Jewels and Ashes (12 page)

When the Zabludowski home was bombed at the outset of the Great War, reporters who came to survey the damage were able to note the exact time the shrapnel had struck, from clocks that had stopped at the moment of impact. The Zabludowskis moved to Nieronies Lane, within a neighbourhood of derelict cottages and tenements near the Bialystok fish market. Father depicts it as a world of snarling cats, skirmishes between rival gangs over control of territory, police raids, and nightly gatherings of unemployed youths who sang bawdy ditties and traded jokes and insults. It was a great spectacle, a theatre of poverty. The young rascals had talent. They were artists in their own fashion, says father, and their songs had rhyme and rhythm, a poetry of sorts; they were bards of the Jewish underworld in a time of hunger and desperation.

Father has now warmed to the subject. He draws me with him to Nieronies Lane. Just several doors away lived the prostitute Feigele. She would receive her clients at home, rather than on the streets as did those lower on the social ladder. Not so far distant, in the Chanaykes, the widow Zlatke presided over a brothel which included girls of White Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish origin. ‘But they all spoke a common language of caresses and sighs', father emphasizes. There was always a light shining at Zlatke's, regardless of the wars, pogroms, revolutions, and rebellions that regularly swept by.

Apart from small-time crooks, there were chronically unemployed weavers, factory workers, and artisans who continued to eke out a living from their crammed workshops. Ah yes, father recalls. Next door lived Zeidel, the master wood-carver. He had bloodshot eyes, and a wry smile that seemed to mock the absurdity of existence. For hours on end he would engrave flowers, biblical scenes, geometrical shapes, and folk symbols on building ornaments and furniture. His workshop was littered with timber shavings and a fantastic array of carving implements.

An assortment of characters wandered the neighbourhood. They strutted their obsessions in full view and left themselves open to taunts and barbs. In a world gone mad, says father, it was difficult to know the boundaries between ‘normal' and ‘insane'. Take, for instance, Moishe Shloimele. He would dress as a woman, and walk unsteadily and bow-legged on high-heeled shoes so worn down on the sides that his ankles seemed to be forever falling flat on the pavement. He looked like a crippled chicken, and bands of children followed him shouting obscenities while imitating his awkward movements.
Yet
he was a harmless soul, gentle in manner and bearing, always drawn towards the domain of women. He made a meagre living by cleaning kitchens, and had become expert in removing stains from pots and pans, and putting larders in order. The neighbourhood prostitutes were far gentler towards him than were the hoodlums. He loved to be treated like a lady; and they obliged by taking him into their houses of pleasure, where they sat drinking tea and gossiping between stints with clients.

Father makes a distinction between born crazies and those who became so due to the circumstances of their lives. Whereas Moishe Shloimele was a ‘geborene', of those who had been born to their peculiar fate, Chane Yolkeshe was a ‘gevorene'. Little rhymes pepper father's monologues, and he recites them with the delight of a child, repeating them over and over as if reluctant to let go of their simple musicality:

Moishe Shloimele was a geborene;

Chane Yolkeshe, a gevorene.

Chane Yolkeshe came from a family of porters and wagon drivers. She had a brother, a murderer, who was nicknamed ‘Yolke'. Since she also displayed wayward tendencies, she was called ‘Yolkeshe'. She would roam the streets and approach women to demand a few coins. If they refused she lifted their dresses to shame them. This was her technique, and it often proved successful. She had a masculine build, a deep voice, and there were those who claimed she had been possessed by an evil spirit, a dybbuk. Thereafter it was common in Bialystok to call an aggressive woman a ‘Chane Yolkeshe'. ‘But I never made fun of her', father claims. ‘To this day I can clearly see the desperation that lurked on her face with increasing intensity as the Great War dragged on.'

Yet, through it all, communal life continued. When he wasn't scavenging for food, father attended a succession of cheders and Talmud Torahs, where he was initiated into the mysteries of orthodox Jewish life. It had begun several years before the War. His first tutor was Reb Eli, a tall man with a long black beard who would threaten his five-year-old pupils with a kanchik, a whip of dangling leather strips with a calf's-bone handle. Reb Eli's task was to teach the alphabet, and the most basic of prayers.
‘Baruch ato adonai aluheinu
, Blessed be thee oh Lord', he intoned with the toddlers in his charge. One way or another, by stealth, smiles, threats, and bribes, he beat this knowledge into their young heads.

When Reb Eli had accomplished his task, father attended Lubelski's cheder where he learned to read prayer books; and since the cheder had reformist tendencies, he was also taught some Russian and Hebrew. Lubelski was a thin man with an emaciated face from which there sprouted a blond goatee. He had developed a unique method of teaching languages to youngsters. He would stroll by the desks, and confiscate toys and playthings — pen knives, slingshots, chestnut marbles, whistles made of plum stones — which were added to those he had stored in a large wooden trunk. He would take some of them out daily and ask the class: ‘Well, my friends, what have we here?' And his pupils would have to describe the objects in Hebrew or Russian. They quickly came to know, of course, that it was unwise to take any toys with them to cheder. But soon enough they moved on, and a fresh batch of youngsters would contribute their toys to Lubelski's growing collection.

Whereas Lubelski had been mild mannered, with a perpetual grin on his face, even as he snatched away toys, father's next teacher, Kabatchnik, was perpetually angry. He not only threatened pupils with his kanchik, but he used it, especially on such carefree and undisciplined students as father. ‘To tell the truth', he confides, ‘I wasn't very interested in my studies. I preferred to be outside, on the streets or roaming the forests.'

When the Zabludowski family moved to Nieronies Lane, elementary school assumed an entirely different appeal. In time of war it was a relief to get out of home for any reason, including school. In even the poorest neighbourhoods there were Talmud Torahs and cheders, sponsored by rich philanthropists for the children of unemployed workers and artisans.

Reb Mendel from Orly was a melancholy man who spoke in a monotone, as if to himself, while he introduced his students to the five books of Moses, the Pentateuch. There was no place for discussion in his classroom. Everything was dictated, copied, learned by heart, while Reb Mendel paced around and lectured to the walls and ceiling. But he would suddenly come to life, pounce upon a student, tweak him by the ear, and ask the stunned boy to recite a portion of Torah or answer an obscure question on a text. ‘Ignoramus!', Reb Mendel would exclaim in mock despair when the wrong answer was stuttered nervously; then he would resume his pacing and his colourless explication of the scriptures.

By 1917 father had graduated to the classes of Reb Chaim, who taught Gemara — the commentaries — and the finer points of biblical interpretation. Reb Chaim was a learned man, with a huge reservoir of traditional knowledge. He taught in the ancient manner, in a sing-song voice, while swaying at the pulpit. He laced his sermons with parables, anecdotes, digressions, and sharp insights. He initiated his pupils into a private universe of Jewish lore that had survived two thousand years of exile, to be recreated again and again, even in mud-splattered alleys such as Nieronies Lane. There was virtually no street without a synagogue or house of study, where devotees prayed three times a day and studied in their spare time — regardless of the upheavals taking place in the outside world.

Late night was the time to penetrate the mysteries. Study groups gathered to contemplate the scriptures. They sat around tables, eyes riveted on their Gemaras, and kept themselves awake until dawn with sweet tea and cigarettes. There were those, father tells me, who awoke at midnight to chant the psalms of King Solomon, or to delve into the Kabbala and the Zohar, the Book of Splendour — the writings of mystics who had sought to experience the very core of Creation.

On Simchas Torah the many houses of prayer in Bialystok came to life with celebration. The Torah scrolls were taken from the Ark of the Law and paraded around the bima, the pulpit where the last chapter of the annual cycle of readings had just been completed. Groups of congregants filed from house to house, where they were treated to delicacies such as cabbage soaked in honey and butter. Father tagged along with the boys of Nieronies Lane, even though, during the Great War, the feasts had been reduced to a pittance.

Father's memory unravels like the scrolls that were paraded on Simchas Torah. He recalls the monthly sanctification of the moon, when orthodox Jews gathered outside, on the first Sabbath night after the New Moon, to bless the renewal of its light. The Hasidim of Nieronies Lane prayed with such fervour that, whenever they came to the ‘amens', their voices resounded throughout the neighbourhood with an emotional force which seemed to spring from the depths of the earth.

1918. Europe is falling apart. Bialystok is a battleground for rival armies. Father would make his way from Nieronies Lane to the cottage of his grandfather Reb Moishe Beinish Liberman and his grandmother Breine. She was a small, plump woman, with a creased forehead poking out from under her wig; and she was extremely pious, alert to the most minute transgression of ritual law. As soon as father entered the house she would ask: ‘
Nu
? Have you said your prayers?' In contrast, Moshe Beinish was far softer; a kindly man, straight backed, with a long beard. He was always dressed in a black caftan, with a peaked cap beneath which his eyes were constantly downcast. Yet, no matter how hard times were, he maintained his dignified bearing and would urge: ‘Have faith. Always maintain faith and all troubles will be overcome.'

Moishe Beinish had taken on the task of preparing father for his bar mitzvah. For three months they would meet weekly and walk together to the nearby house of prayer, of which grandfather was the caretaker. They sat in the empty prayer-hall, where Moishe Beinish showed his grandson how to wind on phylacteries and pronounce the portion of Torah he was to recite on the day of initiation.

Yet it was at this time, as Moishe Beinish was inducting him into the basic procedures of adult religious life, that father was being drawn towards a quite different God. This religion too had its many sects and factions, rival schools of thought and preachers, each proclaiming the greatness of their particular brand of socialism. Since the news of the Czar's overthrow had swept Bialystok, the streets had been alight with longing for a new form of redemption. A higher truth was about to be born out of the wreckage of the old order. Father's elder brother Zachariah had become a convert to Bolshevism and, with his furtive comings and goings, the dilapidated cottage on Nieronies Lane became, like so many others, permeated by a sense of conspiracy and agitation.

According to father's freehand maps, this is where Nieronies Lane was located, more or less. At any rate it fits the description, a neighbourhood of narrow alleys that I follow randomly until I meander into a cul-de-sac of cottages which look as though they have stood here since well before the turn of the century.

An elderly woman pokes her head out of a doorway. She is stout, with fully-rounded hips, thick muscular arms softened by a cushion of fat, and a jovial moon face above which arctic white hair sweeps up into a bun. She exudes the raw health of a peasant, and she gazes at me with a curiosity that gives way to an invitation issued with the wave of a hand. I follow her through the front entrance, which leads directly into a cramped kitchen dominated by a wood stove cluttered with kettles, pots, and pans, some of which sizzle and jump among others which remain mute beneath their charcoal coats.

She ushers me into an adjacent room. Rarely have I seen so much crammed into such a confined space. There are two large beds, a circular table, and an old Singer sewing machine, all of which are strewn with clothes and materials. Everywhere there are dolls: some sit on the window-sill, others lie naked on the floor, while a large company lie huddled on pillows. Clay pots sprout jungles of ferns; a television set squats on the floor beneath carvings of herons and ducks, and the walls are covered with pictures of kittens, ancestors, saints, and dogs. Several live cats lie curled up on piles of material. Dominating all else is an altar crammed with framed photographs of the Pope, an army of Christs adorned with crowns of thorns, the Virgin Mother in various guises, and mountains of flowers: plastic flowers, fresh flowers in vases and jars, paintings and posters of flowers. ‘A wonderful mess', the babushka says cheerfully, as she catches me scanning the room. She serves cups of tea, and biscuits on stained and cracked plates which she places on the table, after clearing it with one sweep of the hand.

A second elderly woman enters, carrying a plate of stale bread rolls. Her face is thin, her complexion waxen, and her smile fixed but kindly. ‘My dearest comrade', she murmurs, pointing towards my hostess. She is her partner in a sewing business , and the companion with whom she shares this room.

As we sip tea an agile dwarf of a man darts into the cottage. His face glows a drinker's scarlet, his bloodshot eyes shift nervously from person to person. The old ladies wink at me. Watch your bag, they indicate in sign language, this man has nimble fingers. Within ten minutes, with a deft hop and a skip, he is gone. We remain in the darkening room in silence, two babushkas munching bread rolls with their unexpected guest from abroad, in a disintegrating house, within a neighbourhood that was once childhood home to my father. They take delight in feeding me, continually bringing more food to the circular table, as if they wish to welcome back a son who has returned after an absence of many years.