Israel (4 page)

The
Forward
was spread open on his knees. Eagerly he scanned the columns for news of Palestine. To read
about that faraway place was the only reason he bought the Yiddish newspaper. He was not a Zionist, but he had a personal interest in what was taking place in Palestine. His best friend had chosen to go to
Eretz Yisroel
instead of America.

In the Ukraine even the youngest, most vigorous Jew must live like someone who is very old and fragile. Even the youngest must tread carefully, avoiding all confrontation, giving daily thanks to God for not sending a calamity to snuff out tenuous life.

Abe Herodetzky was born in 1876 in a large village south of Kiev. It was a place of black muddy streets and whitewashed cottages with thatched roofs the color of tarnished copper. There were often bright blue skies and always crimson hens pecking in the yards but also brutal winter cold and in summer swarms of stinging gnats. It was a place where the rural peace and quiet were deceptive, for death could come to a Jew as fast as the crack of a Cossack's whip.

Years ago an overlord owned the village and the people who lived in it and decreed that Abe's greatgrandfather must become a cobbler. The trade was handed down and by the time Abe was sixteen he was accomplished at the bootmaker's craft.

Abe's mother died of a fever when he was eleven.
When Abe was fifteen his father died of a beating during one of the pogroms that periodically swept through the region.

Abe lived in the rear of the little cobbler's shop. He paid his taxes and did not have to worry about being conscripted into the czar's army until he turned twenty-one. He had already begun to put away money toward the day when he would have to begin paying an annual bribe to the military recruiter to mark him unfit for duty. For a Jew to pay a bribe was nothing unusual. They had fewer rights than any Christian did; therefore they depended on bribes as defense against the corrupt officials who ruled their lives.

One day a boy appeared in the doorway of Abe's shop. Where the child came from he was never able to say, but Abe later came to view this occurrence as God's way of adding a little sweet to the sour of his solitary life. One moment Abe was at his cobbler's bench skiving leather; the next he was looking up into the large blue eyes of a silent child.

“Yes?” Abe called out. “What is it?” He knew all the families in his village, and this ragamuffin did not look familiar. Of course, since the May laws took effect and forced the Jews to congregate in the larger towns, the Ukraine had been in turmoil. These were the worst of bad times, when previously well-to-do Jewish families, banished from their homes and stripped of their property, wandered like beggars.

The boy, no more than ten years old, had a freckled face and dirty blond hair. He was wearing a filthy tunic, torn trousers and rags wrapped around his feet in lieu of shoes.

“I asked you what you wanted,” Abe snapped. His own youth had faded away with the death of his father. His young back was bent and his face creased into a permanent scowl. In the last year, since sitting shiva for his father, Abe had grown increasingly taciturn, bitter and
full of scorn for his fellow man. In Abe the idealism of youth was early aborted by misfortune. He grew up with a heart that had become gnarled and twisted as a tree on a barren, wind-swept plain.

From the boy's ragged condition Abe could tell that nobody took care of him. The child stood in the shop's open doorway as if waiting for something, and when Abe rose from his bench, he tensed to flee.

“Wait. I won't hurt you,” Abe promised, slowly approaching. “Come in.”

The boy moved like an animal, all his senses on the alert. He took a tentative step into the shop and then backed out.

“What's your name?” Abe asked.

“Haim.”

Abe nodded approvingly. It meant “life” in Hebrew. “You have a last name?”

The boy thought about it a minute, then shrugged.

“A family perhaps? Parents? A sister, a brother?”

More silence, another shrug.

“So you are an orphan, like me.”

Try as he might, the boy was afraid to enter the shop. He kept thrusting his rag-wrapped foot across the threshold and then pulling it back, like a swimmer testing the chill of a pond.

Sighing, Abe went over to the boy and picked him up. Haim began to whimper, but Abe put him on his own bed and covered him. Haim yawned, and a few seconds later was asleep.

I can't be more than six years older than he is, Abe sadly marveled. What kind of world is this where I have to play the father?

Abe knew what he was going to do, but still he pretended to brood about his decision, for that was his way. The day wore on and Abe felt the boy's presence, as warmly comforting as the stove.

Abe sewed and mended old shoes and his heart slowly
renewed itself. If he had been a few years older this chance at spiritual healing would have come too late, but he was still just a boy himself, barely an adolescent. His youthful resilience, combined with his own odd, precocious and paternal nature, settled the matter.

That night when Haim got into the bath, Abe was relieved to see that Haim was circumcised. Abe had not been sure he was Jewish due to his light coloring. The last thing Abe needed was to be accused of kidnapping a Christian child. Just such a rumor sparked the pogrom that cost Abe's own father his life.

Abe was about to throw the boy's filthy garments into the fire when he discovered a scrap of paper in one of Haim's pockets. Written in Yiddish was the name Haim Kolesnikoff. From the looks of the scrap it was torn from some larger document, now lost.

That night while Haim slept, the young cobbler walked the narrow lanes of the village to the synagogue, behind which lived the rabbi and his wife. The scrap of paper was presented, and over glasses of tea and a plate of honey cakes the matter was discussed. The rabbi was assured that Haim would attend the village heder and be taught the cobbler's trade. Still, the rabbi was doubtful.

“Abe, it is a great responsibility for one as young as you,” he warned. “This child will depend on you for all things.”

Responsibility, dependence, another's fortune linked to his—Abe finally realized that solitude and isolation had been slowly murdering his spirit. He needed Haim as much as Haim needed him.

“Think hard on whether you wish to take on a son before you take a wife,” the rabbi advised him.

Abe had to grin. “God has seen fit to send the son before the wife.”

The rabbi shrugged. One less orphan was to everybody's benefit. He summoned his wife to bring the schnapps.
Thimblefuls were poured and a toast was made to celebrate the adoption.

The next morning at breakfast Abe asked, “Haim, maybe you'll stay here awhile with me?”

Haim shrugged, nodded, shyly smiled—and that was that.

Haim turned out to be an excellent student and a hard worker. As he grew older he progressed from ward and apprentice to friend and partner. Haim grew to be a stocky, muscular youth, soon dwarfing the slender young man who had taken him in. The rabbi decreed that Haim was ten years old the day he wandered into Abe's shop. That day became his birthday. So it was that three years later, Abe, at nineteen, had the privilege of watching his foster son become a bar mitzvah, a responsible adult.

Several times Abe had been close to marriage, but each prospective bride balked at marrying a man with a stepson near his own age. For a girl still in her teens to take on an infant was one thing; it was quite another for her to be faced with a grown son.

Abe was not much bothered by remaining a bachelor. Even then marriage seemed to him to be more of an obligation than an advantage. He was most comfortable when he was working, and he took pleasure in watching Haim flirt with the village girls. Strong, handsome, always ready with a joke, Haim was the one people noticed. Abe, every inch the proud father, was content to let Haim have enough fun for both of them.

In 1897 Abe turned twenty-one and began the first annual payment to the recruiter to keep out of the czar's army. The rate would rise in the coming years, the recruiter warned. Abe understood. Since coming to power a few years previously, Nicholas II, intent on furthering Russia's involvement in international affairs, had begun to strengthen the army and navy.

The year before the czar had signed an alliance with war-torn China in which the two countries pledged to support each other by all land and sea forces should there be any further aggression against either by Japan. There were more than a million Jews living within the section of land along Russia's western border known as the Pale of Settlement. Abe had no doubt that should a war break out between Russia and Japan, the czar would not hesitate to use young Jewish men as cannon fodder.

That year also marked the founding of the World Zionist Organization. To go on a pilgrimage or to die in Jerusalem had always been a dream to Jews, but in 1881 a group of Russian students made the journey in order to till the soil of their forefathers, and the first Zionist settlement came into being.

Not only did these students begin to raise the house of Jacob in the Holy Land, but they also began to build in the minds of Jews everywhere the idea that a land of their own was possible. Young Zionist groups sprang up in villages throughout the pale. In curtained rooms and stuffy cellars young men and women met to drink tea and drill themselves in Hebrew even as the rabbis denounced Zionism for turning Jews away from religious ways.

In 1903 Haim turned twenty-one and the bribe to the army recruiter doubled. By now Haim was enamored with Zionism. To be dedicated to a cause was not Abe's way, but he appreciated the youth groups as a way to release frustrations. He said nothing when Haim impulsively donated some of their savings to the Jewish National Fund, which had begun to purchase land in Palestine.

The National Fund proposed that the land be in the hands of the nation, not individuals, and this idea was especially inviting to young Russian Jews, many of whom were Marxists.

Various socialist revolutionary parties had begun to call for the overthrow of the Russian autocracy and the socialization of the
land. These groups meant to lure the peasantry to their cause by the call for reform, but the masses, knowing only that they were starving, preferred action to political talk. Violent uprisings occurred, during which peasants attacked estates and stripped them of food and livestock. The disturbances were especially violent in the Ukraine, where the Jews were held as scapegoats for the nation's misfortunes.

Half of Abe's village was sacked before the mobs grew weary and wandered off. Abe and Haim escaped without hurt, but the cobbler's shop was torn to pieces. Fortunately the rioters did not find the money Abe had cached beneath a floorboard.

For some time Abe had been thinking of emigrating to America. It was the czar's military recruiter who first put the idea in his head. This self-serving person came around with his hand out for a bribe on Haim's twenty-first birthday. He suggested that for a reasonable price he could get both Abe and Haim across the border into Austria and Germany. From there the danger would be past; all that would be needed was money to pay for steamship passage.

That was twenty-four months ago. Since then Abe had occasionally discussed the idea with Haim. Always Abe phrased it simply as “leaving Russia,” naturally assuming that Haim understood where they'd be going. Haim was enthusiastic on the few occasions when the idea came up, but he respectfully made it clear that he would defer to Abe on the matter.

So Abe talked about it and then let the matter slide for months at a time. To begin a new life was difficult for a man of Abe Herodetzky's temperament. To go to America? To risk so many dangers? At least they knew what life had to offer them here in the village. There was the shop, the worn, familiar handles of their tools, the smell of leathers and polishes; there was food on the table each day, and tea from the samovar in the corner; and each evening before
they went to sleep, a drink of schnapps. No, life wasn't so terrible after all, not when two who were at once father and son, brothers and friends, could make a living in a place where they had the respect and affection of their neighbors.

In Abe's mind just having the option of going to America was enough for the time being. Whenever life seemed unbearable, he would consider emigrating, and suddenly things didn't seem so bad. Maybe next month, next year. There was always time.

Now there was nothing left to hold them back. Abe stared at the wreckage of his shop, at his tools scattered and broken, while Haim quietly stood by. The ground beneath their feet was soggy with the blood of the injured and dead; the sky above was grey with smoke. All around them was ruination; the air was filled with the weeping of the adult and the wail of the children. So hellish was the scene that the only way to keep one's sanity was to shut it all out. A man had to numb himself if he was to keep control. There were things to be done: help the injured, the dead.

“They'll come again, won't they?” Haim whispered. “They'll rest and forget about this and drink some courage and be fired up by their priests, and they'll come back to wipe us off the earth.”

“They won't come back,” Abe said, but he believed it even less than Haim.

“We've got to escape while we can.” Haim's red-rimmed blue eyes squeezed shut as the tears came.

Those who still had homes in the village opened their doors to those who did not, but Abe and Haim chose to sleep where they always had, wrecked or not. The night was mild and there was no threat of rain. They built a fire in their stove, spread their blankets and stared up at the starry sky through the wide chinks in the sagging roof of
straw. They were too excited to sleep. Surrounded by the ruins of their old life, they began to make plans.

“We must get in touch with the recruiter,” Abe began.