Why Heisherik was Born

In my first years at the Warsaw Yiddish Writers' Club, I became known as an editor of manuscripts. Working as a proofreader for the Literarishe Bleter, I had published a few stories and reviews and had edited a book or two for the Kletzkin Publishing Company. They paid pennies, but I could live on pennies. I was a boarder in a private apartment where the rent was cheap, and I had no need for clothes; year in and year out, my clothes lasted. I had still (continued on page 212)Why Heisherik was Born(continued from page 155) not found my way as a writer, and I spent most of my time with beginners like myself.

One day, at the writers' club, the hostess told me that someone was asking for me. I went to the door and saw a little man with a black beard, dressed in shabby clothes and patched boots. He looked to me like a street peddler. He carried a large package tied with much-knotted string. He said this bundle was his manuscript; he had written a book. Someone had told him that I could edit Yiddish writing.

I had to persuade the hostess to let the man in. Strangers were forbidden entrance. After some hesitation, she allowed him to join me for 15 minutes. I sat with him, and he slowly unbound the knots on his package. His manuscript contained at least 1000 scrawled sheets. I could see immediately that he could neither spell nor punctuate.

He told me that he had served in the Polish army in 1919 and 1920, in the time of the Polish-Bolshevist war. He marched with the army until Kiev, and then he ran back from Kiev to the Vistula, chased by the Red Army. The Reds had been about to take the whole of Poland, but at the famous battle of the Vistula, Pilsudski's army managed to stop the Bolshevist attack. The man told me that he was a pious Jew, that in all those battles he had never missed a prayer or eaten anything that wasn't kosher. Whenever his division came into a town where Jews lived, he went to the synagogue or the study house to pray in a quorum. He also attended the ritual bath for men, even though the water was always cold.

The Christian soldiers mocked him, called him names and played mischievous tricks on him. His decision to eat only kosher food bordered on the impossible. Sometimes, he had to fast for days or live on only a dry slice of bread. He was running and starving. He had to eat with the other soldiers, and the smell of their soups and meats made him almost insane. Some of the soldiers tried to push a piece of pork into his mouth. They laid him out spread-eagled and tried to pry open his jaws to thrust strips of bacon into his mouth; but he struggled with all his might, and after a while, they let him go. A miracle happened to him. There was a Catholic priest in his company who defended him. Not one miracle but a thousand happened to him. Bullets flew over his head; near him people lost hands and legs, their lives as well; but somehow, he remained alive.

"I describe it all in this volume," he said. "I want Jews to read this and to know there is a God in heaven. I went to some newspapers and publishers, and they all told me I'm in need of an editor. My spelling seems to be not quite right. I have great difficulties with the Hebrew words. I have studied in the heder the Pentateuch with Rashi, even the beginning of Gemara, but my father—he should intercede for me—died of typhoid fever, and my mother could not pay the tuition. She became sick with consumption, and I had to peddle merchandise behind the city markets to provide for my brothers and sisters. Every day was a struggle to bring home a few groschen. From this alone, one could write a thick book. Already then the miracles began to happen to me. Later, when I became a soldier and lay in the trenches where the Angel of Death appeared constantly, I vowed that if I had the merit to survive this slaughter, I would describe all of it in a book so that people should know that Providence takes score of all human beings each minute and each second. I kept a little book of Psalms in my bosom pocket, and by the light of the bursting shrapnel, I used to recite a passage or two in the trench."

I said, "You didn't write your name on the manuscript. What's your name?"

"Heisherik. Moishe Groinam Heisherik. The gentiles, the bigoted ones, made fun of my name, but a name is a name."

"How do you make a living?" I asked.

"I buy up tripe—entrails, liver, kidneys—in the slaughterhouses as well as in the kosher butcher shops, and I sell it to soup kitchens. This is hard work but, thank God, I have a wife with seven children, and they need to eat. In the day, I have no time; but at dawn, I wake up and I write. How much will you charge me to go over my manuscript?"

I knew quite well that I would have to rewrite the entire book. Not only couldn't he spell but he had no notion of sentence structure. After each three words, he put a period, an exclamation point or three dashes. For no reason, he put quotation marks around words. Some of his smearings and smudges I could never hope to decipher. The truth is, I should not have squandered my time on such works if I wanted to become a writer myself; but for some reason, I was overcome with compassion for this schlemiel who had suffered so much and had remained faithful to his Jewishness.

I offered him a rate that was cheaper than cheap, but he winced and began to bargain and haggle with me. He called the pittance that I had asked for a fortune. He began to scold me and to scream.

"You sit here in this luxurious salon without a hat, without side locks, your beard shaved, and you try to rob a poor writer. Where shall I get so much money? Every groschen I make comes out of the marrow of my bones. I would have to take away the last bit of food from my children to pay you such sums. God punishes for exploitation. Who do you think I am—Rothschild? I live in a single cellar room with my whole family. Every month, when I pay rent, it is a miracle, like the splitting of the Red Sea."

The man's voice became louder and shriller. A few young writers stopped to listen and to mock. I became so embarrassed that I said, "In that case, I will correct your manuscript with no payment at all."

"I don't ask you to do it for nothing. I'm not a schnorrer, God forbid. When this memoir is completed, all the newspapers will compete to publish it, and I'll pay you for your efforts—but you must give me a deadline on when you'll finish it. I cannot leave the manuscript without completing arrangements. I don't have a copy. If you lose some of it, God forbid, it will be a catastrophe. You must guard it like the apple of your eye."

For a while, we remained silent. I could see that besides his piety, Heisherik had a lot of chutzpah. I knew quite well that no matter how good a job I did, no paper would publish it. The Polish-Bolshevist war was already remote. I could see from thumbing through the manuscript that there was no tension to attract a simple reader, nor were there descriptions to please a more sophisticated one. I wanted to return his manuscript immediately and tell him to find some other victim but, again, I was swept away by pity. If this creature who had suffered so much for his Jewishness could wake up at dawn and work on his manuscript for hours, why shouldn't I give him some of the time that I spent with gossipers and jokers at the writers' club?

I said to him, "All right, I will do what I can; but I can't give you any guarantees in the event of a fire or some other disaster. According to the Talmud, a person who undertakes to take care of someone's property without reward is not obliged to be responsible in case of theft or loss."

"What? Since it was ordained in heaven that I should write it, God will not allow any evil to happen to it---"

He was about to say more, but the doorkeeper came over and said, "Mister, your fifteen minutes are over. You must leave now."

"What is this, a police station?" Heisherik asked. "I'm a Jew and a writer, and I will not be driven out of here. I have some business with this young man."

"You have to leave right now," the woman insisted.

Heisherik argued for a while. I was in the presence of something I would term religious arrogance. The Talmud has a saying about it: "Insolence helps even in heaven." How else could this little man withstand the hunger, the cold, the mischief that the other soldiers had inflicted on him? I had taken upon myself to do a virtuous deed, and I was resolved to do it as well as I could.

•

Many weeks passed, but Heisherik never showed up. From time to time, I tried to do some editing on the manuscript. I often had to laugh at his writing. This Jew who knew little of Jewish lore was convinced that submerging in the ritual bath on Friday was no less important than the Ten Commandments. He had often risked his life to perform some ritual that a Talmudic scholar would have ignored altogether. Heisherik had actually broken the Talmudic law by endangering his life for such minor rituals. He had been beaten by the corporals and the sergeants. He had been put into a military prison. He could easily have been court-martialed and shot for insubordination. While the nations had waged war with one another for their worldly ambitions, Heisherik had waged war against man's intolerance. When it came to numerous battle descriptions, he used for each the identical cliché: "Blood was flowing like water." Like many of the other soldiers, Heisherik had had no idea of where he was marching and what he was fighting for. Both the Poles and their enemies, the Bolsheviks, were to him the same gentiles whose goal it was to restrain a Jewish soldier from attending religious services on time. I edited some 50 pages, but Heisherik never appeared. He had not left me his address.

One day, when I was sitting in the lounge hall of the writers' club with a few young writers, discussing literature—who had talent and who did not—a young member of the club came over, his face full of laughter, and said, "Isaac, your girlfriend is looking for you."

"My girlfriend?"

"Yes, your girlfriend—a great beauty she is. Piff-paff!"

I went to the entrance hall, and an ugly, shabby woman stood at the door. She was wrapped in a tattered shawl and wore scruffy men's shoes. In each hand, she held a basket covered with rags. She said, "I'm Heisherik's wife."

When she spoke, I saw that she hadn't a tooth in her mouth.

"Yes?" I said. "What can I do for you?"

The woman immediately burst out crying, and her wrinkled face became abominably distorted.

She screeched, "My husband deserted me and left me an abandoned woman without a crumb of bread for my seven swallows. Father in heaven, what shall I do? The little ones are hungry. Woe, what happened to me! Such a misfortune, such a calamity, such an ordeal. What shall I do and where shall I go? Merciful God!"

The woman wailed and wiped her tears with her sleeves. She put down both baskets and pinched her cheeks. The hall was full of writers, young and old, and they all came over. Some gaped; others laughed. I asked the woman, "Where did he go? How can a pious Jew do something like this?"

The woman said, "To the Holy Land."

"To the Holy Land? Do they let Jews in? You have to show a thousand pounds sterling. You also need a foreign passport and a visa," I said.

"What do I know? For weeks, he went around telling everyone he had to go to the land of Israel. I said to him, 'Murderer, what will happen to me and your children?,' but he remained stubborn. A dead saint came to him in a dream and ordered him to go there. I'm only a female and I'm not versed in books. He's a writer, a great man, and I can barely read from the prayer book; but I need to eat and my children are without bread. How can a saint tell a man to desert his wife and children? How can a writer be such a cruel beast?"

The woman howled and clapped her hands as if she were at a funeral.

I said, "I'm sorry, but what do you expect me to do?"

"You work for him—you took his money. He took away the last food from me and his infants and gave it to you."

"My dear woman, he hasn't given me a single groschen."

"He gave you, he gave you. He stuffed you with money and left us naked and starving. God almighty, You see everything. You wait long and Your punishment is severe. Give us back the money that you grabbed from him. This was not money but sweat and blood. People, have pity on us. Don't let my kittens die from hunger."

And she beat her head with both her fists.

The older writers frowned. The younger ones laughed. I said to the woman, "I swear by God and by everything holy to me that I haven't taken from your husband a single groschen."

"You took, you took. People like you overeat and let a mother with her children expire from hunger. The landlord threatens me that he will throw us and our belongings out into the gutter. We owe him three months' rent. A fire should consume him, his fever should jump as high as a roof, and then he will taste my bitterness."

The hostess took the woman by the elbow and tried to push her out, but she would not go. Someone said, "Call the police."

"The police, huh? You call yourselves writers; bandits you are, not writers," Mrs. Heisherik howled.

I put my hand into my pocket and found a bank note there. It was ten zlotys. I gave it to the woman and said, "That's all I have; take it and never come again. I've taken nothing from your husband, and there's no reason for you to create scandals."

The woman snatched the bank note and lifted both her baskets. She uttered a long roster of curses and left, slamming the door. One should not do favors for anyone, the Evil One advised me. From now on, if anyone asks a favor of me, I will tell him to go to hell, I thought. I was hungry and had no money to eat supper that night.

The older writers shrugged their shoulders and went back to their tables, but the younger ones joshed me. One of them said, "Confess: You made her pregnant. We know, we know."

Another one said, "If she sues you, you'll have to pay alimony, like they do in America."

On the way home, I swore to myself that I would cast Heisherik's manuscript into the garbage. But somehow, I could not bring myself to do it. I decided to wait until he came and give it back to him. However, for weeks, his wife came to me at the writers' club—always at the same day, same time—and I had to hand her a ten-zloty note through the aperture in the front door. Each time, she screamed that I had become rich from her husband's advances. My colleagues the younger writers, never missed a performance.

A few months passed and I began to believe that Heisherik's wife would remain deserted forever and I would continue to pay her "alimony" for the rest of my life. But one day, Heisherik returned. I could barely recognize him. He looked sunburned and as swarthy as a gypsy. His clothes were in tatters. A part of his beard had become dirty gray. I asked him how he, a religious Jew, could have left a wife and children without any support, and he said, "I had to do it. A great yearning drew me to the land of Israel, so great that I cannot describe it to you. I felt that if I didn't do it, I would die. The Patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob—and Mother Rachel came to me in my dreams. What I went through could not be written in a thousand books. As a matter of fact, I began to add new sections to the manuscript you hold."

I told him that I would not do any further work on his manuscript, and he said, "When the editors of our newspapers read the new chapters, it will cause a tremendous sensation, and you'll be richly rewarded for all your efforts."

He sat with me for more than an hour and told me all the details of his adventurous wanderings. He walked hundreds of miles on foot. He begged alms. He found a way to smuggle himself into the Holy Land. He slept in fields and deserts, sometimes in city gutters. He walked the length and the width of the Holy Land barefoot. He prostrated himself on all the holy graves, slept in ruins and caves. Snakes bit him. He was attacked by Bedouins and jackals. But the pleasure of breathing the sacred air healed his wounds. Sometimes, weeks passed and all that he had to nurture him was water and prickly plants of the scorched earth.

I knew that he was not lying. I was especially impressed by his story of how he had burned the soles of his feet by walking on the hot sand. It had burned him like blazing coals, and he had had to tear off his shirt and wrap his blistered feet. He did all that to reach a grave of a saint whose name I had never heard. I was so touched by the man's love for the Holy Land that I promised to continue editing his book.

As far as I can remember, I never finished that work. Heisherik began to send fragments to the Yiddish newspapers, and two or three were published in some provincial magazines. The Warsaw editors scolded me for troubling them with this illiterate maniac's ravings, and I had to swear to them that I would never again burden them with such scribblings. Needless to say, I have never received a penny for my efforts.

•

I could finish the story here, but life added an important chapter to the Heisherik story, and I cannot avoid reciting it.

As we know, from September 1939 until the end of World War Two, many families in Nazi-occupied Poland were broken up. Many men managed to escape the part of Poland that Hitler had invaded and found sanctuary in the Soviet-occupied territory. Since there was no postal service between those two regions, an illegal messenger service developed. Those messengers were called holy messengers. They not only risked their lives but also were subjected to the most savage torture when they were caught. Most of them—or, perhaps, all of them—were motivated by a desire to hold the split families together, since no money in the world could have compensated them for their terrible hazard. Eventually, most of them perished.

After the war, I learned that Heisherik had been one of those messengers, and he had been the most diligent of them all. He had finally been caught smuggling letters on the road from Bialystok to Warsaw and had been tortured to death. While Heisherik bothered me with his woebegone tales about the war of 1920 and, later, with his roaming, I often wondered, What is the purpose of this man's life? Why was Heisherik born? But it seems that martyrs, like soldiers, have to be trained for the mission that fate has in store for them. He could never have become a holy messenger without having gone through all the ordeals he had described in his pathetic book and had recited to me at such length. I believe that there must be, somewhere in the universe, an archive in which all human sufferings and acts of self-sacrifice are stored. There could be no divine justice if Heisherik's story did not grace God's infinite library for time eternal.

"Near him people lost hands and legs, their lives as well; but somehow, he remained alive."