Yiddishlands: A Memoir

8. The Watercarrier

Uncle Grisha’s table, laden with fruit, jam, and tea—the late-night crowd didn’t drink, never used any external, artificial means of stimulation—was a place for songfest and protest. Vilna, after all, had been the birthplace (in 1897) of the Jewish Labor Bund of Russia and Poland, and some of its founding members, like Anna Rosental, still marched at the head of every May Day rally. Only those whom Mother and her circle protested against were not the class enemy from without but the Jewish enemy from within. This she explained to my friend Michael Stanislawski, who was hired to interview her on behalf of a research project on the Yiddish Folksong in its Social Context. Poland of the 1920s, she contended, was rife with Jewish self-hatred, with what she called kompleksn, neuroses, and the best way to fight back was by means of parodic Yiddish songs. Nosetofinterviewswaseverconductedsoeffortlessly.HevisitedMother twelve times, never left without being fed—if Xenia, our Ukrainian-born maid, wasn’t cooking, even anchovy sandwiches counted for a meal—and only in the middle of session twelve did he remember to fill in the analytic questionnairewithhername,placeofbirth,yearsofschooling,etc.forcould anyone imagine a single informant recording 127 songs in six languages: Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, and one song in Gypsy, heard when she was eight from a beggar in the courtyard of Zawalna 28/30? 47 8 The Watercarrier Those she called her “Bundist” songs were the naughtiest—and most interactive , like “In a Shtetl Not Far from Here,” an anti-Hasidic number punctuated by the assembly adding oy at the end of each line, and with a chorus half in Yiddish, half in Polish. In a shtetl not far from here, (oy) there lives a little Rebbe dear. (oy) A living he makes not by doing miracles, (oy) But from his dumb Hasidic animals (oy-oy-oy)! Next stanza, when the Rebbe’s son is caught behind the bushes with a shiksa, he attempts to justify himself with a last-minute defense: Daddy, daddy, don’t you fret (oy), a shiksa is kosher, you bet (oy). Our son will grow up a Talmud scholar, yet, (oy) the good Lord be blessed! (oy-oy-oy) RealBundistsongs,abouttheoverthrowofthetsar,orseamstressesslaving away at the workbench, she almost never sang, although she harbored certain sympathies for the poor and downtrodden. To begin with, there was an orphanage in her courtyard on Zawalna 28/30, and she sometimes overheard the children playing and singing in Yiddish. During summer vacations , she hung out with the knéytsherkes, the women who fed the reams of paper through the folding machine at the press, and so enjoyed listening to their stories and songs that during their lunch break, when they sent someone out for herring, radishes, and strawberries, she ordered the same menu from the cook and ate alongside them. If these sympathies did not extend to Bundists per se—and here we leave the researcher of Yiddish song armed with his Wollensak reel-to-reel tape recorder and revert back to more primitive means of biographical study—it was because of what they did to my grandmother Fradl in the summer of 1906, a time of revolutionary upheaval, when she was carrying Mother in her womb. Fradl was at the Rom Press on business when someone rushed in to say that a group of Bundist agitators had just tried to publish illegal proclamations but were stopped from doing so by the foreman. Most certainly they were heading next for the Matz Publishing House. Sure enough, chapter eight 48 by the time Fradl got there—it was a good twenty-minute walk for a woman in her condition—the printing presses had been requisitioned, every worker pressed into service, and a young man brandishing a pistol was in charge. Within the hour, they were raided by the police, and everyone made a run for it by jumping through the ground floor window. The only one who stood by Fradl, who obviously couldn’t run anywhere, was Moyshe Kamermakher , as loyal to her as a son, having spent his whole life at the Press. The two of them were hauled off to the Lukishki Prison, where the most hardened criminals and political prisoners were kept. Fradl was in mortal terror . But along the way, they ran into a watercarrier mit fule emers, his buckets overflowing with water...