The Rabbi (5 page)

His grandfather's beard must have been black when Michael was a little boy. But he remembered it only the way it was when he was a young man—a full, white bush that Isaac Rivkind shampooed with care every third night and combed with love and vanity, so that it lay smooth and soft-looking beneath his tough and swarthy face down to the third button of his shirt. His beard was the only soft thing about him. He had a rapacious hawk's nose and the eyes of a disgusted eagle. The top of his head was bald and as shiny as polished bone, set in a circlet of frizzled hair that never achieved the whiteness of the beard but remained a dark gray until the day of his death.

The truth about Michael's grandfather was that he was as tender toward the world as a mother nursing her fatally ill child. What covered his love with a thick veneer was an overwhelming fear of the Gentiles. He had gained that fear in the Bessarabian town of Kishinev, where he was born.

There were 113,000 people in Kishinev. Almost 80,000 of them were Jews. Another few thousand were gypsies. The remainder were Moldavian Rumanians. Although they were the majority in the town, the Jews of Kishinev submitted with resignation to the curses, sneers, and scorn of the Moldavians, knowing that Kishinev was an island ghetto surrounded by a sea of hostility. Even if a Jew wanted to leave the town to work as a fruit-picker or a grape-treader in the vineyards and wineries of the countryside, he was forbidden by the government to do so. The administration taxed the Jews heavily, confined them closely, and supported a daily newspaper—the
Bessarabetz
—edited by an anti-Semitic fanatic named Pavolachi Krushevan, whose sole goal was to incite his readers to the shedding of Jewish blood.

Michael became familiar with Krushevan's name while he was still a little boy, learning on his
zaydeh's
knee to hate it with the same feeling the name of Haman inspired. Instead of
fairy tales or nursery rhymes, when he crawled up on Zaydeh's lap in the mysterious gloominess of the tiny grocery store, he heard the legends of how his grandfather had come to America.

Isaac's father had been Mendel Rivkind, one of the five blacksmiths of Kishinev, a man with the stink of horse-sweat always in his nostrils. Mendel was more fortunate than most of his fellow Jews; he was a man of property. Against the north wall of the poor, sagging wooden structure he called his house were two homemade brick forges. In them he burned charcoal which he made himself in an earthen pit, blowing his fire with an enormous leather bellows fashioned from the hide of a huge bull.

There was great unemployment in Kishinev. No one could afford to pay much to have his animals shod, and the Rivkind family was as poor as its neighbors. It was hard merely to exist, and saving money was something the Jews of Kishinev never considered because there was no spare money to save. But a month before Isaac was born, two of Mendel Rivkind's cousins were savagely beaten by a crowd of drunken Moldavian youths. The blacksmith decided that somehow, some day, he and his family would escape to a better part of the world.

If they had been poor before, the decision rendered them impoverished. They denied themselves a single luxury and eliminated expenses they had thought of as necessities. Ruble by ruble, a tiny hoard of money grew behind a loose brick at the base of one of the forges. Nobody but Mendel and Sonya, his wife, knew of its existence; they told no one because they did not wish to be murdered in their sleep some night by a beer-smelling peasant who came in search of their nestegg.

The years passed, and each year the pile of money was increased by a painfully small amount. After Isaac was
bar mitzvah
his father took him out to the forge on a dark and frosty night and, prying the brick away, allowed him to feel the accumulated rubles, telling him of the dream.

It was hard to build the freedom fund fast enough to keep ahead of their family. First Isaac had arrived, then three years later a daughter, whom they had named Dora after her grandmother,
aleha hasholom
, she should rest in peace. By 1903, a sufficient number of rubles had been saved to pay for three steerage
passages to the United States. But by this time Dora was eighteen and Isaac was twenty-two and had been a married man for more than a year. His bride, the former Itta Melnikov, already was feeling life in her womb, a child who would require more rubles to be placed behind the brick in the years to come.

The times grew worse. Krushevan grew more clamorous. A Christian girl who was a patient in the Jewish hospital of Kishinev committed suicide. In a nearby
shtetl
the uncle of a small boy beat him to death in a fit of drunken rage. Krushevan seized upon both incidents eagerly. Each of the victims had been killed by the Jews, who practiced the loathsome ceremony of ritual murder, his paper reported.

Clearly it was time for those who could to depart. Mendel told Isaac to take the money and go; the rest of the family could follow later. Isaac had other ideas. He was young and strong, and his father had taught him the blacksmith's trade. He and Itta would remain in Kishinev and continue to save rubles toward the day they could leave. Meanwhile, Mendel, Sonya, and Dora could go to the United States and save money to help bring Isaac, Itta, and their child to the New World. When Mendel objected, Isaac reminded him that Dora was of a marriageable age. Did her father want her to marry a poor Jew of Kishinev and face the kind of life that went with such a marriage? She was a beautiful girl. In America a
shidduch
, a match, could be made that would give her a wonderful future—and even help the whole family.

Mendel agreed with reluctance; the necessary applications were filled out laboriously and forwarded with the help of the Jewish tax collector, who accepted with protest the six rubles Mendel forced into his hands, but who made no move to return the money. They were to leave on May 30. Long before the precious passports arrived, to be placed behind the brick with the freedom money, Sonya, Itta, and Dora set to work making feather beds and goose-down pillows, sorting through the few pieces of personal property again and again, trying to decide what should be taken and what should be left behind.

Early in April the men began to run out of charcoal with which to stoke the forges. Mendel obtained his wood in the forest twenty kilometers away from Kishinev, hard chestnut logs which he bought cheap from peasants clearing the woods for
farming. He hauled, sawed, split, and burned the charcoal himself. It was an unending chore. Although Jews were confined to the ghetto, the government recognized the importance of keeping animals in working condition, and blacksmiths were given permits allowing them to leave the town to purchase wood. Since Isaac was to be the new head of the business, he decided that he should buy the wood this time. When she heard, Itta pleaded that she be allowed to go along. They left the next morning, sitting happy and proud on the high seat of the flat bed wagon behind the two old horses.

It was a marvelous trip. Spring was in the air. Isaac allowed the horses to set their own slow pace, and the couple enjoyed the scenery as it slowly rolled by. When they arrived at the woodland which was being cleared it was already afternoon. The peasants were happy at the prospect of unexpected extra money to help ease the debts they had incurred at Easter. They allowed Isaac to walk through the woods and mark the trees that would best suit his purpose. He chose young wood that would be easiest for him to saw up when he took it back home. That evening he and Itta ate sumptuously from the kosher lunch Sonya had packed for them. The peasants were accustomed to this, and understood. That night they slept in a small hut near the fields, excited and happy with the novelty of being away from home together, her head on his shoulder and his hand on her swollen belly. In the morning Isaac worked in his shirtsleeves with the peasants, chopping down the trees and trimming the branches, then loading the trunks onto his wagon. When they were through, the sun stood high in the sky. Isaac paid the farmer eight rubles for the wood, thanked him with warmth and received equally sincere thanks, and then sprang to the high seat next to Itta, clucking to start the horses pulling the heavy load.

The sun was setting as they approached Kishinev. They had realized that something was wrong while they were still miles from the town. A pig farmer who was a longtime customer at the blacksmith shop came riding toward them on a mare that wore shoes which Mendel's hammer had fashioned only the week before. When Isaac hailed him gaily the man's face became pale. He kicked his heels savagely into his horse's flanks and pounded away over the fields.

As they drew closer they saw the first fires, the smoke smudging skyward in long columns that swirled purple in the setting sun. In a little while they heard the wailing. They didn't speak to one another, but Isaac could hear his wife's ragged breath, loud and terrified, a half-sobbing sound, as the horses pulled the loaded wagon down streets which on both sides were long rows of still-burning buildings.

At the blacksmith shop only the brick forges remained whole, blackened now outside as well as within. The house was three-quarters gone, a charred, roofless shell. Near it waited Itta's brother, Solomon Melnikov. He gave a shout of joy when he saw them alive and safe. And then, like a child, he put his head on Isaac's shoulder and began to cry.

Isaac and Itta stayed with the Melnikovs during the funeral and the seven days of mourning. All of Kishinev sat
shiva
. Forty-seven Jews had been killed in the pogrom. Almost six hundred were injured. Two thousand families had been utterly ruined by the crazed mob that had swept through the town, raping and mutilating before they had slit throats and crushed skulls. Seven hundred houses had been destroyed. Six hundred stores were pillaged.

On the last night of the mourning week Isaac walked alone to the ruined blacksmith shop through the dark streets, noting burned shells of houses like missing teeth in a jaw. The loose brick at the base of the forge came out almost too easily, and for a dull moment he was sure the passports and the money would be gone. But they were there. He put them in his pockets, for some reason replacing the brick so that it neatly closed the hole at the bottom of the forge.

He gave his mother's passport to the Melnikovs; he never knew whether anyone used it to leave Kishinev. They said good-by only to the Melnikovs and to his father's cousins, who had also survived the terror.

The Melnikov family was wiped out by the influenza epidemic which swept Bessarabia in 1915. But, as Michael's
zaydeh
used to say, that is another story, all of the facts of which are not known.

His grandfather related these events time and time again, until his mother, who always squirmed throughout the more horrible portions of the tale and whose patience was worn thin
by the presence in her home of an old and cantankerous man, would snap, “We
know
. You told us already. Oy, to the children he tells such things!” This is why most of the stories he heard from his
zaydeh
were in the confines of Rivkind's Grocery Store, a place full of the wonderful smells of garlic and farmer's cheese and smoked fish and half-sour pickles. His grandfather smelled good, too, when Michael crawled into his lap. His beard gave off a fragrance that was a mixture of Castile soap and the strong Prince Albert pipe tobacco he smoked six days a week, and his breath always carried faint traces of sugared ginger and rye whiskey, to both of which he was addicted. He was that rarity, a Jew who was a dedicated drinker of alcohol. Liquor was a luxury to which he had succumbed in his loneliness and single affluence following the death of his wife. He allowed himself a shot every couple of hours from the bottle of Canadian V.O., procured from a friendly Prohibition-hating druggist, which he believed he kept a secret in a barrel of lima beans.

Michael had no need for stimulation from paper-and-ink heroes. He had a living stalwart who was a combination of Don Quixote, Tom Swift, Robinson Crusoe carving a new life out of a strange world. “Tell me the
meiseh
about the border, Zaydey,” he would beg, burrowing his face into the soft beard and closing his eyes.

“Who has time for such foolishness,” Isaac would grumble, but they both knew that he had more than enough time. The old rocking chair that he kept behind the grocery counter would start to move back and forth, creaking like a cricket, and Michael would settle his face even deeper into the beard.

“When I left Kishinev with my Itta,
aleha hasholom
, she should rest in peace, we traveled by train northward, around the mountains. We had no trouble getting into Poland. It was part of Russia then. They didn't even check your passport.

“I was nervous about my passport. It was my father's, he should rest in peace. I knew they wouldn't bother Itta. She had my dead sister's papers. But I was a young man carrying an old man's passport.

“Our troubles began when we got to the border between Poland and Germany. It was a time of
tsorris
between the two countries. There always is trouble between Poland and Germany. But this time the
tsorris
was worse. When we got to the border
the train was stopped and everyone had to get out. We were told that only a certain number of persons were allowed to cross, and that the quota had just been filled.”

At this point the rocking of the chair would cease, a signal that Michael should ask a question in order to build up the suspense. So he spoke into the beard, feeling its hairs tickling his lips and surrounding his nose. Every once in a while the beard into which he leaned his face would become damp from his breathing, forcing him to choose a dry spot. “What did you do, Zaydey?”

“We were not alone. There were perhaps a hundred others in the same trouble. Poles, Germans, Russians, Jews. Some Rumanians and a few Bohemians. Some of them went outside the railroad station, looking for a place where they could run across the border. There were people from the little town who approached us and told us that for money they would show a safe way across. But I didn't like their looks, they looked like criminals. And besides, your grandmother,
aleha hasholom
, had a big belly. Like a watermelon. She was pregnant with your father. I was afraid to try a long trip by foot. So all day long we waited by the border gate. The sun was hot, like a fire, and I worried that your grandmother would become sick. We had some bread and cheese and we ate it, but a little later we became hungry. And we were very thirsty. There was nothing to drink. All day we waited. When the sun went down we stayed because we didn't know where else to go.”