Читать книгу A Paler Shade of Red: Memoirs of a Radical - W. E. Gutman - Страница 20

KABBALAH AND BOILED POTATOES

Nothing turns common folk into polyglots like war, annexation, colonization, deportation, expatriation. Born in the northern Transylvanian town of Sighet, a province claimed and reclaimed as shifting fortunes redrew Austro-Hungary’s map, my father had mastered Romanian and Hungarian by the age of six -- not counting Yiddish, spoken at home since birth. He also spoke Hebrew, practiced daily in heder and during prayers, and German, taught in public school and widely spoken by an elite minority who deemed the other local idioms to be lacking in refinement.

A gift for languages is the tribute vanquished people pay.

Though he later conquered French and English, it was Yiddish, with its rich blend of Hebrew and medieval German, its earthy sonority, inflections and colorful imagery with which he felt most at ease.

“Yiddish is the language of folk tales told and retold by my father. In it I hear the gentle lullabies sung by my mother as she rocked the children to sleep, the heated arguments, shrewd observations, snappy repartees, the sardonic asides and words of love murmured with such tenderness and grace as to melt every trace of rancor, dry every tear.”

Yiddish has a sound, an aroma, a taste, a feel like no other language. It’s a tongue full of familiar tunes. Every note in its inexhaustible register is a melody. Now spoken by fewer and fewer Jews, Yiddish has a taste for nimble blasphemy:

May your wish come true when you can no longer enjoy it.

Or for bitter reproof:

When one must at all cost sully something, one can sully even God.

If nostalgia tinted many of my father’s memories, he was careful not to wax rhapsodic about his childhood. His father -- my grandfather -- was seldom gainfully employed.

“He had no real trade. He kept a small candle-making business but he was too proud to work. He spent much of his time at the synagogue or immersed in his precious books -- the Torah, the Talmud, the Kabbalah -- or strolling up and down Sighet’s main artery, deep in thought and attired in fine three-piece suits bought on credit and rarely fully paid for. He also kept my mother endlessly pregnant. We were nine in a three-room house -- two adults and seven young hungry mouths to feed, seven growing bodies to clothe, seven pairs of feet constantly in need of shoes, ribbons and petticoats and combs for the girls -- Helen, Malku, Lilli -- new knickers and frocks and prayer shawls for the boys -- Yosi, Leibi, Favish and me.

“We ate lots of potatoes; potato soup for breakfast, potato pancakes, salted or daubed with thin layers of homemade plum preserves at lunch, and we often dined on boiled potatoes, sautéed onions dressed in melted chicken fat and moldy crusts of black bread. Meat was a rare and welcome treat. I don’t remember ever feeling full at the end of a meal. It was a miserable existence.”

Lost in inscrutable mystical abstractions, sustained by rigid Orthodox discipline and endless devotions, my father's father seemed indifferent to his family's plight. My grandmother withstood multiple pregnancies, penury and privations with a stoicism and self-effacement that often made my father weep with anger.

“How can you take it, mama,” he asked, grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her.

“Shh, it’s alright, son, that’s life, you know. We must accept our lot. We’re in God’s hands. But things will be better, you’ll see,” she’d whisper. “Study hard and maybe you can leave all this behind one day.”

It was shortly after his Bar Mitzvah that my father, in a fit of youthful rebellion, cut off his peyot, the curly ear locks that had adorned his temples since childhood, repudiated his mother’s fatalism, rejected predestination, renounced God and began to defy the nearly insurmountable obstacles of youth, indigence and anti-Semitism. It was also at that time that he decided to become a doctor, “to treat humankind’s tangible afflictions and to snatch my family from the clutches of poverty.” My father would later claim that it was not at all a question of indebtedness -- “Children don’t really owe their parents anything, they don’t ask to be born” -- but a rage against life’s Sisyphean absurdity and an acute sensitivity toward the suffering of others. Engaged and combative, incorruptible and iron-willed, he would spend the rest of his life fighting intolerance, denouncing hypocrisy, speaking for the voiceless and defending the weak. These contests would keep him in a perpetual state of frustration. He understood the futility of his principles and often voiced bitter disappointment at the shortcomings of those in whom he had placed his trust. When he died in 1987 at the age of 83, widowed for over fourteen years, he’d become a misanthropic recluse.

*

One day, on his way home from an errand, my father saw a high school senior set upon a small boy, pinning him against the ground, beating him about the face and pulling at his ear locks with such force that the boy shrieked in pain. Taking pleasure in the pain he caused, the bigger boy pulled harder, battering his quarry's head against the cobblestones and spitting at him.

“Filthy little Jew. Kike. Hooknosed piece of shit. That’ll teach you to tread on my sidewalk. I ought to rub your face in a pig’s ass. You and your foul race should be exterminated.”

“I saw red,” my father remembered. “Red and blue and purple, and then I saw nothing as the tears blinded me, and I felt my blood coursing through my body like acid and, even though he was much taller and stronger, I let him have it with a flurry of fists and elbows and feet that stretched him out cold in a pool of his own blood in the gutter near a pile of horse manure.”

“What happened,” my father asked the little boy. “He was eight or nine and shaking like a leaf. I dusted him off and wiped his face with my handkerchief.”

“‘I was hurrying home from heder and going over a difficult passage that Rebe Yanku wants me to memorize. I didn’t see domnu (“sir”) and I knocked into him by mistake.”’

“Well, domnu is out of commission for a while. I don’t think he’ll ever bother you again.”

“You think so,” asked the boy, looking at my father with awe then glancing at his persecutor with a remnant of terror.

“I know so. Now run along. By the way, what’s the passage you’re supposed to learn?”

“Habakkuk, chapter one, verses eight and nine."

“Their horses also are swifter than the leopards and are more fierce than the evening wolves: and their horsemen shall spread themselves, and their horsemen shall come from far; they shall fly as the eagle that hasteth to eat. They shall come all for violence: their faces shall sup up as the east wind, and they shall gather the captivity as the sand.”

“I never forgot the incident or the prophecy,” my father told me, “but it took another fifteen years or so to grasp its oracular surrealism, its apocalyptic significance.”

The next day, the high school principal summoned my father.

“You nearly killed him, Ari.”

“He asked for it.”

“That’s not the point. Meanwhile he’s in the hospital with a broken nose, a dislocated jaw, a busted eardrum and a pair of very swollen balls.”

“So what.”

“It so happens he’s the son of Colonel Petrescu, the military governor. He….”

“Fuck him.”

“… He claims you attacked his son without provocation. He wants you expelled. I’ve no choice. He’s a powerful man. Please understand I’m doing this with great reluctance and sadness. You’re one of my best students. I’ve arranged a transfer to the high school in Cluj. Petrescu would have my head if he knew. You’ll do fine there, that is, if you learn to manage your temper and stop playing paladins.”

“But, sir, you don’t understand....”

Able to convey tenderness and forbearance, my father’s pale blue eyes could also ignite with exasperation. Lies did that to him. Lies or absurd rationalizations, and I knew that few people could withstand his disarming gaze. He would have made a lousy politician. The principal, a decent man, a kind man, according to my father, would not be out-stared.

“No, Ari. Nothing you say will change my mind. I’m sorry. Vindicating a wrong has a way of creating a fresh injustice. Sometimes, it never ends. It’s better to let go. For your own good. Maybe someday we can both look back at this and laugh. Good luck.”

They shook hands.

When my father got home and told his mother what had happened, “she pounded her breast and threw her hands up in the air and looked pleadingly at the ceiling where God can be found when tragedy strikes.”

“Cluj? Cluj,” she lamented, “it’s a world away.”

“A very small world measured in mere kilometers,” my father replied. “Now, look mamale, it’s not a big deal. I’ll come to visit once a month or so, you’ll see. Everything will be fine.”

“But how will you live, where will you live? We don’t know anyone in Cluj. Where will you eat? Who will press your shirts?”

“The principal said there’s a small room in the school‘s attic and I can have it in exchange for doing chores and tutoring slow students. Supper is included.”

“What will Tatale think?”

Tatale, it seems, took the matter with pious fatalism, my father would later claim without a hint of bitterness. “He must have felt relieved to learn that he'd have one fewer mouth to feed.”

If God allows men to deny his existence he’s either an atheist or a myth.

*

Two years later, my father graduated from high school with honors and passed the baccalaureate. He applied and was admitted to Prague’s prestigious School of Medicine. As he had done in high school to support himself, he worked to pay for tuition, books, a closet-like windowless maid’s room that stank of bedbugs, and two skimpy meals a day. The evening collation was generally taken in bed while studying and waiting for sleep to subdue nagging hunger pangs.

A year later, ill at ease with the school’s curriculum -- taught in German to foreign students -- he obtained a transfer to the Faculty of Medicine in Paris and came home to Sighet for the summer.

“In the fall, as I boarded the bus for the train station, tatale offered me a new pair of phylacteries, a skullcap and a fresh prayer shawl. ‘It’s not good to start the day without first calling upon the Lord,’ he said, patting my bare head, an air of studied mortification and pity animating his blue eyes. My mother gave me a bag stuffed with sandwiches, cake and fruit. We hugged. She whispered, ‘it’s not good to pray on an empty stomach....’”

Atheists live in certainty; believers in doubt.