Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life (19 page)

As it happened, Mendl was right to hold himself in such exalted regard. He wore a white shirt and a tie, as well as long trousers, reaching to below his low, laced boots. He didn’t attend a Hebrew school, a
kheyder
, like me, but studied in a
shkole
, a Russian-Jewish school. He was free to roam through all the big rooms of his house, and he could ask for anything he wanted. He had no brothers or sisters. He was an only child.

But all that counted for nothing. There were many good-looking, rich Mendls in our town, living in spacious houses. But none of the other Mendls had a singing voice as beautiful as his.

The word in town was that Bentsien’s Mendl was something special and that the world would one day be hearing from him. Everybody in town was aware that Bentsien’s Mendl could read and write as fluently as running water, that he knew whole chapters of the Bible by heart. So, why shouldn’t I feel poor and insignificant in comparison to such a Mendl, for whose sake elderly Jews would run from the
besmedresh
to the
shul
just to hear him sing?

I, too, always raced to hear him. Mendl was the soloist in the boys’ choir that accompanied the old Lithuanian cantor. His angelic tones rang out from under the arched, blue ceiling of the
shul
like a voice from heaven. Sometimes, when he sang in a haunting tremolo, it seemed as if all the flutes and clarinets, all the trumpets and fiddles that were carved into the eastern wall, came to life and joined in.

Now I was sitting as a guest in their home. Mendl looked at me as though I were a stranger. He knew who I was. Didn’t I come here every six months? Yet he made as if he didn’t recognize me. He crinkled his little mouth to one side and never said a word to me. I would have liked to start a conversation, but how to begin if the other person doesn’t even acknowledge your presence?

Aunt Naomi had a request.

“Mendlshi,” she cajoled, “sing something for Uncle Leyzer.”

Mendl looked up with a pair of eyes as large and as pale as his mother’s and shrugged. It was not hard to figure out what he meant by that gesture: “Tell me, really, is there anybody here worth singing for?”

Father smiled at him. “Nu … yes … Sing something, Mendl. I sometimes hear you in the
shul
, but only when I can manage to push my way in …”

Mendl drew his small mouth even tighter. He half-closed his eyes and assumed a dreamy expression. He was actually going to sing! I held my breath. A large, warm smile spread across Father’s face. Aunt Naomi closed her eyes, too, just like her son, and assumed the same expression. Only Uncle Bentsien was oblivious, as he loudly slurped the last drops of mead from his glass and folded both hands across his stomach.

But Mendl didn’t sing. Instead, he walked slowly and stiffly into the next room.

The smile vanished from Father’s face. I let out my breath. Aunt Naomi wrinkled her forehead and tracked her son’s departure with sorrowful eyes.

But a few minutes later, Mendl’s voice resounded from the next room. He was singing! Father’s lips curled with pleasure. The worried wrinkles on Aunt Naomi’s brow turned into creases of joy.

“May I never meet with misfortune, dear God in Heaven!” she nodded her head. “He sings, may he be protected from the evil eye, just like a bird in the forest.”

I, personally, had no idea how a human being could sing like a bird in the forest. But listening to Mendl, I found myself moved to the quick. His voice was as sweet as the best honey. He was incomparable. I now understood that he had every reason to feel high and mighty. If I were in his place, I would have felt the same way.

By now the room was growing dark. We sat there like invalids who are afraid to move lest it aggravate their pain. The glasses of mead stood in the shadows, forgotten. Mendl’s melodious voice hung in the air, yes, like a bird in the forest. I could almost hear it fluttering its wings.

Such marvelous singing, such a marvelous boy, that Uncle Bentsien’s Mendl! I was sated with mead and candied orange peel. Still, I felt hungry and depressed, all because of Mendl’s marvelous, melodious voice.

Father was speaking to me, but I didn’t answer.

When all was said and done, who was I compared to Mendl? A speck of dust, mere chaff in the wind. Father couldn’t even afford to buy me new clothes for the holiday, whereas the other Mendl went about dressed like a prince. Even his voice was princely. I, on the other hand, loitered in strangers’ courtyards. I dealt with people like Jusza and Hodl. I was a boor, an ignoramus. At that moment I couldn’t have wished for anything better than to hear that Mendl had taken ill and had to have his vocal cords removed. Then I would have been able to love him and make him my best, my only, friend. I would have told him about the pigeons on the roof, about Jusza, about Ite, about Yoyne. There were many other things I would have told him, too. But now I couldn’t say anything.

From Aunt Naomi’s we went straight to the
besmedresh
. It was time for the evening service. On this occasion, Moshke the cantor spun out his military marches in so dry and monotonous a tone that it made my ears throb. I prayed for the service to end so that I could lie down, bury my face in the pillow, and cry. All I wanted to do was cry my heart out.

Back home, Father never gave me a second thought. He reported on the wonders of his sister Naomi, on our gracious reception, on Mendl’s mellifluous voice.

I noticed that Mother screwed up her face. I don’t think she much liked hearing what Father was telling her. I could have sworn that Father’s account made her unhappy.

“Enough!” she waved her hand impatiently. “We’ve already heard all about her good fortune.”

I was very grateful to Mother, thankful with all my heart. What a dear human being she was, always taking my side, always sympathizing with my grievances.

Father fell silent. Suddenly everything in the room was silent. Ite was setting the table. Her face looked pinched and angry, with ugly red blotches. Mother had changed out of her holiday clothes. She looked upset and grief-stricken.

“And where is that son of yours?” Father asked before we sat down to the table.

“He won’t be here today,” Mother snapped back.

Ite hurried into the kitchen. Father crinkled his eyes.

“What do you mean? It’s time to make
kiddush
, to sanctify the wine.”

“You can do it without him.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What don’t you understand? He’s not here, and that’s that. He’s been invited to Aunt Miriam’s.”

“Is that so? Mmm …”

We sat down to the table without Yoyne. Again, Ite didn’t join us. We ate in silence.

Yoyne never came back to sleep, nor did he show up the next morning. Ite moved about the house incessantly, her cheeks still aflame, cleaning, washing, polishing.

At the close of the holiday, in the evening, when the Passover dishes were being stored for another year, and the everyday dishes put back in place, Mother went out, taking with her Yoyne’s little, peeling suitcase. Ite sat by the window, worn out from her labors, staring into the darkness.

Father had also gone out, to see his partner, Motl Straw. The house was bleak, without Mother, without Father, without Yoyne. I wandered around the empty house like an orphan. I had the feeling that I would never see Mother again, though she did return late that night without Yoyne and without his little suitcase.

I now had the iron bed all to myself.

I found out later that Yoyne had left town that end-of-the-holiday night without saying goodbye to anyone. Why did he run away like that? No one in the house asked after him, as if they were ashamed to even mention his name. Ite stayed on a while longer. She grew thinner. Her eyes lost the dark, warm luster that she had brought with her from Warsaw. She became lazy, sluggish.

No one seemed to notice that she was wasting away. Mother didn’t say a word. I saw all this but could do nothing. Father was totally unconcerned about his daughter. Six days of the week he moved between sky and earth, among stacks of hay and peasants’ carts. He saw Ite only on Saturdays, but that wasn’t enough time to discern all that was going on. Besides, Father was still walking on air, recalling his sister’s hospitality and her son’s singing voice.

He scarcely missed an opportunity to mention Aunt Naomi and her talented son. That Friday night at the Sabbath meal, when it came time to sing the special hymns, I tried to help Father out. He made a face as if he were swallowing something distasteful, and sighed, “Where do you find another, like Naomi’s Mendl?”

“All he can think of is Naomi’s Mendl,” Mother commented bitterly.

She didn’t like to hear about her rich sister-in-law. She didn’t like to hear Aunt Naomi’s son praised. She couldn’t abide anything that had to do with those spacious rooms and their self-satisfied inhabitants.

“You’d do better to worry about your own Mendl,” Mother said with a touch of resentment. “He’s somebody’s son, too. Believe me, had God been kinder to me, our Mendl would also know how to sing.”

“What foolishness!” Father barely concealed a smile. “Why are you so angry? Who says that our Mendl isn’t somebody’s son? But singing, you should know, is a gift bestowed by God.”

“Gift, shmift!” Mother snorted. “We know all about such gifts! As soon as those gifted souls grow up they become money-lenders, good-for-nothings. What do you think that brother-in-law of yours is, if not a good-for-nothing?”

“Who? Bentsien?”

“Yes, Bentsien, Bentsien …”

“But he’s the secretary of the community. Woman! What’s the matter with you?” Father couldn’t hide his astonishment.

“Some accomplishment! I know how to write, too, and I don’t make such a fuss about it.”

“Oh, leave me alone,” Father dismissed her with a wave of his hand.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“Don’t you worry, I know very well what I’m talking about. I should have so good a year, but Mordkhe-Mendl is a thousand times more important than that Bentsien of yours.”

“My enemies should have such a year! What’s so important about Mordkhe-Mendl?” Father shook his head scornfully.

“I’m telling you. One of these days, Mordkhe-Mendl is going to shake up all of Poland.”

“You mean, shake up all the bedbugs.”

“You’ll see.”

“I’ve seen it for the past twenty years, ever since poor Khane became his wife.”

“Khane is a thousand times dearer to me than Naomi.”

I liked Aunt Khane a lot more, too. She was poor, very poor. A full sister of Father’s and of Aunt Naomi’s, she had Aunt Naomi’s swarthy complexion and Father’s dreamy eyes. She talked slowly, like her sister Naomi, but without the latter’s sing-song drone and without her airs.

No one ever went to visit Aunt Khane. She lived on the outskirts of town in a wooden hut with grimy windowpanes and a green, shingled roof. No spacious rooms for Aunt Khane. In fact, she lived in a single room with a low, sooty ceiling, and an earthen floor that was uneven and full of holes. It contained two half-made beds with faded red bedding and a wide, old-fashioned clay stove with a recess that held a few sticks of firewood set there to dry, and around which several dark-skinned, hungry children in outgrown shirts huddled to keep warm.

Tall and prematurely bent, Aunt Khane’s bony figure was eternally wrapped in an old gray shawl with gaping holes. Her head was always covered by a wool tam, whose color had faded over time. In her house all meals were the same, potatoes in the morning, potatoes midday, potatoes at night. In the winter it was impossible to step outside Aunt Khane’s hut beyond the threshold, because the snow lay piled halfway to the window. All one could do was to wait and look out the frozen panes, avidly watching for last year’s stork to return to its perch on the poplar across the way and announce that at last one could go out, that the precious summer had finally arrived.

Summer was also the time when Aunt Khane would come into town, smelling of cows and of milk, of sprouting wheat and of the warm rain that dampened her ceiling, dripping through the cracks in the shingles.

She would come by our house when dawn still lay sleepily on the windowpanes. She would slip in quietly, say a solemn “Good morning,” and sit down on the edge of Mother’s bed.

Aunt Khane felt toward Mother as she would toward her own sister. She would pour out all the bitterness of her heart to her and bemoan her miserable lot—that there wasn’t a groshen in the house, that there was meat on the table only on the Sabbath, and sometimes not even then, that her children ran about barefoot and naked, that she owed rent for three-quarters of the year, that she was afraid of becoming a beggar.

Mother would console her. “Don’t sin against God. Have faith, Khane. I believe in your husband Mordkhe-Mendl. He’ll shake up all of Poland yet. You’ll see, mark my words.”

Despite the fact that Aunt Khane didn’t have enough sustenance to get her through the day, she, too, had great faith in her husband. In fact, everyone did, except Father. After all, why shouldn’t people believe in Mordkhe-Mendl? What a head on his shoulders! What a doer! Who could compare with him? What did it matter that he was a pauper, that he even had to borrow a few groshen to buy cigarettes? He had great plans, plans on how to get rich. His head was constantly buzzing with new schemes.

Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl wasn’t one of those people who, on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, asked God for nothing more than a decent livelihood and good health for their wives and children. Such people, he said were people with small ideas and even smaller worries. He, Mordkhe-Mendl, wasn’t going to stand before the Almighty and plead for something so paltry as a livelihood. And if he got it, what did it amount to, anyway? Just another bowl of grits, another goose leg.

The chief thing in life, according to him, was to achieve something. The whole world must come to know that there is a Mordkhe-Mendl, somebody to be reckoned with, somebody to be talked about.

For instance, why shouldn’t he lay claim, as his own property, to the nearby woods, where couples strolled the week of Passover, along with its surrounding farm? What gave Aron Shtaynberg the better right? Was he a greater scholar? A more eloquent preacher? Why shouldn’t he, Mordkhe-Mendl, be the one to build a railroad to Bialobrzegì? And why shouldn’t the whole Farle company, with its flour mills and brickworks and sawmills, belong to Mordkhe-Mendl? Was Itshele Beckerman smarter than him?