From Shlomo Katz’s fiction and autobiographical reminiscences the perceptive reader may draw, as from few other writers, a representative picture of the inner and outer life of a thoughtful American Jew with roots both in East Europe and Israel. Here Mr. Katz celebrates the memory of his father, a “hero in Israel” and an example to his son in the supposedly un-Jewish matter of combativeness—which, as we see, is here actually the very Jewish matter of moral courage.
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My father was always an old man. My earliest recollections of him go back almost forty years, and even then his long beard was streaked with gray. Now his beard is entirely white. He is impersonal and remote, and as I sit before him, his mild gaze seems to imply forgiveness. Though my conscience is fairly clear, I submit to his forgiveness. Who isn’t guilty before his father?
He is an old man and his mind often wanders. He begins with the time-honored prologue: “Well, it’s this way. . . .” But he gets no farther. I try to draw him on, to reestablish the thread of his thought. The gentleness in his eyes changes into a faraway look that reaches across distances over which I cannot follow. Then he seems to return for a moment, he recognizes me, and asks: “When are you leaving town?”
“In a few days,” I say.
“And where are you going?” He is a very old man and his memory sometimes fails him. He no longer remembers that I live in New York.
If it wasn’t for his age, and that he is so forgiving of me, I might suspect him of irony. There was a time when the question “Where are you going?” was in place. Each time I left I went off in another direction. But he would only shake his head and say, “Well, go in good health and succeed.” Now that I have ceased running off at a different tangent each journey, he no longer remembers where I came to rest.
So every day I tell him anew that I am going back to New York.
He nods assent, but doesn’t seem to care. New York is only a name to him. At this point the conversation ends, to be repeated in almost identical words the following day, and the one after that, until I depart a week or so later.
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I sit across the table from him trying to sum him up, and I am suddenly struck with the thought that he has been a hero all his life. How is it that I had never seen him in this light? And yet it is quite obvious.
There was that incident only a few years ago, for instance, when he was already in his late seventies. Who would have expected him to act as he did? Yet when it happened it only seemed to be a nice, slightly amusing occurrence.
The neighborhood in which my parents live was once almost exclusively Jewish but was long since abandoned by nearly all except a handful of the aged Jews who no longer move with the stream. In their place, there moved in some Negroes, some poor white people, and many Mexicans. The character of the neighborhood changed. Where formerly there was one bar, there are now half a dozen. The streets that had resounded to the sound of Yiddish now ring with Spanish. Outside the bars Mexican boys and young men pass the time and argue volubly. The remaining Jews in the neighborhood utter the name “Mexican” with overtones of suspicion and apprehension. What the Mexican residents say I do not know, but the expressions one can frequently see on the faces of the young men in front of the bars at the sight of some bearded old Jew reveal an uncomprehendingness that seems ready to leap to hostility. One of the half-unused synagogues is now wedged between a bar and a wooden frame house that has been transformed into a Catholic church.
“Well, it happened this way,” Father told me when I came on my annual visit that year. “It was afternoon and I was going to the synagogue for mincha and ma’ariv.”
“I was going,” he said, but now I recalled that his walk was then already an aged shuffle.
“And on the corner there was a bunch of Mexican fellows, outside the saloon. One of them knocked my hat off. Well, you know, I am a kohen and kohanim are short-tempered. Without thinking I grabbed this guy by the shirt and pushed him. He didn’t expect it and fell. All the other Mexican fellows laughed at him and clapped their hands. ‘That’s good, old man,’ they said, ‘good work.’ And ever since they haven’t bothered me again. I go by there twice every day. Sometimes, when they see me, they laugh and say, ‘Good, old man, good work.’ But I never again had any trouble with them.”
When he first told me about this incident I also laughed; but later, mulling over this matter, there came to my mind two other incidents involving Father that took place long ago in faraway Ukraine during the turbulent times after the First World War.
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There was the first pogrom in town—in itself not an unusual event at that time and in that place. As I think back to it I try to reconstruct the mood and the “flavor” of the two days during which the pogrom lasted. It was a warm and cloudy-gray early summer morning when Mother woke me up and without any prologue announced: “Get up, there is a pogrom in town.” I leaped out of bed and dressed quickly, suddenly aware of a strange and sharp new sense of being that was not altogether without a pleasant tang. There was an atmosphere of haste in the house, though nothing was being done. Everyone walked about tense, ready to leap, but the time to run had not come yet.
Thus no doubt a flock of chickens in their coop might feel when the housewife announces in the evening that she is going to have one of them killed for dinner the following day. The chase hasn’t begun yet. There is no telling which one will be caught. There may still be a last-minute reprieve if the menu is changed. Meantime each chicken feels trapped and nervous and tense—and also chosen.
All of us behaved this way, fearful yet somehow elected, all except Father. He remained calm.
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The doors were still open to the summer morning. Outside, Jews nervously congregated in bunches, rehashing the various rumors. Individuals drifted from one group to another in search of the ultimate rumor that would satisfy them. Without any apparent reason, sudden panic would seize the people in the street and they would flee into the houses and quickly lock the doors, only to emerge again a few minutes later. Outside, it is true, one was not in hiding, but neither was one trapped there. And somehow, intuitively, all knew that “it” had not yet begun, that minutes, perhaps hours, would pass before “it” started.
The terror hung heavy in the sultry air. Peasants from neighboring villages slowly drove into town in their horse- and ox-drawn carts, though it was not a market day. They scowled and occasionally some muttered something indistinct but hostile. Then other wagons, drawn by horses, began arriving. These carried Jewish fugitives from other towns. They chattered hysterically to the clusters of people that instantaneously formed about them. Then there arose the problem of their housing. By noon we had more than a dozen refugees in our house.
By noon “it” began. Somebody came running down the street; and somebody else screamed that “it” had begun, and in a split second the street was deserted and all doors were locked and all window shades drawn. A last frightened man dashed by shouting something incoherent about what went on downtown, and then the street was silent.
There were about twenty people in the three-room house and in the attic, and all were silent. Occasionally someone would whisper a terrified, “Did you hear?” as a muffled cry was heard from afar. Someone would move a window shade a fraction of an inch to peek outside. The street was empty as during a curfew.
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Hours passed before the street began coming to life again, in a different way. Peasants who had come early in the morning were now returning to their villages, their wagons loaded with loot. Many of them were drunk and sang at the top of their voices plaintive, drawn-out Ukrainian tunes. Inside the house as many as could crowded near the windows to catch a glimpse of the loot and to learn from it what had happened. A bolt of cloth on a wagon, a few yards of it trailing in the dust, told about the looted dry-goods store and aroused concern for its owner. Pots and pans strung on a rope told the story of the hardware store. Men’s and women’s clothes had their own stories, though it was impossible to tell to whom they had belonged. A light-colored dress dangling from the side of a wagon was stained with what might have been blood, but it was impossible to know definitely. Small Ukrainian boys appeared in the street shrieking gaily and playing with all kinds of trophies of the looting. Then darkness descended.
Among the twenty in the house there were enough for a minyan and the evening prayers were whispered in unison. Then bread was doled out—cooking was avoided lest the smoke from the chimney attract attention to the house—and the terror of the night descended. From the distance came the sound of screams and the glow of fires.
Early the next day a new problem arose. There was no running water in the house. Water was brought daily in buckets from a well some blocks away and stored in a barrel. The twenty had consumed whatever water there was in the house. By noon thirst began to assert itself.
It was then that Father acted. Without saying a word he took the two buckets and went out by the rear door. We watched his progress. Groups of peasants were once again roaming the street, some sober, others drunk. We saw Father nodding a greeting to them and going on his way. Then he was stopped. He was still in sight but too far away for us to hear what was being said. He put the buckets on the ground. The peasants were saying something, then one of them pulled a long knife from the legging of his boot. The knife was passed around and examined. The group seemed to be going through some terrifying mummery.
Mother stood near the window wringing her hands. All others who could had their eyes glued to the narrow strip of window glass between the shade and the frame. Animation was suspended.
Then we saw some of the peasants roar with laughter. One of them slapped Father on the back, and they left him. Steadily he went to the well and returned some minutes later. Three times he repeated the trip, till the barrel was full, then he put down the buckets without saying a word.
The second incident which I remembered took place at about the same time in the same place as the first. This one, too, involved a pogrom, but this time we were in hiding with a family of Gentile friends. In the course of the hasty exodus from home the family treasures, which had been packed in a sack in anticipation of the event, had been left behind. Some hours after we reached our refuge, when things seemed to have quieted down somewhat, Father went to retrieve the “valuables” accumulated in the course of a lifetime. He did not fare so well this time. He returned a while later carrying the sack, but his mouth was bleeding and he had lost two teeth on this mission. He joined us in our allotted alien corner in a stranger’s house and sat down quietly.
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Since there is so little we can say to each other, especially now that his memory is faulty and his articulation difficult, I become restive after a while, despite my filial intentions. Yet I am determined not to go away before the two hours I assign daily to my parents have elapsed. Rescue appears from an unexpected quarter. Some friends whom I had promised to meet later at my hotel room come to pick me up. They exchange a few words of greeting with my parents and, before we notice it, we are in the midst of an argument on a painful current issue. Who was right during the Congressional investigations of un-American activities? Those who named their former colleagues, or the ones who refused to answer questions about the activities of former friends? The discussion becomes heated. Someone tosses out the word “informers.” This puts things in a different emotional light. Nobody wants to condone “informing,” yet how define it under present conditions?
Even as the argument rages I remember what my father did about it. This incident also dates far back, to the time before I was born. I was a child of eight when he told me about it. I then attended cheder and already knew that while it was no crime to complain to Mother if a sister had taken something I considered my own, it was an unforgivable crime to report to the rebbe anything done by another pupil. That was informing and there was no more base and villainous creature on earth than a mooser—an informer. The only type of informer among adults I then knew of—the only kind then possible—was a person who reported someone to the authorities, or, more correctly, a Jew who reported another Jew to the Gentile authorities.
“Well,” my father began, “there was this Yossel and he was an informer. Regularly he carried tales to the Ispravnik. Jews trembled before him. If anyone did a bit of business without a license, or tried to dodge the draft, Yossel always knew about it and informed. People begged him and argued with him, bribes were offered to him, but it didn’t help. A committee once went to him. ‘Why do you want to harm your fellow Jews?’ they asked him. ‘Have you no decency? Have you no regard for anyone? Does it hurt you if poor people try to earn bread for their children?’ But Yossel only laughed. That was the sort of man he was. He knew he had the authorities on his side. Just a mean and vicious man. Then he pulled a particularly bad one. The man he informed on had a big family and simply couldn’t make ends meet So he began selling whisky without a license to the peasants on market days. He didn’t have a regular place, just went around with the bottle from one to the other, selling it by the drink. And Yossel informed on him. He was caught and fined, but he couldn’t pay it so he had to go to jail for three months and his family almost starved.
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“I couldn’t stand it any longer. There was another man in town who felt the way I did. He moved away some years ago. So the two of us decided something had to be done. We tried to get others to help us, but everybody was afraid of Yossel on account of his pull with the authorities. They even begged us to leave him alone so as not to cause more trouble than there was already.
“The following Saturday, just as they took the Torah out of the Ark, the other man and I went up to the platform and banged on the table three times. Ikuv hakriah it is called, and when anyone in the congregation has very important public business, he does this and they have to wait with the reading of the Torah till the matter is settled. ‘We want to make an example of an informer,’ we announced and the two of us went up to Yossel. Let me tell you, he was scared. He turned white. He didn’t know what we were going to do to him. Maybe he thought we would kill him. As we came up he begged us, ‘Don’t do anything. I promise. I will never inform again. Don’t do anything here, before the entire congregation. I will give you anything you like. I will do anything you say·’
“But we were mad. That last bit of informing could not be forgiven. So we took his arms and marched him around the platform three times, shouting ‘Thus shall be done to an informer!’ I said we marched him around. I should say we dragged him. He was so pale and weak he couldn’t stand on his feet. And, you know,” Father concluded his story, “it worked. He never informed again and a short time later he left town and we got rid of the informer.”
That was long, long ago. Now Father looks at us as we argue back and forth. He does not follow the argument, partly because he doesn’t know enough English and partly because the thread of his thought snaps frequently.
In the midst of the argument I wonder: If he were younger, would he know the answer? Of course, it was so much simpler in those days. The authorities were black; the victims white and pure. In our case the issue is more involved. But the fact remains: he knew what was right and what was wrong. He not only knew, he also acted on his convictions.
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Father had little formal education. Yet he had the answers to many perplexing questions that befuddled much younger people. I often wondered about some of his particularly apt replies, whether he had heard them from others or had made them up himself. Eventually I concluded that they were his own, otherwise he would have given appropriate credit. In his studies of the Talmud he had learned many times how Rabbi X, quoting Rabbi Y in the name of Rabbi Z, said. . . . It became an ingrained habit to shun claiming others’ wisdom as one’s own.
We, the “younger generation,” were in rebellion against nearly everything that he and his generation of Jews had stood for. His generation engaged in petty business, the enlightened part of the younger generation were all Zionists, singing the glories of work on the land in Palestine, or socialists, dedicated to the eradication of all business. His generation implicitly believed in the efficacy—or at least the urgent desirability—of prayer. The younger generation sneered at the mechanical recitation of prayers, frequently performed without comprehending the meaning of the words recited.
Father was not much impressed by this criticism. Most of the time he simply ignored it and would not be provoked into argument. But there was one instance when he took up the cudgels on behalf of the practices of his generation.
The particular discussion concerned the recitation of prayers. The “younger generation” felt on solid ground and indulged in some particularly biting sarcasm. How much true religious feeling could one pour into the repetition of sounds without knowing their meaning?
But Father was not impressed. He listened patiently, and when all the fire and thunder had been exhausted, he began his answer in his usually mild manner.
“Why don’t you understand?” he said. “Consider it this way. A father has a child of a year, let us say. The child still can’t talk. It only babbles meaningless sounds. Yet when the father returns home at the end of the day’s work and the child hurries toward him on all fours, babbling its incomprehensible sounds, and it raises its little arms to be picked up, the father beams with pleasure and is convinced that his is a wonderfully bright child and that its babbling is the greatest wisdom ever uttered.
“It is the same when Jews go to the synagogue,” he continued. “It is true that many of them don’t understand the meaning of what they recite and they mumble their prayers mechanically. But God looks down and sees his children hurrying to his house of prayer. He listens to the sounds they make there and he beams at them with delight. ‘What wonderful children I have!’ he exclaims. And the prayers are thus perhaps more effective than they would be if everyone understood each word he recited.”
There was no answering this line of argument. There were a few weak attempts at rejoinder; there were some defensive remarks about obscurantism, mysticism. But they lacked conviction.
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In late middle age, and later in mounting old age, far from the time and place in which he was brought up and where he belonged, he began to retreat inward. He drifted into the private chambers of his mind where all was clear and where he could commune with his Father, the One who would always understand and appreciate and forgive. He walked about, a strange figure resurrected from a past that extended much further back than his actual age. With a slight change of garb he would have been in place on the ancient plains of the Negev where Jacob’s sons pastured their sheep. Yet he passed along the icy streets of St. Paul, by now a walking principle more than a contemporary man.
Because of sickness in the family I was visiting St. Paul. It was midwinter and the temperature hovered around zero. It was Saturday. I came to take him to the hospital where Mother lay sick. Visiting hours were from two to three in the afternoon and from six to seven in the evening. Though the hospital was miles away and the streets were slick with ice, he would not even consider my suggestion to take a streetcar. He did not say “no”; he merely looked at me as if I had said something entirely incomprehensible. We started out at half past twelve. We reached the hospital a quarter after two and stayed with Mother for the remaining three-quarters of an hour. Then he took a seat in the waiting room to spend the next three hours there. I was impatient and went to a cafeteria nearby. When I returned it was after four and dusk was rapidly setting in. The waiting room was quickly filling with visitors to other wards where visiting began after five.
The waiting room had the depressed hush of such places. People whispered to each other, though there was no need for it. Occasionally the silence was rent by the harsh voice over the intercom calling some doctor and everyone involuntarily winced as though it necessarily meant an emergency. Through the thickening gloom outside the windows the bare branches of the trees swayed disconsolately. We in the waiting room felt at the edge of crying, as an abandoned child might cry to be taken home.
The waiting visitors were Swedes, Norwegians, Irish, Germans. Now and then a furtive glance would be directed toward the patriarchal, white-bearded old man, questioning, uncomprehending glances.
Then Father got up and slowly went to the corner facing east. Completely oblivious of the presence of any other people he began reciting his afternoon prayers in an inaudible voice. Only his body gently swayed back and forth. A hush fell on the waiting room. Everyone looked at him. What was the old man doing in the corner? They were mystified, slightly fearful of the thing they did not understand, and also vaguely reverent. There was something about the rocking figure in the rapidly darkening corner that transcended the waiting room, the rasping voice on the intercom, the pain in the wards above. Had they heard his voice they would not have understood the Hebrew words. And if they had understood the words they would have been still more mystified. There seemed to be no obvious point in intoning: “And to Jerusalem thy city return in compassion . . .” on a cold winter afternoon in the waiting room of a hospital. But he was probably not considering the meaning of the words either. The old man was again a child speaking to his Father without caring what he said.
Some of the visitors looked at me, as if expecting an explanation. I did not volunteer any.
Later, when we were about to leave the hospital to return home, I saw Father fumbling under the corner of the mattress on which Mother lay. It was a frightening gesture as his fingers searched the end of the bedstead. Then I saw him remove a dime from somewhere beneath the frame that held the spring. He explained the matter to me. “When I go to visit Mother on Friday it is still light and I can carry money, so I take along an extra dime and hide it under the spring. Then I walk home. On Saturday, as you saw, I walk to the hospital in the afternoon but when it is time to return it is already dark and after the Sabbath, so I have my carfare here and can take a streetcar back.”
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I sit across the table from him. The glasses of tea before us are getting cold. I want to establish some sort of communication with him and find it difficult. He is so far away. I am reconciled. Perhaps true communication between human beings is impossible at any time.
This not very profound reflection brings to my mind a little story Father told me when I was a child. He liked to tell me stories, some of them above my head and others of a kind that modern educators would disapprove of for a child under ten.
He told me about the lamed vov, the thirty-six secret saints who live in each generation, and for the sake of whose merits the world remains in existence. They never reveal their true identity to anyone. They are only known to each other. In order not to attract attention, the thirty-six generally engage in some such lowly trade as tailors, shoemakers, or itinerant peddlers; they perform their saintly and sometimes incomprehensible deeds in secret, and then they vanish from the scene.
It happened in the time of Nicholas I, Father told me. At that time small Jewish boys were kidnapped in the streets and farmed out to Russian peasants far away from their homes. When they reached their teens they were taken into the Russian army where they had to serve for twenty-five years. If after all this time they survived and remained Jews—for they were cruelly beaten all the time and in other ways driven to become converted to Christianity—they were free to return home. Those who did return seldom found their parents still living. Grief generally had carried them off.
When a Jewish boy was thus kidnapped he was often held in town for a few days until the authorities could get together a party of boys to be sent away. During this time it was sometimes possible to ransom the child by substituting another recruit.
My story, Father went on, concerns such a kidnapped boy, nine years old, who was snatched in the street and confined to jail. His parents came to the prison and wept bitterly outside the walls every day. They tried to bribe the guards to let the boy escape but did not succeed. But there lived in that town a lamed vovnik, one of the secret thirty-six saints. He could not bear to see the mother’s tears, so he volunteered as a recruit to go in the place of the young boy.
He was sent far away to a remote Russian city where there was a fortress. Because he was a grown man they put him in the army right away. He lived on bread and water alone so as not to eat anything that was not kosher.
Often they assigned him to sentry duty. It was then a custom in the Russian army that on dark nights the sentries called to each other every few minutes to make sure that all were awake, because they could not see each other. One sentry would cry out “Sloo-oo-oo-shay“ (“Hear”), and the one next to him would answer the same call, and so it would go around the wall of the fortress till it completed the circle and they knew that all was well and none of the guards was asleep. But whenever the guard next to the Lamed vovnik cried out “Sloo-oooo-shay,” he would mournfully respond, “Shechinta begaluta vai” (“The Shechinah is in exile, woe”).
From a distance it sounded like the regular sentry call.
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