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Dear readers,

Please excuse my audacity to write autobiographical notes. My humble personality does not give me the right to do so, but I do it with one aim: to stand in the shadows and draw pictures in the background, snapshots, types and personalities related to the cultural and social life of that time of our former much beloved Białystok, the city of Białystok.

This is my duty, my eulogy and my memorial to my murdered family members, friends, neighbors, schoolmates and society friends, as well as to the many female childhood friends who awakened the man in me, who penetrated deep into my heart and reigned there, who raised me like a prince and gave me my vision and my dreams day and night.They gave a sweet charm to the streets and alleys of our meeting places. There were, for example:

The main street “Nikolayevske” [Mikołajewska] and the commercial “Gumyener” [Gumienna Street], the “Folksgas”, the “Surazer” [Suraska Street] and the “Markgas” [Rynek Główny], the quarter Pyaskes [Piaski] and  in the scattered expanse “Boyare” [Bojary] and “Hinter der Turme” [“Behind the Prison”, also called “Wasilkowa Street”].

There were the centers of poverty, “Khanaykes” with its “Shayes Gas”; in addition, the commercial street “Lipove” [Lipowa] and the place for entertainment and city walks:

“Gorodskoy Sad” [City Garden], the place of “svidanyes” [meetings], “Zverinyets” [today Branicki Park], “Tsertls Forest”, “Park Rosko” [Park Rozkosz] in the “Griner Alee” [Green Alley].

And there were those forest corners,where I, under the influence of melancholic, night singing of folk songs - such as “Margaritkelekh”, “Sheyn iz Reyzele dem Shoykhets”, “Freytik oyf der Nakht”, “A Brivele der Mamen” and “Dos Talit'l”, mixed with the Russian heartfelt songs such as  “Otshi Tshornya” [Black Eyes], “Yamshtshik nye gony loshadyey” [Coachman, Don't Rush The Horses!], “Akh zatshem eta notsh” [Oh Why This Night] - felt my first physical  “tremors” from the touches and kisses of young girls, from the warmth of bodies and feverish blood, from the innocent romance and the nightly sighing of the longing for our quiet, virtuous, sentimental Białystok daughters, adorned with modesty, who asked for so little and could give so much happiness.

I dedicate my words to you, who came here or disappeared, and I bow to your souls floating above the dark sky of Białystok.

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My words are a deep gratitude for the happy years I spent in your company; and my articles shall be a remembrance of your names and a silent, tear-stained Mitzvah, for your lives cut off early, torn up by the roots. Your lives that carried more spirit than generations of “German culture”. And [so ] finally the life of a Białystoker Jew was more valuable than the existence of the entire German people...

Woe to a world that is blind to the beauty of the Jewish spirit and its morality, to Jewish family life and to the millennial heritage of “לא תרצח” [Thou shalt not kill] and its virtuous “טהרת-המשפּחה” [Purity of the Family], illuminated by Friday night candle flames of the eternal Jewish Shabbat, the Shabbat of “ המבֿדיל בין קודש לחול “ [Who makes distinction between Sacred and Ordinary], the eternal Shabbat and holiday that we Jews carry in our feelings and our hearts and which distinguishes us so much from the great, ordinary, weekday, materialistic Christian world....

A Russian song resounds in my ears:

Where are you, happy days?
Forgotten, vanished, flown away.
Only much sorrow and many pains
have bent my body…

Białystok in 1907, in July.

A sunny Tamuz day. My father kisses me warmly and congratulates me. I turned seven today.

“Yankele, I have a surprise for you today for your birthday!”

And he doesn't even ask me, but takes me by the hand and leads me from Shayes Street, where we lived, to the end of “Mirke‘s Alley” where, across from “Leybl Rachel's Bes-Medresh” [study-house] and “Vyetshorke's Factory”,  I catch sight of a two-story building, with a large sign with gold letters:

“dvukla[n]soye narodnoye utshilishtshe”[Two-grade public school].

“Yankele, you will no longer go to the cheder,” my father says to me, “I want to lead you on the path of education and give you more opportunities...there is Fridman's school. He will test you now. So don't embarrass your father...”

(When I received my student card from the Paris Polytechnic in 1925, I kissed it and cried, remembering my father's words).

So I find myself in a small room of Fridman's “utshilishtshe”, which is decorated with two pictures of “Father Tsar”, Nicholas Alexandrovich,

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looking sternly down at me, and “Her Majesty”, Marya Fyodorovna, the “sentimental German”, as she was called before the First World War.

Fridman, the school's manager, a short, fat man with a fleshy, contourless face and small eyes, short-shorn hair and a green uniform with golden buttons,  looks at me and, laughing mockingly, says to my father, with whom he is on good terms as a colleague and member of the committee of the Teachers' Association:

“Gregory Zelmanovitsh! Who have you brought with you? We will still need a nanny for him…”

My father smiles mysteriously, he does not answer, but straightens me up, “Jacob, natshinay [start]!”

My little young heart beats fast, the blood rushes to my young brain, my voice trembles, but for a moment I forget the sneering, round-faced Fridman and move over to the starry sky over Ukraine in Pushkin's “Ukrainian Nights” and my dreamy little voice recites:

“Silent are the Ukrainian nights. The stars twinkle, wide rivers chase each other between fields, forests and mountains on full moon nights. The slumbering waters glide through winding paths, kissing the banks and whispering mysteriously, spinning legends of water maidens who laugh seductively on full moon nights and lure couples in love to the depths of the gurgling, lulling to sleep river...”

I stop. I give myself a jolt and remember where I am. I meet the delighted gaze of the good-natured laughing Fridman, who pinches my cheek and says:

“-ti prinyat...utshoni mush...[you are accepted...learned man!]”

And strangely enough, near Fridman's school, I came across four symbols of eternal conflict that I was to encounter throughout my life, these were:

The little dear “Rachel's Bes-Medresh”, a lost one at the corner of  Mirke‘s Gesl [Alley], where in the evening hours of the dawning night in the almost dark windows small flames of light rippled on the Gemore [Talmud] stands of the Jews, together with their half melancholy languishing melody. Opposite Fridman's school, surrounded by a high wooden fence, the red glowing sun multiplied in the hundreds of windows

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of Vyetshorek's factory, which looked like a dark gigantic beast with hundreds of half-dead eyes. It devours the sleepy figures of the workers in the early morning and spits them out again into the dark blue sky of the evening.

The last image [symbol] of the neighborhood of Fridman's school, however, is the red-haired “Khazernik” [“The Piggish”, the Jew who does not eat kosher food], who every few days would slaughter pigs right next to the wall of Fridman's school in the yard of his fenced-in pigsty, and with a chopping stump would beat their heads with wild, unrestained blows. And the pigs would scream in agony, drowning out the air with their dying rattle, filling our young hearts with something like an unconscious fear of the future…

Fridman's school, Vyetshorek's factory, Libe [Leibl?] Rachel's Bes-Medresh and, to change to the profane, the “Khazernik”, pushed themselves into my eyes on my future path through life - as eternal symbols of the human, worldwide conflict: culture, work, religion and murder....

Fridman's school was one street away from “Shayes Gesl” [Shaye's Alley], where we lived, and “Shayes Gesl” was in the heart of the famous “Khanaykes,” the alley bordered on both sides by Christian cemeteries, as if they were fitted into a frame.

On one side stood the “Shvyenti Rokh” [Basilica of St. Roch]  on a hill that stretched on both sides of the Old and New Highway, and on the other side were the “mogilkes” [tombs] that rose from the “Kratshak's Street” to the “Moyshe-Ruvens [Moshe-Reuven] Alley”.

Khanaykes [Chanajki] was the heart of poverty. Carriers, carters, cobblers, tailors, organ grinders (in Italian style, with a little monkey or a parrot pulling out “the lucky notes”), comedians who spread out a flowered mat in the middle of the street and in short striped pants did somersaults, swallowed fire and swords, in addition to hammering on the cymbalom [dulcimer] and collecting donations. There, on Shayes Gesl, I saw my first marionette theater, with little puppets on the top of a rectangular covered wagon, singing and playing, confessing their love and slapping each other, to the great amusement of the poor children, who clapped their hands in delight at their first street theater performance for children.

Khanaykes has professional beggars who earn their living by going from house to house begging for an entire week. There is also a small “quiet” alley with streetwalkers, “khasanim” [“grooms”] and thieves... And on the corner of this street there is an inn where “Sorokovke shnaps” [a vodka], hard-boiled eggs and pickles are sold.

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And “Leyzer the Innkeeper”, a pious Jew with a prayer cap, a pointed beard and forelocks, with a large “tales-kotn” [ritual bodice with tassels] that comes down to his knees and looks like a geographical map with its many grease stains, recites the first blessings before the prayer and walks around busily serving his upscale guests, the residents of the “Silent Alley”...

How did we come to the Shayes Gesl? My father was an idealistic teacher who liked the idea of “narodnitshestvo” (the “Go to the People” movement) and “mefitsey-haskole” [“Propagation of Enlightenment”], that is, spreading education among the Jews. My father, an educated and highly literate man, spoke four languages fluently: Russian, Hebrew, French and German.

(After his death I inherited a considerable library of French and Russian books, a source of famous works for me, which certainly influenced my sense of romance, aesthetics, morality and my thirst for beauty in all forms of life).

My father had chosen the poorest neighborhood, settled there and opened a school with the belief and hope of educating the poorest and most disadvantaged Jewish people.

The Shayes Gesl also had residents of high-class ancestry...

There were the two Kanel families, owners of a large textile factory and steam-powered looms, a weaving mill and a spinning mill. Four of their children were my comrades: Avigdor and Khayim (I think they are in Israel today), Ester and Glike. The first two were students at the Aleksandrov Gymnasium and the two girls, dressed in brown dresses with green belts stiffly embracing their young girl bodies, were students at the Commercial School.

It was Ester who stood out. She was a strong, athletic and perky girl who was always with us, playing croquet and “plant” and even “tshort” [“devil”, name of a boys game with sticks], throwing the little pieces of wood into the mound no worse than we did; and even when a little piece of wood hit her in the foot, she gritted her teeth and jumped on one foot until she put an end to it with a skillful laugh...(One of the Kanels, Hershke, is now in New York).

The second of those of noble lineage was Shloymke the Feldsher (Shloymke Goldberg), whose occupation as a feldsher was not enough to support him, so he also ran a barber shop. He, a Jew with a goatee and a pince-nez, was always busy walking  through the poor streets of Khanaykes with his little bag, often sneaking out of a poor patient’s house and asking nothing for his rounds.

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Shloyme the Feldsher had a number of children, including my friends Rote and Dovtshik. Rote, the eldest girl, looked down on us as if we were young fools who had yet to show her any kind of “sex appeal”. Dovtshik, a handsome boy with feminine features, was awkward, a bit jumpy, and could not join in our brawls with the louts of the Old Highway and the alleys that led around the tombs of the “Basilica of Saint Roch”.

Other comrades of our “aristocratic group” of the Shayes Gesl were Pesach Farbshteyn, the son of Itshe Farbshteyn, a hot-tempered Jew who often spanked his children, but for that he was a devoted Jew who urged his children to Judaism and education.

Pesach, my friend, was a healthy, strong boy who talked fast and was always chewing. He had allowed us to climb the trees in his family's garden and pick the half-ripe apples; but his two sisters, Dabtshe and Shoshke, didn't think we were “chivalrous” enough to date. (They are all in New York).

Itshe Farbshteyn was the owner of houses and a grocery store. He had a small band of children, healthy, beautiful, strong, who were all busy in the store, selling Białystok cakes, strudel, matzo with poppy seeds, a pound of “montshe” [granulated sugar], or tapping a bucket of water outside for a kopeck.

I must complete the line of the privileged from the Shayes Gesl with the children of Gusinksi the Karetnik [the Coachman], Tsalke and Muntshik, who spoke Yiddish like the “goyim” with the Russian “r”, a legacy of their mother, who, it was said, came from the distant Caucasus and had converted to Judaism.... (I heard that they are in Israel, and their sister, who married the Białystok Jew, Mr. Kaplan, is in New York).

Khanaykes had another kind of “privileged ones”: The “toyre-yakhsonim” [“Torah Nobility”], the group of craftsmen from the “Poale Tsedek” [“Workers of Justice”], simple laborers who, after a hard day's work, would take a piece of brown bread with herring and “krupnik” (barley soup) with milk, to go to the “Khanaykever” Bes-Medresh. And there, in a corner of the “Bes-Sheyni”^[1], they would become “lomdim” [scholars of Jewish science]. Under the supervision of their Rebbe, Rabbi Moyshe, a Jew with a broad “takak” beard and silent, sad eyes, they would study a sheet of Gemore [Talmud]. And humming melodies carried through the Bes-Medresh, while the bearded artisans, chewing the tip of their beards, swayed to the beat of their dancing shadows on the walls, and a secret fear was felt, for it seemed, as if the souls

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of invisible angels were hovering in the corners around the Holy Ark, [accompanied by] cherubim with the 10 Commandments…

And what part of the city did one feel the Shabbat more than in the poor Khanaykes, when on Friday evening the trembling flames of light shone from the wooden, whitewashed one-story cottages of Shloyme der Shtrikdreyer [the rope twister]. He was a Jew with a round, broad face framed by a broad, fan-shaped white beard, and he used to say the kiddush with a trembling, God-fearing nign [melody]. Shabbat in Khanaykes!

Or, [remember] when Shmuel Ma'as the tailor was preparing to eat the first piece of bread after the blessing, and he nodded his head to his wife Dobe: Mo< “Now, come on... the sakin (the knife), and now the melakh (the salt) ...” because Dobe, a small, shriveled Jewish woman, was a little deaf...

In the small room, hung with white lace curtains and strewn with bright, clean sawdust in honor of Shabbat, the planed wooden table with its starched tablecloth beckoned to the serving platter of stuffed fish, each piece  with red carrot slices placed like dots in the center.

On a summer Friday evening, after supper, the girls with combed hair and red and white ribbons in their plaits, and the boys with polished shoes and with really clean handkerchiefs in their hands, used to walk across the Shayes Gesl, cracking fruit stones and chewing beans and peas, which could be bought at the “Bobitske” on Popovtshizne next to Kormon's houses, or next to Veler der Katsev [the Butcher].

And turning from Shayes Gesl onto the New Highway, paved on both sides, under the dark shadows of two rows of trees, under the beckoning flames of the electric street lamps, the grown-up lads, the “cavaliers”, and the girls, the “barishnyes” [ladies], supposedly would meet quite by chance, joking and laughing with beating hearts, and enjoying in all their fullness the sweet minutes of pleasure of Shabbat rest, in Shabbat clothes and with a really full stomach, at least once a week...

Indeed, Khanaykes, you have had a bad reputation because of your poverty and bad, fallen Jews. But your craftsmen, your scholars, your tzadikim [righteous people], the cordial relation among  neighbors, the rich imagination of the poor children, the hospitality and generosity in the narrow apartments! Strangers did not see all this, but we who lived there saw it very well!

Later, when we already lived in Gumyener Gas [Ul. Gumienna], I was even more convinced of this attitude towards Khanaykes.

Translator's footnote:

1. obviously the nickname of this Bes-Medresh with an allusion to the “second temple” Return

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The year 1905, when the modern “Talmetoyre” [Talmud Torah School, traditional free school for poor children] and “Remeslenoye” were built, was a year of great political, social and cultural achievements for Białystok. In the same year, the Białystok Girls' Commercial School was opened, as well as the Girls' Technical School in the yard of Yudl Kaletskin at Lipowa Street.

In the same year, the later famous Białystok cultural society “Idishe Kunst” was founded, which in 1916, during the German occupation, was led by the editor of “Dos Naye Leben” [The New Life], Pesach Kaplan. He acted as the director of the literary and musical part with the cooperation of his son, Yosef Kaplan.

But in the same year, in July 1905, our Białystok was also hit by the “Shabes-Nakhmu” [the Shabbat after the Ninth of Av] pogrom, with its Russian military punitive expedition on Surazer Gas [Suraska Street] because of the Jewish revolutionary activity; more than thirty Białystoker Jews were killed.

The stormy winds of the revolutionary epoch in Russia created a turning point regarding the petty-bourgeois attitude of the Jews, and the slogan spread:

“Craft brings happiness and blessings”

As a result, in 1905, on the initiative of Yudl Kaletski, a rich merchant, social activist and owner of houses in Lipowa Street, the new modern „Talmetoyre” and the “Remeslenoye” [Artisans‘ School) were opened in the name of Zeev Visotzki [Wolf Wissotzky], who was the main patron and supporter of these two institutions. He appointed his own son, Samuil Yulyanovitsh Kaletski, as the director of the Remeslenoye.

Zeev Visotski is known all over Russia as the King of Tea, and even in the remotest corners of the gigantic Russia, from the warm Caucasus to the cold Siberia, from the richest halls of the Russian aristocracy to the straw huts of the lonely villages, people know the tea package made of silver paper with a golden inscription: “Shtai [Tea] V. Visotski”.

And Białystok enjoys the favor of this tea magnate, because this Visotski is the close relative of Białystok‘s respected social activist Khayim Ber Zakheym.

Years later, after the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917, a joke was circulated throughout Russia to illustrate the power of the Jews. According to this joke, there were three most important things in Russia

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that were in powerful Jewish hands: Visotski's tea, Brodsky's sugar, and Trotzky's work.

The buildings of the modern “Talmetoyre” and the “Remeslenoye” were located in the large round square, which extended from the Khanaykes in the background and in the front to Lipowa Street, framed on the right by the Christian Hospital and on the left by Batser's Yard.

The “Talmetoyre” was called “modern” because in Białystok there was also an old “Talmetoyre” in an old-fashioned building, where the boys received an orthodox, conservative, religious education without secular education. The newly created “Zeev Visotski” Talmetoyre was the exact opposite: it was a large, new building with wide windows, full of light and air, and with a large yard where one could play.

One learned “Khumesh” [Pentateuch] and “Rashi” [the commentaries of] Rabbi Shloyme Yitskhok, “Tanakh”, [toyre-neviim-ksuvim, the Bible], “Shulkhn-orekh” [collection of halakhic rules], grammar and texts in Hebrew, Russian and Yiddish literature and history (“גרעצס”). In addition, geography and mathematics, singing (with the famous conductor of the Białystok “Choir School”, Berman) and even physical exercises (gymnastics), which was the height of modernity at that time.

The new “Talmetoyre” already had such modern teachers of Hebrew, “Khumesh” and “Tanakh” as the later famous writer and editor, cultural activist and musician, Pesach Kaplan. I was fortunate to have him as my first Hebrew teacher and editor. There was a strange contrast between his outward appearance and his inner intellect.

Nature had disadvantaged him physically, but rewarded him richly spiritually, which is a common occurrence and has a philosophical justification. He was short and out of proportion, with short legs and an overlong upper body that swayed when he walked. But his head, with its energetic appearance, with its somewhat sunken cheeks and chin full of determination, with its deep, wise, piercing eyes, penetrated his interlocutor and subjected him to the effect of his deep, wise, analytical thinking.

He was frequently despotic, as is often the case with talented autodidacts and “self-made men” who work their way up to extraordinary abilities through their own energy.

His comments on the “Tanakh”, with his somewhat hoarse but clear articulation and the richness of his language, were so biblically and historically interesting

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and engaging that he kept the whole class in suspense. Later, when I read his book “Biblishe Gezangen” [“Biblical Songs”], on the occasion of my visit to Białystok in July 1939, those unforgettable hours of his Tanakh lessons, which I experienced in my childhood years in the “Talmetoyre”, flashed before my eyes again.

By the way, Pesach Kaplan's [Białystok newspaper] “Unzer Leben” [Our Life] published my last story on European soil. It was the story “Diamond Cutter”, about the life of Belgian diamond workers.

I can still see the figure of the director of the new “Talmetoyre,” where I was a student for two years. Samson Yakovlevitsh Grosman was tall and powerfully built, with a clean-shaven, “goyish” face and black, thick, frizzy hair that fell in poetic curls over his ears, for he always walked without a hat.

With his splendid, accented, precise Russian, this proud, national and Russianized Jew, with his non-Jewish face and his good Jewish heart, fought with all his strength to educate the Jewish children (in this “modern Talmud” whose name did not quite fit) to become beautiful, pure, nationally conscious Jews with self-respect and respect for one another.

And undoubtedly such famous educators as editor Kaplan and conductor Berman were very supportive of [director] Grosman.

Such a great figure as Pesach Kaplan still needs a biographer; and I must express my great appreciation to our editor David Sohn, the talented writer. He has the warm soul of a cultural activist and is a connoisseur and lover of Jewish literature. In his possession is a rich archive of correspondence of famous people, including many letters of Pesach Kaplan, which are very valuable material for the future biographer of Pesach Kaplan.

Conductor Berman was also popular and beloved among us. Knowing that he was our teacher, we took special pride and pleasure in looking at Berman: his proud, upright figure with his noble, white face, his wise eyes and his wonderfully beautiful, carved features, his silver hair and his pointed, finely trimmed little beard.

He always wore his double blue pelerine over his shoulders, which made him look like a professor at a music conservatory.

And I still see before me the figure of the teacher Druskin,

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a highly educated person, who later himself opened a High School in Białystok. Teacher Druskin also belonged to the “ Russianized” intelligentsia, with his aristocratic appearance and beard, like that of a Montparnasse painter, and with his correct attitude he forced even the boys of Khanaykes, of “Mirke‘s Gesl” and “Koratshakes”, to respect him.

There were two teachers, however, who had no luck with us and whose lives we made miserable.

One of them was the Hebrew teacher Rakovski, a man of medium height, red-haired, with a dry, cold face and evil eyes. We never saw a smile on his face, and he was a person of strict discipline. If a student was late and opened the door of the classroom where Rakovski was teaching, the whole class would hold its breath in anticipation of what would happen.

Rakovski approached the victim with slow steps, his face covered with yellow freckles that turned red like his hair. Without saying a word, he grabbed the student's satchel filled with books and threw it into a corner of the classroom, then began to shake the boy several times like a “lulev” [palm branch].

If the student did not comply and dared to protest, he even slapped him.

The second teacher, actually a very quiet one, but not popular with the students, was called Lusternik. He taught Russian history and geography and was known in Białystok as a good pedagogue, who [also] taught in Yafe's [Yaffe’s] school.

Lusternik, a small man with a pink, chubby face, always thought he was big and important. He wore a green uniform with gold buttons, and his face was full of smug haughtiness.

It happened more than once that while teacher Lusternik was pointing to the geographical map where the archipelagos, the Arctic countries of the North Pole, Siberia or Alaska were located, a student sneaked up and smeared his golden buttons with ink. And since he had the habit of holding his hands backwards, he would smear ink on his fingers next to the backmost buttons. Then, when he wiped the sweat from his fat face, he covered it with ink, even his nose.

As soon as he turned his face to the class and the students saw his face covered with ink,

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making him look like a tattooed Indian. The whole class burst out laughing. And the longer the students looked at the teacher's face, the more they laughed hysterically. Lusternik's face became red with rage, and he ran out of class, only to return ten minutes later, washed clean and accompanied by the director, Samson Yakovlevitsh Grosman.

Seeing the director, the children suddenly fell silent. In those days, Grosman, who made every word count with his splendid Russian, used to give a bitter lesson about education and good manners. He would end his harsh sermon with bitterness and the exclamation:

 “nie zabivaytye, tut nie talmud-tora!” (Remember, this is not a “Talmetoyre”!)...

Every early morning, Director Grosman used to inspect the classes. As soon as he came in, all the students stood up and then sat down again, and there was silence in the classroom. He looked at each student to see if they had been washed, looked at their necks and in their ears to make sure they weren't dirty either. He looked at the clothes to see if they were clean and if the buttons were sewn on.

And woe betide if a boy showed up with a dirty neck or dirty ears, or if his clothes were torn after a fight with someone during “peremene” (recess). Grosman would then purse his lips, roll his eyes upward, and, while the class remained silent, lead the student to the center of the classroom. Accentuating every word of his first-rate literary Russian, he would end the matter with his recurring speech, tinged with mockery and irony:

“nie zabivaytye, tut nie talmud-tora!”

I always felt that the proud, educated, Russianized Samson Yakovlevitsh Grosman suffered greatly from the fact that he was a teacher and director of an educational institution called “Talmetoyre”.

The reason was that the name of the old “Talmetoyre” was synonymous with old-fashionedness and conservative piety. Moreover, it was in the hands of educators who were far from secular education.

As in the old “Talmetoyre”, it was mostly children of craftsmen and the poor middle class who studied, and you could tell by their clothes and the food parcels in their satchels, by their elaborately patched trousers and their darned stockings with elaborately sewn

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patches “in the right place” and above the knees, by their father's sewn-on fur capes and overcoats, or their older brother's outgrown and worn-out [clothes].

But poverty was also evident in the food packages that the dear, faithful mothers of Białystok gave their children to take to school to soothe their stomachs during the school break.

The brown paper bags (usually used to cover the lid of the Shabbat cholent, which was covered with potato peels) contained a piece of brown bread with a piece of smoked herring.

For the somewhat richer there was a piece of soft bread with homemade “klops” [Jewish meatballs] with garlic in the package, and for the even richer there was a black piece of peasant bread with “darer kishke” [a type of sausage] or a Białystoker pastry with a piece of halvah. This was considered a luxury, and the comrades begged to be allowed to taste a little bit.

On top of that, the richer ones usually got a few kopeks in addition, which they had already spent at the “vaybele” [little woman], that is, the Jewish woman with her buffet, which consisted of a simple wooden table set up in the schoolyard in the summer and in the hallway of the school in the winter, with good things on display for the little customers.

The “vaybele”, which is besieged by flies during the school holidays, usually offers the following “delicacies”:

Brown, shiny bagels from “Tanchum the Baker”, buckwheat potato pancakes, “kitshmitsh and novent” (candies sprinkled with rice or poppy seeds), “fleyshelekh” (round, soft, colored jams), famous Ladrynka candies.

It is still a mystery to me how the “vaybele” managed to serve dozens of customers, because the school break lasted only ten minutes. And even then, there were those “Marxists” among the poor students who looked at “private property” with contempt and considered it a “mitsve” [commandment, good deed] to secretly steal an “irisl” [caramel] or a “kugel” from the “vaybele's” buffet.

Between the two large buildings of the “Talmetoyre” and the “Remeslenoye”, connected by a large courtyard, the garden of the gentile hospital occupied a space. It was surrounded by a low fence.

So it happened that the schoolboys crawled on the fence and silently watched what was going on in the gentile hospital. And I will never forget how, in the garden, among the patients of the hospital, who were walking around in gray linen dresses and slippers, there was a beautiful young Christian girl. She had long, blond, loose hair and a bare chest (she was probably mentally abnormal).

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And a few days later, I shuddered.

In the garden, this time empty of other patients, I saw the beautiful blonde Christian girl lying with her hair down on a simple wooden table used for dissecting corpses. She was dead, and a doctor was opening the skin of her brain with a sharp dissecting knife to examine it.

It was a summer day, and masses of flies were buzzing around the dead body. A gentile hospital employee, lazily trying to do at least a little of his duty, fanned a green twig over the corpse, but the flies quietly settled on the parts of the dead body where they found it comfortable.

The scene startled me for two reasons:

How could a city goy hospital allow itself to dissect a corpse in public, in the middle of the garden and with many small children sitting on the fence, and what a tremendous hygienic crime it was to dissect a corpse that flies could calmly bite and later spread epidemic diseases among the inhabitants.

I remembered this scene in connection with the fact that in Białystok, on Aleksandrovske [Aleksandrowska/ Warszawska Street] there was a Jewish hospital, which was exemplary for its medical equipment, treatment and sanitary cleanliness, and yet some Polish gentile city fathers published a “Pinkas Białystok” (I think in 1932), in which, in their Polish-Christian way, they praised to the skies the merits of the Polish-Christian cultural and community activists, but at the same time minimized the great cultural, social and industrial merits of the Jewish social activists of Białystok.

I remember my visit to Białystok, in July 1939. During a personal conversation with the [later] deceased great scholar and historian, Sh. Hershberg, z”l, whom I met in the dacha in “Tsertl's Forest” with my father-in-law, Tsvi Hersh Cohen, may he rest in peace, Sh. Hershberg really  motivated me with his writing of the “Pinkas Białystok”: a rehabilitation and historical truth of the great merits of the Jewish population of Białystok.

He reminded me of a “Kanapinski” or “Kvapinski”, head of the Białystok City Council, who was the initiator of the shameful “Pinkas Białystok”, which had moved him, Sh. Hershberg, to create the true, historically correct “Pinkas Białystok”.

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It was intended to show the huge contribution of Białystok Jews to the construction of the city as a whole.

“Where do you get a horse and cart, to hunt for the child years…”

In 1909:
I was nine years old when I entered the third grade of the new “Talmetoyre” and spent two sweet, light-filled years there, learning the beauty and historical greatness of our Jewish people and experiencing through the “Khumesh” and “Tanakh” our rich, proud past. There I absorbed the beauty of the works of the first rising stars of Hebrew literature and poetry, and formed the aesthetic pride of a Jew with national consciousness.

The proud words of the Hanukkah song used to ring in my ears:

“Once you were a people,
once you had a land...”

I used to exchange books every Friday in the library of the “Talmetoyre” and later, when I had already exhausted its stock, I had the privilege of receiving books from the personal library of our director Grosman.

On wintry Friday evenings after dinner, when it was warm in the living room from the heated tile stove and the copper kettles in the top tube of the oven sang, boiled and bubbled, my mother used to serve me nourishing tea with lemon, accompanied by mother's preserved raspberries as a snack, with the words, “May God grant you don't need them,” for occasionally the raspberry juice was used to promote perspiration when someone was ill.

The flames of Friday night's candles are already yielding, but they are still struggling, not wanting to be extinguished. As if there were living souls in them, they filled the room with a sweet smoke of tallow candles, which to this day brings back memories of Friday nights, and sweet, sad feelings of lost childhood years in mother's house.

Father would go off to learn a Talmud lesson with the craftsmen in the “Poalei-Tsedek” [Workers of Justice] of the Khanaykevker Bes-Medresh, and mother, still in her clothes, would fall dead tired on the black, shiny, worn couch. I sat down

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with my Hebrew books, supported my cheeks with both hands, and with the power of the imagination of the authors of the books merging with my own imagination, I rose to the ceiling of the room, opened the roof, and flew out into the high, wide, starry sky. I walked in the air to faraway lands, to the caliphs of Persia and the sheiks of Baghdad, to the princess Scheherazade from “One Thousand and One Nights,” flew on the legendary air carpet, and admired the magical wonders after wiping my hand over Aladdin's magic lamp.

There I am among the childish heroes of Andersen's and Brothers Grimm's stories, there I am chasing through the big world in the perpetual night, together with a finger-sized boy who can hide in a matchbox. Or I stand next to the snow-white beauty “Snegurochka”, whom the evil families and the envious, wicked princesses tried to kill with a poisoned apple. But during the funeral procession [the coffin] bumps into a tree, the poisoned apple falls out, fortunately for me, and “Snegurochka” [Snow Maiden] is alive. ....

I would fall asleep now and then, lay my small, young, blond head on a book, and in my sweet, childlike, innocent sleep I would end my travels through the forests and seas in the [Jewish Temple], the Bes- Hamikdash, in Jerusalem, then by the heroes of Bar Kokhba, and sing in my dream Goldfaden's “In Bes-Hamikdash in a vinkl kheyder zitst di almone Bas-Zion aleyn” [from “Raisins and Almonds”].

The song I heard so often from my worried, complaining mother when she was panting with worry, or on Shabbat after supper when she held her hands behind her back against the tiled stove. The warm little room would be filled with the smell of brown potato skins and sauerkraut in the pot that stood in a corner, covered by a pasta board with a stone on top. Mama would take my head in her lap, nestle it against her chest, and sing those Zion songs.

And I, with my eyes half-closed like a cat in the sun, listened to the light-filled, sweet-dreaming, fantasy-awakening national songs of Goldfaden, Elyakum Zunser, Ch.N. Bialik, Sh. Frug and other great [poets] and singers, lamenting and weeping over Jewish suffering and pain.

When I was eleven years old, I finished the “Talmetoyre” and began to study Russian literature in Fridman's school, while in the “Talmetoyre” I had studied Hebrew literature.

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My father, my mother and brother David had come together to discuss how I should continue my studies.

My brother David was four years older than me and a student of the “Remeslenoye” [Artisans' School]. I, on the other hand, dreamed of the elegant uniforms of the Real School, the Commercial School or the “Aleksandov's” Gymnasium. My brother argued that I was not more noble than him and therefore I should go to the “Remeslenoye”. My father was sadly silent, because he loved me very much and considered my abilities very high. However, he was aware of our sad financial situation.

My mother quietly wiped a tear from her beautiful round face with her apron. It was full of life and laughter, but also full of sadness and tears, which so often alternated on her face. Her brown, warm, motherly eyes looked at me, and in her imagination she probably saw her Yankele already walking in a beautifully fitting High School uniform, with the shiny gold buttons, the High School student hat with the Royal Eagle emblem.

But the sad reality prevailed. My parents hung their heads, and my brother raised his head in victory, but then a glimmer of hope appeared in my mother, and she said:

“But Gershon, you forgot that in Remeslenoye they don't accept boys younger than thirteen, and our Yankele is only eleven!”

Father thought for a while, understanding my mother's last plea to save my High School uniform, but then he replied:

“Teme, you forget that Yankele was registered three years older due to an error in our late Shloymkele's birth certificate. On his birth certificate he is already fourteen years old”.

My mother took me in her arms, leaned my head against her, and wet, motherly tears moistened my face. ....

She sighed softly, as if it were her fault that her child could not be led along the broad main road of “worldly education” with “distinguished children”.

My next “alma mater” was the “Remeslenoye Utshilishtshe”, or known by the short name “Remeslenoye” (Artisans' School).

I, an eleven year old boy, was stretched into a year of work and education, and my further way to wide endeavors, goals, and horizons of that cruel something called “life” was left to my own hands....

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The old Jewish cemetery in Białystok spread out in the middle of the poverty-stricken neighborhoods, admonishing its inhabitants with cold, silent certainty: Sooner or later you too will come to me...

At the back of the cemetery the front lanes of Khanaykes were crowded, on the left - the “Popovshtshizne” [Popowszczyzna, derived from the meaning of land belonging to a Russian orthodox priest], popularly called “Po Vitshizne”. Probably the lane was so named because of the high, proud, half-domed Russian Orthodox church in Byzantine style.

It was surrounded by small whitewashed houses where the rich families of [Russian Orthodox] priests lived, and it occupied the whole corner formed by the commercial Lipowa Street and the beginning of Popovshtshizne.

Across the street was the well-known “cheap kitchen” (“dyeshovaya stolovanya”), where some charitable ladies from Białystok served cheap lunches to poor Jews for two kopeks. They consisted of a thin slice of meat that looked like the sole of a shoe. It was accompanied by barley porridge with beans or lentils and black bread, the smell of which wafted through the whole street.

In the same neighborhood lived my friend Kurlandski, a handsome, blond, romantically transfigured young man. He was an art painter and exhibited his work in Belgium in the 1930s, but he earned his living with “gems,” that is, as a diamond cutter, like me. I wrote [on the side] and he painted. So we both had artistic ambitions and sighed with the prosaic world that did not appreciate our talents.

In the same area was the bookstore of Lifshits, whom I envied greatly, for was it a trifle that a Jew had such a treasure of books at his disposal?!

I devoured books with my eyes, looking at the spines, reading the interesting, fascinating names of the works and Russian authors. I also devoured them with my eyes at night, lying on my bed until two o'clock in the morning by the glow of a red-extinguishing kerosene lamp, which, unfortunately, struggled with the last drops of kerosene to keep the red-hot wick burning.

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My mother used to admonish me sleepily from the next room, “Yankele, haven't you blinded your eyes enough? You won't be able to straighten your head tomorrow!”

But I would relentlessly twist the head of the wick one more time to rekindle the dying flame and answer:

“Right now, Mom, I'm about to quit!”

But I thought to myself, “Well, go on, be a capable person, and don't give up until you've actually reached the end of L.F. Tolstoy's “Anna Karenina” or Maxim Gorky's “Oyfn Opgrunt”.

Opposite the round, majestic church, next to Veler the Katsev [the Butcher], lived Doctor Fin, a short, fat man with a big, round head and thinning hair. He was our family doctor, but he was only called in at the last minute, when, God forbid, you were already dying... It was such a Białystok custom.

There was also a large courtyard with an inn where the small-town carters drove up in their “drongove” [broad, flat, horse-drawn] wagons, with passengers divided into two categories:

Either legs up or legs down. If you had your feet down, that was the poor class, because you had to let your legs hang over the top of the wagon. And if you traveled from Zabłudów or Choroszcz for about two hours, you arrived with numb, asleep legs and stitches in your sides, so that when you got off the wagon you had to dance around for half an hour to feel your legs again.

In this yard with the inn there was also an egg store, which belonged to a Jew named “Barakin”.

His son, a Belgian doctor of medicine, used to visit me in Belgium, and I admired the contrast between his father, a simple Jew, and his son, a doctor, and I was proud of Białystok that from such simple, uneducated parents could come such recognized doctors.

To the right of the cemetery spread the Pyaskov [Piaski] district with its Pyaskov market, where there were many fairs and small, dark and poor shops with their doors always open.

Herring was sold here, as well as kerosene, wagon grease, cheese lime [casein], whip sticks, bran, chopped straw, sour milk, “svorekhts” [cottage cheese], black cumin bread, rye and mixed bread, Białystok pastries with onions and poppy seeds, and round “striezel” pastries sprinkled with granulated sugar. There were also shops with clay pots and copper jugs, wooden rolling pins and tin graters. In addition, wooden spoons,

[Page 30]

for burning the “khomets” [sourdough] and brown varnished “soldier's spoons”, which the Russian soldier, the “fonye zemlyak”, carried around during the day and night, slipped under the shaft of his boots which were rubbed with wagon grease.

And around all these shops on Pyaskes [Piaski] there was a swarming and bustle of small, pot-bellied Jewish women with headscarves, walking barefoot, flaxen-haired peasant boys with haughty noses, female gentiles who had marched barefoot from the villages, with their shoes thrown over their shoulders, hardly daring to put them on, at least in the city.

To the left of the old Jewish cemetery (“Kladbiszczanskaja”) [Cemetery Street] stretched a series of narrow streets with small, low, sunken houses. Often a pane of paper was stuck in one of the windows, giving the impression of a beggar blind in one eye. These small, dirty streets, crossed by a gutter in the middle, had beautiful names that sounded holy to Jews:

Yerusalimske [Jerusalem] Street, Palestina Street, Zion Street....

Thus, as if to mock the Jews and their national dreams, the Tsarist regime made a bitter joke by changing the names of these narrow, poor side streets to Yerushalimskaya, Palenstinskaya, and Syonskaya.

Crossing the winding, dark, narrow Yerusalimske Street and arriving at the wide corner of several alleys, the two-story wooden building of the famous Khanaykever Bes-Medresh suddenly rose from the ground, dark brown in color, with wide windows. It radiated Jewishness, religious devotion, and an appreciation of the proud history of the Jewish past. It bore witness to the study of “Khumesh and Tanakh” [Pentateuch and Hebrew Bible], morality and the laws of justice and family life contained in the ancient folios of the “Gemore” [Gemara, part of the Talmud] and the “Shulkhn-Orekh” [compilation of the most important laws of the Halakha].

Like a source of light, like a brightly shining lighthouse in the sea of darkness, there stood the wooden carrier of Judaism, the Khaynayker Bes-Medresh, unwilling to yield even under severe financial conditions. It was located in the center of poverty, moral decay, slipping into the abyss of crime, theft and fornication, which was the consequence of economic hardship, desperate misery, an upbringing on the street and no education.

An atmosphere of underworld types with their overbearing sneers of foppish glory.

This was the revenge of poverty against satiation, of decay against arrogance.

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The great merit of securing the existence of this Khanaykever Bes-Medresh in perpetuity, given the meager income of the synagogue's worshippers, must be attributed to some Jewish wealthy gentlemen [“balebatim”]. Among them was Reb Yakev Valye, the “Scribe of the Benkl” [bank house], a busy, lively Jew, the owner of a grocery store in Khanaykes. One of his children could always be seen sitting in the store doing his homework, engrossed in his tasks, his tongue twisting and sticking out.

However, the main role in supporting the Khanaykever Bes-Medresh was played by Ayzik the Shames [the synagogue caretaker], a stiff, serious Jew with bright, energetic eyes. Ayzik the Shames was a legendary figure of the Khanaykever Bes-Medresh.

Such a milieu, in which there were porters and carters, very often pious and honest but bitter and bitterly poor people, as well as fences, Jews with half-secret incomes, and common thieves of the lower class (of the type described by “Urke Nachalnik”) [the literary figure of a yeshiva boy who became a prominent gangster and later a rescuer of Torah scrolls], could only be kept in check by such a Jew as Ayzik the Shames.

All he had to do was stop abruptly during the Torah reading and raise his eye or move his mighty eyebrow over his sharp, penetrating gaze, and he would instantly stop a major argument in the “polish” [ante-chamber of the study house] or end a brawl in the back of the tiled stove.

His slow but powerful blow over the lectern in the midst of the reading of the Purim Megillah could stop the wild din of the rattles and ratchets of the uncontrolled, loudly shouting “voyle yungen” [naughty boys], who were not so much concerned with the “terrible Haman” but were happy to make noise and riot, panting and whistling in a “legal way”, so that the Bes-Medresh actually trembled.

But the number of Jews whom the Khanaykever Jews were ashamed of was not large. They were relegated to a corner of the Bes-Medresh, because the front part was occupied by the Jewish artisans and shopkeepers, the Jewish scholars and pious people, who made sure that the “unclean” did not “raise their heads” in “their” Khanaykes, but remained segregated in the dark holes of  Khanaykes.

We lived in the same house as Ayzik the Shames and were neighbors. I was very attracted to his family. Ayzik the Shames had two children: a daughter, Esterke, a girl of 14-15, two years older than me. I dreamed of her round, full face, her fiery eyes, her hearty laugh full of life, that teased me.

[Page 32]

She had full, passionate lips, a healthy, rosy village face with red cheeks as if they had just been patted.

In a small garden with countless green trees and tall grass, we met by chance and together we picked white-blue, innocent bird's milk twigs.

And when, by chance we both reached for the same branch and our hands touched like a warm blow, we laughed loudly, but our laughter sounded artificial, because the touch of her hand aroused in me a vague, sweet pleasure that seized my whole body, as if I had to cry and laugh at the same time at something that had awakened in my young body. This something - it has been known for ages and will be the eternal theme of novels, theater, art and life.

Her brother, Ben-Zionke, was the complete opposite of her. A slim, slender boy, with a milky, fanatically religious face, with looping temple curls, a thoughtful one, who reminded me of the sadly dreaming Bes-Medresh student from [Chaim Nachman] Bialik's “The Masmid” [The Diligent Learner].

The old cemetery was surrounded on all four sides by a low, wide stone wall that reached up to the windows of some houses that leaned close to the cemetery.

The children used to walk along the wide stone wall of the cemetery to the cheder. In the summer they walked there, too, but in the winter, on cold nights with a full moon and blue stars, they walked back along the cemetery wall, on the stiff frozen snow that crunched in the hard frost and even pulled at their ears under their earmuffs.

And with tied lanterns made of tin or paper, they took their revenge on the “Rebbe with the whip” by singing:

“The Rebbe went to Berlin,
There he bought a scratching machine,
atsma, atsmalya!”...

In the summer I was a frequent visitor to the cemetery. I would wander among the graves, reading the inscriptions and stopping with special respect at the ohels [Jewish monumental tombs] of the Rabbis and Sages. In my childhood imagination, they always reminded me of our ancestors in the land of Israel in the biblical cave near Hebron, and I used to put my ear to the wall [of the ohel] with palpitations and curiosity,

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waiting to hear a distant, mysterious voice from that world, or a lament from Our Mother Rachel.

At Tishe-Bov [Tisha B’Av] we boys scattered around the cemetery, filling it with our children's voices as we searched for the green, nut-like, stinging burrs and tore them from the low green bushes.

At Tishe-Bov we began a wild hunt for girls and young women, aiming at them and throwing the stinging burrs into their hair. We took a “sadistic” pleasure in watching them flee from us, struggling to get the burrs out of their hair, while laughing and squealing and hurling the worst curses at us with a good-natured laugh.

In the “yomim-neroim” [Days of Awe], when the harbingers of the joyous holidays of Sukkot and Shmini-Atseres [Shemini Atzeret], Hoyshayne-Raven [Hoshana Rabbah] and Simkhes-Toyre [Simchat Torah] were already in the air, with delicious feasts and new clothes, little girls used to walk through the cemetery with slaughtered chickens.

They had been sent by their mothers from Khanaykes to the slaughterhouse on the other side of the cemetery in the Piaski district to have a chicken slaughtered for the holiday. And so a little girl would stand, frightened, between the noise of the women and the hysterical, screaming chickens. The chickens cried out in rebellion against the kosher butcher and, blinking their eyes in confusion and wiping their snotty noses with their “sleeves,” pushed under the butcher's nose to ask:

“Reb slaughterer, slaughter me first!”

The slaughterer, a bearded blond Jew with cold, calm eyes, would pluck a few feathers from the chicken's neck, mutter a sacred phrase, make a cut with his knife, and throw the slaughtered chicken at the girl's feet. And the little girl, trembling and splattered with blood, after some struggle with the dying chicken, would hang it on an iron hook and look with a trembling heart at its white, twisted eyes, which closed in the last twitch. Later, she would carry the chicken from the slaughterhouse in Piaski across the cemetery to Khanaykes.

In the autumn days of the month of Elul, when the cold sun, which only warmed like a stepmother, covered the cemetery with crooked rays of sunny shadows, the cemetery used to be strewn with dozens of Jews who lay stretched out on the graves of their loved ones, sobbing and wailing bitterly and heartbreakingly. It was a wailing and groaning mingled with

[Page 34]

“takhanunem” [daily penitential Jewish prayers] “to the loving Father in heaven” or “to our dear Mother in this world” to intercede as their intercessor so that the Jewish sufferings would end and they would be enrolled for a good year and receive a good “kvitl” [a good slip of paper for the Book of Life].

The cemetery also served as a hiding place for stolen goods and as a conspiratorial place for revolutionary youth. And sometimes it happened that the inhabitants of the cemetery, who had fallen asleep forever, were disturbed in their eternal rest by police raids, whistling squads, and revolver shots of the Russian police or the agents of the secret service. I can still clearly see before my eyes the types of the revolutionary youth of that time; in black shirts with collars closed up to the neck and black, braided silk belts around their waist.

The girls wore the same shirts and had their hair cut short (like the boys in “La Garçonne” by the French writer Viktor Margueritte). [And I can still see] those who, with smoking revolvers and squinting eyes, aimed at the tombstones of the cemetery and learned to shoot. And it was not uncommon for a Russian policeman, a police chief, or even a governor-general, to be found on a dark night at the corner of a dark street, shot by the bullet of a revolutionary who had practiced in “my” cemetery.

In the moonlit nights, when I climbed the stone wall of the cemetery to close the shutters of our house overlooking the tombstones, I paused for a very long time. I would look at the cemetery under the big sky-blue cloth curtain, where the eternally mysterious, smiling moon floated through the white clouds, as if accompanied by white angels.

The moon covered the cemetery with pale moonlight and the wan trees swayed in the wind like beggars in the light dance of [S.] An-sky's “The Dybbuk.” In addition, the small tombstones of the children's graves nestled against the large ohels of the rabbis and sages, just as grandchildren nestle against their beloved grandfathers.

I was never afraid of the cemetery. And in the pale, silent, mysterious nights of the full moon, I felt that I had a common language with it and that we could speak quietly in our silent language, our language of thought, about how the transition from this world to the world of the dead is a quiet walk that we experience on our journey through life from the cradle to the grave.

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At some point, however, the old cemetery lost its privilege. It was in danger of being forgotten because it had a great competitor in the form of the new and last Jewish cemetery. It was the ghetto cemetery of the entire Jewish population of Białystok.

Tens of thousands of Białystokers, now scattered all over the world, get up every morning and go to bed at night with hearts full of sorrow and sad eyes. [Their thoughts] turn to the new cemetery...

And many Białystokers will die of a “heart attack”. The dry diagnosis of a cold doctor will justify this with arteriosclerosis or coronary thrombosis. For he does not know that the new cemetery in Białystok has caused yet another victim, that it has caused yet another Jewish heart to burst after it could no longer bear the suppressed grief, pain and remorse.

For he, the brother from America, thought that perhaps he had a share in the tragic fate of his brothers and sisters lying there, in the decaying heap of rotting human flesh. And the holey eyes of skulls haunt him with the piercing reproach like skewers, reaching him right there, in his quiet home in America, right from this place, from the new Białystok cemetery....

I never want to set foot on the soil of Białystok again, because I cannot bear to see today's Białystok, which is a big, new cemetery.

And like a mad mother who holds her dead child close to her, caresses it, kisses it and sings it a lullaby, and does not want to admit that her child is dead, I want to caress the Białystok of my childhood imagination and my youthful dreams forever, forever, and sing my sad songs to it. And I do not want to believe that “my” Białystok has already died.

No, for me Białystok, the former Białystok, is not dead, it lives around me and in me...

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