Daniel Yarosh - The Death of Hercules - A DocuNovel

When Zalmund was 14, Isaak sent him to the Novorodok yeshiva in Pinsk. He hoped to instill in him a traditional education, which would bring him a significant bride, while relieving Miriam of the obligation to keep a home for her son. Isaak was sure that he could teach him how to run the Koszuty Estate. By the time he was twenty, Zalmund received his degree of s’micha , or ordination in the rabbinate. It was a purposeless career of study that ill-suited a brooding and edgy boy, but it made his father proud.

Zalmund returned home to Koszuty in 1906, but it was a difficult time for Russia. Unrest had forced the Tsar to accept a Constitution in 1905. By the next year he regretted his decision. The war he instigated with Japan served in some way to unify the country behind him. He found another outlet for discontent in sponsoring pogroms against Jews. His supporters formed the Black Hundreds, a secret fraternity organized to murder, pillage and rape in the shtetls . Jews were libeled as enemy conspirators in the War. Of course, it was undeniable that many Jews formed the backbone of the socialist revolutionaries and anarchist opponents of the Tsar.

The Black Hundreds brought the savagery to Koszuty in the Spring of 1906. On a bright Sunday afternoon, the drinking started early after a rousing sermon in the parish church by a visiting monsignor from Kyiv. By mid-afternoon a team of two dozen Black Hundreds horsemen galloped into the main square, shouting patriotic slogans and urging action against the plague within their town. They brought torches and single-shot game rifles and marched to the Jewish village outside of town, murdering everything in their path. They burned the synagogue, market stalls and the flimsy wooden homes, and the Black Hundreds captain made a show of trampling the Rabbi under the hooves of his horse. After they left, the grieving survivors lined up eighteen corpses of children in the street for a picture. The photograph became a postcard that was circulated around the world as an icon of a pogrom.

Isaak, Miriam and Zalmund remained protected on the estate grounds, but they were not shielded from the resentment of the surviving Jews. Why had Isaak not interceded with Kosiński to protect them? Why had he turned his back on his fellow Jews? Isaak was sick with guilt. The shtetl grossly overestimated his influence with Witold Kosiński. Isaak took orders like all the mansion servants. Could he have protected anyone? Could Kosiński have stopped it if he wanted to? Not likely at all. But the inescapable truth was that Isaak did not try.

Zalmund was acutely aware of the family’s isolation. He was no longer welcome in the makeshift synagogue. He had no vocation and his marriage prospects evaporated. His mother was an invalid in the upstairs room who did little more than inquire about his health. Then she rolled over and stared at the wall with vacant eyes. Isaak was a practical man and sent Zalmund back to Pinsk for studies and work as a bookkeeper in a sugar mill of a business acquaintance.

Zalmund did not return to Koszuty for seven years. He took successive jobs in business and spent time in Warsaw. He had two serious marriage prospects which fell through after his father’s objections. When his mother developed early signs of dementia, Zalmund returned to prepare to accept the management of the Estate. War in 1914 then quickly engulfed the Polish territory, which was partitioned between Germany, Austria and Russia. Poznan and Koszuty lay west of the front in German land.

By that time, Zalmund was 25 and the widowed maid had died. Isaak hired a young girl named Deena Wójik from the town to take care of Miriam and his household. Deena’s father was a tenant farmer who walked each day from his small home to work his parcel. He paid his rent in crops and needed the hard currency that Deena brought home for his wife and son. But he hated Jews in general and especially resented Isaak as his overlord. He swallowed his pride with a mighty gulp each Sunday morning when he walked to the Hofitz home to escort Deena to church.

Deena was a pretty girl as a child, with a translucent complexion and flaming red hair, and attracted much attention from the boys in the few years she attended school. She took great interest in her studies and outperformed the boys but was squelched at every turn. “You’ll be a fine farmer’s wife,” she was told. “Don’t make your face wrinkled with studies. You will nurse many babies!” When she went to work in the Hofitz’s house at 14, the attitude of the town changed. She was now the Jew’s whore, and she was shunned at stores and church. For her part, she turned her heart cold to them. She felt inside her a great curiosity about the world, but inside school she was told not to learn and outside she was told not to work. Her father loved her but could not help regarding her as a foul necessity. Her mother, pretending or not, was oblivious to all the stigma, neither comforting her daughter nor condemning the crowd. Deena developed an aloof demeanor of protection and simmered with teenage rebellion.

Isaak was a secretive and controlling sort and did not leave many serious tasks for Zalmund. He lounged around the house with a book in his hand, eyeing Deena’s maturing beauty as she carried out her chores. He teased her on occasion, and she relished the attention in her lonely routines.

One day Deena saw Zalmund reading. “What do you have there?”

After a pause, he said “the Bible.”

“Your Torah?” Deena, asked, showing off her knowledge of Jews, which exceeded most of Catholic Koszuty.

“No, your New Testament,” he replied. He raised the book to show her it was a copy of her Church approved version in German. “It’s a very nice story. A poor boy is born a bastard in a small town. No one likes him because of it. He apprentices as a carpenter, but he doesn’t like that. He studies to be a rabbi, but no one will give him a pulpit. He finds a small town, Capernaum in Galilee, in which to preach. Soon he gathers around him very young students that no one else wants. He preaches against the authorities, and advocates love. These teenage boys eat it up and adore him. Well, you know the rest. It doesn’t end well for him. Sad.”

Deena was struck silent, eyes opened and jaw slack. She was astounded that he would speak so cavalierly about Our Lord and Savior. She knew that was blasphemy. But she was also shocked that he, a rabbi, read the Christian bible, and was fluent with its message. She spun on her heels and left the room.

The rest of the week Deena avoided Zalmund but could not get his story out of her head. A poor child was shunned by the world and then he changed it forever. Zalmund’s brief recitation was more powerful to her than any sermon she had heard in all the Sundays at church. Did he really believe it?

After a few weeks, she gathered her courage to confront him. On a sunny summer Saturday afternoon, when Isaac was still in synagogue and Zalmund was relaxing on the porch, she stood close by him and whispered, “Now that you have read our Bible, do you accept Jesus as your Savior?” She bit her lip, not knowing what to expect.

“Yes, I do,” he replied quietly, and then paused for dramatic effect. “As well as Rabbi Zevi, our Messiah.”

“What?” Deena cried in surprise.

“Yes, Rabbi Sabbatai Zevi. He was born 300 years ago in Turkey on the holy day of Tisha B’Av, under the sign of Saturn, the highest planet. He was proclaimed the Messiah, the coming of God to the Earth. They said he could fly.”

“No! How could you believe that?” Deena raised her eyebrows.

“Why not? He led a holy life, read sacred texts, and interpreted the Kabbalah. The Zohar predicted his arrival.”

Deena was struck dumb.

“Yes, yes. Sarah was a Jewish orphan who fell into prostitution in Livorno. She had a vision that she was destined to marry the Messiah. The great Rabbi had her carried to him on the wings of angels, and he married her, just as the great Prophet Hosea married a wife of whoredom. Its true! You can look it up in your Bible.”