Читать книгу Maybe Esther - Katja Petrowskaja, Katja Petrowskaja - Страница 15

He who does not find himself finds that his family will swallow him whole.

—ANCIENT CHINESE PROVERB

Seven generations, said my mother, two hundred years long we have taught deaf-mute children how to speak; my mother always said “we,” although she herself never taught deaf-mute children, she taught history. Surely she couldn’t think that teaching deaf-mutes and teaching history were one and the same profession. The way she described it, we would forever remain captive in this selfless dedication, and even future generations would not be free of the responsibility of the We, the responsibility of teaching others, of living for others, especially for their children. These seven generations sound like the stuff of a fairy tale, as though seven generations were enough to reach eternity, to attain the word.

We have always taught, my mother said, we have all been teachers, and there is no other path for us. She said it with such conviction that it sounded like one of those adages that our country thought tried and true, like “A voice cries in the desert,” or “A prophet is without honor in his own country.”

Her sister, her mother, her grandfather, and all her grandfather’s brothers and sisters, his father, and his father’s father taught deaf-mute children; they founded schools and orphanages and lived under one roof with these children, they shared everything with them. These altruists drew no distinction between their job and their life. My mother loved the word altruist; they were all altruists, she said, and she was sure that she, too, carried this altruistic heritage within her, but I was equally certain that I did not.

When my mother told me how our ancestors spread out across Europe and founded schools for deaf-mutes in Austria-Hungary, in France and Poland, I recalled the passage in the Old Testament, or so I thought, but it was actually in the New Testament: Abraham begat Isaac. Isaac begat Jacob. Jacob begat Judah and his brothers. Judah begat Perez and Zerah with Tamar—and more unfamiliar names. I knew this passage as vaguely as my own genealogy, but it seemed to me that our set of ancestors had no end either. One generation after the other, beyond our line of vision and beyond the horizon of family memory, taught speaking to the deaf-mutes. Do you hear their fervid whispering?

Sh’ma Yisrael, in the morning and the evening, Sh’ma Yisrael, Hear, O Israel, hear me!

The first ancestor we knew by name was Shimon Heller, Simon Geller in Russian. Maybe he was following the call of his Hebrew name; Shimon means “he has heard, the one who has heard from God and is heard by him.” The first disciple who heeded and followed Jesus was named Simon, I thought, although this story had no meaning for my Jewish relatives. My Shimon founded a school for deaf-mute children in Vienna, during the first half of the nineteenth century. He taught children how to speak so that they would be heard; otherwise his brothers in the faith would regard them as mentally ill, because the faculties of understanding and reason, they thought back then, reside in spoken language. To be heard is to belong.

Sound by sound, word by word, day by day, they learned to pray. I had grown up in the family of the Soviet Union sister nations; all were alike, and all had to learn my native tongue, but none had to learn prayers. All belonged to our We. I proudly believed that my ancestors taught the orphans of all nations. For an unacceptably long period of time, I couldn’t imagine what language my relatives spoke back then, what language they taught the children. My cosmopolitan present made me think they had taught the deaf-mute children to speak in all the languages of the world, as though deaf-muteness and orphanhood made for a blank page and the freedom to adopt any language and any history. As I saw it, our Jewishness was deaf-mute, and deaf-muteness was Jewish. This was my history and my heritage, yet it was not me.

Sh’ma Yisrael, hear me Israel, where is Israel?

I sifted through stacks of documents, looking for evidence of us in the old papers and on the Internet. The search command highlighted the word deaf in yellow, as though Google knew that yellow was the color of Jewishness, just as I knew that Google highlighted any searched term in bright yellow. Every story with the yellow deaf became a building block of my past, of my Internet Jewishness. Maybe my people had stepped right out of the Talmud, out of the story of the two deaf-mutes who lived near the rabbi and always followed him into the school where he taught, and sat next to him, observing him attentively and moving their lips along with him. The rabbi prayed for them, and at some point it became apparent that they knew everything the rabbi had taught his students; they had learned everything with their eyes. I tried to follow up on all the other stories with the yellow deaf, reading the passages surrounding the yellow highlightings and expecting these deaf stories to flutter up and take on a life of their own.

At the beginning of the history of my family stood a translation. In 1864, the writer and proponent of Jewish Enlightenment Faivel Goldschmidt wrote an article about Simon Geller and his school in a Lemberg-issued Hebrew newspaper, full of enthusiasm about Simon’s personality and his work. Sixty years later, the text was translated into Russian by Simon’s grandson, Ozjel Krzewin, and another sixty years after that, my mother discovered Ozjel’s translation in an archive in Kiev, together with other documents about my relatives’ schools. However, the Hebrew newspaper with Goldschmidt’s article was no longer traceable. Our family’s heritage is predicated on a questionable translation without a source text, and I am now telling the story of this family in German without there ever having been a Russian original.

My mother said, Always with the pencil, they all learned with the pencil, the point in the mouth of the teacher, the end in the mouth of the child. That wasn’t in Goldschmidt’s article, but my mother knew it. She told me about the pencil, amused by the simple trick, yet somewhat put off by how close the mouths came to each other. The pencil vibrated, and the children noticed how the language originates out of the tongue.

“For every illness, even the most severe, the Lord God sends healing,” Ozjel Krzewin translated the article about his grandfather, as though the latter had been a Jewish holy man. After two years the children could read and write Hebrew and German, and they could read lips fluently. After five years, the article went on to say, Geller’s pupils could speak so clearly that their speech barely differed from those who had been endowed with hearing. They set their heavy tongues in motion and lifted off their vocal burdens. Their prophet Moses had also had an unwieldy mouth and a heavy tongue.

When Shimon was still in Vienna, an adult came into his school. The man’s father had died, but he could not pray, because he was deaf-mute. He wanted to learn to pray in spoken language, and when he was able to, he went to the cemetery to the grave of his father, who had died many years earlier, to say kaddish. Even newspapers reported on this.

Ozjel appended his own name, Krzewin, to the name Geller in the translation. Did he want to highlight the relationship, or was the word already in the original text, an added name that Simon had earned? One Polish friend tells me that people named Krzewin are disseminators of knowledge; another says that krzew means “bush”: maybe your Krzewins planted trees. But the Jews had no land, I thought, they planted their trees in the air. I liked the idea that even the name of my ancestors was evidence of this exuberant urge to learn. I leafed through The History of Judaism, six volumes, The History of the Eastern European Jewry, two volumes, The History of the Jews, one volume. I walked back and forth at the Judaica shelves of the library.

I did not find a Simon Geller in the many thick books about Vienna and its institutions for the deaf and mute. The definitive text on the subject, The General Austrian Israelite Deaf-Mute Institute in Vienna, 1844–1926, had a Simon Heller for the time period of our Heller or Geller, but he was the director of an institute for the blind. That has to be him, said the lady in the archive; in the small world of pedagogy for disabled students there can only have been one Simon Heller.

The school started in Vienna, then made its way through rural Polish areas, through Galicia, like a traveling circus, staying briefly in a city, a town, a shtetl, before Simon moved on with his family, the orphans, and the children who were sent by their parents.

I peered inside and listened, thinking of the many selfless men of the Jewish Enlightenment who were inspired by the idea that to spread learning is to pass it from mouth to mouth. For these people, who were obsessed with hearing, the spoken language was everything. I gesticulated, called out, opened my lips, I tried saying Sh’ma Yisrael, again and again, Sh’ma Yisrael, as though I had never spoken, I shook the air, Sh’ma Yisrael, I wanted so much to be heard, putting my tongue and my language to the test, I tried to tell the stories, to render them in my foreign German, I told the stories, one after the other, but I did not myself hear what I was saying.