The Litvaks
Wincelberg, Anita and Shimon
6hc bitvahs From the notebooks of Jacob Marateck translated and edited by Anita and Shimon Wincelberg After some weeks of basic training in the so-called *' 'convicts" company." to which I"d...
...In competitions, he beat not only the Cossacks but even the Circassians, men who were virtually born in the saddle...
...But there was a third recalcitrant in our company who did manage to get out...
...they merely fell like hungry wolves upon the slightest opportunity to relate their learning to a real-life situation...
...For some reason, even these gladiators were awed by our Litvaks...
...But my attitude was, as long as you're compelled to serve Fonya, why not rub it under his nose how good a soldier a Jew could be — if he felt like it...
...And since this was an order we all were ready to obey with great enthusiasm, our leaking comrade promptly made a miraculous recovery and in time even developed into quite a decent soldier...
...And so, after all my parents' anxieties that I not be coarsened and corrupted by Fonya, it turned out that my greatest obstacle to full acceptance by my fellow soldiers was not that I lacked skill with a horse or a rifle — but that I hadn't a firm enough grounding in the Talmud...
...The rest of us begged him not to undermine Jewish honor...
...commemtary, and several anthologies of fiction and drama...
...But the most painful social barrier between the Litvaks and me arose from the unhappy fact that — in contrast to myself, a runaway from Yeshivah at age twelve — there wasn't one of these fellows who couldn't "learn...
...Of course, from a purely political point of view, I should have been in full sympathy with anyone who saw no reason to exert himself on behalf of a Czar who, like some of his ancestors, was restrained only by indolence and absentmindedness from putting an end to us all...
...I found myself unexpectedly transferred to the regimental tailor shop after all...
...In the end, the commission, in its wisdom, decided he was suffering from tapeworm and they actually sent him home...
...They simply didn't feel the Czar had any business drafting them...
...Not so these Litvaks...
...For this service, he used to receive a large piece of challah, which was apparently one of the few pleasant memories he had of his entire childhood...
...They were not being sadistic...
...Thus, for instance, one time while rushing to get ready for rifle inspection...
...in Counseling Psychology and her writing has appeared in the national jewish monthly and Jerusalem post, among others...
...And within less than a month, to my brother's dismay...
...It was simply he had read somewhere that a man who goes without eating anything warm for three months will develop rheumatism and be eligible for a discharge...
...We also had a Jewish boy named Korotkin who'd been a trick rider in a circus, and one from Warsaw who was the regiment's champion sharpshooter and partly responsible for our company's regularly winning the regimental championship — until, over the matter of a new officer who promptly became known to us as "Haman," we went on strike...
...And yet I must tell you, I felt very much estranged in my new platoon...
...They were Litvaks, Jews from Lithuania, and not only did they seem to me, in my Polish innocence, not to look like Jews, but at first I had such a hard time understanding their nasal, crabbed Yiddish, that I preferred to converse with them in Russian...
...I momentarily misplaced my watch, and one of the Litvaks found it...
...to which I"d been assigned, with good Russian logic, purely on account of my height (and which my influential older brother Mor-dechai felt I was in danger of enjoying rather more than was proper for a boy of my refined family background...
...He explained that he was always hungry, and, if he ate any less, he would not have sufficient strength to do his duty...
...after all, peacetime and...
...This, I am sorry to tell you, was also an example of Litvak reasoning...
...Either that, or on the ungenerous charge that a Litvak is so calculatingly pious, he repents even before he sins...
...The book is drawn from the first sixteen of twenty-eight notebooks composed by the author during the depression of the 1930's at his kitchen table in The Bronx...
...But, as it turned out, I suffered from precisely the opposite affliction...
...But it turned out his refusal of hot food was not on anything as principled as religious grounds...
...He happened to be a cantor, at least so he told us, and none of us had ever been in his home town to prove otherwise...
...If he had scruples against touching food cooked in Fonya's tainted pots, we would give him money to buy cabbage, potatoes, tea, sausage...
...One of them nightly bepissed his bed until his straw mattress began to rot and none of us could bear to sleep in one room with him...
...The Jewish Publication Society of America), is one of nineteen autobiographical stories compiled, translated and edited by Anita and Shimon Wincelberg, Marateck's daughter and son-in-law...
...He replied, in a parody of a Tal-mudic singsong, that what he did was perfectly proper...
...But that's another story...
...It was as though they realized that their martial skills, after all, were also attainable by gentiles, whereas the Litvaks were possessed of something which belonged to us alone...
...The ones with whom, to my surprise, I felt least in common were those who had made up their minds to do as little as possible for the hated Czarist regime...
...In addition to his activities in the pre-Revolutionary Russian army, Marateck's occupations ranged from terrorist in Warsaw to junk-peddler, flour-and-grain merchant, fish seller and beer truck driver in Shenandoah and New York...
...I once asked him how fitting he thought it was for a cantor, who is called "the congregation's intermediary," to behave like such a swine...
...After all, how could they return my property until due determination had been made whether or not it constituted a "found object," that is whether I had dropped it or deliberately put it down, and whether on private property or in the public domain, and what unique identifying marks, if any, I had placed upon it, and whether the loss of my watch was analogous to the legal fiction concerning lumber displaced by the tides of a river, and whether or not I could be reasonably supposed to have already "despaired" of finding my lost property — in which case it would have been rendered hefker, ownerless...
...After all, on the Days of Awe, before the Additional Service, does not the cantor publicly say of himself '. . . for a sinner and transgressor am I, and may the congregation not be shamed on account of my own unfitness, etc' Therefore, if I did not conduct myself as I did, then on the holiest of days, when required publicly to admit my unworthiness, I would be lying to the Almighty...
...He, however, spoke a fluent Yiddish, since as a young orphan he used to light the stoves in Jewish homes on the Sabbath...
...These boys were, in fact, a wild brawling hard-drinking lot, such as any army would have been glad to have...
...To them, "learning" was a deadly serious business which took precedence over all else — and if military training threatened to interfere, they simply, irritably, almost absentmindedly, picked up "Esau*s skills" so well, they could have their bodies doing one thing, while their minds were grimly, joyously concentrated on the "real" world...
...Exposure to such a hardboiled character had of course done little to erase my childish prejudices, born of such expressions as "I saw two Jews and a Litvak," or "a Litvak has a cross in his head" (based on the suspicion that his rigorous emphasis on study and religious observance, without the Chassid's sense of mystical joy, would one day surely lead him to apostasy...
...But my problems went deeper than that...
...Take Brod-sky, son of a Kiev millionaire, who was the best horseman in the regiment...
...It was...
...Among the other Jewish soldiers in my company, there were two kinds...
...Not that Jews didn't try as hard as any other normal person to avoid falling into Fonya's clutches...
...while being in the infantry might have been a little more strenuous than smoking my pipe in the tailor shop, bemg back among actual soldiers was to me as exciting as going to a summer camp with all facilities for outdoor sports would be to an American child today...
...The second one went on a hunger strike the day he left home, limiting himself to bread and water, and of course he soon was too weak even to get out of bed...
...Their part of Lithuania was indeed renowned as a district where, as they say, even a dog could "learn," and every Jew was as steeped in ancestral merit as a pig is steeped in mud...
...In any event, the Fourth Platoon, to which Mordechai arranged to have me assigned (hoping, he said, at least to keep me out of further brawls and courts-martial), was almost entirely Jewish...
...Back in Warsaw, you see, practically the only Litvak I had ever known was a professional labor organizer, a man as cold-blooded as any gentile, who had taught me how to arrange work stoppages, lockouts, strikes, acts of sabotage and even how to intimidate (that is, beat up) such "class enemies" as strikebreakers and stonyhearted bosses, two categories who frequently had as little as we did standing between them and starvation...
...My parents' (and Mordechai's) principal concern of course had been that, once I wore the Czar's uniform, I would not only be outwardly transformed but — gorged on Fonya's swinish food, exposed to his lewd and heathenish ways, and the litvaks, excerpted from THE samurai of VISHOGROD: the notebooks of JACOB marateck (Copyright © 1976...
...I don't mean just the Five Books of Moses with the commentaries of Rashi, with which, thank God, I was as familiar as a Jewish child nowadays is with the baseball scores...
...And they had yet another intolerable custom...
...In the end, we had reason to be satisfied with his soldiering, too...
...And it griped me when I overheard my Russian comrades use those few slackers as an excuse for remarks about Jews who were serving only because they'd been too cowardly to obtain exemption by shooting themselves in the foot...
...Anita Wincelberg has her M.A...
...Only this "cantor's" conduct would have been more becoming for an ordinary Communist, for he brazenly stuffed himself with pork, smoked on the Sabbath, and pushed himself among the commonest sort of women...
...He was finally examined by a medical commission, who ruled that his bladder was perfectly in order and if he continued his disgusting practices, his comrades should feel free to take their own measures...
...Finally, against Mordechai's vehement advice, I applied successfully for a transfer to the Fourteenth Company, which was under the command of my brother's sometime friend...
...Here, out of eight men, two I think were actually tailors and therefore obliged to cover for all the rest of us...
...The Fourteenth Company consisted of 118 men, of whom 42 were Jews...
...Because most of my new comrades were not at all what I was accustomed to think of as Jews...
...Its only conspicuous gentile was the Platoon Sergeant...
...don't ask what I went through before they'd let me have it back...
...But, unlike our gentile neighbors, we had far fewer places to hide, and the' recruiters who came after us of course also demanded much heavier bribes, shrewdly suspecting that Jews place greater value on their children...
...He has been represented in magazines including the new yorker...
...Of course, the best answer to such crude remarks, aside from an instant bloody nose, came from that group of Jews in our regiment who were neither hair-splitting Litvaks nor passive resisters...
...Anyway, this cantor's procedure was to stuff himself with up to nine pounds of bread per day, until the officer in charge of provisions reported his outrageous appetite to the regimental commander who convened another medical commission...
...For no amount pf money would you have found among them one man who would own to descent from ordinary Jewish parents...
...His latest play, "The Windows of Heaven (A Cat in the Ghetto)" had its world premiere in Stockholm...
...Altogether, our company had three of these treasures...
...These fellows, by their conduct, naturally, "blackened the faces" of all Jewish soldiers because, no matter how well the rest of us did, some of our comrades, not to mention officers, grasped every chance to judge us all by the actions of these few...
...Captain Mikhailoff, rumored to be the Czar's relative...
...These doctors demanded to know why the cantor ate so much bread...
...But when, after twelve weeks of suffering, he was still as far from rheumatism as I am from Paris, while seeing that Fonya's doctors were perfectly content to see him die of starvation rather than send him home, he quietly abandoned his medical experiment and began to eat like a human being again...
...Far from being brutalized or corrupted by Fonya's Army, these wretched Litvaks, even at bayonet practice, on the rifle range or on cross-country rides, would unreel Talmudic pros and cons as lightly as a blacksmith hammering horseshoes...
...Throughout his life, he remained a practicing Orthodox Jew with a zest for life and a readiness to fight in defense of Jewish honor in the spirit of his childhood idol, whom he came to think of as the Samurai of Vishogrod...
...The horse would come galloping at him at full speed and, as it passed Brodsky, there he'd suddenly be in the saddle and both of them going like the wind...
...Together, the Wincelbergs have written a novel, send money and stay home...
...But the only "learning" my Litvak comrades considered worthy of the term was a total immersion in the labyrinths of the Babylonian Talmud, a body of work whose surface, as a child, I had barely scratched enough to remember much more than what were the four "fathers" of civil torts, the rules governing a wife during her menstrual cycle, or the conditions under which a bill of divorcement had to be written and delivered — in other words, the sort of odds and ends even the dullest of us managed to soak up out of the air we breathed...
...However, neither one complained, because it was apparent that we-others must have had some pull with nochalstva (Russian officialdom), or we wouldn't be here...
...Not, however, for any good revolutionary reasons...
...Not one of them was descended from anything less than a rabbi...
...For an adult observant Jew to have remained as unschooled as I, of course, was not merely a challenge to them, but a provocation, and, in their Litvak way, they were resolved to elevate me to their own level...
...obliged, week after week, to profane the Sabbath — I would, like so many tens of thousands before me, soon forget I had ever been such a thing as a Jew...
...But I soon realized that my years in the commercial jungles and newborn labor movement of Warsaw had almost totally destroyed my ability to cope with the blessings of idleness, at least on weekdays...
...One of Brodsky's favorite tricks (which, after a good many falls and bruises, I eventually learned to imitate) was to stand in a field with his horse half a mile away...
...Shimon and Anita Wincelberg are both active writers...
...For a Jew in Fonya's Army, I could of course hardly have been better situated...
...Worst of all, as my brother Mor-dechai resignedly pointed out to me, they were probably telling the truth...
...Nu, nu...
...I began to crave some other outlet for my youthful energies and thirst for "adventure...
Vol. 1 • October 1975 • No. 4
