Dessert was a compote. We ate in silence. My mother brought in tea and cake. Then she went off with my brother to put him to sleep.
I sat at the table with my father, nibbling at a piece of cake and staring at the flames of the candles. One had burned out; three continued burning on low wicks, dancing in a warm breeze that blew in gently from the open window behind my father. An occasional car or horse-driven wagon went by on the street outside.
“What is Tulchin?” I heard someone ask. I looked away from the flames and glanced quickly around. No one except me and my father were in the room. My father was staring at me.
“Tulchin,” he said.
I had only thought the question. I had not meant to ask it. The same thing had happened to me with Mr. Bader: a question had risen by itself to my lips. How did that happen to a person? I held my breath and stared down fixedly at my piece of cake.
“Tulchin was a catastrophe,” I heard my father say with dense anger in his voice. “I despise it and am contemptuous of it. When a goy comes to kill you, kill him first. Let other Jews learn to take care of themselves, and you take care of yourself.”
I looked up at him and did not understand what he was saying. His face was dark. His fingers were tight around his fork.
“Was Tulchin a person?” I heard myself continue to ask.
“Not a person. A city in Russia. There were in it Jews and Poles. Cossacks attacked it. The Jews fought well. The Poles wanted to surrender. The Jews could have taken over the city from the Poles and continued fighting. But their rabbi would not let them do it. He was afraid that Poles all over Poland would take revenge on all the Jews in Poland. So the Jews of Tulchin gave all their possessions to the Poles to give to the Cossacks. They hoped the Cossacks would take the money and jewels and gold and not destroy the city. The Cossacks took it all from the Poles and then asked the Poles to hand over the Jews. They handed over the Jews, the same Jews who had fought with them to defend the city. The bastard Poles. The Cossacks slaughtered the Jews. Out of fifteen hundred Jews, three hundred half-dead Jews managed to flee from the city. Then the Cossacks turned around and slaughtered the Poles. A nice story, yes? The courageous Jews! What martyrdom! They could have lived if they had converted to Christianity. Not one of them accepted the offer. What was there in Christianity? It is the idolatry of butchers and murderers. So they were slaughtered by the bastard Cossacks. A disgusting story! I remember hearing it when I was a child your age. No, younger than you. It came down through the generations in our family. One of our family was among the three hundred who managed to survive. My father would become enraged when anyone tried to defend the rabbi of Tulchin. He struck a man once, very hard, during a quarrel about that rabbi. He knocked him unconscious. There was trouble with the police. My father has a temper. And he is very strong. Fifteen hours a day working in the flour mill the family owns just outside Lemberg. He has the strength of two oxen. I can still feel his hand on my face when he—”
One of the remaining three candles sputtered loudly. The flame smoked and spiraled and leaped high, as if gasping for air. Then, abruptly, it died. Bluish gray smoke drifted slowly upward toward the chandelier and the ceiling. My father’s nostrils twitched.
“—when he struck me because I had said something to him that was disrespectful. It is a father’s job to teach a child respect, he said. How did I get to this? You asked about Tulchin.”
“Did it happen before the war, Papa?”
“What war?” he asked brusquely.
“The big war. The war where you were a machine gunner.”
“Yes, it happened before that war. It happened about three hundred years ago.”
Three hundred years. I could not grasp it. But three hundred was less than five hundred. And Saul had said that the Golem of Prague had been created five hundred years ago. That meant the Jews of Tulchin had been killed between the time of the Golem and the big war.
“If someone comes to kill you, kill him first,” my father said. “Do not become a saint and do not worry about anyone else. Kill him.” He leaned forward against the edge of the table. “Kill him,” he repeated. “Enough Jewish blood has been spilled in this world. The last war was a Jewish bloodbath. I read an article somewhere that said there would be thirty million Jews in the world today if it had not been for the way goyim have slaughtered us for the past two thousand years. But the last war was a special horror. Everyone butchered Polish Jews. Russians, Ukrainians, Poles. Everyone. The Austrians were civilized. The others were all murderers. Especially the Russians and Poles. First the Russians came and made a slaughter; then the Poles made a slaughter.”
“You joined the Polish army to fight back against the Russians, Papa?”
He regarded me intently out of narrowed eyes. “Yes.”
“Were you afraid to be a soldier, Papa?”
His eyes seemed to close. But he was still looking at me. I could feel him looking at me. “I did not want to be killed,” he said. “But I wanted even less to live as a coward and tremble before goyim all my life.”
“It is a world full of goyim, Papa.”
“Yes. And it is our job to live in it as Jews. If they let us live, fine. If not, we must find ways to live.”
“I’m afraid of killing, Papa.”
“What?”
“I don’t want to have to kill anyone in order to live. I hate killing and dying.”
“Here you will not have to kill. We are hated everywhere. But not everyone who hates us kills us. America is not Poland. No place is Poland. Except perhaps Russia. That is why I am here.”
“But there are very bad goyim here, Papa.”
“Then it is our job to decide how to deal with them.”
My mother returned to the room and slipped quietly into her chair. She looked tired.
“Are you having tea and cake, Ruth?” my father asked.
She shook her head.
“Then let us finish the meal and David will go to sleep.”
My mother said to me later, as she helped me prepare for bed, “What were you and Papa talking about?”
I told her.
She nodded wearily. “It’s like a bone in his throat,” she murmured. “The first time I met him he told me that story. I am tired of it. There are other ways to fight goyim besides killing and killing. How many goyim can you kill? The whole world is full of goyim.”
“What other ways, Mama?”
“One looks around, one finds an idea. Your father has his ideas, I have my ideas. I do not have your father’s strength.”
“I don’t like Mrs. Horowitz, Mama.”
She made a vague, weary gesture with her hands. “I want you to go to sleep now,” she said.
But I could not sleep. My room was dark; it was a waste to let my light bum through all of Shabbat, my father had said before my mother had lighted the candles. It was time I grew up, he had said. The candles had been lit and my lights did not burn at all. I had no white world beneath my sheet. I lay awake a long time listening to my parents talking in the living room and, later, to the strange noises that came from their bedroom. Sometime during the night I pushed aside the curtain that covered my open window and peered out into the dark street. I saw the lights of the lampposts and the shadows they made on the leaves of the trees. Above the roofs of the apartment houses across the street the sky was filled with tranquil stars. The street was very still. The trees were silent. In all the world I seemed the only one awake. Goyim were resting from killing Jews and Jews were resting from defending themselves. It was a good hour to be awake, the streets deserted, the air cool, the night calm, Shabbat everywhere in a dark and secret corner of time. After a while I returned to my bed and was finally able to fall asleep.
That Shabbat morning a new man appeared in our little synagogue. He was of average height but solidly built. His features were angular and there was a mole under his right eye. He was given the honor of being called up to make a blessing over the Torah during the reading of the
portion of the week. He chanted the blessing loudly in Galician-accented Hebrew. In the absence of Mr. Bader, my father read aloud from the Torah. He always read from the Torah when Mr. Bader was away. In Europe the men in his family had been Torah readers for many generations. When the man was about to leave the podium, he turned, embraced my father, and kissed his scarred cheek. No one in the synagogue appeared surprised. I recognized him as another of the men in the photograph.
The synagogue in which we prayed was a rented room inside a very large synagogue that stood on the boulevard near the zoo two blocks from where we lived. More than five hundred people prayed in the main sanctuary of that large synagogue. The room in which we prayed could contain about a hundred people.
Everyone in that little synagogue, except Mr. and Mrs. Bader and the children who had been born in America, had come from the area of Lemberg. They had wanted to pray in their own style, in the informal Galician manner they had known all their lives. My father had approached the big synagogue with the request that they rent one of their rooms to the Lemberg group. The request had been coldly turned down: the Lemberg Jews could pray with all the other Jews in the main sanctuary. Since when were Lemberg Jews better than Warsaw Jews and Vilna Jews and Kiev Jews? My father then had a private conversation with the president of the synagogue. The next week the board of the synagogue met and granted my father’s request. Saul told me the story. He did not tell me what my father had said to the synagogue president because he did not know.
The synagogue stood on a corner of the boulevard. Directly across from the synagogue, on the side street that led to the boulevard, was a Catholic church, a tall white stone building with stained glass windows, a huge cross on its angled roof, and on its small front lawn the stone statue of a woman in robes which my mother had once called an idol. The woman wore a long robed garment. A cowl covered her head. Her face was serene and very beautiful. There was a sad sweet smile on her lips; her arms were raised in a tender, warmly beckoning gesture. I sat near a window in our little synagogue and looked out at the large church and wondered how a statue whose face was so full of love could be worshiped by someone whose heart was so full of hate.
As I sat looking at the statue, the huge carved wooden front doors of the church were opened and a small crowd of people drifted slowly outside, walked down the dozen or so front steps to the street, and began to disperse. I saw Eddie Kulanski and his parents. Eddie Kulanski wore a dark suit with short pants, a white shirt, and a dark tie. His parents were neatly dressed. They were joined by a man and woman who looked to be their age and by Eddie Kulanski’s cousin. Together they started up the side street in the direction of my apartment house.
I looked at the statue. For a long moment I saw it lying in fragments upon the sidewalk, bits and pieces of it scattered about, smashed, stone splinters of its eyes and nose and mouth littering the street like refuse.
I looked away and continued listening to my father chanting from the scroll of the Torah that lay before him on the podium near the center of the room. The congregants were silent. My father’s loud voice filled the small room. Saul, sitting next to me, his injured lip almost healed, was following the Torah reading with his finger on the page of the Bible he held on his lap. I looked at my own Bible. I was able to make out only the short, simple words. How I hungered to read and understand! Saul understood. He followed the reading with ease. I gazed intently at the worn Hebrew Bible on my lap and sensed it as a warm refuge against the hateful, raging world outside.
After the service the men crowded around my father and the newcomer. The women, who sat by themselves behind a gauzy curtain off to the left of the room, began to leave. I went outside and stood on the sidewalk staring at the statue across the street.
Saul came over to me. “Where did you disappear to?”
“It was hot inside.”
“I found out about Tulchin.”
I told him I knew about Tulchin. “From my father.” Then I asked, “Who is the new man?”
He shrugged. “Did your father tell you that the Ukrainians ended up killing the Poles anyway?”
“He told me.”
“Did he tell you that in Lemberg the Poles wouldn’t turn over the Jews to the Ukrainians?”
“He didn’t tell me that.”
“In Lemberg, Brody, and two other places I can’t pronounce.”
“Your teacher told you that?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand it. I don’t understand the goyim.”
“Neither does my teacher.”
“Why don’t they all either like us or hate us? Aren’t they all Christians?”
He shrugged again. His eyes were somber and brooding. The scab on his upper lip was like a blackish mole. “My teacher says the best thing is to stay as far away from them as possible.”
“How can we stay away from them, Saul?”
“He says to study Torah and to have nothing to do with them.”
“I don’t understand.” I gazed across the street at the church. Then I felt myself suddenly weary of talking about it, and asked, “Are we going to the zoo today, Saul?”
“Sure,” he said. “Of course. You don’t want your billy goat to think you’re not his friend anymore. I got to go now. My father is calling me. Have a good Shabbos.”
Later, I walked with my father past the busy shops on the side street.
“Who was the new man, Papa?”
“A friend.”
“From Lemberg?”
“Yes.”
“Did he just come to America?”
“On Wednesday.”
“Is his whole family in America?”
“Yes. They all came with him.”
We turned the corner into our street and walked beneath the maples. It was a hot day. I could feel the heat even in the shade of the trees.
“Did you bring him from Europe, Papa?”
“Me? No. We loaned him money and got him a job and a place to live.”
“We?”
“The Am Kedoshim Society. You remember the picnic last Sunday?”
“Yes.” But it seemed a long memory away. Had it only been last Sunday? “Did you know him in the war, Papa?”
“Yes. He was in the unit I led.”
I looked up at him. “You led? What does it mean, Papa?”
“I was an officer. A lieutenant. A kind of leader.”
“But you were a machine gunner, Papa.”
“I was many things,” he said. “It was a long war.”
My mother was standing alongside my brother’s carriage in the shade of the maple in front of our house. Half a dozen children were playing in front of Mr. Steinberg’s candy store. The old man sat in the sun near the store, his palsied hands on his lap. As I came up to the house with my father, the curtain in Mrs. Horowitz’s window stirred.
“He just fell asleep,” my mother said tiredly. It was not yet noon and she was already weary with the day. “I wanted to see Lezer.”
“He will come to the house this afternoon,” my father said.
“How is he? How does he look?”
“The same. A little older. Otherwise the same.”
“I wish Avruml were here. I wish that search had never happened. I wish—”
“Ruth,” my father said.
She turned her pale face to the sidewalk and was silent.
“Who is Avruml?” I heard myself ask suddenly.
My father gave me a sharp look. “Avruml is dead,” he said harshly. “We will not talk about Avruml. I am going into the house. When you are ready to come inside we will make Kiddush and eat.”
He went quickly up the stairs and into the house. His anger resonated faintly on the quiet street.
I looked at my mother. She sighed and shook her head. “It is his nature to be hard. He was always hard. And stubborn. You get used to it. There are things your father does not like to talk about too often. They remind him of failure. So we do not talk about them, especially on
Shabbos.” She hesitated. “It’s hot today. Suddenly it has become too hot. I do not remember such sudden heat in Bobrek. And yesterday was such a nice day. It was a pleasure to make Shabbos yesterday. Avruml was the new man’s brother, the man who just came from Poland. He was killed. We talked about it once, David.”
“How was he killed?”
“Goyim shot him.”
“In the war?”
“After the war.”
“They shot him? They just shot him?”
“It was a very bad time. The goyim were killing each other, too. But they killed many Jews. They said the Jews were Russian spies.”
I had never heard the word spies before. She explained it to me.
“Was Avruml a spy, Mama?”
“Avruml was a good soldier in the Polish army. He had been with your father and was wounded. They were all with your father, all of them.”
“Who?”
“His friends, the ones you see in the synagogue and in the house. They fought together under your father in the war. He is a hero to them.”
“Was Papa’s brother also in the Polish army, Mama?”
She turned her sad eyes upon me. “David?” She said it with the same inexpressible tenderness I had heard in her voice when I had awakened after the picnic last Sunday. “David?”
It was a queer sensation hearing my name and knowing she meant a David long dead.
“David was not in the army,” she said. “No, no, David could not be a soldier. David was a dreamer, not a soldier. David was frightened of the army. David was a—” She stopped abruptly. Her eyes had filled with tears. She stood there, her head bowed, crying silently.
“Mama?” I heard myself say, my throat suddenly choking.
She said nothing. She was not there. She was crying in front of my eyes on a street in the Bronx, but she was somewhere else, crying for another time, over a death carved cruelly into her memory. I could not comprehend her grief and I did not know what to do.
“Should I go inside, Mama?”
She nodded.
I left her there, weeping beside my brother’s carriage beneath the maple in front of our house, and went upstairs and lay on my bed. The canary began to sing but I could barely hear it over the beating of my heart.