The debris of history and life is stored in those three trunks in the unused guest room, and must be reexamined annually in a ritual that remains the firmest point of contact between generations. Shlomo Katz, managing editor of Jewish Frontier, was born in the Ukraine and came to the United States as a child; the “heritage” he inventories here will be recognized by many as not greatly unlike their own. His most recent contribution to our pages was “Miss O’Keefe’s Children,” published in this department in September 1950.
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The small narrow room overhanging the stairway used to be a bedroom. Its single small window is only about four feet from the blank wall of the adjoining house and the air within it may not have been completely changed since the house was built. But many years ago, before the family had dispersed throughout the country, it had to serve. An immigrant family of six—there was no help for it; every square inch had to be used. When the parents finally remained alone, this small room gradually took on the functions of an attic, storeroom, and—whenever one of the scattered flock came back for a visit—guest bedroom. Every time I briefly visit my parents in St. Paul almost the same scene is enacted in that room on the day before my departure.
The first few days of the visit—or rather the hour or two each day that I spend with my parents—are full of questions, attempts at conversation, and food. The questions are nearly all impersonal. The “old generation” learned a long time ago not to ask personal questions. The “younger generation” is always right in whatever it does. Aren’t they educated? Haven’t they seen the world? Even when they are wrong they are right and an old person must neither question their inscrutable ways nor inquire too closely into their doings. After the few brief, permissible inquiries about health, the talk runs somewhat as follows: “What do they say in New York? Will there be a war?” Or: “Such a calamity! Floods in the country. No wonder prices are going up.”
I try to classify in my mind what “they say in New York” in order to provide some answer, and I find it difficult. Who speaks for New York? The editorial in the Times or in the News? My landlord who insists that there will be no war and that “those Bolsheviks in Albany and Washington” should be forced at once to do away with rent controls, or my neighbor at the Stammtisch in the Waldorf Cafeteria who has it figured out to the minute and the inch when and where the next businesslike (not for purposes of diverting rivers in Siberia) atom bomb will be dropped?
I try to get at the source of my parents’ information about the floods. The Ohio, it is true, had been on a rampage, but that was weeks earlier. When I ask where they heard about the flood, a faint resentment comes into my mother’s voice. “Don’t you think we know what the papers say?” It turns out that a member of the one congregation of now scarcely more than ten that still holds daily services in a synagogue on the West Side was a subscriber to the Jewish Morning Journal. He read it regularly but not always consecutively and repeated the news to his colleagues in the house of prayer. His report about the flooding of the Ohio thus reached its limited audience weeks after the event. I hasten to reassure them about the flood. The conversation lamely proceeds from one subject to another. The gap of years is in the way, and the still greater gap of estrangement.
Then there is the food, with the meal a pathetic version of the prodigal son and the fatted calf. No sooner do I enter than the entreaties begin: “Eat something.” I assure them I am far from starved. They don’t believe me. After a trip? Such a trip too! As with most old people, their memory vaults over the immediate present and the recent past to the far time when any trip meant a journey of at least a day for which one had to prepare adequately—with, among other things, a basket of food conveniently tucked away in the straw in the wagon.
The proffers of food have many overtones. They are an outstretched hand of reconciliation between generations, an attempt to do something in common, for the table is really an altar and when three sit at a table and there is good will among them the divine spirit hovers over them. The insistence on food is also a covert attempt to reassert authority. The “child”—whatever its age—must be looked after.
I give in and “eat something.” But they are not satisfied, for I do not eat enough. If they had their way I would eat constantly and ask for more. It is a problem in group psychology, I think. I am reminded of the distasteful and indelicate superabundance of Jewish restaurants, the staggering mounds of food in delicatessen stores in Jewish neighborhoods, the endearing diminutives applied to a gut shtikele (“fine piece of”) something or other. I can’t help thinking that a similar diminutive of endearment used to be applied to a child’s mental capacities; then it was said that he had a “gut kepel “(“good head”). Wasn’t there originally something very tender and self-contradictory in the exaggerated concern for the eating habits of the children? It was necessary that the children should be sufficiently buttressed against the hostile world. And yet at the same time it was proper that they be not too well developed physically, for weakness was also a symptom of spirituality: the “shvach “(“weak”) child was also the delicate, sensitive, and scholarly one. And, after all, spirituality and scholarliness came first: to give up these would have meant bowing to the values of the enemy world—a final and fatal surrender. So, while the “weak” and other-worldly child was plied with food at every turn, he was never asked to learn to fight and no effort was made to encourage even his more safely aggressive urges. Indeed, what profiteth it a man if he win the world and lose himself ?
“You’ve lost weight; you are so thin,” Mother says. I have not lost weight; but I don’t argue. While chiding me it is her intention to compliment me also. Having lost weight means I have gained in the finer qualities of the spirit.
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Some time during the day preceding my departure I am asked obliquely: “Would you care to go through the things in the small room?” Then, by way of explanation: “There may be some things that can be thrown away.”
I consent. I would go through “the things” even if I were not asked to do so.
“The things” fill three cardboard boxes and are the accumulations of a lifetime. Each year some of the acquisitions whose sentimental value was not great were discarded—school report cards, textbooks, old notebooks and similar documents, as well as articles of wear and household use. Some were thrown away with no more than a slight pang of nostalgia; others caused a considerable emotional wrench. A natural process of selection had its way and the things that survived the wastebasket were no longer likely to be discarded. But the reexamination of the permanent collection took place regularly. The invitation to go through “the things” was in the nature of an annual communion with the “usable past.”
The term “usable” is hardly correct, but the objects in those cardboard boxes do represent a segment of the past. One can only marvel at the inner logic of the process of selection which preserved such a strange conglomerate of articles and documents. At times the logic becomes apparent. Of what value, indeed, are high school and college textbooks or report cards of twenty-five years ago when compared with an ancient birth certificate signed by an “official rabbi,” now that the particular rabbi in question, the entire institution of “official rabbis,” and even the town where he once officiated, are no longer in existence?
No surprises await me. I know exactly what is in those boxes and where each item lies. But there is always a certain newness about the experience, perhaps because the things have grown older by one year, and have therefore become more venerable and of clearer historical validity.
I know that the prize, the bundle of documents tied in a large kerchief, is at the bottom of the box in the corner. But the ritual must be gone through in proper order. Also there is always a faint possibility of discovering something new in the accumulation of objects, something not new as an object but with a new meaning.
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I begin with the box of clothes. Mother provides a running COMMENTARY; I know it by heart yet I do not find it boring. On top and half filling the box is Father’s winter overcoat, the one made of black cloth and lined with fox skins. ‘These days,” Mother says, “everything is junk. Nothing lasts. Just look at this coat, it’s still good.” I know what she means. Her parents had ordered the coat as a wedding present for Father. That was more than fifty years ago. Once, about twenty-five years later, it received a new cloth outside as a gift from new in-laws. It still does duty in the frosts of St. Paul. The fox skins, it is true, are getting quite bald, but when Father puts it on and turns up its huge collar, even Minnesota’s winters are powerless against it.
When I made the coat’s acquaintance it was already about thirty years old. During the winters in the Ukraine, when it was too cold for the smaller children to play outside and Father was at home, we used to stand the coat up like a tent and play hide and seek around it. At night, when the built-in oven failed to give enough heat, it became an extra quilt.
The chief movable wealth of the family consisted of three items: a large number of books, the silver, and the coat—the tulup as it was called. During the pogroms and pogrom-scares that abounded immediately after World War I, the last two items were always hidden away at the first disquieting rumors. The books were too bulky to move and, furthermore, pogromchiks were not interested in books. Then the Bolsheviks came to town. Life was safe again, for the moment. They were welcomed. But they had their ideas of sharing the wealth, and individual soldiers felt it would be accounted a good deed to deprive a bourgeois of a heavy fur coat, even one in the fourth decade of its life. They were also establishing a public library in town, and any household with more than a handful of books was made to contribute its literary possessions for the public welfare. The searchers naturally helped themselves to whatever else caught their eye. As the search committee began its work at the end of the street the silver was quickly hidden away and Father put on his coat and went for a walk in the orchards that bordered the town. The committee came to the house. Their literacy was not of the highest order and they were dubious about the revolutionary quality of some of the books. One of them struggled with the name Nietzsche. He transposed the clumsy consonants and read it as “Nishchi”—“the poor,” in Russian. “Frederick the Poor” struck him as particularly appropriate class-conscious stuff for the new library. The books were loaded on a wagon. The search committee was given tea and smiles; they might take books and other belongings, but when they were around there were no pogroms. As soon as they left I was sent to call Father. The coat was safe.
Nearly everything else was abandoned on the trip to America, but not the coat. Over the long journey it served as coat, blanket, mattress, pillow. Then spots began to appear in the fur. But it held up.
“Yes,” Mother says as I put the coat aside, “they used to make good clothes once, but not any more.” She begins telling a story to illustrate her point. I do not listen. The first box is still half full.
Several other articles of winter apparel nearly account for the rest of the space in the box. Reaching the bottom, I lift out a circular piece of bright yellow damask, frayed at the edges and covered with stains. “A human being is such a fool,” she says, “clinging like this to rags. Better throw this away. Why should it lie around?”
This time I object. This is a cape that was part of her wedding dress. How it came to be brought to America I don’t know, but since it has been preserved all these years, why throw it out now?
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Once before, when I was similarly engaged in going through “the things,” she had talked about it: “It is the cape from my wedding dress. When Father was taken into the army and I was left alone with a child on my hands, I cut it up to make a dress for G. But the cape was left. It was a style like that when I was married.”
“Everybody else managed to stay out and not serve Fonia, only he had to be taken,” she said, and her bitterness at my father’s failure to evade service in the Czar’s army was as fresh as if it had happened the day before.
As a matter of fact it wasn’t true that he was the only one taken. Many Jews in town were drafted. But some took extreme measures, even to the extent of crippling themselves, to evade serving in the Russian army. He refused to take such drastic measures.
It occurs to me that my father’s army service took place in the 90’s of the past century. Every history book now has at least a hundred pages after that period. But my mother’s resentment has not abated a whit, and the sight of the ancient bit of bright yellow cloth revives it. Many times I suspected that Father had had a secret liking for military service despite the severe handicaps that a Jew had to labor under in the czarist army. To him it had been an opportunity to assert himself as a Jew. She only remembered that he had not been as quick as some others in avoiding military service.
When we were children he used to talk about his four years of service, and there was a note of pride in his voice. His victories had been small. It had been a battle of simple, enduring faith against a wicked oppressor. There was the time when a particularly vicious and anti-Semitic lieutenant tried to make life more than normally miserable for his Jewish charges. He especially tried to trick them into breaking regulations when they were on guard duty, for then the punishment would be severe and Jewish soldiers as a group could be blamed for laziness and inefficiency. “One night when I was on sentry duty,” Father told us, “this lieutenant wrapped himself in a wolf skin he had. He thought that he could sneak up unnoticed and grab my rifle from me. It was a very serious offense to lose one’s rifle. But I detected him as he crawled up in the dark and I let him have it with the butt. He hollered out who he was but until he managed to disentangle himself from his wolf skin I gave him a good beating. When he finally stood up I came to attention and saluted. There was nothing he could do to me and he was afraid the other officers might laugh at him, so he didn’t even report me. After that he left us Jewish soldiers alone.”
Other triumphs were of a more sublimated nature: getting up half an hour before reveille each morning to pray in shawl and phylacteries, despite the angry murmuring of the Russian soldiers at being disturbed; performing all the arduous and tiring duties without eating pork and other meat rations; walking many miles to the nearest town on an occasional weekend off for the privilege of praying in a synagogue and eating kosher meals in a Jewish home. Then there was the time when he was sent on some mission that required considerable presence of mind. Two other soldiers had been sent before him and had failed. He succeeded and the major gave him a five-ruble gold piece. A Jewish soldier could not be given rank, so money had to take its place. But why bother about rank—his self-esteem as a Jewish soldier had been given a boost. Let the goyim keep their rank.
These were victories of which he spoke for many years after. But Mother could not share in them. She only remembered that she had been left alone.
“So I cut up the wedding dress to make a dress for G. And then every year I used to make it over and shorten it and fix it up for the other girls as they became big enough to wear it. Six times I made it over. But the cape remained. I don’t know what made me take it when we went to America. But we were in such a hurry. Some things that should have been taken were forgotten and other things, useless rags, were brought along.”
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We were in such a hurry. Relatives, neighbors, friends came to say goodbye and hurried us along. There were rumors of an impending pogrom that spring of 1921. A day delayed and all might be lost. But I myself was in no hurry. I would have liked to enjoy a few days longer the glory of my impending Americanism and boast before my ten-year-old friends how I no longer had to bother with Russian declensions. Who needed Russian in America? But still they kept coming and telling us to hurry. They came to buy household belongings and hurried us. They came to bestow tearful kisses of parting and urged haste. They brought small gifts for the trip and pushed us on. The gifts consisted mostly of food. One well-meaning soul brought a string of garlic. “They are good against sea-sickness,” she said. She herself had never been to sea. The garlic was wrapped pell-mell into a bundle together with a lot of other odds and ends, and somewhere among the hastily packed belongings the cape was included. The soldiers who helped to smuggle us across the frontier searched everyone thoroughly at the border. Garlic was an item of food, so they took it. They had no use for the bright yellow cape from a 19th-century dress.
The first box is empty and I carefully replace the things, leaving the big coat on top. It can do service again next winter.
“Rest a while,” Mother urges before I begin on the second box. ‘There is no hurry. Maybe you’ll have a bite to eat,” she tries tentatively. “Such a long trip ahead of you.”
But I tackle the second box, somewhat smaller than the first. Once it was filled with discarded school books as one member of the family after another added his accumulation of unsold or un-exchanged texts. But most of these had been disposed of. Now in the upper part of the box is the metal base of a small table lamp, a spare electric iron so long unused that it is doubtful whether its coil is still in working order, a folding yardstick, and similar gadgets once bought and used and now retired. I suggest throwing them away now, but my mother says, “They may come in handy some day.”
Beneath these are several Mahzors (prayer books for the holidays), a set of the Bible with commentaries, other religious volumes. Father’s eyesight has been failing and he can no longer use them. Moreover he knows every word of them by heart. The Bible set is bound in parchment and in good shape. The prayer books on the other hand are dogeared and falling apart. “Let me buy you some new ones,” I suggest. She won’t hear of it. “Besides,” she says, “where will you get them here in town?”
These books are among the first things my father bought when he got to America. The volumes still bear the purple oval imprint “Lebanon,” the emporium on Fairfield Avenue which specialized in wholesale matzah distribution, religious books and other items pertaining to worship, Yiddish newspapers, and also a line of delicatessen and groceries. Lebanon was not only a book and delicatessen store; it was also a social center for new immigrants on the West Side. Now Lebanon is no more. The owner is dead, and his emporium in new hands is a prosaic grocery store. ‘There is someone in the city who sells prayer books, but he lives far away. But why should you bother? These are good enough. Last Rosh Hashanah I almost lost the Mahzor. The second day of Rosh Hashanah was on a Saturday so I asked a little boy to carry it home for me. On the way he met some other children and did not bring it to the house. But some days later his mother returned it to me. Things don’t get lost and these are good enough.”
Things don’t get lost, she said, and I was reminded of the curious formula which as pupils of the cheder in the Ukraine we were taught to write in our best calligraphy inside the cover of any new book: ‘This book belongs. . . . To whom does it belong? . . . It belongs to whomever it belongs to . . . Nevertheless, to whom does it belong? . . . It belongs to. . . .” followed by the name of the proud possessor. No one knew who authored this evasive version of ex libris.
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Father comes in as I begin on the third and last box. His tallis (prayer shawl) and tefillin (phylacteries) are on top for easy access every morning. “Do you still have your tefillin? “he asks. I nod assent. “Do you use them?” I maintain a discreet silence. Mother intervenes, fearful that the younger generation might feel offended: “Stop bothering him with your questions. All of a sudden he’s inquisitive.” She addresses no one in particular. “He knows what he has to do without your reminding him.” The younger generation always knows best. How much heartbreak through the years must have gone into the shaping of this state of resigned approval. Father stands rebuked but unyielding. “But you do have them yet?” he asks again. I shake my head in confirmation. I see that he doubts my word but prefers to ask no more.
Beneath the prayer shawl is a thick layer of photographs and receipts of all sorts—receipts for rent, from the electric company, from doctors and hospitals. I know better than to suggest that some or all of these be thrown away. Once I did make such a suggestion and it was vetoed without any ado. The reasons were not explicitly stated but the firmness on the subject could have been formulated somewhat as follows: Assuming that no one is likely ever to ask for these receipts it is nevertheless possible that one may be called upon to prove that the rent for the month of February of six years ago was paid. One may, at any time, be asked to give an account of oneself on earth as well as in heaven. The proof of innocence and of duty performed must be at hand always. With the photographs it is a different matter. I feel impelled to look at each one of them. They are nearly all of relatives in Europe. The “American” photographs are on the walls. During the first years in this country there was a fairly intensive interchange of letters with those who remained behind. As the years passed it slackened until the trickle of communication dried up almost entirely. Now the poorly developed pictures yellowing with age are the only remaining contact with that remote world.
The faces on the pictures already say very little. Only at rare intervals does one of the faded images evoke any appreciable emotional response. But though the likenesses themselves have ceased to be moving because time has blurred their features, the people they represent still have a claim on the emotions. This one is still alive but long not heard from, another died, these three perished at the hands of the Nazis, two others are lost without trace. Thus it goes through the entire collection. Strange faces of lost people, faded images reposing in a cardboard box in the corner of the small room.
Only one thing remains in the box—the bundle of documents tied in the large kerchief. I lift it out and gingerly untie the square knot. It is always something of a thrill to go through these papers. It gives me a vague feeling of anticipation, like that of an archeologist examining a new find of ancient tablets.
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The pile of papers spills over sideways on the table. At the bottom is a huge sheet folded in four. It is the passport on which the family entered the country. It is cracked apart at the creases and one side is covered with stamps and transit visas.
It was 1921 and we were already safely in Bessarabia. Together with hundreds of other refugees we stayed in the women’s section of a synagogue which had been made available for the exiles from Russia. The pews had been taken out and hundreds of cots placed one next to the other. Families, children, single men and women slept next to each other with but an occasional blanket as partition.
In the middle of the hall several wood-burning stoves had been put up and were used for cooking. Before dawn we would be awakened by the plaintive chanting of the Psalms in the main section of the synagogue below. Babies cried, women stirred about the stoves preparing breakfast and quarreling over their turns at the fire. Later in the day the men went about the city looking for work and consulting the “delegates.”
The “delegates” were mysterious creatures sent by relatives of the refugees to facilitate their coming to America. They transmitted money allotments from the United States, helped in obtaining visas, arranged for transportation. We had a fancy “delegate.” He stayed in the best hotel in Kishinev, a building that made an indelible impression on me with its four stories and elevator shaft but no elevator. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and always received his clients in shirt sleeves and wearing suspenders. Up to that time we had never seen horn-rimmed glasses. Where we came from, intellectuals—such as teachers and pharmacists—wore pince-nez on a thin black silken cord and never went about in their shirt sleeves. But Americans were different. It was even said that he was a graduate of an American university. One can’t be a stickler for form with the great of this world.
After months of promises and encouragement he suddenly informed us that we could not get a visa to the United States because the Soviet government still had not been recognized and we had no passports, but he promised, not very convincingly, to fix matters up. More months passed. At length father was sent to Bucharest and was there provided with the huge sheet of paper, made out by some officials of the czarist regime. The American consul promised to honor it. We got our visas. The “delegate” was all-powerful, despite his shirt sleeves and suspenders.
Years later I came across the “delegate” in New York. He sat behind a desk in a small bank. The location of his desk indicated that he was far from being a power in the institution. He wore the same kind of horn-rimmed glasses. But he was not in shirt sleeves. For a moment I doubted that it was really he. I went up closer. I recognized the face, and there was the name plate before him to dispel all doubt. Sic transit. . . .
The passport is always interesting if only because the family photograph is pinned to it—the first in which I ever figured. Taking it was quite an occasion and also one that lasted an unbearably long time. After duly slow-freezing us into the desired posture the photographer communed with himself behind his black cloth for what seemed like an hour. I nearly bit through my tongue trying not to laugh. The result was that on the picture my mouth is pursed into a tube. The others did better and when the end product was shown around among other refugees it met with complete approval. “A good picture; MM, worried Jewish faces,” they said. “May you have luck in America.” Everything was as it should be. The child was “shvach,” the adults had truly Jewish worry on their face. It would be a genuine passport, though signed by a displaced czarist official without authority.
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Next to the passport repose the affidavits sent by the American relatives undertaking responsibility for our not becoming public charges. In triplicate, notarized, and with a blue heavy paper backing, they look as impressive today as they did thirty years ago. With the affidavits had come a letter from the relatives explaining their significance. The message was written on a letterhead showing a skyscraper in the upper left hand corner. We looked at it with awe. Could that building really be theirs?
Disillusionment was not long in coming. They did not own this or any other building. But there was a grain of truth in the picture. There was such a building in St. Paul. Months later I faced it and recognized it. The President was stopping in St. Paul for a day and was lodged in the “presidential suite” of the best hotel in the city. I went to gaze from afar at the building thus made historic. It was our old friend of the letterhead. There was no bitterness among our family on the subject. For a little while it had aroused such wild dreams. If our relatives did not own the huge hotel, one of them must have had lunch in it at least once—though he may have merely gone into the lobby to write the letter and taken a piece of the stationery.
Documents and more documents, ancient pieces of paper, stamped and countersigned, refusing petitions, granting approval, giving instructions, classifying by name, number, age, sex, employment, destination, origin. All of them are answers to questions once asked. Now the questions have long been forgotten but the answers still lie wrapped in the big kerchief at the bottom of the cardboard box. Next to the affidavits are Father’s naturalization papers taken out many years ago. He is a patriarchal-looking man with a long white beard. “You are not an anarchist?” he was asked, and even the questioner must have smiled at the absurdity of the question. Yet questions must be asked and answers must be given. Bakunin, too, had a beard, and so did Marx.
Some old letters in their torn envelopes lie next to the naturalization papers. The most recent is more than twenty years old. They have been saved because of the return addresses. Father had quoted the Talmud: “Mountains don’t meet, people do. Let us keep the addresses, just in case. . . .” One is from a man who came on the same ship. He went to California and in his letter he complained of his lot and asked whether he might not do better in St. Paul. A second is from some distant relatives who had taken up their abode in New York and urged that we too move there. “Millions of people make a living in New York, why should you settle in oisraisenish?”—that is, in a place torn out of the context of human habitation.
Still another letter is from a fellow refugee from our native town. During the many weeks that his family and ours squatted in the women’s section of the synagogue there were numerous and heated discussions about where to go. He had chosen Palestine. “I know it’s poor and small and there are Arabs,” he used to argue, “but enough. I want to go to a Jewish country.” (I was inclined to agree with him in a general way, but personally I wanted to go to America: the trip was longer.) He did go and for a few years a thin trickle of communication was maintained. He was satisfied with his choice, but in his last letter he added nostalgically: “There is one thing I envy you—that you have snow in the winter. I am happy and I never regretted the choice I made even though life is hard here, but every now and then I get homesick for good, deep snow in the winter.” I wonder if he ever got over his homesickness. Letters from acquaintances in Israel inform me that one of his grandsons born in that country is now a high-ranking officer in the Israeli army. I conveyed this news to Father. He said nothing. But I wondered whether he did not wish to ask, “Why didn’t you become a high-ranking officer in the American army?” I may have been wrong; though his eyes were fixed on my arm, he may only have been thinking of the tefillin, not of the corporal’s stripes.
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“That’s nothing,” Mother says as I pick up the next piece of faded paper. I quickly replace it. It is the ketubah, her marriage contract, and even at this late age she acts self-conscious about it. If old people could, I think she would blush. I once tried to read it. The ink is faded almost to illegibility, the script is fanciful and hard to decipher, the Aramaic is virtually a sealed book to me.
There is also a bunch of diplomas, one from grammar school, three from high school, and a number of certificates from various evening courses. Among these there is also one small certificate from the Hebrew school which lasted for one brief summer in our town in the Ukraine. It is handwritten and only the single word “diploma” on top is printed.
The Bolsheviks had come and new winds began to blow. A trained Hebrew teacher appeared from some big city and, utilizing such local talent as was available, he established a Hebrew school with a regular curriculum and well-organized classes for the children between nine and twelve. The school was a success and we loved it. But autumn came, the Bolshevik authorities frowned on the idea of a Hebrew school, and there were rumors of pogroms. The families of many of the pupils fled or thought of flight abroad. The teachers, too, prepared to emigrate. Our class, the oldest, was disbanded and we were given these diplomas—the first diplomas we had ever had. There were no facilities for printing these documents, but in order to lend them a greater degree of authority and thus enhance their value in our eyes, a few letters of Hebrew type were obtained somewhere and the word Teuda—diploma—was printed on top. With our ingrained attitude of reverence for the printed word, especially print in the “holy tongue,” that one word was enough to give the small piece of paper a magic quality.
When the class was disbanded, the departing teacher organized those of us who were to remain behind into a Hebrew-speaking group. We met regularly all through that winter. Our Hebrew was a bit halting, it is true, but we made up for it in enthusiasm. For one thing, we had an organization of our own at a time when the very word “organization” was a charm. Then, too, we had to fight for our existence. The meetings were held in private homes and on the day we gathered it was our duty to scrounge around for fuel—sticks, branches, straw, reeds, anything that would burn—to warm the house in which we met. Very soon we acquired still another incentive—the disapproval of the Bolshevik authorities. We were in a revolutionary mood. There was revolution all around us. What could be more revolutionary than to say yea when the authorities, real, genuine city authorities, said nay?
The brother of one of our members was a power in the local “revcom”—the revolutionary committee. This brother appeared at one of our meetings and told us, kindly but firmly, to dissolve our organization. There were more important things for boys to do in a Bolshevik-ruled town than speak Hebrew once a week, he said. We refused and decided that henceforth we would speak Hebrew whenever we met each other. The next time the commissar’s kid brother came to the meeting there were outcries of: “Spy! He is a spy! Kick him out!” Then and there some sort of trial was held and it was decided to exclude him from membership because he told our “secrets” to his brother the commissar. The boy denied tattling. He was expelled just the same. Out of spite he said he’d tell his brother “all about us” and that from now on he would be a Bolshevik. We were ordered bluntly to dissolve our children’s group. In reply we staged a protest before the office of the local “revcom.” Somebody dashed out with a broom and chased us away. We scattered, our loyalty to Hebrew greater than ever as a result of this persecution. Alas, it did not last long.
The leader of our group, the one who was first to shout “Spy!” and to lead the demonstration against the “revcom,” was a boy whose father, a man named Velvel, had been murdered in a pogrom the previous year. The son always took the lead in our Hebrew group; it was as if he had vowed to his martyred father to remain true to his people, its past, its culture. But several years after we came to America we received a letter from someone in our town, with this postscript attached:
“Do you remember N., the son of Velvel who was killed in the pogrom? He is now a fanatical Communist and he has already reported to the Cheka a number of secret Zionists in town and they were exiled to Siberia. He is now a big shot in the local administration and when one speaks to N. Vladimirovitch it’s best to be careful.” N. Vladimirovitch—from Velvel to Vladimir. Vladimir means “rule the world”: the martyred father had attained a strange posthumous triumph.
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“Enough, enough,” says Mother. “Do me a favor and have a bite of something. Tomorrow you have to go on a long trip.”
I am almost finished going through “the things.” Only a few old birth certificates remain. They had been thought lost for a long time. Then they were accidentally rediscovered after many years and I found out that I had been using the wrong date for my birthday. At home we had naturally used the Jewish calendar for such occasions as birthdays and death anniversaries. When first asked in America what my birthday was, I guessed at it as closely as I could. The rediscovered birth certificate showed that I was more than a week off. I was not quite the same person as the boy who pursed his lips so hard in order not to laugh when posing for the passport photograph.
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