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Evening. The darkness of the night is spreading over Białystok. Naughty little stars, impatient guests, jump into the sky much too early, waving their fiery little eyes at Mama Earth, my Białystok.

There is a little commotion at home. Mama is wiping her nose with her apron. She is hot from closing the oven with the glowing coals and locking the door.

She wipes her flushed face, runs to the door again and again,

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sticks her head out and listens for footsteps in the street, waiting with motherly concern for me to come home. She mumbles to the street, but when she talks to my father, words come out of her mouth:

“The father doesn't care that his child is lost, such a cold person. It's so late and he's not here yet!”

Quietly, at the window, my father drums a military march from his military service in Bessarabia and smiles good-naturedly. He understands a mother's heart.

Finally, she sees me coming home with my satchel on my shoulder, flushed and hurried from running so fast. Mama throws herself at me:

“Where do you get lost for whole days? At four o'clock your school ends and now it's already eight!- He just walks around at random, but everywhere he finds something. Where there are two, he must be the third. He is curious about everything. Probably he's been standing and gawking at some crazy guy in town again.”

This time my mother is right, she got to the point. It is my mad passion to keep an eye out for “crazy people”, confused drunks and other derelicts on the streets of Białystok.

During the long winter nights in Białystok, when the city was covered with white, freshly fallen snow, I used to lie under a warm blanket and relive, as if in a fever, dozens of images and types that I had experienced during the day or that had passed me by.

I lived permanently, almost like a moon addict, dreaming while awake, wandering the streets of Białystok for hours in silence and thought. After school or on the festive Shabbath days, I automatically absorbed everyday life. Almost without realizing it, I absorbed the images, characters and scenes.

I followed and observed strange people, eccentric types, half-addled and maniacs, melancholics, official madmen, and the simply inexperienced, who were already slipping into the status of recognized, “madman of the city”.

With my young mind and good child's heart, in my night

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visions I used to feel pity for the unfortunate ones, thinking of the miserable wandering madmen who had no roof over their heads: Where were they now, in the cold, snowy winter night? With what did they warm their starving bodies?

What parts of their naked bodies were probably sticking out of their patched and torn clothes? There is something special about the naked human body, even when it is peeking out of worn beggar's clothes.

The creatures who have been rejected by God and man and who have lost their human appearance, who are victims of ignorance, hereditary diseases, alcoholism, and unrestrained human lust, are above all victims of the powerful ruler and tyrant of the world, the executioner and torturer, His Majesty, “Lord Hunger and Misery”.

Crazy people can be divided into categories and distinguished like writers: There are the “recognized” and the “non-recognized” who still have to “work their way up. There are those who have already reached “seniority” and are famous, and those who are still beginners but have already been eternalized.

There are the serious, dramatic and comic madmen, then those whose appearance evokes horror and portrays a tragic story or reveals a page full of human tragedy. There are madmen who make you laugh, entertain you, distract you and make you forget your own worries. And the crazies whose condition indirectly drives you into a state of sweet selfishness because you're still okay: “Now look at that crazy guy - he's even worse off!”

How magnanimously beautiful and sublime, and how base and mean, a man can be when he finds comfort in the suffering of another. People who have learned to look into their own souls are often shaken by the destructive contrasts between the heavenly grandeur and the mean baseness that are so artfully united within us and in the same bundle of brain which we call “markh”  and the same tangle of feelings we call “neshome” [spirit, soul].

And now, writer, with your super ability to wrap tangled thoughts into an endless chain without stopping, disappear and remain an observer and painter. Become a calm portraitist, suppress your own emotions and, with the power of the magic word, evoke images and figures whose limbs are already resting under the ruins of your hometown..

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Bendet, the Tshayner Yat [Tearoom Lad]

Bendet is a tall, broad-shouldered Jew with a red, bloodshot face framed by a blond beard. His tipsy dark blurry eyes peer into the air. He walks shakily on his legs, which are stuck in dried-out, hard leather boots smeared with wagon grease.

He holds on to the rope tied around his belt and shouts in a hoarse voice that echoes down Gumienna Street and ends with a “nign”[melody]- a mixture of a psalm, a human groan and tears- due to the “bitter drop” [schnapps].

“Bendet is a Tshayner yat… אשרי האיש [blessed is the man]… a
hardship for bourgeois people … למנצח מזמור שיר [a psalm song for the cantor]”

Bendet bawls half-singing, with snatches of psalms. And his hearty, serious face seems so immensely sympathetic that he is the darling of the mercantile Gumienna Street, where the bourgeois, the factory owners, the grocers, and the simple stick-turners [with irregular income] are very happy about him.

Bendet is not a “madman”. He is an eccentric, curious guy, a combination of a hard-working Jew who thinks a lot about the Torah and quotes biblical verses, but also one who loves his glass of liquor and his horse.

Bendet is a proud Jew. His face expresses seriousness and self-confidence as he stands on Gumienna Street, next to Shoshkes' tobacco shop or Ferder's fur shop, waiting for a crate of goods to be carried away.

Next to Bendet, on the corner of Gumienna, Bishkele, the newspaper vendor, is busy walking around. He is so small that one third of his body is taken up by a dusty pair of leather boots, and the remaining two thirds by Bishke. He works hard, yelling obsessively and raining newspapers into receiving hands. At the same time, he throws his body like a juggler, nimbly pulling out a “Haynt,” a “Moment,” or a “Togblat,” and, in search of scraps, letting his hand crawl into the large leather bag that takes up Bishke's entire belly.

Tall Bedet looks at little Bishkele with contempt, and disdain is [even] reflected on his face as he looks at him with his calm, typical “Bendet‘ish” philosophical seriousness.

Bendet was not always a simple carrier. He was once a wagoner, the owner of his own horse, and he and his horse were always together, like a couple in love. And when Bendet

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would sip from his bottle, he would also give his mare a sip, and the horse would often be as drunk as its owner.

But when Bendet began to shout, singing his confused, psalm-like song aloud and leaning against the horse's head, the horse would usually close its eyes and turn its head away, as if to show its contempt for its master for not behaving as well as he should and making such a racket in the streets.

In a philosophical way, the horse also had a bit of Bendet in it, but as for Bendet's hoarse charivari, it behaved in a more dignified manner, as befitted a horse.

Bendet played politics with his horse and did not give it anything to eat, but accustomed it to his way of life, to get by on nothing but schnapps. Anyway, the horse did not have Bendet's indestructible health and could not stand it. He said goodbye to Bendet with his bottle and disappeared into the world of horses.

I just can't bring myself to say that Bendet's horse was anything like  “croaked”.

After the death of his beloved friend and breadwinner, Bendet began to pour huge amounts of alcohol into himself and wail with his “Bendetish” melody:

“שרי האיש [blessed is the man], I made my carrion a man, taught him the craft of fasting, is “למנצח מזמור שיר [a psalm song to the cantor]... She finished her song and left, בגן עדן תהיה מנוחתה [she will rest in heaven]...Bendet is a Tshayner yat. It is a misery for the poor and a hardship for the bourgeois.”

To the group of only slightly crazy people, who were not yet very well known, belonged Blume. She was somewhat manic, dreamed of social justice and was a child of the Białystok revolutionary years 1905-1907.

Very often she visited the textile factory family Moreyn on Białystokshanke [Bialostoczanka Street]. Between the noise of the machines, the pounding of the steam looms and the heavy breath of the steam engine, Blume's voice could be heard, usually asking for a gift and demanding “justice” in the Moreyn's kitchen. What she got was very little. And when Blume looked at the alms on her hand, she always went out with the same “saying”.

Her eyes began to flicker, her chest heaved,

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and her squeaky voice spread out, drowning out the noise of the machines: “What, are you sick of not giving more? Do you really think all this is yours?”

And switching to Russian, she continued to shout:

“Eto nie moyo, i nie tvayo. eto ikhnye. Rabotshye narabotali.” (This is not mine and not yours. It is theirs, the workers have made it for you).

When she went out on Bialostoczanka Street, she would rant heatedly, ending her tirade with half-mad eyes:

“But I gave it to them!...I spared them nothing, those disgusting bourgeois people!”

And for a long time one could hear the angry voice of this unhappy soul, who did not know on whom to vent her anger, and who, exposed to the “revolutionary epidemic” that filled the air of Białystok, demanded “social justice”....

Among the lunatics of Białystok one can also count the two maniacs “Plush Velvet” and the “Kalkher of the City Clock”.

“Plush Velvet” was a madman who was attracted to girls in plush or velvet dresses. When he saw a woman in plush or velvet, he would run after her and just have to stroke her coat or dress. Of course, the girl would squeal in fright and run away, and he would not stop running after her until he could touch her.

The men were very amused and perhaps sexually aroused by this. Many admitted with a laugh:

“This 'plush velvet' is not that crazy! You can count on him, he knows what he wants!”

The “Kalkher of the town clock” was a gaunt, thin man with sunken cheeks and feverish eyes. Every Monday and Thursday he would appear on the “Bremelekh” with a ladder and a bucket of lime, calmly and earnestly place a ladder against the town clock amidst the general throng of “Breml” merchants and passers-by, and set about whitewashing it.

Under the general laughter of the “Breml” [the area around the clock tower, where there were many Jewish stores in whitewashed cottages standing in rows, the Bremlekh] merchants, who were very happy about the free “attraction”, the rushing police

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could only with great difficulty keep the volunteer amateur from beautifying our popular town clock.

I walk through the streets of Białystok. I am drawn to the “big shul” [Wielka Synagogue], where on festive Shabbat days the big electric light shines through the colorful windows and cheerfully illuminates the whole synagogue courtyard, which is filled with dressed-up Jewish youngsters and girls who quickly seize the opportunity to flirt before their father comes out of the shul and they have to be back home for father's kiddush.

Groups of people stand around. A group of Jews has formed, laughing and joking around a tall, pious Jew. He wears a beard that swings as he prays and gestures with his hands, gazes up at the sky with his eyes, and talks as fast as if he doesn't want to miss a minute:

“The Messiah is already here....Be aware, Jews! Be aware, Jews, that the Messiah is already here!”

And as he passes by the people around him, he speaks as softly as if he were announcing a great mystery to them:

“I am the Messiah! But this must not yet be made known. Hush, sh...sh....! I am the Messiah!”....

The Jews around him make fun of him, cracking jokes and asking, “Reb Mikhel! When are you going to lead us to the Land of Israel?”

Then the Jew, with his wandering eyes turned to heaven, bends to them once more and says quickly:

“Soon! The time is near! Soon the end of the days will be revealed! The  right moment...the redemption...”

The children, dressed up for the holiday, push him, laugh, tear at his clothes and shout:

“Messiah! Messiah!”...

A young man approaches the Messiah, takes him by the hand and says sternly:

“Reb Mikhel, go home! They are already waiting for you at home with the Kiddush!”

With his head raised, the Messiah disappears, his eyes gazing far into the sky, as if reading something in the dark blue clouds. One Jew says to another:

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“What a heartbreak about that Jewish merchant! After all, the Mikhl Grodzenski has a furniture store, there, across from the old Bes-Medresh. But when his crazy impulse gets the better of him, he thinks he's the Messiah.”

“Is that a miracle?” replies the other Jew, “when a people has been dreaming of the Messiah for two thousand years, everyone gets the idea that he is a bit of a Messiah...Everyone thinks in his own way that he is the Messiah...even the socialist and the Zionist!”

And the Jew ends his speech with a sigh, “Who knows which one of us is clear, and which one is crazy?”

One of the main “stars” of the Białystok madmen was the well-known “Alyampas”. Small he was, with short, coarse feet, with a large, coarse, swollen belly and a round, big, puffy head, which grew in on his broad shoulders. His narrow, dull eyes gave the impression of a snarling, wild beast, and his voice resembled one of the oink of a pig. He had developed a system of “mooching”.

He would lie down on the ground next to a shop (usually in the “Bremlekh”) and begin to roar wildly. And while stamping his red, bare, swollen feet, he would repeat one word without stopping,:

“a kopek...a kopek....a kopek...”

“Alyampas” always arranged it so that he would lie on the threshold of the shop, so that no one could enter. And the lady shopkeeper, shouting and scolding, could not help giving him a kopek. As soon as he got his kopek, he looked at it carefully. His dull eyes shone with an expression of triumph, and, without a word, he stole away to another shop to do the same trick again.

There was something hulking, animal in his coarse, chunky red half-naked body. Only the dull, wild, cunning eyes showed signs of a stubborn will to live, like a primitive, coarse wild animal.

A famous lunatic in Białystok was Shmaye. Everyone knew him. He was an unhappy, bitter madman, and children made his life a misery. But he did not owe them anything.

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Shmaye was a mad beggar, a privileged one. He used to go to the rich houses of textile manufacturers and merchants, to trading houses and large stores.

His appearance was comical. He was small, with a long, wide suit coat that reached down to his knees, and his pockets were full of sugar and bread. One of his eyes was always closed, distrustful, as if he was looking at you with suspicion and could not clearly assess your intentions.

The children used to run after him, stooping in front of him and tugging at his wide, unbuttoned skirt tails from behind, shouting at him:

“Shmaye with the fiddle,
play me a lidl [song]!”

He usually walked crossly and sullen, with one shoulder slumped forward, and would suddenly throw a stone from the pavement in the direction of the children, while growling with his half-closed eye:

“I want to split your heads...crooks!...”

Girls and women trembled before Shmaye, who had the fault to approach them and lift their clothes. Squealing, they fled from him, to the great amusement of the passers-by.

Shmaye was a madman and a songwriter. He had a penchant for cantorial prayers. When we lived on Gumienna Street in Ganyandzkin's yard, above Khashe Goldshteyn's cloth store, and our back door faced the “Rokhe the Shvartser” Alley, Shmaye used to go into the corridor with his “famous colleague, Sane”, and give a concert of cantorial prayers.

He had a penchant for “yomim-neroimdike” [10 Days of Awe] prayers. I used to sneak quietly into the stairwell area and listen to Shmaye's concert. There was really a change in him. He was unrecognizable. His face lit up. His suspicious half-closed eye opened, and a naive smile appeared on his otherwise always malevolent lips.

He instructed Sane to sing the cantor's accompaniment. He himself devoted himself to the [songs] on Rosh Hashanah, “Kevakorat Ro'eh Edro”… [כבקרת רועה עדרו, as a shepherd guards his flock, excerpt from the haftarah reading  for the second day of Rosh Hashannah, from Jeremiah, 31:10].

And Sane used to echo him:

“Kevakorat, kevakorat...”

Shmaye's hoarse voice rose to the high notes of the melodies of the Days of Awe.

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And when it soared to very high notes, his voice sounded strangely wild and weird, like the howling of a miserable dog at midnight. Outside, a crowd of listeners was already gathering to open the closed door of the corridor to enjoy Shmaye's concert.

Usually Shmaye would interrupt his “ singing”, run out angrily and disappear. His “singing” made a strange impression on me. Something resonated in his hoarse prayers with his weeping, dog-like yowling - a kind of Jewish groaning, not just a bitter heart poured out because of his personal fate, but a kind of Jewish lament that united the mad son of his people Israel with the whole Jewish people. Thus, although he was a madman, he was still a Jew whose entire madness disappeared in contact with Jewish prayer, as if this very madman felt the tragic fate of „madness”, poverty and a dog's life. Who can crawl into the soul of a madman? Especially, a mad Jew?

The well-known “Bobtshe with her children” was a strange type of a feeble-minded and mentally ill person. She was small in stature, in her early thirties, a round, plump, big-breasted woman with a good, childishly foolish, awkward smile, with a certain feminine charm, which in today's modern world would be called “sex appeal”.

She was always out and about with her two children, running from shop to shop asking for alms. She was always good-natured and smiling, and her full, voluptuous lips expressed a kind of joie de vivre. Almost always barefoot, she held her children by the hands, who looked contented from their soiled faces. Bobtshe didn't even know who their father was. Often pregnant with another child, she was the object of jokes and ridicule by the grocers, who usually asked her with a laugh:

“Bobtshe, what is it? Are you pregnant again?”

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Then Bobtshe would charmingly draw out each word, sharply accentuate each sentence, as is characteristic of a Białystoker, and answer quickly, good-naturedly, and unaffectedly:

“May cholera strike those Khanaykover scoundrels! They put me in a stable! May a disease take them away!”

The grocers would then laugh cackling and ask more:

“Well, Bobtshe, why did you let it happen? Why didn't you call for help?”

Bobtshe would always give a simple answer with the same good-natured smile, while looking into the distance, as if trying to understand her own words:

“Because the disaster knows it. Because I love it.”

And, “the disaster knows it; I love it” was a popular saying in Białystok, and many did not even know that this naive, simple, honest answer, in which there is so much frank truth that rarely a woman dares to say, came from the crazy Bobtshe.

But Bobtshe was a passionate mother. She spent every penny she got, every piece of cake, every bit of cooked food on her children. And once, when two gypsy women were pressuring her to buy the children from them, she screamed for help so loudly that people ran together and the gypsy women barely escaped with their lives.

There was something of a quiet grace, motherliness, of Jewish spirit and naive, vague philosophy of life in this miserable, run-down woman and mother, who did not even understand her tragedy, but accepted everything with a good-natured smile.

Her imbecility was like a serum to not have to comprehend the magnitude of her drama.

An exact opposite type of a tragic mental patient was the popular “Asara Dibraya”. Her madness was actually based on a personal life drama that brought her to this state.

The [real] name of “Asara Dibraya” was Sore Kaplan. She was the sister of the well-known Białystok editor Pesach Kaplan, who after her death inherited her small wooden house on “Nayvelt” [Nowy Świat], not far from Bialostotshanske [Bialostoczanka].

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Sore Kaplan was the victim of a love tragedy, the plot of which could be the material for a theatrical drama. Sore, who was beautiful and educated in her youth, had an intimate love affair for a long time with a student whom she supported financially and to whom she was faithfully devoted.

She loved the student with all the passion of a young, Jewish-Russian, sentimental, romantic girl. But the student, having finished his studies to become a doctor, fell in love with another girl and married her. Wanting to forget her lover, Sore decided to marry another. But under the chupah, she realized the full tragedy of a romantic girl about to marry a man she does not love.

Her love for the former bridegroom [lover] burst forth in her with strong passion, and unable to bear it any longer, she went mad under the chupah.

She was not completely insane, but, as they say in French, “déséquilibre” [unbalanced]. In Yiddish, they say: she lost her balance, the control over herself.

She walked the streets of Białystok finely dressed, always in black or dark clothes, often with a black veil over her face. She walked erect, stiff and proud, with a face that was always thoughtful and excited. She talked to herself as she walked, and that's why she was nicknamed “Asara Dibraya”.

She had a little girl living with her, whom she raised in her own way. It was tragicomic to see her dressing the little ten-year-old girl in dark clothes with a veil over her face. But when the melancholy left her, in normal moments she became a philanthropic lady, going to parties and weddings to collect money for the poor and doing many humane good deeds.

I often watched her. How she walked with quick steps and talked to herself, often gesticulating, getting more and more agitated as she talked. But her stiff, proud figure and dark clothes inspired respect, compassion and pity.

Shoye-Toye was an urban figure in Białystok. On busy weekdays or Shabbat afternoons, Shoye-Toye used to stand leaning

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against the corner of a wall on Vashlikover [Vasilkowska] or Gumyener [Gumienna] Street and hand out leaflets from the then “silent” movie theaters  “Vyes Mir” on Vasilkowska Street or “Modern” on Lipowa Street. Later [he distributed leaflets] from the “Apollo” and the “Palace Theater” or from a festive Shabbat “gulyane” [event] of a popular Białystok City Garden immersed in green trees.

Tall he was, scrawny, with one side sunken in, a paralytic. His beetroot-colored, half-crooked face had an awry mouth and a pair of dull, empty, expressionless eyes, typical of paralyzed people. His paralyzed leg was leaning against the corner of the wall, and his half-paralyzed hand was carefully pulling out the playbill with its fingertips, carefully groping so as not to give out, kholile [God forbid], two playbills.

One had become so accustomed to the sight of Shoye-Toye that something was missing if one did not see his stooped figure leaning against the wall. Probably also because he was the messenger of news from the cinemas and places of accommodation, announcing that today in “Roskosh” Park, in “Tsertl's Forest” or in the City Garden there is a “gulyanye”, where you can take your “barishnye” [lady] in for free, because today is “Damy Besplatno” [Ladies Free]...

Shoye-Toye was a Jew with many children, and when a Białystok Jew, a joker, once asked him cynically, “David, why do you make so many children?” David stammered, struggling to pronounce the words more clearly as his red cheeks blushed even more:

“What... should I do? Making... children is what I do for a living.”

This was no joke, for his large number of children was indeed a means of earning an income. He had himself photographed with his wife and nearly half a dozen children: Shoye-Toye with his wife in the center and around them his children, with bright, spirited eyes, haughty little noses, and in a proud pose, as if they were royal children of the Tsar, standing around their famous father.

The sale of this family picture provided him with extra income. There was not a single Jewish house on Khanaykes, Piaskes, or Suraska Street where the litographic reproduction of the family photograph of Shoye-Toyve with his family, covered with flyspeck, did not hang, pinned to the wall.

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Apparently, the flies had little respect for Shoye-Toye and his family members and took care of their needs right next to the large Russian inscription “Byedni David s'Semyeystvos” (Poor David with his family).

I was very close to Shoye-Toye because we lived in a stone house together with Shoye-Toye's sister, “Sheyne the Molyerke” [the bricklayer’s].

I was a frequent guest at all our neighbors' houses. There one had to read the agenda of the Russian court, such as a tax notice or a criminal record, because the gutter or the “privy” had not been cleaned, because one had “disturbed the order” (“narushenye poryadka”), or one had quarreled with the neighbor. One was also held responsible by society for having caused suffering to an animal (“pokrovytyelstvo zhyvotnikh”), for having killed a cat or a dog.

If one had to write a Russian letter or a Yiddish letter with a non-Jewish address, one always turned to “Yankel the Teacher” [me].

I was “the little one” who couldn't even reach the table, and I was very popular with my neighbors. Love was mixed with respect. And, strangely enough... the whole “gallery” of neighbors, various types of rough, simple and uncouth people, without education and manners, those cobblers, tailors, porters, packers, coachmen, adapted.

They spoke to me in a tone of exaggerated courtesy, with a stilted posture, a warm smile, and selected noble words. The very people who were accustomed to using coarse language in their colloquial speech, peppered with cynical expressions, avoided any coarse language when speaking to me.

By the way, among our neighbors we had the family of “Lyalke the Izvoztshik”, whose mother and son are now in New York, the latter being a member of the “Białystok Friends Club”. I remember how I always admired the tall, stocky figure of the burly Lyalke the Izvoztshik.

He had red cheeks, a brown face, a wrinkled neck, and a pair of coarse, powerful fists that marked the type of a bold, daring, and strong Jew who knew no submission. If necessary, he would deliver a powerful blow to the gentile's teeth if he dared to show “Esau's hands” or mock a “parkhati zhid” [mangy Jew].

He belonged to that race of Jews who, together with the Jewish workers, excelled in “samoobrone” (self-protection) when it came to sacrificially defending Jews in the dark “Shabes nakhmu” [the Shabbat Nachamu pogrom, the Shabbat after Tish'a B'av] and in the bloody Białystok pogrom.

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But I also remember other neighbors who represented the specific types of poor Khanaykes.

Katshalski, the painter, a man of medium height, always smiling, with thick hair and a slightly graying forelock, and his wife, Maryashke, a beauty with a tall, slender, aristocratic figure, with shiny hair as black as pitch, which surrounded a constantly laughing face, which seemed to be “felt-turned,” as if shaped by a sculptor. In a milieu of hopelessness, despondency, withered faces, and perpetual worry marked by poverty, she was a contrast like a blossoming flower among yellowed, trampled autumn leaves.

Shmuel Kamenetski, or Shmuel the Shoemaker, was a small, hunchbacked Jew with a short, round-shaven beard. He loved the khaynaykover bes-medresh, was in love with all the khazonim [cantors], and sang all the festive Shabbat prayers at work, to which he would beat the time with a small hammer, tapping the shoe nails, which he held in his mouth.

The smell of softened leather and beet stew, which his wife cooked in a large milk pot before Shabbat for the entire week, constantly wafted through the house.

His wife Khaye, a small, skinny Jewess, dealt in chickens and offal and carried a basket of kosher-slaughtered poultry. Always smiling, she thanked the Creator of the World for the mercy he showed her.

But when Shmuel the Shoemaker flew into a rage at one of his two sons- both tall, handsome boys with biblical names, Yisroel and Yakev- the crooked, hunchbacked shoemaker did not even bother to get up from his little bench, but threw a shoe or a kopek at his son's face, screaming with bloodshot eyes:

“Obezhane [Monkey!]...a disaster shall befall you!”

One of Shmuel the Shoemaker's sons, Yakev, later became my student, and I prepared him for the “Remeslenoye” [Artisans’ School]. He grew up to be a handsome, intelligent, well-read fellow with good manners, and later became a clerk in the Białystok “Jewish Bank” on Kilinski Street, which was next to the editorial office [of the newspaper] “Dos Naye Lebn”.

Closest to me, however, was Enye-Bashe, Hersh Fisher's daughter, a girl of thirteen, a year older than me. She gave me my first lesson in “innocent love” by pushing me against the wall and kissing my face. And when she burned me with her young, blossoming girlish body

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she made me feel so wonderful that I didn't know what was happening to me, because my little heart was pounding and I was filled with a feeling of unknown pleasure and shame, as if I were doing something forbidden.

She was the first to open my eyes to the fact that there is a difference between boys and girls and an incomprehensible but so sweet happiness that lies hidden within her young, beautifully formed girlish limbs.

Shoye-Toye's sister, Sheyne di Molyerke, was a short, plump, red-cheeked woman with a noble face. Goodness and softness flowed from her every word. I was very fond of her. She was a “good neshome” [good soul] and always ready to do favors for her neighbors, not considering that she herself was in need.

I kept thinking about the contrast between Shoye-Toyve and his sister. Anyway, I remember an episode which illustrated to me somewhat the type of Sheyne the Molyerke, but also gave me a terrible picture of the manners and scenes of the Khanaykes of that time. For it was a quarter that stood out from the other streets, full of unusual types that only the Khanaykes quarter knew, types that fit so well into the group of unusual types of Białystok at that time.

In the corner of Mirke‘s-Shayes Street there was a small alley with a name that did not fit at all into the customs of the alley. It was called “Tikhe Gas” (the Silent Alley). One half of this narrow alley looked like a painting by Marc Chagall, with small, crooked houses, curved roofs and dirty courtyards, full of narrowness, suffering and hardship.

The other half was a nest of streetwalkers, thieves, and fences.

On the corner of the “Quiet Street” there was a wooden house that served as a tavern, selling beer, hard-boiled eggs, pickled cucumbers, fried fish on “pulmislekh” [large plates] - and secretly under the counter also a glass of “Sorokovke” vodka from a [government] “Monopol” bottle, or a “forty” Russian liquor, for the sale of which one had to pay “special guild dues”.

The innkeeper, “Leyzerke the Shenker [Innkeeper] “, was famous throughout Khanaykes. He was a Jew with a pointed yarmelke [skullcap] and a goatee, with curly, frizzy forelocks over his ears, and a brown, dirty “tales-kotn” [a fringed undershirt] with “tsitses” [ritual fringes] dangling down to his boots, which were rubbed with shiny blue cod-liver oil.

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Leyzer the Shenker [Innkeeper] was the owner as well as the waiter and servant of his “high class” guests: smart, garishly primped young people with boastfully twirled mustaches. Their heads were smeared with shiny black fixing pomade, and they wore silk shirts with colored rubber bracelets, black shoes with reflective lacquer, and gold signet rings on their hands.

These were the professional railroad gamblers, “aristocrats” of their “trade,” who used to cheat at card games on the railroad. When they picked up a “yold” [yokel] or a “frayer” [punter], they “pestered” him and, to use the language of crooks, robbed him of his “mamtakem” [money].

Among these “shady” young men were also pickpockets and burglars [thieves] in houses with their helpers, who looked out for “black goods” watched during the theft, and then helped to hide the “goods” in a “maline” [hiding place].

And this whole gang of criminal types was grouped around a group of laughing “ladies,” garishly made-up prostitutes with cynically perky movements and disheveled hair. They wore sheer, flowered dresses with wide-open, unbuttoned tops, and their exposed breasts wobbled in the large necklines. Their short dresses revealed their legs, bare above the knee.

Leyzerke would run into the courtyard to attend to his human needs. He would return impetuously, but with tiny steps, to the kitchen to practice the ritual of “nail water” [the ritual practice of washing nails/hands] with the copper “kvort”, [a container with two handles for ritual washing] overzealously wiping his hands in the long tail of his caftan, and quietly whispering the “Asher-yotser” [the blessing to be pronounced after accomplishing natural needs]. Then, with a pious mien, he would serve his guests and, with half-closed eyes, count with sweet pleasure the copper, dark-stained “ditkes” and “tsenerlekh” [three-kopeck coins and 10-unit silver money].

Leyzer the Shenker, exactly the same type as the pious Jew from “Yankel Shapshovitsh” [from Sholem Asch's “God of Vengeance”], was an “authority”, an exceptional type, a local celebrity. In an incomprehensible way, his piety and strict religious habits were combined with the boisterous environment of thieves, fences, thugs armed with knives and prostitutes of the lowest kind.

Once it happened that the Jewish porters and packers of Leyzer got drunk and got into a fight. The two protagonists were the husband of Sheyne the Molyerke (Shoye-Toye's brother-in-law), who, depending on the season, worked sometimes as a bricklayer and sometimes as a porter, and another porter, his bloody rival.

In order to settle the dispute in a serious way, two “duellists” went to the yard of Mirke the Kremerke [storekeeper], in the street that was actually popularly known as “Mirke's Alley”.

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They closed the gate of the surrounding wall and immediately began a fight with steel, shining knives, a brawl to the death and life.

Sheyne the Molyerke also managed to get into the courtyard to help her husband, and with all her impetuosity she threw herself wildly at her husband's opponent, striking him on the temples with a stone.

The whole of Mirke and Shaye Streets came together, for it was the middle of the day. But no one dared to enter Mirke's yard to tear apart the two Jews who were competing for a morsel of bread and a shot of liquor to wash down their sorrows. Their constantly suppressed bitterness and their vulgar, degenerate environment could lead to severe beatings and bloodshed, which are so repugnant to the Jewish character.

Later, when the two wings of the gate were pushed open, the two Jewish porters were seen there with their heads covered with blood, and Sheyne di Molyerke, the good, noble, hearty Sheyne, was still standing there with a stone in her hand, hammering it on the bloody head of her husband's opponent.

It was then that I understood the intricacies of the human soul, and what suppressed feelings of need, suffering, and despair can do to a quiet person when they turn into burning, raging anger.

We often see this in outbursts of popular hatred, a spontaneous revolutionary convulsion of suppressed rage that turns the silent, dejected “Bontshe Shvayg” [a Jewish folk legend written by Yitskhok Leyb Peretz] into a wild, bloody beast.

Tanchum was the favorite of the “Bremlekh”. He spent much time there. In the warm summer months, the grocers of the “Breml” would stand by the doors of their shops, “breathing in” the life of the streets and spending time with Tanchum, enjoying his singing and good-natured jokes.

The women, the splashed, pot-bellied grocers of the “Breml”, would put their hands together under their aprons and keep an eye on the charming, amiable and cheerful man who was the half jester and half madman of the city.

Tanchum was slender, taller than average, with a noble face and canny, lively, yet dreamy eyes under his tangled, unkempt chestnut hair.

His elastic body, which swayed in his gait

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as if he were a drug addict or an opium smoker, gave a special grace to his movements. He always spoke in a way that was partly joking, partly noble and almost feminine soft, for he had a light tenor and loved his “craft” of amusing his audience.

He sang cantatas and folk songs or chatted with the “Breml” grocers, who were bored on weekdays without sales. They would sit by their doors and Tanchum would be a free attraction for them, driving away their evil thoughts of the Polish sequestrator and the taxes and the creditors with their promissory notes.

Tanchum walked around in the middle of the Breml like a popular actor sure of his success with the public. Nobody thought of him as a madman, but only as a town jester, a joke-maker, a kind of Białystoker “Hershele Ostropolyer” , endowed with the strange ideas of a madman.

Even his tattered suit-a gift from a generous Jew-with the long trousers that clashed and wrinkled on top of the torn, waxed-polished shoes with holes in the sides, nestled tastefully and charmingly against him. If Tanchum had been dressed in an elegant suit and taught a few “salon manners,” he would have looked like an elegant “heartbreaker” and movie star in Hollywood.

Tanchum was in love with his watch, a yellow, scuffed, copper watch with a big face that hung on a rusty nickel chain.

Every few minutes, he would proudly pull it out of the top pocket of his jacket and hold it anxiously to his ear. When he heard the “tick-tock,” his face would smile happily, and he would wave mischievously and contentedly at the women, as if to say that his watch was already a [household] appliance, and he would proudly and carefully put the watch back in his pocket.

The women were delighted with their favorite, and when they began to ask him to serenade them, he would stand in the middle of the “Breml” so that all could hear him. He would raise his head and fix his eyes on the top of the city clock, lengthen a nign [melody] from a prayer to the “Yomim-Neroim” [Days of Awe] that he had heard in elementary school, or, while tapping his foot to it, sing one of the folk songs that the Białystok youth used to sing when they walked along the “Green Alley” in the Białystok city forest with its dense trees on summer evenings.

Tanchum would never ask for money, oh no! He was proud. If he was given something, he would shyly and quietly put it in his pocket, smile quietly and dreamily, and not even say thank you.

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But Tanchum's main attraction was to tell how he had been freed from Polish military service. This was his “royal role” that made him famous. And it was based on real facts confirmed by the “prizivnikes” [conscripts]. Namely, they were present at the comic scene in the Polish “uzhond voyskovi” [recruitment office] at the “komisya poborova” [military commission]. And my acquaintance, who also had to register [for the draft] at that time and witnessed Tanchum's appearance before the military commission, also confirmed this.

And this is the story:

On a hot, summer day in July, Tanchum received a draft notice to join the military. Tanchum scratched his ear and said with a smile:

“The hell I will serve him, that Polish crook!”

On the day Tanchum reported, hundreds of young people marched to “Old Shoyseyner Street”, where in a large, whitewashed wooden building the Poles had designated the place for the registration of new recruits to the Polish Army.

In the large, rectangular barracks, about 50 young, half-naked people had lined up. They had taken off their shirts and wore only trousers. They were gentile peasant boys from the village, giggling, coughing, blowing their noses, and spitting on the ground, and Jewish youths from Białystok, with sunken chests and narrow shoulders. Among the latter was Tanchum.

By the large window, next to the table, sat the other members of the military commission. A short, gray colonel with the red face and red nose of a drunkard, with a drooping Pilsudski moustache, and a young lieutenant dressed like a dandy, with white-manicured nails and a bold, leering look.

His freshly shaved face with a cheeky, haughty nose expressed contempt. Also sitting [there] was a plainclothes clerk with quick, short-sighted eyes. With his eyes squinted behind his glasses, he held each form up to his nose and looked at it for a long time.

When it was Tanchum's turn, the colonel examined him carefully. He had been born in Białystok and could speak a broken Yiddish with “coarse reysh” [the letter “ר”, r]. Tanchum seemed familiar to him, even though he was half-dressed. Tanchum was standing beside the table, and behind him, in a long line, were Jewish youths from Białystok, curiously awaiting the “spectacle” of Tanchum's enlistment, their faces beaming, forgetting their own worries.

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The nearsighted clerk read Tanchum's name on the form, and the dandy lieutenant raised his head haughtily at Tanchum and asked:

“What do they call you? What is your name?”

Tanchum moved a little closer to the table, bent his head to one side, stared at the ceiling with his eyes wide open, and began to sing:

“Friday evening,
every Jew is a king,
in every corner there is laughter
in every corner there is merriment...”

A loud laugh came from the row of conscripts. The Polish lieutenant rose to his feet, a wild rage in him, and he was about to grab Tanchum by the throat. But then the old Polish colonel, who understood Yiddish and knew Yiddish songs, began to laugh with joy; his narrow eyes closed and his belly vibrated with laughter.

He gestured to the lieutenant, pointing to his head: “This draftee is a lunatic.

Presumably the colonel had recognized him and, now taking over the muster himself, asked Tanchum in a mixture of Polish and Yiddish with tears in his eyes from laughter:

“Tanchum, psha-krev [damn it], where were you born?

Tanchum, still standing in the same pose, raised his eyes to the ceiling, stretched, and let out a song:

“Who knocks in the night,
Khone, the gas man,
Nekhome, Foygele, open to me,
I am your lover after all.”

The Polish lieutenant, with bloodshot eyes, smiled a little crookedly. But when he saw his superior, the colonel, laughing half to death, he smiled sheepishly, not knowing what to do.

The whole line of conscripts, however, laughed in different ways, from a squeaky soprano to a thundering village chest tone. The colonel's eyes filled with tears, and he fell into a fit of laughter that tossed him back and forth in his chair, but he kept asking:

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“Tanchum, cursed plague, what is your mother's name?”

Tanchum continued to stare, spreading his hands as if praying to God and singing:

“A Jew has a little wife,
he has sorrow because of her.
If she can't make a pudding,
she's good for nothing”.

The colonel almost fell off his chair with laughter, and, waving to his assessors, continued his question:

“Tell me, Tanchum! Do you want to be a soldier in the Polish army?”

With his tender smile, Tanchum calmly looked at the colonel, felt that he had won the battle, and again answered with a song:

“Do you remember, do you remember, behind the gate,
I told you a secret in your ear.
Me without you and you without me,
is like a doorknob without a door.”

The colonel, recovering a little from his laughter and realizing that he had overdrawn the bow a bit, shouted with feigned malice while his laughter still choked his breath:

“Silence, you dog's blood! Throw him out!”

Then the lieutenant grabbed Tanchum's back with one hand and his neck with the other, led him to the wide-open door, and, to the general laughter of the draftees, threw Tanchum out into the yard. Tanchum rolled over twice and stayed there, butt up.

When he came to, he stood up, brushed the back of his pants with his hands, and smiled good-naturedly. He waved mischievously at the Jewish conscripts and muttered dreamily:

“But the hell I'll go to military service for that Polish crook!”

All of Białystok knew about this story at the military commission, and many came to the conclusion that Tanchum was not at all as crazy as they thought.

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A Shabbat afternoon. The summer sun spreads over Białystok, caressing and warming. Bundles of light rays break through the fringed, flowered curtains, illuminating thousands of dust motes that spin like flies around the sun's arrows.

My father sits hunched over a Russian novel, hands behind his ears, seeing and hearing nothing. My mother lies slumbering on the black leather sofa. But when I tiptoe to the door and grab the knob, her maternal ear hears it and she murmurs half asleep, “Yankele, where are you going? Don't be out too long. Be back for Havdalah.”

I am already outside. I squint for a sunbath and warm up like a cat for a while. Oy! How sweet is freedom! I don't even want to go to any of my friends, just walk alone through the streets. Watching the life around me.

I notice unnoticed things and feel a sweet delight in the vibrancy of life. I see people and catch images with serious observation and youthful curiosity.

On Shabbat afternoon, the streets of Khanaykes are dozing. An old Jewish woman with two pairs of glasses on her nose sits by the window, bent over a pleading prayer. She sways her upper body, gazes indifferently into the distance, and moves her lips silently in a God-fearing and pious whisper. At the second window stands a little girl with a bundle of red ribbons entwined in her braids. Her face is red as a beet, with big doll's eyes and laughing cheeks. When she sees me, she cheekily sticks out the tip of her red tongue.

Two cheder boys stand by a fence, their pockets full of buttons. One, with a pockmarked face and tousled blond hair, is shaking his pants in glee. He pulls out a mountain of little buttons. The second boy, black-haired and thin, with peppery, shining eyes, puts the “tombak” (a brass soldier's button) into the wall and aims at the buttons. Both boys are heated, totally absorbed in what they are doing, as if they were trading capital.

In the house next door, the windows are wide open, and an old Jew with a fan-shaped, curly beard is rocking over a religious book, singing

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a “nign” [melody], chewing on the tip of his beard, and chasing away the flies that circle stubbornly around a glass of tea with a red scarf.

I cross a field that leads from Khanaykes to Piaskes - pieces of empty fields. Here are mountains of dung and pits of light sand that the Jews dig to pour on the floor on Friday afternoons, because the so-called “shitn pilinyes” [pouring of sawdust] costs a fortune!

The field is dear to me. Here I used to burn the “khomets” [leaven] in a wooden soldier's spoon. I would put some bread and a goose feather on it and tie a piece of white linen from an old torn shirt around it. I liked to sit there for hours, watching the red, crackling fire and breathing in the smell of burnt leaven.

Leaving the field, I enter Piaskes. A drunken gentile staggers on wobbly legs, strokes his mustache, looks with blurred eyes at the Jewish children who run away from him and stop at a distance, frightened and curious. In a state of intoxication, saliva flows from his mouth and words come out of his lips:

“zhidi, zhidki, mosheniki” [Jews, Jewish pack, swindlers].

The head of a Jewish woman with disheveled hair sticks out of a window. She is shouting something to her daughter. She is carrying a copper pot of hot water, which she took from the teahouse in exchange for a receipt. She has stopped in the street to watch a “heaven and hell” game. Her mother shouts:

“Mirtshe! Zgrabne lyalike! Why are you dawdling so long? The hot tea will be cold by now as if it came from the ice cellar!”

Two girls in flowered linen aprons are dancing on one leg in the chalked boxes, a group of girls standing around them and clapping for the winner. Two full-grown fifteen-year-old girls, almost of bridal age, sit on a small wooden bridge and play “tsheykhes” [a kind of jackstones], reaching nimbly and tipping their hands in the air.

A boy and a girl, leaning against a gate, look lovingly into each other's eyes, crack fruit stones, look at each other with bright, laughing eyes, and burst out laughing, poking each other in the sides.

The market on Piaskes is empty, the stalls are closed. The tables are covered with a tarpaulin made of linen. An old dog trots across the silent market and suddenly stops next to a hidden cat, which hisses viciously with bloodshot eyes and sets its claws.

I cross Piaskes, passing “Polyak's Pharmacy”, next to “Rabbi's Street”.

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It is the only shop open. In the windows of the shop are white jars with labels with Latin words on them. I have respect and fear for the pharmacy and stop for a while. The door of the pharmacy opens, and a gang of dressed up, drunken goyim rushes out, carrying a young peasant boy with a bloody bandaged head.

A bride, a village goy with cheeks as red as apples, in a white wedding dress, comes running from behind, crying and wringing her hands. Apparently the goyim have been fighting to the knife at a village wedding.

I enter “Flaker's Gas” [Oficerska Street]. Girls with colored cheeks, blackened eyes, and short, light, bright, see-through dresses sit on the veranda and wave to the passing men. Three soldiers walk by, stop, lift their heads to the loudly laughing girls, exchange glances. One pulls out a leather wallet, opens it, counts the copper and silver coins, and scratches his close-cropped hair. He embraces his soldier friends and climbs up to the porch, where the “girls” rise from their straw chairs. They disappear into the house with its mysteriously drawn curtains and locked shutters.

I am not far from the forest, and the outlines of the tall trees, like a giant broom, are already clearly visible.  You can hear an organ grinder playing, the chirping of children's voices, a humming of sounds. I am already at the merry-go-round. Wooden, colorful little horses and sledges are turning, going up and down.

Children with fluttering blonde and dark heads sit on the little horses, holding on to the nickel bars, their faces shining with happiness. A young peasant boy with wildly tousled hair, an unbuttoned shirt and a hairy chest, barefoot and in short, rolled-up trousers made of drillich, jumps from one child to the next to collect the kopeks.

The hurdy-gurdy squeaks the famous song “na tshto mnye mat' rodila” (Why did my mother bring me into the world?). A little blonde girl cries in a loud voice, rubs her teary eyes with her little fist, pulls her mother's hand toward the merry-go-round and tears herself away. The mother scolds the merry-go-round and shouts to her child:

“She's already wasted a fortune. She spent almost two kopecks on rides, and she wants more. These children today!”

An old man with a brown, gypsy-like face stands with a small box of “nevies-brivelekh” [divination slips]. A shabby parrot with a yellow nose [sic] gurgles on the box.

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It is tied to the box with a rusty chain.

The parrot squawks torn pieces of words and pulls with its pointed beak several colored “divination slips”, promising good luck and far journeys.

I am already at the soldiers' barracks. A group of soldiers with red, steaming faces from the sweat bath and cheerful, washed-out eyes are marching with brooms and towels under their arms, singing in chorus after a first solo, accompanied by whistling.

They sing the well-known soldier's song of the Russian doctrine “Dyevki v'lyes” [Girls in the Forest] with the following lyrics:

Girls in the forest,
I go after them,
Girls in the field,
I go after them,
Where the girls are
There I am.

Three barefoot “shikslekh” [non-Jewish girls] walk by, carrying their high shoes by the laces thrown over their shoulders. The whole platoon of soldiers turns their heads to them, smiles at them cynically, makes humorous remarks, winks at them with their eyes. The blond “shikses” with the freckles on their cheeks blush up to their ears, giggle happily and shamefacedly. [Finally], they pant with laughter and hide their faces in their colorful aprons.

The scent of green trees. Shadows of the cool wind. Green-yellow leaves falling into the sand. Groups and pairs of walkers meet me at the edge of the forest that leads to “Roskosh” Park.

Dark gray streaks have stained the sky. Night has begun to fall. A round red aura has struggled before it sets, crawling once more with effort to the distant sky with its bloody red tinted horizon, creeping through the sparse trees of Tsertl's Forest. Powerless, it retreats, sinking lower and lower and then disappearing, leaving red fiery streaks like glowing iron in the bluish sky.

On the poles on both sides of the sandy road the electric lamps are lit. The municipal Białystok “konke” [horse-tram] creeps past to “Roskosh” Park with a ringing sound produced by the conductor's foot pressure.

The “konke” is pulled by two small, lean, sweaty horses, from which hot steam rises. The passengers:

School youth in student hats, men in hard “kapelyushn” [the hats were called “kugelniklekh” in Yiddish) and ladies in big yellow straw hats, in bright summer dresses with white umbrellas in their hands. They sit gracefully on the benches of the open “konke”, next to the polished wooden poles.

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Boys in silky black suits, caps with twisted visors and big, dusty shoes, have jumped up from behind in the middle of the ride and latched on to grab a free ride. They look nervously at the conductor from behind and wipe their noses with their sleeves.

Individual coachmen drive back from the forest, their scrawny mares crawling lazily and slowly, chewing hay that hangs from a sack around their necks.

From time to time, the coachmen in their shiny leather hats crack their whips in the air. They sit on the seat of the “rezinke”, as the modern carriages with rubber tires are called, and when they meet a “konke” they cover it with curses and look at their passengers crossly.

In the distance you can see the chandeliers of the verandas of the weekend houses. Many electric lamps, like big, soft, milky balls, surrounded by a big wooden fence, whose four corners disappear in the large forest, tell me that I am already near the “Roskosh” Park. I slowly approach the park with my eyes wide open, as if hypnotized.

Countless lamps beckon to me. I stop. A mysterious force pulls me back into the city. In front of my eyes appears the good, tender and loving face of my mother. She is floating in the air in front of me and her lips are whispering:

“Yankele, don't forget to come to Havdalah!”

I try to chase the figure away, but the words now sound even closer and louder, as if they were screaming in my ear:

“Yankele! Don't forget to come to Havdalah!”

I dreamily stop beside a tree. In my imagination I am walking home. My father's house floats before my eyes, on Shabbat evening. The darkness is getting thicker. Stars appear in the sky. My father opens the curtain and looks at the bluish horizon. My father, the intelligent one, is attached to Judaism, he guards the Jewish customs and never misses a Havdalah.

He lights a large candle of colored braided tallow, lifts my hand with the candle high up (a charm to grow higher). The little flame flickers and bends in all directions.

My mother looks at the small flame and her eyes become moist. She mumbles unintelligible words and moves her lips silently.

My brother David looks thoughfully at the flame and picks his nose, as is his habit.

Our gray cat sits, paws tucked under her, on the chair, and her half-closed, predatory eyes peer, unblinking, at the flame of the Havdalah candle.

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My father stands stretched out like a soldier on sentry duty, a silver cup in his hand, his eyes half closed. His head is turned toward the ceiling and his melodious voice clearly captures every word: “

“...הנה אל ישועתי , אבטח ולא אפחד”

And I translate the words for myself with my poetic interpretation: “Here I stand before You, O Almighty God, and ask You for help! Nothing frightens me, for I believe in You and am safe with You.”

I open my eyes. The image of my mother's house disappears. The countless fiery electric lamps attract me, call me. A mysterious world I don't understand beckons me from there. My young heart beats in anticipation of the new pleasures that the future enticing unknown will draw into the picture of the blue, starry night in the promising, brightly illuminated “Roskosh” Park.

Summer. Shabbat afternoon. A quiet warmth rolls over the city and drives people into the forest. The forest swings with its green treetops as if calling to itself. It, the forest, begins where “Zverinyets” [today Branicki Park] ends and the long, whitewashed rectangular buildings of the soldiers' barracks can be seen, from which the smell of Russian soldiers' “kapuste” [cabbage borsht] permeates, filling the area and tickling the nostrils.

From there you can hear Russian military songs with contrived soldier's majesty, interspersed with tones of nostalgia. Longing for Mother Russia, for the vast fields of the Russian countryside, for the Sunday dances and songs accompanied by the harmonica, longing for the village “shikse” with the colorful headscarf, for the native wooden hut and the unworked earth.

The soldiers' songs echo to the Jewish young men and girls who fill the forest on Shabbat afternoons, mingling with the Yiddish songs, with the traditional Yiddish sob and with the silent, tear-stained meldodies, interspersed with a cantorial nign.

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The “Green Alley” of the forest is littered with couples and groups. Silent, melancholy tones of “Margeritkelekh” mingle with “Reyzele dem Shoykhets” [Reizele the Slaughterer's].

The tender nign “Oyfn Pripetshik” drowns in an imitation of [Fyodor] Shalyapin's bass song “Blokhe” [Song of the Flea].

A couple walks arm in arm, looking into each other's eyes and seeing no one, their heads nestled together. A cheder boy is running after a bush cricket. He desperately wants to catch the wildly fleeing creature and would love to stick a needle into its little tail.

An old couple is walking with shaky steps. He, carefully plucking his little gray beard and fanning himself with his shiny black jacket, and she, hobbling along her swollen legs and sighing.

A “cavalier” cracks white fruit kernels, expertly peels the seeds, and, like a gentleman, holds a small brown bag to the sweaty girl with the red cheeks, who limps a little on one foot, for her high leather shoes with twenty buttons are very tight.

Flies and bees buzz through the air, whizzing past the ears with their song as fast as airplanes.

A young groom with a stiff bow tie puts his finger to his neck to let in some air and is drenched in sweat. His shoes are covered with white dust, and from time to time he wipes them with the back edge of his pants.

The bride beside him is a coarse, short-grown clumsy maid, fiercely constricted in a corset that pushes up a pair of broad, full breasts at the top that look as if they belonged to a longtime wet nurse.

The bride wipes her face with the wide sleeve of her fringed blouse and tosses green, soft, hairy gooseberries into her mouth for refreshment.

The winding “Green Alley” in the forest ends and leads to an open triangle where lively Shabbat trading takes place. This is also where Roskosh Park begins, with verandas scattered here and there among the green pines and birches.

Roskosh Park is enclosed by a high fence, which surrounds it like a paradise and hides it from the [glances of] Białystok's poor boys and young men, who seek “oylem-haze” [earthly] pleasures without paying and shrewdly want to enter over the fence.

The adjacent cottages are inhabited by Białystok merchants, who every year after Passover pack their, shabby, polished wooden beds for “the master and the madam,” plus the maid's bed, a few eiderdown quilts for cold nights, the crockery and cutlery for “meaty and dairy,” a pasta board, a rolling pin, and a few vessels.

All this is loaded onto a pole cart,

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on which one still wisely packs a “quarter eighth” of birch wood to heat the hearth of clay.

In the triangle of Tsertl's Forest, next to Roskosh Park, a lively Shabbat trade is flourishing. A young man in a pink revolutionary shirt, buttoned up to the neck, carries on his head a padded pillow on which he has placed glass bowls of lemon water with a few pieces of ice floating in them. Every few minutes he calls out mechanically:

“A cold drink...a cold drink!”

A short-grown Jew with a red bulbous nose, wearing an apron that was once white and has now taken on all the colors of the rainbow, stands next to an ice cream cart and shouts, his head raised like a rooster on a fence:

“Sakharnoye morozhenoye, sakharnoye morozhenoye!” [Sweet ice cream, sweet ice cream].

A little boy, with a shoe on one foot and a scarf tied around the other, is licking from a tin of pink ice cream. He is disheveled and sweaty but happy, and with his sleeve he wipes a liquid from his nose, which with all its strength sets out to trickle into the ice cream....

A Jewish woman, her headscarf wrapped around her, stands next to a table and conducts a lively trade with customers, who greedily let their eyes glide over the goods on display: A tied box of “kitshmitsh” (a kind of sweet dough with raisins), a tin of “landrin-tsukerkes” [hard “landrynka” candies made of syrup], brown and yellow “irislekh” [caramels], and gray, browned “ulniklekh” [buckwheat potato pancakes].

A young girl stands with a woven basket of peas, fruit seeds, and beans leaning against her legs.

A tall, thin young man with an Adam's apple and an uncovered chest is haggling with the girl over the measure of beans. She adds two more beans to the measure for him, and the young man is very pleased with the bargain, artfully tossing one bean in the air and catching it in his mouth.

A small, thin, withered Jew with a whitish opacity in his eye and a belt around his neck, to which a small board with a white tablecloth is attached, sells square candies sprinkled with rice and sings loudly and audibly to a special, well-known motif:

“Zolotoy sovar, zolotoy sovar kharoshi [Golden goods, golden fine goods]...tralya-lya-lya, tra-lya-lya lya lidl, lidl lyam...”.

A lame “goy” with a red scarf around his neck and a shabby black plush “kapelyush” on his head spins a barrel organ that fills the air with the Russian song:

“Na tshto mnye mat rodila” [Why did my mother bring me into the world?]

[Page 94]

It ends with “A Brivele der Mamen” [A Letter to Mama]. The young men and girls, peeling fruit stones and sucking landrynka candies, pick up the “nign” and throw grateful glances and copper groschen at the organ grinder in his shabby “kapelyush”. The “goy” holds it up, bowing and turning submissively, calling out with a flattering smile, “spasibo, bbrattsi rodnye” [Thank you, my dear friends] ...

In a corner, on a high mound, a Jewish woman with a yellow, ragged, freckled face stands next to a table with glass jars of juice and a large copper siphon of soda water sitting in a bucket of ice.

A little girl with a perky nose and blond braided pigtails, “sings” in a stretched voice:

“Give me a glass of soda water with raspberry juice, raspberry juice!”.

But as the saleswoman carefully pours a scant spoonful of juice, the girl's mother growls:

“Passable! If you're going to take a whole kopek for a splash of water, you could at least put a little more juice in it! There's a Jewess enriching herself on a poor child!”

Night falls. The residents of the vacation homes, coming to their senses  after their Shabbat afternoon nap, move to their verandas, stretch, rub their eyes and reddened cheeks, for sleep has not yet sobered them up.

The verandas fill up with guests. Families from the city come to visit, to breathe some fresh air and eat a free meal, especially after such a walk, when the stomach stirs and the appetite becomes that of a wolf.

On the table show up home baked oil-challah, cake and small honey cakes that surround the large copper samovar. The latter boils and bubbles and stands tall, majestic and proud, like a grandfather surrounded by his grandchildren, by jars and trays of preserves and sliced lemon. All of this is in line with the large glass bowls full of fruit.

I stop next to such a porch and feel a growl in my stomach. My young stomach makes itself felt and demands its portion. That's when I remember that my uncle Meylekh Darshin, my mother's brother, the powerful, distinguished man in our family, the rich cloth seller on commission, who sends telegrams day and night to deep Russia, to vast Siberia and near Łodz, has a vacation home not far from here. I am on my way there.

From a distance, I can see my uncle Meylekh sitting

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comfortably in a wide, woven chair. He is wearing a silk caftan tied with a belt, from which the ends of a spic and span white shirt peek out.

The table is set with plates, glasses, small jars and genuine “frazhet” forks, spoons and knives.

There are earthenware bowls of sour cream, flowered plates of strawberries, black huckleberries, radishes and chives, a basket of pastries and a huge braided challah with reddish-brown kitke. And around the table, my corpulent aunt Yakhe rushes hysterically, ordering the maid around the kitchen in a commanding tone.

Bashfully, I come up to the veranda. My aunt Yakhe turns her head to me and, not stopping to set the table, she says in an energetic voice:

“Nu Yakov [well, Jacob]! What are you standing around for? Surely you are hungry, now sit down! What is Mama doing? Your father is still the same shlimazl [unhappy man]? I feel sorry for your mom, such a well turned out woman, she just has no mazl! Now come, sit down, sit down to eat!”

Uncle Meylekh turns his head from a Jewish religious book, takes off his glasses and adds:

“Nu, yo [well, ok]! How's Mom? Long time no see.”

I don't get a chance to answer, because a crowd of Uncle Meylekh's grandchildren is streaming in from the back rooms. Aunt Yehudit Rozental's children, Roze, Dare and Nyomke, and Aunt Khaytshe Shustitski's children, Tsilye and Sashe (later the wife of Dr. Reygrodski's son).

They sit around the table. I am squeezed into a corner. After all, I am only the son of poor Aunt Teme, and they are the rich merchants and High School students with new uniforms and brass buttons. And they don't even say “zdrastvoytye” [hello] to me.

I choke down a bite. My pride rebels in me. They talk about “klasne urokn” [best lessons], “stikhotvarenyes” [poems] and poetry.....

Nyomke can't remember who wrote about Peter the Great. I join the conversation. I remind him and begin to recite in Russian the famous poem “Kto On” [Who is He?], dedicated to the Russian Tsar Peter the Great:

“lyesos tshastim i dremutshim, po tropinkas i po mkham, yekhal vsadnik probirayas, k'svyetlim nyevskim beregam...”.

(Through a dense forest full of moss and wild paths, a horseman rides, making his way to the bright banks of the Neva) ...

I forget my embarrassment and fall into a kind of ecstasy, accentuating every Russian sentence, and at the end of my poem recitation there is a reverent silence.

[Page 96]

When I finally finished, everyone applauded, and the tender gaze of my beautiful cousins did me so much good. Suddenly they see me, and my cousin Tsilye puts it this way:

“Ya sovyersheno nye znala, tshto Yakov tak kharasho vladyeyet ruskim yazikom”. (I didn't know that Yakov spoke Russian so well).

But in Tsilya's innocent remark lay the whole tragedy of that epoch of Russification: what kind of person is one who does not know Russian? True, the ice was broken. I have become one of them, but I feel foreign. As always, I am too sensitive. I withdraw and hide in my solitude.

I say goodbye to my mother's brother, to my uncle Meylekh Darshin, the Hasid with the kaftan and the belt, and to his beautiful assimilated grandchildren, who are already dreaming of other worlds, far away from Judaism and Hasidism.

Thirty-eight years later, in 1951, my mother's brother, my uncle, the pious Hasid in kaftan and belt, received his punishment. Thirty-three years after his death (he died in Yekaterinoslav, at the same time and in the same town where Dr. Yosef Khazanovitsh died).

My cousin Sashe Shustitski was one of the heroes of the episode in Tsertl's Forest in 1913. In 1939 she escaped to Sweden with her husband, the son of Dr. Reygrodksi. There she divorced him and moved to America.

When I once visited the “world ambassador” of the Białystok compatriots- who carries the concerns of the Białystok people from all over the world-  my friend David Sohn, the editor and director of the Białystok Center, I was surprised to find my cousin Sashe in his office.

She had come to inquire, a little faded, but still the beautiful, elegant, aristocratic Sashe with the manners of a salon lady of noble birth.

She greeted me in good Russian, later in bad German, later in even worse French, or even in tortured English. But never in Yiddish, which she knew very well because her parents didn't speak any other language. She always remained the same dogged assimilator who had grown up and taken root in the then Russianized environment.

However, “Mama Yiddish” is terribly vindictive. Sooner or later, she will take a cruel toll on those who run from her.

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A few weeks ago I received a phone call from a friend who congratulated me with a sarcastic undertone:

“Yakov! Mazl Tov! You have enriched your noble lineage...your cousin Sashe has married a Christian, a German Christian and aristocrat, a nobleman!”

And a few days later I received an official notification from Sashe personally that she had married a Christian of the German nobility, a respected member of the German aristocracy. She celebrated her wedding with a Christian German, with a son of the people who murdered my family and hers and many millions of our unfortunate Jewish people.

This is the terrible price that my uncle, the pious Hasid in the kaftan, paid for raising his grandchildren in false, empty pride to accept foreign cultures and foreign languages and to alienate them from their Jewish language, Jewish tradition and the Jewish people.

Summer. A Shabbat afternoon in Tertl's Forest. Bluish shadows cover the sky as if with a gigantic curtain. The red, fiery blazing sun fades on the far, far horizon, still struggling as if not yet to set, sending its red, fiery projections into the windowpanes of the weekend homes, lighting them up as if they were on fire.

Early starlets leap out gleefully and impatiently, like the first guests at a wedding.

From afar, the bells of the lighted “konke” [horse-drawn carriage] ring out. Open on both sides, it carries passengers from the city, dressed in bright summer clothes, with happy, laughing faces and resounding voices. The horses' hooves clatter merrily and the sweaty, panting horses swish their tails as they carry new passengers to Roskosh Park.

Colorful posters signed by the omnipotent police chief, “Rotmeister” [Captain] Pulan, are pasted on the town's fences and kiosks, announcing the noble purpose of the “gulyanye,” which is to support the needy students of the Commercial School.The “konkes” bring new passengers, filling Tsertl's Forest with commotion and laughter.

[Page 98]

On the verandas of the cottages begins a hustle and bustle. On one veranda, a group of Jews is standing and praying the “Mayrev” [evening prayer] in a beautiful manner. A Jew with an meticulously combed white “Franz Joseph beard”, dressed in a silk caftan, sways with his eyes closed, swings his body on all sides and taps his chest in religious ecstasy.

On a second porch, a young man wearing a golden pince-nez and a short-shaven “komets” beard [the vowel sign that means an “o” in Yiddish ], performs Havdolah, singing an ornate, cantorial melody.

A young student plays the guitar on the veranda surrounded by youth.  Young men clap their hands to it and a young slender girl snaps her fingers and gracefully dances a tango to the beat, with turns and figures, writhing like a snake.

The entrance to Roskosh Park is brightly lit. Next to the ticket office stands a line of young people, wasting no time in making acquaintances with a romantic flirtation, interspersed with Russian.

The carved, brown, garishly lit gate to Roskosh Park is strictly guarded by the police.

A lout of sixteen years with a little hat of the “Gorodskoye” [Municipal School], flaxen hair and a haughty nose, tries to sneak in between the students with a mien of “holy innocence”. .

Noticing this, a policeman with a long mustache shoves him out, gives him a blow with the dull side of his saber, and growls at him, “sukin sin!” [son of a bitch].

The lout is “less than thrilled,” trots away and tries his luck in the darkness, in a far corner of the fence. He takes a “forbidden ticket” and climbs over the fence.

Roskosh Park is filling up with people. In a large wooden “litanke” there is a restaurant counter. Officers in elegant uniforms with shining sabers and jingling spurs, and students in new uniforms, with all their buttons buttoned up and with their student hats boastfully tilted on the side, are joking cheekily with the young, beautiful waitresses in their white aprons.

They serve at the tables of the guests, serving portions of roast goose, boiled eggs, marinated herring with white sauce, tasty black and rye bread, and secretly pass over a bottle of “monopolke” made of white Russian vodka.

It becomes more and more cheerful. The voices are getting louder. The eyes are shining. Groups are forming: At one table are hysterical, drunken officers. At another table are quieter, more serious students. Next to the dense, wide-spreading trees, groups of the Białystok intelligentsia gather.

[Page 99]

The sons and daughters of factory owners and merchants, whose religious upbringing does not allow them to get too close to the Christian officers' circles, keep themselves stately and strictly separate.

The corpulent figure of the middle-sized Yakov Markus, with his dignified, beautifully shaped, proud face of a magnate, catches the eye. His chubby body is squeezed into an elegantly sewn suit. Next to him stands his younger brother, the darkly handsome Misha, with the swarthy face, black hair and black, passionate eyes of an Oriental.

Two brothers- two contrasts. The Markus family is very well known in Białystok. When talking about themselves, its members proudly say “mi Markus” (we, the Markus'es).

Yakov Markus is a textile manufacturer with his own spinning and weaving mill and is also the commander of the Białystoker fire brigade. He is the favorite of the women of Białystok and is on friendly terms with the Russian authorities.

Next to them stands the slender notary Klobukov, with his eagle nose and lean, ascetic, cold, stiff face. In another group you can see the Plovski brothers and sisters, the children of the famous merchant Hilel Plovski [or Plavski]. They are tall figures, full of wit and enthusiasm, respected in the boisterous life of the “golden youth of Białystok”.

There is the engineer Gonyondzki, who has inherited a large house on the busy commercial corner of Gumienna and Lipowa streets, where there is Khashke Goldshteyn's factory shop, Mlinazhevitsh's oil shop, Khazan's ladies' dress shop, and Voroshilsky's jewelry shop.

Gonyondzki, with his beak-like nose and red cheeks, is surrounded by a group of merchants, “realistn and gymnazistn” [students from junior High Schools and High Schools] and their “ladies”, schoolgirls and studying youth.

In a corner. Two famous Białystok wrestlers stand proudly leaning against a tree: Pokzhive, “the Byelovezher [Białowieża],” with a gigantic body and bulging chest, and an intelligent, noble face that does not match the massive, fleshy body at all.

The second is Ostrinski, a strong young man who often performs with Pokzhive in the circus on Soloveytshik [Nightingale] Lane in the “French Fights” [French style wrestling?]. Ostrinski is also a member of the Białystok fire brigade, and he takes particular pleasure in walking around in the fire brigade uniform, with the brightly polished hat that shines like gold.

When he [Gonyondzki?] passes by the Jewish youths, he looks at them with pride and feels safer among the Christians in the company of the two powerful Jewish men.

[Page 100]

A warm wind, coming from the Ignatke [Ignatki, Grodno district] and Gorodyani areas, picks up the scents of Tsertl's Forest and shakes the tops of the trees. Two foolish birds snap their little heads in the air and chirp a serenade of rapid trills for no particular reason.

The illuminated Roskosh Park is filled with a hum of voices. The drunken voices of the alcoholic officers are swallowed up by the deafening noise of the military orchestra “Uglitski Pułk “ [Uglicki regiment, an infantry unit of the Russian Empire, disbanded in 1918], which sits in full width next to the “okriter stsene” [open-air stage] and plays energetically and continously waltzes, tangos and polkas.

The conductor, with his pretentious mustache and golden epaulets hanging wide over his shoulders, waves his baton with affected grace and greets the well-known ladies with a smile. Passing cavaliers toss confetti into the faces of the ladies, who laugh in feigned protest and thank the men with fiery glances.

A loud commotion can be heard. The whistling of the policemen indicates that they are looking for a nimble pickpocket of the “blate yatn” [criminal urchins], who apparently picked the pocket of a drunken officer while he was flirting with a lady. The thief is chased by the rampaging police and now runs like a squirrel in tight turns between bushes and trees.

In the “litanke” where the restaurant counter is located, angry shouts and excited voices can be heard. A group of students is surrounded by drunken officers. An officer with a red drunken face and glassy eyes is drawing his saber with difficulty to teach a lesson to a student who made an insulting remark about His Majesty the Tsar, mocking his military uniform and the honor of his royal people.

The other officers, with proud, condescending expressions, look at the students threateningly, but hold back their colleague to avoid a scandal. Suddenly, the famous Białystok police chief Reshute appears in his short varnished boots, elegantly saluting and speaking with affected erudition:

“Raskhodityes gospoda ofitseri... raskhodityes gaspoda studenti!”[Disperse, gentlemen officers... disperse, gentlemen students!]. And to the audience standing around he shouts:

“Nu tshevo nye vidali..razaydis! [So what, we haven't seen anything, get lost!].

As the crowd disperses, Reshute looks victorious and proud, fully aware of his greatness.

The orchestra becomes silent. Loud applause rages. The guests rush to sit down on the long, wooden benches of the open-air stage. The men rise gallantly

[Page 101]

from their seats to make room for the elegant ladies dressed in white. They flirtatiously wave their fans, politely thanking the cavaliers. The silence grows.The tension is great. The performance on the open-air stage begins.

Everything is still. Next to the open-air stage, a branch breaks from a tree under the weight of a hidden boy. One hears a silent “sha, sh...” [shush!…] from the audience. A police dog with black and white spots and drooping ears moves, growls and barks softly.

This is followed by a “sha, sha, sh...” from the audience waiting with anticipation. The well-worn brown plush curtain opens. A singer dressed as a clown appears, with a white-smeared face, a big mouth and wild eyes, singing in Russian the aria of “Payats” [Pagliacci, Clowns]. His tenor voice makes the air vibrate with choked tears as he reaches the phrase: “Laugh, Payats, at your broken love, laugh and cry...”.

The sentimental female High School students sob silently, blowing their little noses into their unfolded handkerchiefs. Their boyfriends look lovingly into the eyes of their romantic ladies and laugh mockingly, but also sympathetically, while they jokingly dab the eyes of their sweethearts with their large men's handkerchiefs.

After a roar of applause and repeated bows from Payats, now “happy” with his success, a man with a black pointed beard and a monocle in his eye, dressed in an elegant black tuxedo, appears on stage with a black lacquered cane, which he holds playfully in his white curved fingers. He steps forward for a demonstration of his magical arts.

He catches playing cards in mid-air and gracefully pulls white eggs from his black sleeve. He lifts his shiny top hat to reveal a bald head with a few black hairs attached to his head with shiny gel. And to the general groans and sighs of surprise, beautiful white innocent doves fly out of the top hat, which flap their wings, fly across the stage and back again, landing on the shoulders and head of the magician.

Now comes the most interesting part of the program. A famous dance troupe touring Russia performs the famous “Shantekler” dance [“Chantecler” is an old French animal fable from 1910 about a rooster who believes that the sun can only rise through his wake-up call]. Here a group of women and men dressed up as chickens and roosters with colored feathers, tails and heads of chickens dance the “Shantekler” dance in a row one after another.

[Page 102]

This was the “hit” of the season and the name became the fashion for colorful women's costumes and wild men's ties.

The French group “Kvi Pro Kvo” [Qui Pro Quo] ends their performance with the famous French “Can-Can”, in which the dancing girls lift their dresses and brazenly reveal their round, soft bottoms in white, lace-trimmed panties. This leads to loud applause and shouts of “bravo” from the men, because what man - seeing a half-naked, graceful, blooming, lively, young, flexible female body in white underwear (and even its hindmost part) - wouldn’t be happy to overlook the fact that the women gave a very rude performance.

The sentimental ladies of Białystok blush, shyly lower their eyes and look furtively at their male companions. Their looks seem to ask:

“Does this mean that men really like this? Are they really not interested in an intelligent discussion about art, literature and social problems? ....

A tall, thin man with disheveled long hair and a white, stiffly starched shirt appears. He hurries to the stage, clutching his hands in excitement at the thunderous applause. Joyfully the name of the couplets [a multi-strophic witty, ambiguous, political or satirical song with a distinctive refrain] is shouted, which are currently circulating in Białystok and are sung in the remotest wooden huts of Bojari, Nove, Skorupy and Khanaykes.

The singer is the favorite of the Jewish audience. Happily, he gives a little cough, covering his mouth with his fists, then bows cheerfully and jokingly to the audience and, waving his white, stripped glove, he sends air kisses and asks:

“Well, gospoda [men]! Now, rebyata [boys] of Khanaykes, which couplet shall I sing?”.

A buzz of voices rises, snatches of words, applause, heckling, laughter and shouting:

“Sing 'Kot Makha' [Cat Macha], sing 'Vyetyerotshek Tshut Tshut Dishet' [The breeze is blowing], sing 'Zhil Bil Na Khanaykakh' [There used to live in Khanaykes].”

The singer raises his hands like a conductor raising his baton, and in a minute there is silence:

“All right, my dear beloved guests of 'Nikolayevske' [Mikołajewska] Street and Khanaykes, of 'Kupetsheske' and 'Plakers' Street, of 'Aleksandrovske' and 'Moyshe Ruves' Street, I will sing 'Kot Makha'. Every Białystok High School student will recognize himself in it, and you will support me! And every Białystok 'mamashke' will learn how she is fooled by her daughter!”.

In the pose of a sentimental girl in love, the singer contorts his face into a sweet expression and sings a song. At night in her room’s bed, she dreams of her beloved one.

[Page 103]

And suddenly, in the blue, starry night, under the pressure of a light summer breeze, the window opens and her beloved appears, approaching her with a small jump and outstretched arms. He puts his finger to his mouth to warn her not to cry out in surprise.

And when her dreamed lover is already going to her bed in the darkness of the moonlight, he knocks over a vase on a high flower stool, which shatters with a terrible bang.

In the next room, her mother's panting, sleepy voice sounds, asking anxiously:

“Kashenka, who is it?”.

And she, Kashenka, is very embarrassed and does not know what to say. It escapes her:

“A cat, mama, a cat, mama, a cat!”

The whole audience joins in: “A cat, mama, a cat, mama, a cat has caused Mashenka great trouble!”

The audience goes wild with joy, laughing, stamping their feet, applauding and shouting:

“Bis, bis! [Encore, encore!”]

The second number of the singer, who made a strong impression in Białystok, is the popular song “Rivotshka”, which the singer sings with much feeling in Russian. It is the drama of a young Jewish girl from Khanaykes, whose father is very pious and fanatical. He studies day and night in the Bes-Medresh and guards his daughter very strictly. The daughter longs for an easy life as a woman and for pleasures, and the audience, sympathizing with the unhappy Rivotshka, sings silently along with the singer, accompanying him and repeating the words:

“Zhil bil na Khanaykakh Borekh Pik....

In Khanaykes once lived Borekh Pik,
He was a pious Jew......

He went to the Bes-Midrash,
To pray to God with songs,
Protected from unkosher things...”

And the audience, which the singer leads with his hands, joins in:

“Oy, oy, Rivotshka! Oy, oy, Rivotshka! Oy, oy, Riva,
Riva moy kumir...” [Riva is my idol]

The audience is in ecstasy. The cheeks are glowing. The girls nestle tenderly against their cavaliers, and a warm, summer night breeze plays with the hair of the amorous, dreamy girls who radiate.

[Page 104]

the scent of the forest, of chamomile, field flowers and freshly mown hay, which makes the young blood drunk. The last applause slowly abates, still lingering in the air, until it gradually dies away completely. The performance is over.

The men are still humming the melodies of “Zhil Bil Na Khanaykakh”, looking with amorous eyes at the young girls, and the youthful passion flows into the luscious bodies.

In the distance, a rooster crows, not asleep and annoyed that the others are asleep. The big lamps slowly go out. A few women's mouths open to a slight yawn, which is quickly covered with a hand so that the gentlemen do not notice.

The officers click their boots and say goodbye to their ladies, kissing their hands and glancing hostilely at their corpulent mothers, who bustle about and won't leave their daughters.

Outside Roskosh Park, several brightly painted carriages wait. The coachmen with their long whips sit stiffly like wooden dolls, waiting for their “barines”, the rich textile manufacturers of Białystok, the powerful ones who live in grand style. Most of the visitors to Roskosh Park, however, have to run to get a seat on one of the last “konkes”, which are specially reserved for park visitors.

The richer people, who can pay five kopecks, sit at the back of the “konkes”. At the front, near the ponytails, sit those who want to save two kopecks, paying only one copper “ditke” [three-kopeck coins]. Poor people and “crooks” from Khanaykes hang on from behind, and to the musical accompaniment of the “konke” bells, the fully loaded vehicles move toward the city.

Couples walk arm in arm along the “Green Alley” and the wide main roads of the Białystok Forest. They are faithfully accompanied by the white, smiling moon, which does not leave them and looks down on the children of the earth with love, while it curves into its eternal, mysterious, ironic smile.

But the naive children of the earth forget that, compared to the infinity of the moon, their birth and death are like a short, quick child's laugh that sounds in carefree joy, only to immediately turn into a long, wailing cry.

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