Yiddishlands: A Memoir

23. Leybl’s Ark

147 Finding his street, Yordei Hasiráh, Those-Who-Landed-in-a-Lifeboat, was not easy—a narrow U-shaped street tucked away in the Katamon section of Jerusalem, where massive Arab villas stood out amidst overgrown gardens and gnarled trees. Jerusalem was no planned city, like Tel Aviv. Nor did I expect to be greeted at the gate by a barking dog, since most Yiddish writers I knew hated dogs. “Sheket, sheket!” a voice called out from inside. Although it was just after five, Mr. Leybl Rochman appeared at the door in a maroon-colored bathrobe , his shock of black hair disheveled, as if I had caught him napping. Before I could invoke our phone conversation, he waved a handwritten manuscript in my face, another in a series of articles about the Six Day War, he explained, that had to be mailed out the next morning to the Yiddish daily Forverts in New York. Could I imagine such a thing? In the days before the outbreak of war, the Burial Society of Greater Tel Aviv had mobilized its gravediggers to be prepared to bury the thirty thousand corpses expected to be sent back from the front or to perish in their homes. Were it not for the miracle of Jewish arms, we would have been slaughtered all over again, our cemeteries filled to overflowing. By now he had led me through the narrow kitchen—the main entrance to their subdivided part of the villa—and into the dining room, where, on 23 Leybl’s Ark the ceiling and on every wall, I saw them: a sea of torsos, naked arms, legs, buttocks, breasts, and multitudinous eyes, drawn in black charcoal, a few in red, orange, and yellow, writhing, birthing, dancing, beseeching, some with their faces hidden in their black tresses, others with huge skulls and penetrating stares, anatomically askew yet emphatically alive, erotic yet innocent , and into the next room as well, the salon, where a few goats insinuated themselves among the human figures, at once sacrificial and beneficent .Onlyfiguresunderwaterdefiedgravitylikethat,orswimmersinsome celestial ether. A story accompanied these murals, the work of his daughter Rivka, drawn when she was twelve, in the course of a few weeks. “I need a wall!” she had cried, as if possessed, so they moved heavy furniture at her command and let her transform the walls. “In Zion,” Mr. Rochman concluded with a flourish, “will the cadavers take on flesh and blood. Exactly as prophesied.” HisnamewasLeybl,justlikemyfather’s,onlyunlikeFather,unlikeanyone I had ever met, Rochman didn’t speak; he made oracular pronouncements . They lacked all sense of pride, his people, Israel. The gentile nations spat in their face and the Jews called it rain. Centuries of self-deception had so dulled their senses that, even now, when friend and foe alike acknowledged the miracle of Israel reborn, precious few would hearken to the call. He didn’t mean me, God forbid; he meant the others of my generation, who once again were willing to spill their blood for every conceivable cause save their own. Hadn’t the young Jews of Poland, so smartly dressed in their blousesandneckerchiefs,marchedthroughthestreetswithredbannerson the First of May? Did their selflessness avail them any? When the enemy descended, they were the first to be sacrificed on the altar. Like all true prophets, I thought, Leybl’s wrath was directed most fiercely against his own people. My phone call had taken him by surprise, first because our mutual friend, the writer Yehuda Elberg from Montreal, had not informed him of my coming, and second because no one in those days ever heralded his arrival by calling. People just dropped in, anytime from 5:00 pm to midnight, for tea, compote, and homemade nut cake, baked by Esther, petite and black-haired, who would soon return from her expedition into town to buy Rivka a special set of pastels and later, at a time when most Jerusalemites chapter twenty-three 148 were getting ready for bed, dinner would be served, the tiny kitchen dispensing food enough for all who found refuge there; and Morwa’s barking would announce each new guest, who, depending on his place of origin, would move the conversation from Yiddish to Hebrew, occasionally to French, but never Polish, which language Esther read late into the night. She read Hemingway and Faulkner, Balzac and Proust, but deferred to Leyblonmattersliteraryandmetaphysical,asultimatelydideveryonewho sat...