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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781550961348 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Exile Editions |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2012 |
| Pages: | 360 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.20(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
THE ZHOLFS OF ZASTAVIA
In the late 1880s, Joshua Falek Zholf, my father, lived in Russia in Zastavia, a ghetto village just inside the Polish border, a village under the writ of Czar Nicholas II. It was a shtetl of schnorrers and shadchans, peddlers and small tradesmen, men who were known to quote from the Holy Book, "Tov shem meshemon tov" ("We were better off without the trains"), poor village people of plain tastes who were loyal to their cultural traditions, the tfillin, the T'hilim, and particularly the craft of melamed, the teaching of the Bible to their children.
Joshua Leib, father to Joshua Falek, had wanted to be a dirt farmer, he had wanted to reach down and take hold of the earth in his hands. "Blessed is he who has earth in his fist." He had even owned a saddle and ridden a horse, and he had almost managed to qualify as a peasant worker, but czarist law, if it was strictly imposed, and in Zastavia it was, forbade Jews from engaging in serious farming, and so – as an ultra-Orthodox Jew – he had eked out a meagre living by teaching the young shtetl children Hebrew and the proper practice of their rituals, their religion. "Blessed is he who has the thorn of the word in his heart." As such a teacher, he and his wife, a woman with a club foot, had led a hard-scrabble life, barely able to feed their four sons.
Since he was not only ultra-Orthodox but a rigorous believer, he thought of socialism and Zionism as Jewish heresies, abominations, and so he had sent Joshua Falek, his son and my father, to a place removed from such insidious influences, a big rabbinical seminary in the city of Brest-Litovsk. This cheder, this seminary school, had under its roof a rabbi of renown, and Joshua Leib believed that this rabbi would make my father into a scholar, a decoder of conundrums, and, eventually, a rabbi, too. Appropriately, Joshua Falek, the student, wore a caftan, the fringes of his talliskot'n sticking out, side curls, and the beard of the Chassidim. Though restless by temperament, he sat down and easily and effortlessly mastered the lessons of the yeshiva seminary, he mastered the kind of dialogue with God that is sealed in candle wax. He did this during a troubling pre-1917 period when candles were being burnt at both ends, a profoundly revolutionary time, when he often smelled flesh burning in the ditches and barns. History had gone cross-eyed, clocks were wound down, clocks were adjusted, Karl Marx nursing his boils here, and Theodor Hertzl boiling with resentment there, promised a future founded – independent of each other – on an inevitable and acceptable increment of deaths. Lenin was moving inexorably east towards St. Petersburg's Finland Railway Station. At the same time, Czar Nicholas' fierce horsemen, his Black Hundreds, were looting and pillaging the shtetls, slaughtering Jews. As well, doltish Polish and Ukrainian peasants had grown churlish, and were turning on their Jewish neighbours. And there – there – saying his Orthodox prayers, looming over them all, a spectral figure for his time, the czarina's crazy bedkick and spiritual advisor, Rasputin.
Joshua Falek Zholf was no supporter of such a czar. He wanted to be rid of him. He had rejoiced at Japan's victory over Russia in 1905. He was sure the czar would soon be toppled. Being of a restless mind, he would sneak late at night into his Orthodox seminary, and then into his yeshiva cell where he would read by candlelight all the forbidden socialist (Prud'homne) and Zionist (Ze'ev Jabotinsky) pamphlets.
Socialism, a young man's dream of one for all and all for one in a dialectically driven proletariat, became part of my father's commitment to Russia, his motherland. No matter the Jew-haters and Jew-baiters, Russia was his motherland. Loyalty. To something deep. Roots, he had roots. Maybe not a farmer's roots but his family had been in Zastavia for generations. He felt he owed the fulfillment of his proletarian dream as a debt to Russia, but certainly not to the czar, not to that Jew-baiting autocratic regime. And if his motherland were to fail him, to betray him by disintegrating, by succumbing to brute power at the end of a gun, he believed he then owed a dream to himself, the dream of going to Palestine or America. This dream made the frustration and misery of his life, the humiliations of being a Jew, bearable.
Then came the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918). Czarist Russia entered this mechanised war on horseback, as an ally of Britain and France. Great military fronts, East and West, were formed. Trenches were dug in the earth, and also in the mind and spirit. Men who lived by the sword died by the machine gun. Russia now needed more and more manpower and wasn't purse-mouthed or fussy about where she got her foot soldiers. Even Jews became eligible cannon fodder.
Maybe they were suddenly eligible, but Jews did not support the war of the hated czar. Young Jewish men chopped off fingers and toes to avoid being drafted. Still, no matter their missing digits, thousands of Orthodox Chassidic Jews were drafted into the czarist army.
Joshua Falek Zholf, the son who was of draft age in the family, declined to fight in defence of Czar Nicholas II. He shaved his beard, and dressed himself in peasant's garb. He stared at himself in a small mirror of polished tin, and said, "How could I ever fail such a nose?"
"Nihil me paenitet hujus nasi,"— that is, "My nose has been the making of me."
"Nec est cur paeniteat,"— that is, "How the deuce should such a nose fail?"
– Sterne
CHAPTER 2SOLDIER Z
For almost two years, my father lived in hiding in the dense local woods, scrounging for food and shelter. Months passed. The seasons unwound. Sometimes he worked with a hand scythe in the fields and, on occasion, he ventured into town to work in small factories. Though he had our family nose, the schnozz, he somehow kept his Jewish identity hidden. Gangs of czarist police were roaming the country roads, punishing Jews who had refused to lay down their bodies in support of the czarist war. Once again, the czar's horsemen, the Black Hundreds, were on the gallop, raiding villages and shtetls, raping, looting and killing as if they were living amidst a moment of reckless czarist triumph – even as the czar's armies were collapsing, his foot soldiers dying, even as the German cavalry, cannons, and mechanised infantry advanced.
Zastavia, in 1916, fell into German hands, as did a great swath of czarist Russia, a Russia in upheaval.
In St. Petersburg, Rasputin had been shot several times and then thrown into the icy canal and told to swim for home, while in Moscow, social democracy had reared its unruly head under Alexander Kerensky, forcing the czar, to bring the Duma – the parliament – together at a time when the Bolsheviks said that they planned to take Russia out of the war.
In his draft-dodging days, Joshua Falek Zholf had easily run into the Bolsheviks. Activist Jews, men and women, were at the very forefront of the revolution. He was impressed by these Jews, men like Leon Trotsky. Jews were shaping the new history. Joshua Falek Zholf was tempted to join the Trotskyites, but, committed as he was to the preservation of Jewish conventions and Jewish cultural life, he had less confidence in the Bolsheviks ... they were not the answer to his or the Jewish people's distress. Dreamer he might be, but he knew that no one had an immediate answer to the Jewish people's social and political problems. Except maybe Kerensky. Kerensky was different. Kerensky intended to amputate the czar, and then continue the war against Germany.
Joshua Falek Zholf consulted his conscience; his conscience told him what to do.
Kerensky represented new prospects for Russia's Jewry: he stood openly for the equality and freedom of the Jewish people. No more would my father be a hapless draft-dodger, playing hippity-hop from house to house, outwitting the local Jew baiters and snitches, the czarist police. Kerensky was going to make Joshua Falek Zholf a free man. Russia was going to be a country where my father could live and raise a family, be a proud Jew and a proud Russian at the same time. At least, that was his belief. In February 1917, after the Revolution, Joshua Falek Zholf came out of hiding and went to one of Alexander Kerensky's wartime recruiting offices. Not only that, he had, inside his peasant blouse, a personal handwritten manifesto. It read:
To the Russian Revolutionary Army
Dear sirs:
Whereas I, Joshua Falek Zholf, have hitherto refused to shed my blood for the bloody Czar Nikolas II, enemy of my people, and whereas, the Great Revolution has freed my people and all other peoples that inhabit Mother Russia, I today present myself in payment of my holy debt of loyalty to the Fatherland.
As soon as the Kerensky apparatchiks found out he could read and write Russian, Joshua Falek Zholf was sent to an "instant" officer training school. Within a month, he could click his heels, fire pistols with both hands, and bark out commands. He was transported, this scholar in officer's clothing, to the trenches in the Eastern Front to face a German behemoth that was commanded by Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. During his time with the Kerensky-led army, my father saw real action many times, some of it fierce, even hand-to-hand, but there were even longer periods spent in silence and stagnation, living like a mole in the trenches. A dank stillness. A stasis that intimated death. And always, there was the mud, the rats, the dampness in the bones, the cold, the lack of proper food and dry clothing, the boots that wore out, the puttees that shredded.
"One day," my father once told me, "our trenches were visited by a young bearded Jewish revolutionary. He urged us to lay down our arms and walk away from the front – toward the peace, bread and freedom that he and his fellow Bolsheviks were promising.
"Some of my men wanted to do just that. I ordered them to stay put. 'A democratic Russia had to be fought for,' I said. We had to be on the same side as America – the promised land of democracy and therefore the promised land of the Jews. That Bolshevik was wrong, my son. He was a disgrace to the Jewish people. That Bolshevik was Leon Trotsky!" [A name I was to hear again and again, particularly from my father, who found Trotsky's later exploits as commander-in-chief of the Red Army truly heroic, and his assassination by Joseph Stalin pure barbarism.]
Then my father was captured by the Germans. He became a POW.
"The Germans were kind to us," my father said. "They found out I had some rabbinical training and put me in charge of seeing to it that the Jewish prisoners-of-war got proper kosher food. It was crazy. Like a shochet, I was. Out there in a landscape blighted by barrages, among fields of charred tree stumps, I slaughtered cattle and checked the insides of chickens for disease. I acted like a proper ritual slaughterer, and the German prison camp commandant gave me an 'A' for a grade."
Then, as a battle tactic, the Germans released their Russian prisoners-of-war, letting them spill by the wandering, starving thousands back into the East, especially into the Polish borderlands, which clogged up Kerensky's – given the civil war that was raging – tenuous lines of communication. This tactic also played into the hands of Vladimir Lenin – who, by then, had passed through St. Petersburg's Finland Station – and the Bolsheviks he and Joseph Stalin were leading; they were manoeuvring for power in Moscow. The chaos that ensued among the ranks of Kerensky's front line soldiers was matched by the anarchy in Russia's cities, towns and villages. The pits of hell had broken open, erupted. And Lenin had emerged stroking his beard, Stalin at his side.
The power and influence of the Bolsheviks ricocheted across the land. By October 1917, they had seized power in St. Petersburg. My father had made his way to Moscow and he was there when the Bolsheviks unfurled their red flag. He stood in Red Square and listened to the impassioned oratory of Stalin, the communist chief who was now in command of Moscow. By toppling the Kerensky government, the Bolsheviks had cut my father loose from his commitments.
Meanwhile, in the Ukraine, Hetman, Symon Petliura, fighting the Reds for the Whites of Ukraine, was massacring hundreds of thousands of Jews. Even as dead bodies abounded, my father returned to the Zastavia shtetl.
By 1920, the village was occupied by the Reds, which caused Jewish self-defence vigilantes to form into groups, and my father became one of them. The tension, suspicion, small betrayals and bitterness caused by rapidly shifting loyalties and ethnic and religious animosities did not soon go away. Hunger and starvation ravaged the village. The Reds, fierce in their idealism, brought their own scrupulous sense of socialist and dialectical political correctness to every aspect of the villagers' lives, particularly my father's, because at that time he was very active in Herbert Hoover's American Famine Relief program for that border area of Russia. By supporting Hoover – the ultimate capitalist – he fell afoul of the Red Communist functionaries, who branded him a counter-revolutionary. Once again, he had to go into hiding.
And then, Zastavia fell to the Poles, to a new quasi-fascist government none too friendly to socialists or Jews. My father, a natural born contrarian, always at odds with himself and his destiny, kept his schnozz, his Jewishness, close to the ground – but like his father, he took up the role of educating Jewish children, teaching them Jewish cultural values. In no time at all, however, the Poles met him nose-to-nose and arrested him. They thought it might be mildly amusing as well as publicly instructive to execute my father, but as he was being led to the place of execution, the pleas of a young Polish girl, a Catholic neighbour – on a whim, in a burst of goodwill – persuaded the Polish authorities to let my father go.
"It was then that I knew I had to emigrate," my father has since said. "Europe was no longer a home for Jews. My life had come down to a little girl's whim. An afterthought. In Europe we had always been second class, short of breath. But now we were forbidden to breathe, to live."
As it so happened, however, Joshua Falek, reluctant but stand-up revolutionary, reluctant but able officer, reluctant but forceful vigilante – in other words, a man who still, in this life, left himself room to dream – had in that moment, met the love of his life, Freda Rachel Pasternak.
CHAPTER 3MOTHER
In his memoir, On Foreign Soil: Tales of a Wandering Jew, published in 1945, my father wrote: "Beautiful and slim was the youngest of Reb Meier Pasternak's four daughters, Freda Rachel. She was very tall, slender and curvaceous, like a young tree, a veritable sapling. Her black eyes were always smiling; they burned with a fire that lit up the hearts of all those around her.
"Freda Rachel was the embodiment of impish energy. She exuded love of life and a sun-filled happiness. Her laughter was the purest silver. It appeared that life itself had bestowed on her all the intuitions of youthful good looks.
"She was wonderful with children. She would gather them all together and tell them tales, read them beautiful Yiddish and Russian stories. She would then pick up the dolls and play with them. She was really a child at heart. She was the darling of all the Jews and Christians in Zastavia. She would write beautiful letters for them to send off to their children, those who had grown up and moved abroad.
"She also had a great sense of humour. She could mimic all the town's characters. Those who watched her were convulsed with laughter. She knew her Russian and Jewish literature. She loved Sholem Aleichem and his famous little town of Kasrilevka, which was to her like Zastavia.
"And she, Freda Rachel, was an expert swimmer. She was the best swimmer in town.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Dialectical Dancer"
by .
Copyright © 2010 Larry Zolf.
Excerpted by permission of Exile Editions Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction, by Peter C. Newman,
A Prefatory Note,
The Zholfs of Zastavia,
Soldier Z,
Mother,
Falek and Freda,
In the Cornfields of His Mind,
The Nine-Pound Honker,
My Darkest Hour,
Falek the Fictioner,
My Mother and Me,
My Older Sister, Rose Zholf Borodkin,
Of Rings and Things,
Meyer, Meyer, Pants on Fire,
Pillow Talk,
Extra, Extra, and a Rim Shot,
Beansy Bider – Beautiful Loser,
Judith, Princess of the Jews,
Our Block,
The Little Declamationist,
Tag Day,
Of Oils and Fats,
The Schmaltz Factor,
The Little Propagandist,
The Little Prince of the Winnipeg Ghetto,
The Funeral,
Not So Damn Fast,
The Naming,
At Leavenworth,
Kosher Wars,
Birth of a Salesman,
The Dummy Duma,
The Holocaust Children,
95% in Logic,
The Prodigal,
Pissing on My Parade,
The Ping-Pong Affair,
The Bells Toll,
The Dancer Dancing,
The Trouble With Harry,
Blood Leibele,
The Flaming Red Rabbi,
Onto the Good Ship Lollipop,
Lollipop, Lollipop,
Ten Sir Johns,
In the Good Old Days,
My Father at the Mayo Clinic,
Joshua Falek Zholf, Gone,
Hallelujah, I Become a Bum,
Losers in the Night,
Natalia's Room,
A Polish Joke: The Varsity Jews,
Penis Envy and Loathing at the U.S. Senate Urinal,
A Parting of the Red Sea,
Scoop,
A McCarthyite,
Down in Mississippi,
Loshn Koydesh,
Genug,