A Tale of Love and Darkness (24 page)

My mother remembered her Grandpa Ephraim Mussman as an impressive patriarchal figure. His face seemed sublime to her on account of the long snowy beard that flowed down majestically like that of a prophet and the thick white eyebrows that gave him a biblical splendor. His blue eyes sparkled like pools in this snowy landscape, with a happy, childlike smile. "Grandpa Ephraim looked just like God. I mean the way every child imagines God. He gradually came to appear before the whole world like a Slavic saint, a rustic wonder worker, something between the image of the old Tolstoy and that of Santa Claus."

Ephraim Mussman was in his fifties when he became an impressive if somewhat vague old sage. He was less and less capable of distinguishing between a man of God and God himself. He started to mind-read, tell fortunes, spout morality, interpret dreams, grant absolution, perform pious acts, and take pity. From morning to evening he sat over a glass of tea at the desk in the mill office and simply took pity. Apart from taking pity, he did virtually nothing all day.

He always had a smell of expensive scent about him, and his hands were soft and warm. ("But I," my Aunt Sonia said at eighty-five with ill-disguised jubilation, "I was the one he loved best of all his grandchildren! I was his favorite! That's because I was such a little
krasavitsa
, such a little coquette, like a little Frenchwoman, and I knew how to twist him around my little finger, though actually any girl could twist his handsome head around her little finger, he was so sweet and absentminded, so childish, and so emotional, the slightest thing brought tears to his eyes. And as a little girl I used to sit on his lap for hours on end, combing his magnificent white beard over and over, and I always had enough patience to listen to all the rubbish he used to spout. And on top of everything else I was given his mother's name. That's why Grandpa Ephraim loved me the best of all, and sometimes he used to call me Little Mother.")

He was quiet and good-tempered, a gentle, amiable man, rather a chatterbox, but people liked to look at him because of an amused, childlike, captivating smile that constantly flicked across his wrinkled face. ("Grandpa Ephraim was like this: the moment you looked at him, you started to smile yourself! Everybody started smiling, willy nilly, the moment he came into the room. Even the portraits on the walls started smiling the moment he came into the room!") Fortunately for him, his son Naphtali Hertz loved him unconditionally, and always forgave him or pretended not to notice whenever he got the accounts mixed up or opened the cash box in the office without permission and took out a couple of notes to hand out, like God in Hasidic folk tales, to grateful peasants after telling their fortunes and treating them to a moralizing sermon.

For days on end the old man used to sit in the office staring out the window, contentedly watching his son's mill at work. Perhaps because he looked "just like God," he actually saw himself in his later years as a kind of deity. He was humble yet arrogant, perhaps a little feebleminded in his old age. He sometimes offered his son all kinds of advice and suggestions for improving and expanding the business, but most of the time he forgot what he had said after an hour or so and proffered new advice instead. He drank one glass of tea after another, glanced absentmindedly at the accounts, and if strangers mistook him for the boss, he did not correct them but chatted to them pleasantly about the
wealth of the Rothschilds or the terrible hardships of the coolies in China (which he called
Kitai).
His conversations normally lasted for seven or eight hours.

His son indulged him. Wisely, cautiously, and patiently Naphtali Hertz expanded the business, opening branches here and there, making a little money. He married off one sister, Sarah, took in another sister, Jenny, and finally managed to marry her off too. ("To a carpenter, Yasha! A nice boy, even if he was very simple! But what other choice was there for Jenny? After all, she was nearly forty!") He employed his nephew Shimshon at a decent wage, and Jenny's Yasha the carpenter too, he spread his largesse over all his brothers and sisters and kinsfolk; his business prospered, and his Ukrainian and Russian customers bowed to him respectfully, with their hats pressed to their chests, and addressed him as Gertz Yefremovich (Hertz son of Ephraim). He even had a Russian assistant, an impoverished young aristocrat who suffered from ulcers. With his help my grandfather extended his business even further, and opened branches as far away as Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg.

In 1909 or 1910, at the age of twenty-one, Naphtali Hertz Mussman married Itta Gedalyevna Schuster, the capricious daughter of Gedaliah Schuster and his wife Pearl (née Gibor). Of my great-grandmother Pearl, I was informed by Aunt Haya that she was a tough woman, "as shrewd as seven traders," with a sixth sense for village intrigues, sharp-tongued, fond of money and power, and desperately mean. ("The story goes that she always collected every lock of hair that was cut off at the hairdresser's for stuffing cushions. She cut every lump of sugar into four precise little cubes with a knife.") As for great-grandfather Gedaliah, his granddaughter Sonia remembered him as a grumpy, thickset man, overflowing with appetites. His beard was black and unkempt, and his manner was noisy and domineering. It was said of him that he could belch loud enough to rattle the windowpanes, and that his roar was like the sound of rolling barrels. (But he was scared to death of animals, including dogs, cats, and even kids and calves.)

Their daughter Itta, my grandmother, always behaved like a woman whom life had not treated as gently as she deserved. She was pretty when she was young, and had many suitors, and it seems she was pampered.
She ruled her own three daughters with an iron hand, and yet behaved as though she wanted them to treat her like a younger sister or a sweet little child. Even in her old age she continued to treat her grandchildren to all sorts of little bribes and coquettish gestures, as though begging us to make a fuss of her, to be captivated by her charms, to pay court to her. At the same time, she was capable of behaving with polite ruthlessness.

The marriage of Itta and Hertz Mussman endured, with gritted teeth, through sixty-five years of insults, wrongs, humiliations, truces, shame, restraint, and pursed-lipped mutual politeness. My maternal grandparents were desperately different and remote from each other, yet this desperation was always kept under lock and key. Nobody in my family talked about it, and if I ever managed to sense it in my childhood, it was like a faint whiff of flesh being singed on the other side of a wall.

Their three daughters, Haya, Fania, and Sonia, sought ways to relieve the misery of their parents' married life. All three unhesitatingly took their father's side against their mother. All three loathed and feared their mother; they were ashamed of her and considered her a depress-ingly vulgar and domineering mischief maker. When they quarreled, they would say to each other accusingly: "Just look at yourself! You're becoming exactly like Maman!"

Only when her parents were old and when she was getting old herself did Aunt Haya manage finally to separate her parents, putting her father in a home for the elderly in Givatayim and her mother in a nursing home near Nes Tsiyona. She did this despite the protests of Aunt Sonia, who thought such enforced separation was totally wrong. But by then the schism between my two aunts was at its height. They did not speak a single word to each other for nearly thirty years, from the late 1950s until Aunt Haya's death in 1989. Aunt Sonia did attend her sister's funeral, where she remarked to us sadly: "I forgive her for everything. And I pray in my heart that God too will forgive her—and it won't be easy for Him, because he will have an awful lot to forgive her for." Aunt Haya, a year before her death, had said the very same thing to me about her sister Sonia.

The fact is that all three Mussman sisters, in their different ways, were in love with their father. My grandfather, Naphtali Hertz (whom
we all, his daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren, called Papa), was a warmhearted, paternal, kindly, fascinating man. He had a swarthy complexion and a warm voice, and he had inherited his father's clear blue eyes, those piercing sharp eyes that concealed a smile. Whenever he spoke to you, you had the impression that he could plumb the depth of your feelings, guessing between the lines, grasping instantly what you had said and why you had said it, and at the same time discerning whatever it was you were trying unsuccessfully to conceal from him. He would sometimes shoot you an unexpected, mischievous smile, almost accompanied by a wink, as though to embarrass you slightly while being embarrassed on your behalf, but forgiving you because after all, when it comes down to it, a human being is only human.

He considered all human beings to be reckless children who brought great disappointment and suffering upon themselves and each other, all of us trapped in an unending, unsubtle comedy that would generally end badly. All roads led to suffering. Consequently virtually everyone, in Papa's view, deserved compassion, and most of their deeds were worthy of forgiveness, including all sorts of machinations, pranks, deceptions, pretensions, manipulations, false claims, and pretenses. From all these he would absolve you with his faint, mischievous smile, as though saying (in Yiddish):
Nu
, what.

The only thing that tested Papa's amused tolerance were acts of cruelty. These he abhorred. His merry blue eyes clouded over at the news of wicked deeds. "An evil beast? What does the expression mean?" he would reflect in Yiddish. "No beast is evil. No beast is capable of evil. The beasts have yet to invent evil. That is our monopoly, the lords of creation. So maybe we ate the wrong apple in the Garden of Eden after all? Maybe between the tree of life and the tree of knowledge there was another tree growing there in the Garden of Eden, a poisonous tree that is not mentioned in scripture, the tree of evil" (the tree of
rishes
, he called it in Yiddish) "and that was the one we accidentally ate from? That scoundrel of a serpent deceived Eve, he promised her that this was definitely the tree of knowledge, but it was really the tree of
rishes
he led her to. Perhaps if we had stuck to the trees of life and knowledge, we would never have been thrown out of the garden?"

And then, with his eyes restored to their merry sparkling blue, he went on to explain clearly, in his slow, warm voice and his picturesque,
orotund Yiddish, what Jean-Paul Sartre was to discover only years later: "But what is hell? What is paradise? Surely it is all inside. In our homes. You can find hell and paradise in every room. Behind every door. Under every double blanket. It's like this. A little wickedness, and people are hell to each other. A little compassion, a little generosity, and people find paradise in each other.

"I said a little compassion and generosity, but I didn't say love: I'm not such a believer in universal love. Love of everybody for everybody—we should maybe leave that to Jesus. Love is another thing altogether. It is nothing whatever like generosity and nothing whatever like compassion. On the contrary. Love is a curious mixture of opposites, a blend of extreme selfishness and total devotion. A paradox! Besides which, love, everybody is always talking about love, love, but love isn't something you choose, you catch it, like a disease, you get trapped in it, like a disaster. So what is it that we do choose? What do human beings have to choose between every minute of the day? Generosity or meanness. Every little child knows that, and yet wickedness still doesn't come to an end. How can you explain that? It seems we got it all from the apple that we ate back then: we ate a poisoned apple."

THE CITY
of Rovno (Polish Rowne, German Rowno), an important railway junction, grew up around the palaces and moated parks of the princely family of Lubomirsky. The River Uste crossed the city from south to north. Between the river and the marsh stood the citadel, and in the days of the Russians there was still a beautiful lake with swans. The skyline of Rovno was formed by the citadel, the Lubomirsky palace, and a number of Catholic and Orthodox churches, one adorned with twin towers. The city boasted some sixty thousand inhabitants before the Second World War, of whom Jews constituted the majority, and the rest were Ukrainians, Poles, Russians, and a handful of Czechs and Germans. Several thousand more Jews lived in the nearby towns and villages. The villages were surrounded by orchards and vegetable gardens, pastures and fields of wheat and rye that sometimes shuddered or rippled in the breeze. The silence of the fields was broken from time to
time by the howl of a locomotive. Occasionally you could hear Ukrainian peasant girls singing in the gardens. From a distance it sounded like wailing.

Wide, flat plains extended as far as the eye could see, here and there arching up in gentle hills, crisscrossed by rivers and pools, dappled with marshes and forests. In the city itself there were three or four "European" streets with a handful of official buildings in neoclassical style and an almost unbroken facade of two-story apartment buildings with wrought-iron balconies, where the middle class lived. A row of small shops occupied the ground floor of these merchants' homes. But most of the side roads were unpaved tracks; they were muddy in winter and dusty in summer. Here and there they were edged with rickety wooden walkways. No sooner had you turned into one of these side roads than you were surrounded by low, broad-shouldered Slavic houses, with thick walls and deep eaves, surrounded by allotments and innumerable ramshackle wooden huts, some of which had sunk up to their windows in the earth and had grass growing on their roofs.

In 1919 a Hebrew secondary school was opened in Rovno by Tar-buth, a Jewish educational organization, together with a primary school and several kindergartens. My mother and her sisters were educated in Tarbuth schools. Hebrew and Yiddish newspapers were published in Rovno in the 1920s and 1930s, ten or twelve Jewish political parties contended frantically with each other, and Hebrew clubs for literature, Judaism, science, and adult education flourished. The more anti-Semitism increased in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s, the stronger Zionism and Hebrew education grew, and at the same time (with no contradiction) the stronger became the pull of secularism and of non-Jewish culture.*