Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

The family had a better idea of the end of the story, because Ruben had been there and liked to talk about it, with the religious zeal of someone who has personally experienced a miracle. Because had it not been a miracle, a nes min hashamayim, that his father was suddenly standing in front of him in the rebbe’s house. ‘And,’ he said, and however many times he told the story, he always failed to grasp it, ‘at first I mistook him for a stranger, just as Joseph’s brothers didn’t recognise him when they stood before him in Egypt.’ Ruben had become accustomed to speaking in Biblical similes, but his religious sense overall had become much more tolerant. The more certain someone is of his conviction, the less need he has to force it on others.

Zalman had had no difficulty finding the house of the Ottynia rebbe. It was the most magnificent building in the place, which didn’t mean much, because Ottynia was a poor small town where the people, as the saying goes, could only have Shabbos if everyone borrowed something from his neighbour. Piety alone doesn’t build palaces. But Rabbi Chajim Hager, a son of Rabbi Baruch of the famous Vizhnitz family, was a tsadik, a prince of the Torah, a scion of old scholarly nobility, so his Hassidim took care of him even if they had to go hungry themselves to make their contributions. Unlike almost all the other houses in the town, made only out of wood, the building in which he resided and held court for his devotees was made of stone. It had two further storeys above the ground floor, and the three-cornered gable that had been placed on it like a stage set, was adorned with a Star of David.

Most of the ground floor was taken up with the room for prayer and study — ‘shul’ in Yiddish, because a pious person is always also a student — and on feast days more than a hundred Hassidim could gather here and still had enough room to throw themselves on the floor in the Yom Kippur prayer.

Now almost five hundred people crowded into the building. If one needed the Rebbe’s presence even in peace, as a child needs his father, how much more did one need him in time of war? Where else was one to seek shelter?

For many years the devotees of the Rebbe of Ottynia had come here on pilgrimages, to take advice and blessing from their spiritual leader. They prayed and sang with him, and when the got their bite from the shirayim, the leftovers from the Rebbe’s table, it tasted as delicious to them as the Leviathan to the righteous in Paradise.

Now there was no more than a bowl of buckwheat groats a day for each of them, and people had stopped leaving shirayim long ago.

In Ottynia they had always liked to see the Hassidim arriving, because they brought in modest takings. Even the Zionists, who were so proud of their enlightened modernity and secretly mocked miracle rabbis, were happy to rent the pious pilgrims a bed or spanned their thin horses to take them to the station in Kolomea.

Now there was nothing more to be earned from them. The community’s poor box had long been emptied, and the price of food was rising further every day: people were now asking a whole crown for a single loaf of bread. If it was meant for the trapped Jews, it could easily be twice as much; he who has no choice cannot bargain. The Russian district commander had declared the rabbi’s house a place of detention, and all its residents prisoners. The Jews had destroyed a telephone line important for the war effort, was the official explanation, and that made them all saboteurs. Anyone who tried to leave the building and was caught received twenty-five lashes. Sometimes it was seventy-five, or just as many lashes as it took before the provost’s arm got sore.

It was not forbidden to enter the house, but no one was permitted to leave. When Zalman knocked at the door, the sentry didn’t stop him, but just laughed and said to his comrade, ‘Look at this, now the calves are coming to the slaughter of their own free will.’ The new arrival was assailed from all sides and asked about news from the outside world. If Zalman hadn’t been so tired, he would happily have lifted the spirits of the inmates with a few hopeful lies. But first he had to look for Ruben.

He found him in a room in which six people could have lived and in which twenty of the Talmud students from Kolomea were staying. They slept in shifts, none longer than four hours, so that each of them could lie down once in the course of the day.

Ruben, his sidelocks longer than he would ever have worn them in Zurich, sat by the wall, emaciated and hollow-cheeked, his arms wrapped around his bent knees, had closed his eyes and was rocking his torso back and forth as if praying or weeping. Zalman had to climb over the sleeping bodies to reach him; one sought peace where one could find it, even if a pious person should not lie on the floor, because that is the place for the dead. He knelt beside his son and hugged him, and Ruben opened his eyes and didn’t know who this strange man was, who smelled of smoke and country roads, and who had tears running down his unshaven cheeks. Then he recognised him and moved his mouth in silence, had forgotten how to speak, and when at last he found his voice again, his first words were from a verse of the scripture.

‘Pletah gadolah,’ stammered Ruben, words which mean ‘great deliverance’.

‘God sent me before you’, Joseph said to his brothers, ‘to preserve you a posterity on the earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance.’

Years later, when Ruben was ordained a Rabbi and delivered his very first sermon, that was the text that he took as his theme.

‘Let’s go home now,’ Zalman whispered. Ruben explained to him that they were locked in here and no one could leave the building, but his father just cracked the joints of his fingers and said, ‘A way can always be found.’

Zalman’s friend, the one whose house Ruben had lived at in Kolomea, had never arrived in Ottynia. Something must have happened to him, no one knew what. It was a time when people just got lost like a handkerchief or a keyring.

Zalman had come to Ottynia on the Friday, and in the evening he was standing beside Ruben in the prayer hall. They had really had to fight their way in, because even though the Ottynia rebbe was a gebentschter, one of the thirty-six righteous men, his devotees said, for whom God had not destroyed the world, his shul was not the Temple in Jerusalem which, legend relates, grew larger every year to make room for all the pilgrims. They stood shoulder to shoulder, pressed so tightly together that at the end of the Shemoneh Esrei no one could take the three steps back and the forward that are part of the prayer.

They stood in absolute darkness. They had run out of candles long ago. Above them, a red dot in the void, floated the eternal light.

Since the Baal Shem, the holiest of holies and wisest of the wise, was freed from the clutches of pirates, all Hassidim greet the Sabbath with the 107th Psalm, in which God is praised for delivering the prisoners and the lost, and letting the hungry sow their fields and plant their vines once more. ‘And led them forth by the right way,’ the voices sang around Zalman, ‘that they might go to a city of habitation.’ They sang it jubilantly in the darkness of their prayer hall, as if the prediction had already come to be.

Somewhere right at the front, at the eastern wall, was their rebbe, leading the prayer. The fact that he could not be seen, or heard through the confusion of voices, made him a mystical presence, so unreal and yet as real as the invisible Sabbath bride to whom they all turned as they entered.

They prayed and sang and would also, in their ecstasy, have danced if there had been room to dance.

Zalman had never been a pious person. He often said, with a mixture of mockery and resignation, ‘I don’t know if there’s a God, I just know that we are his chosen people.’