Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life (31 page)

Joseph, no more, no less! Did he know what the righteous Joseph had looked like? Did he have a coat of many colors? In short, how did Yankl, the son of Yarme the coachman, come to Joseph the righteous?

“Don’t rack your brains,” Yankl said to me and proceeded to explain.

Sheve the seamstress had already sewn him a coat of many colors.
She would be in the play, too, as Mother Rachel. Notele the blacksmith was going to play Father Jacob, and Hershl Bulldog and Yellow Velvl, Reuben and Simeon. There would be a tombstone. There would be a depiction of the Land of Israel. There would be portrayals of Pharaoh, the ruler of Egypt, of the Philistines, and of Moses.

Yankl must be a total ignoramus, I thought. What did the Philistines have to do with Moses? Moreover, when our forefather Jacob went down to Egypt, Moses hadn’t even been born yet.

“That’s what’s written in the book,” said Yankl, “the book that has the play in it.”

He added that no one would be admitted to
The Sale of Jacob
without a ticket bearing a special stamp and that a ticket cost twenty groshen.

What was I to do? I couldn’t save up twenty groshen by Saturday night. Had Yankl told me about this earlier in the winter, I would have put away one groshen after another and by now would have saved up enough for two tickets.

As it turned out, Mother had also heard about the forthcoming performance of
The Sale of Joseph
in Yosl-Tsalel’s hall.
She had once read the play in one of her storybooks, and soon after her wedding to her first husband had even seen it, staged by the Brody Singers. One had to buy tickets then, too, she said. But that was then.

“Who today is as good as the Brody Singers?” she lapsed into reverie. “Who can perform like them? Nothing will come of this, I tell you. Yankl playing Joseph the righteous? When the Brody Singers performed the play, Joseph the righteous had a black, silky beard and you could barely see his face. Your Yankl has a face covered in freckles.”

Mother was probably right. But since I had never seen the performance by the Brody Singers, Yankl would be good enough for me.

“Well,” Mother said, “if you really want to go, I’ll come with you.”

I hardly slept a wink that whole week. In my imagination I saw the tombstone that Yankl had described to me. I saw Sheve the seamstress, and Yankl himself. But where would he find a black, silky beard like the one that Mother had seen on the Brody Singers’ Joseph?

On Sabbath, during the prayers at the shul, it occurred to me that, instead of Yankl, Uncle Bentsien’s son Mendl ought to be playing the part of the righteous Joseph. Most likely, Joseph would have to sing, and who, other than Mendl, sang as beautifully? Except that it would have been beneath his dignity to appear onstage together with Notele the blacksmith and Sheve the seamstress.

However, these were idle thoughts. What really mattered was the performance that was going to take place that very evening, and that the Sabbath day was dragging too long. The dark red sun seemed to be standing still, not moving from our windowpanes.

Father also seemed to be lingering longer over the
shaleshudes
, the late-afternoon Sabbath meal. He didn’t tap his knife on the table, as he usually did while chanting the hymns, but held it upright by its handle, the blade turned to the setting sun and mirroring, as it were, the mournful melodies. Mother, too, lingered over her women’s prayer, adding words of her own, additional praises of God, and repeating each phrase twice.

Everything took longer than usual. The three stars that signified the conclusion of the Sabbath were late in appearing. Father took his time reciting the
havdole
prayer ushering in the new week. Mother couldn’t find her head scarf. By some miracle, Motl Straw came by just then to go over the accounts with Father. This made Mother hurry up and, with luck, we finally managed to get out of the house.

Yosl-Tsalel’s hall, where
The Sale of Joseph
was to be performed, was housed in a round building, lying between the “wide” market and the street leading to the Gentile hospital. Jews passed by there every late Friday afternoon, before candle-lighting time, on their way to bathe in the Pyarski River. It was along this street, too, that the victims claimed by the river were borne, summer after summer.

The hall itself was spacious and circular in shape, with red walls and tall windows that looked out onto a section of the market and an even greater stretch of the hospital street. Up front, against the far wall, stood a wide padded armchair whose red velvet seat was worn and flattened from the brides of every shape who had sat thereon before being led to the wedding canopy with their grooms. From that hall, too, the members of the butchers’ and tanners’ guilds would carry the new Torah scrolls they were donating to their respective synagogues. It was also the place where, in times of trouble for Jews, rabbis and other leaders of the community held their assemblies. In that same hall, Yosl-Tsalel, himself a musician, with a refined black beard, often took up his fiddle and performed his own tunes and melodies.

Now, in honor of Purim, Yosl-Tsalel had rented out his hall for a performance of
The Sale of Joseph
.

A good part of the market and half of the hospital street were packed with people. A black sky stretched over the rooftops. Young men waved sticks in the air and threatened to tear out everybody’s guts. Young girls with disheveled hair tried to break into the young men’s ranks. A small Jew in a hacked-off
kapote
with frayed edges ran back and forth shouting, “Tickets, tickets! You can’t get in without a ticket!”

That set off a round of protests.

“Look who’s asking for tickets from us …”

“It’s Moyshele the apostate … what he’ll get from me is a smack, not a ticket!”

Mother and I stood to one side. She had no wish to push her way in, nor did she have the strength. But when Moyshele, coat flaps flying, ran past us, Mother stopped him.

“Young man! Excuse me, young man!”

“What do you want?”

“I’ve got tickets.”

“So what!”

“What do you mean, so what! I paid for them.”

He took a moment to think it over, then took a closer look at Mother.

“Aren’t you Frimet?”

“Yes.”

“And that’s your son?”

“Yes.”

“Does he have a ticket, too?”

“Of course”

“Then come with me.”

He led us through the hospital street into a beer hall, where Gentiles sat drinking from large, foam-topped mugs. From there we followed him into a dark, narrow courtyard, reeking of manure. He took us up a narrow, gray staircase.

“We’re going in there,” he said curtly.

We came into a blue-and-white kitchen, where a wide-hipped woman was stirring a big pot with a wooden spoon. A waxen-faced Jew with a wet beard was poring over a sacred book by the light of a candle. The wide-hipped woman walked behind us, pointing the direction.

“Straight ahead, straight ahead.”

That’s how we eventually got to Yosl-Tsalel’s hall.

We were immediately assailed by the smell of sweat, mixed with the aroma of rock candy and orange peels. The audience stood on long, low, wooden benches. Girls threw their arms around the shoulders of young men. A bearded Jew slunk along the wall. Women were wheezing and munching on squashed strudel wrapped in kerchiefs.

The play hadn’t started yet. The place where the red velvet bridal chair and its footstool usually stood now looked like a Gentile window decorated for Christmas. A large, bright lamp, wrapped in red tissue paper, hung down over a tombstone. The tombstone itself was hammered together from boards and smeared with whitewash.

Two misshapen deer, with the faces of wailing cats, held a gold Torah-crown between their front legs. Next to their hind legs was a sign in black and white:
HERE LIES OUR MOTHER RACHEL.

I was imagining how exciting it would soon be to see Father Jacob and his sons, to see the sons selling their brother Joseph to the Ishmaelites, to see them dipping the coat of many colors in blood, taking it to their father and saying that a wild beast had devoured Joseph.

While I was imagining all this, a figure stepped out and stood next to Mother Rachel’s tombstone—a tall Jew with a long, yellow beard made of hemp, wearing a white robe and a silver crown. He carried a long, twisted staff, no doubt the very staff with which Moses had split the Red Sea and also struck the rock to bring forth water. A murmur swept through the hall: “Our Father Jacob!”

The benches began to creak. Chins were propped up on the shoulders of strangers. Someone complained about the loud smacking of lips. He was immediately told that if he didn’t like it, he didn’t have to look. For good measure, those who felt falsely accused by this remark hoped that those whose eyes were too big for their own good might go blind.

All the while, Father Jacob was standing beside Mother Rachel’s grave, waiting for the noise to die down. But the longer he remained silent, peering at the crowd from under his yellow eyebrows, the harder they pushed and shoved one another, and the louder their squabbling grew. Father Jacob banged on the floor with Moses’ staff and roared out like a lion.

“Quiet, everybody! A black year should befall you!”

The noise stopped. Father Jacob raised his staff and began to proclaim: “Listen, good people, we are about to enact for you tonight …”

And so the play finally began:

Herewith the tale of Joseph and his brothers,

Told in sweet words and glorious song,

To be sung, at Purim, glass in hand,

In every town, in every land.

Father Jacob didn’t simply recite the lines but sang them out in a nasal voice, half sniffle, half screech. When he came to the end of the verse, he clapped his hands and called to the closed door:

Come in, my children all,

Come in, heed your father’s call.

The children began to file in. First, two by two, came Reuben and Simeon, Judah and Issachar, stepping stiffly, as if each had swallowed a stick. Then Naphtali stumbled in, as if someone had pushed him from behind. Then in ran Levi, a young man who looked like a corpse, with long red hands that he didn’t know where to put.

How handsome they looked, the children of Jacob, all so dressed up!

Reuben wore a black silk
kapote
, girded round the middle like a Hasid, house-slippers, and white socks. Simeon, sweating profusely, was dressed in a wagon-driver’s jacket, with the padded lining on the outside, and Judah looked like a hangman. What person in his right mind would wear a red shirt? And where did he get hold of it? Issachar, on the other hand, in his soft, turned-down collar and tie, looked like a newly married husband boarding with his in-laws. In my view, that’s what Benjamin should have worn, instead of that tight-fitting, womanish waistcoat and those laced-up shoes.

All the brothers stationed themselves around the tombstone. All blinked their eyes and all had distorted faces, so smeared with makeup that they were impossible to recognize.

Just then Joseph the righteous himself came running in. He looked different than all his brothers, not only as described in the Bible, but here, in actuality. I knew it was my friend Yankl, with the freckled face, but he looked resplendent. He wore a velvet skullcap, like the son of a rabbi, and sported small side curls, shiny, black, and tightly wound.

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out where Yankl had gotten hold of those side curls. First of all, he never wore side curls, and second, his own hair was straight and blond.

But what difference did it make? He looked so handsome. The blue silk shirt, cut low, like a girl’s, suited his face. It was too bad, though, that they made him go barefoot, and the staff he carried was certainly a mistake. It should have been curved at the top, like Father Jacob’s.

Well, so be it. The important thing was that all of Jacob’s sons had assembled, and the play could now proceed in earnest.

Father Jacob surveyed his sons and addressed them as follows:

Attend my word, O children of Israel.

The might of the Lord is without measure,

The Lord who recalls my great suffering

At the hands of Laban the Aramean.

Now, my children, take the kine out to pasture.

And so that I don’t succumb to sorrow,

I’ll keep Joseph here with me to study Torah.

The brothers went out slowly, one by one, leaving Joseph behind, alone with their Father. Father Jacob then got up on a bench and began to sing in a mournful voice:

Make haste, to your brothers run.

Go and see if they are done

With all the tasks that I have asked.

Joseph bowed to his father and replied:

Father, Father, I hasten to do as you say.

I’ll bring back my brothers without delay.

Father Jacob blew out the lamp, Joseph hastened to his brothers, and darkness enveloped Mother Rachel’s grave.

Nobody had the slightest inkling as to whether the play was over or not. Once again, the audience began to push and shove, complaining noisily.

“Where did Joseph go off to?”

“What’s taking him so long?”

“He’d be the one to send to go looking for the Angel of Death!”

But in a short while, all the brothers were back in view. Holding their staffs before them, they advanced with confident steps. Joseph the righteous looked small and scared. And with good reason, unfortunately.

Just then, one of the brothers stepped forward, made an angry face, and, lowering his eyebrows, said:

Brother Joseph, brother Joseph,

What is your wish, what your desire?

Why has Father Jacob sent you here?

Joseph sat down on a velvet footstool, the very one on which the brides rested their white wedding slippers, rocked back and forth like a student poring over the Talmud, and answered thus:

Hearken my brothers, I have something to tell,

About a dream I had. Please listen well.

We were all in this field, working away,

Binding sheaves all the long day.

Our work done, we were about to depart,

When the sheaf I had bound stood up with a start,