Yiddishlands: A Memoir

9. Yeast

It takes twelve hours for yeast to complete its work. This I know not from taking science (my worst subject), but from my father, who wrote his master ’s thesis for Stefan Batory University on the properties of yeast. The worst part, he told us, was not the long wait so much as the overpowering aroma, which became as sickening to him as the taste of turnips, his staple diet in Moscow and Saratov during World War I. Father spent the better part of 1927 nauseated by the smell of yeast on the ground floor of the chemistry building located off-campus. I think I got a whiff of it when I posed in front of that building some fifty years later. Bored beyond words, especially on Sundays, Father whiled away the twelve-hour stretch by singing to himself. What did he sing? Not revolutionary hymns (he might blow his cover), and not the latest cabaret hits (when did this student living hand-to-mouth ever see the inside of a cabaret?). Vilna had recently become part of the Polish Republic, so singing in Russian might brand him as a Bolshevik while Polish he had only learned of late by memorizing a Russian-Polish dictionary. Father came from a strictly observant home, and despite the years of war, exile, and revolution, all he had to do was close his eyes and the sacred tunes of early childhood came flooding back. So he passed his time in the chemistry lab singing snippets from the liturgy and cantorial favorites from the High Holy Days. 51 9 Yeast One Sunday morning he hears a knock on the door. In walks the janitor. Prosze Pana, says the janitor, using the polite form of address. The young gentlemen, he says, is kindly requested to keep his singing to himself, for just above on the second floor lives Herr Doktor Professor Eger, the chairman of the chemistry department, and the singing disturbs his work. The young gentlemen promises to keep mum and manages to do so for a while, at least until there’s another knock on the door. This time the exchange is testier, but Father placates the janitor with his sincerity: he positively won’t sing. The third time, dispensing with the niceties, the janitor tells Father to follow him upstairs. Father is ushered into Professor Eger’s study. Seated behind his huge mahogany desk, Eger sizes up the short bespectacled Jew standing before him. “As you can see, young man, I live directly above the laboratory. Your constant singing disturbs my concentration.” Father apologizes in his best Polish and is about to promise to stifle his singing once and for all when his scientific eye spots a portrait hanging to the left above the desk. Eger follows the direction of the young man’s gaze and responds with the hint of a smile. There hangs a rabbi with a large yarmulke covering his head. The black skullcap contrasts sharply with the rabbi’s full white beard that blends into the sumptuous white of his fur collar . Take away that beard and there is something familiar about the contemplative look in his eyes. Now unlike Mother, whose stories were hardly age-appropriate, Father waitedtotellusthisstoryuntilwewereoldenoughtosavoritsironies.From Lerer Dunsky, our history teacher, we knew about the illustrious Rabbi Akiva Eger and his various descendants, rabbis and halakhists, legal scholars , all. Was this the last chapter, one branch of the Eger family that opted out and one of whose offspring had gone on to become the very model of a Polish professor? Then why was he so proud of his Jewish lineage? And if he was so proud, why all the fuss about Father’s melancholy chanting? Or did Eger simply want to take a closer look at this new generation of Polish Jews? Since hearing this story, I’ve done some further research on the historical propertiesofenzymes.Sopowerful,Ilearned,weretheenzymesfromthose yeast cells of Father’s that despite a worldwide depression, despite economicboycottsagainsttheJews ,despitetheriseofHitler,theyworkedtheir organic magic: my father, Leybl Roskes, moved from his spartan student chapter nine 52 quarters on Zawalna Street in Vilna to a cottage on the factory compound in Krosno to a luxury apartment on the hill in Czernowitz, all in the span of six years. And even when everything was lost, in the summer of 1940, the tiny one-celled fungus proved eminently adaptable to the harsh climate...