5. BURN THE BOATS, Part 2
Reason for Being in the World
I had learned what I could. No, not all that I could. There continued to be more. There is always more. There is always another detail, another perspective, some greater or broader context, a new construal of an old construction. There is no bottom. But I had learned enough so that light had broken through: clerestory windows into the darkness of my father’s past.
When I studied pre-revolutionary Russia and then the Soviet era as a 20-year-old in that Shephard Hall classroom at the City College of New York, I recognized then for the first time that history contained people — and that particular history the person of my father, though he wasn’t included in accounts of it. Now I had gotten closer. I was able to spie towns from afar, see streets winding through them, make out figures of people, like charcoal smudges, scattered across them to suggest a living world.
But I didn’t see their faces, couldn’t hear their voices. And where was my father?
I had learned a very few things. At the end of the day, Dad watered his grandfather’s horses by the waterfall down at the lake. Once, by the lake in the dark, Mac became frightened by the full moon and ran up the hill through the trees to escape it, but he discovered that it always followed. Zakiah had led the family among the same trees through the Jewish cemetery to the home of friendly Ukrainians, to hide them during pogroms.
Who was Zakiah? I have the one photo. Dad carried it with him all that way for all those years to America. Zakiah had four living children. One daughter divorced and left her children behind to start a new life across the world. Another lived in Kamianets-Podilskyi. A son lived in Lviv with his Romanian wife. Aikah, the youngest, helped care for her niece and nephew, Golda and Meyer, after their grandmother died. Zakiah bore his responsibility: he cared for and protected the lives of his daughter and another daughter’s children. He was too old, too traditional, too uneducated, probably, to be an outspoken socialist. Was he pious? Or was he one of those dissenters who on the Sabbath and on the holidays worshipped alone for reasons of his own in the lean-to side addition to the Old Shul, the “cold shul,” that no one alive could remember being built or how or by whom?
What else made up Zakiah’s life, the poor balagula, his children mostly gone, besides the long daily trips over rutted dirt roads and care for his eyniklech? Did he visit his wife’s grave each day, just a walk up the hill? Did Zakiah — after my father watered the horses and they were stabled, after dinner was done, and Aikah and Golda and Meyer were asleep — did Zakiah sit down by a window with a candle for some last, quiet waking minutes and… write?
Did he argue with some Jews on the streets of Kamianets, after dropping off a fare, that there would be no Messiah because there was no God, because even if there had been a God, he had been murdered in the shtetls of the Pale a thousand times — a hundred thousand times — the Bal Shem Tov be damned, and maybe that’s why our father never went to school, besides the war all around them, because there were only the Jewish schools, the cheder, and Zakiah, almost everyone gone from him now, was too poor to afford them. He wouldn’t take the town charity of the high and mighty balebatim who rode in his wagon but wouldn’t marry their children to his son or daughters. To hell with them, anyway, they taught two thousand years of nonsense, put a horse’s reins in your hands and you’ll live.
But Zakiah dies. Mac didn’t remember how. Had he ever known? In a pogrom? One of the hundred thousand? From a heart attack, the Ashkenazi affliction that would nearly kill Mac, that killed my brother, my mother’s brother? Face down in the dirt one day, no one knows what. All Meyer and Golda know is he’s dead. He’s gone.
Now, it’s Aikah, maybe only 18 or 20 herself, all alone with the two children. It’s 1920, the Revolution won, the Civil War won, the Ukrainian nationalists on the run, but pogroms killing Jews everywhere, and the Soviets, now occupying the town, upending everything. Some of the young Jews are among them, turning on the old, the poor ascendent and turning, too, against the Jewish balebatim and the Russian landowners. The old order is gone, the Jewish one too. Danger is everywhere.
Aikah, the children must leave or they will die. You have to make them understand, and even if they don’t. Send them to America. Let them find their parents. Look after yourself.
For years, there were these separate things I knew, pieces of information from Mac that had no context and little story, occupying space in my mind, doing no work: Mac and Goldie spent four years surviving on their own in Poland. They went at one point to stay with their uncle in Lviv, and the uncle’s Romanian wife did not want them. The day they left Orynin, they were rowed across the Zbruch River in the darkness of night.
I studied maps, old maps. In a decade of almost constant war throughout Central Europe and Western Russia, so many nationalities fighting each other, frontlines of occupation and national boundaries regularly shifting, land became Hungary in the spring, Poland in the fall, then Russia, then Ukraine, in no area more than northwestern Ukraine and southeastern Poland. And in 1920, the famed and beauteous Ukrainian city of Lviv — where the earliest Ukrainian refuges first fled, even now, from the current war with Putin’s Russia — Lviv did not lie in Ukraine. It was in Poland.
With a negotiated border between the two along the Zbruch River.
While the common route of the very marginal emigration to Palestine ran out of Odessa, Jews who were headed to the United States — once they had cleared the monetary, bureaucratic, logistical, and discriminatory hurdles — most often traveled by rail through Austro-Hungary and Poland to ports in Germany such as Hamburg and Bremen.
Mac and Goldie had been sent to their uncle in Lviv in route to the United States, which required crossing the Zbruch River, and that put them in Poland, where something went wrong. Their uncle’s wife had not wanted them.
But they were two children alone, on their own. How could they even have left?
Zakiah had horses and a wagon, for which Aikah now had no use. She had sold them.
— To a Jew who gave her the best deal she could get.
— To a Ukrainian who treated her less well, but still kindly: Zakiah had warned him once, on his return from Kamianets-Podilskyi, of an impending visit from the local Soviet to check on illegal crop growth; the Ukrainian in return had hidden the family during the last pogrom, when Zakiah led them on faltering legs up the hill, through the Jewish cemetery, ahead of Cossack horses.
But the Ukrainian would not himself take the children anywhere; it was too risky, to be seen aiding Jews so publicly. He would lend the horses and wagon to Moishe, the poor simpleton who worked in the barrel factory attached to Zakiah’s stable. But Moishe must be back by nightfall. Anything might happen after dark, and the Ukrainian had paid good money for the wagon and those horses.
So preparations were made. One of the Sherrels – who lived next door to the horse yarid, the market, perhaps the father of the Sherrel Aikah would one day marry, the Sherrels who would still be remembered in 2005 by the one man left who had once only just been married to a Jew, father of Joseph, who fifty years later would show Meyer’s youngest child how to drink his vodka in one shot followed by a rye bread chaser – one of the Sherrels had made contact with a man (he wasn’t a Jew, and he required payment, but he would do it) who ferried people across the Zbruch River into Poland at night.
On the day they left, with commotion in the streets and alleys, new rules daily from the local Soviet and rumors always of new attacks on Jews, Aikah made up sacks of food and bundled the children’s clothes. The night before, she had talked with Golda. She was older; she must take care of her brother.
They rose before the cock’s crow, Moishe already outside dozing on the wagon. Aikah would not travel to the river, over 50 kilometers away, a full, long day there and back over broken earth pounded smoother by hoofs and wheels, deep into tree cover. She would close the door and try not to think too hard or remember too often the parents now dead, the sister gone to America, the nephew and niece to whom she had given her heart. She would write again to her brother in Lviv, her sister in Kamianets-Podilskyi. They would tell her how to survive, though she already knew. She must marry as quickly as she could, before it was too late, before she became desperate. She had no dowry, but she had the house, meager hut that it was, and it contained her mother’s pripetchok, her pride of an oven. Aikah would offer it all to Abram, who owned the barrel factory. He would give her a fair price. That would be something.
At the door, she straightened Meyer’s jacket on him, tugged hard on the short little boy’s lapels as if to fix him to the ground so he couldn’t really leave. He was such a dutiful boy, staring at her now so quietly, expectantly. Golda waited, already outside the door, watching. Aikah glanced at her, then back at Meyer. They looked so much alike, the boy with his reddish-brown waves, the girl with golden-red hair like her mother, Meyer with his sweetness, Golda a little masculine, with a bulbous nose.
“Remember, what I told you,” Aikah said to Meyer. “Don’t fight with your sister, and even if you do, you must forgive her right away. You have only each other now and no one else.”
Meyer stared. Aikah shook him a little with love. So few words. They had been taken from him.
“Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Let nothing come between you.”
She tied a scarf around his neck, against the river cold and the cold to come. She took his face in her hands and framed it to remember; she might never see it again or not for fifty-eight years. She kissed his forehead, closed her eyes, then pushed him away. Go.
Meyer and Golda threw their bundles onto the back of the wagon and climbed up behind Moishe. They looked back at Aikah. Her hand was at her mouth. Moishe flicked the reins. Aikah cried out.
She ran around the other side of the wagon to Golda. She reached up and held the side of the girl’s face.
“My fierce Golda.” She kissed the girl’s hand. “Stick to him, to each other. Protect him. Let him protect you.”
Golda nodded. Aikah came around to the other side and Meyer. She looked up at Moishe and lifted her head. The horses started.
“Meyer, sheyn bubula, look at me.” Meyer looked, as the wagon pulled away.
“Keep looking. Don’t stop until you can’t see me anymore.” She watched them move on. “I’ll still be here,” she added.
From the forked road where their small clay house stood, attached to a cooper’s factory, the wagon trundled toward the Post Road in the dawn’s light, Meyer gazing back at his aunt.
“Golda, Meyer,” he heard called out, “where are you going?”
“To our uncle in Lviv,” Golda answered, and Meyer turned to look. It was Lev, the cooper’s son, and they all stared, but when Meyer looked back again, they had already rounded the corner onto the Post Road, through the center of Orynin, and Aikah was no longer there.
All the way down the Post Road, Meyer saw the merchant’s houses pass and the side market streets already starting to bustle, and there was no more looking back at the only life he and Golda had ever known receding from them, everyone they had ever loved receding from them, except for each other.
They passed the town square and the post office and a flagpole, with a new red flag with letters on it, and then they were leaving the town. Golda folded her arm around Meyer’s shoulder. He shook it off without looking at her. Golda stared at him. She gently petted the back of his head, then withdrew her hand and placed it in her lap. Now she looked forward.
The 50 kilometers were long and rugged, and what receded in the bone jarring distance was an ache so deep and broad in the body that after a while, was it months was it years, it could not be located or even recognized as pain anymore. It was in the sinews, everywhere, and in the life to come, when the ache swelled up again suddenly, in a flash of rage or a bitter, painful mistrust, it would show like a wounded animal roused from a curled and nestling self-comfort. Before the stick’s poke – a disregard, a disrespect – the hurt had almost forgotten.
Moishe drove slowly, uncertainly. They arrived late. It was already near dark. He must turn right around. The Ukrainian would be angry. Almost still a boy himself, Moishe nonetheless paused and held out his hand.
– Good luck, Meyer. Good luck, Golda. Maybe someday I’ll follow. They say in America a Jew is treated like anyone else. Now that would be a place to see!
But Moishe had not followed. It took some years — he was no woman’s prize catch — but he married and had two sons. To emigrate with a family, with young children, was a hardship he couldn’t imagine, and a transformation of her world Shayndel didn’t wish, so he made the best of it, the best life he could for all of them. In the new Soviet world, he was a little less Jewish, though they still kept the Sabbath privately and the boys studied Torah. And sometime in August of 1941, around the time all the Jews of Kamianets-Podilskyi were executed by the newly occupying Germans, Orynin, too, was occupied, and its Jews confined to a ghetto. Ten months later, in June 1942, a Nazi Einsatzgruppe ordered that all the male Jews of the ghetto assemble in the town square for work assignments. The Ukrainian auxiliary police called out and knocked on doors, and soon Moishe and his two sons were walking among several hundred other Jews along the Post Road.
Someone in the crowd wondered what the labor might be that the Germans would set them to.
Another said, Fool, have you not heard the rumors? The stories of those fleeing across the countryside all around us. There will be no labor today, or any day.
– You are such a pessimist, Yisroel. Always thinking the worst. Why should they kill us? We haven’t opposed them. What would it achieve? They need us, better, to work.
Moishe did not speak. He rarely spoke. They always laughed at him when he spoke. But while the others argued, he spied from the corner of his eye a figure running along the eastern tree line. He squinted carefully through his spectacles. He wasn’t sure, but it looked like Goldfarb, bending and darting furtively as if an animal. Then he was gone, lost in the trees. Moishe looked back at the slowly moving crowd. It didn’t appear as if anyone else had noticed.
Moishe hung his head. He did not think the Germans were going to put them to work. No. He did not. They were all going to die. That day, they were all going to die. He might flee now himself if he could find the will to action he had never found before, if the police did not line the road, their rifles pointed at the passing Jewry of Orinin. So there was no flight to be made. And there was no denial by which to be fooled. Moishe Mandelbaum would die that day. He and Yankel, to his left, who was the number one student in the secret Talmud Torah school, and Yossel, to his right, who already called himself a socialist, they would die. And who would remember them? Shayndel would remember them, that’s who, his beloved Shayndel, who had loved him when no one else was able.
Unless they killed her too, maybe tomorrow. Oh, my wife! Then who would remember? Who would remember any of them?
Ah, why hadn’t he left when he was young, as he said he would? Why hadn’t he left — like Meyer and Golda all those years, a lifetime, ago, at the Zbruch River? What had ever happened to them? he wondered. Had they soon perished, been dead themselves these long years? Or had they survived? Were they in America? Were they long in America living lives without fear? Aikah had married and left Orynin, so he never heard. Oh, why wasn’t he in America? Why hadn’t he gone when he might have gone, and been free himself?
Moishe squeezed more tightly the hands of his sons, winced his eyes shut. Oh, my God, you are a cruel God – to make me choose between the life I had wanted and the life I had, with my beautiful wife and sons, though we die here today. To make me wish it. To make me choose this death because life without them would be no life at all.
Moishe raised his head then. He became aware of everything around him, though he saw none of it. He was in his thoughts, instead, in a dream realer than real, though reality was like a dream. The square neared. They were walking, slowly, but still forward, and the square was coming closer, where police were lined up and waiting. Together — they were so alike — Yankel and Yossel glanced at him. And for only the second time in his life Moishe knew dread. Not simple fear, which he’d felt so many times, but a dread that sank into the earth. He knew, even, the taste of dread. It tasted like sea salt. Like the sea salt of the Black Sea, which he had actually seen in the year before he married, in the great adventure of his life (yes, he had had one!) when Victor, whose father had bought the barrel factory, then tore it down, whose grandfather had been among the last of the Chumaki — when Victor challenged Moishe to make the journey with him, and Moishe had actually swum in the Black Sea and nearly drowned. He remembered the gathering dread, then, of how, thinking he was about to die, he could see the world still through the wavering, watery glass of light at the sea’s surface, how the water washed into his mouth, the bitter salt water, and how, thinking he was going to die, still he could see the world – he could have reached his hand toward the clear surface of light that was the world, that was the school house before him, though it grew dimmer, dimmer and farther away, until it was sixteen years later, and what he thought he had escaped had been waiting for him, oh, look, it had been waiting for him all these years . . ..
Meyer and Golda stood alone among the trees where Moishe had left them, at the appointed spot – they hoped! – along the Zbruch River, waiting for the appointed hour. They remained within the tree line so no one would see them and wonder what this boy and girl were doing alone by the river as night approached. It grew dark. Then it truly was the night. They talked to each other softly and tried not to be scared. They were scared.
Then at last the boat arrived, from across the river. The man at the oars, was he a Pole? He spoke Russian. Who knew? He was not mean, or even brusque, but very matter of fact, like it was business. Where was the money? he asked. They offered it to him, separate from their other money, so he would not see. (Aikah had told them that.) Would he beat them – a full-grown man, a hard man – and steal their money, take them nowhere? How long would it be before such fear was gone from their lives?
The river man helped them onto the row boat. Then he pushed the boat off, leaping on and stepping toward the bow. He turned to face them and settled on his seat, with his back to the opposite shore, and for a moment stared at the two children. Golda wanted to hold her brother, but she did not. She did not want to appear afraid. She stared back at the man. She didn’t think he was Jewish, so rather than Yiddish, she spoke in Russian, as he had done.
“Please, sir, take us to Poland now,” she said.
The river man looked at her, expressionless. He began to row.
In no great time and with no great effort, they had reached the middle of the river. With no moon — the plan — it was black all around them but for starlight, like just after Zakiah would blow out the lamp. Night had fallen over the world. The river man rowed with long, deep, dual strokes, his back strong, his purpose to reach the other side and be done. Meyer was still, as he had been all day, but he saw the cold water streaming beside the boat, and as any man might, but surely any boy would, he dipped to trail his hand in the darkling waters and followed the fingerlet waves with a backward gaze. He watched them disappear.
Meyer had no words to form for himself these beginning thoughts, no experience by which to know his unschooled emotions, but he wondered in some vague way, glancing back, what it was he had come from, to where it was he was going. It was all so blank, he felt to be going nowhere at all.
Somewhere in the middle of the Zbruch River, on a border between Poland and Russia that had changed and would change again, eighty-four years before he would die in the intensive care unit of West Hills Hospital, in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, California, the boy who had tried to run from the moon stared up at the sky, and for a moment, as it does every moment, the world stopped, just for a moment, with stars unblinking and oars suspended in air.
Meyer sat poised between two shores, a boy held in the full suspense of every fate that might be his, all the possible futures that swirled and eddied invisibly around him: our father, long before he was our father, before he was the man who would become our father, coming to us, as a boy, slipping through the stream of possibility in which at any instant he might drown. Though the boy didn’t know it, in America, where he would someday land, what would be called the Jazz Age had begun. In France, the many-storied Paris of Stein and Hemingway, Pound and Joyce was already being written. Hitler was soon to rise in Germany, and Trotsky, not many miles away, was winning and losing a revolution.
But he was just a boy on a river, as there have always been boys and girls on rivers, crossing perilously, far from the distant reaches of power where the world is made and remade from ideas and into forms for which the young can have no care. The stars, the boy thought for that moment, seemed so far away. And what were they really? He didn’t know.
Then my father caught a scent from the far shore. Honey, it seemed, sweetening the soft night, but something else too he couldn’t place. He turned his head to it, up toward the far shore. Golda turned, too, to follow Meyer’s gaze. She placed her hand on her brother’s shoulder…
…and the stars began again to blink. The long-forgotten river man began again to row, a nameless oarsman pulling the boat's paddles, plashing in the moonless night, stroke after stroke tugging them all forward, beating on, beating on, bearing them swiftly on the human current, drawing them, without recourse, into the future.
AJA
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
This is remarkable in every way.
Jay, what a breathtaking marriage of family history with fictional techniques. The story you tell so movingly here contains elements of many familial stories, mostly unknown and told. My mother’s parents left their respective shtetls in Ukraine at a terrible time, and I thought of them while reading your essay.