
 

We were six young men and one young woman. She and I would cuddle and kiss and caress, but we never actually ‘did it'. A tiny girl with dark squinting eyes, she had a seductive smile and thin, gentle, beckoning hands. For a whole year we met in her home, a small room where she lived with her sister, who had an infant girl born out of wedlock. My sweetheart would describe how, night by night, her sister and her lover would tear at each other's flesh. ‘I wish
we
could go all the way,' she said, ‘instead of just fondling each other.'

‘Have you thought of what might happen if we did?' I reminded her.

‘I don't care. We're just outsiders looking in. Why
shouldn't
we live for today?'

I felt she was right yet I couldn't bring myself to go along. Apart from anything else, I was inhibited by the presence of the child, who was looked after by my girlfriend during the daytime when her sister was working. Eventually, after a silly but rowdy altercation, we parted company.

A few days later, at a poetry reading under the guidance of our learned Aron Wolman, we met again. These sessions always took place in the modest home of one of my friends, a single room divided by a curtain, creating the illusion of a double apartment. I remember every stick of furniture in that flat. On the right as you entered stood an unlit stove, and on the left a large brown cupboard, to which the curtain was attached; the cupboard housed a collection of blue-bound books by Anatole France, among them the famous
Penguin Island
and
Thaïs
, which had been borrowed and read by all of us. In the centre of the room was the lame table around which we sat together. I liked my friend's home, and I liked his quiet mother — who seemed to have stepped straight out of a story by Gorky. After we consumed
the bit of dry bread each of us had brought, which for most of us was our daily meal, it was time for Wolman's talk.

‘One might wonder,' he began, ‘why on earth, in the current political climate, one should bother about the Polish– Jewish literary “osmosis”. Or, is it
precisely
because of our present situation that people like us are compelled to examine our literary partnership — if only in order not to be consumed by the hatred that surrounds us?'

Wolman then briefly surveyed some of the important Jewish writers and their contribution to Polish literature: the work of Julian Tuwim, Bolesław Le
ś
mian, Mieczysław Jastrum, Marian Hemar, Józef Wittlin, and of course the tragic Bruno Schultz. From here he deftly turned to I. L. Peretz, the great Yiddish writer who had proclaimed that foreign ideas plant foreign cultures — though this did not mean, Aron stressed, that we had to lock ourselves up in a cultural ghetto. ‘On the contrary, Peretz argued that cultural isolation led to spiritual death. We have to take and give, share each other's spiritual heritage, yet remain Jewish. Remember,' Wolman added; ‘a writer who forsakes his roots has no place in posterity.'

He then spoke at length about the poet Adam Mickiewicz, and about the hunchback Jew Yankel the musician in his
Pan Tadeusz
— one of the great Polish literary masterpieces of all time — and went on to analyse the Polish influence on our Jewish writing, in particular that of
Wesele
by Stanisław Wyspia
ń
ski (another exalted Polish poet) on Peretz's play
At Night at the Old Market
. Wolman also read out a poem which the Yiddish master had dedicated to his beloved Polish poet, Maria Konopnicka:

I saw poems white as snow

blossoming fragrantly as in spring

and pure as the bluest sky at night,

and like a sad angel in thought

they sang of love...

After this, each of us read a piece — most of them about our disrupted lives, our aborted youth, our sadness, but few without a ray of hope or a longing for universal peace and redemption. The last to read was my no-longer girlfriend. I cannot recall the exact form of her poem, but the message at its heart is lodged in my memory:

A ghetto might tarnish the nobility of young love,

but to erase it completely is to succumb to cowardice.

The moment she finished her poem she ran from the room as if it was burning. I gave chase, flying recklessly down the three flights of stairs, and caught up with her on the bottom, street-level landing. I pulled her to me and tried to kiss her tears away. ‘Don't!' she almost shouted, tearing herself away. ‘There's no need to pretend — we're not on the stage!' And she hurried off sobbing into the night.

 

 
Enigmas