The Woman from Hamburg (16 page)

In the one-story house over which hover the spirits of bankers, artists and philosophers, in a room that used to be the bath-house dressing room, the East European Jew looks at holiday greeting cards. They come, as they do every year, from Izdebno, Leokadia, Zygmunty, Melanów, Chotyń, and Wielki Las.

Finally, he reaches for an envelope from New York.

“Read it aloud,” he says. “I’m almost blind.”

The envelope has been cut open. The thin airmail paper, covered with awkward writing, has been read many times.

“Reading your letter, I wept bitterly. I, too, regret that I ran away from the train. Life is lonely. I wish you good health, Your Mojsze.”

They were traveling in the same freight car to Treblinka: Mojsze Landsman, a friend from Łaskarzew, and he with his four-year-old son. When the son smothered to death in the freight car, Mojsze Landsman whispered, “Now,” and jumped first.

“Write,” he says to me. “I’m almost blind.”

He hands me note paper and starts dictating:

“Dear Mojsze, you are right. For whom did we jump? Why the hell did we jump? Did we have to jump from that train?”

But no …

He has changed his mind. He takes the paper away from me and hands me a shiny card. It is a picture of a Christmas tree with a lot of colored lights and burning candles.

“Write,” he says. “Dear Mojsze, on the occasion of New Year’s Day 1995 I wish you much health and …”

“And …?”

“Well, write, write. Don’t you know what you’re supposed to wish people for the New Year?”

The son of Ninel, God’s great-granddaughter, was prepared for his bar mitzvah by the bearded Jew who boards the trolley on Targowa Street.

He was a
shochet
, a ritual slaughterer. He was taught the art of slaughtering by Izaak Dublin, while Mosze Tipnis taught him Talmud—both of them the most pious, the most learned Jews in all Rokitno.

When you have reached sixty years of age you can no longer be a slaughterer. Your hand might tremble, the knife would wound the animal, and the meat would be
treyf
.

When the Jew from Targowa Street stopped being a
shochet
, the last one in Warsaw, the last one in Poland, he decided to emigrate to Israel.

He got his furniture ready for the journey, locked it up in one room, hung a padlock on the door, and hid the key in a linen pouch. He moved into the kitchen. Pots that there’s no point in washing, jars that should be recycled, stale baked goods, old newspapers, pieces of aluminum foil, old shoes, bottle caps, corks, and rags all piled up.

When he comes back from morning prayer he takes off his black suit and lies down in his underwear on the bed, which there’s no point in making up with fresh linen. He stretches out his white beard and grayish-yellow bare arms on the grayish-yellow comforter. He sinks into a short, alert sleep before his afternoon prayer.

He would like to sail to Haifa on a freighter with his furniture. He would like to travel free of charge, so he visits the Israeli Embassy and asks for a ticket.

They reply that that is impossible.

A couple of years pass. He visits the Embassy, asks for a ticket.

They say it’s impossible.

A couple of years pass.

Maybe in other countries, in West European countries, one GOES to Israel.

An East European Jew does not simply GO, just like that.

HE PREPARES TO LEAVE—and that must go on and on.

The bearded man from Targowa Street, the last Polish
shochet
, has been preparing to leave for Israel for thirty years.

A middle-aged Jew came to visit the last
shochet
. Also an East European Jew, but from Wola.

His father had a tailor’s shop on the corner of Redutowa and Wolska Streets, opposite the well.

Water was carried in buckets on yokes.

The well pump was red.

His father made suits.

The wife of factory-owner Krygier paid him 115 zlotys to sew her a woolen suit.

His father bought a wringer for five zlotys, a washtub for fifteen, and gambled away the rest at cards.

This happened right before the Passover holiday. His mother sent the children to the rabbi. The rabbi also lived on Wolska Street, across from the
cheder
. All five of the children went there, he and his sisters Krajndł, Frendł, Fajge, and Hania. The rabbi gave them four dozen eggs and a packet of fat from the Central Agricultural Co-op.

He watched his father carefully, looking at how he played and how he lost, and he drew a conclusion: in all card games, it is possible to give fate a helping hand.

His parents were deaf mutes. They spoke to each other in Yiddish, using sign language. Thanks to that circumstance he did not have a Jewish accent and after the liquidation of the ghetto he was able to pose as an Aryan kid without much difficulty.

He was a street singer, a shoeshine boy, a cigarette seller, a cowherd, and a railway workers’ assistant. He lived at the West Station, on platform four, in the comptroller’s booth. German troop trains passed through the station carrying soldiers on leave from the Eastern front. People bought champagne and sardines from the soldiers on the trains and sold them flashlights, batteries, and fountain pens. He traded at night; first thing each morning he turned the goods into cash at Hala Mirowska, and during the day he walked around with a hammer and checked the rails, wheels, and brakes.

He married a Polish woman. She bore him sons who did not want to be Jews.

He doesn’t like to brag, but there is no better player than he in the Marriott Hotel or the Rio Grande Club, nor in the Różycki bazaar. He plays poker, roulette, and sixty-six. He wouldn’t want to brag, but there is no better gambler in all Warsaw.

And it all comes from the fact that his father gambled away his earnings from the suit he’d made for the wife of Krygier the factory owner.

The last gambler came to see the last
shochet
about a delicate matter.

He has a woman, Tośka. She is easygoing, with a large bosom and kind, blue eyes. His wish is that Tośka should turn out to be Jewish.

Once, she was telling him about how her father would kill a rooster: “ ‘Slash …,’ and he’d make a smooth motion across his throat, and then the rooster was dead.”

A sudden hope dawned in the gambler.

He and Tośka went to see the last
shochet
.

They put him in their car.

They drove to the countryside.

They bought a rooster.

The last
shochet
plucked a few feathers from the rooster’s neck. He removed his ritual knife—slender and sharp, with no nicks in it—from its linen sheath. He checked with his finger to be sure the blade was smooth. With a single motion he drew it across the throat: “Slash …”

They looked at Tośka.

“Is that how your father did it?”

“Yes,” she agreed.

“Then he was a Jew,” the last gambler rejoiced. “Maybe he was even a butcher?”

“Did he check the gullet?” the last
shochet
asked anxiously, carefully examining the killed bird. “There cannot be even a grain of feed remaining in the gullet; a bird with feed is unclean.”

Tośka could not remember if her father used to check the gullet, but the last gambler was not interested in details.

“Your father was a Jew, you are a Jew, at last your life’s pathways are straightened out, and it’s all thanks to me.”

He took her to the synagogue, sent her to the women’s balcony, stood beside the Torah and prayed, as he did every Saturday, for the souls of his four sisters: Krajndł, Frendł, Fajge, and Hania.

The last cantor, Dawid B., and his wife, Zysla, decided to emigrate for the sake of their son.

The son had passed his high school graduation exam; he earned 5’s in all his science exams and he wanted to study electronics.

Dawid and Zysla yearned for him to graduate from college, to find a Jewish girl, and for the girl to bear him nice
children. They yearned for a peaceful, happy old age spent near their children and grandchildren.

Everything was prepared for their emigration.

They had the down comforter restored. (The proprietress of the workshop on Wileńska Street had never seen such down, so they explained to her that it was from pigeons. Miriam, Zysla’s mother, had sent the comforter to them in Łuck literally at the last minute and it was the only thing that they had not exchanged for flour and potatoes. Thanks to the comforter they survived the wartime freezing weather in the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and in Akmolińska oblast.)

They placed the comforter in a chest along with a clock that chimed every quarter hour. It was an unusual clock. Dawid B. had replaced the numbers of the beautiful, old clockface with Hebrew letters. Now, instead of 1 there was
aleph
, instead of 2,
beys
, instead of 3,
gimel
, and so on. (His father taught him singing and his love of clocks. He was the owner of a clock-maker’s shop in the center of Kielce, and also the cantor in a small synagogue on Nowowarszawska Street.)

They packed up their pictures. A certain Shevchenko, a Ukrainian, had painted them. Everyone ordered paintings before leaving. They represented women standing above the Sabbath candles, men studying Torah, and Jews as eternal wanderers. They liked the scenes with the Torah because the synagogue reminded them of the one in Kielce, on Nowowarszawska Street, but they had reservations
about the wandering Jew. He was sitting there exhausted, barefoot, beside a road that ran through a field, with the Holy Book in one hand, a walking stick in the other, his shoes slung over his shoulders. Maybe they were too tight; maybe he didn’t want to wear them out. That was it: there was a serious mistake in those shoes—they were old, dirty, and they touched the book. (Zysla pointed this out. She knew the prohibitions and commandments perfectly, because she had been taught religion by the wife of the Powiśle rabbi. The rabbi lived on the corner of Chełmska Street and Zysla lived on Czerniakowska; there was a
mikva
across the street and a prayer house. After the rabbi’s death his son-in-law, a follower of the Piaseczno
tzaddik
, inherited the position. He had a medical diploma, and in addition he was the very own brother-in-law of the Kozienice
tzaddik
. When Zysla was in the hospital, the rabbi gave her mother medicine and uttered three words:
Got zol trefn
, God will help. And God did help; the next day, her fever broke.)

They gave away their furniture.

They sold the piano.

They packed up their clothing.

Zysla tidied up the apartment and went downstairs to take out the garbage.

When she returned the window was wide open. Someone was screaming in the courtyard, horrendous screams.

The cantor’s wife wants to believe in an unhappy accident. The women in the synagogue believe in an unhappy love.

The photograph on the headstone, in the Jewish cemetery, portrays a good-looking boy with serious, dark eyes.

The pictures on the apartment walls portray women praying over Sabbath candles, men studying Torah, and the wandering Jew.

On the bed there’s a comforter made of pigeon down.

The clock strikes every quarter hour.

Two large suitcases stand in the main room. In them is the son’s clothing, packed for the journey. They haven’t opened the suitcases in twenty-five years. Every day they dust them and cover them again with a white, crocheted tablecloth.

The last cantor boards the trolley at Zamoyski Street.

He attends synagogue only on Saturdays.

He sings only once a year, on Yom Kippur.

He sings
El mole rachamim
, God full of mercy.

All year he gathers his strength for that day and that song.

All the Jews in the synagogue are waiting for it.

From his frail, old man’s body emerges a voice that is clear, powerful, overflowing with love and despair.

No one sings the
El mole rachamim
anymore like the last Warsaw cantor does.

It is time for a question: What is meant by “East Europeans,” and where does the East begin?

For Bohumil Hrabal it begins where “the Austrian, empire-style railroad stations end.” That is not clear. The empire style was dominant in architecture when there were no railroads or railroad stations. Perhaps he was thinking about the later white Austrian buildings bordered with green tiles. In that case, Eastern Europe would begin east of the stations in Leżajsk, Sarzyna, and Nisko—starting only in Stalowa Wola.

For Agnieszka and Henryk Samsonowicz the East begins immediately beyond the Vistula River. On the road to Dzbądz we passed the Śląsko-Dąbrowski bridge, drove into Targowa, and Agnieszka said, “Oho, the East.”

But at the corner of Kawęczyńska and Radzymińska Streets, a good five kilometers from there, in a private lending library, they had all of Proust throughout the grim 1950s. The prewar, gray-haired proprietress took the prewar volumes down from the shelf, each wrapped in packing paper, and said, “
This
you should read.”

Andrzej Czajkowski, the pianist, brought Proust back from Paris. But I brought it back from a lending library on Kawęczyńska Street.

Should Eastern Europe, then, have begun in front of the lending library with all of Proust?

For Abraham J. Heschel, philosopher and theologian, the borders of the East were unimportant, because East European Jews lived in time more than in space. And if
they lived in space, then it was between the abysses and heaven.
³

According to Jewish legend, “Poland” derives from the Hebrew words
po-lin
, “reside here.” Jews fleeing pogroms and the plague in Germany discovered these words written on a piece of paper. The paper came from heaven. It was lying under a tree. In the branches of the tree wandering souls were hidden. Only a pious Jew reciting the evening prayer could help them. If, therefore, there exists a boundary point for Eastern Europe, it is the tree under which that piece of paper was lying.