Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life (2 page)

Since 1930, Perle had been hard at work on something entirely different. “I am writing a book in three parts,” he told a reporter, “about the bygone generation … thirty years of Jewish life. I couldn’t find the form, the tone, until Gorky showed me the way with his
My Universities
.”
¹⁶
At about the same time as Henry Roth in New York procured a copy of Joyce’s banned
Ulysses
and realized that “you didn’t have to move out of your environment, out of an urban slum, to get all the material you wanted—convertible into great literature,” Perle discovered the key to his own childhood and youth. “A writer has no secrets,” Gorky revealed to him. “He must expose with absolute honesty.”
¹⁷
Just as Gorky began his autobiographical trilogy with a death, so too would Perle; poverty, ignorance, and cruelty rounded out the curriculum as taught by life’s universities.

Yidn fun a gants yor: a bukh fun a fargangen lebn—Everyday Jews: Scenes from a Vanished Life
—was published in the spring of 1935 to mixed reviews. The official Bundist press was scandalized by the sex scenes, a sad legacy, it claimed, of Perle’s career as a pornographer. Yitskhok Bashevis (Singer), recently arrived in America, complained that the novel was too bleak to be psychologically credible, its autobiographical hero (whom Perle had even neglected to describe) coming from a home at once “gray and impoverished” and “
umheymlekh
, forbidding.” Niger, too, took issue with the novel’s bleakness, while noting that Mendl, the novel’s young narrator, was a close cousin of Sholem Aleichem’s antic orphan Motl, the cantor’s son. In the last (perfunctory) analysis, however, according to Niger, Perle’s novel “lacked an idea.”
¹⁸

Rachel Auerbach (1903–1976) finally rose to Perle’s defense in the leading Yiddish literary review. She cautioned against reading Perle’s realism too naively, pointing to the novel’s analogical structure as a measure of its subtle modernist design. True to the dictates of a Bildungsroman,
Everyday Jews
followed a loose chronology, its individual episodes and the fate of its protagonists obeying a “spiral” pattern, a constant ebb and flow that mimicked the rhythm of its young hero’s life. So too the flow of ethnographic detail, never fetishized; the treatment of Jewish-Christian relations, which can so often deteriorate into kitsch; and the remarkable richness of the Yiddish, worthy of independent study. All told, Auerbach proclaimed, there was a truthfulness to this work, an existential honesty almost absent from the rest of contemporary Yiddish fiction.
¹⁹
Gorky’s example, in other words, had been faithfully upheld.

On the strength of
Everyday Jews
Perle was accepted back into the fold. Dramatic changes followed. The mill where he had been employed burned down; he gave up his career as a purveyor of
shund
in the pages of
Moment
; he joined the full-time staff of the
Bundist Folkstsaytung
; and he was elected to the Warsaw branch of the Yiddish P.E.N. Club, which in turn conferred upon
Everyday Jews
one of three I. L. Peretz Awards for the best original Yiddish works to appear in recent years. Blackballed and humiliated at the YIVO gathering in Vilna, Perle was definitively rehabilitated in Warsaw as part of the fortieth anniversary celebration of the Bund, held in the Nowości Theater on November 15, 1937. Two one-time literary awards were conferred at this occasion: the best-writer award to the thirty-six-year-old Itzik Manger, and the best-novel award to the forty-nine-year-old Perle.
²⁰

If the Bund now claimed to be the standard-bearer of Yiddish culture and sought to enlist all Yiddish writers under its banner, some Yiddish writers resisted and voted with their feet. Melekh Ravitch was the first to leave Poland—for Melbourne and, later, for other exotic destinations—followed by Kadia Molodowski and Yitskhok Bashevis, who settled in New York. (“How sad it is without him,” Perle wrote to Ravitch, a sentiment that Bashevis never reciprocated.
²¹
)

By this time, Polish Jewry was under siege. “We’re being slaughtered,” he reported to Ravitch. “In the small towns”—referring to the recent pogroms in Przytyk and Minsk Mazowiecki—“Jews won’t go to bed, for fear they’ll be murdered in their sleep.” As if in direct response, Perle’s literary ambitions expanded. His projected trilogy was now to encompass “over forty years of Jewish life in Poland,” from the 1880s to the 1920s.
²²
Moving from the narrow, psychologically defined, autobiographical perspective of
Everyday Jews
, its sequel,
Di gildene pave
(1937)—
The Golden Peacock: A Novel in Two Parts
—assumed a completely unexpected form, as Perle reverted to the sensational plot devices, moral dichotomies, broad geographic-historical canvas, and sentimentality of his earlier
shund
production. In a note, Perle urged readers to find “traces” of
Everyday Jews
in the sequel.
²³

The hope was in vain. Except for the theme of marital deception, a rambling plot driven by the inchoate longings of a woman, and cameo appearances by minor characters from
Everyday Jews
, the two works have little in common. Instead of an older Mendl, as one would have expected, occupying the center of consciousness,
The Golden Peacock
stars Perle’s beautiful half-sister, called by her real name, Rukhtshe, who vies with the virtuous Sheyndl (“the beautiful one”) for the affections of a man known as “the second Paganini,” the virtuoso folk fiddler Kaddish. Even though Sheyndl dies in childbirth midway through
The Golden Peacock
, by the end of the third work in the series, titled
Gilgulim
(1939)—
Metamorphoses
—we still don’t know whether Rukhtshe and Kaddish will ever get together again—and we may never find out. The one extant copy of the volume—the sequel to the sequel, so to speak—deposited in the National Library of Poland on the very eve of the Nazi invasion, is missing its last pages.
²⁴

Act III of the Perle life story is nothing less than the tragic fate of Polish Jewry. There were two escape routes, and Perle attempted them both. In September 1939, he joined tens of thousands of refugees fleeing eastward to the Polish territories annexed by the Soviet Union as part of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. Sometime in November, along with his son Lolek and new daughter-in-law Yudis, he reached Lwów/Lemberg, where the newlyweds found work as engineers. Twenty-one-year-old Lolek, a member of the (illegal) Polish Communist Party, no longer had reason to fear; not so Perle senior. The moment a Soviet Writers’ Union was established in a requisitioned palace on Copernicus Street, embracing three nationalities—Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews—the family of Polish-Yiddish writers turned against itself. Writers once united in the
Warsaw Almanac
began denouncing one another; as a prominent Bundist (and thus anathema to their traditional Communist antagonists), Perle was especially vulnerable. However, the Polish Communist poet Elżbieta Szemplińska came to Perle’s defense, and he was admitted into the Union.
²⁵
The delegations of Soviet-Yiddish writers from Moscow and Kiev, eager to reunite with their Polish brethren after a terrible decade of separation, also came to his rescue. Peretz Markish (1895–1952), who had spent his salad days in Warsaw, was especially welcoming. A 1940 group photo of the Yiddish writers’ colony in Lwów shows Perle seated second from the left, looking at Markish. This photo became one of Perle’s most cherished possessions. The Soviet regime showered Perle with all the usual rewards—public readings before factory workers; translation into Russian; a trip to Kiev as an honored guest; and lucrative book contracts, provided that he submit his work to censorship, which he willingly did.
²⁶

The other escape route was to America, where two of his half-siblings had settled. Through Ravitch, now in Montreal, Perle located his long-lost half-brother, Leybl (Louis) Pearl, of Brooklyn, who sent him the necessary affidavits. But Louis never heard from his kinsman, for once Perle had thrown in his lot with the Soviet Union there was no turning back—except to Warsaw.
²⁷

In the wake of the German conquest, Lwów and environs became the site of a massive pogrom carried out by local Ukrainians, followed by the more systematic mobile killing units of the Germans. The Warsaw ghetto, in its second year by the time the Perle family returned, was a haven by comparison, a city-within-a-city made up of three parts: the
Judenrat
, or official community, operating under the rapacious eyes of the Nazis; the Jewish Self-Help, a vast network of social services funded mostly by the Joint Distribution Committee in America; and a political underground, mimicking the prewar welter of parties. Perle was at home in all three, where writers and intellectuals formed a protected class. Rather than join the ranks of the 150,000 refugees crowded into the typhus-ridden section of the ghetto, the Perle family returned to its old haunts, on Nowolipie Street, and Perle found immediate employment in the
Judenrat
under the patronage of the munificent Shmuel Winter (1891–1943). More important, Perle was recruited by the historian Emanuel Ringelblum (1900–1944), the director of the Jewish Self-Help, to write for the underground Oyneg Shabes Archive. Perle’s first assignment was to produce a detailed report on the Soviet occupation of Lwów.
²⁸

What Perle had seen in the Soviet workers’ paradise, and what he now observed among the living remnant of Polish Jewry, changed the tone and substance of his writing. It became ever darker. A “comicsatiric” novel, apparently titled
Our Bread of Affliction
and describing ghetto life, featured such real people as the ghetto comedian Rubinshteyn.
²⁹
Perhaps Perle was trying to document the perseverance of the Jewish collective in extremis. But by the spring of 1942, when Oyneg Shabes asked him to participate in a survey of Jewish intellectuals about the fate of Polish Jewry after the war, he could envisage no viable future—neither for its “bourgeoisie,” riddled with informers, lacking in national pride, nor for its Yiddish-speaking ordinary folk. The Jews, he angrily concluded, “hate the Yiddish language.” Even in the Soviet Union, where the regime lavished support on Yiddish literature and theater, “even there Jews don’t want to speak Yiddish.” The sole hope for postwar Jewry, he maintained, lay in a Communist-Jewish state, in Palestine or, more plausibly, within the Soviet Union proper.
³⁰

Then came the last chapter of Warsaw Jewry, the Great Deportation. In a six-week span during the summer of 1942, 235,741 Jews were rounded up at the notorious assembly point, the
Umschlagplatz
, and shipped off to die in Treblinka. During a surprise nighttime blockade, when the Germans appeared in his courtyard and shouted for everyone to come down, Perle ignored the order, stayed put, and survived.
³¹

Amid the daily roundups, in the brief respite between August 27 and September 5, 1942, Perle began to chronicle “The Expulsion of Jewish Warsaw.” He completed it three weeks later, having changed the title to “Khurbn Varshe”—“The Destruction of Warsaw”—to indicate a calamity as shattering as that of the ancient Destruction (
khurbn
) of the Jerusalem Temple.
³²
Even as he asserted that “of Hitler, of this antediluvian beast, it is possible to believe anything; the sadistic methods that he employs surpass all human understanding,” most of Perle’s moral outrage was directed inward. He railed at the Jewish police, who “dragged their tortured victims up from beneath the ground and down from the sky; from all the cellars, from all the holes, from all the chimneys”; at the
Judenrat
, whose members deserved to be hanged from lampposts; and ultimately, at the entire ghetto population. “Three times 100,000 people,” he thundered with prophetic rage, “lacked the courage to say: NO. Each one of them was intent upon saving his own skin. Each one was ready to sacrifice even his own father, his own mother, his own wife and children.” Why was there no resistance, even among the mighty Jewish proletariat? Perle’s final indictment was this: “If a community of 300,000 Jews did not try to resist, if it exposed its own throat to the slaughterer’s knife, if it did not kill one German or one Jewish collaborator—then maybe this was a generation that deserved its bitter fate!”

While Perle was documenting “The Destruction of Warsaw,” Shmuel Winter secured him a job in the artificial-honey factory on Franciszkanska 30. Now only Jews with numbers hung around their necks like dog tags had the right to live, working for slave wages under labor-camp conditions. “Number 4580”—also the title of Perle’s last-known work—was Yehoshue Perle himself, a once proud Polish Jew transformed into a faceless, historyless set of digits.
³³
In this account, Perle’s tone turned heavily ironic, his style more idiomatic than ever, and the main target of his invective became the narrator himself, whose number was “chosen” in a diabolical perversion of the biblical promise and in an absurd inversion of statistical probability. “Of three times 100,000 Jewish souls it was granted that some 30,000 ciphers of the Chosen People be left.”

“Number 4580” is part meditation on the meaning of a person’s name, part last will and testament, a summation of its author’s life and literary career, and part self-indictment. Here Perle recalls his beloved Sarah. Here he alludes to the rescue of his good name by abandoning the writing of
shund
. And here he admits, “In order to become a number, my fifty-three years had to be jabbed at until they bled. Jabbed at, mocked, raped.” Those chosen to survive carried an unbearable burden of guilt toward those who did not. And of all the available archetypes of mourning and lamentation in the treasure trove of Jewish texts, the one that still spoke to the present moment was none other than
Motl, the Cantor’s Son
, Sholem Aleichem’s tale of the lively and lovable orphan boy. Playing on Motl’s tragicomic slogan, “I’m alright, I’m an orphan,” familiar to every reader of Yiddish, Perle signed off with the bitter words, “I’m alright, I’m a number!”