Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

‘You’re a tailor?’ Mimi asked with surprise.

‘What else?’ said Zalman Kamionker. ‘Did you take me for a street-sweeper?’ He wasn’t very well brought up, that much was clear to Mimi very quickly. If you burst into someone’s house at an impossible time of day when people are having their dinner, and the lady of the house asks you purely out of politeness whether you might perhaps be hungry, you have to say no, even if your stomach is rumbling. You certainly don’t just say thank you, push your cap back on your head and just plonk yourself down at the table. And if you do, then you wait politely until you’re offered something, you don’t just reach into the bread basket and then grab a piece of cold meat before the lady of the house has time to call the maid and set a fourth place.

But on the other hand, if a young man is hungry… And he praised everything, the cold meat and the bread and even the tea, which he sipped in the Russian way through a lump of sugar. He knew himself that he was eating greedily, and apologised for it. ‘The people from my union put together the money for the “Eintracht”. But as for food… I’m the ox who’s doing the threshing, and whose mouth has therefore been bound.’ And for a while he said nothing more, although silence, and this was now clear to anyone, was certainly not his way.

‘He doesn’t look like a tailor,’ Pinchas thought. ‘Herr Oggenfuss, who lived next door to the Meijers in Endingen, he was a proper tailor, narrow-chested and thin as a reed. This Kamionker is far too strong for the job, his suit fits so tightly over his muscles that you could imagine him as a bricklayer or furniture packer, if they weren’t such goyish professions. And his shirt is a worker’s shirt too, out of that thick, not quite white fabric — what’s it called again? — that farm labourers wear. But one can be mistaken. Perhaps practices are very different where he comes from, over there in the East.’

‘He doesn’t really have green eyes,’ Hinda thought. ‘Not in this light. Where did I get that idea? He has brown eyes. Brown with little light specks. Or are they green, in fact? One would have to look at them from close to. He has a little scar on his forehead. Maybe he gets into fights a lot, this peaceful man. No, he has too friendly a face for that. A sweet face. One might imagine…’ And then she pulled herself together, sat up quite straight and was fully resolved not to imagine anything at all.

Mimi saw Hinda looking and looking away and looking again, and was reminded of another young man who had once stood simply outside a door, had just sat down at a table, who had also been hungry and also knew how to talk, someone who even read novels out loud, and in the end it had been nothing but empty words. No, she didn’t like this Zalman Kamionker after all. He just took his knife and cut off a piece of bread for himself! ‘I’m glad you like it,’ she said sharply.

Pinchas heard the undertone and smiled to himself.

‘The smoked meat,’ Zalman Kamionker said, before he had even swallowed down the last mouthful. ‘The smoked meat is excellent. In my country we don’t get things like that any more. When the people come off the boat the first thing they do is to cut off their payos, and the second thing is to forget how to eat respectably. But that’s just how things are in America.’

‘America?’ Pinchas said in amazement. ‘But you said…’

‘I’m an American from Kolomea who speaks German like a Swabian. A muddle, as befits a Jew. A Galician Yankee with an Austrian passport. I only came to New York two years ago. Some people say I’m still a greenhorn.’

‘A green what?’

‘He does have green eyes,’ thought Hinda.

‘A greenhorn is someone who’s only just arrived in America. Who doesn’t yet know his way around. Who thinks there’s money in the street in the golden medina, and you just have to bend down and pick it up. But bending down is the biggest mistake you can make. You have to defend yourself. Hence the union. Hence the Congress.’

‘I’m interested in this Congress,’ Pinchas said. ‘You’ll have to tell me more about it. How did you end up there?’ And Zalman Kamionker, who was now full and content, was not the man to need cajoling when offered a challenge such as this.

So he told them about Kolomea, that little town in the Imperial Crown Land of Galicia, where every second inhabitant was a Jew, where there had even been a Jewish mayor — there had been dancing in the street when Dr Trachtenberg was elected — and where the nationalities were all mixed up together as if in a big pot, the Austrians and the Ukrainians, the Huzules and the gypsies, there were even Tartars, and in Mariahilf the Swabians from whom he had learned his German. He described the chaos of churches and synagogues, where the various religions lived together in a great whole — ‘Although sometimes we had to fight, what are you going to do?’ — where there weren’t even any real tensions after the pogrom in Kiev, which wasn’t all that long ago, where it was only difficult to find a parnassah, unless it was in Simon Heller’s tallis weaving mill, where he too had worked, but not for long — but, he said, that was all part of it, if you wanted to understand why he was no taking part in his Congress.

Because this man Simon Heller was a Jew, a very pious one, in fact, with a seat right against the eastern wall of the synagogue, but also a capitalist, and therefore paid wages that weren’t real wages but a joke. In the end they had to found a union — ‘not a real union, we didn’t even know what that was’ — and because no one else wanted to do it, they had appointed him, the young Zalman Kamionker, as their spokesman. He had tried to negotiate at first, quite peacefully, but old Heller had had him thrown out of his office, twice and three times, and so in the end they had called their strike, the famous strike of Kolomea, they must have heard of it, even here?

No, no one here had heard of it.

‘That’s how it is,’ said Zalman Kamionker, and laughed, showing his teeth, ‘you think you’re shaking the world, but the world can’t be shaken so easily.’ He was used to talking in front of other people, it was obvious. He had the sort of calm that people only have when they’re sure no one is going to interrupt them.

They actually won their strike — ‘To tell the truth, we hadn’t really believed we would’ — and old Heller had to grit his teeth and pay every weaver and every tailor a few more Kreuzer for the working day, but they weren’t a real union, not the kind they had in America, everyone thought only of himself, of his own little advantage, and when the strike-leaders were fired a short time later and couldn’t find work anywhere else, no one fought for them. Still — ‘He who has a bad conscience gives tzdoke’ — enough money was raised for a crossing to New York, and eventually he had disembarked in Castle Gardens, a total greenhorn, and had looked for work and found it — ‘You take what you get, what are you supposed to do?’

So he had — ‘Beggars can’t be choosers’ — learned to sew coats, by hand and with the machine, he had even had a talent for it, but it hadn’t made him rich, he’d come just too late for that. ‘The coat factories all belong to the German Jews who have been in the country already for twenty years; the Russians and the Galicians can only sit at the machines.’

He was a good storyteller, and when it was already getting dark outside and they had had to call in Regula to light the gas lamps in the room, they were still listening. He told them about the two seasons that existed in the coat-making world, two months of winter in the summer, and one month of summer in winter, and laughed at their uncomprehending faces. ‘In the summer you sew coats for the winter season, two months’ work, that’s when the orders are issued, and the manufacturer doesn’t need any more cutters or stitchers or finishers. When it’s hot, fewer coats are sold, so in the winter there’s only half as much work, and during those three crucial months, two in summer and one in winter, you have to earn enough money to live off for the whole year. But I’m boring you with stories.’