Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life (45 page)

“Teacher, sir,” he said, “they threw stones at us yesterday.”

“Who did?” Teacher Mattias stuck out his yellow, stained mustache.

“Itzik did and so did Mendl. Everybody threw stones.”

Teacher Mattias delivered smacks to jaws with his fist, squeezed ears, and rasped drunkenly, “Scum! Hooligans! I’ll get you for this!”

It was a bitter life. We all prayed that Teacher Mattias, Moyshele the tavern owner’s son, and the blackboard should all meet with an unnatural end.

But of what use were our prayers, if Teacher Mattias went on drinking in Moyshele’s father’s tavern, if the blackboard continued to wobble on its unsteady, drunken legs, and Moyshele kept squealing on us, even more than before?

Our curses did Teacher Mattias no harm whatsoever. On the contrary, he thrived on them. But death did catch up with Reb Yankele, despite the fact that all of us kept blessing him.

That day, it was sleeting. The shutters outside our windows tore at their chains, groaning like the sick. Father didn’t go out on his rounds. Mother wouldn’t let me go to the
shkole
.

“God forbid, you’ll catch cold,” she said. “Stay home.”

But that day I was drawn more than ever to the
shkole
. The night before I had been awakened by a feeling of pressure on my heart. I thought I heard my late brother Moyshe moving about in the kitchen, looking for something among the pots. I heard mice scratching and, for the life of me, couldn’t tell whether the clock had stopped or not.

I said nothing about this, but when Mother told me to stay home, I was overcome by panic. I told her that I simply had to go because this was the day that Reb Dovid would be calling on me to translate the weekly portion of the Torah.

The rain and snow kept slapping me in the face, and the wind kept tugging me back as if it, too, didn’t want me to go to the
shkole
that day.

But I forged on stubbornly. I could still feel the pressure on my heart of the night before. I stepped up my pace, but was still late. No one said anything to me when I finally arrived. No one even saw me come in.

An extraordinary scene greeted my eyes. Not a single boy was sitting in his right place. There was no studying going on. Everybody was rushing about. Doors stood open. Reb Dovid was limping around the room in little, fast hops on his short leg and making motions with his hands. Teacher Mattias was already present, looking gloomy and shrunken. He kept lighting one cigarette after another, not smoking any one to the end. Every few minutes a different boy ran up to Reb Dovid, said something to him, and waited with an alarmed look on his face. Skinny, green-faced Yukele was crying quietly. Could Moyshele, the tavern owner’s son, have pinched him that hard?

Over there was Moyshele himself, all alone, seemingly coming toward me. I wasn’t speaking to him, so why should he be approaching me? But Moyshele and his bloated belly pushed on, his soft, girlish face as white as dough.

“Don’t you know?” he said in a constricted voice. “Reb Yankele died.”

“Oh, my God!”

I couldn’t tell whether it was I who had cried out or Moyshele, but the pressure on my heart suddenly rose to my throat and I began to choke. I didn’t notice Yukele coming over to us. I only felt his small, green hand on my shoulder.

“Reb Yankele! Reb Yankele!” he sobbed.

Reb Yankele had died suddenly in the middle of the night, probably from a pressure on his heart that had traveled, so they said, to his throat and choked him to death.

“Are you all here?” Reb Dovid’s cracked voice suddenly called out.

“Yes!”

“All of you, form a line and keep quiet.”

Teacher Mattias stood with his head lowered, staring down at our feet.

“Are anybody’s shoes leaking?” he asked in Yiddish, in a deep, completely sober voice.

“No.”

“You will all have to go to the funeral.”

“Alright.”

Reb Dovid raised a hand, an empty one now, free of his leather strap.

“Children,” he cried out, “your teacher, Reb Yankele, is dead!”

“He’s gone,” Yukele sobbed.

Reb Dovid closed his eyes, wiped his forehead, and nodded slowly,

“Yes, he’s gone.”

Teacher Mattias told us to go to the Skarszew barrier gate, line up three abreast, and wait for him and Reb Dovid to join us.

In the early afternoon, Reb Yankele’s body was carried out of his daughter’s house. That tall, stoop-shouldered Jew now lay in a small, narrow coffin that swayed to and fro amid a sea of slowly moving black hats, over which towered the silk top hat of the rabbi and the squashed, fur-trimmed hat of the religious-court head, Reb Aron.

This was on a Friday. The wind, which earlier that morning had torn the tin coverings from roofs, had now quieted down. The snow and rain held off for a while, no doubt waiting for the burial to be over. Stores shut down hastily. People followed the funeral procession for some distance, begging forgiveness.

The entire
shkole
, with Reb Dovid and Teacher Mattias leading, was walking three abreast ahead of the coffin.
With all our hearts and the deepest feeling we could summon, we walked through the cold, intoning the words of the Psalmist, “Justice goes before Him, justice goes before Him …”

That day was the first time that I’d ever been inside a cemetery. It seemed to me as though even the living themselves might not return from there, and I kept looking around, to make sure they weren’t closing the gate.

Here, next to a tree, in his final resting place, they would be laying our teacher, Reb Yankele, the former timber merchant, the master of Scripture, the great scholar. He was sure to be greeted by his two beloved prophets, Isaiah and Ezekiel. Certainly the prophet Jeremiah would weep over the death of such a fine, decent Jew.

But why were they lowering this fine, decent Jew into such a wet, narrow pit? Why was the gravedigger in such a hurry? Didn’t he know that someone as honorable as the deceased should be treated in as gentle a manner as was Reb Yankele himself?

But it was Friday, and the Sabbath was approaching. The wind had subsided. The rain held off. The rabbi and the religious-court head were long gone. The remaining mourners were hurrying to get back to town. Women sat themselves down in the carriages. The coachmen haggled over the fare. Suddenly, the wind, too, remembered that the funeral was over and whistled through the tops of poplars. The sleet again began to come down. Reb Yankele’s daughter, son-in-law, and their two young boys left the graveside. Only Teacher Mattias and small, green-faced Yankele remained, standing there, until two wax Sabbath candles appeared in the window of Zalman the gravedigger’s hut, signifying the onset of the Sabbath.

At the
shkole
, for some time afterward, one could still hear the squeaking of Reb Yankele’s boots. After his death, the lamps burned with a pale, yellow light. It didn’t help when their glass was replaced, nor when the kerosene, bought at a different store, was refilled. Somehow, everything looked pale yellow to us—the wall with the map, the portrait of Moses Montefiore, even Reb Dovid’s face with its sunken eyes.

Teacher Mattias smoked even more than before, his voice rattling in his throat. He went on smacking chins and pulling ears. Even Moyshele, the tavern owner’s son, felt the occasional taste of his hand. Teacher Mattias himself, as time went on, grew shorter by half a head.

We now studied Scripture with Reb Yankele’s son-in-law, that blond young man, a follower of Jewish Enlightenment, a
maskil
, and a Zionist. The son-in-law had a white, pinched face and a sparse, pitiful beard. His voice was monotonous, and when he translated a verse it came out dry and thin. It was said of him that he fed us stale
hallah
and cold grits.

That was the truth. In his droning, somber voice, the words of the prophets resembled tired flies, clinging to cold windowpanes with their last bit of strength. He never hit us, never rebuked anyone. He merely walked between the desks, tapping the tops with his soft, bamboo cane.

No one knew his name. In the first weeks, he was simply referred to as Reb Yankele’s son-in-law. Later, somebody dubbed him Stale Hallah, and the epithet stuck.

He was neither liked nor disliked. He would enter the classroom with dancing steps, tap with his cane for a few hours, translate some verses in his droning tones, and then hurry away with those same dancing steps and without so much as a “Good night.”

We were told that Stale Hallah’s tenure was only temporary, that for the new term he would be replaced by another teacher, somebody with a sharp mind, a graduate of the gymnasium for whom my grandfather had once sewn a blue uniform with silver buttons.

The new term started, but Stale Hallah stayed on, and my grandfather stopped sewing blue uniforms altogether.

Passover had come and gone. The spring mornings shimmered over the orchard, warm and blue. The house still smelled of fresh bed linen and freshly scrubbed floors. Who would ever have expected, at a time of such blue mornings, that Grandpa would die? I had always thought that Dovid-Froyke, with his little songs and his merry ways, would be the last one in town to die. Now he lay on the floor, long and narrow, like a fish on its back.

The door to Grandpa’s little house stood wide open. Strangers wandered around inside. Wladek, that foolish Gentile, sat on the pump outside in the courtyard, two empty pails beside him, shaking his matted beard and muttering to himself, “Pani tailor’s gone, gone.”

Mother, who had left the house at dawn, her hair disheveled and her shoes unbuttoned, now lay stretched out on Grandma’s rumpled bed, her face buried in the pillow, neither sleeping nor weeping, but making hiccuping, gasping noises.

Aunt Miriam, Grandpa’s other daughter, stood at her father’s worktable, speaking to it in her thick voice, as if to a living creature.

“Who will now work by your side? Who will now sing by your side?” she repeated over and over.

The words seemed to issue of themselves, as though she weren’t present. Then, suddenly, as if recalling something, she stretched out her hands into the room and, standing fixed to the spot, cried out, “Let me join my father! Let me join my father!”

But how could her father help her when he was no longer in our domain? He was no longer her father nor my grandfather, but merely an inert body, a corpse.

From under the black cloth that was covering him, his two big toes stuck out, thin and yellow, tied with straw. Strange women were sitting in the room. People were reciting Grandpa’s praises. On the stove in the kitchen the chipped pots stood unattended. But no one took notice of any of this. All one saw were the two big toes and Grandma Rokhl, standing over her dead husband, tiny and shrunken, shaking her small head over the black covering.

“Dovid,” she wailed, “whom are you leaving me with? Who will make the
kiddush
over the wine? You were snuffed out like a candle. If only you had said to me, ‘Rokhl, I don’t feel so well.’ But you simply turned to the wall and … that was that. Was it for this that I spent a lifetime with you, so that I shouldn’t be able to save you?”

This was how she spoke, all day long, though as the hours passed her voice grew quieter, each utterance less audible. She put nothing into her mouth, not even a cup of tea. She lapsed into silence only when night came, when the two white candles at Grandfather’s head burned with a misty, yellow light.

Nightfall was as black as the cloth covering the corpse. A dark-faced Jew with a short beard was reciting Psalms. Mother leaned her face on a post of Grandma’s bed, Aunt Miriam sat on the other side of the bed, and I, along with Aunt Miriam’s children, were crowded across the entire width of that same bed. Grandma, all by herself, moved her wooden chest closer to the corpse and remained there throughout the night, guarding the two dead, yellow toes …

The funeral took place the following afternoon. We had been waiting for Grandpa’s two sons to arrive—Uncle Avrom-Ayzek from Warsaw, who built castles in the air and was a miserable pauper, and Uncle Leyzer from Lodz, who couldn’t build castles in the air and was a wealthy man.

The Lodz uncle arrived with an affluent cough and a snow-white handkerchief that he was constantly applying to his nose. The Warsaw uncle, wearing an eight-sided hat and eyeglasses, was thin, with a neat, blond beard. He laid both hands and his head on the coffin. Uncle Leyzer from Lodz walked back and forth with slow steps, every now and then looking behind him.

The rabbi and the religious-court head didn’t follow Grandpa’s funeral procession. No stores closed down, no schoolboys intoned, “Justice goes before Him.” As the procession passed, no one, in a city full of Jews, knew who had died. Only the sun knew. It shone on the coffin, on the shoulders of the pallbearers, on the horses’ legs, like the Pillar of Fire, when the Children of Israel went forth from Egypt.

After Grandpa’s death, a pall of sadness descended on the family. Wealthy Uncle Leyzer went back to Lodz one day after the funeral. Impoverished Uncle Avrom-Ayzek remained, passing the mourning period, the seven days of
shivah
, in Grandma Rokhl’s little house. All week we recounted stories about Grandpa. On the day after the
shivah
, before he himself left, Avrom-Ayzek, who was also a tailor, completed sewing the last blue uniform that Grandpa had started.

That night he boarded Yarme the coachman’s omnibus and returned to Warsaw, to his wife and child.

Grandma remained all alone in the little, white house. Now, there was no one to use the flatirons. There was no one to sing little songs. The only person to look after her was Wladek, the foolish Gentile.

So Grandma set about dealing with the inheritance left by Grandpa. Some things she sold, some she divided up among the family. Uncle Avrom-Ayzek took back with him to Warsaw Grandpa’s prayer shawl, his phylacteries, several prayer books, and a box of needles. Mother received all the Passover dishes and the Elijah cup for display at the seder. All that Grandma kept for herself was Grandpa’s worktable and her own small, wooden chest. With those few possessions she moved into Aunt Miriam’s house.