My Childhood Years in the Pyaskes
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Unfortunately, after I had rested from my “vacation”, the same problem remained: where would I get a job? My father's business was going downhill and there was nothing he could do for me. I had to find a job! I searched, inquired, asked friends and acquaintances if they knew of any job openings.
But there was nothing. The chances of getting a job as an accountant in Bialystok were very slim. The few ten large manufacturers of cloth and “shody” employed older people as accountants who had worked for them for years. Small manufacturers did not need “scribes”; they did their own bookkeeping. However, they could not find anyone to fill the position of merchant's clerk. This job required climbing a ladder, taking heavy “keyklakh” (rolls of cloth) down from the high shelves and carrying them up again. This kind of work was not for the strength I had.
But what was I to do now? How much longer should I go around alone? מה יהיה התכלית? (What would be the result)? The friends advised me to go to Łódź , the second largest textile center in the world (Manchester, England;
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Łódź, Poland; Fall River, America).
My friends were convinced that I would make a difference in Łódź , a city six times the size of Bialystok. My [acquired] knowledge of Russian, German, Polish and accounting should not be lost. I accepted very practical advice and my father agreed.
In this second-largest city in Poland, with its streets full of tall buildings and huge textile factories with tall, round chimneys, I had more luck than in my hometown. I even got jobs, but these “jobs”, as they say, only lasted from “Esther Fast to Purim”[1].
I never stayed long in those jobs.
The first job I got was with a Polish Hasidic Jew named Abraham-Mendl Morgenshtern. He owned a spinning mill and was a tall Jew with a long, dark brown beard. He wore a full hat with a large brim and a long, clean kaftan, which gave the impression of a “stout person”. He spoke and wrote perfect German and Polish (but not a word of Russian).
Before hiring me, he instructed me to write my own application by hand in German. As soon as I finished the first sentence, “Da ich gehört habe, dass Sie gerade einen Buchhalter brauchen”[2], he interrupted me and said, “Enough!”. He understood that I knew enough German to keep his books.
Although he was a capable man, he was constantly worried and anxious. He ran around looking for work and money for his spinning mill to run his business, but often found nothing.
His customers were in no hurry to pay him, or they simply couldn't pay him on time for his work.
He was always short of money.
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Once it happened that he didn't have enough money for the “plate” (the wages to be paid to the workers). He was terribly nervous. Fortunately, a neighbor from the same factory building came with a gmiles-khesed [interest-free loan]. He saved the day. This was on Friday evening, and my “balebos” [employer], a Gerer Chasid, was able to go home and joyfully welcome the Sabbath in his silk belted kaftan.
When I came to work for him three months later, however, the confused Mr. Morgenstern had brought his nephew, who needed a job, to the office - and he let me go.
Translator's footnotes:
My second job [or rather, job offer] was with a box maker who had a small factory on Alexandrinski Street (which was called “Mordekhay Gabay's Street”). Since the business didn't need an accountant, my new “balebos”, a Chasidic Jew in his forties, of medium height, with a close-cropped black beard, offered me to teach his daughters Hebrew, to teach them to say the blessings, the “Krishme” [Sh'ma Israel prayer] and other religious “things”. I refused the offer. It was beneath me to become a “dardaki-melamed”[1] with a bony pointer.
If my parents at home would have heard that I had become a “rabbi”[2], sadness would have moved into their house, and my friends in both cities would have simply mocked me and actually looked at me like a “melamed” ... In short, I had to find another job.
Translator's footnotes:
My third employer was a small manufacturer who owned ten steam looms. He was
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all, in his mid-fifties, with a short brown beard and... dressed half Hasidic: A short suit coat and a black cloth hat with a short brim. He spoke German and Yiddish. But he only spoke German to me. (It was obvious that he wanted to show me, the “Litvak[1], that he was not a simple “Itshe Meyer”[2]). Warsaw, Łódź and other cities in Poland were full of “Itshe Meyers” in those years.
The reason for this was that a few years earlier a famous Hasidic rabbi named Itshe Meyer had died, and so all Hasidic boys born that year were named after the deceased “Good Jew”...
Many of the Hasidim were simply ashamed of their double name. This name was ridiculed in the same way that the name “Melamed” was ridiculed in Lithuania.
Instead of saying, “Don't be a Melamed!”, people in Polish towns would say, “Don't be an Itshe Meyer!”
Even my first “balebos” [employer], Abraham Mendl Morgenshtern, was ashamed of the name Itshe Meyer. When he once sent me to visit one of his clients, an A. Em. Gutman, he wouldn't tell me his full name at first. But when I persistently asked for his friend's real name, he answered with a smile: “Itshe Meyer”.
Translator's footnotes:
On the first day, my new “balebos” had not yet shown me the books. He just told me to go around the factory and learn about the raw materials that come into the factory and how the goods are made.
When I came home in the evening and told the other lodgers of the boarding house that fortunately
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I already had got another job with this man (unfortunately I have since forgotten his name), they laughed at me and warned me not to work for him under any circumstances, because if I worked for him, I would lose my good reputation forever and would never get a decent job again.
“Why?” I asked. And the answer was that my new employer was a former “Yankl Shapshovitsh” (the owner of a brothel - Sholem Asch's hero in his “God of Vengeance”). I didn't go to him again - and didn't even ask for anything for the one day's work.
My fourth and last job in Łódź was with the factory owner Zelig Shakhnerovitsh, on Petrikover Street. The workplace was just as I wanted it to be: large and long, with shelves full of goods. A man [in the position of] merchant's clerk and chief accountant, whose name, as far as I remember, was Abramski, turned out to be a pleasant young man who showed me my work areas and the books I was to use for my work.
The office was in the warehouse. When I went in, I saw different people: Buyers, brokers, “Lieferanten” (called “loynketnikes” in Bialystok and “contractors” in America)[1], and others.
After a week, one afternoon [Mr.] Shakhnerovitsh, a slim, blond Jew with glasses, came in with another gentleman, whom he introduced to me as Mr. Katz, the new partner.
And only a few days later, when no one was at the office, Mr. Katz came to see me. (He was a Jew from Minsk, while Shakhnerovitsh was a Litvak from Grodno).
Mr. Katz instructed me to write in the ledger that
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certain quantities [measured in “yards”] of [cloth] goods were sold at such and such a price, which amounted to exactly three thousand rubles. At first I was reluctant to obey such an order, explaining that this was no way to keep accounts. First of all, I told him, before a transaction is entered in the ledger, the entry of a “zakaz” (order) must be visible, then it is written in the sales book, and from there it is transferred to the ledger.
But Mr. Katz became angry: “Write, write! If you are ordered to write, you must write and not ask questions!”
So I had to write. I had no other choice.
About two weeks later, the entire business moved to another building on the same Pyetrikover Street. The new “local” [premises] was bigger, nicer, more spacious and brighter than the first place. But you didn't see as many people coming and going as before. The “shutef” [partner], Mr. Katz, had disappeared, and Abramski didn't appear in the store for days.
It was a sad atmosphere...
Shakhnerovitsh came and went, never staying long. One evening, when there was no one in the office, he came to me with the “good news” that he no longer needed me. Business was going badly[2] and I should look for another job.
A few days later it became known in town that Shakhnerovitsh's firm was “pleyte“, that is, “bankrupt” (in Bialystok it was called “ongezetst”). Now I understood why I had been hired, namely to make “false entries” in the ledger. If the creditors had sued him in court, it would have been considered a criminal act. Apparently Abramski had refused to do [such entries].
He knew that he, like the boss,
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would have been held responsible for such a criminal act. But I didn't know about such a law, so I was just dragged into it...
However, Shakhnerovitsh's bankruptcy did not go to court. He had previously “gesetlt” with his creditors (translated from the business language of Bialystok and Łódź , this means that arrangements were made).
Translator's footnotes:
In short, I was once again a candidate for a new job. But I couldn't find anything! I searched and searched, asked, begged friends and acquaintances to do something for me, but - in vain! Nothing was available.
Week after week, month after month went by, and there was still no job in sight. I borrowed money from everyone I knew and was up to my ears in deposits: I had rent and restaurant debt, plus grocery store debt, so I had nothing left to “put in my mouth,” but still no prospect of income. So I had to go home, where at least I had a place to sleep and something to eat.
When I left the great textile city, which at that time had a Jewish population of about 150,000, I took with me a number of bitter memories: I saw how the police broke up a workers' demonstration on a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1903; how a rough, red-necked policeman grabbed a young Jewish demonstrator and, on the way to the police station, cruelly and brutally beat him on the head with a whip filled with lead bullets.
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I also saw another policeman with murderous eyes confiscate a coachman's whip. The coachman, a non-Jewish Pole (there were no Jewish “cabdrivers” in Łódź and Warsaw), cried bitterly because he could no longer drive without his whip. I went to the murderous, unscrupulous policeman and asked him why he had taken the whip from the poor driver. I asked him to give him back his whip, “he has to earn his living, have mercy on him”.
“Nye tvoyo dyelo!” he replied angrily, “stupay!”
(This is none of your business, go away!).
(It was said in the city that the tsarist government had deliberately sent “real” Russians, former criminals, as policemen into Polish cities, i.e. people without a conscience and without any compassion, in order to have them suppress and terrorize the workers' movement and the Polish hoi polloi as a whole).
I had the “rare opportunity” to see how Jewish weavers “live” in Balut, the poor district of rich Łódź , an area about which numerous authors have written, such as Yitskhok-Elkhonen Rontsh, Rafael Pozner, Gina Medes, Y.B. Beylin and others.
The contractor I had seen had his little “factory” and “apartment” in a small square room on the third floor of a long, dark gray wooden building in a very narrow alley. It was late in the evening when I entered the “factory” in the square room. There were three wooden looms, one for the balebos [the owner], and two for the apprentices. Opposite the first loom was the stove where dinner was cooking.
Next to the stove stood a small cradle with a
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blond baby, and the contractor told me that the apprentices slept under the looms, on coarse pieces of cloth and sacks.
I didn't see the balebos' “apartment”, and I didn't ask about it. The strong smell of the kerosene lamps simply took my breath away, and I had to leave the small “factory” - with its terrible air like hell - as quickly as possible.
“It's a good thing you came”, said the balebos to me, a Jew in his forties with a broad reddish-blond beard, “the accountants should know how we weavers live!”
As I walked outside, I wondered how children could grow up physically and mentally healthy under the conditions I found with the weaver in Balut. And the people of the town knew that poor parents threw their children, who did not grow up well, into the street. In those years, 1902, 1903, and 1904, there was already an active Jewish women's association in Łódź , which took care of collecting the unfortunate children who had been thrown out and giving them to private families to raise.
A committee of the aforementioned women's organization used to visit “their” children every week and bring them gifts.
I once witnessed a touching scene when a volunteer social worker met a mute six-year-old boy. As soon as the mute boy saw the volunteer, an intelligent, graceful girl in her twenties, he fell on her neck, kissed her and cried bitter tears. He saw this kind-hearted girl as his only hope, as he did not know his father or mother, and the family he lived with was not really friendly to him.
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During the almost two years I spent in Łódź , I had little fun - due to the facts the reader already knows from the previous chapters.
Only once did I actually have some fun with a couple of well-known young guys. And that was the “incident” with the mixed up, moldy tefillin [phylacteries].
The “mayse fun der geshikhte” [“the (hi)story of the story”], as Sholem Aleichem says, is as follows:
In Mrs. Epshteyn's lodging house on Vidzever Street there were five lodgers-four Litvaks, from Brisk, Kobrin, Pinks, and Bialystok (me)-and a short-clothed pious fellow from a provincial town in Poland.
Before we left for Łódź , either to look for work or to return from vacation, our mothers strictly instructed us that - for God's sake - we must not forget to pray and put on our tefillin.
When we Litvaks left home, as if by magic, we didn't feel like praying - not on weekdays, not on Shabbat, not on holidays... And because we didn't pray and didn't put on tefillin, our prayer straps and the prayer capsules for the hand (“shelyad”) and for the forehead (“shelrosh”) became covered with a thick, ugly layer of mold...
When the day before the holiday came and we had to go home for the vacation, we Litvaks were all very busy in our quarters wiping off the mildew with wet, hot cloths so that our mothers would not see the mildew.
Because if they had discovered the green mold, they would have known that we hadn't “used” the teffillin... And there would have been a scandal, which the boys naturally wanted to avoid.
However, the Polish boy did not need to clean his teffillin. He was devout and prayed every day. Once, early one
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holiday morning, when we were busy cleaning, one of the litvaks from Kobrin (his name was Lukin) suddenly became too lazy to continue cleaning his religious utensils. At the same time, he wanted to take them home clean. Then he thought of a solution: When the pious Pole left the house to go shopping, he, Lukin, a strong young man with bright black eyes, went to the table where the Pole's little bag of tefillin lay. He took out the clean ones and put in his moldy ones, and the owner of the clean ones knew nothing about it...
When the latter came home for the holiday and his mother saw the “green” leather straps, she cried out loud because her youngest son had become an “apikor”, a heretic... Her little son (his middle name was Merilender) was blond with dreamy blue eyes. He swore wildly that he had prayed. But his good, pious mother didn't believe him, and so unfortunately he also had to wipe the mold off Lukin's tefillin... It was obvious that he didn't want to use his father's or older brother's tefillin...
When the “Poylish ingl”, as we often called him, returned to his quarter from his vacation, he began to shout in German, in Yiddish, and with a Polish accent, cursing loudly all the Litvakers. He had suffered such an insult because of them and the exchange of his clean tefillin for dirty ones, and he demanded that his tefillin be returned to him.
Three of us showed him our tefillin, but Lukin said that he “forgot” to take his tefillin and left them at home...
When the robbed, pious Merilender stopped screaming, he himself began to laugh heartily at the trick that the Kobriner, Lukin, had played on him. And believe me, dear readers, it was really something to laugh about...
When I returned to Bialystok in the summer of 1904, I was immediately busy looking for a job.
A few months after my arrival, I actually got two jobs. But while the four jobs in Łódź - as I noted earlier - lasted from “Esther Fast to Purim”, my Bialystoker jobs were indeed, as the expression goes, “oyf hinerne fislekh” [on shaky ground] from the very beginning.
Both were already doomed...
My first job as a bookkeeper was with a leather commissioner who bought unfinished leather and took it to the “valker”[1] to prepare it for the cobbler. He sent the finished pieces of leather to his customers in Berditshev (or as Sholem Aleichem pronounced it, “Barditshev” - his hometown).
A few weeks later, however, his customers from Berditshev, who usually paid as soon as they received the goods, were a few times late in sending money orders, and he was left penniless. He had nothing left to “dreyen”[2], as merchants call it.
The “valker” couldn't help him because he had no liquid reserves of money either, so [my employer] had to pawn his goods with a usurer. And my Berditshver “balebos”, a sturdy Jew with a short black beard, would have had to go to the usurer and pay him interest and warehouse rent to get the pledged goods back.
In short, it didn't take long - and his business was over.
Translator's footnotes:
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My second “job” was at a great tailoring and cloth company on the rich residential and commercial street
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“Vashlikover Gas”. The owners of the company were two Jews. One, a “zakroyshtshik” (cutter), was a very tall Jew with a short, thick dark brown beard and glasses. The second, a tailor, was a blond young man. In front of the store was the cloth warehouse, and behind the store was the tailor's workshop. The two partners worked “zakazne” (in English, “made to order”) for the upper “cream of the crop” of Bialystok - the high and mighty, the professionals, high bank officials and military officers who needed civilian (city) clothing.
Everything was noble and fine: a beautiful store. The high intelligentsia came in: Teachers from secondary and commercial schools, bankers, doctors, lawyers and even judges. They all had interesting conversations. But along with the intelligentsia, there were also claimants and plaintiffs: One came to ask for wood and coal, another for the cost of tailoring, a third for cloth, and the owner of the house for rent. [In addition], there were tailors who had accepted commissions.
There was even a Jew who demanded money for cigarettes (in those years many Jews made a secret living by making cigarettes and selling them in large covered boxes to certain customers, deceiving the government).
And if the Jewish cigarette seller didn't get anything, he would cry his heart out...
Once, on a Friday morning, a tailor came in crying that he needed money for his wife to celebrate Shabbat.
But the most interesting demander was the “kazyoner” [government appointed] rabbi, Dr. Mohilever (a grandson of the late Bialystoker rabbi, Reb Shmuel Mohilever, who was one of the first Zionists[1]).
The “balebatim” knew that the rabbi had delivered a suit and a coat
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with instructions to have them mended and pressed. The [finished work] was given to a worker who was to take it back to the high and distinguished customer. However, the worker from the tailor's shop who was supposed to bring the “work” to the rabbi was a drunkard. He pawned the clothes and wasted the money on alcohol. Dr. Mohilever demanded the clothes back or financial compensation and explicitly told the tailors that he would take his claim to court...
More creditors came, and the whole store looked as it did in Sholem Aleichem's “Shimele Soroker”[2]. The door could no longer be closed because of the many claimants. But there was no money to satisfy the creditors. The rich customers of the intelligentsia, who used to dress up in beautiful, elegant clothes, had forgotten that they also had to pay the tailor. I sent out letters in German, Russian and Yiddish, asking the “noble” customers to pay their debts to the tailor. But very few replied, and those who did sent only a tenth of what they owed.
My poor “balebatim” were truly suffocating for lack of the funds they would have needed to turn the tide.
Translator's footnotes:
Concerning Shmuel Mohilver, see https://museum-mohaliver.org.il/zionist-rabbi/ Return
When I walked in one morning, I saw a strange sight: the store was full of people - known and unknown - and the shelves where expensive goods were usually displayed were empty! People were shouting and making noise. The two partners were accusing each other of stealing the goods.
The tailor's sister-in-law, a young brunette of thirty, raised a cry:
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“My dowry, my dowry!” she cried, not knowing, or pretending not to know, that her own brother-in-law had done the “job”...
And one of the tailor's uncles, a tall Jew with a blond beard and glasses, shouted:
“What have you done to my poor niece?” But he immediately received a fiery slap in the face from the brunette young woman for shouting. They scolded and shouted at each other all day, and only parted in the late afternoon. But the tailor remained in the empty store and workshop. He buried his face in his hands and wept bitterly...
The sad end of my two employers in Bialystok and Łódź was just one example of the helpless situation in which thousands of small businesses in the old homeland found themselves.
They lost their existence for lack of small loans. Many of these “melkosobstvenikes,” as the small businessmen were called, did not survive their troubles. They often suffered from illnesses such as nervousness and cancer, from which many died.
Others committed suicide.
During my time, three small factory owners ended their lives: Leybl Ash, Yankel Katz and Yakov Halpern, a prominent Jew from the aristocratic New Town Street.
The first two threw themselves under a moving train, and the third hanged himself.
It was said of him in the city that although he owned a large stone house, he found himself in the tragic situation of not being able to give his wife any money for the household, and had to take his two sons
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out of the [elite secondary school] “realne utshilishtshe”.
(I met the two boys I knew from Yofe's school in New York in early 1905. They knew neither Yiddish nor English and became paperboys. They worked for a newspaper agency and delivered papers to private homes. Their knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, and mathematics, acquired in the “realne” from which only five percent of Jews were accepted, was ultimately of no use to the learned and aristocratically educated boys).
Of course, with the demise of the cloth and tailoring company, I lost my job and had to look for another one. But I searched all day long, for weeks and months, without having a job. All my “work” consisted of walking with a stick in the streets of Pyaskes.
In the nineties and early twentieth century, it was fashionable for young men in my town to walk with a stick, and for women to walk with an umbrella. Not only 'balebatishe' boys, but also [young] workers such as weavers, tanners and tailors carried sticks.
Once I forgot to take my stick. My father shouted at me, “Only a pickpocket goes without a stick. (Because, as we know, for a pickpocket a cane would be a disturbing factor in his “operations in other people's pockets”. After all, it was a “job” that required two empty hands...).
I felt very unhappy walking around idly with nothing to do. I couldn't find a place or peace for myself. I couldn't read either because I couldn't concentrate. Even if I took the courage
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to pick up a book, someone from our house would immediately come to me with a reproach: “Why are you resting on your privilege? You'd better get a job, try to earn some money!”
I managed to read at least half a dozen books, but only in Russian. No Yiddish books were allowed in our home. My father didn't want me to read books in Yiddish, or “jargon,” as he called it. “That's the language of the maids,” he used to say (although he spoke Yiddish himself and wrote letters in Yiddish when he was away from home).
As for Yiddish, I remember that in those years there was great respect for those who didn't speak or know our mother tongue.
A young Jewish man who spoke only Russian considered himself a “yakhsn”, a distinguished man with privileges. And those who had a close relationship with a young man or girl who spoke Russian considered themselves to be “yakhsn number 2”[1]. We often heard naive young people boasting that they had just made the acquaintance of a Russian man or woman.
Once our neighbor's son came to our house and told my sister that the day before he had made the acquaintance of a young Jewish girl who didn't know a word of Yiddish. When my sister pointed out to him that this could not be true, since a Jewish daughter brought up in a Jewish home must understand and speak Yiddish, the enthusiastic “Russian” swore that he was telling the truth.
“I will fall ill,” he cried, “if she can speak a word of Yiddish!”
Translator's footnote:
I had to turn to my real problem: what should I do, or as the famous Russian writer [Nikolay] Chernyshevsky said:
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“Tshto dyelat?” [What is there to do?], or as the “Tano”[1] says:
מה יהיה התכלית?
[What is the purpose?]
Really, how long was I supposed to walk around idly without a penny in my pocket, begging my mother for a “pyatak” (five kopecks) for a pack of cigarettes? (Unlike today, I smoked then). Was there really no prospect of a job? What should I do?
I thought about learning a trade - weaving, tanning or tailoring. When I mentioned this to my father, he reacted very angrily. “Staytsh!” [what'a all this about], he shouted, “so the son of Yoshe Hindes is to become a “veberik”[2] or a “shneyderik”[2] ?!” (This is what factory owners called skilled workers).
Although my father's business was going downhill, as I mentioned earlier, he was left with an empty pride. And it was the same with all the other factory owners, who often ran around to borrow a “dreyerl”[3] for Shabbat, a “finferl”[3] for Purim, or a “25ker” [3] for Passover.
Both large and small cloth and “shody” manufacturers considered themselves the “top of the pestle” and looked down on anyone who did not belong to the “branch” of manufacturers - even the rich forest and grain merchants and the “professionals”, such as doctors, lawyers, teachers, and all educated people in general.
Translator's footnotes:
Assuming that I wouldn't get a job or learn a trade, the question arose as to what I should do. The situation at home was very tense. A Russian proverb says: “Ot pradnosti roditsa mnogo gorya i stira” [From idleness comes much sorrow and shame]. And I actually experienced this. As I walked down the street, I thought that every neighbor I knew pointed a finger at me
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and growled “A balebatical idler”, a loafer with “stones in his sleeves” (the latter expression was used to describe anyone who couldn't get a job or other employment). On top of that, the matchmakers made my life a misery.
As soon as these matchmakers became aware of a young man who had been released (from conscription), a parade of them marched to the young man's house.
What did they, these “lekishevate” [ignorant] Jews, want from me?
How could I think of something like a match when I didn't even earn a kopeck?
But they just came.
Finally, whether they achieved anything or not, they were entertained as guests - with a glass of tea and a snack.
They were simply unbearable.
One day a middle-aged Jew with a broad, gray beard came to our house to arrange a marriage for me with the daughter of a “melamed”[1]. My father didn't like this matchmaking at all.
“You want me to have a melamed as the father of my daughter-in-law?” he snapped and became angry.
The matchmaker tried to defend himself.
“He teaches bridegrooms,” he tried to calm my enraged father.
“But he's still a melamed!” my proud father huffed angrily. He wanted to throw the incompetent man out, but he held back. Instead, he grabbed his winter coat and left the house. Unfortunately, the naive Jew couldn't understand why my father was so angry about a [possible] marriage contract with a melamed...
Translator's footnote:
The situation in Bialystok was very tense. Terrorists resumed their activities. One morning
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in October 1904, the anarchist Notke from Vashlikover Street, a cross-eyed but strong blond lad of twenty, together with his comrade, threw a bomb into the police station. The bomb exploded in the wrong direction and both comrades were killed.
The police went wild with rage against the Jewish proletarians and intelligent people. In the middle of the night they raided hundreds of houses and arrested innocent young people. Agents of the “Okhranke” [secret police] and policemen stood on the corners of the main streets, chasing anyone they suspected of taking part in the terrorist actions.
In short, life became unbearable. Every young man and woman had one foot in jail. And for me, there was only one way out: America. And as soon as possible.
Like all mothers, my mother regretted that I was leaving home forever. But in the end she was happy that I would leave the city and Russia, because she was afraid that I would end up in the hands of the police, like her cousin's son, Yankl Fisher, the son of Kive the broker. Yankl was innocently arrested and his father had a heart attack from all the grief and died a few days later.
The only one in my family who was unhappy and against my decision to leave was my father. He had the desire and ambition to make me a “fifteen-hundred-ruble young man,” that is, a young man who would receive a fifteen-hundred-ruble dowry. But, as the saying goes, “necessity breaks iron.”
My only choice, to free myself from my unbearable situation and go to America, thwarted my father's proud ambitions...and I did go.
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On a cool spring evening in 1905, a week or two after Passover, I was already standing far from the city center next to the “polyester train“[1], surrounded by my family, relatives and neighbors, who asked me to send greetings to their relatives, to ask them on their behalf to send them support, or if possible, to take them over to the new country.
And as we stood there, talking with great anxiety about my future in America, suddenly Alter, the “agent”, a slender Jew in his late thirties with a close-cropped blond beard, joined us and said in an almost commanding tone:
“It's about time!”
And as is the way, we immediately started kissing, crying, kissing again and crying again...
“Don't forget us!”
my mother begged, wiping away her tears. Five minutes later, I was already sitting in a long wagon with three other passengers going in the same direction as me - to America.
The sun was setting as the “haul” with its four passengers began its long, sad journey. For the next three miles to the closest village, through fields and forests, the setting sun accompanied us - as a huge, red “ball of fire”. At times the red ball would hide behind the floating dark clouds, only to appear and disappear again until it finally disappeared completely. And the “train” with the four frightened emigrants drove off into the silent, dark night...
We didn't talk. The agents strictly forbade us to speak so as not to attract the attention of the police. The other three had to be very careful because they were
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refugees from the Russo-Japanese War, which was still going on, although it was already in its final stages. It was impossible to sleep through the night. The wagon was shaking.
Sometimes I would fall asleep, then wake up, and it would go on like that all night. And as I fell asleep and woke up again, the images I had seen on the Pyaskes in my earliest childhood years unfolded before my eyes.
I saw in front of me the mile-long green field across from our house (even before the “Argentinean roads” were built). The field extended into the forest - the forest where we schoolboys played, danced, jumped, picked stone fruits and sang various folk songs in the summer months after Shabbat dinner. There, our friend Shimen, a ten-year-old boy with a full face and freckles, sang in his hoarse voice, half Yiddish and half Hebrew:
“I was walking in the forest, walking;
I heard, heard the voice of a bird,
Singing ro-ro
And I am not responsible and I am not bad”.
Another black-eyed boy there sang a touching love song he had heard at the maid's house:
“When I remember you, my sweet lover, I sit and mourn and weep” ....
In the same forest I also “saw” the “Green Alley” where thousands of young Jewish boys and girls from the Pyaskes and Khanaykes went for a walk or sat around a burning campfire in the evening and sang those pleasant, heartfelt Jewish and Russian folk songs, but also proletarian songs, like:
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“Sleep my child, keep sleeping
I will sing you a song,
When you get older,
You will know the difference.“[2]
And another lullaby by H.D. Nomberg:
“There are black clouds running and chasing,
And a wind is blowing;
Your father sends you greetings from Siberia, my child.”[3]
And also the well-known Bundist song:
“Long live in Russia, Lithuania and Poland
the Jewish Workers' League!” (and so on).
And I had the feeling that I was hearing the Yiddish folk song again:
“Flicker, fire, flicker,
Crackle merrily for us”[4].
Likewise, the Russian folk songs [sounded in my inner ear]; and I also felt as if I were hearing the Zionist songs, sung with great enthusiasm, like the “Hatikva” - and also the Yiddish peasant song [“The Song of Bread”]:
“Almighty God, we sing hymns,
You alone are our help.
Gather the sheaves, brothers,
Until the sun goes down;
Gather the sheaves, brothers,
Until the sun goes down!”[5]
And so the long, sad, monotonous journey to the border towns dragged on. The night was completely dark. There was not a single star in the sky.
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In some places the sky looked cloudy - a sign of rain... It was impossible to sleep, but to stay awake, the darkness made it impossible to see the fields and forests or the rivers we passed. Unable to fall asleep, I stayed awake with my eyes closed...
And again I saw the images from the distant past. There I see and hear a group sitting around a campfire singing the gypsy song:
“Moy kostyor v tumanye svyetit, iskry gasnut na lyetu”.[6]
And again I “see” the forest with the fenced park, with “Tsertl's Buffet”, with the open “scene” where we were shown the first “moving pictures” in 1902 or 1903, (then called “b-i-o-s-k-o-p”), and where we also had a colored couple perform for the first time. Pregnant women didn't want to look at the black people because they were afraid that, God forbid, they would give birth to black children.
In the same park I also “saw” the huge gray wooden stage where I heard such interesting operas as “Faust”, “La Traviata”, “Les Huguenots”, the Polish opera “Galka”, the German opera “Der Vogelhändler”, the Jewish historical drama “Uriel Akosta”, Gogol's “The Government Inspector” and other interesting performances.
In the second theater I saw a strange ballet: cooks danced with [female] cooks, soldiers with maids, colonels with their wives, middle-aged aristocrats with their aristocratic wives, merchants with their wives, professors with teachers, and actors with actresses. Everyone was dressed in appropriate costumes and expressed their individual facial expressions. What more do you want? Anyway, there was something to see!...
Translator's footnotes:
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My Childhood Years in the Pyaskes
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