Mitla Pass (21 page)

It had been a good cradle, holding all seven of her children, four boys and three girls. Miracle of miracles, all of them survived. The cradle was permanently at stoveside during the day for warmth and because it was where Sophie spent most of her waking hours.

Nathan, the eldest, who had just turned ten, stood by the door for a moment and listened. He had heard his momma sing that song to six of his brothers and sisters. He didn’t remember her ever singing to him. Maybe he was too young to remember. More likely, he thought, she never sang to him.

Nathan was a small, frail child, often sick and endowed with a nature that was perpetually surly. He never seemed to engage in laughter. Not that there was that much for Jews to laugh about.

Yet, there was relief from the misery, ecstatic outbreaks of pure joy. Not a week passed without a wedding or
bris
or
bar mitzvah.
There were the holidays and the Sabbath as well, for happiness. But happiness eluded Nathan.

Although his father, Yehuda, was considered part of the clergy, the family was not nearly as fanatic in their observances as the ultra-Orthodox and sects of Hasidim. Sophie had adamantly refused to shave her head and wear the traditional married woman’s wig when she wed her husband. Her defiance was considered a serious matter for a time, one that tested the wisdom of the rabbi and the elders.

Wolkowysk was a small city, partly modernized and industrialized and not so isolated and therefore a bit more advanced in its thinking. Other girls, too, were rebelling against the iron dictates of rabbinical tyranny.

Nathan was happy his mother had won because she had beautiful hair which she twisted into a large bun in the back of her head. When times became desperate, she would cut off some of her hair and braid it into a switch and sell it to the wig shop. It always grew back, but each time it was a little grayer.

In Wolkowysk the younger boys and girls were now allowed to dance with one another at celebrations. This was a very modern innovation. Nathan tried it a few times but he felt awkward and ashamed because the girls were always taller. He was afraid to touch them because he knew it could lead to trouble and he wondered why the boys in his class talked about girls so much. Didn’t they all realize that the matchmakers were on the prowl, watching the children from an early age for a likely
shiddach
a few years down the line? If an arrangement were made for Nathan he could end up just like his mother and father, doomed to a life of poverty and fear. He would do better. He’d escape the Pale one day and become wealthy. Then all of the family would have to come to him and bow before him. He would be kind and generous to them, despite the way they had mistreated him. This would be his delicious revenge. He would be nice to Momma but quite stern with his father. As for his brothers, he’d make them crawl. This was Nathan’s great dream. His sisters would come humbly before him and beg him to put up a large dowry so they would be able to capture an important husband. Oh, the power he would exert!

Nathan stood over the cradle and poked his finger in the baby’s stomach, ostensibly to draw a smile, but he was too rough and Reuben screamed his displeasure. Sophie slapped Nathan’s hand and admonished him to do his chores. He backed away from the crib wondering how many more babies they were going to have.

Nathan carried two buckets of water in from the pump, wobbling under the weight of the yoke, then gathered wood from the shed and stoked up the stove, which was both hearthstone and slave master of the house.

Today was window-washing day. Where were his brothers Mordechai and Matthias? Probably playing stickball or, worse, that
goyim
game of soccer. Nathan didn’t like to play the games. He was afraid of getting roughed up. That damned Mordechai knew how to avoid his chores, and when things weren’t done Poppa always blamed Nathan, often with a clout to the ear.

Mordechai, who was a year younger, was the bright scholar, the apple of Yehuda Zadok’s eye. Even now, with Nathan earning a ruble a week as a runner for the savings and loan office after school, Mordechai didn’t have to fill in with chores at home. Nathan often fantasized punching Mordechai half to death, but his brother was larger than he and very mean.

There were big celebrations when sons were born, but Nathan liked it better when he had a new sister. The girls didn’t get so much attention and at least they grew up knowing how to work.

Rifka, Sarah, and even little Ida always had busy hands. Sophie prepared them to be homemakers almost as soon as they could walk. Before the daughters came, Momma did everything: baking and cooking and making the candles; sweeping and scrubbing and washing and ironing; mending and dressmaking; bearing children and nursing and mothering; keeping the vegetable plot and running a kosher home. Sophie was a splendid
balabosta.
How she managed to make ends meet was through incredible manipulation. And she taught her girls, early and well. Nathan frankly preferred his sisters for another reason. As a male, he was allowed to boss them around.

Y
EHUDA
Z
ADOK
was the
shohet
of Wolkowysk, the ritual slaughterer of chickens, an ancient profession first dictated in the Book of Deuteronomy. Each chicken was accorded a brief benediction, then dispatched quickly and with the least amount of pain and in a manner to assure they were kosher.

The tool of his trade was a ten-inch knife with a blunted end. He had a half dozen of these, made of the finest German steel and honed to exquisite sharpness. Yehuda kept them in hand-tooled leather cases which he carried in a little black bag along with other paraphernalia of the trade.

When Nathan was very young he enjoyed going with his father to the slaughterhouse behind the poultry market and watching him at work. His father’s hands were sure and swift like lightning. He did the bird in with one clean stroke across the neck, plunged it into a vat of hot water, said a prayer, and plucked it clean in a matter of seconds. It was a matter of great pride that Yehuda never left pinfeathers in his birds. The rabbis periodically examined Yehuda’s chickens to assure his proficiency and never found an improperly killed bird.

Nathan’s early fascination turned sour when he realized his father was grooming him to follow in his footsteps. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life slitting chickens’ throats, especially when he felt that Mordechai would end up as a rabbi.

Moreover, his father’s bloody hands and bespattered apron always had a chicken smell. Even the weekly ritual bath at the
mikva
failed to completely deodorize him.

Yehuda was paid a few kopeks for each bird. In a good day he could pocket a few rubles, scarcely enough to sustain his family. He found a variety of odd jobs, mainly sharpening knives and scissors, to augment the family income.

There were benefits. He could take out some of his pay in chickens, so there was usually enough to eat. Sophie knew how to utilize every part of the bird, except the parts that were not kosher. Extra chickens were traded for carp at the fish market or vegetables and milk from the gentile farmers. Even during the years of drought, when half the chickens died of heat prostration, there was some food on the table.

The main benefit of being the
shohet
was that it was an honorable, if undesirable, profession. Life in a
shtetl
town centered around the synagogue. Yehuda Zadok was a learned man in Talmud and his job accorded him a certain communal respect.

The synagogue had a rigid social structure. The building was always constructed so that the most sacred place, the Ark, was on the Eastern Wall which faced Jerusalem. Seated along the Eastern Wall, according to rank, prominence, and respect, were the rabbi, cantor, and other town dignitaries. The last seats were reserved for the
shohet
and the
shammes
or sexton.

The townspeople sat in the main body of the building facing the Eastern Wall. The closer to the Ark, the higher the communal rank. Wealth, of course, could acquire such a seat. Behind the first rows were the ordinary people and the poor. Farthest removed, along the Western Wall, were the beggars, town misfits, and visiting strangers. A small balcony, veiled off by latticework, was reserved for the women.

Yehuda Zadok was gentler than most of the heads of households. Generally the father’s outlet against eternal frustration was to impose an authoritarian reign. Corporal punishment of children was common and wife beating was not uncommon. Yehuda seldom whipped his children, except when the futility of daily existence periodically crashed down on him. But his hands were always swift in delivering a single clout to the head or yank on the ear, usually Nathan’s.

A crisis was brewing in the Zadok household, as Nathan and Mordechai were reaching an age where plans were to be made concerning their future education. Until now, his sons had attended
cheder,
a small one-room school connected to the synagogue. The subjects were Yiddish and Hebrew and, later, the Talmud.

The
cheder
was little less than a glorified cell; the teacher often a cruel ignorant authoritarian. His reward was to hold power over ragged, half-starved little boys. The hours were exhausting and the rabbi or teacher ruled with a leather strap. Textbooks were a few tattered volumes and modern methods and subjects were unknown. Nathan had been an adequate student, a survivor. Mordechai was singled out as exceptional and received tender treatment. By the age of nine he was a veritable fountain of Talmudic and religious knowledge.

The next stage would normally be to go up to yeshiva, a larger school, which also taught state-approved secular courses in Russian and mathematics.

Yeshiva posed a serious problem for Yehuda Zadok: there was a tuition of a ruble and fifty kopeks a week as well as other expenses for books and materials. A rich man’s game. It was boiling down to making a choice between Nathan and Mordechai. As the oldest, Nathan was entitled to attend yeshiva first, but two sons in an advanced school was a luxury that a
shohet
could scarcely afford. Yehuda had been thinking all along of sending Nathan to a trade school so he could help with the family finances until he became a
shohet.

Nathan had a secret listening post into his parents’ discussions. His cot was against the wall next to their bedroom. If he stayed up late enough when they spoke, he could hold a glass against the wall and make out their conversation.

“It would be unfair to deprive Nathan of yeshiva,” his mother argued.

“And it would be criminal to deprive Mordechai,” Yehuda retorted.

“So Nathan is not by any means a genius, he is still our oldest.”

“What am I? The Baron Rothschild? Sophie, we’d not only be sending the wrong head to learn, but we’d be losing a ruble a week that Nathan earns. We are elastic, but elastic also breaks. Since the Lord singled me out for personal abuse, it is reality that we cannot put two boys through yeshiva at the same time. It takes no rabbinical court to tell which son is which.”

“And Matthias, and one day, Reuben?”

“So, by the time they are ready for yeshiva, Nathan will be a
shohet
with a full salary.”

Sophie rushed in to argue the injustice of it but her case was as thin as the wall.

“Besides,” Yehuda said as an afterthought, “it is sometimes beyond difficult to be nice to that boy. Nathan is bitter. If only he didn’t wear a face like rhubarb.”

Nathan heard it all. He clenched the sheet in his little fists and wept on the pillow. I’ll show them! I’ll run away from home! I can make two rubles a week peddling to the army camp.

Yehuda became more interested in his wife. Their lovemaking had fascinated Nathan at first, the way he was fascinated by watching his father kill chickens. Over a period of time their grunting and slobbering had grown grotesque. He had overheard Momma speaking among the women. She really didn’t like doing it. Her insides were bad from having so many children and it caused her great pain. Yet she could not deny her husband. Nathan covered his ears. His father was sounding like an animal.

L
IKE MOST CHILDREN
, Nathan was of the belief that his mother and father were either ignorant or naïve about what was happening in the world around them. Yehuda Zadok had long mastered the art of contemplation while he prepared chickens for kosher. He was aware that certain past and present realities dictated future realities.

Yehuda was a boy of six when the pogroms of the early 1880s flared up throughout the Jewish Pale of Settlement. His hometown, Kiev, had a particularly odious history of persecution. Forever seared into his young mind was a horrendous night when the Cossacks stampeded the Jewish quarters and bashed in skulls, burned down synagogues, and looted and raped in an unrestrained frenzy of Jew hating—behavior encouraged and supported by the church and the czarist government.

Yehuda tried to get to the synagogue to rescue his father, who had entered the burning building to save the sacred Torah scrolls. The boy was caught by a pair of drunken Cossacks, severely beaten, and left for dead.

His body eventually healed but his brain had sealed in, and was condemned to perpetually replay, the sight of his father’s smoking corpse.

W
HEN
I
SLAM
came to power in the Arab lands in the seventh century, the main Jewish population of Europe was centered in the Rhineland where they lived a precarious existence and were continually victimized by Papal-inspired scourges.

During the Crusades of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, legions of rabble were recruited in the Rhineland for the fight to regain the Holy Land. Maniacal monks, supported by a perverse church, whipped up an ignorant peasantry into blood orgies against the Jews, then marched off under the banners of Jesus Christ on their sacred mission to save Jerusalem from those other heathens, the Moslems.

In a desperation to escape, hundreds of thousands of Jews fled eastward into the feudal serfdoms of Poland and Russia. Most came at the invitation of the nobility, who needed Jewish skills to establish a middle class of merchants, craftsmen, bankers, physicians, and men of commerce, all areas where Jews excelled.