Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life (43 page)

“Must it always be a Jew! Do you think they’d let a Jew sing in the Great Theater?”

Mother’s face narrowed, not just because Battistine wasn’t Jewish, but because Tsipe dismissed Jews so disdainfully. It caused Mother grief.

“But what about Davidov?” Leybke bestirred himself to ask Tsipe. “Have you ever heard him sing? Battistine may be alright, but Davidov also sings before the Emperor, the tsar batyushka, the Tsar-Father.”

“Leybke, have you ever heard Davidov sing?” Tsipe asked quietly.

“Of course I have!” Leybke replied, as he stuck out a foot, waved one hand in the air, and sang in high voice, “Volga, Volga …”

Davidov must have sung it altogether differently, for Tsipe waved her hand in contempt and said, “Leybke, enough already.”

Tsipe always made the same gesture whenever Leybke began to tell his stories about Ekaterinoslav or about his regiment and its commander. She would crinkle her nose and mumble in an aside, “We’ve already heard all about it.”

At those moments, Leybke’s face would drop, his stiff hat would shift on his forehead, and one would notice his big, hairy hand, with one of its fingernails blackened.

Tsipe said that men with big hands were not to her liking. That was easy to understand. After all, she herself was refined. She could purse her lips so small that they resembled a groshen. Not only was she refined, but her large hat that looked like a mushroom, her frilly garments that rustled like silk, and her little, polished shoes on their high, hollow heels—all were at the service of her refinement and charm. And once, when Tsipe put on her short jacket with the raised collar, the one she called her “Mary Stuart,” Leybke twirled one end of his mustache, scraped his foot, and asked her, in his Ekaterinoslav Russian, “Would you like to take a walk with me?”

“
Spasibo
… thank you,” Tsipe replied with a thin smile, and went out by herself.

Mother stepped outside to see where Tsipe was headed. Yarme the coachman’s wife was in the courtyard, standing with her hands folded across her pregnant belly. The chief prison guard’s wife peered out her window, and the new neighbor living directly above us called down from her tiny window under the roof, “Not to tempt the evil eye, but she looks just like a princess.”

Yarme the coachman came strolling in, with slow, leisurely steps.

“How come she’s alone?” he asked. “Why isn’t she with Leybke?”

“How can you compare Leybke with Tsipe?” Mother replied, with all the haughtiness of a shipowner who has a cargo-laden vessel at sea.

Yet, despite Tsipe’s beauty, and even though Leybke couldn’t compare with her, the atmosphere at home, with Tsipe present, was chilly and strange. Tsipe took no notice of me at all. She didn’t bring me anything from Warsaw, nor did she come with gifts for anyone else. Her songs about the “beautiful Helena” and “the Jewess” didn’t appeal to me one bit. I preferred Ite’s nice lad who went back to Vienna to visit his parents.

It seemed as though there was nobody else in the house but Tsipe. Mother never stopped talking about her. She cooked and baked only for Tsipe, scrubbed all the pots and pans herself, while Tsipe primped and preened before the mirror. Mother herself carried all the food into the
sukkah
, the tabernacle set up in the courtyard, where we ate the week of the holiday. Not once did Tsipe say, “Let me help you, Mother.”

Even at night, when the whole house was asleep, Mother got out of bed to have a look at Tsipe. She checked to see if the door to the kitchen, where Leybke slept, was properly locked. She looked in on Tsipe asleep in her bed, listening to her breathing.

Tsipe herself was conceited and arrogant. She, too, knew that Leybke wasn’t good enough for her. As for Father, she never spoke to him at all. Even when she first arrived, she never came up to him and inquired, “How are you, Uncle? How is everything?” Bending over her open suitcase, she mumbled from across the room, “So, how goes it, Reb Leyzer?”

Father didn’t respond.

Mother called out to him, “Leyzer, someone’s talking to you. Why don’t you answer!”

But Father didn’t hear. Throughout the entire holiday, he never heard a thing—and kept his silence.

When the holiday was over, Mother packed Tsipe’s boxes. Yarme the coachman, whose horses were all harnessed up, asked for six gilders for the trip to Warsaw. The train cost one ruble and fifty kopeks, and Tsipe preferred taking the train. She wasn’t going to be tossed around for a whole day in a ramshackle coach driven by somebody called Yarme. What would they say in Warsaw?

However, Tsipe didn’t have enough for the train. She was missing a ruble and Mother couldn’t help her out. Father was getting ready to go out. Mother stopped him.

“Leyzer,” she said, “maybe you could give me a ruble?”

“A what?”

“I need a ruble.”

Father didn’t respond. He merely stuck his head deeper inside his collar and left without saying a word. Tsipe followed his departure with her pretty, almond-shaped eyes and, less prettily, yelled out, “Leyzer
jolek
! … idiot!”

The blood rushed to my head. “Leyzer
jolek
” was what Mother sometimes called Father. But that was alright. First of all, she was his wife and perhaps she was allowed. Second, all her life Mother was convinced that she had done Father a favor by marrying him.

Tsipe, however, was another matter. How did she have the nerve, after spending the entire holiday with us and eating Father’s hard-earned food, to throw that word at him?

At that moment, had I been able, I would have walked right up to that pretty Tsipe, who kept pestering Mother about missing the train, and smacked her right in her pretty mouth. That would have gained me an extra ten years of life.

The fact that Father pretended not to have heard, and that he didn’t give Mother the ruble, I found highly satisfying—even if, in the end, Tsipe actually took the train. It was Leybke who gave her the ruble, a crisp, new, Ekaterinoslav bill. Leybke also helped carry Tsipe’s boxes onto the droshky.

We drove along Lublin Street. Mother and Tsipe sat on the upper seats, Leybke and I on the little bench below. At the station, Leybke bought Tsipe her ticket and brought all her boxes into the train. The whole time, he kept scraping his feet and stationing himself in front of her, like an officer. When the train started pulling out, he walked alongside, waved his stiff hat in the air, and called out in Russian, “
Dosvidaniye!
… Goodbye!”

Mother was wiping her eyes. She kissed Tsipe over and over again, and told her to keep God in her heart and not to get into a frenzy. For Tsipe had told her, during the holiday, that she didn’t care for her intended groom, the brush-maker. He was coarse, she said, didn’t know a word of Polish, and felt uncomfortable around people.

Mother groaned and said that Tsipe should have thought about that earlier. Now, after going out with him for so long, it was too late. Moreover, he was taking her without a groshen of dowry.

However, Tsipe insisted that she still wasn’t sure what she would do. Lately, a better match had come her way, with an educated man, a bookkeeper.

That was how Tsipe left, without a “Thank you,” without a farewell to Father.

Mother sighed deeply, and for many days thereafter. Her sighing, together with the scents of Tsipe’s little bottles and boxes, lingered on in the house until well into winter.

After the holiday, the orchard in our courtyard turned black and wet. Zaynvl the fruit-seller carted away the last wagonful of apples, wrapped in a crumpled red featherbed. Dusk fell in the middle of the day, dense and foggy. Yellow leaves stuck to the misty windowpanes.

In the evenings Father sat in his padded vest, making marks with the chalk on the table, as he did his Lenive accounts with his partner Motl Straw.

Leybke was no longer in the house. He was supposed to have gone to Warsaw to look for work, and was waiting only for a letter from Tsipe.

She had promised to write him and to pay back his crisp, Ekaterinoslav ruble. But Tsipe must have forgotten. Leybke then began to move about silently, lost in thought. He no longer told stories about the Russian army, and the grease smell slowly wore off from his body. One day he came home and informed us that he would no longer be living with us, that he had found work with Pinkhes the blacksmith, who would pay him six rubles a week, midday meals included. So he moved out.

He returned as a guest the first Sabbath after his departure, coming by just after we had eaten. He hummed under his nose and tapped his foot, and inquired after Tsipe. Had she written? Had she gotten married yet? He asked Mother to send his regards in her next letter.

Leybke must have noticed that we weren’t exactly swimming in money. In fact, he had once told Mother that if she needed to, she could borrow some from him.

Mother was certainly in need of money, not, God forbid, for herself or for some extravagance, but for me. In that post-holiday season, I had ceased being a
kheyder
-boy. Mother had enrolled me in a
shkole
called the New School, where the tuition was higher and where they taught Russian and grammar, in addition to the traditional Hebrew subjects.

Father had been opposed to the idea. In the
shkole
, he said, they turned students into Gentiles and the teachers there taught bareheaded. Here, Leybke took it upon himself to mix in and cited an example from Ekaterinoslav, the state-appointed “crown rabbi” of that city, who had also studied at a
shkole
.

“One never knows,” he said. “Mendl might one day become a ‘crown rabbi,’ too.”

Leybke was probably joking. But at the New School, the studies were different from the
kheyder
. When you left there, you knew how to read from the Torah with the proper cantillation.
You were able to look into the Hebrew journal
Hatsefirah
. You could partake in Zionist activity.

Indeed, everything at the New School was different from the way it was at Sime-Yoysef’s. Here there was no single, dark room lined with sweat-soaked benches, but two spacious rooms with many scrubbed windows and an iron balcony facing the street. In the center of both rooms, arrayed like soldiers, one behind the other, stood rows of small, black desks, with compartments and little boxes for holding food and writing implements.

Hanging on one wall was an old, large map, blue and half-peeling, of cities and towns, rivers and oceans. On the other wall, looking down from charts, were pictures of wild animals and domestic beasts, fishes and lizards, plants and fruit.

High up, alongside the portrait of the Tsar, who was decked out in a blue silk sash across his chest, hung two other portraits.

One was of a stout man in an eight-cornered silk hat, with a trimmed, gray beard and a short neck, sporting a white cravat.
We were told that this was Moses Montefiore and that he was a lord. I took an instant liking to him on account of that white cravat, not unlike Mother’s jabot.

The second portrait was of an altogether different sort, a clean-shaven man with the face of a Gentile, piercing eyes, and a black mustache with upturned ends. I was amazed. What was that angry-looking Gentile face doing at the New School? But the other boys told me that he wasn’t, God forbid, a Gentile. He was a Jew, an important magnate, right hand to the king.
He was none other than Baron Hirsch, who sought to redeem Jews from their long Exile.

I couldn’t believe it and, disregarding the fact that he was the king’s right-hand man, I didn’t like that baron at all. His black mustache ends were too pointy. His eyes were constantly staring you in the face, and not just staring, but boring into you, as though he’d been hired to watch your every step, your every twist and turn. Not that we needed him to keep us in line. For that he could rely on our teacher, Reb Dovid.

This Reb Dovid was a Sime-Yoysef of a different order entirely. He was a vulgar Jew in a vulgar rayon smock, with a vulgar wispy beard, and one vulgar leg shorter than the other. In addition to his teaching, he owned a grocery store, had a grown daughter, and wielded a long, curved leather strap removed from a sewing machine.

This was the teacher who instructed us in the Pentateuch, with the Rashi commentary, as well as provided a review of the weekly Torah portion. Actually, it wasn’t he who taught us, but that curved strap of his, which he wrapped around his fingers, like a soft snake.

Reb Dovid had a wide, low-slung backside, which he would heave onto the top of a bench, resting his shorter leg on a stool. In that way he was able to look over the heads of all the pupils. He had small, squinty eyes and arched eyebrows. Nevertheless, he could see what everybody was up to. When he noticed something amiss, he would slide his backside off the bench, pretend to look in the other direction, and, limping sideways, sneak up on the culprit like a stealthy cat, snatch the cap off the culprit’s head, and let fly the leather snake across the full width of the unfortunate’s bare head.

“May the cholera strike you!” he would hiss, twisting his mouth to one side. “Do me a favor and stop playing that game with the buttons, bastard you!”

A welt would erupt on the “bastard’s” head. It would run down to a good part of his cheek, where it would come to a stop, like a swollen, bloody vein.

It was said that Reb Dovid was on his third wife, and that he would bury her, too. It was known in town that he detested her and called her despicable, but still wanted her to bear him children, even though he already had a grown daughter from his first wife.

Reb Dovid would turn up at the
shkole
later than his pupils. He limped about in a pair of old, worn slip-on shoes and in shriveled trousers that looked like pipes. All that notwithstanding, he regarded himself as a learned man. During the Days of Repentance, he propelled himself to the pulpit to lead the prayers, and on the Sabbath he read the Torah at the synagogue of the Zionists.

People also said that Reb Dovid was an ardent
Misnaged
, an opponent of the Hasidim, whose leaders, the
rebbes
, he held in contempt and despised. He was supposed once to have cursed a
rebbe
publicly, and from that time on started limping.