Читать книгу My Sack Full of Memories - Zwi Lewin - Страница 8

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The family tree my aunt Bruria created shows her parents Chaim and Mina having their firstborn, a daughter Tila, in 1902. A cascade of birth dates follows, each two years apart: their first son Nisan, followed by Daniel and then my mother Gitel. Four more children were born before Bruria, the youngest, was born in 1919 – Yosef in 1910, Shmuel in 1912, Rivka in 1914 and Malka in 1917.

Aunt Bruria’s family tree

In Orthodox families births were not usually registered but only recorded by the Hebrew calendar and written inside the cover of the family Bible. Many birthdays were remembered only by how close they were to major festivals. The Lazovski family was large, but not unusually large for the time.

Vishey was a shtetl, a small Jewish town like so many others, and one of hundreds dotted through Eastern Europe before the war. It was called this because so much of the population was Jewish. In Vishey, it was over half. Of the fifteen shops, twelve were Jewish owned. There were four textile shops, two butchers, two restaurants and one shoe shop. There were even two Jewish doctors.

Memorial to L.L. Zamenhof in Vishey

The most famous doctor of Vishey was an ophthalmologist starting a new practice who may well have seen Chaim’s father as a patient. Dr L.L. Zamenhof from Bialystok worked there in 1886 and 1887 while at the same time creating his universal language, known as Esperanto. Dr Zamenhof was in Vishey for only the two years, having greater ambitions, but he was still the town’s favourite son. He has a street named after him and there is a Zamenhof memorial. The Jews of Vishey have been completely forgotten for there is no formal recognition of the town’s Jewish past in Veisiejai today. The former Jewish cemetery is untended: the fence broken, the grounds overgrown with pieces of broken and scattered headstones underfoot. Being unknown to the locals, it is difficult to find.

The irony is that Zamenhof was Jewish.

Tragedy struck the young Lazovski family when Nisan, their second born, died as a four-week-old infant. It was before my mother Gitel was born. Family history or mythology suggests it was Chaim, coming in from a day’s labour, slinging his heavy fur coat down carelessly on top of the cot that led to Nisan being smothered, a cot close up to the kitchen stove where the warmth was concentrated to soothe an infant, but also near the rear entry to the house. A more generous view may be that it was a cot death, but from then it is said there was tension between my grandparents, Chaim and Mina.

Recently tended Jewish Cemetery, Vishey

My grandfather Chaim was strong-willed, authoritarian, quick to anger and unforgiving, perhaps characteristics shared with his father, the judge. Mina, my grandmother, was loving and generous, as she baked challah for the surrounding homes as well as for herself before every Shabbat. Mina was a community leader who others turned to when in need. The children were fearful of their father, but adored their mother, it is said.

Chaim would expect the children to travel in the back of the dray with him to the farm no matter how cold the weather, with no acknowledgement of their efforts at the end of the day. He expected his sons to follow him and become farmers and for his daughters to work both in the house and on the land and then to marry – hardly realistic, for the land barely allowed his family to survive let alone be sufficient to feed another generation.

Further tragedy occurred when Tila was thirteen years old. Chaim and Mina had gone to celebrate a wedding and were away overnight. The children were left in the care of a servant. Spring ice remained on the lake and Tila went skating and fell through the unstable cracking ice, to be rescued half frozen by her brother Daniel. She was carried into the house and placed in the alcove above the stove. She seemed to recover, but overnight she died of what was called a thrombosis. None of the good fortune that once blessed Chaim could save Tila.

Lake Ancia frozen-over at Vishey

Chaim and Mina had now lost two children, Nisan and Tila. In their grief after that they refused to ever attend any celebrations – no weddings, no birthdays, no brit milah (circumcisions). They would only celebrate the Jewish High Holy Days.

My mother Gitel became the second oldest, her brother Daniel now being the oldest, and, most importantly, she was the oldest girl in the family.

When my mother was born, Lithuania was more of a concept than a country, as it had been under Russian rule for nearly a hundred years. The area of Russia that included Lithuania incorporated much of Eastern Poland as well and was known as the Pale of Settlement, for it allowed Jews to permanently reside there. The Pale was established late in the eighteenth century to restrict Jews from moving to the Russian interior and to cities such as Moscow. Its initial aim was to prevent competition with Russian merchants, which meant the Jews living there remained impoverished, as they were also restricted in their occupations. Its unintended consequence was to concentrate the Jews into communities where they became the majority of the population. In shtetls such as Vishey and in the cities, Jews in the Pale were unified by their common language, religious practices and culture. The Pale was expanded with Russian conquests and ultimately was an area twice the size of France, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea to become a virtual Jewish nation state. Before the Second World War the Pale had a population of four million Jews and was the largest Jewish population centre in the world.

In 1915, during the First World War, as the Russians retreated from Lithuania, the four hundred Jews of Vishey were forced into exile by order of the Russian Army as the Russians were concerned about Jews being potential traitors in the war against Germany. This movement of Jews to the interior had a practical effect. It led to the Russian parliament overturning the regulations of the Pale in 1917.

Vishey fell to the Germans for a brief period until they retreated after the end of the war in 1918. The Germans of the First World War were remembered kindly, often giving sweets to the children and extending courtesies not expected of invading soldiers. The tragedy was that this remembered behaviour so misled the Jews of Europe when the hate-filled murderous Nazis returned in the next war.

Following the Germans leaving in 1918, the neighbouring Poles then tried to forcefully take Lithuania. Finally, an independent state of Lithuania was established and so declared by the League of Nations. Only half of those expelled Jews returned to Vishey following this declaration of the new state, yet by the 1920s there were over five hundred Jews once more.

Twenty years later, in 1939, the Germans attacked Poland and then handed the territory they captured two weeks later to the Russians under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Lithuania was spared the invasion by the Germans in 1939 as the same pact deemed the country to already be under the Russian sphere of influence. The Russians made certain of this so-called sphere of influence by invading the country a year later. Lithuania had been an independent state for less than twenty years.

Lithuania had its own language but each invading force tried to impose its own language. As an example, Vilnius was the capital of Lithuania until 1922, when it was forcibly taken over by Poland. While the large Jewish population naturally spoke Yiddish, the vast majority spoke Polish, and Lithuanian was the least frequent tongue in Vilnius. No wonder Zamenhof thought a new universal language was the solution.

The Jews of Vishey, however, didn’t need his Esperanto. Yiddish was more than a simple spoken language, for Yiddish literature is deeply expressive with a great depth of feeling. Yiddish theatre, klezmer music, songs, poetry and even a child’s lullaby could easily bring the listener to tears. Classics such as My Yiddishe Mama are now universal melodies.

I have spoken Yiddish all my life.

My mother’s language at home was this Yiddish, but she would have needed to speak Lithuanian, Polish and Russian; and at school she would have learnt Hebrew as well. There was only one Jewish school in Vishey, with a total of sixty pupils, which her mother would have insisted she went to. Her father, it is said, was little interested in the children’s education.

Vishey had a library with seven hundred books in Hebrew and Yiddish, the librarian being the town barber. There was no secular Lithuanian library.

There was only one synagogue. The synagogue existed from the eighteenth century soon after the first Jews arrived in this small town which had been built around a church and market in the sixteenth century. The 1799 synagogue was destroyed by fire in 1872. Once rebuilt, fire destroyed it again in 1884 and 1892.

There is a photo of the nineteenth century synagogue showing a wooden building built on a foundation of compacted rocks looking like a tall barn. It was made of rough-hewn unpainted planks both outside and in and topped by a steep-pitched, shingled roof as tall as the building beneath. Large, multi-paned windows only on the women’s upper level may well have been for security. Inside, the photographs show handrails were so coarsely finished they would have risked splinters in any hand that touched them. Outside was a barn door, sealed as barn doors usually were, by yet another hefty piece of timber. A forbidding building from the outside, yet it was renowned for its cantor and choir.

The Vishey choir would be invited to other nearby towns in Lithuania to perform. In the synagogue, the Torah (the Scroll with the Holy Scriptures) was kept behind the bi-fold doors of the Aron Kodesh (the Holy Ark). The doors and surrounds were hand-carved with a motif of branching vines with abundant stylised bunches of grapes looking rather like pineapples, which was unlikely the intent of the carver. An imposing double-headed Russian eagle topped the Aron Kodesh, holding a sword in one hand and wearing the imperial crown on its head, a not-too-subtle reminder to the congregation of whom one was expected to revere.

Next to the synagogue was the school and library. The synagogue suffered once more from the problem of building with timber in a climate where in winter only log fires could keep you warm, or there was a hostile gentile population with matches and evil intent. Not surprisingly, there was a Jewish volunteer fire brigade in Vishey.

The synagogue burnt down once more in 1924, when my mother was eighteen. It was rebuilt in 1927 with a new design, still made of logs, but better finished, and the gable roof was made of tin. It was a substantial building, for the new prayer hall was twelve metres long and eighteen metres wide with twelve windows on the longer walls and three on the southern and northern walls. A brighter and more welcoming building with the capacity to accommodate the whole community had been created. The men entered through a doorway in the centre of the western façade, while the women went up an external staircase to the upper level. Today, it remains intact, though green-painted weatherboards have covered the logs, and it is now a Baptist Church called ‘The Way of Life’ with no sign to indicate its previous incarnation.

The Baptist Church that was the Vishey Synagogue

Vishey Synagogue as seen from Lazowski home

Of greater interest is the fact that the synagogue was located on the opposite side of the lake from the Lazovski home. Both on the water’s edge, the two buildings had an uninterrupted view of each other and were separated by just a short walk across the bridge. Every Shabbat the Lazovski girls would be dressed in white and would walk together hand-in-hand to the synagogue.

In 1923, when my mother was seventeen, the first census took place in Lithuania, confirming that there were now 531 Jews in Vishey, over 50 per cent of the population. These were from 200 Jewish families spread over a few blocks on either side of the lake. They would have known every member of the community. By the 1930s, most of the Jewish youth belonged to Zionist organisations that flourished in Vishey, for there were at least four Jewish youth groups. The town was becoming progressive and a break was occurring between the older Orthodoxy and the new secular Zionism. Many of the young were enthused by the visit of Ben Gurion to Lithuania in 1933; by the start of the war one hundred of the families from Vishey had migrated, mostly to Palestine. They included my mother’s youngest sister, Bruria. They were the fortunate ones.

Being the oldest daughter, my mother had to grow up quickly. She would have had to look after her two younger brothers and three much younger sisters. At eighteen, she would have known how to cook, to prepare cholent and kugel in covered pots to be taken to one of the two bakers in the town, who on the Friday afternoon would have fired up their ovens so as to slow-cook the Shabbat lunch. Her pots would join the others of the town, as cooking was forbidden on Shabbat, and in winter a hot meal was especially appreciated.

My mother carried these recipes with her for the rest of her life as cooking became her vocation. She was taught to roll and plait the dough for challah, prepare the carp for gefilte fish and how to keep the house. School days were long over and she could soon look forward to life as a farm girl, helping her father when not needed in the house.

Her parents, however, had other plans.