The Family Moskat (5 page)

The lodging-house where Asa Heshel hoped to find a room had three courtyards. It was almost like a town in itself. Peddlers called out their wares, artisans repaired broken chairs, sofas, and cots. Jews in faded coats and heavy boots fussed about their carts, which were hung with wooden buckets and lanterns. The meek-looking nags with their thin protruding ribs and long tails nuzzled at a mixture of oats and straw.

In the middle of the courtyard a group of jugglers was performing. A half-undressed man with long hair was lying on the ground, his naked back resting on a board studded with nails, while with the soles of his raised feet he juggled a barrel. A woman in red pantaloons, her head cropped close, padded back -22-and forth on her hands, her feet waving in the air. A ragpicker, with a dirty white beard and a sack on his shoulder, came in from the street, raised his eyes to the upper stories, and cleared his throat.

"What'll you sell? What'll you sell?" he shouted in a rasping, hoarse voice. "I buy pots and pans, old shoes, old pants, old hats, rags, rags."

The ragpicker must have some deeper meaning, it seemed to Asa Heshel. What he really meant was: "Rags, that's all that's left of our striving."

"And Rabbi Hiyah taught: One man says, you owe me one hundred gulden, and the other answers, I owe you nothing." The words came in the traditional chant from a study house in a room off the courtyard. Through the dust-laden window pane Asa Heshel caught a glimpse of a dark face framed in disordered sidelocks. For a moment the singsong voice prevailed over the tumult in the court.

The steps up to the hotel were littered with mud and refuse. At the left, in a kitchen, a woman bent over a steaming washtub. At the right, in a room with four windows, and with moist, sweating walls, a group of men and women sat about a large table. A fair-haired man was gnawing at the leg of a chicken; an old Jew with a beard growing askew from his chin and a parchment-yellow forehead, furrowed with wrinkles, muttered over an open volume.

A plump young man in a sweat-stained vest held a stick of sealing wax to a candle and dabbed the heated end on an envelope. The women sat somewhat removed from the men, the older of them with kerchiefs over their matron's wigs. A man in a quilted jacket, below which protruded the fringes of a ritual garment, was repairing a sack with a heavy needle and ropelike thread. A gas lamp snored and flickered. The hotelkeeper, a youngish man, came forward. He was wearing gold-rimmed glasses and under his collar a stringlike, typical Chassidic tie.

"A newcomer? What can I do for you?"

"Is it possible to get lodging here?"

"What else? First 1 have to see your papers. A pass or birth certificate."

"I have a pass."

"Good. A hundred per cent. What's the name?"

" Asa Heshel Bannet."

-23-" Bannet.

Any relation to Rabbi Mordecai Bannet?" "Yes. A great-grandson."

"An aristocratic family, eh? And where are you from?"

"Tereshpol Minor."

"What brings you to Warsaw? To see a doctor, I suppose."

"No."

"What, then? To go into business?"

"No."

"Maybe to enter a yeshivah?"

"I don't know yet."

"Who else would know? How long do you want to stay?

Overnight or longer?"

"In the meanwhile just overnight."

"You'll have to share a bed with someone else. It'll come out cheaper."

Asa Heshel made a wry mouth and started to say something, but he composed his lips and was silent.

"What's wrong with it? It isn't good enough for you? This is Warsaw. You have to take things the way you find them. This isn't the Hotel Bristol. The biggest merchants sleep two in a bed when the place is full."

"I thought I could get a room for myself."

"Not here."

A silence fell on the group at the table. The man who was repairing the sack lifted his needle high in the air and stared at Asa Heshel with perplexed eyes. A woman with a triangular face broke into a laugh, showing a mouthful of gold teeth.

"Look who wants to pick and choose!" she said in a sharp Lithuanian accent. "Count Pototski!"

The other women giggled. The glasses on the landlord's nose seemed to gleam with triumph.

"Where did you say you come from, your highness?" he asked, his mouth close to Asa Heshel's ear, as though the newcomer were deaf. "Show me your pass."

He looked long and carefully at the passbook with its black covers and wrinkled his forehead.

"Ahal From over there," he said. "From one of those one-horse villages."

He raised his voice. "All right, put down your basket. Warsaw'll put you in your place."

-24-

2

Asa Heshel came of distinguished stock on both sides of his family. His maternal grandfather, Reb Dan Katzenellenbogen, had a genealogical chart of his own, inscribed on parchment with gold ink in the form of a many-branched linden tree. The root was King David, and the branches bore the names of other illustrious forebears. Reb Dan himself had on his forehead a scar that, it was said, was the mark only of those descended from kingly stock and privileged to wear the crown when Messiah came.

Asa Heshel's grandmother on his father's side, Tamar, had worn a ritual fringed garment, like a man, and had made the New Year pilgrimages to the Chassidic court of the rabbi of Belz. His paternal grandfather, Tamar's husband, Reb Jerachmiel Bannet, was a man of fervent and inordinate piety, who never touched food before sunset, mortified his flesh with cold baths, and in the winter rolled his body in the snow. He paid no attention to household or business affairs, but day and night sat locked in his attic room, studying a volume of the Cabala. Sometimes he would disappear for days on end. It was said that on these journeys he would meet in some humble place the six-and-thirty hidden saints, by whose virtue and humility the entire earth is enabled to exist. Since Reb Jerachmiel refused to take part in any civic affairs, it was Tamar who participated in the community council's deliberations. She sat at the end of the table, alongside the propertied men of the town, her brass-rimmed spectacles perched on the end of her nose. She took snuff from a horn snuffbox, gnawed at sticks of licorice, and talked in determined accents. It was said that the rabbi of Belz himself stood up and put a chair in place for her when she came in.

She had brought eight children into the world, but only one of them had survived to adulthood. Some were stillborn, others had died in their cradles. She had not permitted the little bodies to be carried away until she had herself prepared them for burial. As a charm the last-born had been given five names, Alter, Chaim, Benzion, Kadish, and Jonathan, and to fool the Angel of Death they dressed the child in trousers of white linen and a white cap, like a shroud. Around his neck he wore a little bag containing an inscribed amulet and a wolf's tooth to ward off the evil eye. At twelve he was pledged to Finkel, the daugh--25-ter of the rabbi of Tereshpol Minor. At fourteen he was married.

Nine months after the wedding the young wife was delivered of a daughter, Dinah, and two years later of a son, who was named Asa Heshel, after one of his great-grandfathers. At the circumcision ceremony both grandmothers lifted the hems of their skirts and hopped and bobbed to each other as though they were at a wedding.

But there was little peace in the house of the young pair. Every couple of weeks Jonathan--they called him by the last of his five names--would climb into a coach and ride off to his mother in Yanov. Tamar stuffed him with pancakes, eggnogs, roast chicken, egg noodles, and preserves. In the spring she made him take a tonic against worms, as though he were still a schoolboy. The delicately reared Jonathan could not stand his father-in-law, who was always engaged in some dispute or other with half the town; or his mother-in-law, who kept the food pantry locked against her daughters-in-law; or his brothers-in-law, Zad-dok and Levi, who, for all their learning and education, sat around playing chess or exchanging witticisms. When his father died--it happened in an almshouse during one of his trips away from home--

Jonathan went to his mother and stayed there, dispatching a divorce to his wife by a messenger. Finkel was barely nineteen years old at the time.

Asa Heshel went through all the diseases of infancy; Gimpel, the Tereshpol Minor barber-surgeon, gave up all hope for him time and again. He had measles and whooping cough, diphtheria and diarrhea, scarlet fever and ear abscesses. He would weep all night long, get fits of coughing, and turn blue, as though he were dying.

Finkel had to carry him around in her arms all night. Very early he began to suffer from fright; anything might frighten him--the blowing of the ram's horn, a mirror, a chimney-sweep, a hen. He had dreams of gypsies stowing children in a sack and spiriting them away, of corpses that walked about the cemeteries, of ghosts that danced about behind the ritual bathhouse. He was always asking questions: How high is the sky? How deep is the earth?

What's at the other side of the end of the world? Who made God?

His grandmother would put her hands to her ears. "He drives me crazy," she wailed. "He's a dybbuk, not a child!"

He attended cheder for only half a day. He quickly got the reputation of a prodigy. At five he was studying Talmud, at six -26-he began the

Talmudic commentators, at eight the teacher had no more to give him. At the age of nine he delivered a discourse in the synagogue, and at twelve he was writing learned letters to rabbis in other towns. The rabbis would send him back long epistles, addressing him as "The Keen and Eagle-eyed" and "Uprooter of Mountains."

Matchmakers flooded the family with matrimonial offers; the townsfolk predicted that he was sure, in God's good time, to inherit his grandfather's rabbinical chair, for what were his uncles Zaddok and Levi but empty heads and dawdlers. And then what does the promising youth do but abandon the roads of righteousness and join the ranks of the "moderns"? He would start endless disputes with the others in the study house and criticize the rabbis. He prayed without putting on the customary prayer sash, scribbled on the margins of the sacred books, made mock of the pious. Instead of studying the Commentaries he delved into Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed and Jehuda Halevi's Khuzari. Somewhere he got hold of the writings of the heretic Salomon Maimon. He went about with his coat unbuttoned, his earlocks unkempt, his hat pushed to one side, his eyes looking into the distance beyond the rooftops. His Uncle Levi would chide him: "Don't think so much. The sky won't fall."

The town agreed that it was Jekuthiel the watchmaker, follower of the heretic Jacob Reifman, who had brought the youth to grief.

Jekuthiel Watchmaker had once studied under Reb Dan Katzenellenbogen, but later had gone in for worldly learning. He lived in a small house at the end of an alley, kept away from the religious folk, and fraternized mostly with the town musicians. He had a thin beard, a wide and lofty forehead, and big black eyes.

All day he sat in his tiny workroom over his work bench, a jeweler's glass in his eye. In the evening he read, and sometimes to pass the time he played on the zither. His wife had died during an epidemic, and the children had been taken by her mother. Asa Heshel became a familiar at jekuthiel's place. The watchmaker had in his library old copies of the modern Hebrew journal
Hameasef
and the Pentateuch in Moses Mendelssohn's German translation, besides a collection of the German poets, Klopstock, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, as well as some old textbooks of algebra, geometry, physics, and geography. There were also the works of Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant, and Hegel. Jekuthiel gave Asa Heshel the key to his house and the youth spent entire days there, reading and studying.

He only

-27-half understood

the German. He struggled over the problems in mathematics and drew geometrical figures with a piece of chalk on a board. When his grandfather learned that the boy had thrown himself into the study of worldly books he disowned him. His mother's eyes were swollen with weeping. But Asa Heshel stuck to his new path. Often he would stay for the evening meal at Jekuthiel's. While the older man prepared the food, he discussed philosophy with Asa Heshel.

"All right, let's assume that the earth was torn away from the sun"--

Jekuthiel spoke with the traditional prayerhouse chant--"does that settle the matter? There still has to be a First Cause."

Asa Heshel swallowed all the books at a gulp. He managed to plow his way through the Russian and Polish with the help of a dictionary, the Latin from a Vulgate that Jekuthiel had borrowed from the priest. The "emancipated" Jews near by in Zamosc heard of him and began to send him books from their own library. Jekuthiel even wrote out for him a list of works that might help him go on to higher education without the help of a university. But years passed and little came of his undisciplined efforts. He began courses of study but never completed them. He was reading without system, browsing here and there. The eternal questions never gave him rest: Was there a God or was everything, the world and its works, mechanical and blind? Did man have responsibilities or was he accountable to no higher power? Was the soul immortal or would time bring everything to oblivion? In the long summer days he would take a crust of bread, a pencil, and paper and go off into the forest, or he would climb up to the attic of his grandfather's house, sit himself down on an upturned water barrel, and daydream. Each day he would make up his mind anew to leave the town, and each day he stayed. He had neither money for travel nor any idea how he might earn his keep out in the great world. Ever since he had departed from the accepted ways, his mother had begun to ail.

She had taken off her matron's wig and went about with a shawl over her head, in the manner of a mourner. She lay in bed for days at a time, reading her prayerbook. His sister, Dinah, complained that because of him she could not find a husband.

Reb Dan Katzenellenbogen's enemies began to discuss bringing a new rabbi to the town.

His grandmother Tamar was no longer alive. His father had disappeared. Some people said that he was somewhere in Galicia -28-and had