Jewels and Ashes Read Free Page B

‘Bialystok — Photo Album of a Renowned City and Its Jews the World Over’. Copies were sent to countries around the entire globe, to every corner where Bialystoker had fled and recreated their lives.
    A random flip of the pages revealed scenes of a thriving metropolis and its citizens, both prominent and obscure. Other more faded photos and paintings depicted an era when Bialystok was merely a village enclosed by field and forest. But the pages could just as easily fall upon images of ruin and desolation, with buildings aflame or reduced to rubble. Then there was one particular page: after I discovered it I would always turn to it first, skimming over the ruins, not quite seeing or allowing myself to focus fully upon them. Recently I returned to that page which had once held me so captivated; and even though it was years since I had last seen them, the images retained their haunting quality and hinted at mysteries I had not quite penetrated.
    There are five photos under the heading, ‘Memorable Bialystoker Characters’. Above, to the left, stands Yankel the Organ-Grinder, holding aloft a wooden box from which a parrot is drawing out a lucky envelope with its beak. They are in a market-square surrounded by a crowd watching this poor man’s lottery. Yankel’s hair is white, as too are his ample beard and moustache. He has the bearing of a fierce patriarch, a communal elder rather than a pedlar of cheap dreams.
    Alongside Yankel, to the right, is a photo with the caption: A Bialystoker urchin from the Chanaykes’. Wrapped in a ragged overcoat, he leans against a timber door, clutching a cigarette to his mouth. He squints at the camera defiantly from beneath a peaked cap that perches crookedly on his head — a little rascal from the alleys of the neighbourhood where my mother once lived.
    On the lower half of the page there are three passport-size photos. One of them remains as sinister today as it appeared when I first saw it and began to realise that, at a certain point, the romance wore thin and there were darker forces that could obliterate it. On the face of the ‘Boy Layser’, we are informed, the anti-Semite Dr Granowski had burned the words ‘ganev’, ‘dieb’, and ‘wor’ — all meaning ‘thief’. The words can be seen clearly, tattooed several inches high, one plastered across the forehead, one etched into each cheek. This incident took place in 1888. Almost a century later the face of Layser stares out, frozen and trapped within a square-inch prison that bears witness to the day he had been irreversibly branded and bound to his fate.
    For relief from the intensity of Layser’s gaze, I would turn my attention to the photo of Faivel Lilliput. A turban wrapped around his head, a white robe draped over his shoulders, a hand held against his chest in a Napoleonic gesture — Faivel was a dwarf, a circus performer, and a distributor of theatre placards throughout Bialystok.
    I knew Faivel. In the 1950s he resurfaced in Melbourne. His inflated head, muscular shoulders, and rolling gait were a familiar sight. He seemed to be everywhere: a jester at weddings; a guest at circumcisions; a mourner at funerals; an odd-job man in the run-down houses of newly arrived immigrants. He loved to play pranks and always put aside time to play with us, the children, as we darted about the communal functions that our parents often attended. He played with the abandon of someone who had long ago resigned himself to having no children of his own. And besides, he was our size, and saw the world from our perspective. He taught us how to mimic the gestures and antics of the grown-ups who towered above us, and to caricature their endless speeches. As my father used to say of him: even where he is not sown, he also manages to grow.
    The fifth image is of an elderly man, balding at the temples, his beard neatly trimmed. He wears a white shirt, tie, and black