Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

Later, when he told Hinda about this Friday evening in shul in Ottynia, he said thoughtfully, ‘Whether a God exists, I still don’t know. But there’s something there.’

‘Lamp down, worries up,’ they said in the Meijer family. There was no Shabbos lamp here that could be lowered over the table and lit, and had there been, there would have been no oil for it. And yet in the darkness of the prayer hall Zalman had the feeling of being able to let go at last, at least for a day.

The sude, the solemn Sabbath dinner, consisted of a piece of bread and a pinch of salt. Zalman took the olive-sized bite that means one has done one’s duty, and left the rest to Ruben.

For a few hours they slept side by side on the floor. Zalman had put an arm around his son and inhaled the smell of his hair, as he had done when Ruben had climbed into his parents’ bed as a terrified little boy because there was a storm outside his window.

A piece of oilcloth was found, which had once been a tablecloth — who needs tablecloths when he has nothing to eat? — and from it he made a long bag with two long straps at either end. He didn’t explain anything, he just said to his son, ‘If you want to say goodbye to someone, do it quickly, because we two are about to leave.’

In the rebbe’s house, where all the rooms and corridors were full of people, rumours spread quickly, so everyone soon knew that there was a man there, a meschuggener or a gebentshter, who could tell, who said he could simply stroll pass the guards into freedom. Even though no messenger or formal invitation had come, the rumour also knew that the Rebbe wanted to see them both, the tailor Zalman and his son Ruben. Standing in front of the Rebbe and being able to ask him his advice and his blessing was a great honour, but also a formal occasion, at which the rules to be respected were just as strict as at a royal audience. One didn’t present one’s problems orally to the Rebbe, but wrote them on a piece of paper, the kvitel, which mustn’t contain anything but the name of the supplicant, his place of origin, and the matter involved. A sage like the Rebbe of Ottynia needs no explanations, he just understands.

‘Ruben ben Hinda and Zalman ben Scheindl,’ they wrote, because in a kvitel you give the name of the mother and not the father, ‘both from Zurich’. As the reason for his audience Ruben gave the first thing that had come into his head at the sight of his father: ‘Pletah gadolah’, great deliverance.

The Rebbe was the only one in this overcrowded house who still had a room of his own, even if it was no longer the big study room, just the little room to which he had sometimes retreated in the past to get half an hour’s rest. The gabbai, the rebbe’s steward, opened the door to them and let them in.

Rabbi Chaijim Hager sat behind a table full of books. The first thing that struck Zalman about him was his eyes, because they were so completely different: one wide open and penetrating, the other, with a hanging eyelid, half narrowed as if the Ottynian were seeing through his interlocutor with an admonitory gaze, and at the same time forgiving him for everything again. Only later did he discover that the Rebbe — ‘But he still sees more than anyone else!’ — was blind in one eye. Under his thick grey beard his lips were always somewhat pursed, as if for a kiss or to taste an unfamiliar morsel. He wore the black silk kaftan, but on his head he was not wearing, as he had done on the Sabbath, the shtraiml, the fur beret with thirteen dark brown sable tails, but a stiff black hat, a bowler, of the kind worn by a Galician schoolteacher, or market trader. His hat was pushed to the back of his neck, and the velvet cap was visible on his high, bald forehead.

The gabbai had closed the door behind him a long time before, but Rabbi Chaijim stared into the distance with his good eye, and didn’t look at them.

The set the kvitel down in front of him, along with the obligatory coin that the Rebbe would pass on to the poor. A few minutes passed in silence. Only then did he pick up the piece of paper and hold it up to his good eye. ‘Pletah gadolah,’ he read, and spoken by the quiet, but powerful voice of the rebbe the words sounded like a promise. Of course he knew the Bible passage; he was said to know by heart not only the Tanakh with all its books, but also the whole Mishnah. He smiled at them, and when the Rebbe smiles no more bad things can happen to you. ‘It was not you who sent me hither,’ he continued the Bible quotation in Hebrew, ‘but God.’ And added in Yiddish, ‘If someone is sent by God — how can he fail?’ He raised his hand in blessing and sank back into his thoughts.

That was the whole audience that Zalman and Ruben Kamionker had with the great Rabbi Chaijim Hager of Ottynia. It was time to set off.

Behind the house, where in more peaceful times the vegetable garden had been, a latrine had been dug, enlarged twice and still too small, and there Zalman knelt down on the dirty boards and, holding his breath, fished out a handful of filth and then another and then another. He did it with his bare hands and filled the oilcloth bag with the repellent mass. He wiped his hands on his son’s trousers — ‘That too has a purpose,’ he said — and then he set about the most difficult tailoring task of his life: he sewed up his bag full of shit, with coarse stitches and in great haste, because it cost him a great deal of effort not to vomit.

Ruben had to tie the bag around him and pull his trousers over to it. Because the stitch, quite deliberately, was not quite tight, he soon felt the strange excrement running slowly and disgustingly down his legs.

‘That’s good,’ said Zalman.

He put his son over his shoulder, a hunter with a slain deer, walked back through the courtyard at the back and marched resolutely down the long corridor and past the shul, opened the front door, and when the guards blocked his way, bayonets at the ready, he said only one word.

‘Cholera,’ said Zalman.

In the Russian army, too, more soldiers had been killed by this insidious disease than by enemy bullets, and when the soldiers saw the shit running out of the young Jew’s trousers, when they smelled the nauseating miasma and saw his sunken face and closed eyes, they took a step back and then another and let him pass.

‘It must have been like that when Moses parted the Red Sea,’ Ruben said later.

With his son over his shoulder, Zalman walked through the whole of Ottynia. It was only in the little forest, where in the spring you could pick tiny strawberries and in the autumn huge mushrooms, only when no one could see and hear them any more, that he put him back on the ground, took a few steps to the side and threw up. ‘Try and clean yourself as best you can,’ he said, and retched again.

When Ruben was clean — not really clean, he wouldn’t be able to do that until he could finally take a bath in Czernowitz — when the oilcloth bag was buried under a pile of rotten leaves and there was no longer any sign of it, Zalman opened his now threadbare rucksack, took out his sewing kit and unrolled the scissors from the cloth. ‘They will grow back, but a head doesn’t grow back,’ he said as he cut off his son’s sidelocks. For what he planned it would not have been good to be seen as a Jew.

They took the way south-east, taking a wide arc around Kolomea, because Zalman wouldn’t have been able to bear seeing his home town as he had found it three days before.

Their goal was the border with Bukovina, where the front was as well. The way there was easy to find: they only had to take the direction from which the refugees were coming.

They reached Sniatyn, where they were so close to the armies that they would have heard their guns, except that the Russians had run out of ammunition, and the Austrians were waiting for victory in the West before going back on the attack along with their German allies.