Mitla Pass (24 page)

Uncle Boris likewise didn’t have a shabby thread on his coats and jackets, which were numerous. He spent as much time away from Tante Sonia as he was able, withdrawing to his personal library to read and work on accounts. Their meals were wordless.

Let me tell you something, that even with all the high-and-mighty business the food was delicious. Tante Sonia had a woman who did nothing but cook for them and there was meat three, maybe four times a week.

“The first thing you must learn, Nathan, is how to eat properly,” I was informed. For such food I could take a little torture with her meat slicing and napkins and hands in the lap and eating soup without making noise. I also saw, for myself, for the first time in my life, oranges.

So Mariupol was heaven? Not exactly.

The Borokovs had two sons, both older than me and both of them in Palestine studying at the famous Herzlia Gymnasium. I therefore not only had a bedroom to myself, I had a closet filled with clothing the sons had outgrown. Tante Sonia had burned the clothing I arrived in, particularly my coat.

Because Uncle Boris had sons in Eretz Israel, he was a self-proclaimed Zionist. He bragged endlessly of the great sacrifice he had made for the redemption of Palestine.

The third child was a daughter, Tilly, who was a year younger than myself. To be quite frank about it, Tilly was a real
mishkeit,
an ugly. She was about twice my size to start with, and from there it got worse.

When I was told I would receive a salary of twelve rubles a week, I should have become immediately suspicious. Nobody pays anybody so much money for nothing. Tante Sonia announced she would send eight rubles a week directly to my family. The other four rubles would go for my room and board. Somehow, it didn’t seem quite right, but here it was and here I was.

For this enormous salary, of which I received nothing, I worked sixty-two hours a week. If there is anything filthier than killing chickens, it is the coal business. Despite my mounting disillusions, there was the knowledge I was keeping my family alive, although after a day’s work shoveling coal it gave me very little satisfaction.

Uncle Boris had an office on the docks. Every day he promised that I would work myself into the office to a nice desk job, but until then I had to learn the coal business from the ground up.

My first job required little genius. I worked in the coal packaging yard. This was for smaller sales. So I shoveled from the bins into burlap sacks, sewed the sacks, and stacked them on wagons. Then I went into coal delivery, another profession that didn’t require a university education.

Later I graduated to a checker. When a shipload came to the docks, I had to see to it that the correct tonnage was delivered to the yard and oversee the transfer to coal trains. After ten to twelve hours of work and another two hours to clean myself up, I was often too tired to eat, despite the fantastic meals. The only day off was the Sabbath and I could scarcely drag myself out of bed to go to synagogue.

M
ARIUPOL HAD
problems for me other than the Borokovs. We were a small number of Jews living among a large number of Ukrainians, a formula for catastrophe. There was no real Jewish communal life—we only went through the motions. There was neither a Jewish marketplace nor schools. Cultural affairs, such as Zionist meetings, were frowned upon even by the rabbis and had to be held in secret. The Borokovs admonished me not to use Yiddish. They spoke Russian at all times, even in synagogue.

The Jews of Mariupol had learned their place, to shut up. With Russia boiling from one end to the other with massive discontent, the Borokovs pretended nothing was happening. Nonetheless, as invisible as the Jews tried to make themselves, the Ukrainians reminded us regularly that we were dirty Jews. For me it was a very miserable existence, without a friend, to say nothing of—that “God should strike them all dead”—the coal business.

There was another matter that was not the least of my problems—namely, Tilly. She let me know in not so subtle ways that she didn’t object to having a cousin living under the same roof.

Each night I would have to scrub in the yard for over an hour and as soon as my shirt and pants came off, Tilly appeared like magic. A few times I scalded myself jumping into the hot tub to avoid letting her see me naked.

Tilly found the oddest times, both day and night, to come into my room for incomplete reasons. Maybe I needed something? Did I get my laundry back? Would I like to smell this new perfume all the way from Paris? She had it down to a science, making me squirm.

I, in turn, tried to be friendly and enrich her with the vast knowledge I had gained by reading literature and becoming a lecturer of some note in Bialystok. But all she would do was giggle. She rarely put six words together without ending with a shrill giggle. Despite the sophistication I had gained in gymnasium, I still remained innocent regarding matters of girls. Even though Tilly was a genuine ugly, there were certain parts of her which might become interesting if I so inquired.

I thought all the time of running away. Not such an easy matter. I was a prisoner in golden handcuffs. Despite Tante Sonia’s beautiful home and the food, I had no railroad ticket, no money in my pocket, and Uncle Boris kept my passport in the safe in his office.

Fate stepped in.

After almost two years and the passing of my seventeenth birthday, I developed a cough. Probably I had breathed in half the coal dust in southern Russia. Within a week, the cough became so bad I was unable to report for work. After another week, Tante Sonia finally took me to a doctor, but he failed to share with me the results.

For the Borokovs to stop sending my parents the eight rubles a week because the son is being worked into an early grave presented for the Borokovs a delicate problem. It all unfolded at a Sabbath dinner.

“The time has come,” Uncle Boris said with great aplomb. “Nathan, you will move into the office and learn the books.”

Tilly giggled.

“To be utterly candid,” I replied, “I am not finding the coal business as enriching an experience as I had hoped.”

“From the outside, coming to the inside, you will find things much different,” he assured me.

“God forbid I should sound ungrateful for your generosity, but there are other problems as well,” I said.

“What possible problems could you have?” Tante Sonia interjected indignantly. “We are feeding you like a dog, maybe? Your room is not spotless? Your clothing is rags?”

“It’s just that ...”

“What?” they demanded jointly.

“I don’t have any time off, not to read or anything. I haven’t even been to the library.”

“But this is a promotion, Nathan. Going to work in the office is automatic shorter hours.”

Tilly giggled.

“I don’t feel so good about being a Jew here,” I finally blurted out.

“And who understands that better than I do?” Uncle Boris intoned, slipping into a profound mood. “You cannot say that your Uncle Boris is not a Jew. I have given sons to Palestine, gladly. However, Nathan, you will learn that living quietly, away from all the problems of the
shtetl
is not such a difficult adjustment. For those of us smart enough to get along, we make for ourselves a very comfortable life.”

I didn’t argue back, but in a million years I could not feel at ease in a jungle of Ukrainians. “I don’t have a kopek in my pocket to spend,” I croaked.

“Uncle Boris and I have talked it over and decided to give you a pay raise of two rubles a week,” Tante Sonia said. “One ruble, I insist, should go into savings. The other ruble, mad money. Put it in your pocket, go to the cinema, do with it what you want. Make merry!”

So, why are they behaving this way to me now? Are they sorry for how they have worked me? Did an angel come in the middle of the night and threaten them to be good to Nathan, or else? All I could say of the moment, it was not typical Borokov.

A few nights later it occurred to me exactly what was unfolding. I was taking a pish in the thunderbowl, which was kept under my bed, when all of a sudden I heard that giggle. It was muffled, but unmistakable. I had never given much thought to it, in my innocence, but Tilly’s room was connected to mine and there was a transom between us. It was covered with special paper, but on close examination I found that some of it was scratched away and so, standing on a chair, she could look directly into my room. God only knows, she may have been watching me sit on the pot for weeks, even months.

What a stupid I’d been.

My beloved mother, Sophie, and Tante Sonia had made a
shiddach
for me with—GOD SAVE ME—Tilly Borokov. A plot hatched over three thousand miles. I needed some kind of confirmation.

There was an old yard hand I had befriended by the name of Gregor. He was not a bad fellow, as Ukrainians go. Gregor was afflicted with the usual Ukrainian disease of alcoholism. When I had saved up three rubles, I took him one evening to the tavern. Information flowed after the first drink.

“So, Boris Borokov is telling you that shit about what a great Zionist he is. His sons ran away to Palestine, because they hated equally that house and the coal business. He has no heirs except Tilly, and Mariupol is not big enough for finding a husband for that one. You are a marked man, Nathan.”

What to do?

I went back to bed and coughed and coughed. I coughed in their faces. I coughed at the dining-room table, spraying everyone’s food. I spit and missed the spittoon, landing my wad on Tante Sonia’s most precious Turkoman carpet. I tracked coal over the parlor and got dirty marks all over her doilies. I lost the documents on a coal shipment, which cost Uncle Boris double taxation.

God must have heard me coughing, because the war broke out between Russia and Germany. For the next several months the coal business was in a bad state. All winter long I remained useless to Uncle Boris because my cough continued until springtime. All of us, by this time, wanted to get rid of one another.

Mail was slow with the war on, but by March I received a letter that a job was waiting for me in the city of Minsk in the jewelry store of another uncle, Bernie Zadok.

Minsk, 1915

T
HE TRAIN TRIP
from Mariupol to Minsk, likewise almost three thousand miles, was a certified nightmare. The Russians, from the Czar on down, blamed the Jews for getting them into the war. Their logic escapes me, but every empty wall, particularly in the railroad stations, was filled with anti-Semitic slogans:
KILL A JEW AND SAVE
R
USSIA
.

Before the war it was difficult for a Jew to make a long train ride without having a bad experience. Now it was completely impossible. Soldiers heading for the front prowled for Jews as though it were a blood sport.

From the minute I left Mariupol, I could not escape from the Jew-baiting, from the slogans on the walls to the newspapers to the gossip on everyone’s lips.

Every car I boarded, they would be looking for me. I was easy to pick out and easier to pick on. First came the dirty remarks and the pushing around. Then came the humiliation of having my pants pulled down to see if I was circumcised, and it ended with a slapping around or a beating. Once it was established that you were Jewish, at a whim of the Russians you were not permitted to sit down, even on the floor. The soldiers made all of us—men, women, and children—stand from station to station. After a few hours people would start collapsing. Sometimes I stood for so many hours I crawled off the train in a state of exhaustion. Food had to be eaten carefully. For example, bread could not be gobbled so you hid in the latrine and ate it slowly. If you had potatoes or cucumbers, you gobbled it down fast.

The worst was during the final leg, when the train was boarded by a company of Cossack soldiers returning from the front, where they had taken a terrible beating from the German Army. My overcoat was ripped apart to see if I was hiding money and when they found none, I was beaten unconscious. This is the condition my Uncle Bernie found me in at the Minsk station. I was in the hospital for over a week, with cracked ribs and a broken nose. One more train ride and the story of Nathan Zadok would have been over.

M
INSK,
I
AM
happy to say, was a change for the better. Uncle Bernie had become a man of means. He owned a small jewelry manufacturing business with a retail outlet on the elegant Gubnartorsky Street. Along comes the war and his business is booming. Minsk was a major staging area for the Army and its streets were filled with soldiers and many officers had their women. No one seemed to want to go off to war without buying a trinket or two. Uncle Bernie’s was filled from opening to closing.

Despite his new wealth, Bernie Zadok was a real mensch. He and Aunt Sarah remained earthy people with no fancy-shmancy ideas like the Borokovs. Decent and generous, especially to orphans, Uncle Bernie had a seat on the Eastern Wall. Because of the war there was a shortage of workers, so I fit right in and in no time whatsoever I am jack of all trades.

At home in Wolkowysk, the family situation changed for the better when my father was again able to resume his profession as
shohet.
With the war on, his wholesalers had contracts with the Army and he was butchering chickens around the clock. My father was a good
shohet
but nobody would appreciate that except, in a strange way, the chickens. The birds he slaughtered were not kosher of course, but good enough for the Russians.

TONIGHT OPENING MEETING OF THE POALE ZIONIST ORGANIZATION OF RUSSIA REGIONAL CONFERENCE. KEYNOTE SPEAKER, NATHAN ZADOK WHO WILL RECOUNT HOW HE SECRETLY COVERED THE MENDEL BEILISS TRIAL IN KIEV.
A daring account of one young Poale Zionist and how he secretly interviewed the evil Pranaites.

Perhaps I made a slight exaggeration about my participation in the Beiliss trial, but people were coming halfway over the city to hear me speak and there were delegates from all over the eastern part of the country. What’s the sin? What’s the crime if I make them feel proud?

I cannot hardly describe the sensation of approaching the rostrum after thunderous applause. Thousands out there and me, little Nathan Zadok of Wolkowysk, the youngest delegate to the entire convention.