Jewels and Ashes Read Free

destiny, my mother could not shake off her vision of Reb Aron Yankev, running frantically along the platform of the Bialystok station, desperate to make one last contact with his estranged daughter. He had paused for a moment when he reached her, to steady his voice, before he said, somewhat hesitantly, ‘I wish you a safe journey and a successful future in your new home. And I forgive you’.
    When she recalls this moment, mother invariably adds, ‘And how could I have known that I would never see them again? Not only my father, but almost everyone who stood there on the Bialystok station farewelling me?’.
    His parents were not informed. Her father had no idea at the time, although Chane Esther the matriarch knew, and one of her brothers was a witness. From father’s family there were no witnesses. The minyan of ten males required by traditional law had to be rounded up; there were always people on hand to make an extra zloty as witnesses on such occasions. The rabbi performed the ceremony quickly. Bishke Zabludowski happened to pass by the marriage bureau soon after.
    â€˜Mazel-tov’, the office workers exclaimed. And why should I be congratulated?’, he replied. ‘Don’t you know?’, came the shocked answer. ‘Your son Meier has just been married.’
    â€˜We didn’t confide in our parents’, father has told me. ‘We never discussed our personal affairs with them. In the pride of our youth we saw ourselves as being far in advance of previous generations. We were freethinkers, breaking away from stifling traditions; at least, this is what we thought at the time. Many of us didn’t bother getting married. The major problem was finding a room. Once you found one, you could begin “married” life.’
    They were officially married because, they hoped, the papers would enable him to receive a permit to the New World after his wife had settled there. They didn’t require a room because she went home immediately after the ceremony to pack. She had received a permit from a sister who had migrated several years previously. The newly-weds were not to see each other for over three years.
    My father loves words. It is a passion that still grips him at the onset of his ninth decade. The discovery of a new word — its origins, precise meaning, nuances, and variations — can make his day. Father’s most prized possessions are his dictionaries, among which are the rare ones he took with him on the sea voyage from Europe half a century ago. Instead of clothes he packed books and dictionaries: Polish-Yiddish, English-Polish, RussianYiddish, German-Russian, Hebrew-English; all the permutations of the six languages he has mastered over a long lifetime.
    Father claims he knows what his first words were, his first naming of things, the earliest labels he attached to the world. It is 1907. A two-year-old boy dressed in a sailor’s suit runs beside his mother through a town square. Above him looms the clock-tower of Bialystok. He points to the tower and at an object moving through the streets. He names them, and his naming becomes a refrain he repeats over and over again:
    A zeiger, a konke
    A zeiger, a konke.
    The zeiger is the town clock, and the konke is a horse-drawn tram that ferries passengers within the city and beyond it as far as the Zwierziniec forest. ‘You see’, father remarks triumphantly, ‘even then I was already a philosopher, and my first poem was about time and space.’
    They lived on the edge of time and space, my ancestors, always on the verge of moving on, continually faced with the decision: do we stay, persist, take root within this kingdom, or do we take to the road again? Perhaps it is safer, greener, beyond the next river, over the next mountain-range, across yet another border? Often enough the choice was made for them, and they fled for their lives in the wake of expulsions, inquisitions, and massacres to