Jewels and Ashes (2 page)

To our beloved son, brother and brother-in-law Meier. On the occasion of his departure for New Zealand, we wish him a heartfelt bon voyage and a happy future in his new homeland.

In his customary red biro, father has reinforced the black frame to isolate this insert from those that surround it. Directly below is a notification of the drawing on this day of a lottery conducted by the orphans' welfare society. Above it is advertised a forthcoming series of lectures by the renowned pedagogue Sholem Broide of Warsaw: ‘Be enthralled by his slide-illustrated talks about his recent journeys to ancient cities of the Mediterranean! A rare insight into other worlds for the people of Bialystok!'. To the left is the news that Celina Sandler, ‘for many years a Professor at the Université de Beauté in Paris', no less, will be giving advice from her suite at the Hotel Ritz, for absolutely no cost. And to the right is a proclamation of a special unbeatable quality Passover matzos, now available from Messer Brothers Bakery.

Over the matzos advertisement is attached a note, on a scrap of paper which apparently father had inserted several years ago, indicating how the various signatories to the farewell notice were related to him. Yet again he had written in red, as if to alert any curious descendants who might stumble across the newspaper in years to come, and to provide them with a means of deciphering this clue to branches of the family tree.

On March 17, 1936 father bought
Unzer Lebn
for the final time. That night he boarded a train to begin a one-way journey to the other side of the globe, his newspaper tucked away in trunks crammed with books and journals. Decades later they were to become the decaying reminders of the world he had left behind.

December 26, 1932. Mother stands by the Warsaw express at the Bialystok station. Her closest friends are clustered around, conveying their final farewells; among them is Meierke, her husband of a day. The luggage has already been taken to her compartment; the train is warming up. At this moment, mother catches sight of Reb Aron Yankev in the distance, on the platform, running frantically towards her. The black caftan he is wearing trails down to his ankles and flutters by his side as he rushes beside the train.

When mother had left the family apartment several hours earlier, Reb Aron Yankev had, as usual, maintained his silence towards her. In his eyes, the daughter who was about to depart had long since strayed from the righteous path of Orthodoxy, lured by modernity and worldliness. He broke his silence for just a moment, as she was leaving, to remind her to kiss the mezuzah attached by the door. Chane Esther, the matriarch of the Probutski household, also decided not to accompany her daughter to the station. She was too ill and, I suspect, much too upset. What my mother recalls is that Chane Esther's last gesture was to insist on her drinking a glass of milk to fortify her for the journey. ‘Five weeks at sea?', she had queried. ‘You'll die of hunger.'

Mother tells stories in fragments. Over the years she has retold the same anecdotes many times. Her experiences flow through her, always liable to leap out unexpectedly in moments of unguarded reflection. The sight of Reb Aron Yankev dashing along the platform of the Bialystok station is one of these recurring images; as too is the glass of milk.

From such lean and Spartan clues I have reinvented her journey. On the Warsaw express she had wept incessantly. A pair of lovers sat in her compartment whispering to each other until they disembarked and disappeared into the night at a provincial station. Warsaw was a dream shaded with heartbreak at the loss of Bialystok. After staying overnight at her brother Joshua's, she arrived back at the Warsaw station to pandemonium and a sea of farewell tears as hundreds of immigrants resumed or began their journeys to the West. The train departed at midnight, and for the first time since leaving Bialystok she gave way to exhaustion and fell into a deep sleep.

She was woken at dawn by the voices of German border-police asking for passports and papers. She ate breakfast in Berlin, crossed the Belgian border at night, and waited for several hours at the Paris station, shivering in a hall crowded with passengers falling asleep against each other. Mother recalls a collective meal to which fellow immigrants contributed salami, sardines, and schnapps; and many times she has told me about her first-ever glimpse of the sea, as the train emerged from the night and rushed towards Marseilles. Wonderful pictures began to form before her eyes: green fields; a ring of mountains with their summits covered in snow; and then the glistening ocean, aflame in the morning sun. Over the water's surface there glided an aeroplane, and at the docks the Wild Mama was waiting.

The living quarters, when mother first saw them, seemed like crowded pigsties. In the first few days she was confined below deck, nauseated, as furious storms whipped up heavy seas. In Alexandria she disembarked and bought a gift — two black elephants carved in wood — for the sister who awaited her in Melbourne. And as she sailed through the Suez Canal she was riveted by what was to become the most indelible of memories: Bedouin boys diving for coins that flew from the decks of the boat.

Yet throughout that voyage, even as she succumbed to the adventure, to the breath of unlimited freedom that wafted across open seas, and to that special bond that develops between immigrants thrown together by chance to become ship brothers and sisters with a common destiny, my mother could not shake off her vision of Reb Aron Yankev, running frantically along the platform of the Bialystok station, desperate to make one last contact with his estranged daughter. He had paused for a moment when he reached her, to steady his voice, before he said, somewhat hesitantly, ‘I wish you a safe journey and a successful future in your new home. And I forgive you'.

When she recalls this moment, mother invariably adds, ‘And how could I have known that I would never see them again? Not only my father, but almost everyone who stood there on the Bialystok station farewelling me?'.

His parents were not informed. Her father had no idea at the time, although Chane Esther the matriarch knew, and one of her brothers was a witness. From father's family there were no witnesses. The minyan of ten males required by traditional law had to be rounded up; there were always people on hand to make an extra zloty as witnesses on such occasions. The rabbi performed the ceremony quickly. Bishke Zabludowski happened to pass by the marriage bureau soon after.

‘Mazel-tov', the office workers exclaimed. And why should I be congratulated?', he replied. ‘Don't you know?', came the shocked answer. ‘Your son Meier has just been married.'

‘We didn't confide in our parents', father has told me. ‘We never discussed our personal affairs with them. In the pride of our youth we saw ourselves as being far in advance of previous generations. We were freethinkers, breaking away from stifling traditions; at least, this is what we thought at the time. Many of us didn't bother getting married. The major problem was finding a room. Once you found one, you could begin “married” life.'

They were officially married because, they hoped, the papers would enable him to receive a permit to the New World after his wife had settled there. They didn't require a room because she went home immediately after the ceremony to pack. She had received a permit from a sister who had migrated several years previously. The newly-weds were not to see each other for over three years.

My father loves words. It is a passion that still grips him at the onset of his ninth decade. The discovery of a new word — its origins, precise meaning, nuances, and variations — can make his day. Father's most prized possessions are his dictionaries, among which are the rare ones he took with him on the sea voyage from Europe half a century ago. Instead of clothes he packed books and dictionaries: Polish-Yiddish, English-Polish, RussianYiddish, German-Russian, Hebrew-English; all the permutations of the six languages he has mastered over a long lifetime.

Father claims he knows what his first words were, his first naming of things, the earliest labels he attached to the world. It is 1907. A two-year-old boy dressed in a sailor's suit runs beside his mother through a town square. Above him looms the clock-tower of Bialystok. He points to the tower and at an object moving through the streets. He names them, and his naming becomes a refrain he repeats over and over again:

A zeiger, a konke

A zeiger, a konke.

The zeiger is the town clock, and the konke is a horse-drawn tram that ferries passengers within the city and beyond it as far as the Zwierziniec forest. ‘You see', father remarks triumphantly, ‘even then I was already a philosopher, and my first poem was about time and space.'

They lived on the edge of time and space, my ancestors, always on the verge of moving on, continually faced with the decision: do we stay, persist, take root within this kingdom, or do we take to the road again? Perhaps it is safer, greener, beyond the next river, over the next mountain-range, across yet another border? Often enough the choice was made for them, and they fled for their lives in the wake of expulsions, inquisitions, and massacres to seek a new place of refuge. At other times they were welcomed, initially, for the skills they had accumulated as wanderers; centuries on the move had made them masters of the ephemeral. They knew how to serve as middlemen, entrepreneurs, navigators and astronomers, court advisers and healers; even though their hearts longed for some soil to till.

So it was in Eastern Europe one millennium ago, when they began to arrive in flight from the Crusades. Later they came as guests of noblemen, who invited them to settle in their fiefdoms to become conduits between aristocrat and peasant, town and countryside. They traded as pedlars and merchants, transformed forests into slabs of timber, and shaped the timber into expanding towns, where they could set up workshops to weave, sew, hammer, cut, and shape future destinies.

Towns and villages sprang up like mushrooms after rain. Over the centuries they expanded in all directions: north to the shores of the Baltic Sea; south into the Carpathian Ranges and towards the Black Sea; west into obscure pockets of the Austro-Hungarian empire; and east, deep into Czarist Russia, beyond the banks of the River Dnieper. Settlements emerged as far and wide as the horizon and shifting foreign borders would permit them.

Yet at no time were these communities entirely secure. Arbitrarily, a charter or privileges they had been granted could be repealed, and their function, place of residence, and status redefined. There was always the threat of a sudden whirlwind, a madman on the rampage full of drink and misdirected rage, inciting the mob to join in and take out its frenzy on these peculiar people who had settled among them with their private God and the countless prayer-houses in which they worshipped Him.

So they maintained their talent for movement, travelling within the prescribed boundaries as itinerants, eking out a living from limited opportunities. Foremost among them, or at least this is how I once loved to imagine it, were the troubadours, storytellers, cantors, and bands of Klesmorim who toured obscure hamlets trading tales for a meal, songs for a drink. Wandering preachers, scribes, scholars, and wonder workers exchanged Hebrew and Aramaic scriptures, amulets, and talismans for precious roubles and zlotys to send home to their impoverished families. Their gifts and messages were borne along dusty roads and country paths by horse-drawn wagons. ‘We will return soon', they wrote, ‘by spring, in time for Passover; or by autumn, for Rosh Hashonah and the Days of Awe.' Sometimes they would break beyond the limits completely to steal over the horizon, murmuring: ‘Enough! It is time to find a new haven with greener pastures and the possibility of redemption.'

When, as a child, I had my first intimations of these ancestral wanderings, I saw them initially as a romance. I imagined myself the descendant of Gypsies and nomads. I tried to retrace their steps. I would catch glimpses of footprints and hooves etched in mud and dust within the pages of Yiddish novels that I read voraciously. My interest waxed and waned, and sometimes the footprints would peter out. Old volumes I found in the recesses of forgotten corners in our house would revive my flagging interest with an unexpected photograph of a forefather walking absentmindedly through a village, crooked cottages visible in the background, cobblestones underfoot. They drew me, these volumes, in spite of myself, back to the search.

One particular page stood out. In the wake of the Annihilation, the survivors had assembled photos, snatches of history, glimpses of what had been until so recently their beloved hometown. They did it in haste, as if building a moat against the ravages of memory loss. Within six years it was published, in New York: a massive volume encased between hard covers of dark crimson on which were embossed, in gold lettering, in Yiddish on the right-hand side and English on the left, the words, ‘Bialystok — Photo Album of a Renowned City and Its Jews the World Over'. Copies were sent to countries around the entire globe, to every corner where Bialystoker had fled and recreated their lives.

A random flip of the pages revealed scenes of a thriving metropolis and its citizens, both prominent and obscure. Other more faded photos and paintings depicted an era when Bialystok was merely a village enclosed by field and forest. But the pages could just as easily fall upon images of ruin and desolation, with buildings aflame or reduced to rubble. Then there was one particular page: after I discovered it I would always turn to it first, skimming over the ruins, not quite seeing or allowing myself to focus fully upon them. Recently I returned to that page which had once held me so captivated; and even though it was years since I had last seen them, the images retained their haunting quality and hinted at mysteries I had not quite penetrated.

There are five photos under the heading, ‘Memorable Bialystoker Characters'. Above, to the left, stands Yankel the Organ-Grinder, holding aloft a wooden box from which a parrot is drawing out a lucky envelope with its beak. They are in a market-square surrounded by a crowd watching this poor man's lottery. Yankel's hair is white, as too are his ample beard and moustache. He has the bearing of a fierce patriarch, a communal elder rather than a pedlar of cheap dreams.