Remnants

Nearly All the members of the Yiddish Writers' Club in Warsaw, where I went in the Twenties, considered themselves atheists. Free love was an accepted way of life. The younger generation was convinced that the institution of marriage was obsolete and hypocritical. Many of them had become Marxists and proclaimed something they called ''Jewish worldliness.''

A different kind of writer altogether was Mottele Blendower, a little man, a descendant of famous Hasidic rabbis. He (continued on page 152)Remnants(continued from page 145) had a dark, narrow face, a pointed beard and large black eyes that expressed the gentle humility of generations. He was the author of a book about Hasidic life in Poland. One of Mottele's grandfathers had separated himself from his followers in his later years and had become a sort of divine recluse. After his death, his disciples destroyed his writings, because they hinted at blasphemy. Although Mottele had done away with his long gabardine and his rabbinical hat and had cut off his side locks, he spoke like a rabbi, used their solemn style of language, took on their exaggerated politeness, always on the watch, God forbid, not to insult anybody. Mottele attempted to combine Yiddishist modernism with the lore of the cabala. He undertook to translate into modern Yiddish such mystical works as the Zohar, The Book of Creation, The Tree of Life and The Orchard of Pomegranates. In his essays, he preached that love and sex are attributes of the godhead and that the proper use of them can be a means to penetrate the illusion of the categories of pure reason and to grasp the thing in itself and the absolute.

Sometime after I met him, Mottele had fallen in love with a woman named Zina, who was known for her beauty. She was blonde, tall and the daughter of a rich Warsaw family. One year, she was elected the Queen Esther of the Yiddish literary masked ball. She had married and divorced a rich young man, a lawyer. From her parents, she had inherited a large sum of money that evaporated with inflation. Zina was a distant relative of Mottele's. They had a large, noisy wedding.

Those who knew the bride and the groom foresaw that the match wouldn't last long. Mottele was gentle and weak, while Zina was robust. Her first husband, the lawyer, said openly that his ex-wife was a nymphomaniac. There were rumors in the Writers' Club that she had invited all her former lovers to the wedding. An intimate friend had learned that Zina confessed all her sins to Mottele but he contended that he was not jealous about the past and that he would give her full freedom in the future. Mottele was supposed to have told her, ''The roots of both of our souls are in the sephira of splendor, and in those spheres, sins are virtues.''

One of Zina's lovers, whom she was supposed to have cared for most, was the writer Benjamin Rashkes. She told Mottele that she could never forget Rashkes. When he was forced to move from his bachelor's furnished room because he had impregnated the maid in his boarding-house, Zina offered him a study in her new, spacious apartment. She put in a sofa, a writing table and even a Yiddish typewriter imported from America so that Rashkes could work there whenever the Muse granted him inspiration. The trouble was that he was less and less inspired to write. He poured all his energies into so many would-be love affairs that he had no time for anything else.

There was constant talk in the Writers' Club about the triangle of Mottele, Zina and Rashkes. Even though Rashkes promised Zina to avoid the Writers' Club and do his work, he came to the club every day and spent all the time on the telephone. Closing the door of the phone booth, he went on whispering his unending love declarations. Rashkes maintained that monogamy had destroyed eroticism. Men and women are not jealous by nature; the only thing they dislike is to be deceived. Also, they prefer the truth to come to them in small portions and as a part of the love-play. Rashkes was telling his colleagues that many men enjoy sharing their wives with the right kind of lovers and that his ideas were based on his personal experience. The husbands of his paramours were all his friends and admirers, he said. They often reproached him for neglecting their wives. Rashkes claimed that he kept peace between his lovers and their husbands.

A year did not pass before the gossips in the Writers' Club had a new sensation to talk about. Zina had become seriously enamored of a known Communist leader, Leon Poznik. The Trotsky purges had been in progress in Russia for some time, but Poznik remained an ardent Stalinist. He was the editor of two Communist magazines; one in Polish and one in Yiddish. The Defensywa, the Polish political police, had arrested Poznik a number of times, but they always released him. They were not interested in keeping the leftist leaders in prison too long. Poland was officially a democracy. One could not jail people on the basis of their convictions. Besides, the leaders of the Defensywa did not want to root out communism in Poland and put themselves out of jobs. As for Poznik, he needed those short imprisonments to add to his prestige in the party and in the Soviet Union. He boasted about his courage during the interrogations, describing how well he lectured to the Polish fascists about Leninism. However, the comrades called him, jokingly, the ''Polish Lunacharsky''--a Communist of talk, not of deeds.

Poznik was broad-shouldered, small and wore shoes with elevated soles and heels. His eyes, behind the horn-rimmed glasses with their thick lenses, seemed to sparkle with a light of their own. I often imagined that all the victories of world communism shone through those glasses.

That Zina should fall in love with Poznik seemed unbelievable. He had a wife, a Communist functionary who had been sentenced to five years in prison. He bragged about his affair with an important woman in Moscow, where he was invited every few months. Besides, Zina had never shown any interest in politics. She had been at one time a disciple of the celebrated medium Kluski, who specialized in materializing spirits of the dead. It was her fascination with the occult that initially attracted her to Mottele. But who can fathom the ways of love? It became known in the Writers' Club that Zina now took part in all of Warsaw's leftist activities. The leftists published interviews with her in their magazines. She put on a leather jacket, the kind worn by the functionaries of the Cheka, the Soviet political police. She sold her jewelry for the support of political prisoners. Zina had revealed to someone that the Defensywa had summoned her for an interrogation and that she had been kept overnight in the arrest house on Danilowiczowska Street where suspects were held. There was a saying in the Writers' Club that communism was like influenza; everybody had to go through it sooner or later.

In the spring of 1927, Poznik and Zina left for Russia. They disappeared suddenly, without any notice to anybody in the club. I was told that not even their comrades were informed. Neither Poznik nor Zina could have acquired a foreign passport. Those who were invited to the Soviet Union had to smuggle their way across the border at the town of Nieswiez. For a long time, one heard nothing in the Writers' Club about Poznik or Zina. Then the rumor spread that Leon Poznik had been arrested in the U.S.S.R. and put into the infamous Lubyanka prison. Rashkes had received a single Yiddish postcard from Zina with an altered name--he recognized only the handwriting. She used the conspiratorial code language: ''Uncle Leon is mortally sick and they put him into the Lubya hospital. The doctors give scanty hopes.'' She signed the card, ''Your despairing Aunt Charatah,'' which is the Hebrew word for regret. Later, it came out that in Kharkov, a Yiddish magazine had published an attack on an anthology Poznik had edited two years earlier. The (continued on page 308)Remnants(continued from page 152) writer of the article, a Comrade Dameshek, had discovered in Poznik's introduction to the book traces of Trotskyism.

•

Not long after Poznik and Zina left, the news spread in the Writers' Club that Mottele Blendower had become a penitent--not of the modern type that compromises Jewishness with worldliness but one who returned to extreme orthodoxy. He grew his beard and his side locks, exchanged his modern clothes for a long robe, and one could see his fringed garment hanging down from behind his vest. He published a letter in the orthodox daily condemning all his former writings as heresy and poison for the soul. He forbade all the Yiddish dramatic circles to use his play and sent back his membership card to the Writers' Club. The owner of a Yiddish bookstore made it known that Mottele had bought from him all the copies of his book, spat on them and threw them into the garbage. Rashkes had gone to Mottele's apartment to get back some of his manuscripts, but Mottele told him that he had thrown them into the stove. Mottele's marriage to Zina was annulled and he was allowed to remarry after collecting the signatures of 100 rabbis. It was published in the Yiddish orthodox newspaper that Reb Mottele had married a pious Jewish daughter, a descendant of renowned rabbis, and had become the head of a Yeshiva. The curious in the Writers' Club found out that his new wife was an 18-year-old girl who, according to the Hasidic law and custom, had shaved her head the day after the wedding and had put on a bonnet, like a rebbitzen. Mottele had changed his telephone number so that heretics and mockers could not contact him. Once, when I met him in the street, I greeted him, but he turned his head away. It was hard for me to believe that only a year ago, Mottele had spoken with me about Kant, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Ouspensky. Previously, he had been inclined toward Zionism. Now he called the Zionists betrayers of the Jews.

One winter evening, perhaps two years later, I received a telephone call at the furnished room I rented. I could not recognize the woman's voice until she told me that she was Zina. I had never been one of her friends--I used to greet her in the Writers' Club, but we seldom spoke. Now she spoke to me as if I were an old friend. She told me that she had smuggled her way back to Poland. While in Russia, she had learned that Mottele had remarried. Here in Warsaw, she had tried to call Rashkes, but it seemed he had moved out of the room where he boarded lately. She had asked for his address in the Writers' Club, but no one knew it. She expected me to know Rashkes' whereabouts, but I couldn't help her. Zina's voice had changed. It sounded hoarse and old. She asked me if I could meet her in the street, at the corner of Solna and Leszno. I told her that I was afraid to be seen with her, because I might be arrested.

Zina assured me that the Polish authorities knew that she had escaped from Russia and there was no danger for me to be seen with her. She said, ''My dear, I'm not the same Zina. My own mother wouldn't recognize me if she were alive. I lost everything in the Red Gehenna--my beauty, my faith in the human race. A living corpse is speaking to you.''

I let myself be persuaded and went out to meet her. A mixture of snow and rain had fallen. An icy wind was blowing. At the corner of Leszno and Solna, I saw Zina. I would never have known it was she. She looked emaciated and aged. Her hair had turned dark and was disheveled and stringy. She had on a gray padded jacket--the kind market vendors wore. She extended her moist hand and said, ''I'm hungry and half-frozen. I haven't slept for three nights. When we went to Russia, I left all my clothes in the apartment I had with Mottele. I tried to recover them, but his wife slammed the door in my face. The little money I had, I spent on telephone calls, but none of my former friends seem to be home. Where is Rashkes? Where is he hiding? They all run from me like from a leper. You won't believe it--the receptionist at the club didn't let me in. Well, I deserve it all.''

Zina spoke and coughed. She spat into something that looked like a dirty napkin. She said, ''My lungs are sick. I suffer from consumption or God knows what.''

''What did they have against Poznik in Russia?'' I asked. ''He subscribed to all their lies.''

''What do they have against anybody? They swallow one another like wild animals. Have pity on me and take me somewhere where it is warm.''

After some hesitation, I took her to a café on Leszno 36. The waitress frowned when she saw Zina. I ordered tomato soup for her and a glass of tea for myself. Zina had abandoned all manners. She dunked the bread in the tomato soup. She spoke loudly, and the patrons around us winced. She tilted the bowl, drank the last of the soup and said, ''I don't recognize Warsaw. I don't even recognize myself. What I went through from the day they arrested Poznik until now cannot be described. I literally lived in the streets. I hoped they would imprison me just to have a roof over my head. But when a luckless person wants something, the very opposite happens. I told them in clear words, 'You are murderers, not socialists, worse than fascists. Your Stalin is a criminal.' They just laughed. They were even unwilling to commit me to an insane asylum. When I crossed the border on the way back to Poland, they let me go without asking for documents. ...''

Zina began to cough again. She took out the dirty napkin and blew her nose. ''Don't gape at me,'' she said. ''It's me--Zina, the ball queen of the Yiddish Writers' Club, the crowned Queen Esther. Woe to me!''

She smiled and, for a second, her face looked young and beautiful once more.

•

Years passed. I had left Warsaw and gone to the United States. The Hitler war broke out, and then the atomic bomb came and afterward the peace. Between 1945 and 1950, we found out, more or less, who remained alive in Europe. I had heard that Poznik had died in prison in Moscow even before the war began. Others said that he had been sent to dig for gold in the north and that he died there from starvation. As far as I knew, both Mottele and Zina had perished in Poland.

In the fall of 1954, I made my first trip to Israel. There I got more details about those who had vanished in the ghettos, in the concentration camps or in Russia. I heard gruesome facts about my own family. One day, in my Tel Aviv hotel, I was trying to read a book by the dim light that filtered through the shutters of the window. I had closed them for protection against the thin desert sand that would be carried in by the hot khamsin wind.

Someone knocked at my door. I had already become accustomed to unannounced visitors, since the telephone was seldom functioning. I opened the door and saw a little man with a white beard, dressed in a rabbinical hat, and beside him a tall woman in a wig covered with a shawl, her face golden from the khamsin sand. I looked at the couple and thought that they must be a pair of schnorrers out to collect alms for some cause. I noticed that the woman carried a box in one hand and an umbrella in the other. She looked me over from head to toe and said, ''Yes, it's him!''

''May I know with whom I have the honor?'' I asked.

''Little honor,'' she answered. ''My name is Zina, and this is my husband, Mottele Blendower. Don't be afraid; we didn't come from the grave to strangle you.''

I should have been shocked, but since I had undertaken this journey, I had become used to the most astonishing encounters. The little man said, ''A surprise, heh? Yes, we are alive. I know that I was counted among the dead. They even published my obituary here, but I'm still in this world. Zina and I met in Lublin in 1948. My other wife and my children were killed in the ghetto, and what happened to me is a story of a thousand and one nights. We came here to the Jewish state only two months ago.''

''Come in. Come in. This is really a startling event,'' I mumbled. Zina immediately crossed the threshold and, after some hesitation, Mottele followed.

He asked, ''Why do you sit in the dark? Because of the khamsin? I have experienced all kinds of storm winds, but a hot, sandy wind like this I see for the first time. The winds in Russia are always cold, even in the summer.''

''Everything there is cold,'' Zina said. ''In 1939, when the war began and the Polish radio announced that all men should cross the Praga bridge and run in the direction of Bialystok, I went with them--first to Bialystok and later to Vilna, which belonged to Russia. I was sure that the Communists would know my record and send me to Siberia or to the wall of the firing squad; but somehow, no one paid any attention to me. What I endured in the Red paradise for the second time is not something to talk about now. I survived the siege of Leningrad and later found myself in the Caucasus Mountains, among Persian Jews. They had been there for the past two thousand years and spoke a mixture of Parsee, Hebrew and Russian. In 1945, all the refugees attempted to return to Poland or reach the DP camps in Germany, but I said to myself, 'Since Poland is nothing more than one big cemetery, what is the rush?' But I became deadly sick with asthma. When I finally reached Warsaw, I walked among the ruins like that prophet--what was his name?--Jeremiah. I saw a young man there digging up the earth with a spade. I asked him what he was trying to find and he told me, 'Myself.' He was not exactly mad, but queer. Later, I met some of our former Communists who used to visit the Writers' Club. They had lost everything but their chutzpah. From there, I made my way to Lublin. One day, as I walked on Lewertow Street, I saw this helpless creature, my former husband. He had also managed to stay alive; isn't that funny?''

''Why are you standing?'' I asked. ''Sit down, both of you. I don't have any refreshments. ...''

''What? We didn't come for refreshments,'' Mottele said. ''We came to see you. You don't look much older. We followed your work, even in Russia. In Poland, I found a book of yours. As you can see, my beard is all white. You must be wondering how we can be together again after what happened between us. The answer is that the signatures of a hundred rabbis cannot really annul the spirit of a marriage. Anyhow, our reencounter was an act of providence. There is a lot in the Zohar about naked souls, and we two are naked souls.''

''Why do you stare so at my wig?'' Zina asked me. ''This was Mottele's condition, that I should put on a wig and behave like a pious matron. I told him openly that I don't believe in anything anymore. But since this was his will, I gave in. What is a wig? Just some hair from a corpse. The truth is that I'm almost left without hair. I got typhoid fever while in Leningrad and became bald. I read somewhere that hair grows even on the heads of the dead in their graves. But my hair won't grow. This means that I'm worse than dead.''

''Zina, don't exaggerate,'' Mottele said.

''What? I don't need to exaggerate. The truth is weird enough.''

''Where do you two live?'' I asked.

Mottele grabbed his beard. ''Promise me that you won't laugh at me and I will tell you.''

''I will not laugh.''

''They made me a rabbi,'' he said.

''Nothing to laugh at. You are a son and a grandson of rabbis.''

''Yes, yes, yes. We came here without a penny. The Joint Distribution Committee paid our expenses. Someone announced in the newspapers that I was alive. There are quite a number of my father's Hasidim here, and they all came to me--from Tel Aviv, from Jerusalem, from Safad, even from Haifa, though Haifa is known as a town of radicals. They began to call me rabbi immediately. 'What sort of a rabbi am I?' I said to them. 'And what about Zina?' But they answered me, 'You are a child from our school. You are the image of your saintly father.' I will make it short: I became a rabbi and she a rebbitzen right here in Tel Aviv.''

''In my eyes, you are more of a rabbi than all the others,'' I said.

''Thank you. Jews come to me on the Sabbath, we eat at the table and I recite Torah. What is there left to preach to them? Nothing but silence. They rented an apartment for us and they provide for us. What could I do here? I lost my strength. They offered me compensation money from Germany, but this money to me is an abomination.''

For a while, we were silent. Outside, the wind howled, cried, laughed, like a bevy of jackals. Zina said, ''Don't be amazed that I wear make-up. I know that it does not suit a rebbitzen. But I suffer from eczema. A man can let his beard grow and cover his cheeks. Everything shows on a woman. In a wind like this, my face swells up.''

We were silent again for a long while. Then Zina said, ''Guess what I have in this box?''

''Zinele, he's a writer,'' Mottele said, ''not a mind reader. Tell him what is there.''

''Rashkes' unfinished novel,'' Zina said.

''Yes, I understand.''

''No, you don't. That day in September when the Warsaw radio ordered all men to run to Russia, I went over to Rashkes and tried to persuade him that we should go together. But he refused. He was as pale as death. The first day of Rosh Hashana, he lay down on the bed and never wanted to get up again. From all his admirers, only one woman remained faithful to him--Molly Spitz, a bad writer, a psychopath.''

''I knew Molly Spitz,'' I said. ''She used to come to the Writers' Club.''

''Yes, she.''

''I didn't know she was Rashkes' lover,'' I said.

''Who wasn't his lover?'' Zina asked. ''He ran after all women between fifteen and eighty. When the war broke out, they all forgot him--but Molly Spitz, that monkey, remained with him. The truth is that a Nazi bomb had exploded in the house where she lived and she was homeless. I had finished with him once and for all; still, I tried to save him. I pleaded with him, but he said, 'Zinele, go wherever you want. I have lived my life and this is the end.' He told me to open a drawer, and there I found what I am carrying now. He said to me, 'Take it if you insist. The Nazis don't need my writings. Neither do the Reds. They can use these pages for cigarette paper.' These were his last words.''

''You carried it for all these years?'' I asked.

''Wherever I went--to Bialystok, to Vilna, to Leningrad. This is not just a novel. This is the story of our great love. I tried to get it published in Vilna, but they had all become flatterers of Stalin. The mountain Jews in the Caucasus didn't know Yiddish. Here is his novel. I dragged it with me over all the frontiers, all the ruins. I lay with it in cold railroad stations. I took it with me to the hospital when I got typhoid fever. When I met Mottele in Lublin, I gave it to him to read and he said, 'It's a masterpiece.' ''

Mottele slowly lifted up his head. ''Forgive me, Zina; I never said this.''

''Yes, you did. It was your idea that I should bring the novel to him,'' Zina said, pointing at me. ''Now that we are in the land of Israel, I want to publish it. I want you to write an introduction to it. This, too, was Mottele's idea.''

Mottele shrugged. ''All I said was that he knew Rashkes better than the others did.''

That day, I promised Zina to read the novel and write an introduction. The night after, I lay awake until three o'clock and I read the entire manuscript. I was reading and sighing. From time to time, I slapped my forehead. I had always considered Rashkes a genuine talent. But what I read that night was the worst kind of mishmash. Had he become prematurely senile? Had he forgotten the Yiddish language? The protagonist of this novel was not Zina but a man who indulged in drawn-out polemics with the Warsaw Yiddish critics in tedious pseudo-Freudian analysis, misquoting all sorts of writers, philosophers and politicians. I never would have believed that Rashkes was capable of writing this bewildering hodgepodge if I had not recognized his handwriting. He had even forgotten how to spell. Rashkes had a reputation for to spell. Rashkes had a reputation for being a humorist, but there was not a trace of wit in this pathetic monolog.

A few days later, Mottele called me, and I told him what I thought of Rashkes' last work. He began to stammer, ''I never praised it. I said one thing and she heard the opposite. If Hitler could hypnotize Germany and Stalin Russia, something is the matter with the human race altogether. Zina is sick. She was twice operated on for cancer. They cut off her left breast. I cannot tell her the truth about Rashkes. She will soon have to go to the hospital again. I myself suffer from angina pectoris. I shouldn't have visited you in that sandstorm, but she actually dragged me. What can I tell her about your introduction? Please find some excuse for declining.''

''Tell her that I will send her the introduction from America.''

''Yes, a good idea. There is great wisdom in delaying things. I would like to meet you alone, without her.''

I made an appointment with Mottele, but a day before we were to meet, someone called me on the telephone and told me that Mottele and Zina had both been taken to the hospital. The man introduced himself as one of Mottele's Hasidim and an ardent reader of mine.

He said to me, ''This may sound to you like a contradiction, huh? However, after Treblinka, one should not ask any questions.''--Translated by the author and Lester Goran

''There were rumors that she had invited all her former lovers to the wedding.''

''Mottele's marriage to Zina was annulled and his new wife was an 18-year-old girl.''