Jewels and Ashes (6 page)

A man must enjoy life and keep moving', he exclaims, his body heaving and sweating as we climb the wooden staircase which spirals from an inconspicuous back entrance to the synagogue. I have gathered from him, so far, that he is a professor of mathematics, retired. He was born in Warsaw, stumbled in adolescence through the war years, emigrated to Palestine, and has lived for decades in New York. But his heart gravitates here, he tells me more than once, and he comes every year now, for several months. ‘It's a madness. Yet somehow, in Poland I feel most at ease. It has the smell of my childhood and a distant remembrance of the womb. I have a flat in Warsaw, and a girlfriend. She's a Poilishe. She knows how to look after me: a true sweetheart. Sometimes, mind you, she gets cold feet and runs to the priest. So let her confess! It does no harm. At such times I have many friends to spend time with. We take trips to the Tatras mountains, to Zakopane, Krakow, Gdansk, the Baltic Sea resorts, as I did during my youth. What more is there to say? This wilderness is for me a home, a habit I cannot break.'

We emerge from the stairs into a crowded dining room with a dozen tables scattered over exposed floorboards. Nathan has donated a Kiddush, a little something to eat and drink for the Sabbath. We are served bread rolls and gefilte fish — imported from Hungary, Nathan informs me. On each table he places several bottles of vodka which are quickly consumed.

The room sways with conversation. Guests circulate from table to table. A man seats himself beside me and announces, without introduction, that he has two brothers, both of whom are rabbis. ‘One lives in Brooklyn, the other in Buenos Aires. And I, may the devil have such luck, live in Warsaw, where there is no one you could call a rabbi.'

Holding court at the same table is a visitor from New York. His face is set in a permanently sour expression. He is wearing a pink suit, mauve shirt, and a crimson tie which dangles over the gefilte fish as he proclaims: ‘My son is an adviser to the President. You've never heard of him? Of course not! How could you? He is no boaster. He maintains low profile.' My newly acquired friend throws his well-worn refrain at Pink Suit: ‘I have two brothers. Both rabbis. One in Buenos Aires, the other in Brooklyn. Mermelstein is the name. Perhaps you know him?' Pink Suit, annoyed at the interruption to his monologue, shoots back: ‘Know him? Why should I? You think I should know every Jew in New York?'

A gaunt stalk of a man paces around the room, his eyes aflame as he mutters to any unsuspecting guest whom he ensnares with his relentless gaze. He is wrapped in a shabby suit, and his face has the corrugated tan of a tramp who sleeps by highways and in barns. He stutters angrily, in a monotone of broken English: ‘I have put my case to the chief rabbi of Israel. I wrote him a long letter. I sent also a copy to Gorbachev. Neither of them has replied.' He strides away before he can be engaged in dialogue, and from time to time I hear his voice rise above the tumult with the same fierce lament. ‘What is his case?' I ask Nathan. ‘Ah! Here everyone has a case', he says. ‘They cling to their cases for fear of opening them and seeing, with finality, that they are empty, and were in fact emptied one lost generation ago.'

Nathan waltzes back into the chaos. He is the attentive host, pouring a glass of vodka here, serving a slice of honey cake there, dispensing gusts of laughter and humorous remarks for dessert. The room dances with increasing abandon, a whirlpool of drink and talk at the centre of which sits Reb Greenbaum. A fertile beard flows from his cheeks, and he strokes it while he observes the revelry with a bemused smile. His eyes are a sheepish green, slightly moist, somewhat remote. He seems always to be hovering on the verge of a sigh. Nathan had pointed him out in the hall, totally absorbed in prayer: ‘He's the only one in this shul that I can guarantee is one hundred per cent pious. The others come to talk, to do business, to pass the time. They are as pious as cats', claims Nathan. ‘Only Greenbaum I can guarantee. He walks all the way from Praga, on the other side of the river, refusing any form of transport on Shabbes. The genuine article, one hundred per cent.'

Everyone seems to be talking at the tops of their lungs, although at close range I realize many of them are actually whispering with an urgency which lifts their voices into stabs that punctuate the air. At the height of the storm a scream arises. A spasm of fear shudders through the room. An uneasy silence stretches the seconds, broken only by the sounds of a woman sobbing. ‘This is a cursed place', she says repeatedly. But Greenbaum remains undaunted. He reaches out and touches her on the back: a gentle pat, a knowing smile. The woman dissolves into laughter. As her mirth increases, the spell she has cast is abruptly broken. The room spins back into the storm. The remnants of Warsaw Jewry, or at least a proportion of them, dance frenzied conversations on a naked timber floor in the garret of a synagogue. And the next moment they are gone, the room deserted, except for a woman who alternately weeps and laughs, and an exhausted Nathan Berman who stands among the abandoned chairs like an actor deprived of an audience.

As we make our way down the spiral staircase we stumble across the last departing guests. They toil slowly, an odd couple, leaning often against the wall to grab another breath of air. The woman is wafer thin except for a leg, swathed in bandages, bulging out to elephantine proportions. Her eyes, in spite of their vein-ridden whites, are kindly and girlish. Her face tapers to a sharp chin that sprouts grey bristles. Her hair has withered to strands of decaying straw. A worn cardigan and cotton dress hang from a body that has barely enough substance to keep clothes afloat. Her companion hunches beneath his shoulders. He looks up just occasionally to glance at us timidly as we edge by. He wears a limp grey suit and huddles against the frail elf as he steers her down the stairs. They both carry plastic bags full of leftover food from the Kiddush.

As we are squeezing past we are stalled, involuntarily, by a barely audible monologue that issues from the lips of the elf. Her lilting Yiddish takes us on a stroll to a cemetery in a village near Krakow, forty-five years ago. We are caught in her labyrinth, the four of us balanced on three stairs, Nathan's massive frame swaying nervously, as a girl called Chanele Fefferberg hides for two years in a burial ground. She witnesses mass executions as she darts from stone to stone. One day her mother, father, brothers, and sisters are among those the SS drag to the cemetery. Chanele maintains her girlish smile, a set grin in eyes that are far distant. I realise this is her permanent tale, which she weaves without beginning or end. There is no need to intervene, or to do anything but gently disengage ourselves from her universe, and unwind out of the creaking folds of the synagogue into the fresh air.

I accompany Nathan in search of a coffee shop. On Saturday afternoons central Warsaw is lifeless. The people are at home in their private domains or in the countryside to absorb the final few weeks of summer. Within the weekend emptiness the heart of the city is exposed as a curious mixture of boutiques with modern facades, supermarkets with emptied shelves, boarded-up foodstalls, and run-down buildings surrounding vacant lots given over to silence and the occasional solitary pedestrian.

Nathan guides me through this wilderness to the Samantha coffee shop. Single men sit at laminated tables sipping drinks. Elvis Presley sings, ‘Come with me to Blue Hawaii'. When at last the caffeine stirs in his veins, Nathan winks at the waitress behind the counter and comes back to life with tales of Polish girlfriends, disapproving priests, and escapades to holiday resorts. ‘I come to Poland to have a good time, not to fall prey to the gloomy past. Life here is cheap. The dollar goes very far, especially on the black market. Time passes smoothly.'

Like an apparition, the odd couple appear, struggling along the pavement, turtle-paced, in full view of the Samantha. Chanele drags her swollen appendage, inching her way through the street. Her escort pauses occasionally to examine objects lying in the gutter.

Nathan registers their presence uneasily. Fatigue and sadness skitter beneath his surface gaiety. We watch their progress in silence, until they are fully out of sight. Nathan orders a second cup of coffee, stirs in three, perhaps four teaspoons of sugar, and remarks with a touch of defiance: ‘As far as I'm concerned Reb Greenbaum is the only kosher Jew left in Warsaw. The rest are battlers and shnorrers. They live in the past and can barely deal with the present. But Greenbaum I can guarantee you. A pious man. There were tens of thousands like him, before the Annihilation. Now there is just Greenbaum. But him I can guarantee. A true Tzaddik. The genuine article. One hundred per cent!'

Marszalkowska Avenue winds for many miles through central Warsaw. It is so bloated that the opposite sides seem lost to each other. But in some sections it narrows to a more intimate scale, enclosed by buildings whose shadows touch in the early mornings and evenings. In pre-war times the display windows of department stores lining the avenue drew thousands of passers-by. Among them there wandered my father during one of his rare visits to Warsaw. Marszalkowska was a thoroughfare of the future, an avenue of dreams that challenged the provincial outlook of a man from the flatlands of White Russia. Dummies clothed in the latest fashions from the West glittered reflections of legendary cities: Paris, London, Berlin, Rome.

Warsaw overwhelmed father. He preferred the moderate scale and familiarity of his native Bialystok. Yet he was irresistibly drawn to wander the streets of the city which had become, by the 1920s, the vibrant centre of Polish Jewry. He would lose himself in its maze of courtyards and neighbourhoods, its self-contained kingdoms of stone-clad tenements teeming with feverish activity. Within the courtyards grandmothers sold potato latkes, hawkers peddled a wide array of household needs, artisans sat in cramped workshops to ply their trades; while mothers tended their hordes of children, who seemed to split the seams of their crammed apartments and spill out into the passageways, into the open air, like plants reaching desperately for light.

Street musicians and jesters would spread their blankets and make their frantic bid for a living. Crowds quickly surrounded them, while from the upper reaches faces peered down from windows and balconies where drying clothes fluttered in the breeze. The cries of newborn babies mingled with the relentless clatter and chatter of commerce, as the performers strained to be heard above the din. And, on days when their coffers were empty, they would mutter, ‘You may as well go beat your head against the wall'.

Father recalls sprawling markets where life was endlessly recycled until there was hardly a thread left on a garment or barely a leg for a table to stand on. There were goods for sale that nowadays you would find only in rubbish dumps. Father is at pains not to romanticise Warsaw, yet his growing excitement in describing it betrays his efforts. Images tumble out in a rush: of side-streets where yeshiva boys and talmudic scholars swayed in houses of worship; of homes which were merely a room in a garret or basement; of makeshift timber shacks that had somehow found a place between the brick and mortar. Every square centimetre of space was used by the devout or profane — for business or prayer, scriptural studies or a game of cards.

But the Vistula River, that was a different matter altogether. Here, father's voice slows down, and his hands stroke the air gently. The Vistula was a retreat from the tumult, a comfort, full of stillness, such a contrast to what was happening in the bowels of the city. Ferries and barges steamed by, and the vast expanse of water hinted at broad estuaries that meandered into oceans he would one day cross to gain access to a new life.

From the river banks the streets climb as steeply today as they did then, when father trudged back towards the boulevards, the beckoning display-windows, the avenues crowded with trolleys, horse-drawn coaches, and omnibuses. Pedestrians chewed bagels on the run. Bearded Hasidim hurried to and from prayer averting their eyes from the temptations of modernity; and the sons and daughters of wealthy bankers and financiers flocked to the Bar Central nightclub to hear Rosenbaum's jazz band play music of the New World.

Again the images are racing, father's hands are dancing, and Warsaw whirls into a frenzy of activity as the hub, the headquarters of political movements left, right, and indifferent. Bundists, Zionists, assimilationists, the orthodox, and freethinkers fought each other for communal control and allegiance. Their many factions and splinter groups seemed to rain down upon the city like confetti at a never-ending society wedding. Yiddish theatre groups played to full houses every night; provincial circuses pitched their tents in vacant lots; and news vendors sold Yiddish dailies, Hebrew periodicals, Polish tabloids, and cheap paperback romances. Circles of aspiring artists and writers gathered in cafes and meeting rooms to argue, exchange ideas, and feel the ebb and flow of what they believed to be a wave forever rolling towards an inevitable redemption. Warsaw was the vortex that absorbed the creative energies of a people who had honed their survival skills on the piercing edges of wildly fluctuating fortunes and centuries of impending disaster. And in the final years of the 1930s it stood poised, a community of 350 000 Jews, teetering on the brink of annihilation.

I turn off Marszalkowska into Ulitza Litewska, a street shaded by trees and medium-rise flats clad in greystone. Pre-war Warsaw endures in these cool shadows, its fading elegance intact. An arched entrance draws me into a courtyard presided over by hanging gardens suspended from balconies. Craning my neck I see them rising upwards, seven storeys of subdued greys interspersed with splashes of colour sprouting from miniature jungles of potplants. Each entrance — from street to courtyard, from courtyard into dark foyer, from stairs onto a third-floor landing — brings me closer to the familiarity I crave.

Szymon Datner, historian of Bialystok, is a frail man in his seventies. He walks with difficulty, each step an act of will as he guides me into his study. It is lined with books from floor to ceiling, numerous volumes with titles in English, Polish, Russian, French, Hebrew, and Yiddish. Among the books there are spaces in which stand wooden statuettes carved by folk artists: figures of klesmorim, the families of musicians who played at shtetl festivals and weddings. Wooden parrots daubed in purple, scarlet, and turquoise perch on antique cabinets. On every spare area of wall space hang paintings and photos: family friends, historical figures, and scenes of pre-war Bialystok. In the centre of the room there is an oak table, reassuringly bulky. Nearby stands a desk cluttered with papers, manuscripts, dictionaries, writing pads: a work in progress.