In Polish Woods

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Text originally published in 1938 under the same title.

© Borodino Books 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

IN POLISH WOODS

By

JOSEPH OPATOSHU

Translated from the Yiddish

by ISAAC GOLDBERG

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

PART ONE — IN THE FOREST 4

1 — MORDECAI’S ANCESTRY 4

2 — MORDECAI AND HIS FATHER 8

3 — POLISH WOODS 16

4 — THE PROCESSION 22

5 — REB ITSHE THE CABALIST 28

6 — A NIGHT IN THE FOREST 34

7 — DEBORAH 39

8 — LASHES 45

9 — RABBI LEVI ISAAC OF BERDICHEV AND THE ANTI-CHRIST 52

10 — THREADS 58

PART TWO — KOTZK 65

1 — PILGRIMAGE TO THE RABBI 65

2 — REB MENDELE OF KOTZK 93

3 — THE HERETIC 108

4 — THE LAST ONE 116

5 — THE GREAT IMPROVISATION 122

6 — REWARD AND PUNISHMENT 131

7 — IF ONE WERE ONLY SURE 134

8 — DROOPING EYES 142

9 — GLORY 148

10 — SOLOMON MOLKO 156

11 — THE ANGELIC TEACHER 160

PART THREE  BEFORE THE STORM 168

1 — ROME AND JERUSALEM 168

2 — BLOOD AND FIRE 178

3 — THE DEATH OF REB MENDELE 201

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 212

PART ONE — IN THE FOREST

1 — MORDECAI’S ANCESTRY

Mordecai’s forbears—father, grandfathers, great-grand-fathers, back to the sixth generation—had all been born in the woods of Lipovetz. There they had intermarried, living clannishly. On Hanukkah they would drive in from all directions, assembling at the home of the eldest of the kinsfolk, and take stock.

In the good old days there had been more than a hundred of them. One by one, upstanding individuals, like so many trees. Far into the night they would sit before oaken tables, chalking down their computations in strokes and circles, eating cracklings and roasted duck in such quantities that the women were almost exhausted from plucking feathers. They washed this down with home brew; they lost their tempers, fought like cats and dogs, and blood flowed often. But soon they made up, arranged matches between their children, and drove back home.

Whenever any of them celebrated a wedding (and this happened very often) more than three hundred guests would come a-riding, every one of them a relative.

Each branch of the family would bring along the rabbi of its own district, as well as a band of musicians. They would play in the open, while the families quarreled, always threatening to break off the match just before the ceremony, always patching up their differences. They would dance all over the place—in every room, in the barns, in the woods.

From an excess of comfort and of idleness, the young folk were forever falling in love, and forever warning their parents that sooner than brook interference they would commit suicide. As for the parents, they did not spare the rod, and they sent the youngsters packing. The children always asked forgiveness and returned.

And when once it happened that a Gentile fisherman from across the Vistula fell in love with one of their daughters, marrying her in a nearby church, the Jewish youth of the neighborhood waylaid the couple on the highroad, tearing the bride from her Gentile groom. They would have no apostate in their family. The young bride, out of shame, threw herself into the river, thus washing away the stain.

In this fashion had Mordecai’s people—plain, whole-some Jews—lived in the forest of Lipovetz to a ripe old age. They had no use for learned folk; they held a rabbi in respect, worried little, crammed their coffers with the best of everything, were fruitful and multiplied. For their children, until the sixteenth year, they engaged tutors. The children never advanced beyond the ability to read simple prayers, or chant the weekly portion of the Pentateuch; or, rarely, the unpointed scroll in the Synagogue.

One Hanukkah, just after the assembled guests had finished their regular squabbling, having stuffed themselves with fat duck, Mordecai’s great-grandfather, at that time the eldest of the kinsfolk, suddenly collapsed. The old fishermen, the local doctor, the physician from the city, were alike helpless; the patient was at death’s door. The simple forest Jews sat at his bedside, smoking their strong tobacco, all hope surrendered. Each was wondering who would inherit the Holy Scrolls; for the Holy Scrolls were customarily handed down to the eldest, in whose home they had all forgathered for the Hanukkah reckoning. All at once, as if by a miracle, along came creaking, right by the window, a covered wagon drawn by two horses. And out jumped a Jew, asking to be put up for the night. He carried an important passenger, he said—the Rabbi from Lublin. No sooner had the Rabbi walked into the room and laid his hand upon the patient’s head than the sufferer began to feel better. In fact, he sat right up in bed.

From that time Mordecai’s people had taken to journeying to Lublin; then to Pshiskhe; and then to Kotzk.

And just as they had been good Jews, they became ardent Hasidim. They sat thenceforth at the head of the Rabbi’s table, gave up the custom of marrying among themselves, and drove to the Rabbi to consult him upon every pending match.

Gradually the Jews of the forest began to send their sons to other parts of the country. For their daughters they acquired Hasidic scholars as husbands. No sooner was the wedding over, however, than the husbands settled in the surrounding towns, refusing to live in the woods. So the Jews of the forest were scattered over Poland and Volhynia, and ceased to increase. Every year, at the Hanukkah census, the roster of the family was shorter. Until, within two generations, there was but one left in the woods of Lipovetz: Mordecai’s father.

Mordecai’s kindred, then, had dwelt for generations in the forest of Lipovetz. And although they were but clerks, they ruled the woods and considered themselves the rightful owners. Wherever a new community of Jews was established, Mordecai’s people sent hewn lumber—provided a goodly portion of Poland with synagogues and houses of study, where Jews might pray. Whenever a Talmud Torah or house of study needed fuel for the winter, Mordecai’s people sent it. They furnished heat for half a province.

The peasants of the surrounding districts gathered without hindrance the twigs of the trees that had been chopped down. If there was a death in the house of a poor peasant, Mordecai’s people contributed boards for the coffin.

To the right—the dense forests of Lipovetz, where century-old oaks fell from sheer age, crumbled, and gave life to still sturdier oaks. To the left—fertile meadows, where tiny whitewashed fishermen’s huts were barely visible above the tall grasses.

The region was far from any settlement, as if isolated between water and woods. So the children of the fisher-folk grew up half savage, rushing into concealment like so many frightened little beasts whenever a stranger happened to drive through.

By day the fishermen slept. And they slept like gypsies, without privacy, the whole clan occupying an entire house. Father, mother, children, sons-and daughters-in-law, lay promiscuously on sacks of straw. At night, the men, thoroughly refreshed, went off to the catch. Before they left, their women would make the sign of the cross over them, provide them with burned wheat as bait, and also with a small purse of wolves’ teeth—a charm against their being led astray by Wanda, the Queen of the Vistula.

The lusty, tanned fishermen, who more than once had looked death in the eye, had remained but children situated between the river and the forest. They understood children’s language, and conversed with every wave, every murmur of the stream.

They would stretch out in their dories, scatter the burned wheat in the river, and then listen. If the Vistula began to bubble, like water coming to a boil, then they knew that the catch would be good. In happy mood they would prepare their nets, their ears cocked sharply. The murmur of the river would grow louder. Shoals of tiny fish, like silvery fragments of ice, would come rushing by, disappearing, reappearing. Famished pike, carp and tenches, their mouths eagerly open, would dart after in pursuit.

Carefully the fishermen would lower their nets into the stream, pulling forth now and then from their boots the bottles of whiskey, warming their blood with the drink and settling back to doze. They dreamed of the wills-o’-the-wisp, who light up the water at night and sparkle in the woods like so many wolfish eyes. They were sure that these lights were jewels—Wanda’s treasures. But to follow a will-o’-the-wisp was forbidden; the creature lured you to destruction.

And should the Vistula break loose as if in a rage, assuming beneath the moon the appearance of greenish slabs of ice, the fishermen would entreat her, like so many children begging their mother to have pity upon them and desist. And if the waters refused to grow calm, they would throw in one wolf’s tooth after another, for Wanda, and anchor their dories together along the shore. Then, drawing on their porcelain pipes, they would spit into the water and listen, for the hundredth time, to the tales of the older fishermen: how the catch was diminishing yearly—and how Wanda was fettered, and the waters of the Vistula were divided, and the good old days when a fisherman glided over the waves like a bird were gone forever.

From the waves rises Wanda into the night. She spreads her wings, enfolds the Vistula, mourning her children. She cries that the waters have been polluted, that strangers have come flocking like a plague of locusts, and that she is pent-up. Whereupon the younger fishermen extinguish their lanterns, spit into their palms out of pure sorrow, get a firmer grip upon the oars, and glide over the stream as if over the spine of a huge, curved beast. They are stealing into the government waters, where the catch is larger.

And this was how the fishermen had lived from generation to generation, far from human settlement. They grew up strong as the forest oaks, with flaxen hair and eyes of steely hue. Even in their eighties they had all their teeth—yellowish teeth, like old, moss-covered stumps.

Rarely did they go to church. More rarely still did they go to confession. The day before Easter they would get together, each contributing generously, and go to fetch the priest to sprinkle their food with holy water. And on Monday, the second day of Easter, they would all leave—every mother’s child of them—for the forest, dressed in their best, to invite the clerks, conducting ceremonially to the Vistula a straw effigy with large eyes made of colored eggs. Mordecai’s people, too, believed implicitly that the Vistula demanded her tribute. So every year they gave kegs of beer, and these Hasidic Jews, followers of Reb Mendele of Kotzk, together with the fisher-folk, would bring a sacrifice to Wanda. The effigy was cast into the waters.

2 — MORDECAI AND HIS FATHER

Mordecai’s father, Reb Abraham, had a second wife. He was in his fifties, of medium build, broad-boned, with a long, grayish beard that reached down to his waist. He was one of those fellows who never hold their change in a purse, but pour it into their trousers pockets so that it shall jingle and be handy for a generous alms.

Abraham was well off, and gossip had it that if he weren’t so crazy he would become a really rich man. The neighboring landowners entreated him to relieve them of their grain and their wool. Abraham, however, refused to buy more than a small section of the forest. And when he learned that Shammai Shaft, a miserly Hasid from the city, who had eaten and slept at his home for weeks at a stretch, and whom he had given a footing among the princely estates, had been buying the harvest of the landowners year after year at a low figure, he boxed his ear, yelled that he was a disgrace to the name of God, and gave orders that thereafter Shammai should never be allowed to cross his threshold. Shammai received the boxing as if nothing had happened. In fact, although by that time he was worth more money than Abraham, with many thousands to his credit, he nevertheless danced to Abraham’s tune, on all fours, and looked up into his eyes as meekly as a whipped cur.

Several times a year Abraham would make the pilgrimage to Kotzk. If it should happen that he observed the Sabbath away from home, he would set up his own table and invite as many Hasidim as there were in town. At table the Hasidim of Kotzk took care not to discuss Torah. For they knew that although Abraham was a repentant soul, he was hardly what one could call learned, was fond of a joke, and capable of poking fun even at the Rabbi himself. Once he had taken a Hasid aside—a naïve fellow, to be sure—and had asked him, in a stage whisper, why Reb Mendele had so many aunts and sisters-in-law in his household, just like—to make a distinction—the priest of his village. This last comparison he repeated several times, exploding with laughter. Or, when Reb Mendele, after the death of his wife, had married one of his relatives, and his new wife had been brought to bed six months after the wedding, Abraham, before a large group of Hasidim, declared that at last he understood the meaning of the rabbinic saying: The labors of the pious are accomplished through others.

I don’t mean anything—I—I mean—God— stammered Abraham, as if in apology, a silly expression on his face, and always that explosive laughter.

Had it been anyone else, the Hasidim would have slain him on the spot. These self-same Hasidim, however, smiled foolishly at Abraham’s jest. They felt embarrassed in each other’s presence, as if some Gentile peasant had cracked a vulgar joke in a company of Jewish scholars. The scholars do not take the matter to heart. For they realize that the man is, after all, a Gentile. In the same way the Hasidim always received Abraham’s jokes. They knew that he had a loose tongue, but that he was a good fellow at heart—a Jewish heart. They knew that he was exceedingly generous. So they pretended not to hear what he said.

Abraham had had no children by his first wife. He himself, once, when he was in excellent humor, sitting among his Hasidic boon companions with a glass in his hand, had confessed that he had played more than one dishonest trick upon his first, and that more than one couple in the outlying towns had been on the verge of divorce because of him.

After the death of his wife he became a penitent. From Kotzk he brought a young recluse and began to study the holy books. Exactly a year later (he was then forty) he married a girl in humble circumstances, the daughter of a rabbi. Deborah—that was her name—was a maiden of high lineage, of whom the rabbi had written that she had been born in holiness and purity. Deborah was exceedingly young at the time of her marriage. Not yet sixteen. She was a tender, shy thing, looking for all the world like some sensitive plant that would wilt at the slightest touch. At first, Abraham approached her with fear. It seemed to him that were he to embrace her she might break in two; it was as if a huge, powerful lout were to hold a tiny child in his arms, fearing lest he hurt it unawares.

Deborah was very pious. There was always a Yiddish book of devotion in her hands. She was always reciting prayers; always did as her husband told her to. She was forever sending donations to the rabbis, asking them to pray for her. She lighted nine candles on Friday night; and once, when Abraham put his arms around her waist as she was in the midst of her devotions, she offered no resistance, stood there as mute as a dove, weeping silently. It was because of such infractions as this that God had punished her with barrenness. To make matters worse, directly after the wedding her health declined.

Abraham treated her as if she were a queen. He waited on her hand and foot. He took her to Danzig to be examined by the city doctors. Whenever he went off on a trip he always brought gifts for her.

Three years after the marriage Deborah gave birth to a son. Mordecai grew up a rather pensive and reserved child. Days at a time he would spend in company of Vatsek, the Gentile woodcutter’s boy, who was just his age. As. a child, Mordecai had very little to say; when he was addressed, he never replied at once, but was lost in thought,, as if it were difficult to understand what he had been asked. He was forever saying foolish things, blushing, and looking out of those large, gray eyes of his so openly, so softly, that everybody simply had to take a liking to him. From the first he was evidently different from other children. For example, he couldn’t bear to watch the children of the fishermen torture the domestic animals. Yet when, for the first time, he saw the shohet slaughter hens in his father’s yard, he was almost unaffected. Later, for a week he kept dreaming of the shohet with a bloody knife between his teeth, and with a pair of soft, frightened eyes. Almost all shohets, it seemed, had soft, frightened eyes. And this dream so tortured him that once he awoke in great excitement, sat up in his cot, yawned for a long time, then made a dash for the hencoop. And if it hadn’t been for the timely arrival of his father, no one would have believed that this youngster with the big, dreamy eyes, who had never harmed a fly, had actually been trying to slaughter a hen with a bread knife.

Mordecai remembered this adventure with the hen for the rest of his life. Also the blows that he received from his father. He kept wondering how on earth it had ever occurred to him to do such a thing.

When Mordecai was ten years old his father procured for him an instructor in the Talmud. The teacher was a curmudgeon of about fifty, bald-headed except for a few stray hairs in the forehead; his neck was ringed by a sparse fringe, such as one finds in children. On the tip of his head sat a greasy skull-cap, as if it had become part of him; in summer and winter he went around in a threadbare coat of rep, except that hardly a sign of the material remained. Only the lining, and two rows of large, round buttons were to be seen. His face, wreathed in a greasy smile, was covered with a matted grey beard that crept almost into his eyes. If it hadn’t been for his beard he would have looked like a moon-face. Down the middle of his beard ran a yellowish groove, as if it had been etched by the drops of snuff that were forever trickling from his nose.

Shloime was as lazy as a gypsy. He did precious little study with Mordecai. He lay day after day upon a sofa, one hand behind his head, sniffing his snuff and reeling off Hasidic anecdotes. His stories were inexhaustible. And the same enthusiasm that he brought to his tales of the wonder-working rabbi, he would bring to his accounts of Napoleon the Third. He was positive that Napoleon was the greatest of sorcerers, and that he had certain contrivances which, when put into operation, caused violent sneezing among the enemy, thus ensuring victory to himself.

Shloime was a jolly, good-natured Hasid. Worry was almost foreign to his temperament, and rarely indeed did he become angry. There were two exceptions, however: his wife and the Gaon of Vilna. He refused absolutely to forgive the Gaon his controversies with the Baal Shem Tob, the father of Hasidism; nor could he forgive him for having postponed the end of the Jewish Exile. As for his wife, with whom he hadn’t been living for several years, he harbored a secret enmity against her; he avoided all mention of the woman. On the eve of the holidays, when everybody in Abraham’s household was occupied, Shloime would go around in restless, disgruntled moodiness; he couldn’t find a place for himself. He wouldn’t take his snuff; he would drink his whisky straight, curse away at the top of his bent, and look for someone to whom he could open his heart. Such moods, however, would not last long. At the first opportunity he would lock himself into a room with Mordecai, ostensibly to instruct the boy in the specific duties of that particular holiday. He would burst into weeping before his pupil, shedding bitter tears. Mordecai would weep with him, and be ashamed to look his teacher in the eye. Shloime would forget that he was talking to a mere child. He would tell him, as one tells a friend, every detail of his misery, not withholding a thing, even about his wife, to whom he referred only in such terms as That she-devil has been my ruin, or, If it hadn’t been for that cursed shrew, I wouldn’t have to be sitting at other people’s tables in my old age, teaching children. Of this haranguing Mordecai understood but little. All he could see was his teacher’s wife, a tall, scrawny creature with a horn sticking out of her forehead, just the kind that Vashti had according to legend.

When Shloime had wept out his troubles, it was as if they had been swept away; once more he was the good-natured Hasid. He drank less, sniffed Galician snuff much more freely, sang from morning till night, and was continuously merry, as if he had never had a care in the world. This would last until the next holiday.

On the contrary, every time that Shloime wept out his troubles to Mordecai, the youngster went about in a daze. He was sure that Shloime was the unhappiest mortal in the world, without a soul to lean on. And he felt sorely repentant that he had so often disobeyed his teacher, that he had made fun of him; he vowed from that day on to obey Shloime scrupulously and love him as he loved his own father.

At twelve Mordecai was able, without assistance, to read a page of the Gemara. His mind wandered, however, and despite the most earnest study, he was capable of asking Shloime such questions as, Why does a man develop a bald-spot on the head, and not on the beard? Or else he would extract from his pocket a green little toad and let it take a walk over the holy pages.

Shloime would always smile indulgently at his pupil’s dubious wisdom and never raise a hand against him. Once, however, when Mordecai’s mother had reprimanded Mordecai in his teacher’s presence, telling him that it did not befit a youngster who was studying Gemara to play around with Gentile fishermen’s daughters, or even with Rachel, the Jewish dairyman’s little girl, Mordecai stood silent, looked his mother straight in the eye and blushed. Shloime, thoroughly upset, strode back and forth, spitting as if a fly had got into his mouth. At first, after the mother had left, he had nothing to say. Then he sat the boy before the table and opened to a passage in The Beginning of Wisdom. He took up a position behind Mordecai, planted his hairy hands upon the table, rocked to and fro above his pupil’s head and began to shout into his ear:

You infidel! After the Gentile girls, eh? You disgrace to Israel!

For the first time since Shloime had been teaching Mordecai, he gave his charge such a pinch that the boy fairly jumped. The child became confused, and could not understand what his teacher was talking about, or what was expected of him. All he could feel was Shloime’s beard moving across the back of his neck, and over his cheeks like slippery little serpents; he shivered with cold disgust. Tearing himself loose from Shloime’s grasp, he ran off so far that nobody could find him, and disappeared for the next few days in company of the fishermen.

So Mordecai grew up into a big fellow, looking people fearlessly in the eye, fond of fisher-folk, fond of his teacher, and afraid of nothing. He believed it when Shloime told him that Aristotle had revealed to Maimonides the name of a minute human vein, and that, if it is cut out of the body after death, the corpse is brought back to life. He believed Vatsek, too, according to whom there was, deep in the forest, a willow tree that had never heard the sound of water or the crowing of a cock, and if you make a pipe of such a willow you can raise the dead with your piping.

Deborah was continually complaining that Mordecai was growing up wild, that he looked (no evil eye!) like a youth of eighteen, and couldn’t exchange two words with a person. She kept insisting that Abraham should take him off to her father. Her father would make a man of their son.

Abraham was not over fond of his father-in-law; he postponed the journey from one month to another. In the meantime, along came a wealthy produce merchant, agreed with Abraham upon a match, and the first thing Mordecai knew he was betrothed. His prospective father-in-law stipulated that the boy should study with his grandfather, the rabbi, until he was married.

So that in Mordecai’s fourteenth year Abraham took the boy to the ill-beloved father-in-law, then in his sixties.

The Rabbi, Reb Moishe, was a diminutive, stringy fellow, with a sparse little beard that refused to get grey, and a pair of tiny, watery eyes. He had a habit of not looking at the person he was addressing, and scrutinizing the nails of both hands during the conversation, as if pronouncing the benediction at the close of the Sabbath.

Reb Moishe used to make pilgrimages to Kotzk, the Hasidic stronghold; at bottom, however, he was a Mitnagged, an opponent of the Hasidic cult, and had hated the Hasidim for years. As a young man, visiting the town for the first time, Reb Moishe had brought his credentials from Reb Leibush the Brilliant to the aged Hasidic leader, in which it was requested that Reb Moishe, when called to the reading of the Law, be addressed as Our Master. The Hasidim, though it was the Sabbath day, tore Reb Moishe’s credentials to pieces. They weren’t going to suffer any conceited fellow in their midst.

The Rabbi spent his life at study. He hated the ignorant, and was pious to the point of fanaticism. For the slightest infractions he imposed heavy fines even upon the most prominent members of his town, so that everybody stood in great awe of him. Every Friday he made the rounds with his beadle, tested every scale, every weight; and many a storekeeper had to give up his weights, paying a heavy fine. Before the lighting of the candles on the Sabbath eve he would always open, in the council-room, a brass-trimmed chest and would count over the dowry-money that poor engaged couples had entrusted to his keeping. Then, filled with a silent, inner peace he would go forth to the synagogue to greet Princess Sabbath.

During the first days Mordecai went about in a whirl. One thought alone occupied his mind: how to escape to his home. Not for an instant did his grandfather take an eye off him; not for an instant did he cease to lecture him. At every opportunity the old man would scold him, gloomily predicting that he’d grow up to be just such a good-for-nothing as his father. If the rabbi ever discovered Mordecai asleep without the skull-cap on his head, he threatened to bind him