Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

Very slowly, page after page, Janki tore up his manuscript and said to Chanele, ‘Never again, for as long as I live, will I deliver another speech.’

‘That’s fine,’ she replied.

Joni Leibowitz edged his chair closer to Désirée’s, stroked his sprouting moustache and said with vain courage, ‘If there should be a war, of course I will have to fight. You’ll see, my uniform really suits me.’

Désirée had allowed his compliments to wash over her all evening without reacting. Now she smiled at him, which he took as a hopeful sign. But she had only been thinking, ‘If there’s a war, Alfred will come home very soon.’

‘You see,’ Sally Steigrad said to Arthur and tried to look as if he had planned even this surprising outcome to the evening, ‘this is why we need insurance. Because you never know what’s going to happen.’

‘A war would be a punishment from God,’ said Pinchas.

‘But is it good for the Jews?’ asked Mimi.

In front of everybody, Zalman Kamionker put his arm around his wife Hinda and drew her to him. ‘I feel sorry for Emperor Franz Joseph,’ he said. ‘He really has no luck with his children.’

The war broke out, and Alfred didn’t come home.

On the day of Germany’s ultimatum to France, François sent a telegram to Monsieur Charpentier. Alfred set off on his journey the following day, but the order had already been issued for general mobilisation. He was a French citizen, and when his train reached the border, he was taken out of his compartment and asked for his military leave orders. His train had set off from the Gare de l’Est before the official start of mobilisation, so he was not accused of desertion. Alfred was only brought back to Paris and brought before the recruitment board. He was, like almost all candidates in those days, found to be fit, and assigned to a training unit. By the time his family in Zurich found out, Alfred was already a recruit.

François, convinced that most problems can be solved with money, gave Monsieur Charpentier plein pouvoir to buy Alfred out, but in France patriotism had broken out along with the war, and the traditional little channel of corruption no longer worked.

Training wasn’t all that bad, Alfred wrote to his family; so far in the general chaos they hadn’t even found rifles for the new recruits, and exercises with broom-handles had an almost comical character. The French had as little a chance against the well-organised Germans, this was his firm conviction, as they had in 1870–71, and the war would be over long before he himself got to the front.

Janki travelled unannounced to Zurich to talk to François. When he didn’t find him in his office, he looked for him all around the department store and in the end made a scene in front of him in the middle of the fabric department. He wasn’t doing enough to solve the problem, he told him, not every soldier was as fortunate as he, Janki, had been in his own day, and if Alfred had to go to the front and died there, it was all François’s fault. When François tried to calm him down — one doesn’t discuss family problems in front of other people — Janki lost control and started hitting his son with his lion’s-head stick. For the first time, François was glad that business hadn’t been good since the outbreak of war, which meant that only a few customers were able to observe the embarrassing scene.

Meanwhile Chanele had gone to see her daughter-in-law Mina, and the two women were trying to give one another encouragement. But try as she might to conceal her own anxiety, Chanele could not suppress the thought that Mina had only ever been unlucky all her life. Why should it be any different with her son?

Mina, the only member of the family council to vote against Alfred’s banishment, gave no outward sign of what was going on within. Only once, when she met Parson Widmer in town, did she spit on the ground in front of him, and then had to struggle to resist the urge to apologise to him. The misfortune had begun not with him, but with that plot of land for which François was prepared to do anything.

François, in the meantime, in his attempt to change the situation, had abandoned his lifelong resistance and decided to become Swiss. There were several communes which were known to like refurbishing their coffers with increased fees for — mostly Jewish — new citizens; he opted for Wülflingen near Winterthur, where they declared themselves willing to speed up the procedure for an acceptance fee of five thousand francs above the usual amount. As at his baptism, Alfred was involved in this too, without having been asked first. But at first the argument of his new citizenship did not persuade the French authorities to free him from military service.

Désirée did nothing but cry now, and Mimi dragged her to see Dr Wertheim. He diagnosed anaemia and general nerves and prescribed a strengthening diet. But one doesn’t heal broken hearts with beef broth, even if it’s made according to the recipe of Grandmother Golde.

Pinchas said Tehillim every morning and even, without making much fuss about it, had several personal fast days. There was much to be asked for during those days, because prayer had to be said for Ruben too.

Immediately after the events in Sarajevo, Zalman and Hinda had urged their son to come home straight away. He had written back to say that he only wanted to stay the few days until Siyum, the traditional feast that is always celebrated when the students of the yeshiva have finished studying a section of the Talmud. Then the war broke out, and all connections with Eastern Galicia were suddenly interrupted. At the Post Office they were told only that telegrams could unfortunately no longer be accepted for regions where battles were being fought.

Hinda did not moan or complain, but became very quiet, and did her work mechanically. Lea and Rachel had only ever known their mother to be cheerful, and found it hard to accept the change. During this time they were more hard-working and helpful than anyone had known them before. It was the only way they could show their concern for their brother.

With Pinchas’s support Zalman set up a fund for refugees from Galicia, more and more of whom arrived in Zurich in the course of September. He asked each one of them who registered with him whether he had heard anything of the yeshiva in Kolomea, but the new arrivals were all too preoccupied with their own fates. The invading Russian troops, they said, treated the Ruthenian inhabitants with perfect correctness; the Galician Jews, on the other hand, were generally suspected of collaboration with the Austrians, which constantly gave the Cossacks new excuses for acts of violence and looting.

Even though Switzerland was neutral, even here the war changed life from the bottom up. It was shocking how quickly one got used to it.

Arthur, the most unmilitary member of the whole family, volunteered for the emergency medical services, but was not taken because of his weak eyes. Joni Leibowitz was in active service as an infantryman with Fusilier Company IV/59, where he quickly rose to the rank of corporal. As a quartermaster, Sally Steigrad finally had the adventures he had always yearned for.

Alfred reported from Paris that they had by now received their guns, but they still lacked ammunition, which is why, ludicrously, they were only being trained in bayonet fighting. The German victory at Tannenberg confirmed him in his conviction that the war would not last long, and he was already making plans for the time that came after. ‘If they still want to part us,’ he wrote poste restante to Désirée, ‘I will win you back with my bayonet.’

On Erev Shabbos and on the eve of the feast days, all the Jewish refugees, whether they were religious or not, turned up for service at one of the two congregations. Because of the mitzvah, but also out of genuine pity, people tripped over themselves to invite them to dinner, and it even turned into a real competition over the most pitiful figures. On Erev Sukkot, Pinchas Pomeranz brought a whole family home, a couple with a grown-up daughter, all three of whom had to be kitted out from the various wardrobes before they could sit down at the table reasonably yontevdik. They had fled full pelt from the Russians, and spent the whole of Yom Kippur on a train, crammed tight into a cattle truck with many fellows in misery. ‘Even the treyfest among them fasted,’ the man said bitterly, when he climbed the stairs to the attic behind his host, ‘because there was nothing to eat or drink.’