The Landsmen Read online

  I have more on my mind, but let this be enough until later.

  Once in a nickel magazine I saw an advertisement for safety razors. A small boy was standing on a stool before the bathroom mirror, giving himself a shave. For a peppy eye-catcher they took a poetic saying, “The child is father of the man,” and put it above the picture. But opening the heart is not selling safety razors, so don’t think I delude myself. You are not on my side, but start with this:

  Remember that when I came back to my Golinsker hut with the dried raspberries after I had seen the way Uncle Mottel had fixed my mandolin, I had then begun to change into a more important version of myself, for I came home with a secret worth lying about, the possession of a playable instrument and a teacher for it. The connection with Uncle Mottel in all its past, present, and future whys and wherefores had changed me into a learning-cadet in the permanent and in-

  visible war between man and the State. And thus the anger that did not die. Why such anger? What was under the wrinkles of speculations, between veins, behind knuckles, hidden in curves of eyes or under beards or in the middle of throats ? A plain wanting to walk in airs, to sleep under oceans, to be a piece of electricity; anything to explode the insanity established by no one man. I think of my father with such bitter tears that they can never be wet. I think of him as a bug lying under the rock of the State, a bug personally not in the least wanting to be a bug but a person with a pride, a use, and a valuable history. I think of my father standing beside the lamp on the table, his face down to blow the lamp out with one tired puff of air ... a face that if painted by the right artist would have made a rock blow its nose. But the State has other plans for the artists, connected to the selling of safety razors — the opening of the heart becoming the unadvertised miracle, the guarded secret, the message taking centuries to deliver and even then it doesn’t always arrive.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have kept it all in. Maybe I should have sat in cafes and drunk tea and knocked the government, or hung around a lot of Union Squares and given the revolution my permission to go ahead, or made free love with philosophical girls and in such pastimes sweated off the anger. But I was a musician and played a musician’s pinochle. I did not fool myself into believing I could buy every meld and that a Turkish bath fixed everything. No bluffs or baths could wring “Mottel’s Sonata” or “Papa’s Conservatory” out of me because these were in the marrow; all the sweating in the world couldn’t have dissolved them. Nor by the method of thinking so fashionable in self- complicated circles, where anything is taken and chopped up for eating with fancy forks, could I have employed my Golinsker heritage in recipes from romantic cookbooks to try to win the prize for the most original treatment of a left-over. This was more in the line of my nephew Leon, the professor, and my son Lester . . . but not me. Right here, ladies and gentlemen of the world, appears the only victory a person can permanently win, to leave the world with the same sweetness he brought, to keep himself clean of the dirt of the State with all

  its ridiculous recipes for “growing up,” for sitting through life as through a play, waiting for the intermissions and the end; for fearing not your wounds but their cure, for seeing your food but not your prison.

  Let experts argue; I claim I did right (though in my family this remained my personal opinion, no more). For instance one night in 1928 or 1929 I was doing a stage show in Newark with the all-girl orchestra and my son Lester, who by then played sax in a big hotel band, came to take me to a special party of musicians. They were going to play without music for their own pleasure, improvisations. “Come on, Pop. Climb out of ‘Poet and Peasant,’ everything ain’t ‘Kiss Me Again,’ ” he nudged me.

  We were riding in his big second-hand Marmon down Broad Street in Newark on the way to a place in Harlem where the boys were meeting. We passed a Hebrew National delicatessen and stopped off for a bite. Between the hot pastrami and the pickles and an argument with the house manager in the Newark theater, I got a little gas and didn’t feel like hanging around all night listening to jazz so I said, “Lester, go alone. I’ll take the subway.”

  “But Pop,” Lester said, “Bix is going to show up. You can’t miss Bix.”

  “I got gas tonight, Lester, also a headache. Anyway Pm not such a jazz baby.”

  “Pop,” Lester said, his mouth full of pastrami, “you’re in America now, for crissake. Melt yourself down an inch.”

  “America is not a pot and Pm not tin.”

  “Aw, Pop, again?”

  “Just like going to play with Bix doesn’t yet make you an American, your sitting here in the Hebrew National eating hot pastrami doesn’t make you a Jew either.”

  “Ok, Spinoza, take it easy!”

  “Don’t worry, Lester,” I said, and went home.

  With me the anger was too deep to come out to my own — except once. It kept me home alone in the apartment the day of the fire; the truth spoken, it burned me to death. Had I been doing what was ex-

  pected of me, had I been sitting on the witness stand reciting a few lies to help save my nephew’s twelve-story building in New Roseville, New Jersey, I wouldn’t have been burned, physically, in the slightest.

  At my funeral three different rabbis pronounced words about how I lived like some giant bird of the skies, soaring on lonely wings to places few spirits ever knew; about how I lived in the mantle of the gentle prophet, Hillel; and about how my household sang with the beauty of my violin. Nothing was said of my wife Gertrude’s disappointment when I told Aaron to keep his five-thousand-dollar bribe; that he could go save his building without my help. Nothing was said of my son Lester’s dutiful pity of me. Nothing was said of my failure to be to my nephew, Aaron-the-success, what my Uncle Mottel was to me. Nothing was said about my having no one to give my Mottel- ness to, that surge of a life lived free and full to the extent allowed by the arrogance of the State. And not even the slightest hint was there of the love and grief I had for my own, betrayed by the invisible enemy; so “mature,” my own, so “practical.”

  My love and grief and anger are for them.

  4 * Nochim

  (1834-1886)

  At sixty inches i stopped growing; year after year in my youngest manhood the recruiting clerks would measure me. Some tried to stretch me; one of them made a change in my nose with his pistol butt and I never wore the Tsar’s uniform.

  I made the most of my caricaturish appearance. It invited openings for conversations leading to possible sales of the dairys I peddled in my cart all around the Golinsk district. Without dairys, when my credit with the farmers had returned to zero, I would go about the different towns with my fiddle, and set myself up in the market places and at fairs. Peasants would stop to insult me, yet they often left coppers the more my figure became familiar. (This, only when I needed cash; and never in Golinsk itself.)

  I developed also the ability to seek out a wedding feasible for me to make an entrance as an uninvited supporter of the celebration offering the joy of my fiddle for a hatful of coins or a bag of leftovers. To learn of weddings, I would jolly with postmen, listen long hours in taverns, pester housewives, and look to see which boys smiled at which girls. On such wheels I rolled to Pukop the week of Laib’s confirmation, intending to return to Golinsk in time for the ceremonies. Laib’s gentle father had been my good friend; were I six feet tall, Aaron could not have spoken to me more respectfully.

  It being after Passover, cows ate the new grass, seeds pushed, the sun baked my face, chickens walked around like policemen and my stomach was as empty as my purse. The charm of the season did not therefore lie in my head. I stood in the Pukop market square near some gypsies, round confident people from the south who swore to the

  gathered peasants that the contents of their green bottles guaranteed sons. I stood doing nothing, fiddle in hand, busying myself with four principal thoughts.

  First, though I needed any coins the peasants might throw me, I had good reason not to interfere with the gypsies. I wanted to ask one of the
women if she had ever met a redhead of twenty-seven with a mole as wide as a thumbnail high on her right cheek. This was my daughter Lenka, whom I had disowned twelve years before when she had allowed herself to become a piece of the Squire’s entertainment. I had kicked Lenka away from me and the landsmen had upheld the piety and wisdom of the sacrifice. But I could never after stifle my love nor mourn her as a dead soul. The religious command was just and true; there must be no harlots in a clean Jewish house; the Law had been satisfied yet not I; nor could I ever expect to be. My condition simply demanded that I accept the fated thing. Earning hardly enough to keep my family alive, Nochim the sometimes-beggar could send no agents to search for Lenka; I would never in the world see her again, never tell her the biggest secret — that I loved her anyway — unless by some fortune, news of her would come my way. Therefore, I did nothing to annoy the gypsies.

  Second, I hoped to meet someone who might drop a hint of a soon wedding. But it was already Tuesday, the day of Jewish weddings in our district; if I hadn’t known of one by then, there wasn’t any. I knew of a gentile wedding there that Sunday but I had to be in Golinsk Saturday for Laib’s confirmation.

  Third, I waited for a Jewish Pukopper to notice me and offer an invitation to evening prayers and supper. But the Pukoppers held us Golinskers to be half-Hasids, pathetic dwellers in the air as irrationally pious as we were ignorant, looking down our noses at them as though we were transplanted Galicians. The fear of being corrupted into our simplicity made them avoid us. The Pukoppers had a saying, “If a Shnavker walks with you, be careful of your coat. If a Svutzker kisses you, count your teeth. If a Golinsker says hello to you, go elsewhere at once.”

  ISlochim 151

  Fourth, I stood like a stick in the Pukop market square thinking of what my grandfather used to repeat in times of trouble. “What is a man ?” he would ask. “A king at a year, a pig at two, a horse at eighteen, a donkey when he marries, then later a dog not ashamed to beg for a living, and in his old age a monkey, curious and childish, with nobody paying attention.” I walked out of Pukop in the late shadows, starting for home. Thirst worried me more than hunger and I looked for water. Then I saw the cows, two of them, heavy with milk. I took my cup out of my cotton bag and stepped into the field, approaching them, then crawling near enough to reach one and squeeze a quick cupful.

  Then came the voice in Yiddish. I jumped to my feet and saw an older man. “Better ask than steal!” he said.

  I took a strong stand. “By what law am I a thief?”

  “Whose milk is it?”

  “The cow’s, naturally,” I replied.

  “The milk is mine!”

  “Not in the field. In the field her milk is her own. It becomes yours when you milk her in your barn, not before.”

  “Thief, turd!” he spat, taking the cow-ropes in one hand, holding my arm with the other.

  “Such charges I would dispute with Moses,” I said.

  “That won’t be necessary. Where are you from?”

  “Golinsk”

  “Now I remember . . . you’re the fiddler.” He began walking me to the road, his fingers almost meeting themselves around my thin arm. “We won’t drag Moses into this. Rabbi Sussya-ben-Mordecai will show you who owns cows as it is understood in Pukop! We’ll squeeze your Golinsker stupidity like a boil!”

  Within the half hour this Itzik and I stood in the dark before the rabbi’s house in Synagogue Street. Itzik turned to me. “Now really, Golinsker, don’t you feel foolish?”

  “I can’t feel anything but your grip.”

  “Then you admit,” he demanded, “that the milk belongs to me no matter where the cow stands?”

  “I admit nothing.”

  “Ay,” he said, disappointed. “Knocking sense into a Golinsker’s head is no easier than growing hair on a stone.”

  “One often sees hair growing on stones,” I said, “among the Pukopper Jews.”

  “I’ll show you a stone,” Itzik cried, his hands butting the front of my head against the rabbi’s door, not stopping until the door opened. The middle-aged woman saw my hurt nose and held her apron to it. Meanwhile the rabbi shouted from behind her on the stairs, “Ay, Itzik!” He slapped the banisters sharply with his hand as he hobbled down the rest of the way to Itzik, now ashamed. “He insulted me, Rabbi!”

  “You couldn’t think of a softer answer?” the rabbi said, the eloquence of his tone making his words deeply critical; even after his stroke, Reb Sussya still kept all his dignity.

  “You handle with him,” Itzik answered bitterly, running away without another word. The middle-aged woman, the rabbi’s niece, started after him, but the rabbi touched her shoulder.

  “Hold yourself, Resel. Where a man leaves his pride, he will return for it.” Then he bent down to me, a faint smell of cinnamon to him.

  “It’s my nose,” I said. “Any other place would have been better. Tt’s made over to begin with.”

  “Ay, the Golinsker fiddler, and where should bad luck strike except where one is weakest?” His beard lay not an inch from my face. I felt almost like a child. “Take him in, Resel, and give him to wash. Then we’ll go to the table.”

  The rabbi’s table ... in a room used only for eating, with no three hands going to the one piece of bread! The rabbi and I ate cabbage soup with meat, tongue and raisins in sweet sauce, then tea and compote. I had heard much of Sussya-ben-Mordecai and seen him a few times in the Pukopper synagogue before his stroke; but no Golinsker had ever been in his house — something to tell about at home. I could hardly believe that this widower of sixty-three, this part-invalid but vigorous person, was the same Rabbi Sussya-ben-

  ISlpchim 153

  Mordecai who had been a target for Golinsker contempt the past twenty-five years (a contempt more saucy than bitter, perhaps, but consistent). The friction had begun when the rabbi once had withheld free wine and unleavened bread from us at Passover time, a charity he had become noted for in all the towns of the district (it being understood that the Pukopper did not hold himself above mixing in various illegal transactions to take care of the poor at New Year’s and Passover). He had, however, excluded us from his bounties because we did not bother to find ourselves an ordained rabbi out of one of the academies, preferring the unlettered purity of Reb Maisha’s teachings to theatrical exhibitions of rabbinical scholarship. Such baggages of pride and ornaments of arrogance we could not afford in the first place. But we would have held to our own heart-to-heart understanding of The One Above anyway; we used to say, “All the charity the Pukopper never gave us in this world, we’ll give him in The Next.”

  After supper the rabbi took me up to his study, sitting me at his silken-covered judicial table; then locking the door with an important twist of the key. I looked at the books and at the rabbi in his throne of a chair. I felt encircled by commentary, controversy, and hostile knowledges.

  “Now then, Nochim. How did you come to my house?”

  I told him. Gravely he asked if I had ever before been called a thief. I replied that I had, but unfairly.

  “In this case Itzik said right.”

  “Rabbi, I am not a thief, especially in this case.”

  “One reason?”

  “I smashed no gates.”

  “Gates, cows, who cares?” Reb Sussya growled with professional ease. “You stole nevertheless. The commandment, ‘Do Not Steal,’ includes the stealing of a man’s mind with misleading words. That was the sin. With your talk of cows-in-the-field and cows-in-the-barn you so kidnapped Itzik’s senses that he succumbed to beastliness and hurt your nose against my door.”

  “Yes, Rabbi,” I said, “according to such, I am a thief. But according to the Zbarezer rabbi I ought not to be.”

  “What Zbarezer, the father or the son?” the rabbi asked, annoyed that I should know either.

  “I can’t say exactly. You’d have to ask Reb Maisha,” I replied semi- diplomatically.

  “The Hasidic side,” the rabbi murmured. “Ay . .
. that’s where the dog lies buried. . . .”

  “The Zbarezer is supposed to have said to a thief, ‘Since I do not wish you to be guilty of a sin, I therefore make you a gift of what you are stealing.’ ” I stretched my hands toward the rabbi. “A cup of milk, Rabbi?”

  “Ay.” It took him a long time to sigh himself out. “Your Zbarezer means well and does harm. He is a freethinker; a speaker of half- truths, a free spirit but no thinker. Well, enough words. You’ll sleep here tonight, Nochim, and tomorrow we’ll find work for you. You’ll go home with something in your pocket.”

  “Live until a hundred and twenty, Rabbi,” I said, warming to him for his unexpected breadth.

  The next day the rabbi told Itzik to put me at harness-mending, roof-patching, and knife-sharpening. Itzik wanted to give me a ruble and let me off but the rabbi said, “It’s not the same. That way it’s no blessing at all.”

  The next two days were restful; I had a place and a use. After prayers the second day the rabbi told me to stay the night in his house and start for home in the morning, a Friday, so as to be back in Golinsk in good time for the Sabbath. “Thank you, Rabbi. I saw a few Svutzker wagons in the market. If I got a ride I could be home tonight.”

  “Never mind, I need you tonight.”

  “For what, Rabbi?”

  “The less you ask, the more you’ll know.”

  That night the rabbi again sat me at his study-table. I waited for him to open his mind; from the way he sat forward, his elbows on

  ISlpchim 155

  the table, his shaking fingers clasping themselves tightly together, I saw something not-so-rabbi in him. The deliberation was close to the way merchants in taverns wrung themselves ready for a piece of business. “We travel to perform a blessing tonight,” he said, “and I will need your help in it.”

  “A blessing, well ...” I tried to sound not cautious. “And for this, Rabbi, you held me here two days?”