Last Days of Peace

Sayings: Bessarabia, Halycia, 1913-1939

Karlsbad-Hamburg—The Postcard: July, 1914

Odessa: February, 1932

Kremenets, 1942; Odessa, 1973

A Dream: Odessa, 1988

Sayings: Bessarabia, Halycia, 1913-1939
translated by Dale Hobson and Ruth Hinkle Kreuzer
1.
Rabbi Yitzchak Levi said,
”People and trees have this in common—
roots in the land.”

2.
Rabbi Schraga Mendlowitz said, ”Not exactly—
the roots of trees are whole
and succulent,
even in parched land;
ours are scattered and shriveled.”

3.
Rabbi Yitzchak Schteinmacher said,
”It makes little difference,
dead or living—
our roots nourish us.”

4.
Rabbi Shlomo ben Yehudah said,
”It is not for us to judge
whether our roots are living or not;
we have an Assistant
who promised us resurrection
and is true to his word.”

5.
Rabbi Yitzchak Schteinmacher said,
”Look, you are bickering;
it disturbs me, this image of a family tree.
We draw the trunk—exalted,
and the branches—powerful and wide,
the name of each ancestor—a fruit,
ripe, perfect.
But in reality, the family tree
is slowly sinking into the land.
Not only its roots are in the land,
but also the trunk and the powerful branches,
and we are but simple leaves,
illuminated by the sun of the Torah.
What are we trying to say here?”

6.
Rabbi Schraga Mendlowitz said,
”Alas! How sad it is to conceive a tree
rooted in death,
sinking into the land.
There is a subtle error in this conception;
for our roots are in the Land,
and this land is not the Land,
but the wilderness of our wandering.”

Raising his voice,
Rabbi Schraga continued,
“Truly I tell you,
if anyone dared to sift,
using the finest sieve,
the sands of Sinai,
seeking the remains
of those who came out of Egypt,
there would be not one thing—
for our roots are in the Land,
and this land is not the Land.”

7.
And all four said,
“Blessed are you, o tree,
growing in the Land
and sunk into the Land.
Blessed art Thou,
Who makes it tremble
in reverent awe,
to tremble wholly
from the slimmest limb
down to the root.
For behold—this trembling,
or rather, the very capacity
to feel terror and to tremble
with horror, with suffering,
is the sign of life itself.”

* * *

Much later, in the seventies,
after the Six-day War,
archaeologists excavated the Sinai
in search of “material remains”
of the forty-year wandering
of Jews in the wilderness.

They found nothing.

Karlsbad-Hamburg—The Postcard: July, 1914
translated by Dale Hobson and Ruth Hinkle Kreuzer
1.
A woman of middle age
with a round, even puffy, face
wears a dress down to her heels
and stands against a background
of overly-picturesque cliff
(a carefully painted backdrop
in a photographer’s studio).

Little is known about this woman.
Even her name, Rachel,
was preserved only on a little page
of autobiography written
by her eldest daughter to get a job
in some sort of Soviet office
at the beginning of the thirties.
“My mother, Rachel, an office worker,
died in July, 1919...”
that is—five years after
this bit of news was posted
to her son (a medical student
at the time) in Hamburg.
On the back of the card
are just a few phrases,
lacking even the usual inquisition
about his health or a wish for his fulfillment.
There is just the one reminder:
it is time to order a new suit.

Apparently the youth’s health
was not then in doubt.
Fulfillment (unthinkable outside marriage)
was thought for now to be premature.

2.
It remains unclear whether Robert succeeded or not
in having a new suit ordered and made before August,
when he, as an enemy alien, was deported
as a consequence of the onset of events
which, throughout the whole world,
are still unresolved.

For some reason, grandmother Raya
(that is Rachel, who had changed her name)
told me that her mother-in-law
(that is Rachel, who hadn’t change her name),
just before dying, bequeathed her all her jewels.

There was just enough to survive
the four famine winters
that came in the next decade.

It is known too,
that Rachel could not abide
modern trends in art.
She forbade her son
to display two prints
rendered in pointillist style.
Rachel called these pictures,
composed of dots,“spotted fever”—

the disease that took her life.

* * * * *

This is what Robert said,
in December, 1952,
when the prospect of arrest
loomed with sufficient clarity:
“The twentieth century began
with a fourteen-year delay.
I don’t know when this century will end.”

The first part seems to be a quotation;
as for the second part, for Robert,
the twentieth century ended in 1954.

Odessa: February, 1932
translated by Dale Hobson and Ruth Hinkle Kreuzer
1.
A Jewish school. Here Solomon and Nadya
teach separate subjects inYiddish to teens.
Both come home late. Dishes clatter.
They eat face to plate, instead of face to face.
He doesn’t ask her,“Why do you hate me?”
She doesn’t dare to say, “Dear, go away!”

Nobody asks and nobody leaves
because half a word, half a gesture
will suffice to light the usual row—
even silence may explode.
Solomon’s glasses slither down his nose;
he pours himself a shot (Mustn’t do that!), then another,
tosses to the cat (Mustn’t do that!) a scrap of sausage.

A pity there’s a witness—the daughter, almost eight.
She had been spending nights with her namesake aunt the last month.
Raya has nightmares and obsessions, goes wild,
fantasizes—and goes to the sanitarium every fall,
and in spring has a hacking cough and swollen glands,
which may owe more to rejection than infection.

Nadya goes to her bed, sobs and mutters from the corner.
Solomon opens a book: Mendele Mojkher-Sforim,
An Everyday History. Black humor,
reading less like speech than moaning.
“What do we fight for, Lord; what do we fight for?”
“Best not to say—best not to say.”

2.
Only half a year of this life is left them.
They will die, one after the other: Nadya, of cancer,
saying (when she received the morphine needle)
that she was afraid of becoming addicted—
Solomon, of tuberculosis, coughing and choking,
finished off by the blood filling up his lungs.

Only the Christian cemetery accepted other nationalities
at the beginning of the thirties, so they buried them there.

Among its crosses I have seen the tombstones:
concrete slabs, marble plaques,
names in Russian and in Hebrew.

But both Rayas, daughter and sister of Nadya-Nekhama,
had a childish fear of death, and so, of graveyards.
No one now remembers the number of the plot.

Sometimes I feel compelled,
to delve into the graves registry.
Instead, I sort through old pictures.
Here is Solomon, two years before his death,
standing tall in a Persian lamb hat
wearing a winter coat with a coachman’s collar.
The photo is faded, worn, torn at the corner.

This is Nadya, taken at the beginning of the twenties.
Wide-brimmed hat, big eyes, swollen lips.

Grandmother used to say to me,
“In the first years, I grieved for my sister,
who died before she turned forty,
but everything happens in its time. . .”

* * * *

And I thought the dead, who have already died,
more fortunate than the living, who are still alive (Eccl. 4.2).

Kremenets, 1942; Odessa, 1973
translated by Dale Hobson and Ruth Hinkle Kreuzer
1.
Everything in his life
was shaping up perfectly:
his desires were divined,
his requests, granted;
his achievements were everyone’s delight
and further greater achievements
were anticipated. His rare talents
were the talk of the town;
people asked him to repeat his cleverest remarks.

A truly marvelous life!
Pity, it lasted no more
than five years.

We keep at home a photo
of a small, serious boy
in shorts and a sailor’s jacket.
On the photo’s back, in block letters,
is written: Boba! Katz!

2.
His older brother,
who also astonished his neighbors
with his rare talents, was sent to school
in the U.S., where the beginning
of World War II found him.

Of his large family, he knew neither
how they tried to survive under the Soviets
nor how they died under the Nazis.
He just had a feeling, one moment,
that the distance between him and his family
had increased a thousandfold.

No big deal for him, a mathmetician,
simply a quantitative leap,
a statistical discontinuity.

They became anonymous dust
mixed into the soil
of Galicia and Trans-Dnieper;
he became a reknowned scientist,
a fellow of numerous institutes,
the organizer of an annual seminar
which bore his name.

3.
We met him once,
when he came to a conference in Kiev
and later (without official permission)
by train to Odessa

to visit his aged aunt, the sole survivor.

I don’t know which bewildered him more—
our country or our family.

He didn’t get it,
why poor relations wouldn’t take his money,
why the streetsweepers didn’t sweep the streets,
why there were posters all over
that began with the word “glory.”

He tried to joke, asking
“What kind of glory? Glory in what?
In any civilized country
they would be thrashed!”—

and was astonished that no one laughed.
He probably didn’t get it—
what a strange brew
of curiosity, hope and fear
possessed us
in his presence.

Getting into a taxi returning to the station
he patted the driver on the back, saying
“Brother—to America—and step on it!”

The driver slouched down. Nobody smiled.

The rest is silence.
He let the correspondence lapse
and so did we, thinking
the first word should come from him.

After a year, Father couldn’t take it
and mailed to Uncle
a polite but stiff letter.

A reply came from one
of the scientist’s many protegés,
on behalf of his widow, asking that we excuse
her not notifying us of her husband’s death
shortly following his return,
in a hospital, the name of which
I can’t recall.

A Dream: Odessa, 1988
translated by Dale Hobson and Ruth Hinkle Kreuzer

1.
He sees in a dream
the small town
on the estuary
where he worked
the first few years
following graduation,
a resident physician
at the regional hospital.

He had left that place
with few regrets.

From time to time
former patients
would visit him—
fewer and less often
over the years.

In his dream the square
in front of the new department store
and the slope down
to the bus station and the wharf
are filled with a dressed-up,
almost festive crowd.
He walks, rubbernecking,
seeking in vain even one familiar face.

Here is the church, long converted
for use as a furniture store;
scattered in front of it
are new but shoddy
armchairs and sofas
where old ladies
in flowery, fringed babushkas sit.
The womens’ faces hold no expression,
their gnarled brown hands
rest on their knees;
at the feet of each old lady
is a basket of old junk—
around them crowd mocking,
stylish teenagers.
The women keep their peace.

2.
While crossing the square
he runs into his father
who has gotten old, all worn out.
His charcoal suit
has probably seen better days;
father is unshaven, which for him
is unprecedented.
In his hand is a small briefcase
containing a stethoscope
and a nickel-plated reflex mallet.

The dreamer is startled to realize
that he himself is carrying
an identical, or rather
the same briefcase.

Father says,
“Well, you finally made it back.
Congratulations!”

The dreamer replies,
“No congratulations necessary.
Fifteen years of work—
all for nothing. I will be forty soon,
you know, and already
I don’t have the energy
to start from scratch.
There must be some mistake.”

Father responds,
“First—soon you will be seventy;
second—the only solution
is to start again from scratch;
third—your mistake
was in leaving this place.”

Then the dreamer feels
a little shove against his chest;
he rises slowly
into the air above the heads
of thousands of people,
but only a single face
is turned up to follow him.
The small round dome,
having flashed below, vanishes.
He is surrounded by a dim, pale,
faintly pulsing, cloudy shroud.

Oh Lord, the years pass
and already have passed
when there is nothing left
but to fall asleep lonely
and to wake up weeping.

Last Days of Peace
tranlated by Anna Halberstadt
It feels weird—but these could be our last days of peace.
Friends are abandoning us. We are staying alone
to face, or rather, to see the enemy’s mouth, his snout.
Will he really step into this trap?
Does he really want to stuff his mouth with our soil?
Is his best friend a subterranean mole, not a wolf?
Is the earth that hungry for blood?
The vampire is insatiable and gentle like a calf,
only he doesn’t suck milk, he prefers to suck blood from veins,
so that he gets asked later—in what regiment he had served
so that his chest is all covered with orders, post-mortem.
The body decayed; the soul remained all alone.
What is there for it to do on the battlefield?  But, there is no way to heaven.
It’s so scary to be thinking—these could be the last days of peace.


February 12, 2022


Originally published in EastWest Literary Forum