Jewels and Ashes Read Free Page A

seek a new place of refuge. At other times they were welcomed, initially, for the skills they had accumulated as wanderers; centuries on the move had made them masters of the ephemeral. They knew how to serve as middlemen, entrepreneurs, navigators and astronomers, court advisers and healers; even though their hearts longed for some soil to till.
    So it was in Eastern Europe one millennium ago, when they began to arrive in flight from the Crusades. Later they came as guests of noblemen, who invited them to settle in their fiefdoms to become conduits between aristocrat and peasant, town and countryside. They traded as pedlars and merchants, transformed forests into slabs of timber, and shaped the timber into expanding towns, where they could set up workshops to weave, sew, hammer, cut, and shape future destinies.
    Towns and villages sprang up like mushrooms after rain. Over the centuries they expanded in all directions: north to the shores of the Baltic Sea; south into the Carpathian Ranges and towards the Black Sea; west into obscure pockets of the Austro-Hungarian empire; and east, deep into Czarist Russia, beyond the banks of the River Dnieper. Settlements emerged as far and wide as the horizon and shifting foreign borders would permit them.
    Yet at no time were these communities entirely secure. Arbitrarily, a charter or privileges they had been granted could be repealed, and their function, place of residence, and status redefined. There was always the threat of a sudden whirlwind, a madman on the rampage full of drink and misdirected rage, inciting the mob to join in and take out its frenzy on these peculiar people who had settled among them with their private God and the countless prayer-houses in which they worshipped Him.
    So they maintained their talent for movement, travelling within the prescribed boundaries as itinerants, eking out a living from limited opportunities. Foremost among them, or at least this is how I once loved to imagine it, were the troubadours, storytellers, cantors, and bands of Klesmorim who toured obscure hamlets trading tales for a meal, songs for a drink. Wandering preachers, scribes, scholars, and wonder workers exchanged Hebrew and Aramaic scriptures, amulets, and talismans for precious roubles and zlotys to send home to their impoverished families. Their gifts and messages were borne along dusty roads and country paths by horse-drawn wagons. ‘We will return soon’, they wrote, ‘by spring, in time for Passover; or by autumn, for Rosh Hashonah and the Days of Awe.’ Sometimes they would break beyond the limits completely to steal over the horizon, murmuring: ‘Enough! It is time to find a new haven with greener pastures and the possibility of redemption.’
    When, as a child, I had my first intimations of these ancestral wanderings, I saw them initially as a romance. I imagined myself the descendant of Gypsies and nomads. I tried to retrace their steps. I would catch glimpses of footprints and hooves etched in mud and dust within the pages of Yiddish novels that I read voraciously. My interest waxed and waned, and sometimes the footprints would peter out. Old volumes I found in the recesses of forgotten corners in our house would revive my flagging interest with an unexpected photograph of a forefather walking absentmindedly through a village, crooked cottages visible in the background, cobblestones underfoot. They drew me, these volumes, in spite of myself, back to the search.
    One particular page stood out. In the wake of the Annihilation, the survivors had assembled photos, snatches of history, glimpses of what had been until so recently their beloved hometown. They did it in haste, as if building a moat against the ravages of memory loss. Within six years it was published, in New York: a massive volume encased between hard covers of dark crimson on which were embossed, in gold lettering, in Yiddish on the right-hand side and English on the left, the words,