Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life (4 page)

These are the very
tefillin
that kindhearted Ite had brought as a gift from Warsaw the year before. Pristine and glistening, they might someday become as desiccated as the phylacteries, stiff from frost, that Father placed on his arm and forehead at the very outset of Mendl’s journey into maturity. It is doubtful whether the “pale Jew with green whiskers” will have anything of lasting spiritual value to impart to the thirteen-year-old boy. But such a boy, armed with a heightened visual sensibility and an uncompromising view of human relations, a boy who combines within his psyche both his father’s quiet voice and his mother’s tear-filled eyes, might someday escape his provincial fate by becoming a great Yiddish writer.

On March 17, 1952, the revered Yiddish poet H. Leivick (1888–1962) published a lengthy article in the New York daily
Der tog
about two wartime documents that had recently come to light. One was an anonymous chronicle from the Warsaw ghetto, an eyewitness report of the Great Deportation. Leivick was so scandalized by this chronicle, printed in the Warsaw-based
Bleter far geshikhte
, that he pronounced it a forgery, a product of the Jew-hating Polish Communist regime.

The very next issue of
Bleter far geshikhte
carried a fierce rebuttal by the editor, Ber Mark (1908–1966), accompanied by a facsimile of the heretofore anonymous manuscript, the identity of its author having just been established—none other than Yehoshue Perle.
⁴⁴
The manuscript was “Khurbn Varshe,” Perle’s anguished account from 1942. His fierce denunciation of his own people, his excruciatingly accurate day-by- day depiction of Warsaw Jewry in its death throes, was morally unassimilable to the postwar reader, for whom all the victims, the blameless and the bad, were shrouded in sanctity. Perle’s ghetto writings are known today only to specialists.

Thus Yehoshue Perle’s reputation as a writer rests on
Everyday Jews
alone, which has gone through five Yiddish editions: two in Warsaw, one in Moscow (typeset but never published), one in Buenos Aires, and one in Tel Aviv. Through the Yiddish original, readers have communed with a “vanished” Jewish life. When a Hebrew translation appeared in 1992, Israeli readers, in marked contrast, were enthralled by the book’s modernity and unabashed sexuality.

We now offer
Everyday Jews
to the English reader in Maier Deshell’s masterful translation, based on an earlier draft by Margaret Birstein. To obviate the need of a glossary of foreign terms and thus enable a smoother reading, the translator has incorporated the elucidation of Judaic and Slavic terms into the body of the text. Otherwise, the translation renders Perle’s distinctive diction and cadences with the utmost fidelity. Whether looking for vanished Jews or for a window into the everyday, the English reader will here—for the first time—discover a modern master. This is no everyday occurrence.

The wailing of cats outside the window of our house startled me from my sleep. I was lying with my face turned to my father’s back, inhaling the sour smell of his heavy, hairy body. Father was snoring loudly, wheezing and rattling as if trying to expel a piece of phlegm from his throat. I raised my head a little to peek across his bony shoulder.
A small kerosene lamp smoked on the dresser between Father’s and Mother’s beds. It cast a reddish circle of light on the low ceiling, throwing off quivering shadows between uneven patches of darkness.

The two brass weights of the clock must have stopped moving in the middle of the night. One of the weights reached down to the top of the dresser and came to rest. The other hung in midair like a severed leg. I heard a rooster crowing in the distance, its cries mingling with the wailing of the cats and telling me that morning was about to dawn.

I clearly saw that the other bed, in which Mother should have been sleeping, was empty. Smack in the bed’s center was a dark shape, indicating that a garment had been hastily tossed there. Mother, it seemed, hadn’t yet returned from the hospital, where she had gone last night after serving Father and me our supper.

I myself, a chubby kid swaddled in layers of clothing, had just returned from the day’s study at the Hebrew school, the
kheyder
. Father was still at the table, looking tired, mumbling the prayers of the Grace after Meals. Mother plopped down my supper, and then, wrapping herself in the large, gray woolen shawl, hurried off to the hospital to Moyshe, her youngest, and handsomest, son by her first husband.

Handsome he was indeed! Fathers of marriageable daughters had set their sights on him and sent matchmakers around. Moyshe had a round, dimpled face, like the full moon, ruddy cheeks, and a beautiful handwriting. He was already a full eighteen years old and worked for Israel the bookbinder, applying strips of paper decorated with birds and flowers, as customers requested.

He’d promised to paste those same birds and flowers on the four panes of our window and around the walls of our long, low-ceilinged dwelling. But Moyshe preferred taking girls out for walks, the flaps of his coat fluttering in the wind. He would come home so late at night that our maid, Jusza the cooper’s daughter, who lived with us and helped Mother with the household chores, always had to get up to let him in.

Who would have thought it possible? Who would have imagined it? One morning Moyshe couldn’t get up. He moaned quietly and complained of stitches in his side.

Bespectacled strangers began coming to our house and Jusza, who now washed the floor only every other day, helped them out of and back into their overcoats. The strangers told Moyshe to take deep breaths, tapped his ribs, and wrote out prescriptions, to be rushed to the pharmacy, for little bottles of oddly colored liquids.

The windowpanes frosted over with a tracery of white pine trees. Sometimes the trees took on the shape of a ship at sea, sometimes that of a little old Jew in a nightcap, with a pointy beard.

Moyshe gazed at the panes with watery eyes. His face had turned gaunt and greenish, and brown blotches appeared around his eyes.

The sweet-sour smell of his medicines and perspiration permeated the room, and Mother kept forgetting to comb out her
sheytl
, the wig worn by married women. As Moyshe kept staring at the frosted panes, Mother’s chin grew more pointed and the veins on her hand stood out more prominently. Jusza, her black hair disheveled, pattered about barefoot and repeatedly crossed herself at her iron cot in the kitchen.

Father, coming home at night, would look about him, dull-eyed, and in a nasal voice ask, “Nu, how is he—Moyshe?”

But nothing more could be done for Moyshe at home, and so one weekday afternoon, without a by your leave, he was rushed to the hospital.

Father was standing in a dark corner of the room, reciting the afternoon prayers. A cold blue haze settled on the four frozen windowpanes, whose icy coatings now looked more like those of a ship underwater. Moyshe was padded with a pillow held in place by Mother’s woolen shawl, and wrapped in the very coat he was wearing when he caught a chill.

An unknown Gentile in a yellow sheepskin helped Mother and Jusza get Moyshe out of the house. They propelled him forward slowly, step by step, as one would sometimes shift a heavy wardrobe.

Outside everything was blue—the snow, the houses, the roofs. Moyshe was placed on a low, wide sleigh where he lay flat on his back, like a narrow, dead fish, his wrapped face looking up to the sky. Mother sat at his feet, facing him, her feet dangling onto the snow. Several women, heaving deep sighs under their frozen noses, called after them, “May he return in good health!”

The sleigh set off, gliding along the soft snow, leaving behind two broad ruts, like two incisions on a live body. The farther it traveled, the smaller it grew in the deepening blue of the approaching evening.

Back in the house, Moyshe’s unmade iron bed, its rumpled bedclothes still warm, stood forlorn. Damp wisps of straw littered the floor. The medicine bottles along the window sill seemed to have moved closer together, their necks inclining toward each other in a fraternal nod, and one of Moyshe’s mother-of-pearl cufflinks peeked out from under the table, like a white, dead eye.

At the hospital they drained water from Moyshe’s side and from the same side removed two of his ribs. He lay in a separate cubicle with two tall white windows. The bare, upturned branches of a tree looked in through the bluish panes.

Mother went to the hospital every evening and stayed through the night. By the time she returned, Jusza had already chopped some wood and was blowing into the open fire with puffed-out cheeks. A gloomy chill still clung to the walls. Father would be standing by the tiny flame of the kerosene lamp, reciting Psalms, when Mother would return from the hospital in silence, her eyes red from lack of sleep. She would immediately stick her head under the tin hood that hung over the stove and that resembled a peasant’s cap, and she would start fixing Father’s breakfast, weeping softly into the pots still unwashed from the night before.

Dipping a morsel of bread into salt, Father would ask from across the table, “Nu, Frimet?”

With her head hunched between her shoulders and talking into the pots, Mother would answer, “He’s in need of God’s mercy.”

This morning Mother wasn’t standing under the hood above the stove. Outside, the cats seemed to have tired of wailing. Somewhere in the empty darkness of the room one could hear the sharp scratching of a mouse. The cot in the kitchen where Jusza slept creaked, but the mouse went on scratching. Jusza must have hurled something across the empty space for there followed a sound like the cracking of an earthen pot. I pulled up my legs and huddled closer against Father’s back.

All of a sudden there was a dreadful pounding on the door. Jusza leaped up to open it and, like a cork popping from a keg, a drawn-out shriek pierced the room.

“Leyzershi! Leyzer-my-crown!”

Dad’s wheezing snore stopped as if throttled midway. I sat bolt upright, and saw Mother standing in the middle of the room, rocking from side to side, clutching her head between both hands, then dropping them limply to her sides as if gripped by an unbearable pain.

“Such a young tree! Such a noble soul!” Mother wailed, still rocking from side to side.

Now Father sat up abruptly.

“Hah! What happened?” his hoarse, drowsy voice echoed around the room.

“He’s gone!” Mother cried, spreading her arms as if crucified. “Leyzershi, I’ve lost him!”

Jusza stood beside Mother in a long nightgown, her tousled hair like a black sheep’s wool, clawing at her cheeks with both hands, all but tearing the flesh from them. She turned up the lamp. On the ceiling the quivering red ring widened like a strangely distended eye. A draft swept through the room. I got out of bed and dressed quickly. Father set down a pair of blue feet onto the cold floor and groped for his slippers.

The four small windowpanes turned blue and behind their blueness the faces of strangers suddenly appeared. A stooped old woman in a red, feather-strewn nightcap slowly sidled up to Mother and, inclining her head like a napping hen, gazed straight into her face. Our upstairs neighbor, a shrill-voiced woman, came running down the stairs in unlaced shoes, their tongues flapping.

Then, fair-haired Fayvl, who sold us a quart of milk every morning straight from the cow, arrived with his battered can. Today, nobody went out to meet him, pot in hand. Two women, total strangers, pressed in behind him. One of them, a hunchback, looked around the room as if she’d lost someone there. The other, in steel-rimmed spectacles attached to her ears with two white ribbons, like a teacher in a girls’ school, shuffled about the room as if she owned it. She whispered something to Father through narrow shrunken lips.

Father gave her a sidelong glance, raised his black beard, and muttered, “Yes, yes … Frimet’s son, my stepson.”

By now it was brighter, but no one turned off the lamp on the dresser. The woman in the spectacles, pointing at the clock, said, “It stopped. The clock …”

At that moment the door burst open and Aunt Miriam almost fell into the room, her mouth pursed into tiny wrinkles that looked like deep-set veins, her small nose pointy and red.

I was surprised. All her life Aunt Miriam used to speak softly, with winks rather than words. Talking loudly, she maintained, was a Gentile custom. Jewish children ought to speak in a quiet manner, like the biblical Mother Rachel. Our Mother Rachel, she explained, was soft-spoken and never raised her voice. Now that same Aunt Miriam barged into our room with an alarmed, panic-stricken look. The shout about to explode from her lips was signaled in her round, wide-open eyes. Mother, sitting in a chair, completely crushed, her head buried in her hands, seemed to have sensed that someone dear to her was in the room. Before actually setting eyes on Aunt Miriam, she leaped up and, with hands held out stiffly, threw her head back and burst into a loud wail.

“Sister dear, save my child!”

As though she had been waiting for her cue, Aunt Miriam let out a wail that pierced through to the ribs.

Father had stationed himself by the window, his face to the glass.

Mother’s tears not only flowed from her eyes but also seemed to gush from her heavy, frozen garments. Suddenly she stood motionless in the middle of the room, as if struck dumb. The room became very quiet and she looked about her with inflamed, frenzied eyes.

“Frimet! Oh, Frimet!” Aunt Miriam cried out and rushed to her sister.

But Mother didn’t seem to have heard her. She had changed into a different person, taller, straighter, unlike the crushed woman she had been a moment ago.

The people in the room huddled closer together. A slight tremor, barely noticeable, passed over their heads.

At that instant, Mother tore herself from the spot, lunged toward the wardrobe, tore open the doors, not unlike—may God forgive the comparison—a worshiper who opens the doors of the Holy Ark during services in the synagogue. Only then did she burst into tears again.

“What good are they to my child now that he’s gone! Come and take them, good people!” she said, and, in an outburst of frenzy, started flinging Moyshe’s clothes about. “Pray for my poor child. Let God revoke this evil decree!”