East of Time (37 page)

Future scholars of the social sciences will shake their heads in disbelief. How was it possible, they will ask, for so many of these permanently hungry ghetto-dwellers, whose only release from their miseries was death (a death which arrived daily), to continue to immerse themselves in writing poetry, studying languages, engaging in philosophical discourse, and conducting heated debates over purely intellectual abstractions?

Once, while in the ghetto, I had the good fortune to spend time with a group of former yeshiva students, twenty-odd years
my seniors, to whom the Yiddish language had opened the gates to European literature and had transformed these people into a formidable intellectual elite, flag-bearers in the republic of words, with a hatred of all dictatorial systems. No wonder our overlords saw them as enemies of the state.

‘Perhaps,' one of the group remarked, ‘our mistake is that we forever consider ourselves
citizens
, whereas the people we alive amongst think of us merely as
sojourners
. Look, for fifteen hundred years we lived in Spain,' he argued, warming up. ‘We settled on the Iberian Peninsula when it was still a waste and desolate land, we invested our blood, our sweat and our intellect in its future, yet in the end we were made to leave. And now? We have dwelt in this country for over a thousand years, and helped to build it, and we're still considered intruders by our neighbours.'

‘But do you know why?' asked another, and proceeded to answer his own question. ‘Perhaps our crime is, on the one hand, that we are constantly seeking shelter with xenophobic rulers disliked by the masses; and on the other, that we inject into the insularity of our neighbours the dream of a universal brotherhood, which antagonizes those rulers — who conveniently rob us by exiling us from their land.'

‘Though wouldn't you think,' commented a third, ‘that it is our wanderings which forged the very essence of what we are?'

‘And what might that essence be?'

‘Intellectual acumen.'

‘And yet, according to Rashi, wandering has three effects: it breaks up one's family life, reduces one's wealth, and lessens one's standing in the world.'

‘Precisely so,' said a man we all called Trotsky, not for his political hue but on account of his goatee. At heart a poet trapped between the present and the past, Trotsky was a real charmer. The only thing I resented about him was his slow,
condescending smile. ‘It seems to me that you all lack passion for the land that our faith should have ingrained in our psyche,' he went on. ‘The land where we can all be regarded as legitimate settlers...'

‘Nothing will change,' someone interrupted him. ‘Do you really believe that after two thousand years of wandering we can transform ourselves into settlers?'

‘
Vil nor
...' retorted Trotsky. ‘If you but so desire it.'

Gazing up at the firmament, he continued: ‘It's only just past midday and our mighty God has already dipped his brush in the blood of our martyrs.' Then, out of the blue, he launched into a Yiddish verse by Yosef Papiernikov:

Maybe I build my castles in the air,

Maybe the story of God isn't true;

In my dreams it's better, in my dreams it's brighter,

In my dreams the sky is bluer than blue.

As he made for the door, Trotsky pulled up his jacket collar, turned his head towards us and, with his condescending little smile, announced: ‘It seems to me that all our intellectualizing may have led us to the brink of an unavoidable abyss. At a time like this, gentlemen, an ounce of common sense might be better than a ton of scholarship.'

For some reason, we laughed as we waved him off.

 

 
Purim
 

It was ghetto life which brought about the democratization of sorrow in our tenement. David Klinger, a refined well-educated man, lost his wife to a sudden selection; three months later his unlearned neighbour Rachel, ten years his senior, was cradling
him to sleep every night. David's political enemy Velvele, nicknamed
Sheker
(lie), who believed that V. I. Lenin was King Solomon incarnate, walked around our yard after the Soviets' successful spring offensive, singing, in Yiddish-accented German:

Auf, auf zum Kampf, zum Kampf!

Zum Kampf sind wir geboren!

Dem Karl Liebknecht haben wir's geschworen,

Dem Rosa Luxemburg reichen wir die Hand.

Velvele said that David strutted about like a national hero but was in truth a coward afraid to sleep in the dark by himself.

‘Unfortunately,' David would retort, ‘misery acquaints a person with strange bedfellows. This life we lead has no precedent. Whether we like it or not, we are being terrorized daily by loneliness.' And perhaps to aggravate Velvele, he might add: ‘As far as I can see, without a national homeland our whole Jewish existence will have been one frightful mistake.'

David Klinger was a fine fellow, a wonderful idealist, and a Zionist who belonged to the extreme wing of that movement. Joseph Trumpeldor, killed in 1920 defending the Tel Hai settlement in Palestine, was to David a legendary hero, while the name of Jabotinsky he uttered like a psalm.

Even in the most adverse circumstances, David would uphold the Jewish national tradition — if only verbally. I recall a visit he paid us one cold and cheerless evening. After a word or two about the political situation he mentioned Purim, and all at once, as if entering a trance, David the dreamer was on a hike into history. There, he eyed the foolish king Ahasuerus (also known as Xerxes), and then his malevolent chief minister, the former barber and bath-attendant Haman; and when the beautiful queen Esther made an appearance David's face lit up.
Arm in arm with Mordechai the Just, who brought to naught Haman's deceitful machinations against the Jews, he would lead our people into a free Palestine under the triumphant flutter of blue-and-white banners...

So hallucinated our idealist friend on that howling evening of 9 March 1943. The morrow would bring Purim, commemorated by the Jews as well as the Germans: the Jews celebrated Haman's demise twenty-four centuries ago, the Germans his present and glorious rebirth.

In the gallery of my memories there hangs a picture covered with rag-years and framed in white snow. It shows a morning in fog, and hundreds of wooden clogs shod with slush, tramping across a timber footbridge, and in the background stands a gallows, where, from nine ropes and with mouths open, ten Jews are dangling (for one of the ropes is shared by a father and son), on their faces a few meek and dying rays of sun, and around them six men in black rejoicing at Haman's resurrection. The picture is dated ‘Wednesday, 10 March 1943'. Time has almost erased the painter's name.

 

 
Anniversary
 

The closeness of the Jewish family unit was something of which our arch-adversary was all too aware, and its final destruction was his obsession. Maybe this stemmed from the fact that his father had been born out of wedlock. In any case, he set out on a course of effectively starving his victims to death, doubtless in the belief that we would soon be eating each other's flesh...

At the start of every week we would collect our weekly bread rations. My mother took out her innocent scales, her indifferent knife, and cut the bread into three equal parts. (My two
sisters, each with her little girl, lived apart from us, though in the same tenement block.) Mother made sure that we had enough for just one slice each per morning, so that the loaf would last through the week. But on one occasion father transgressed, secretly helping himself to some of mother's portion. Mother was horrified when she discovered this, and recalled her friend Berenice's anguish over her own Josef's lapse. But she responded by giving father the rest of her bread. ‘He needs it more than I do,' she said. ‘He is weaker, and he's only human.'

My parents had been married on 25 December 1913, and this was a date we celebrated even in the darkest moments of our family life. I recall our last such celebration, their thirtieth anniversary, in the winter of 1943–44, when the walls of our unheated room wore a brilliant coat of frost. I never learnt where my sisters had got hold of the two brown candles they brought over — I thought the colour was a bad omen. Meanwhile, however, there was a cake baked from chaff and another from potato-peels, and mother boiled up a special brew of water.

We ate and drank. Then, as he did every year, father took out the old letter — yellowed from spending its life between the pages of an ancient book — and the three desiccated twigs that had once been abloom with three glorious white roses, and he read out, as he did every year, the words he had written to his bride on their wedding night.

When he came to the line ‘I'll be true to you, my love, for the rest of my days', his tongue stumbled, his face broke, and suddenly father was sobbing. I had never seen him cry. My two sisters were aghast, they didn't know what had happened. But mother and I knew. That transgression of a few months ago weighed heavily upon him, he still couldn't forgive himself. I'll never forget the way mother got up and embraced him. ‘You are my husband,' I heard her whisper. ‘You're my husband.'

 

 
Confession