Jews From Poland

"It was near the end. They had already shot my sons and my husband. I remember that people were saying, 'How can she do it? Why should she save herself? For whom?' But you know, the life force has such strong roots, you can't tear it out. Even after those we love most have died. But you are young, what do you know about that? ("The Other Shore")"

"Tiny drops of moisture bead up on her forehead. She wipes them off with the back of her hand and with this gesture seems to wipe away the thoughts that torment her, because once again she smiles and says, "Did you ever see someone who was killed in the war but who is still alive?""

"She says, "Other people suffered so much.... But no one beat or tortured me.... I never saw a German.... But still it's as if they killed me. Because I'm not the same person. My name, my date of birth-they're not mine. The doctor said it's shock. I don't know what happened before then, or what I was like. So it's as if I didn't exist.""

"Finally she says, "What I remember best is the silence. But you can't talk about silence. Silence is the opposite of talk," she explains."

""I always wanted to paint. Always, before the war, that is. But I was thirteen then." ("Splinter")"

"Again she reaches for the photograph, raises it to her nearsighted eyes, looks at it for a long time, and says, "You can still see the traces of footprints." And a moment later, "That's very strange." That's the direction they walked in. From the Judenrat down Miesna Street. She looks at the footprints, the snow, and the stalls once again. "I wonder who photographed it? And when? Probably right afterwards: the footprints are clear here, but when they shot them in the afternoon it was snowing again." The people are gone-their footprints remain. Very strange. "They didn't take them straight to the fields, but first to the Gestapo. No one knows why, apparently those were the orders. They stood in the courtyard until the children were brought." She breaks off: "I prefer not to remember..." But suddenly she changes her mind and asks that what she is going to say be written down and preserved forever, because she wants a trace to remain. "What children? What trace?" A trace of those children. And only she can leave that trace, because she alone survived. So she will tell about the children who were hidden in the attic of the Judenrat, which was strictly forbidden under pain of death, because children no longer had the right to live. There were eight of them, the oldest might have been seven or so, although no one knew for sure, because when they brought them over they didn't look at all like children, only like...ach...The first tears, instantly restrained. They heard the rumbling, a horse cart drove up to the yard, and on it were the children. They were sitting on straw, one beside the other. They looked like little gray mice. The SS-man who brought them jumped down from the cart, and said kindly, "Well, dear children, now each of you go and run to your parents." But none of the children moved. They sat there motionless and looked straight ahead. Then the SS-man took the first child and said, "Show me your mother and father." But the child was silent. So he took the other children one by one and shouted at them to point out their parents, but they were all silent. "So I wanted some trace of them to be left behind." ("Traces")"

"There was the square, thick with people as on a market day, only different, because a market-day crowd is colorful and loud, with chickens clucking, geese honking, and people talking and bargaining. This crowd was silent. In a way it resembled a rally-but it was different from that, too. I don't know what it was exactly. I only know that we suddenly stopped and my sister began to tremble, and then I caught the trembling"

"This time was measured not in months but in a word-we no longer said "in the beautiful month of May," but "after the first 'action,' or the second, or "right before the third.""

"What our cousin experienced, locked up in that room, will remain forever a mystery."

"Once again, after the second action, a postcard turned up. It was written in pencil and almost indecipherable. After this postcard, we said, "They're done for." But rumors told a different story altogether-of soggy earth in the woods by the village of Lubianki, and of a bloodstained handkerchief that had been found. These rumors came from nowhere; no eyewitnesses stepped forward."

"Each day and night of those weeks could fill a book, if only the pen could take on this burden of despair and helpless loneliness."

"The man made a small chink for himself in the outside wall of the barn; through this chink he could keep an eye on a scrap of the world: the meadow in front of the peasant's fenced-in yard and a strip of road."

"Once again it was quiet, too quiet after what had happened. ("The End")"

"None of us had actually been thinking about a journey at the moment when it really began; and yet that moment was accompanied by the hollow rumbling of wheels and the whistle of a locomotive piercing the silence of the night. (p5)"

"Sometimes even I would return from work, open the door, and feel as if I were seeing a stage on which the last act of a play was about to begin at any moment. (p18)"

"It was then-the old men of our town were already on their way and were passing their homes and the children and grandchildren hidden behind their windows-it was then that the door of one of those houses opened and we saw a woman running across the marketplace. She was thin, covered with a shawl, carrying her huge pregnant belly in front of her. She ran after those who were walking away, her hand raised in a gesture of farewell, and we heard her voice. She was shouting, "Zei gezint, Tate! Tate, zei gezint!" And then all of us hidden in the darkness began to repeat, "Zeit gezint," bidding farewell with those words to our loved ones who were walking to their deaths. ("*****")"

"I can think of no other writer on this subject who has domesticated it in quite the way Ida Fink has, conveying the banality of evil through ordinary details the smell of kasha cooking on a stove, mosquitoes buzzing, sunlight playing on water-and then suddenly, quietly, suffusing that banality with the taste of blood."

"It was silent in the forest. There were no birds, but the smell of the trees and flowers was magnificent. We couldn't hear anything. There was nothing to hear. The silence was horrifying because we knew that there was shooting going on and people screaming and crying, that it was a slaughterhouse out there. But here there were bluebells, hazelwood, daisies, and other flowers, very pretty, very colorful. That was what was so horrifying-just as horrifying as waiting for the thundering of the train, as horrifying as wondering whom they had taken. ("Jean-Christophe")"

"Standing by the window, she thought: If only a star would fall. She was superstitious; in those days everyone was superstitious, each in a secret, private way. She had a great many personal superstitions, but shooting stars weren't among them--to wish on a shooting star would have seemed too romantic, too impossible. Nevertheless, that evening she thought: If only a star would fall—even though it was already late autumn, and everybody knows that stars fall only in summer. Still, she kept her eyes stubbornly fixed on the heavens and suddenly saw a flash of light on the horizon: some careless person had turned on a lamp without first covering the window. This flash in the darkness was not the star she was waiting for, but it could have been, and she took it as a good omen. (first lines)"

"June turned into July; the linden trees perfumed the air; the frogs croaked in the river; the dogs bayed at the moon; the nights were bright and sleepless. The white posters demanded tribute. The Jews gathered gold and silver, coffee and tea, and money, money. The Landrat insisted on silver tableware and valuable china. From nearby towns came news of gold and silver, of coffee and tea and money, money. Gold and silver, coffee and tea, were supposed to buy peace and quiet in the town, peace that was not peace, quiet that was not quiet. "People are naive," Szymon shouted, "whoever believes them is naive. This is only the prelude," he shouted, "only the beginning." He did not say what it was the beginning of. He didn't have to."

"the seemingly quiet days were in fact full of anxiety and insecurity. We were walking on shaky ground, mined with guesses and speculations. We dissected every fragment of every sentence, every look, every smile; we studied them, as if under a magnifying glass-and we waited. In those early days we felt a growing sense of siege. We wondered: What next? (p87)"

"How can I explain what happened in the weeks that followed? At the time, we blamed it on the stupidity of the girls who were involved. Possibly they didn't realize that they were passing sentence on us-sealing our doom. Their behavior on the final day would seem to suggest as much. Possibly they weren't evil. But a blind hatred was deeply rooted in all of them, and neither words nor kindness could penetrate that dark jungle of primitive instinct. (p84-5)"

"She went for so long without talking that silence became a habit."

"Because many places that year had posted signs that said NO DOGS OR JEWS ALLOWED, the only amusements left were strolls along the river that flowed through the clean, Germanized town."

"The car was silent. But just as we reached the door, came the first whispers: "Jews. They caught some Jews." (p29)"

"They were saying that we had eaten up all our fruit while it was still green, and that we were right to do so, because who knows what would happen to us by winter. What they were saying was absolutely true. ("The Garden that Floated Away")"

"Sabina was tall and thin, with a startled expression, as if she knew in advance that the world and its inhabitants had nothing good in store for her. (first lines of "Sabina Under the Sacks")"

"It suddenly seemed to me that the further away we got from Poland, the more complicated everything became-nothing was getting easier. We were dragging along all the obstacles we had overcome, and they were spawning new ones, and no sooner did we overcome these than they gave birth to even more. I looked at the young, pink-faced woman, and I could hear her musical, childlike laughter, and her voice, saying, "The important thing is to find a boyfriend." Would she give us away? (p66)"

"I turn to Kadia Molodowsky, predominantly known for her poetry, but whose stories minutely depict assimilation in America as she witnessed it in the 1940s and 1950s. All these Jewish women—Julia, Nadia, Patti, Gina, Fradel, Kadia—are my ancestors. They are mayne bobes, mumes, shvester, my grandmothers, aunts, sisters. Mir darfn zikh bakenen. We need to become acquainted."

"In her often-quoted poem "Froyen lider" (Women poems), Kadia Molodowsky wrote of Jewish women who appear in her dreams: "Es veln di froyen fun undzer mishpokhe/bay nakht in khaloymes mir kumen un zogn..." ("The women in our family will come to me in my/dreams at night and say...") Written in 1920, the words are stark and unambiguous: "undzer mishpokhe"—our family—the Jewish people, clear and simple, easily identified by the language they spoke-the Yiddish speakers of Europe, of the world. Kadia was rooted in her world and its history. Her writing echoes with the richness of the Yiddish culture which she loved, but which she was also conscious erased women and women's lives. As she herself says in this poem, she was a page torn from a book whose first line is illegible. Still, when Kadia dreamed, she knew and remembered who and what she dreamed of."

"Molodovsky, who knew the Jewish sources and spent many years teaching in Jewish schools, turned poetry into a conduit through which the biblical matriarchs could express their fellow feeling for every kind of sorrow"

"...in a city, when the tongues start wagging, God protect us from what can happen."

"Yeah, yeah," the gentile said. "A bad dream will bring life to an end."

"In modern Yiddish writing, the moral, spiritual, and emotional capital of generations of Jewish women was utilized by male and female writers alike... Female prose writers, such as Fradl Shtok, Esther Kreitman, Rokhl Korn, Kadia Molodowsky, and Khava Rosenfarb, also deepened the awareness and understanding of the feminine contribution to Jewish civilization... In the realm of poetry, four female writers deserve special mention: Miriam Ulinover, Kadia Molodowsky, Rokhl Korn, and Rajzel Zychlinsky...Kadia Molodowsky's life in Yiddish literature took her from Poland to the Soviet Union, and from the United States to Israel and back. She made lasting contributions to the short story, the novel, the essay, and children's literature. In the United States,she also founded and edited the literary journal Svive. Her most important and original work, however, was in poetry. She was simultaneously the voice of traditional Jewish motherhood and of the struggling modern Jewish woman confronting ideas, emotions, disappointments, and hopes. Her philosophical poems, Holocaust poems, poems about Jerusalem, and children's poems are particularly noteworthy."

"The young man wiped the fingers of his hand with his handkerchief, as if he wanted to wipe away the shame"

"The sorrow of all the poor people of the hill fell upon Feyge-Tsipe and spread across the whole house."

"What is rarely known except by scholars is the range and variety of the pre-Holocaust Ashkenazi communities of Europe: traditional, socialist, communist; Orthodox and secular; capitalist and worker; Yiddish-speaking and/or fluent in the vernacular of wherever they lived: Russian, Polish, French, Czech, German. ... There is a whole literature, not just Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer, or Sholem Aleykhem, but also brilliant narrative writers and experimental poets such as Chaim Grade, Kadia Molodowsky, Anna Margolin, Mani Leyb, Itsik Manger, and a host of others."

"the eminent poet Kadya Molodowsky"

"This was the happiest laughter that was ever heard on the hill."

"She eats with obedient earnestness down to the very last crumb, as if she were finishing praying."

"I wrote the stories included in this book in the last fifteen years. From a world that vanished most dreadfully, and that lives on in our memories, images of piety, virtue, and Jewish morals awaken. There people stood with feet on poor soil, but with their souls in a higher world of good works and good deeds. These very images live in me, and they emerge in a large number of the stories in this book. A Jew was never concerned with the appearance of the walls of his house. He would never call an interior decorator when he needed to whitewash these walls for Passover. He merely hung a picture of the Vilna Gaon on the wall, and that was embellishment enough. He wasn't concerned about what kind of bookcases he had, as long as they contained the Talmud. It didn't matter to him if the windows of his house weren't in the latest style, because he still knew where the eastern wall was. When he gave to charity, he certainly didn't look in the newspapers to see if his name was there, and if the letters were big enough. In our time, people have moved from an inner, spiritual world to a life of externals, to things that flaunt themselves in one's face, that have more glitter than warmth, more talk than thought; more outward show than introspection. And as a Jew advanced from an inner to an outer station, as usual, in that advance, he lost those possessions he had, and had to go back, look for, and find them. These losses and gains are both tragic and comic. A good number of the stories in the book are dedicated to this significant phenomenon in our lives. Perhaps that was why I wanted to call the book A House with Seven Windows: light and shadows enter into each window."

"When a person gets rich suddenly, it's not so much apparent in any one thing so much as it is in his eyes and his lapels. His eyes stiffen up and so do his lapels. (first lines of "The Brothers")"

"After the meal ended, the little flames of the Sabbath candles began to leap and then to go out, and the darkness threw sadness across the table."

"One rich man is drawn to another."

"no one's good luck lasts forever."

"It was one of those blessedly beautiful afternoons at Brighton Beach, when the sky is so distinctly clear, it was as if it had been washed with a heavenly blue, and the sea looked exactly as if a choirmaster had given the waves their tempo, so that they ebbed and flowed in a harmonious murmur. In short, it was a very beautiful afternoon. (first lines of "The Rafalovitches" 1947 story)"

"A person would not be able to live in this world if not for the bit of goodness that he has seen with his own eyes-this is what Tulye Shor said to me."

"When a person lies in a fever, he keeps nothing hidden. When a person's head is burning, his tongue loosens."

"As her reputation grew, she came to be called the "First Lady of Yiddish Poetry." Her volumes included Dzike gas (1933), Freydke (1935) and Likht fun dornboym (1965). Extremely versatile, she wrote children's literature, plays and fiction, much of which reflected her concern with 20th-century Jewish history. The play Nokhn got fun midbor (Toward the God of the desert, 1949) and the novel Baym toyer (At the gate, 1967) gave voice to her growing commitment to Zionism. Other fiction included the novel Fun Lublin biz New York (From Lublin to New York, 1942) and the collection A shtub mit zibn fenster (The house with seven windows, 1957). The latter shows Kadia's awareness of the tensions in American Jewish life. "The Lost Shabes," for example, reflects her observations of assimilation and the abandonment of Yiddish. "Oys" (Gone) describes how the Holocaust profoundly affected American Jews' sense of identity. Other stories-"Di kvin" (The Queen)-depict the materialism of American Jews. Her tendency was to romanticize European Jews who, she claims in the preface, didn't need interior decorators for their walls, just wanted to know which wall to face when praying. Still, her depiction of ordinary people is remarkable. Her characters never become bigger than life; rather they remain exactly who they are-ordinary and unaware of the large historical currents in which they are caught and which they shape."

"There were always guests at Bashke's table: merchants conducting business with her husband, emissaries soliciting for a yeshive, visiting rabbis, preachers, paupers and random travellers. Bashke greeted every stranger with respect. In the city her house was renowned; Jews called it Jerusalem.""