This autobiographical footnote to history brightly illuminates the process by which the principle of national self-determination, after World War I, tore apart the fabric of harmonious living among the varied peoples of the old Austrian and Turkish Empires and left them the embattled racists of today.
_____________
Moving from one continent to another is a confusing experience. In my case, as in the case of most immigrants, years of concentration on discovering America, and being discovered by it, almost obliterated from my mind the place where I was born and brought up. Whether it is Hitler, or the influence of Henry James, or plain resistance to being melted down, or all of these, for some reason I have been thinking a good deal about Harlau. I am, after all, a man of two worlds, not one.
When I recalled my home town it came back to me as an image of Central European life before the First World War. Harlau is a more or less typical market town in the northern corner of old Rumania, the “Regat.” It straddles the main highway between the traditional capital of Moldavia, Jassy, and the smaller provincial city of Botoshani. (Much of the town was destroyed in 1944 by artillery fire, for Harlau stands on the line where the Russian army was pinned for several months by the Nazis before taking Jassy.) On one side of Harlau is Targul Frumos, which means “the pretty town,” and on the other an unattractive and petty market place, Frumusica, “the pretty little one.” But Harlau held an unchallenged historical superiority. We boys firmly believed that it had been a favorite of Stephen the Great, and we played frequently about a cave that led, by secret underground passages winding for forty miles, to the buried treasure of the 16th century prince of Moldavia.
The official population figure given to us in school was 4,500, which we agreed to raise by easy annual stages of 500—a minimum for any decent city—to nearly 10,000. This promoted Harlau to a place among the more important centers of the country. The fact was that we were constantly losing people through emigration to larger cities and especially to the United States.
_____________
The Harlauer were mostly Jews, many of whose families had lived in Rumania for centuries. Others had moved over from Austria-Hungary, principally from nearby Bukowina, during the past century. Some of the more prosperous merchants and wholesalers and the Jewish physician were of Austrian descent or citizenship; so were the two friseurs—who not only cut your hair and shaved you but also pulled teeth, applied cups, let blood, and hazarded medical diagnoses—and one of the two Hasidic rabbis who visited the town every other year with their lordly retinues. A large number of the Jewish inhabitants, perhaps a majority, were descendants of refugees who fled from Russian rule about a century ago. Moldavia and Wallachia were then not yet united as a national state and lived under the relatively mild rule of the old Turkish Empire. The refugees were generally boys who were shipped across the Prut River by their despairing parents, to escape the rigors and profanities of the conscription system of Czar Nicholas I. The soldiers served for twenty-five years and ate treif (un-kosher) food; many of them returned as Christians. Soldiering amounted to de-Judaizing.
In time, after the rise and ingrown development of the national state of Rumania, the Jews of Harlau and other Moldavian towns were cut off from their kin in Bessarabia and the Ukraine. And the Pruth was a mere thirty miles away! We looked chiefly toward the West; in immediate geographic terms, this meant Austria and, more vaguely, Germany. The Germans indeed were generally regarded as philo-Semitic, which is not strange in view of the persecutions and pogroms in Russian, Rumanian, and even Hungarian areas before the First World War. So isolated had we become from Russian Jewry that only in the winter of 1916—17, when a Russian army crossed the river to assist Rumania against imperial Germany, did Harlau discover the existence of a modern Yiddish literature. We promptly set to reading, beginning of course with the stories of Sholom Aleichem. Then Mendele Mocher Sforim, the grandfather of Yiddish literature, died in Odessa. We Harlauer had arrived a little late.
Across differences of origin there ran a deeper social difference in the Jewish community. Merchant and craftsman were worlds apart. They worshipped in different synagogues, and avoided each other in the bathhouse on Fridays. The merchants were secular-minded, progressive, “modern.” The craftsmen were old-fashioned. True, they were no longer organized into guilds, but the typical shop counted a master who did not disdain to take needle or hammer in hand, a journeyman or two laboring incredibly long hours for short wages, and the lowly apprentice, who did more house work than shop work.
The snobbism of the poorest merchant and his family toward the richest of master craftsmen was intense, unbending, and fully repaid in resentment. My own family, though hardly prosperous (no rich Harlauer emigrated), was bourgeois. Father owned a grocery and produce business in the center of town. He was usually away, collecting produce in the villages and transporting it to the railroad or to nearby export centers like Targul Frumos; Mother, intermittently assisted by a salesman and a maid, ran the store and somehow raised seven children. A slow but sure learner, I assimilated carefully the prejudices of my class, which looked upon all manual labor, even the most skilled, as degrading. Early influences are strong, and even today, though I have met Marxism more than half-way, the typewriter is my only spiritual compromise with the classless society. I still prefer to do first drafts in longhand, and in moments of high feeling prefer an old-fashioned pen to the mechanical—and therefore suspiciously proletarian—fountain pen. Back home, it was considered extraordinary that my best friend, the only son of a well-to-do tailor, should be admitted to the circle of the enlightened bourgeoisie; but then the reason was extraordinary. For Marcu Buium (Rumanian for Mordechai Benjamin) was extraordinarily brilliant and outshone all the mercantile rest of us. I remember well how he once engaged the older leaders of town opinion in debate on Zionism and electrified a large audience by flinging down the challenge of Le Cid:
Je suis jeune, il est vrai; mais aux âmes
bien nées,
La valeur n’attend point le nombre des
années.
Yet Buium remained to the end—an early end, at twenty-one—”a shneider’s a zihn,“ and my friends and I felt not a little self-conscious when visiting with him, behind his father’s shop in a back street.
_____________
There were several nationalities in town, in addition to the Jews. A few expatriated Austrian subjects practiced their hereditary craft of pottery, and produced wares much finer than those of the Rumanian village potters. I do not remember their linguistic affiliation, but I think they were Slovaks, like the traditional besom-binders of the larger towns. A Russian group, called Lipovani, had settled in town mainly as hog-raisers and butchers for the peasant trade.
Then there were Germans. Two families of German wheelwrights turned out the better carriages and wheels for Harlau and the surrounding district. The pharmacist was a German from Austria, who regarded Rumanians and Jews with impartial contempt. You wiped your feet in the summer, or your boots in the winter, before intruding into his sparklingly clean and confusingly scented Holy of Holies, which was located in a two-story building, the only skyscraper in town, on our main street, Strada Stefan cel Mare. The pharmacist sported a trim Vandyke, also the only one in town. Fortunately for him, he did not have to talk to his customers, who always brought him messages from the physicians in Latin. His only direct intercourse with the customers was to mention the price, the only fixed price in Harlau, by the way.
A few Levantines—Greeks, Armenians, Turks—were engaged in characteristic businesses such as cafés and candy stores. It was inconceivable that a Jew should manufacture nougat, for example, which the boys thought was pressed into shape in unprintable ways. One of the cafés, which served non-alcoholic drinks, mostly tea and coffee, was operated by a native of Asia Minor whom our elders assigned to the people of the notorious Haman. Our timkhe—Hebrew for “miserable”—was a quiet and likable old fellow, but on Purim, when we celebrated the fall of the tyrant who proposed to exterminate the Jews, he shut up shop, drew the blinds, and went into a kind of mourning. Our Purim was his Yom Kippur.
The itinerant merchants were as mixed as the residents. Only the Turks sold coffee grinders, for instance. The traveling salesmen who peddled prayer-books and shawls and phylacteries generally came from Austria. A contractor from Italy built our new town hall, which overlooked the business district from a slight rise. He brought his own gang of skilled masons, who settled in town for a whole year, with their families, to complete the job. This was in a day when national walls were neither so many nor so high as they became in the years between the two world wars. Movement was still free in Central Europe. We drank coffee, prayed, and built houses on lines stretching from Italy to Turkey to Austria.
_____________
Whether settled or migratory, all these groups got along fairly well. Their occupations dovetailed conveniently to produce a neat economic mosaic. Trades and enterprises were divided according to hereditary specialties, almost like the guilds and corporations of the Byzantine Empire or the medieval towns of the West. The various nationalities did not intermarry or mix very much socially, but they showed otherwise an ingrained tolerance, or at least a good-humored indifference.
But neither the Jews nor the other groups got along so well with the native Rumanian population that surrounded and engulfed them. The commercial-minded townsmen thought the Rumanians parochial in outlook. Yet these backward people were the ruling “nation” and as such exercised an official and officious superiority. They were a small minority in town but a large majority in the district, that is, in the villages roundabout. This territorial preponderance gave them their privileged political position, under the doctrine of national self-determination, which brought all the Central European states into being. In such agrarian regions, the favored nation was naturally the populous peasantry or, speaking more realistically, its more or less primitive leadership, the semi-literate, white-collar, lower middle class of aspiring clerks and office-holders.
That was why the few Rumanians of Harlau held the national monopoly of administrative, bureaucratic, and political office; of the jobs, the nuisance value, and the graft. The mayor, his council and clerical assistants, the police chief, his sergeants and night watchmen, the judges and lawyers and their secretaries and notaries, the tax-gatherers and the inspectors of weights and measures, the street-cleaners and lamp-lighters and the firemen, the principal and teachers of the state-supported school, the holders of licenses to distribute spirits, salt, and tobacco, which were state monopolies—all these and their kind were Rumanians. They supervised, recorded, intimidated, mulcted, and, when their palms were insufficiently greased with baksheesh, pushed around the non-Rumanians. In short, the lumpen cast off by the village and the periphery of the town ran the community of traders, professionals, skilled craftsmen, and specialized industrial workers. This was national self-determination, when what Harlau needed much more was home rule and an atmosphere of fluid opportunity cleansed of invidiousness. Only in such an atmosphere might the individual overcome the rigidities of hereditary specialization and cultural isolation, of tribal craft, and the mosaic of Harlau become a “melting pot.”
_____________
Dominated by the village politically, the town was the economic leader. It brought the village into contact with the wider world, multiplied and fructified its wealth, and raised its standards of consumption and exchange. On Sundays and special market days, thousands of peasants swarmed into its streets and fair places, carrying, on beast or back, wheat, maize, barley, oats, nuts, fruits, furs, fowl, and eggs. Most of the produce, however, was picked up in the villages by Jewish traders operating from town in horse-drawn carts. (None of the townspeople owned teams of oxen; that was for the peasants. . . .) The surplus beyond the needs of the town was shipped to the larger cities and thence abroad, mainly to Austria-Hungary and Germany.
In exchange—a money exchange that frequently looked like plain barter—the town stores supplied the peasants with the products of its craftsmen and the stuffs of distant and foreign manufacture and production: salt, herring, groceries, and of course wines and hard liquors; cloth, the rudimentary leather sandals (opinci) which take the place of shoes in Central Europe, ready-to-wear clothes, and the national costume of white shirts, tight long trousers, and broad red stomachers, made familiar in the United States by newsreels of the Albanian army on the march.
The town was the place to which the peasant ran away to forget his troubles and drown his grievances. One day in 1907, after news of the agrarian rebellions in Russia had finally got around, the villagers converged upon Harlau in their tens of thousands, very angry at the landowners— none of whom lived in town. The greatest landowner in the district was Prince Ghika, a descendant of the Phanariots (originally from the Greek district of Phanar in Constantinople), whom the Turks of old had employed as the tax-farmers, bureaucrats, translators, and even provincial governors of their empire. Prince Ghika lived in lonely splendor in a palace several miles out of town. He spoke perfect French and German and wretched Rumanian. (He practiced his German on the Austrian-Jewish barber whom he ordered fetched in a magnificent carriage several times a week.)
The peasants, preferring to tackle lesser fry than the great prince, congregated in town instead of in the palace court. One of my earliest recollections is looking out of a tiny window in the attic over our grocery store at a threatening mob milling in the narrow Strada Stefan cel Mare. Somehow the expected pogrom did not occur. In the evening a regiment of foot-soldiers arrived from Botoshani to find all the peasants gone.
The secular antagonism to the town confused the peasants in their struggle with their traditional rural masters, before whom they were little better than serfs or slaves. This helped to solve their problems no more than it helped to solve the problems of the townsmen. Nationalistic agitators could always divert peasant resentment to the dreadful foreigners, who had lived in the country for centuries and without whom all trade and industry would have collapsed.
_____________
If Harlau had been variegated, as it was, and the hinterland solidly Rumanian, the picture would still retain a kind of simplicity. But there were multi-colored patches even in the area surrounding the town. If you drew a circle with a radius of, say, ten miles, you would enclose half a dozen nationalities, again assorted by trades and callings, alongside of the Rumanians.
There was the village of Maxut nearby, a small industrial settlement consisting of a glass factory and the office of a forest company. A trunk railway established in Harlau in the early years of the century had stimulated industrial enterprise. Glass-blowing consumes much firewood and the factory was nestled conveniently in the forested hills. Everything—sand, transportation to distant markets—was available in our district— everything, that is, except glass-blowers. For them the company had to go all the way to Saxony. A whole community of craftsmen, complete with families, preacher, and Marxism, was imported, transplanted into company houses, and supplied with a company church, school, and store. Some of the workers became permanent residents; others, loath to leave their native land forever, contracted for a few years’ work and were then replaced by other Saxons.
The German community of Maxut was as distinct and self-contained as the Jewish. The cultural level of this run-of-the-mill proletarian group was far above the new environment. The workmen and their families continued to speak German, learning enough Rumanian to conduct international relations. The Jewish traders of Harlau met them more than half-way by simulating a little German. Again, there was little general mixing with other groups, although some of the children, being Christians, were readily admitted to the state school. The German dress was distinctive, too: on Sunday the workmen appeared in embroidered velvet jackets and shorts and Alpine hats.
I came to know something of the inner life of Maxut while boarding one winter with a family there. My recollections are pleasant although—perhaps I should say because—they center largely around the kerosene-lighted dinner table. The meals were heavier and there was more meat than I was accustomed to, in those days of the First World War. This was entirely to the taste of a growing boy. I remember learning, amid the steam of Braten and Knoedel, my first Lieder, in the family of an excellent glass-blower and middle-of-the-road Socialist.
The reason I boarded away from home—where I left behind five little sisters and a brother, to be raised somehow—was that I had a job as the assistant to the assistant to the executive secretary of the company that was cutting the forest. I was jack-of-all trades in the small office, but my main assignment was to reproduce, on an ancient gelatin hand-press, the beautiful calligraphy of the secretary’s reports to the home office in Bucharest. Like the town pharmacist, and I think also the investors in the company, the secretary was a German from Austria. He was a short man, stocky, cultivated, and morose. A character out of Chekhov, he brooded and chafed over his exile among the savage tribes in the provinces. He never spoke to me, except through the older and more sophisticated assistant.
The work of our company was divided between two national monopolies. Rumanian peasants from nearby villages carted the wood to the factory and to the railway station in ox-carts and sleighs. But they were never hired to cut it. This work was reserved for an informal corporation of Hungarian and Ruthenian lumberjacks, with a sprinkling of Turks. After spending a long spring and summer farming their little plots in Bukowina and Galicia, these wood-cutters would arrive in the fall to go into a kind of industrial hibernation. They lived in primitive huts, cut trees with large saws and axes, and ate the other mammals of the forest.
On Sunday these strange, heavily-bearded creatures, enveloped in several layers of fur and swinging significant walking sticks whose handles were miniature axes, invaded our office clamoring for pay and scaring the wits out of me. They spoke no Rumanian and little German, and never went to the local churches. The only link between them and the Rumanian carters was our office. The German capitalist sat at the center, integrating their activities and relating them to the distant market.
_____________
But in other fields, such as truck gardening and melon raising, enterpriser and worker belonged to the same national “guild.” When, in the spring, the Ruthenians and Hungarians set out northward for Austrian parts and the Turks headed southward, they crossed paths with another species of dormice, the Bulgarians, Slav in language, semi-Mongol in ancient origin, and Greek Orthodox in religion. These got down to work at once, opened their neat barns, polished their tools, broke up their rented soil near town, and appeared in the market stalls within a few brief weeks with the most luscious vegetables in the world. This whole trade was in their hands. They learned a little Rumanian to deal with their customers, but retained their foreign citizenship, as did the other migratory and even some of the resident groups. On an appointed day in the fall, probably a religious holiday, the Bulgarians vanished, weighted down by their broad leather belts filled with paper money and coins, bound for Dobrudja and Bulgaria, where people live to be a hundred simply by eating a lot of yoghurt. Indeed these gardeners looked timeless. It was a game among the boys to guess their age after a brief glance; they looked fresh enough to be adolescent and were wrinkled enough to be not only old but long buried.
The Bulgarians found other Slavs in the district, let alone in town. A large group of Russian farmers had settled a village in the neighborhood. These were descendants of deserters and stragglers from the Russian army that passed through Moldavia in 1877-78 to make war on the Turks; the Czar nearly took Constantinople that time! The village was called Flamanzi, which means “the hungry people.” Could the kasha have given out in the victorious army? Another group of Lipovani had settled a rather infertile valley in the hinterland and raised melons, pumpkins, and squashes in their many varieties. They monopolized this trade as the Bulgarians monopolized truck gardening. The Russian groups were, of course, Greek Orthodox, like the Rumanians, but they preferred to worship in their own onion-steepled churches and to be baptized and buried by Russian priests. If a Lipovan was important enough, the Russian bishop came all the way from Jassy to bury him.
We were very careful to distinguish the Lipovani from their strange kinsmen, the Skoptsi, who virtually monopolized coach-driving in the larger towns of the country. A Skopets drove Prince Ghika’s carriage. These beardless and high-voiced sectaries castrated themselves, some of them after marrying and having a child, on the admonition of St. Matthew (19: 12): “. . . there be eunuchs which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it let him receive it.” The Skoptsi have been scattered to the four winds by the persecution of the Czars.
Shall I mention the Gypsies? They were too vagrant, and belonged—or rather didn’t belong—everywhere. Their long trains of covered wagons, brimming over with pots, rugs, and infants, would be rushed through town by the rural gendarmes. They were not allowed to settle in populated places; one came upon their camps at the roadside. The Gypsies were reputed to steal little girls, presumably for the white slave trade, and mothers were alert whenever they were known to be in the neighborhood. One of my sisters disappeared on such an occasion, but fortunately only for an hour or two. The more positive contribution, of the Gypsies was metal-working, tinkering, fiddling, fortune-telling, and trading in horses—not always their own, it was whispered.
_____________
With all their Bohemian color, the Gypsies were merely a patch on the Joseph’s coat which was the Harlau district. The countryside was varied, although less so than the town. Rather than just Rumanian, the district was Rumanian-German-Jewish-Bulgarian-Ruthenian-Greek, to be brief. Only politics was dully uniform and integral; all else was multiform, kaleidoscopic, characteristically Central European. The whole of the area lying between Western Europe and the farther reaches of Russia and the East was more than a frozen ethnological mosaic; it was a living organism functioning through ethnic divisions of labor. In “much of Central Europe”—I quote from C. A. Macartney’s Problems of the Danube Basin Cambridge, 1942, pp. 45—6)—the market gardeners are “Bulgarians; the stop-me-and-buy-one men, Macedonians; the horse copers, hangmen, and fiddlers, Gypsies; the itinerant besom-binders, Slovaks. Some villages of Albania, the Rhodopes and Hungary consist almost entirely of masons and bricklayers. The male population of one, such village in southwest Hungary built much of the Turkish capital of Ankara, and no mean proportion of the new buildings in Park Lane [London].” Such “nations” are functional more than linguistic. “You are a subtile nation, you physicians,” wrote Ben Jonson—in an age when the West, too, wore a variegated aspect.
High-school boys in Harlau, strolling self-importantly of an evening on Strada Stefan cel Mare, spoke French almost habitually; especially the older ones in addressing the younger! They had first exchanged Yiddish for Rumanian and then had spurned Rumanian. The educated classes all over Central Europe, whether in town or country, preferred French, and sometimes German, to their native tongues. But the new “national” state must promote and impose a distinctive language; and this language, on the notion of self-determination, must be the rudest and least developed—that of the benighted rural population. As the energetic and skillful classes were subjected to peasant leadership, and the town to the country, the advanced culture was subordinated to the barely literate. Can any country progress if its urban elements are shorn of influence? Has any country ever done so?
Society moved backward, but statesmen like Woodrow Wilson, who added their powerful voices to the demands for national self-determination, didn’t know why. Wilson, for example, was brought up in two American states—Georgia and South Carolina— which had extraordinary homogeneity of ethnic origin and tradition. Wilson’s contemporary, Thorstein Veblen, knew better; a century ago, when Veblen was born, his native Minnesota consisted of an ingrown group of recent Norwegian immigrants, a sharply set-off community of Irish Catholics, and a Yankee-dominated town population. The divisions, as in Harlau, were economic as well as religious and cultural. Now suppose Minnesota had become a “national” state whose favors and advantages were assigned exclusively to one of the three groups. . . . No wonder Veblen wrote, in 1917, that “full and free self-determination runs counter to the rule of live and let live.”
Veblen was closer to Harlau than Wilson. I thought of him as I watched motion pictures taken in my home town in the mid-thirties. I could hardly believe my eyes. My memory painted it as a bright little community, with a busy main street, punctuated by smart store-signs. The latter-day reality was dismal and dilapidated.
In the features of Harlau, as in those of the rest of Central Europe, was written the terrible depression of the twenties. The empires of the Hapsburgs and Romanovs had been dismantled and with them the economic patterns they had embodied. National and tariff walls were proliferated and rose higher and higher, until life was confined in prison cells. Men made themselves smaller to enter them, like Milton’s devils squeezing into Pandaemonium to listen to Satan:
. . . they but now who seem’d
In bigness to surpass Earth’s Giant Sons
Now less than smallest Dwarfs, in narrow
room
Throng numberless. . . .
Then came Hitler. The mosaic of traditional variety and cunning interplay of parts was broken up entirely. The pieces of glass flew apart. The great hammer came down. Harlau, with countless other towns and cities, was ground into dust.
_____________
