Extracts from a novel Dream About Vanished Jerusalem by Grigori Kanovich translated from Russian by Yisrael Elliot Cohen It seems that I dreamed about it when I was still in the cradle long before I first saw it for real. Long before 1945, when it took me into its bleeding embraces that still reeked of the smoldering embers of war. Long before one could see there a burial hillock whose mud besmirched all my joys and forever stained with a poison-yellow tint all of my sorrows because it was there that my mother (may her memory be blessed) found peace or perhaps did not find it. In the course of my now already hardly short life I have visited many cities – New York and Paris, London and Geneva, Toronto and Berlin, Turin, Prague, and Warsaw. But not one of those majestic, inimitable, attractive cities ever entered my dreams. I only dreamed about a single city in the whole world. I dreamed about its streets and its alleys narrow like the clotheslines on which for centuries Jews hung out to dry their laundry that was still moist with tears that had been shed, laundry blue with the blueness of unfulfilled hopes that were daring and lofty like morning clouds, and the blueness of musings that fell like a downpour on the gentle souls of girls and boys with resounding regal names like Judith and Ruth, Solomon and David, who played in courtyards. I dreamed of its brick roofs along which cats scurried like angels and angels like cats. I dreamed of its pavements where every cobblestone was like a fragment of the tablets of Moses. I dreamed of its synagogues and its markets, where the whispering of passionate, frenzied prayer alternated and combined in my nocturnal visions with shouts like: Kugel! Heise beigelech! Frishe fish! Its merchants resembled ancient prophets whose shouts resounded threateningly and piercingly like psalms and whose grey locks fluttered in the wind and eyes burned with a fire not of this world. Its potato dumplings smelled not of an oven partly blackened by soot somewhere on Zavalnaya, Novogrudskaya, Myasnitskaya, or Rudnitskaya Street but like an altar on Mount Moriah in the Judean hills. In my childhood, which itself has become a dream, dreams about that wondrous city that was unapproachable for me -- were evoked in the protracted, wistful tales of the members of my family (Grandma and Grandpa and my uncles and aunts, who had never gone anywhere beyond the borders of our shtetl but who knew as well as God Himself about everything in the world). They were also evoked in the fabrications of our numerous neighbors, who were both loquacious and full of imagination (every day my fellow shtetl dwellers adorned the grey canvas of life with their fabrications) and in the fabrications of hungry beggars who wandered into our town on the banks of the Viliya and paid generously for a nights lodging and food with all kinds of tall tales or maiselekh, as we called them in Yiddish. Their unhurried narratives, their long stories that went back to the dawn of history, stirred my imagination like the Passover Haggadah. O Lord, how intoxicating were those beautiful, unforgettable fabrications, those overwhelming and beneficial half-truths. They made me dizzy. They filled our house with sighs that expressed both sadness and happiness and with exclamations that combined grief and rapture, passion and wondrous intoxication. OY! my aunt Hava would exclaim, while surreptitiously wiping away a tear. The city also appeared in the dreams of that old maid, perhaps even more often than in mine. It appeared to her in the form of a huge hupa, a wedding canopy, spread overhead in a broad green meadow. She stood with her beloved under the hupa, all in white and overcome with happiness. In that marvelous city even the most unattractive women found husbands. There at every hour of every day, brides and grooms exchanged golden wedding rings. For my Aunt Hava Vilno was a kind of golden ring lost in the universe. When he heard its name, my uncle Leizer exclaimed Ah! in pleasure just the way he did when he was enjoying the pleasures of the bath house. It also appeared in his dreams. Uncle Leizer dreamed that he was chosen to be the elder of its Great Synagogue and that he had a beaded yarmulke that shone in the dark like a star in the firmament. Leizer dreamed that he was buried next to Rabbi Eliyahu, the Vilno Gaon, the most righteous and wisest of men. Ye-es! was the way the baker Rachmiel, who was born in that marvelous city but had been taken away as a boy to some pagan place in Lithuania, would prolong his affirmation of the city. He baked different dreams. He was not at all interested in a beaded yarmulke and he was prepared to be buried in the cemetery next to anyone. After all, the cemetery is not a marriage bed. Whenever anyone began speaking about Vilno, he saw himself there as the owner of a pastry shop located opposite the Great Synagogue, where from morning to night he sold rolls with raisins and cinnamon that smelled of paradise. The Lord Himself, after the morning prayers, might stop in and sample his wares. From those tales, embellished with exaggerations, like an untilled field with wild flowers, from those stories that struck one with despair or with enthusiasm bordered on madness, from those sighs and exclamations, from those hints and half-hints there emerged what did not exist under a single one of the shtetl roofs, what one could not see through any window -- even if it had a gilded frame. From them there emerged the image of the City of cities, of a Jewish island in a stormy ocean of hate and foreignness, the image of a capital of Jewish piety and wisdom. From them, like a ship shining with lights, emerged the city of our dreams. It was a marvelous ship. It sailed on water, on dry land, and in the air. It found a port in every house, in every hut. Its holds were filled with valuables, with treasures, and were always open to everyone, as if to say: Just take something, fill your pockets and your soul, rich man or poor man, clever person or fool, happy person or unhappy one. From dream to reality was 130 kilometers. What would that distance mean now in our time of supersonic planes and powerful Mitsubishis? But then!... Then the distance from our shtetl to Vilno seemed as far as to the Great Dipper. The fact that it was unreachable increased our longing and our love. As my grandma, may her memory be blessed, used to say, An imaginary cube of sugar is sweeter than a real one because in your mouth it melts, but in your imagination – it never does! Vilno never melted in the imagination of those who from distant times had been called Litvaks. I remember how my uncle, the shoemaker Shimen Dudak, would roll his eyes, that were small like cracks in a barn lock, and raise his shaggy eyebrows toward his bald skull, that was as smooth as a bat, and exclaim: O Lord, what shoemakers there are there! Their awls were sharpened by the Almighty Himself! I recall how the tailor Shimshon Bankvecher, stoking his aristocratic moustache and leaning on his shortened right leg, would praise himself without shame: I learned to sew in Vilno. The world doesnt have such tailors as they have there. They make a hump-back look good! I recall how our local madman Motele, who was gentle and was always dressed in white as if he were wearing a shroud, used to say: What a city! There everyone is mad! Everyone! And, then he clicked his tongue as a sign of agreeing with himself. My grandmother, who due to her piety was called Gods bride, yearned for the city with her whole being, whispering its name the way one does that of ones beloved, while she prepared herself, if not for a real meeting, then at least for a short encounter with it. In her imagination she would go up to the womens section of the Great Synagogue, murmur a prayer and the Lord God would hear her, forgive all her sins, and breathe gently, as if on a flickering candle, on her old age and bring back her youth. However, her dream was not to be fulfilled. Just the same way that the dreams of her relatives and fellow shtetl dwellers, those modest and not very successful laborers, fish mongers, midwives, tailors, and shoemakers, leather workers and carpenters, shop keepers and tinkers whose earthly journeys were brought to an end by the will of the Almighty or of the Devil. I cannot tell Grandmother, the bride of God, the truth about the Great Synagogue. I cannot tell about this to a single one of the more than 200,000 Jews who were killed in Lithuania during World War II, not to the child who was thrown alive into a pit nor to the old man who when he was being burned or shot uttered the words Shma, Yisrael, that Jews repeat from childhood. Like the living, the dead do not believe in a truth that leaves them no hope. How can it be that there is no Great Synagogue? Who says that not a trace of it remains? When the Messiah comes we the dead will rise from our graves and be the first to rush to pray there!... Long before the unheard of slaughter, before the terrible harvest that did not leave a single shoot, a single seedling, a single branch on the tree of Israel in the shtetls of Lithuania, my grandmother did not allow a single speck to sully her aspirations or the dream of her beloved city, which continued to shine for her in all its splendor and beauty. Before the war only one person from our shtetl was fortunate enough to visit it. That was the balagula, the wagon driver, Peisach-Tsimes, a distant relative of my grandfather. When he returned from Vilno, Grandma asked him: Well? What do you have to say? She was expecting from him some words that she had never heard before, words that would suddenly create a rainbow for a tortured soul that had been overshadowed by impenetrable clouds. But knowing the character of the old woman, the balagula Peisach hesitated, sniffled for a long time with his carrot-shaped nose, and shuffled from one foot to the other, as if he were standing not on a wooden floor but on a raft on stormy waters. Its a city like any city. Its crowded and dirty… and there are Jews everywhere. There are also as many balagulas as there are uncircumcised dogs. * * * I arrived in Vilno (Vilnius as the Lithuanians call it) at the beginning of 1945. February was drawing to an end. Snow was falling thickly and the snow-covered city resembled a sick person lying in bed on high pillows filled with goose feathers. The roofs of the houses had been torn off. The streets had been ripped up by the heavy treads of tanks. There were a few pedestrians with loaves of bread under their arms. The sole cab driver at the square in front of the train station was looking for a customer while his horse was nervously pricking up its huge parchment-like ears. The spires of churches pierced the sky that was covered with leaden clouds; and there were windows, windows, and more windows with broken panes without curtains, without people, and from which no voices came. There was also a rusty sign in German with barely legible letters. Everything was strange, incomprehensible, and caused fear and suspicion. My eyes sought in vain for some familiar outlines or details. My ears tried in vain to catch some sound that might link this city with the one about which I had heard so much, the one that used to appear in the dreams of my childhood. Was this really Yerushalayim dLita? Would my Aunt Hava, the old maid, really find her destined husband here? Would the baker Rachmiel really open here, opposite the Great Synagogue, a shop which would be visited in the morning by the Almighty Himself in order to taste a pastry with poppy seeds, one that was as light as a butterfly? Would Uncle Leizer really be buried here in a grave near that of the wisest of the wise, Rabbi Eliyahu? And where is the Great Synagogue? Where is the cemetery where the remains of the Gaon of Vilno lie? Where are they: the Leizers, Havas, Rachmiels, Shimshons, Meteles, where are they – the girls and boys with the resounding royal names of Judith and Ruth, Solomon and David? All around there was only snow, snow, snow. Perhaps Mother had taken me somewhere else? Perhaps we had ended up in a quite different city, an ordinary, in no way special, bleak one, not Vilno, not the Jerusalem of Lithuania? Perhaps in our haste we had made a mistake and bought tickets for some other destination? No, for the right one, Mother replied. Well then, where … where are they all? Who do you mean by all? The Jews. The Jews, Hirshele, are there... Mother sighed and pointed to the snow. Nothing was visible beyond the shroud of snow. Nothing, except for gray houses, lifeless and silent like tombstones. In the spring, when the trees turned green we set out – for Ponary. The air was clear and fresh. The birds sang in Ponary, as they had sung a century before. They burst into song so enthusiastically that you might think that their joyous chirping could be heard by the dead, the 80,000 dead. Sometimes the birds abandoned the trees from which there still wafted the stench of burned bodies, alighted on the ground, on the autumn mud. With their beaks they plucked slow-moving worms from the mound there. I looked at them and my heart contracted with horror. It seemed that they were plucking up not worms, were not eating some insect but the eyeball of the scamp Chaimele or of the dark-haired tomboy Hanele. The Ponary massacre took place in the spring, but this was preceded by the one in the Great Synagogue, the same one where the immortal spirit of Rabbi Eliyahu hovered and opposite which the baker Rachmiel dreamed of opening a profitable shop. Back in Vilno I stood before the ruins of the synagogue and could not stop feeling that very soon, within a minute or two, in the blink of an eye, from under the rubble, from that combination of eternity and mortality, from under that wreckage of ruined iron Rabbi Eliyahu would rise and shout so loudly that the whole city, the whole country of Lithuania, the whole world, could hear him say : Jews! Both dead ones and those still living! Take crowbars and pickaxes, axes and chisels! Hurry from all around – from shtetls and towns, from homes and graves! The Great Synagogue should not be allowed to lie in ruins! Roofers, fix the roof! Carpenters, make new floorboards! Glaziers, put in windows! Smiths, make candlesticks! Tailors, sew prayer shawls! It will soon be the holiday of Passover. The holiday of the liberation from Egyptian bondage! Hurry, hurry since there is no worse slavery than forgetting, than amnesia! Unfortunately, no roofers came, no tailors came, no smiths came, no carpenters came. No one came! The living stared at the ruins and walked past. No one picked up a handful of debris, spread it on his palm or poured it, like ashes, on his head. But the Soviet bondage was worse than the Egyptian one. In my student days like many of my peers I worked helping to rebuild the city, clear roads, lay out parks, and plant trees. The favor of the victors was extended to everything -- except for things of value to Jews. In yeshivas, where for centuries young Jewish minds pondered the mysteries of the universe and the purpose of Man, like young versions of Maimonides, where truth was cultivated among grapevines of payes, there were now housed institutions that were concerned with the collection – not of revelations about the ways of humanity -- but with rubble. In Jewish schools the bosses were faceless, stubborn bureaucrats who handed out passports with the hammer and sickle or signed pages for the personal files of undependable, semi-dependable, and even some dependable citizens. Printing houses that before the war had earned considerable fame throughout the Jewish world had been closed by the Bolsheviks. Now they were printing pitiful imitations of Moscows Pravda and Kommunist, election ballots that did not allow any choice, and great works by Joseph Stalin, the genius of all times and peoples. In the gloom that enveloped the Jerusalem of Lithuania there were still some warm hearths. There was a Jewish orphanage that offered shelter to children who had survived the recent massacre. There was a Jewish school where one could still hear the sounds of the millennial Jewish alphabet being repeated. In the former jail that the Germans had transformed into a ghetto, there was a soon to be closed down Jewish museum, where the exhibits consisted less of documents that had been preserved than of its director Gudkovich and a few other staff members. I lived in Vilnius for almost 50 years and discovered there tatters of that real Jerusalem of Lithuania that I used to dream of at night and detect traces of its lofty and enduring spirit. We young and hungry striplings, partially Russified and speaking a Yiddish distorted by a foreign land, after having been scattered by the whirlwind of war into territories where the word zhid [kike] stigmatized our people, ran to the Jewish literary evenings that took place in post-war Vilno. We welcomed with rapture guests from Moscow like Perets Markish and Aron Kushnirov while at the same time taking pride in the fact that we had living in our own city such wonderful poets as Abraham (Avrom) Sutzkever and Hirsh Osherovich. I shall never forget the incomparable impression made on me by the recital of Sutzkevers epic poem Kol Nidrei by my uncle, the womens tailor Motl Kanovich. Lovers of Jewish theater and literature used to gather at his home on Stalin Prospect. The guests included the large-headed, majestic, somewhat deaf teacher Rozentalis, who looked like a Roman senator; the tailor Dogim, with a complexion so dark it looked charred and a voice that split the air like a siren; and the extremely quiet bookkeeper Upnitsky, who continued to calculate and check things everywhere. Frail Uncle Motl, who was smiling (after all, a womens tailor is fated from birth to be a “smiler”: he has no choice but to smile), read that poem that had just appeared in the press with an expression and a passion that were quite uncharacteristic of him. Not only did the small living room where the reading was taking place recall the orchestra of an ancient Greek amphitheater but the reader looked like an ancient oracle rather than a frail tailor. His voice caused vibrations in the air, in the cherry brandy in the carafe, in the lily-shaped crystal wine glasses, and in our souls. Tears flowed down the cheeks of the silent audience. I cried too even though I didnt really understand why. Of course, in those days there was no shortage of tears and they had more causes than just poems. Each new year brought new woes. Then the terrible year 1953 arrived, threatening to exile all of us Jews to Siberia. For that reason in Jewish homes rusks were being prepared for the way. And Jewish books were being carried out of Jewish homes like dead bodies. In haste, at dusk, in an empty lot not far from the Lukishkskaya prison our frightened-to-death neighbors were burning all Jewish writings, starting with ones by the innocent, starry-eyed Mapu and ending with those by the gloomy and stern David Bergelson. Sixteen volumes of the prerevolutionary Jewish encyclopedia were carried off into the night like sixteen coffins. Those voluntary book burnings were carried out by people to save themselves from possible accusations, to get rid of material evidence against them even though their only guilt was belonging to the Jewish people, that they had been born under a Jewish roof. The odors of these bonfires hovered over my youth, suffocating me and threatening to suffocate the Future. And what could be worse than a Future that was singed with fear and humiliation? I still did not fully realize then that it was not paper that was burning but the city of my dreams – Yerushalayim dLita, and that I myself was no more than a smoldering coal or at best a dying ember. How many of the latter there were and how many of them were extinguished by a wind! However, sometimes stars were lit by them, stars like the Jewish singer Nechama Lifshits. But even those stars did not remain visible for long in the firmament because they were covered over by clouds. Emigration began. It was difficult but irreversible. The city of my dreams, Yerushalayim dLita, shrank like the material in Balzacs novel The Magic Skin. Meanwhile, with persistence and courage worthy of the Maccabees, Jews rushed to OVIR, the department for granting visas and registrations, the way they used to rush to prayers in the Great Synagogue. Our most desirable and indeed sole meeting place was the scarred and streaked with black oil platform of the Vilno station, the first way, as the railway people called it, and the most trustworthy way, as the Jews put it -- the way from the Jerusalem of Lithuania to the real Jerusalem, the eternal and irreplaceable one. In the mid-1970s I went to the station to see off an old friend. When he was ascending the steps to the train car, I drew his attention to the cars number, 0. Car number zero, does that mean a grade of zero? I asked. It doesnt matter if it says zero, he replied calmly. As soon as we get there, a 1 will be added before the zero. Which 1? I wondered. Number 1 representing our homeland, my friend responded eloquently, a primary value for every Jew. I dont know whether the object of his love turned out to please this person who was inclined to idealize things or whether he later felt bitterly disillusioned, but at that time on the platform, where some young lads were energetically dancing the hora, his reply sounded quite convincing: You cant live with ghosts. No matter how good dreams are, they have to end sometime. Why didnt I ever think of this? Perhaps my friend was right after all, that whoever lives with ghosts will himself become a ghost. The Great Synagogue is a ghost. The Jewish Museum -- a ghost. The houses are ghosts. Ghosts in the past, in the present and, perhaps, in the future as well. Aunt Hava, the baker Rachmiel, and Uncle Motl who read the poem Kol Nidrei with enthusiasm and lamentation, along with the wisest of the wise, the Vilna Gaon, and the widow Romm … are all ghosts. Even the person closest to me, my father, by the grace of God a tailor who sewed clothes for half the city, suddenly became a ghost. Early in the morning, every day – as long as he could get around by himself, at 80 plus years old, this unfortunate (as he referred to himself) set out on the chase. Where are you going? I would ask. Im going to try to catch a Jew. He caught them in the Bernardinsky Garden; at the square that still, before the declaration of independence, bore the name of the immortal Lenin; on the banks of the Viliya; or in the vicinity of the new central post office. Yesterday I caught two, he boasted. The goldsmith Sholem and the shoemaker … whats his name?… Oh yes, Nison. How about the day before yesterday? The day before yesterday, only one – the barber Menashe. His daughter has a car, a Zhiguli. She promised to take us to the cemetery… On Sundays the cemetery is full of Jews… they wander there… and look around… There were days when there was no catch. Then Father came home sad, incommunicative, angry at his old age, at his fate, at the whole world. His catch diminished with each passing day. The goldsmith Sholem emigrated with his children and the shoemaker Nison had requested an exit permit… But Father needed at least one Jew, whether of his age or not, it didnt matter. The main thing was to find a free bench in the Bernardinsky Garden, to sit down and plunge, dip, or dive into the warm streams of memory. To remember, remember, remember: a bar mitzvah, a wedding; serving in the army – the Lithuanian, the Polish, the Russian ones; or the Day of Victory at Tilsit or Lublin… And today there, in squares and parks, on the quays and in the woods on the edge of town there undoubtedly still wander old men like my father Solomon. They wander without finding what existed or what never existed. Exhausted, forgotten by God, they involuntarily fall asleep under the lindens and the oak trees. And, like me, they have dreams about the Jerusalem of Lithuania, about the city where they were born or about which they had heard from someone long ago in childhood. They should not be forgotten. They no longer have the strength to live while awake and no longer the strength to live in a dream. It is not right to recite the memorial prayer, the kaddish, for a city, especially if one can find there at least one Jew, young or old, awake or asleep. I do not want to bury its streets and alleys, narrow like the clotheslines on which for centuries Jews hung out their laundry. I hang out there my grief and sorrow. I do not want to bury its brick roofs, along which cats scurry like angels and angels like cats. I climb to the attics and purr about my love to the sky and to the moon that shone for many generations of my brothers and sisters. I do not want to bury its pavements where each cobblestone is like a fragment of Moses tablets. I place a memorial stone on those pavements that will scorch with fire every step that people take and remind them of the Massacre, the killing of thousands and thousands of totally innocent people. I do not want to bury the Great Synagogue. I will always pray there and, as long as I pray, no one will wipe it off the face of the earth because the face of the earth is my face and your face. I do not want to bury my dreams. Who says that they scatter with the first rays of the sun? For those who have lost what they loved they are the only sun. https://dropbox/s/u96b84x0d0lfanj/S_06_Vilna_ENG.mp4?dl=0
Posted on: Fri, 12 Dec 2014 19:06:02 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015