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  Shmulik is a clever boy,

  He may be in rags but he’s never coy;

  Don’t turn your head, don’t even blink

  Or he’ll take your money in a wink.

  I still recall the summery September day in 1942 when Shmulik, escorted by the Jewish police of our inverted state, walked ahead of his family towards the cattle-truck that would take them to be ‘resettled’. Shmulik was sad, he looked forlorn — I had never seen him like this. Perhaps he knew intuitively that his career as an entertainer had come to an end.

  Years later I had the good fortune to meet up with Shmulik’s cantor from the old days, the one who had been so enraptured by his voice. I don’t know why people used to say that a cantor is a fool; for as it turned out, this cantor was now a confident, fully accredited rabbi with a long white beard. We were pleased to see one another, but I had barely opened my mouth when he patted me sagely on the shoulder and declared: ‘In everything that happened to Shmulik lies God’s hand. How else could he have become the head soloist in our heavenly Father’s choir? How else?’ he repeated, triumphantly.

  Star-crossed Lovers

  The four-storey tenement block where we lived was occupied by sixteen families. Every family dwelled in a one-room apartment. Each room had two beds: one for the parents, the other for their four or five children. What better proof of the closeness of our families?

  Our landlord Motke — a grey-bearded man who swaggered around with a black-lacquered cane and a white handkerchief in his breast pocket; whose quarters comprised two rooms, plus a kitchen, a balcony and a foyer; whose set of gold front teeth established beyond question his enormous wealth — this man was known by everyone as Motke Machinist.

  Not that he had anything to do with repairing machines. No. The honorific was bestowed upon him because in his younger years — that is, before he inhabited a residence with a foyer — Motke had been one of the most sought-after safebreakers. Legend had it that he worked only at night, in his socks, and with his eyes closed so as not to look upon his accomplices. Evidently he enjoyed strict solitude.

  Motke had a fascinating history. He was a plain-looking, rather morbid man, yet it had happened that Kraindle — the most delectable, the smartest, the best-educated prostitute in the profession, who distributed up front to the needy the money she made on her back — had fallen passionately in love with him.

  Motke’s parents, however, though no more kosher than he, had refused to have a prostitute, even a noble one, for a daughter-in-law. Motke protested, threatened to hang himself; Kraindle wept, vowed that she would go straight, swore that she knew a doctor who could ‘make it good as new’. But Motke’s family, especially his mother, would not hear of it. They soon forced their son to marry the strong-headed Ruchcia, who by way of a dowry received a fishstall at the market from her father — whom we called Mussolini because he peddled Italian typewriters.

  As soon as Kraindle learnt of her defeat she had slit her wrists, and would most probably have bled to death had she not been saved by one of her ever-alert colleagues. Rumour had it that, thanks to her connections in higher circles, she was able to secure a position in the French Foreign Legion...

  Meanwhile, every Monday morning Ruchcia would ride in a hired horse-and-buggy to the nearby village, where she bought fish from a young farmer who played the flute. One year, just before the High Holidays, she departed at dusk, never to return.

  Mussolini and his wife, Tzerl — who went about moaning, with white compresses pressed to her forehead — ran to the police, hired private detectives, lit candles at the cemetery. But all to no avail. Tzerl’s carry-on infected our lives with some bizarre stories. According to one, Ruchcia had been murdered at Kraindle’s behest; another had Kraindle climbing through Motke’s window at night; a third was put about by a selfproclaimed seer who announced that it was ‘definitely a young flautist’ he had seen in his dream, whipping with a dead fish the flesh of the hapless Ruchcia, harnessed to his buggy...

  Years later (when Motke’s parents had long been playing canasta with the angels) — after a plague of grey hornets had assailed our skies, and all the familiar stories had been torn up and tossed into the basket of oblivion; after the difficult times that had descended on our lives, times of cruelty, restriction, confiscation, confinement, and the exodus, finally, of even the mice from our microcosm — Motke was still living in the same tenement block. Without a family, without a friend, he looked an old and broken man, though he was no more than sixty. He had been exiled from his apartment to the attic on the roof, where the beastly cold wind reigned supreme. One day he told himself, ‘Enough is enough,’ and on the first available occasion added his name to a list of men due to be shipped out from our inverted kingdom.

  Accordingly, one wintry frosty noon, Motke climbed into the cattle-truck that would deliver him to another land. Then a strange thing happened, something that no one could ever explain. People swore that they saw Kraindle walking beside him, holding on tight, her still-radiant head resting on his drooped shoulder. ‘Kraindle, what has brought you here?’ Motke was heard to call out. ‘Jealousy,’ his escort replied. ‘I’ll not let Lady Death have you all to herself!’

  Interrupted Song

  Speaking of Motke, I must back-track for a moment, for Motke always brings to mind the Goldhamers. They were a family of six — father, mother and four children — who had become members of our four-storey tenement community back in 1933, and whom our landlord held in the highest regard because of their sedateness, piety, and dependability as tenants who never failed to pay their rent on time.

  Isaac Goldhamer, thanks to his enormous size, was immediately nicknamed ‘Byk’ (Ox). A very strictly religious man, Isaac presided over his fruit business dressed in traditional black garb, with a prayer always on his lips. One of his boys, Simcha, was my age; his brother Moniek, though two years younger, was nevertheless equally eligible to be accepted as a fully-fledged member of our backyard football team. As a rule, however, a beating preceded the initiation of anyone who desired to enter our fellowship, and on this occasion I volunteered to carry out the job. After school, in the dark cobblestone entrance to the yard, I lay quietly in wait for my two victims. Or so I thought. After the thrashing the two brothers gave me, my own mother couldn’t recognize me!

  And yet almost overnight the three of us became close friends. Little Moniek even confided a secret that he kept from his own brother — that he would rather be called ‘Moishe Shambelo’, and when he grew up he would be leader of an underworld gang, living in caves frequented by a fraternity of robbers. Both brothers had fine voices, especially Simcha, and they consequently became choristers in the Great Synagogue on Wolborska Street (which the Germans, to prove their Aryan superiority, would later burn to the ground).

  On Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, Simcha asked me to join him at the morning service. This was an awesome experience, for I had never been inside a synagogue before. So many Jews, all enveloped in the white wings of prayer-shawls! Then there was the singing of the choir — and above all the voice of Simcha, chiming like a brass gong in the cupola of a holy temple.

  Avinu malkenu...

  That night I confessed to father that I had spent the day in synagogue. ‘You did the right thing, son,’ he said. I was taken aback: ‘But why? We’re not religious.’ ‘The synagogue is a fortress of Yiddishkeit,’ he explained, ‘and we are Yidn.’ I was still puzzled: ‘Aren’t we also socialists?’ ‘Of course, though primarily Yiddish socialists,’ he replied. ‘How is that?’ I persisted. ‘Well, did our circumcision not come before our socialism?’ And father closed the inquiry with a smile.

  Encouraged by this confusion, I managed to talk all my backyard friends into becoming members of Skif, the Socialist Children’s Union. When our Skif choir was preparing itself for a concert in aid of the workers combating Fascism in Austria, Simcha proved a most welcome recruit, and was duly appointed to sing solo the main theme-song of our production. This arran
gement turned out to be a rather traumatic experience. The whole choir was assembled on stage, the curtain was about to go up, but no Simcha! And there was no last-minute arrival, because our star never showed up.

  When I got home I discovered that Simcha’s father had got wind of the whole affair and had locked up his son for the day in a dark closet. Spotting me in the yard, Isaac Goldhamer burst from his door like an unstoppable bullock. ‘If you ever involve my children in your gang of Apikorsim,’ he shouted, ‘I’ll skin you alive!’

  For years I lost track of Simcha. I caught up with him in November 1944, in the slave-labour camp of Wolfsberg. He was singing to entertain the kapos for a slice of bread. Haggard, worn to the bone, he had no life left in him. At roll-call next morning he was selected to be transported to the Auschwitz gas chambers. The deputy commandant, who was known as Henk, asked Simcha if he had heard of the singer Joseph Schmidt. Simcha said that he had. ‘And do you know his famous song?’ ‘Yes, Herr Unterscharführer.’ ‘So let me hear you.’ ‘I’ve forgotten the words, sir.’ ‘Then let me teach them to you. This is the final day, of my existence; this is my final day, I can be sure...’ But Simcha, already in the open truck, remained mute. ‘Damn Jew,’ screamed the officer. ‘Damn Jew, sing!’ My friend’s lips stayed firmly sealed. Then, as the truck began to move, Simcha looked straight into Henk’s eyes and, with his last ounce of strength, let his voice fly. It resounded once again like the chime of a brass gong:

  Avinu malkenu...

  Though this time beneath the unblemished blue of an indifferent cosmic cupola.

  The Melamed

  I cannot quite remember how it came about, but one evening, as mother was dishing out our dinner, I heard her say: ‘Gershon, I’m about to engage a melamed for our son.’ A melamed was a religious teacher. ‘I don’t think the extra study will interfere with his school program, and it will enhance his knowledge of Jewish history.’ Father’s non-response was a sign of acquiescence.

  But my older sister Pola, a confirmed Marxist who had already done time for the glory of Stalin in a couple of prestigious Polish prisons, would not hear of it. ‘Why, mother?’ she pleaded. ‘Why should you introduce your son, at such a vulnerable age, to that opium?’

  Father, a sworn atheist who quarrelled with God all his life, chuckled. He was a socialist but, like many others of his comrades, of the Fabian persuasion. Once, in a discussion, I heard him remark that if Marx had been born into money, he would never have written Das Kapital. In fact, father argued, Marx hated the very class he yearned to belong to.

  Next day after sundown, as I was finishing my homework, Eliahu the melamed arrived. He was a smallish man with a very sympathetic face, but without one solitary hair on his chin. What’s this, I thought, a rabbi without a beard? After he left I asked father — who, at the other end of the table, had pretended to read the paper while listening attentively to my first lesson — how it was that the rabbi’s face was as smooth as a baby’s bottom. ‘Well, son,’ he replied, ‘better a rabbi without a beard than a beard without a rabbi.’

  Father had clearly taken a liking to the man, and so had I. Eliahu began each lesson with a story from the Chumash (the Pentateuch, or Five Books of Moses), to which I would listen with a certain juvenile scepticism. Yet these stories opened up a new world. It was not that I hadn’t heard them already from my teachers at school; but Reb Eliahu knew how to add fire to these wondrous tales, and they set my boyish head spinning.

  One evening, as mother interrupted the simmer of the kettle on the stove and poured hot tea into white enamel cups, the melamed asked my father: ‘Reb Gershon, why do you not send your son to a proper religious school where they teach about the Almighty and His real glory?’

  My father smiled. ‘You mean about our personal Creator, the one who governs our lives? Well, Reb Eliahu, the Creator’s track record is not a very good one, especially in relation to His chosen.’ He said this without a hint of sarcasm.

  ‘Are we to take only the good, without the bad?’ the other man retorted.

  ‘Ah, Reb Eliahu, you are talking with Job’s tongue. Yet is it not the very book you’re quoting which casts the longest shadow on divine justice?’

  Eliahu fell silent, his face reddened. He was a refined man, perhaps he felt he had gone too far. Burying his eyes in the steaming cup, he regained his composure. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘there is a school of thought which upholds a theory that the sages consciously placed the Tav, the first letter in the word Torah, at the very end of the alphabet — meaning by this to remind us that a man may have a world of knowledge at his fingertips, but without immersing himself in the depths of the Torah he still remains unlearned.’

  Father smiled; obviously he loved this fable. For a good while the two men searched one another’s eyes. Then my melamed stood up. As father stretched out his hand to him, Reb Eliahu said, ‘Thank you, sir,’ and with the footfall of a shy child he stepped toward the door and gently closed it behind him.

  The Legend

  On 18 July 1936, Fascist insurgents who would later be led by General Franco rose up against the legally elected government of the Spanish Republic. Although Spain was a thousand kilometres from our town — where unemployment was a way of life, where little folk were pressed into holes in dilapidated houses by a system that mocked their misery — the temerity of the insurgents threw our neighbourhood into a state of great ferment.

  Almost overnight there were demonstrations, meetings, protests, fundraising drives; people greeted each other with clenched fists, shouting Red Front! And everywhere, our neighbours’ son Lucjan was to be found: tall, dark, handsome Lucjan, reliable Lucjan — alias Luzer, who, forever on the lookout for answers to the intractable question of the wretchedness in our midst, had discovered the Soviet Union. Sitting on the shoulders of two comrades, a red flag in his hand, above a tumultuous, ebullient throng that heaved like a stormy sea, Lucjan sang at the top of his sonorous voice:

  In smoke sinks Barcelona,

  Flames engulf Madrid,

  And sailing over Aragon

  A golden moon does bleed.

  Madrid is a tower of light,

  In the dark a shining beam;

  But Italy sends its bombers

  And poison sends Berlin.

  Some two months later, as the papers brought grim news from the front, we heard that Lucjan, in the company of others like himself, tailors who had never held a gun in their hands, was off to join the International Brigade to fight for Spain’s freedom. Lucjan’s mother cried. ‘Please, son, don’t do this to your old mother.’ His father pleaded. ‘Why, Luzer? Why lay down your young life for Spain, what is Spain to you? Have you forgotten what they did to your ancestors, how they murdered us in the tens of thousands, burned us alive in the bonfires?”

  But Lucjan was immovable. ‘Yes, father, I do remember. But remembering and dwelling on the past are two different things. Dwelling on past tragedies is self-destructive,’ said the young party man, ‘and I, your son, am going to make sure that Spain never reverts to the those shameful times of the Inquisition.’

  On 19 May 1939, as General Franco was taking the salute at his victory parade in Madrid, Lucjan, his right arm in a black sling, limped into our neighbourhood and was greeted by the general acclaim of its inhabitants. His head was bowed in sorrow. It was clear that his inner anguish was far more painful than his physical injuries — the knowledge of defeat, and of the Soviet betrayal.

  Two years later we heard him speak, perhaps for the first time since his return; and although we were still teenagers we could tell that the words he wanted evaded him, while those that did come seemed inadequate to express the feelings that filled his heart. But the fact that he had fought in the battles we all dreamt of joining created an extraordinary aura around the young Lucjan, an aura which embraced him like a mantle and lent a special credence to his nickname — for after his return, we rarely referred to him other than as ‘The Legend’.

  As the Days Dar
kened

  No one knew what had come over Szymon, our consumptive mystic-turned-Cassandra. Out of the blue he started running through the city, waving his hands about, shouting: ‘People, good people! O hear me, you sinners! Our years will be shortened by months, our months by weeks, our weeks by days — and all because the mezuzahs on our doorposts are tarnished. The demon is on his way, he is coming, coming! He’ll attack out of lust, with great brutality...’ And thus screaming, Szymon would dart like a fiery arrow from house to house, inspecting the Shema — the prayer nestled within the mezuzah — at the door of every home in our community.

  Szymon’s neighbour, Sonek the cartman, who lived in a shed with his wife and little girl, was a man of steel. People believed that Sonek could do with one hand what Samson had done to the Philistines with two. It was reputed that one rainy night, when his horse tripped and broke a leg, Sonek had picked up the beloved mare without blinking, brought her home to the stable, covered her with his own blanket and nursed the animal back to health. Since then he had never sat atop the cart.

  Every day Sonek got up before the first spark of dawn, thanked God for his life of plenty and went off to the bakery where he worked as a delivery man. But on the night, the horrible night when the Almighty took his little girl away, Sonek ran out naked into the yard and, throwing his fists at the heavens, shouted: ‘Murderer, murderer! What have You done? What have You done?’ From that moment, he became a mocker of religion, a morbid man impossible to be with. Before long, his wife had to leave him and go back to her parents.

  Well, to say that Sonek’s blasphemous outpourings made him Szymon’s mortal enemy would be an understatement. And the feeling was mutual. Not surprisingly, when Szymon approached Sonek’s doorstep, the cartman chased him away with his horsewhip. ‘Sonek!’ yelled the fanatical mystic. ‘You’ll burn in hell, I promise you!’ ‘Then at least,’ the other shot back, ‘after my bitter cold life, I’ll be warm for a change!’ At this, Szymon spat upon the ground, in the general direction of Sonek’s feet, and ran off to find another doorstep.