Read Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life Online

Authors: Yehoshue Perle

Tags: #Fiction, #Jewish, #Cultural Heritage

Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life (3 page)

From this point on, every rescue effort was doomed. The typed and edited manuscript of the true sequel to
Everyday Jews
, a novel written in the first person, completed in 1939, hidden with friends, retrieved upon its author’s return from Lwów, and kept in a valise under his bed—that huge manuscript was lost in January 1943 in the chaos of renewed deportations. Perle reacted stoically to the loss.
34
In March, father and son secured Aryan papers provided by a friend of Lolek’s. (What happened to Yudis is not known.) Since Sarah’s suicide, Perle had never let Lolek out of his sight, and both of them might have beaten the odds, Perle hiding under the alias of “Pan Stefan,” were it not that the Germans had one more card to play. To flush out Jews in hiding, the Germans offered to sell Latin and Central American passports, and the “lucky ones” were assembled at the Hotel Polski—from whence they were to be sent to transit camps in Germany and France on the first lap of a journey to freedom.
35

Father and son arrived in Bergen Belsen, where for three months they did enjoy privileged status. Perle attended lectures on the Bible, had happy opportunity to exercise his Yiddish, and spoke lovingly about those who had perished. Apocalyptic rage had given way to sorrow and silent grief. Party loyalists, meanwhile, his son Lolek among them, convened a makeshift court to settle old scores. Those convicted of collaborating with the enemy were punished with social ostracism.
36

On October 21, 1943, 1,800 Polish-Jewish inmates boarded a sealed train that was supposed to take them to Bergau, near Dresden, en route to Switzerland. As always, Perle was nattily dressed. He seemed hopeful—perhaps still so when at destination’s end they were greeted by an SS officer posing as a representative of the German Foreign Office, who explained that the Swiss authorities demanded that all tourists undergo a delousing process before being admitted. The roll call was in alphabetical order. From the disrobing chamber the group was led straight to the gas. “Bergau” was actually the yard of the crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
37

As the writer, so was his consummate work: at once open and accessible, graced with sophistication and subtle design. The idiomatic title,
Yidn fun a gants yor
, denotes the simple folk, salt of the earth. The novel focuses on an impoverished Jewish family in a nameless Polish provincial town at the end of the nineteenth century, and offers through them a cross-section of Jews, Christian Poles, and a few Russians struggling to hold body and soul together. Perhaps the “bleakness” that so bothered the critics is of a piece with the proletarian Zeitgeist of the 1930s.

The title also may be read as
Jews the Whole Year Through
, and delivers on its ethnographic promise by covering the entire Jewish liturgical calendar—the weeklong Passover observance, complete with a seder (Chapters 9–11); the performance of a traditional Purim play on the
Sale of Joseph
(19) and the observance of Purim itself (20); the gathering of rushes for the Shavuoth festival (21); the celebration of the High Holidays (26); and the last day of the winter festival of Hanukkah (33). Sabbaths, in various settings, loom particularly large. (Christian observances also put in an appearance.)

Then there is Mendl, the first-person narrator, who bears such a striking resemblance to the young Shiye Perle. The family is dirt poor. The father, Leyzer, shares his name with Perle’s own father, and, like him, ekes out a living from the sale of hay. The anonymous town is so transparently Radom that whole passages from the novel were excerpted in the
Radom Memorial Book
of 1961, following the commemoration of the town’s rabbis, scholars, philanthropists, and prominent Zionists. Perhaps the novel was Perle’s revenge against the shtetl’s ruling class—those “well-fed Jews who wore top hats on the Sabbath” and who “always stayed clear of my father’s impoverished home”—counterpoising a gallery of folk types arranged into loosely connected “scenes.”
38

Everyday Jews
tracks in meticulous detail the sexual initiation, moral struggle, and psychological maturation of its young and impressionable hero. Mendl, the twelve-year-old narrator, is born into a world at war with itself. But the battle is being waged not along lines of class, ethnicity, or ideology. These “everyday Jews” are engaged in a relentless and open-ended battle of the sexes.
39
With each holiday and passing season, the casualty figures keep mounting. Mendl’s own sense of himself as a male will be forged between the hammer of his father’s stubborn silence and the anvil of his mother’s longing.

Frimet, the mother (whose name resonates with
frume
, the pious one), pines for the spacious rooms with brass-handled doors that she inhabited during her first marriage, just as Mendl’s father longs to return to nature, to the simple life of the rural village where he grew up. As someone who can both read and write, Frimet enjoys an obvious advantage over Leyzer, who, apart from some liturgical competence, can do neither, and she plays her hand even at the seder table. Leyzer’s main defense is his studied deafness, and only rarely does he blow his cover. The household is further divided between Father’s grown children from his first marriage and Mother’s from hers.

Knowing who belongs to whom is Mendl’s—and the reader’s—first item of business. Mendl’s rude awakening into articulated memory occurs with the sudden and traumatic death of Frimet’s favorite son, Moyshe, the only one of her four older children living at home. He was everyone’s favorite, including Jusza, the live-in Polish maid-boarder. The visits home by any one of Father’s five children from his first marriage—daughters Khane-Sore, Beyle, Toybe, and Ite, and a son, Leybke, now serving the Tsar in the Russian interior—can be as fraught as Moyshe’s death and Mendl’s subsequent near-fatal illness. Is this because there is not enough food and affection to go around, and never enough beds? Is it because romantically inclined girls are easy prey to cynical young men? This would explain why Ite, a cook in a wealthy house in Warsaw, who comes home to spend Passover with the family, is so easily seduced by her stepbrother Yoyne, an upholstered-furniture salesman visiting from Lodz. Why then does Leybke, arriving unexpectedly just before Yom Kippur, having been released from his military duty, fail to seduce his stepsister, Tsipele, a salesgirl in a fancy Warsaw shop, who joins the crowded household for the Sukkoth festival, flaunting her big-city airs? Is it because each grown child is really a proxy in the power struggle between Mendl’s parents?

On the next level of separation, that of Mendl’s uncles and aunts, the battle lines are redrawn. Mother has the larger family—two sisters and two brothers—but only one, Aunt Miriam, lives in town, and she is called in only for family emergencies. Father’s two sisters—wealthy Aunt Naomi and impoverished Aunt Khane—play far larger roles, and it is they who stretch allegiances to the limit. For Father basks in the exalted status of his insufferably self-important rich brother-in-law, Bentsien (husband of Naomi), and touts the musical talents of the couple’s son, the other Mendl, while Mother identifies with the hapless but ever-optimistic Mordkhe-Mendl (husband of Khane), a sort of Yiddish Mr. Micawber. His success—which he achieves, albeit fleetingly—paradoxically would shift the balance of power into Frimet’s camp.

Mendl’s sole refuge from the ruthless battleground of his parents’ misery is to be found in the house of his maternal grandparents, the happy-go-lucky, nip-taking tailor Dovid-Froyke and his indulgent, pleasantly sarcastic wife, Rokhl. Here Mendl is miraculously nursed back to health after nearly freezing to death in a snowdrift. It is they who effect the reconciliation of his parents following a domestic crisis. And it is Grandfather’s death at the novel’s end that signals the uncertain road ahead.

At the heart of the novel’s conflict is the archetypal plot of mutual misrepresentation. Pieced together from adult conversation and recalled in a flashback (Chapter 16), the deception involves two mismatched people, worlds apart, whose marriage was predicated on a lie. The distance between their beds is much greater than that mandated by Jewish law. At times, however, when Leyzer maintains that a bed is “like a wife, the touch of a strange man could defile it,” or when he casts a “dreamy look” in her direction, there is possibility of a truce. It takes the provocation of Hodl, their troublemaking boarder, to sow the seeds of jealousy in Frimet’s heart.

The natural realm has much to teach Mendl as well. From his half-sister Ite he learns of the tender coupling of pigeons, noiselessly pairing off on the rooftops, and is induced by his neighbor Yankl into witnessing the wild mating habits of domesticated horses. He discovers that everyone engages in romantic pursuit, from Yarme the coachman to the doddering Sime-Yoysef, his Bible teacher. Crazy Wladek, the Polish peasant who is an habitué in the grandparents’ house, talks of nothing else. There is even a wooden shack in the lane, behind the prison, next to the family’s latest residence, where the prostitute Big Juszke holds sway, entertaining Russian soldiers, whose shouts echo through the night, though Father somehow manages to block out the cries.

Mendl’s own attempts at love are hopelessly inept. “What could Janinka and I talk about?” he laments about his first love, a pretty, blonde Polish girl who lives in the same courtyard. “I knew little more than some bits of Bible with Rashi’s commentary.” But in fact, Mendl is supremely intelligent, having learned from the university of life how to mix and match the human and natural, the sublime and ridiculous, the mysterious with the mundane. In the opening chapter alone, there are many examples of his remarkable descriptive powers, his profound grasp of physical reality.
40
“The windowpanes frosted over with a tracery of white pine trees,” he notes. “Sometimes the trees took on the shape of a ship at sea, sometimes that of a little old Jew in a nightcap, with a pointy beard.” Nor does he shy away from the sight of his ailing brother, whose body, as he was being taken to the hospital, was propelled forward “slowly, step by step, as one would sometimes shift a heavy wardrobe,” then laid flat on a wide sleigh, “like a narrow, dead fish, his wrapped face looking up to the sky.” And here is Mendl’s still life of what Moyshe left behind, a composite of metonymic details that tell of a sensual life cut down in its prime:

Back in the house, Moyshe’s unmade iron bed, its rumpled bedclothes still warm, stood forlorn. Damp wisps of straw littered the floor. The medicine bottles along the window sill seemed to have moved closer together, their necks inclining toward each other in a fraternal nod, and one of Moyshe’s mother-of-pearl cufflinks peeked out from under the table, like a white, dead eye.

Complementing Mendl’s realism is Perle’s modernism, the subtle and sophisticated way in which the plot unfolds both in “spiral” fashion and analogically, as Auerbach suggested and as Dan Miron has demonstrated.
41
In one such spiral, Yoyne, whose name (in Hebrew) means “dove,” and whose rapacious gold teeth contrast with Father’s healthy white choppers, seduces Leyzer’s youngest daughter, Ite. Several twists of the spiral later, Toybe, whose name (in Yiddish) also means “dove,” will be seduced and abandoned—with horrific consequences—in contrast to the joyous unions of the pigeons as earlier observed.
42

What drives the plot is Frimet’s restless nature, her unrequited longing, her yearning to move from one set of quarters to another. For Perle’s great theme is the existential condition, a world in which most ordinary people long to be somewhere—or someone—else. The provincial town where Mendl is born and bred remains nameless, the better to underscore the irresistible pull to a score of other named places—another neighborhood, another street, or away from the city to a country estate or to a primitive nearby village; not to speak of the allure of Warsaw, reachable by horse-drawn omnibus, or Saint Petersburg and Ekaterinoslav, deep inside Russia, where only soldiers of the Tsar are free to travel. Mendl learns, without ever leaving home, that those who try to make good the dream of changing their fate will be utterly crushed. Those few who are satisfied with their lot—and their spouses—are the unsung heroes of this earth.

In Perle’s reconstructed past, everyday Jews live, dream, struggle, and make love among everyday Poles and Russians.
43
While the grown-ups are at his half-brother Moyshe’s funeral, and as a way of working through her grief, Jusza the Polish Christian maid-boarder initiates the pubescent Mendl into the mysteries of sex. Later, the biblical romance of Ruth and Boaz is reenacted by Mendl’s young friends and neighbors, the precocious Yankl and the pretty Janinka. On a family visit to Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl’s (temporarily) acquired country estate, Mendl and his cousin Reyzl are so alive to the stimuli of nature that they are instinctively drawn to the Polish gardener, who speaks lovingly of his flowers. Indeed, almost the only reprieve from the constant upheavals, the prolonged silences, and the grinding poverty are two lyrical intermezzos in the heart of nature.

The Judaism of these everyday Jews is as natural, unselfconscious, and debased as all other aspects of their lives. Here, too, the moments of reprieve and self-transcendence are few and far between—enjoying the performance of a visiting “Litvak” cantor on the High Holidays; celebrating a Sabbath out of doors, in the heat of the harvest season; studying the Prophets from a truly inspired, soon-to-die teacher. Perle captures the interplay between the ever-shifting human landscape and the fixed cycle of religious law and ritual—between “Jews” and the “everyday”—in the novel’s closing paragraph, Mendl’s final observation:

It may have been Father’s quiet voice, which, ever since I could remember, had never been so quiet. Or it may have been Mother’s tear-filled eyes, when, on a certain weekday, Father helped me into my coat and went with me to the study house, where a pale Jew with green whiskers began to instruct me in the laws of
tefillin
, the donning of the phylacteries that would mark my entry into manhood.

Other books

Three Daughters: A Novel by Consuelo Saah Baehr
Holly's Intuition by Saskia Walker
Crane Pond by Richard Francis
Silent End by Nancy Springer
Tourist Season by Carl Hiaasen
The Castle Mystery by Gertrude Chandler Warner
Something More by Watson, Kat
Ten Novels And Their Authors by W. Somerset Maugham
Ripple Effect by Sylvia Taekema


readsbookonline.com Copyright 2016 - 2024