The Landsmen Read online

  The landsmen

  The landsmen

  The Landsmen

  Table of Contents

  i. Yeersel

  Yeersel 19

  38

  2 - Nlaisha

  < l Ttfaisha 6 3

  c tMaisha 67

  <2 Tlfiaisha 69

  zMatsha 83

  84 L'he Landsmen

  The Landsmen

  3 . Laib

  122 The Landsmen

  4 * Nochim

  1Bevel

  The Landsmen

  190 The Landsmen

  'Berel

  214 The Landsmen

  "Bevel 219

  6 . Shim

  23 8 The Landsmen

  Shim 249

  7 . Laib-Shmul

  8 . T^ippe-Sora

  9 . Laib

  The Landsmen

  310 The Landsmen

  Laib

  338

  363

  io. M.ottel

  Afterword

  The landsmen

  None

  Martin, Peter, 1907-

  None

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  Lost American Fiction

  Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli

  The Landsmen

  A Novel by Peter Martin

  Afterword by Wallace Markfield

  $8.95

  A novel ofJ ewish-American roots , this powerful, original work reconstructs life in a tiny Jewish community in Czarist Russia.

  Set in the village of Golinsk near Minsk at the end of the nineteenth century, The Landsmen evokes life under a system of massively cruel anti-Semitism. The word “landsmen” in Yiddish means people from the same place, but in this novel it conveys the larger meaning of “brothers”-—brothers in suffering, brothers in faith, brothers in humanity.

  Peter Martin wrote the novel from the memories of the old people he knew as a boy in Brooklyn. The result is a work of fiction that is rich in a sense of time and place. The effect is bardic: this is the way it happened; this is how it was told to me by those who experienced it. Each section of the novel is narrated by one of nine characters: Yeersel, the tailor; Maisha, the religion teacher; Laib, the musician; Shim, his brother; Nochim, the dairyman; Berel, the water-carrier; Laib-Shmul, the butcher; Tzippe-Sora, the distiller; and Mottel, the outcast. Some migrated to America; some died in Golinsk.

  First published in 1952, The Landsmen was the first volume of a projected trilogy, and was written to establish a sense of Jewish identity as the background for a large fictional examination of Jewish-American life. Although it was well received and was nominated for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, it was never republished. The second volume of the trilogy, The Building, appeared in 1960. Peter Martin died in 1962 at the age of fifty- five.

  *

  0

  Lost American Fiction

  In 1972 the Southern Illinois University Press republished Edith Summers Kelley’s Weeds . Its reception encouraged the Press to mount a series that would republish obscure or unavailable works of fiction that merit a new audience. Since 1972 eighteen volumes of Lost American Fiction have appeared—in hardbound from the Southern Illinois University Press and in paperback from Popular Library, the cooperating publisher.

  The editor is frequently asked about the basis for selection. Obviously, there can be no clear guidelines, for the decisions are largely subjective and impressionistic. The only rule is that to be considered for publication a book must have been originally published at least twenty-five years ago. Our chief consideration, of course, has been literary merit. Another quality we are looking for might be called “life”: does the work live?—does it have a voice of its own?—does it present human nature convincingly? A third test for including a work in the series is its historical value: does it illuminate the literary or social history of its time? The volumes chosen so far do not represent one editor’s judgment: some were recommended by colleagues, our cooperating publishers, and by strangers who responded enthusiastically to the concept of the series.

  At this point the editor and publisher feel that the Lost American Fiction series has largely achieved what it set out to do. Eighteen novels have been given another chance, and some have found new audiences. The paperback reprint arrangement with Popular Library is making the books available to a wide readership. To be sure, some will vanish again. We cannot claim that all of the titles are lost masterpieces, but we believe that some of them are. There has been considerable disagreement from readers about individual titles. We never expected uniformity of response. That readers would find the Lost American Fiction books worth reading and would be prompted to make their own appraisals is all we wanted.

  M. J. B.

  FOR

  HOWARD, SIMON, MICKEY, CHARLES, DONNIE, HARVEY, KARL, AND DAVID

  Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

  https://archive.org/details/landsmen0000mart

  Contents

  I

  Yeersel (1844-1906)

  3

  2

  Maisha ( 1815-1887)

  46

  3

  Laib (1874-1932)

  93

  4

  Nochim ( 1834-1886 )

  149

  5

  Berel ( 1846-1887)

  167

  6

  Shim (1871-1922)

  225

  7

  Laib-Shmul (1840-1899)

  267

  8

  Tzippe-Sora (1827-1898)

  268

  9

  Laib (1874-1932)

  279

  10

  Mottel (1848-1887)

  367

  The Landsmen

  i. Yeersel

  (1844-1906)

  We jews of the village of golinsk were all plain talkers and long- winded. We spoke as we felt and our hearts were always full and what we said never came out dainty or grammatical; yet our own everyday language, our Yiddish, our treasured private tongue in which we could speak safely, held for us the daily comfort of a mother’s song. Because of this, any two Golinsker Jews in a hurry could stop to say hello in the afternoon and still be a-talking until time for evening prayers.

  Living as we did among those opposed in principle to our ver
y existence, in a Russia of poverty, pogroms, and self-disgust, we thanked God for our Jewishness and for our Yiddish language, which gave us at least among ourselves the freedom to speak heart-to-heart. To the non-Jews of the village we were undesirable transients, even though many of us were born there, and our use was as pawns in the interest of Squire Konayev, the owner of the village. Truthfully speaking, to the Squire and to the non-Jewish villagers we were usable offal, a kind of special manure to improve the land, and we saw nothing remarkable about this because it had always been so; or I should say since the time fifty years before my birth when the district was opened to habitation by Jews. At that time, I am told, my grandfather Yeersel- ben-Mayer came to Golinsk from his village in Poland, running away from a famine which had quite naturally produced a reaction against the Jewish population.

  Golinsk in 1885 held some sixty families of which nineteen were Jewish. A primitive hamlet some forty miles from Minsk, it had neither mayor nor town council, being administered by Selenkov, the

  postmaster, and Rezatskin, the clerk, under the direct supervision of the Squire, who had inherited the village. The Squire handled them as was usual between men of affairs and minor government officials. Unlike in your time, this was considered no corruption at all but the accepted state of affairs.

  Our village lay in scraggly lanes of huts on both sides of the highroad to Minsk, between Pukop eight miles to the east and Svutz about seven to the west. Pukop was larger than Golinsk, had more Jews, supported its own rabbi, contained a military garrison, and was owned by more than one Squire; indeed there were even not-so-poor Jews to be found in Pukop. Svutz was sleepier, dirtier than Pukop, more like Golinsk except Tat many of the Svutzker Jews had long since taken themselves to America. Those remaining were mostly cattle- traders who lived by stealing not only from the non-Jews, but from each other. We feared and avoided them and cursed them for being bad Jews and good troublemakers. Only when times were very hard and I needed the business very badly did I ever offer to sew a coat or a suit of clothes for a Svutzker. And more often than not, on those rare occasions, I would bring home a keg of illegally distilled alcohol instead of the cash I had been promised.

  We liked the Pukopper Jews but unfortunately they did not care for us. The worst of their four tailors sewed a better garment than I, the best of our two; their synagogue had a stone foundation and ours had none; they could support a rabbi, the venerable Sussya-ben-Mor- decai, and the best we could do was to wait for some itinerant rabbi or other to come to us, or to snare, from time to time, a student from the rabbinical school in Minsk who would come for the Passover or for the week of the High Holidays and then never be seen by us again. We were too poor to make it attractive to the rabbinical students we invited, but also it was more than that. Reb Maisha, our aged learner of the youth, the teacher of our school in the synagogue, had embroiled himself in a twenty-year-old feud with the head of the Minsker rabbinical school, Rabbi Hillel-ben-Joseph, who was the cousin of Rabbi Sussya-ben-Mordecai of Pukop, and we of Golinsk for the

  most part stood together with Reb Maisha in the controversy. We held that piety had to be more precious than learning, and that to be too poor to support a rabbi was nothing to be criticized about. The Pukop- pers and the Minsker Rabbi both whipped us with the accusation that we were not so poor as we were stubborn and narrow-minded. But we Golinskers bitterly rejected anything so demeaning and we affirmed the purity of our piety. “Pukop is twice our size,” we would tell them, “and you have several Squires to use to play one against the other, while all we have is Konayev, let him only choke to death before evening prayers.”

  But after the Tsar’s assassination in ’ 8 i, when the military garrison moved into Pukop and Rabbi Sussya-ben-Mordecai suffered his stroke, both sides quieted down. Each held its position without any attack upon it. We enjoyed good relations with the Pukopper Jews as long as nothing was ever mentioned by a Pukopper about Reb Maisha’s “disgraceful ignorance of the Holy Law,” or of “the true piety” of a Golinsker. Truthfully speaking, some of us envied, secretly, the comparative well-being of the Pukoppers but we honestly could not puzzle out ways to live with the Squire any better than the ones we had settled upon.

  To understand how we had to live in Golinsk, let me say something about the place. The nineteen Jewish families in ’ 85 , about one-third of the village, lived in unpainted log huts to the north of the highroad, on land rented from the Squire’s father by our own elders when they came from Poland. They could build and own their huts, but not the land. Fifty yards behind our huts stood the synagogue, and everything else in Golinsk was on the non-Jewish side of the road.

  This comprised the smithy, the four taverns, the three brothels, the post office, and market sheds, the druggist’s, the church, the shoe-shop, the feed man, the Squire’s warehouse and sheds, and surrounding them, in a rising slope, the huts of the villagers; then the more substantial houses of the postmaster and the feed man, and then the church and Father Semyon’s house, and then the stone house of Dr. Ostrov, the Squire’s personal physician, and finally, on top of the hill looking

  down upon us all, the Squire’s little fortress, half villa and half castle. At the very top of the rise, behind circular tiers of white birches, the Squire’s graystone turrets stood concealed in the summer, and from November to April looked like roly-poly sentinels. No Jew had ever gone further up the hill than the doctor’s house, excepting by special command of the Squire, so we called Dr. Ostrov’s “Halfway- to-Heaven.” We stayed mostly on our side except to do business across the road. Gershon sewed shoes in his hut, Naftoli-Dovid made and peddled the yeasty white beer called kvas, I and Aaron-ben-Kalman were the tailors, Hertz made greases, Nochim traded butter and cheese and played wedding-fiddle, Laib-Shmul was our ritual meat-slaughterer, Berel-the-Ox our watercarrier . . . and so on.

  We were everyday Jews in a populated place too tiny even to be a speck on the map. None of us ate more than one decent meal a week, and if the week seemed too long to cope with, too dreary and senseless, we would perk ourselves up a bit thinking of the Sabbath to come — the lighting of the candles at Friday sunset, the beautiful ways the wives had of putting their well-worked palms to their temples, covering their faces for a moment as they uttered the peaceful ritual of the candle-lighting — the dignity of our Sabbath tables, the unity of our clean dear joy, the white cloths, the peace of the shared ecstasy of the Sabbath — the thankful pride in our wives* eyes as we smacked our lips over our savory soup, our slab of meat; and the pudgy curves of the Sabbath loaf baked in twists and jeweled with poppy seeds. Often the loaf did for the week and the soup became thinner and thinner and the nightly potatoes less and less filling, but this only meant that the Sabbath again was nearing.

  And in the slack of the week our prayers seemed to take longer and feel less demanding of the ear of The One Above. We intoned and cantillated with simpler variations and the smallest item of village gossip sent us into epics of interpretive cross-analysis. We were hungry; we talked to pass the time against the coming of the whispers we never dared listen to as they rose within ourselves, excepting when we prayed: “O God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”

  But there was always the Sabbath, and in the summer picking berries and fruit by the day for the Squire, and cabbages and cucumbers too, eating them as we picked; and that was our village, our home, our Russia, where all our suffering and strength started from, all the beauty and bravery our children were to take to America, which most of us would never see. We knew piety amid filth, and the hardship of the Squire. We could be only what we had to be — simple, narrow, unique people. We Golinskers laughed and sang as we beat our chests and cried — so often, so often without any necessity, only circumstance. People can live to be a hundred and never perceive the differences between necessity and circumstance. But the moment you are dead, it is clear.

  The Squire’s house, if you remember, looked down upon the village. And when we prayed in the synagogue the sounds would
seem to rise directly into his face, something never mentioned even by our most rabid tongue-wagger, Tzippe-Sora. We had such a fear of the man, or better to say, of the titular head of the family Konayev, that during the time we prayed we tried to imagine he had never lived. In the depth and purity of our daily devotions we shut out any belief in the existence of such a sniveling nincompoop, such a professional son-in-law whose whole career was to outlive his wife’s father and thus inherit the means of freeing himself from his unhappy life as a country squire with nothing better to take up his time but think of ways to squeeze enough money out of his village to go on junkets to Petersburg and Paris. The Squire had taken some education in his youth and had gone as far as to consider the study of medicine, but had fallen into what turned out to be a comical marriage dictated by his father. So the keen young student had become a horseback-riding squire not quite finished with picturing himself the cultivated man buried in the provincial hole. From time to time Konayev would take out his old medical books and pore over them; and in a locked cabinet of his study he kept his collection of badly translated pornographic romances ordered direct from Paris, with pen-and-ink illustrations. When the mood struck him he

  would bring a few of these books down to the brothel operated by Profim Alexi Buzarov, his steward’s brother; he had become used to a girl there named Varya who worked well with him in imitating certain of the pen-and-ink drawings from his Parisian collection.

  In such a fashion, rotted by impatience and disgust at his father-in- law’s apparent immortality, the Squire tutored himself for the life to be his when he would come into his inheritance. Roweled every day by his dull noisy wife and the two marionettes who were his daughters, and irritated by the inadequate appreciation of his basic qualities on the part of all of us illiterate semi-starved Golinskers and outlying peasants, Jews and non-Jews together, the Squire had applied himself over the years to cultivating a permanent and sour sadness out of which he brewed his aggravating ideas and contemptuous froths of nervous wrath. Like stones flung into a stream the circles of his anger touched all who lived on the many circumferences of his arrogance. With the joyless implacability of a foolish boy poking a stick into a beehive, and with so self-satisfying a bitterness that it often seemed to be not there, this graying little person with the belly of a carrying sow and the voice of a castrated tenor kept himself busy with his village, seeking little ways to make more out of us with the dull persistence of a hungry man chewing a clean bone. Through his steward, Vassily Buzarov, he knew everyone’s business, and by the use of the village bailiff, Rezatskin, the Squire quite well estimated how much he could draw from us, linking this through his Vassily to a steady traffic in illegal alcohol, in which at one time or another he involved us all. There was no question of refusing when the word came that Vassily wanted to talk to any of us; we knew he was going to assign us our stations and tasks relative to one of the Squire’s schemes; and we knew we would perform our duties as suggested; for together with the regional military commander, Colonel Vladimir Yakol stationed in Pukop, the Squire each year handpicked the Golinskers he deemed ready for military conscription. Since the Colonel’s real interest lay in jolly living, by which he meant over-eating and over-gambling, and since the Squire fraternized with him in these activities and made good the difference between what the