Mitla Pass (22 page)

Jewish history in Eastern Europe was to be enveloped in an eternal pall of gray. When the Russians of the north halted the advance of the Moslem armies from the south, reign over all of Russia fell to the Czars of Moscow in league with the Greek Orthodox Church. Jews were offered the dubious opportunity of converting to Christianity. During the Middle Ages, thousands of Jews were burned at the stake for rejecting the honor. Conversion attempts were so unsuccessful over the ages that Catherine I unleashed a series of pogroms in the early 1700s which climaxed with the expulsion of a million Jews from Russia to Poland.

An era of wars and conquest was launched by a successor, Catherine the Great, with the result that Poland was repartitioned a number of times and Russia reinherited the Jews who had been previously evicted.

Thus started a never-ending series of laws banning Jews from trades and ownership of land, and excluding them from Moscow and St. Petersburg where they were considered to be in competition with Christian professionals.

It all evolved into the establishment of a huge reservation in which the Jews had to live and beyond which the Jews were forbidden to go. The Pale of Settlement consisted of a million square miles from the Baltic to the Black Sea, one monstrous ghetto where they were trapped, divorced from the mainstream of Russian life, and reduced to basic survival.

This was the birth of the
shtetl,
a string of towns and small cities open to Jews. Although the law of the Czar was all-powerful, the
shtetl
towns themselves gained a certain autonomy. The Jews ran their own social and health programs and religious courts, spoke the unique Yiddish language, operated their own schools and printing presses, and mainly kept each other alive through a magnificent system of charity.

With Jews restricted to a few basic crafts and trades, boycotted from higher education, facing a constant barrage of suppressive laws, and subjected to the outrages of pogroms,
shtetl
life was a birth-to-death privation.

A few Jews were able to slip through the net and were given dispensation to live in the great cities, but they were the rare cases. Such permission was granted to a handful of the wealthy or talented or cunning whose value to the Czar made them the exceptions.

Despite the shabbiness of dress and humbleness of home, life in the
shtetl
had a magnificent and vital heartbeat. Much of the
shtetl
was in the grip of the tyrannical rabbis and cults, but otherwise there was harbored a smoldering genius of immeasurable magnitude. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a new rhythm overtook the
shtetl
and it was relentlessly probing to liberate itself.

The pogroms of the 1880s became the flashpoint. Feeling neither love for “mother” Russia, nor loyalty to the Czars, the Jews bolted out of the country in massive numbers after the latest series of state-approved blood baths.

A
FTER HIS FEARSOME
beating during the Kiev pogrom, Yehuda Zadok seriously considered emigrating. His older brother, Samuel, had fled Russia for the questionable alternative of becoming a pushcart peddler in Chicago.

Samuel Zadok pushed his cart well—right out of the seething cauldron of Chicago into a small, mobile mercantile business that followed the silver strikes in Colorado. This resulted in a small general store in the frontier town of Denver. His oldest son had been accepted into a university to study medicine and two other sons were going to follow to college. America! America! What a wondrous place. Even Samuel’s daughter was earmarked for higher education. Can you imagine?

For a time Samuel urged Yehuda and his other close kin to emigrate, but Yehuda was a child mired in the
shtetl
without the necessary ambition or courage to wrest himself loose from the grasp of his narrow, tortured life. After all, what could a
shohet
with a growing family do in America? That
shtetl
was a pitiful and marginal way to go through life, but at least it was familiar. America was a wild and frightening place. Here in Wolkowysk, Yehuda knew he could always scrape through and he did have that seat on the Eastern Wall.

His brother Samuel left an abundance of needy relatives in Russia and he was as generous to them as he was able. Often the international postal money order had kept Yehuda from going under. Yehuda accepted, but never asked. He had made his own bed.

A new idea was making headway among the Jews and that was the resettlement and redemption of Palestine. Many of the younger people chose the Holy Land and left with a spirit of pioneers. The movement to Zion was small by comparison to the flood going to America, but it carried extraordinary zeal.

The return to Zion was codified by a Viennese Jew, Theodor Herzl, at a convention in Basel, Switzerland, and soon had organizations in every
shtetl.

In 1905, the year of Reuben’s birth, another series of pogroms erupted. General discontent was spreading all over Russia and somehow the venom was turned against the Jews, as it had always been. In the neighboring city of Bialystok the suffering was particularly horrible for the Jews at the hands of the army.

Breezes of change became winds of change. Yehuda Zadok was wise enough to know that his sons would probably want to emigrate. He had silently prepared himself to let them go. All of them, except Mordechai.

Mordechai was the flesh of his flesh, the soul of his soul. A young man immersed in Talmud, immersed in Yiddish, prepared for
shtetl
life. Although the
shtetl
was splintering, some, like him, could never leave it. He was determined to salvage his own life and perpetuate it through Mordechai.

When Nathan’s turn at rebellion came, Yehuda was ready. Irreversible forces of history were at work and Yehuda had made a pragmatic decision of what to preserve and what to let go.

I
T WAS A
pleasant spring day. Yehuda was feeling chipper. Max Pinsker, owner of the textile mill, had had his first son born to him. Max was one of a half-dozen wealthy members of the community and a major benefactor of his fellow Jews. He supported the yeshiva among his other notable charitable causes and almost no one begrudged him his seat on the Eastern Wall.

There was a residue of bitterness when the union attempted to organize his factory. He stopped the attempt ruthlessly. Everyone knew the labor people were wild radicals and agitators filled with anarchist philosophies coming out of Russia. They were no damned good! Moreover, Max was humane to his employees, more or less.

One of Yehuda’s positions was that of the
mohel,
the circumciser. It was an honorary job but no one failed to slip the
mohel
a couple of rubles for his services. There were always a few slices of cake from the celebration for him to take home to his family.

From a man so esteemed as Max Pinsker came a ten-ruble gratuity for the circumcision. This was a week’s earnings. Yehuda was feeling a bit tipsy and expansive from a tad too much wine at the celebration. What was more, the Sabbath was coming and already people were passing him and bowing.

“Good
shabbas,
Rev Zadok.”

“Good
shabbas,
good
shabbas.
”

Mordechai was at his father’s side, hands clasped piously behind him, imitating his gestures. Of course, the title of “Rev” was also honorary, to denote Yehuda as a learned man. Mordechai would become a true rabbi, a real Reb.

Sophie grabbed her husband as he entered the cottage and with a special urgency that suddenly dampened the spring day.

“Mordechai, look after your brothers and sisters and get them ready for
shul,
” she ordered. “Yehuda, come with me.”

She led him across the yard to the woodshed. Nathan sat shriveled in a corner, his nose streaked with dried blood, his shirt torn and his cheeks bruised.

“Will someone kindly inform me what is going on?”

“He tried to run away. He took three rubles from my thimble box. The police brought him back, looking like this.”

“Stand up, Nathan,” his father demanded sharply.

The boy struggled to his feet warily, sniffling.

“What happened?”

“Goyim
caught him on the road. They took his money from him,” his mother said.

“You little
goniff!”
Yehuda cried, raising his hand to deliver a clout. On further note, he decided that his son didn’t need another
klop.
“So where did you think you were going with three rubles, to China? Speak up!”

“Bialystok,” he answered in a quivering voice. “I was going to take the exam to enter the gymnasium.”

“Gymnasium! Not even yeshiva, but gymnasium. Such fancy ideas! The blood is still flowing in the streets of Bialystok and you have a head filled with notions of grandeur. You’ll go to gymnasium when onions grow in the palm of my hand. Get into the house and stay in your room. You will not come to
shul
tonight.”

Nathan limped off. His father had not even asked about his injuries. Late that night, with the pain from the blows fully settled in, Nathan groaned close to the wall, put a glass against it, and listened to his mother and father.

“That boy is like a board with a hole in it,” his mother said. “We are lucky not to be having a funeral.”

“We can’t spit on the truth,” Yehuda said.

“And what is the truth?”

“Mordechai is the one who must go to yeshiva. It would be a waste to send Nathan. I don’t know where he got the crazy business in his head of gymnasium. I’ll talk to the savings and loan and maybe they will give him a full-time job.”

“Now who’s talking crazy? He’ll run away again.”

“Maybe you can tell me how we are going to support his elegant ideas?”

Sophie, as usual, was slightly ahead of her husband. “If Nathan goes to Bialystok, his bed here will become available and we can take in an out-of-town yeshiva student and charge the family two rubles, which, in turn, we will use to pay for Nathan’s room and board in Bialystok. So, what’s the loss?”

“What about the ruble a week we will lose from Nathan’s salary at the savings and loan? And Mordechai will have expenses at yeshiva on top of it.”

“So, you’ll have to ask your brother, Sam.”

“I can’t
shnorr
him. Sam is not a well man and he hasn’t had such a good year in business. Besides, he’s supporting our mother and God knows how many relatives.”

“He wouldn’t turn you down, Yehuda, not when it comes to education.”

“It gives me such a lump in my chest to have to ask him.”

“I know what Mordechai means to you,” Sophie said after a long time, “but Nathan will have to be on his own sooner or later. Even emigrate. We are duty-bound to give him the best education he can get. We’ll manage, we’ll manage.”

Bialystok, 1906

K
ALONYMUS
W
ISSOTZKY
, the “Tea King of Russia,” was among those elite Jews given dispensation to live in Moscow. The fortune he amassed as an international merchant was given away to charity nearly as fast as he earned it.

After the pogroms of the 1880s, it was apparent that there must be an alternative to the misery his fellow Jews endured in Russia. Along with the Baron Rothschild and a number of other Jewish philanthropists, Wissotzky helped found and support the new movements to Palestine.

Wissotzky died just about the time of the renewed pogroms of 1903, but with the knowledge that Zionism had taken root and a door of escape was now opened out of Russia.

His entire fortune was left to a foundation which dispensed moneys to innumerable charities throughout the Pale. One of these was the gymnasium in Bialystok that bore his name and to which Nathan Zadok came in 1906.

Nathan found living quarters in the home of Esther Ginsburg, the widow of a leather worker in the impoverished Channakes district. Over the years she housed a number of students from Wolkowysk. Her rate of two rubles, fifty kopeks a week was the cheapest to be found. For this she provided a bed and four meals a week, and washed and mended the boys’ clothing.

Nathan was faced with a new problem, hunger. No matter how bad things had been at home, there had always been some part of a chicken to eat. Here it was a luxury.

Fortunately there were designated “eat” days for the poorer students, a dubious distinction for which Nathan qualified. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and the Sabbath, different families alternated in feeding the students an evening meal. It was mostly lentils, cabbage dishes, potatoes, and a concoction with a carp base called gefilte fish. Few and far between were whiffs of even the stringiest meat.

On the Sabbath, the students fared a little better because this day brought out the pious instincts of some of the more affluent families. But the gnawing edge of hunger never left Nathan’s belly.

During his first year, when Nathan had no seniority in Mrs. Ginsburg’s home, his bed was a lumpy couch in the living room where his single blanket had to be augmented for warmth by newspapers he piled on himself.

Otherwise Bialystok was a revelation to Nathan, a city burgeoning with culture and surging with currents and countercurrents of ideologies.

The smaller towns of the
shtetl
generally wore a uniform coat of drabness. What distinguished one from another was the degree of orthodoxy and the domination by one of a number of religious sects.

Bialystok was dramatically different. Located at a crossroads between Russia, Poland, and Prussia, the Jews originally settled at the invitation of the Polish nobility, where they became purveyors to the advancing, retreating, and occupying armies. Bialystok grew into a major textile center. By the turn of the twentieth century, over three hundred and fifty mills were in operation and these were almost entirely Jewish-owned.

This brought a strong trade union movement with heavy socialist leanings. Largely because of Wissotzky’s personal interest in Bialystok, equally strong Zionist organizations took early root. When these diverse groups were added to the traditional
shtetl
religious sects, a Yiddish press and theater, capitalists, czarists, and an assortment of intellectuals, freethinkers, and mystics, Bialystok was a lively mix.