STUDY QUESTIONS

The Samurai of Vishogrod: The Notebooks of Jacob Marateck, retold by Shimon and Anita Wincelberg (Philadelphia, 1976): 51-66

A Cosmopolitan Way of Life

To me, the memorable thing about being thirteen was not my bar mitzvah, a celebration disposed of on a Monday morning with no more fanfare than putting on a fresh, still-creaking pair of tefillin and tasting my first glass of brandy.  It was the fact that my father finally agreed there was no future for me in our town, and allowed me to depart for Warsaw and lead my own life.

Tuesday was when Tuviah the teamster carried goods and passengers to Warsaw.  I'd already received my police permit to travel, and could hardly wait to escape our village and its backward ways, and begin to share my brother Mordechai's liberated and cosmopolitan way of life.

My brief experience in Vishogrod as a matzo baker already had convinced me that I could work the same hours and at the same speed as a grown man, and Mordechai, in his letters, had assured me that he could get me a job like his, as a baker's assistant, which seemed to me a very adult and responsible profession.

It was a bitterly cold spring day and my mother, who had insisted on traveling with me, pounded her feet and shivered beside me on Tuviah's crude open wagon.  Harnessed to this vehicle were two moribund horses, who clearly had been better trained in how to fast than how to run.  Friends and relatives had come to see us off, and piously wished us that we might arrive in Warsaw without the loss of any fingers or toes to frostbite, as sometimes happened to people who rode with Tuviah, a man who attracted small disasters the way bare feet attract splinters.

Unlike my mother, I felt no discomfort whatever.  Tall and proud as a general, I sat beside her on a crate of eggs, one foot resting on a live calf and the other dangling jauntily over the side.  Imagine, I thought, here I am traveling to Warsaw, a place where people eat white bread in the middle of the week and you drink hot tea with lemon and sugar even when you're healthy.

But just as we started to leave town, it occurred to me that if I was truly going to make a career for myself in the great world, now was as good a time as any to begin standing on my own feet.  I persuaded my mother to go back home, and Tuviah obligingly stopped his horses, although you would have needed a microscope to distinguish between their walking and their standing still.  Before climbing down, my mother handed me my baggage, all of it tied up in one red kerchief, a chunk of bread with an onion, and although I was on my way to a liberated new life, my prayerbook and tefillin.

Then she said goodbye to me with as many tears as it would have taken to dispatch one's son to fight the Turk.  I, for my part, wasn't laughing either.  But I comforted myself with the thought that, big as Warsaw was, I wouldn't let it gulp me down.

As an afterthought my mother gave me Mordechai's address.  She didn't know where he worked, but after all I could wait for him in his room.

In the next few hours the wagon passed through various other villages and began to fill up with passengers.  One of them was Laizer, a leather dealer who, being a Hasid, did not permit himself to sit next to a strange woman.  And so, before I knew it, a healthy pair of hands had lifted me and put me down as a buffer between himself and Guta Yerel, the midwife.

At first I was insulted at being handled like a child.  But, since Guta weighed at least 250 pounds, I soon saw the benefit of being sandwiched between two such warm, well-padded bodies.  To add to my comfort, a drunken Pole sat directly behind me, and soon dozed off and started to wheeze like a sick horse.  The alcoholic fumes he exhaled began to warm the back of my neck, and when they reached my nose I became pleasantly drowsy, and slumped against the fat midwife as though she were a pile of soft feather bedding, I was awakened by a scream of outrage.  All around me was darkness as deep as the ninth plague.  What had happened? While riding through the Rysovar forest, that historic den of highwaymen and horse-thieves which the Polish police avoided like the evil eye, something very simple had occurred.  With the passengers huddled for warmth into a tight, slumbering knot, and Tuviah up front, surrounded by a curtain of snow, sleeping as sweetly as any paying passenger, someone had quietly walked alongside and unharnessed the better of the two horses.  His accomplices had helped push the wagon so that it never slowed until the stolen horse was far away.

Tuviah first noticed something was wrong when the wagon began to stutter to a crawl.  Half in his sleep, he shouted the Polish equivalent of "giddap," and automatically brought his whip down on the healthier horse.

 When he realized he was beating the air, he woke up altogether, saw what they had done to him, and for a moment alternated between cursing the thieves and beating the innocent horse they had left him.

His passengers, too, now came to life, encouraging Tuviah with cries of, "What are you waiting for?" and "Let's catch them!"

But no one made a move except the unfortunate Tuviah himself, who jumped down and began to circle the wagon, and even looked underneath as though his good horse merely might have gotten mislaid.

In the end, of course, everyone had to get off and help push, while Tuviah walked in front, bitterly leading the horse even the thieves didn't want.

On the icy road, sometimes the horse fell, sometimes Tuviah did, and sometimes both of them together.  Since no one had taken any notice of me, I stayed on the wagon and tried to go back to sleep.  But I missed the warmth and comfort of being squeezed between Laizer and Guta Yerel, both of whom were huffing and pushing behind me.

At daybreak, the exhausted passengers cheered up a little.  A town was visible in the distance.  With a renewed burst of strength, horse and wagon were dragged and pushed until we reached the inn.

Here, no one seemed the least bit surprised at our calamity, and the good news of our arrival spread like the rumors preceding a holy man.  A number of Polish peasants soon arrived with horses for sale.  To their credit, be it said that not one of them tried to sell us back our own horse.

In the taproom of the inn, meanwhile, the men among the passengers, not counting the Pole, lost no time taking out tallis and tefillin, and even the women brought out their womanish prayerbooks, and, possibly to help us keep warm, we said our prayers with such fervor, a cloud of steam soon hovered over our heads.

Afterwards, we all, myself included, moved up to the counter and, after a few glasses of vodka, felt a good deal more cheerful about continuing our journey.

First, of course, we all had to have a bite.  Only I realized that, after splurging on two glasses of schnapps, I could no longer afford a piece of bread and herring.  I still had money in my pocket but, even though a glass of hot tea with sugar was only a kopek, my total capital was limited to the equivalent of maybe sixty cents, which had to last me until I got a job.

Back in the wagon, where I made sure of getting my old seat between Guta Yerel and the chaste leather dealer, a new comedy now developed.  The horse Tuviah had hired to pull us into Warsaw was strong and well rested, while the old one, which he had inherited from his father, liked every so often to stand in one spot and admire the scenery.

As a result, when Tuviah cracked his whip, the new horse eagerly lurched forward.  But, held back by its partner, it ended up with its front legs doing a futile little dance in the air, while the old horse remained nailed to the spot, dreaming its horsy dreams.  Tuviah unleashed a string of deadly oaths along with his whip.  But his tired old horse merely turned around with a look of reproach, as though wondering whether Tuviah could possibly mean him.

Bystanders soon gathered and started favoring us with the usual sort of good advice.  One peasant said we should have the horse change places with the passengers.  Another suggested we hang a bundle of straw under his nose and set fire to it, and the other recommendations were all on a similar high level.

The end result was that Tuviah had to hire another fresh horse.  He declared bitterly that, after the years he'd spent training his horse to go without food, the innkeeper had spoiled it by feeding it too much.

We had been due to arrive in Warsaw at noon.  We got there shortly before midnight.  Almost at once, I saw some of the wonders I'd heard about: cobbled streets free of mud, horseless trams running on tracks, buildings so tall you wondered what kept them from tumbling over like a house of cards, and, funniest of all, men wearing short coats and stiff collars.

The fortune of sixty kopeks I clutched in my pocket spared me the need to look for a hotel.  However, since it was still a long time to sunrise, I thought I might as well look for a place to sleep.  My nose led me to a stable filled with hay.  I crawled in, covered myself, and didn't wake up again until, what seemed like minutes later, a large hand, reaching in for a load of hay, pulled one of my feet out with it.

Since it was now broad daylight, I began walking the streets, asking people how to get to my brother's address.  After several hours of being spun like a dreidel in all four directions, I found the street and number.  My brother's lodgings turned out to be on the fifth floor of a four-story house.  I climbed up to the attic and knocked.  A shriveled old woman in a robe which seemed to have been stitched together out of dishrags opened the door, peered at me blindly, went back to find her glasses, and then demanded to know what the devil I wanted.  I told her I was the brother of Mordechai the baker.

The name seemed to mean absolutely nothing to her.  With a sinking heart, I insisted that this was the address I'd been given.  After some further evasion, she finally allowed that some baker boys were living there, and if my brother was one of them, he came home to sleep only on Friday nights.

It seemed to me very strange that my brother should need to sleep only one night a week.  Meanwhile, I had a glimpse of what she meant by home.  It was a narrow room with a diagonal wall and no ceiling whatever.  Under this wall was crammed a row of narrow beds, each of them covered with straw-filled sacks and pillows.

I stood and thought what to do.  The old woman either didn't know or wouldn't tell where my brother was working, and here it was only Wednesday.  What to do with myself till Friday? Since I'd indulged myself in a breakfast of coffee and a roll, I had only about fifty-seven kopeks left to my name, and nowhere to sleep.  Yet my feelings in that wretched place were such that I couldn't get myself to ask the old woman if I could use Mordechai's bed until he turned up.

So I spent the day prowling the wondrous wide streets of Warsaw, marveling over a hundred things I had never seen before.  Finally, I stopped in front of a little cafe which I'd been told by a shopkeeper served as an office for several small employment agents.

As soon as I approached the place, two ragged little men in bowler hats with canes in their hands came running out and fell upon me like hungry cats cornering a fat mouse.

Each man pulled out his little notebook and took my name.  I admitted that I had no address, and therefore wasn't yet registered with the police, but they seemed willing to overlook that.  I was happy to see unemployed boys of thirteen were so much in demand, after all.  But now, both men put out their hands and stared at me.  I stared back, bewildered.  Finally, one of them hissed, "Advance on commission.  One ruble."

I told them I didn't have a ruble, but as soon as they found me a job....

Both fiercely crossed out my name in their books and told me to go to the devil back where I came from.

This brought to mind that, even if I'd wanted to go home, I didn't have the return fare.  Night was falling once again, and I had been told that if the police caught me without a legal place of residence, I would wish I had never seen Warsaw.

Meanwhile, inside the café sat boys with their mothers, boys with their fathers, candidates for high school, all being urged to eat up, not showing as much as a moment's embarrassment at the envious way I sat on a bench outside and watched them.  Finally, one mother feeding a runny-nosed boy was sensitive enough to come out and beg me to stop staring, because I was spoiling her son's appetite.

I moved my seat and tried to look elsewhere.  Business began to thin out.  It was dark now, but I was more troubled by the growling of my stomach than by thoughts of the police.  I started up a hopeful conversation with a waiter who looked faintly familiar.  He turned out to be a landsman from Vishogrod!

He asked me if I didn't have relatives in Warsaw.  Did I have relatives! I had a brother, a baker.  What more did I need? He dismissed my brother with a wave of his hand.  A baker, he said, is no longer a human being.

But he's still my brother!

A boy who works as a baker, he patiently explained, is already half-dead.  His very life no longer belongs to him.  What is the good of a brother like that?

His words left a chill around my heart.  I now understood why my brother slept in his room only on Friday nights.  The rest of the week he didn't have enough time to go home.

The waiter saw how depressed his words had left me.  He took me into the kitchen and found me something to eat.

By the time I'd finished eating it was midnight once again.  The restaurant closed, the waiters were swallowed up by the darkness, and I still had no place to sleep.  My landsman also had warned me that any homeless boy found in the streets at night first is given a warm welcome in the cellars of the police station, and then is deported back to where he came from, which at the moment seemed to me even more terrible than what they might do to me in jail.

Cautiously, I made my way back to my brother's lodgings, felt my way up five flights in total darkness, and banged on the door.  No one answered.  After a while, I stopped banging and fell asleep in front of the door.

Before long, though, I was awakened by the janitor who'd heard me sneaking up the stairs.  He was holding a lit candle so close to my face I could feel it singe my eyebrows.

Brother or no brother, he warned me that if he ever again caught me sleeping on the stairs, he'd turn me in to the police.

I went back down into the freezing street.  Every bone ached.  I couldn't stop yawning.  I tried to tell myself not to lose courage.  Then I quickly searched my pockets to make sure the janitor hadn't robbed me.  Thank heaven, my wealth was intact.

Unseen, I plodded the dark streets to keep my toes from freezing, and after some hours the sun grudgingly rose.

I now began in earnest to look for a job of any kind, simply to tide me over till Friday afternoon.  But before the day was over, I realized there were literally hundreds of boys like myself, all freshly arrived from the provinces, unregistered by the police, also looking for any kind of job.

While I was standing with a group of these boys, wondering whether I wouldn't do better alone, a middle-aged couple arrived, looked us over like cattle dealers on market day, and decided on me.

"Want a job?"

"What kind?" I said stupidly.

"You want or you don't want?"

By now it was as cold as it was dark, and where was I going to spend the night? I said, "I'll take it."

They had me follow them home, where they put a plate of bread and herring with tea in front of me.  ("Balanced menus," you must understand, are entirely an American invention.  In my day, before growers and manufacturers had learned to steal the vitamins out of our food, people were able to live and thrive on a diet of little more than bread, raw onions, cabbage, tea, herring, and boiled kasha, and maybe some fresh fruit in the summer.  Even today, I still think of green salads as grass for the cows.) I ate silently, still afraid to ask what they expected of me.  Then I waited to be shown my room.  The master nodded for me to follow him down a flight of groaning wooden steps.  The cellar contained a barrel of dirty water and what looked like a thousand empty, mud-caked beer bottles.  I looked at him.

"Get to work," he said, not unkindly.

I was to wash each one, inside and out, before going to sleep.  What choice did I have? The boss watched as I set to work, and complimented me on my energy and neatness.  Then he proceeded to tap a barrel and fill the bottles I had washed.

In this manner, it got to be one o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock, and I was still washing bottles.

My fingers were stiff with cold, and since my boss was working as though it were broad
daylight, I felt embarrassed to ask him when his workers were expected to sleep.

I'd already given up looking at the time, when the boss's wife suddenly shouted down, "Let him go to sleep already, or he'll run off like the others."

The boss nodded like a man who has learned to be tolerant of human weakness.  He pulled out a sack filled with straw, and smoothed it down against the floor.  "You can sleep now, if you like," he said like a man who understood that a child cannot be expected to work like a man.

Although I didn't care for his tone, I fell onto the straw mattress as though from a great height, and think I was asleep before I even closed my eyes.  But I'd barely had time to turn over, when I found the boss's wife tugging impatiently at my shoulder.  Half-asleep, with darkness still covering thc windows as thickly as it covered my eyes, I was back washing bottles.

During the day I was sent with a sack from tavern to tavern to collect more empty bottles, and my bosses kept me so busy with that, I never even had the chance to ask about food.

By evening, I was staggering like a drunk, and quite willing to forget about supper if they would just let me sleep for a while.  But the boss again gave me some bread and herring and, as kindly as ever, explained that on Thursday nights all the bottles had to be filled for Saturday night deliveries.

Therefore just that once, it was customary to work all night.  But to make up for this, he would let me sleep all Friday night and all day Saturday.

He made it sound as though only a monster of ingratitude would fail to see how reasonable his request was.  But I had simply gone too long without sleep.  And since, in the last two days, I had earned the equivalent of exactly seventeen kopeks, and tomorrow I was sure to see my brother, I decided I could afford to be independent.  When I told him he could keep his job, the boss was almost speechless with indignation.  Never in this world had he encountered such impertinence.  A boy who expected to eat without working! He had no doubt that, with luck, I would end up before a firing squad.  (About which, as I mentioned already, he wasn't too far wrong.  But that's another story.) He also declined to pay me my wages.

Once more, my problem was how to get through the night without being arrested.  On Nalevka street I met another homeless boy, and he took me to his quarters, an abandoned bakery, where I had my first good night's sleep since I had left home.

In the morning I awoke full of happy anticipation.  At last it was Friday.  Today I would see my brother, and he'd see to it that I had a job and a place to lay my head.  It was agony to wait until evening.

Toward sunset, I stationed myself in front of the house where my brother had his bed.  I didn't know whether he would come directly home, or go to the synagogue first.  But I wanted to take no chances of missing him.

It was getting dark already, when I noticed two ragged human skeletons dragging themselves along the pavement.  They moved on scrawny, tottering legs and seemed, every so often, barely to be able to keep one another from pitching face down into the mud, they were so paralyzed with sleep.  It took me some time to recognize one of these ghosts as my brother.  I ran to throw my arms around him.  He gave me a blank look and went right on past me.

I cried, "Mordechai, it's me, your brother Jacob." But he and his companion kept on, as though afraid to lose their momentum.  They staggered up the stairs like a pair of drunks on an icy road.  I followed close behind them, ready to catch Mordechai when he fell.  But he somehow made it up to the attic floor and lurched into his dormitory.  Before he could lie down, I grabbed his arm and once again tried to remind him who I was.

He peered at me with eyes no longer able to focus.  Finally, by way of a sholom aleichem, he extended a limp hand covered with flour and dough, then told his landlady, "Give him to eat," and fell on his bed as though he'd been shot.

To tell the truth, I was beginning to feel a little unwelcome.  Here it was Shabbos, the one day in the week on which it is forbidden to fast, and while tonight I might have inherited Mordechai's portion, I surely couldn't also expect to eat for him tomorrow.  At the same time, if I had any notion of being allowed to use one of the beds, it was only minutes before each one of them was filled with a bakery boy, all in roughly the same condition as my brother.  Their snores, which weren't long in coming, began to sound like a railroad station where several trains were getting up steam.  It was a terrifying sight.

The landlady tugged at my arm and pointed to a little bench on which she had put down some food for me.  But either the snores, or the food itself, had killed my appetite.  The moment her back was turned I started to lie down on the floor next to my brother's bed, and a thick cloud of sleep smothered me almost at once.  Yet my final waking thoughts were of utter contentment.  I felt at peace.  I had, after all, known from the first that as soon as I found my brother he would take care of me.

The Smell of Fresh Bread

For boys like me, who at age thirteen or fourteen had come to Warsaw to make their fortunes, the authorities had a foolproof system.  You couldn't get a job unless you had a place to live, and no landlady could rent you so much as a straw mattress unless you had a job.

Somehow brother Mordechai, in his harassed, infrequent letters, had forgotten to mention this, too.

However, true to his word, the moment the Sabbath was over, he took me back with him to his bakery and saw to it that I got a job, permit or no permit.

By the time the night was over, I'd already begun to get a picture of what it meant, back in those simple, unspoiled days, to be a baker's apprentice.  And then I understood why, even among boys as hungry and homeless as myself, the kind of person who voluntarily became a baker was believed to be someone whom even his parents no longer expected to grow up into a human being.  Such a boy, after he'd already been thrown out of the house, which I think you know a Jewish family doesn't do lightly, was often apt to end up sleeping on top of the oven in a bakery, which in my day was an almost traditional place of refuge.  Then, after he had hung around the bakery for some time and kept his eyes open, as soon as one of the other employees, almost inevitably, collapsed of fatigue or caught pneumonia, he was in a perfect strategic position to inherit the job.

That, however, was not the way it had happened to Mordechai.  He had come to Warsaw innocently, ready to take any kind of honest work and, after hungering for several days, simply had been attracted in passing by the smell of fresh bread.

Almost at the moment he had set foot in the store, half hypnotized by the intoxicating odors, he had found himself signed up for an apprenticeship of three years, for a salary of ten rubles a year, plus meals and sleeping privileges on the bake-oven.  (And if that sounds to you like good money, remember that my father managed to starve very nicely on ten rubles a month.)

The word "union," of course, was unheard of, and a good working day could sometimes run for twenty-two or even twenty-four hours.  To make up for this, however, you were free all Friday night and all day Shabbos until sundown.  The moment after havdoloh, though, the boys panted back to the bakery like condemned souls being lashed by demons and didn't see sunlight again till--with luck--the end of the week.

Unlike New York (whose bakeries, several decades earlier, already had steam-driven machinery even for matzo baking), all the kneading, mixing, and baking in Warsaw at the turn of the century still was done by hand.  In addition, wood had to be chopped for the ovens, barrels of water hauled from the well, and flour from 200-pound sacks dumped into huge vats and kneaded by hand.

I remember the shock it gave me the first time I saw my brother and two other boys immersed and struggling through one of these swamps of flour and water, while the sweat ran freely off their brows and arms into the dough, and one of them, if you'll forgive my mentioning it, had a runny nose adding its steady drip to the mixture.

Thus they stood day after day, night after night, asleep on their feet while their hands continued to push, to stir, to clench and unclench.  Already by Monday they truly no longer knew when it was day and when it was night.

Except when things were busy, they got a breather for two or three hours shortly before dawn.  During that time they didn't know what to do first--wash, eat, sleep, or say their morning prayers.

Frequently a boy would put on his tefillin and fall asleep.  But almost before he could start to snore, he was awakened and chased back to work.

The quality of the baked goods produced under such conditions I leave to your imagination.  It would happen sometimes that customers returned loaves of bread in which various unexpected articles had been found--a penknife, some eggshells, a cuff torn from a shirt, or, most frequently of all, a half-smoked cigarette.

In such cases, the offending bread was cheerfully exchanged for another, and that was the end of it.

Only once did it happen that a woman came running in with a cry of outrage, and there were so many other women with her, they blocked the street.  What had she found in the bread that was so terrible? The housing of the tefillin which are worn on the head.  Obviously, one of the bakers had fallen asleep while praying, and when awakened and sent back to work, he had tried to finish his prayers while standing over the vat.  Apparently he had dozed off once more, and none of the other bakers were sufficiently awake to notice that his head tefillin had fallen into the dough.

A perfectly understandable accident, I would have thought.  But this woman insisted that the offending baker should be arrested and deported back to his home town, no less.

The master finally managed to calm her down by pointing out that this particular man happened to be the cleanest worker they had, because at least he didn't smoke.  The offending worker, for his part, was less concerned about losing his job than he was about finding out whether his tefillin, after having been baked still were fit to be used.

The following week when my brother told me of a slightly better job available at another bakery I thanked him kindly and decided to pass it up.  In fact, hungry as I usually was, it took some time before I could once again sink my teeth heartily into a chunk of fresh bread.