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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780897335263 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Chicago Review Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 08/30/2005 |
| Pages: | 226 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Golden Medina
By Jack LaZebnik
Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 2004 Jack LaZebnikAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-89733-526-3
CHAPTER 1
I am what I am, but I was what I was. I will be nothing on earth. Who knows where God will take me after? When I look at the white foam they make for a ceiling in this home not my home, it looks like worms crawling, ready to drop on my blanket. Sometimes I see God up there, so help me. Why he should want to come out of the worms, I don't know, but they push Jesus on me so much in this place and his hair hangs too straight and his beard needs a washing and his eyes should be brown, not blue, so he's not my Messiah, my Hashem who talked to me when I was screaming with each child, six times, and when I was dying in the automobile accident and all the tsorris, the tortures in my life, when I was yelling help. Now I say, who cares? If nobody cares, nobody cares. Why do we live in the first place? Because Momma and Pa lived and Bobbeh and Zaydeh, and back and back to the beginning, to Ahdam and Chava. When we know what happened, then we care. My children and their children should know who I was, and I should know, also. Who was I? What I remember. But I remember only when I talk or put words in my head. When the words can't come anymore, I will be nothing on earth.
My life in Russia, I wrote already, in Yiddish and my son, Jackie, he made it in English. I sat with him and explained what it was and then he made it up like I was talking, but he put in more, what he remembered in all the years I talked with my sister Sophie at the kitchen table. My children, my grandchildren, from Yiddish, what do they know? I talked to them in Mommeh Loshen and they answered back in English, so on both sides we learned mixed up. Another hundred years, what will be? Another hundred years, how many Jews will be left in America?
Now I got to let it out, what I didn't say to Jackie, my life after I left my town in Russia, my David-Gorodok, to go to America. I got to save myself, what I was. Please God, let me live to finish.
How did it happen? Like living, it happened. On the day the Cossacks came again — let onions grow in their belly buttons! — I went early in the morning with my sister Chaya to our lesson to read. We saved up sugar cubes to take to Tante Frumeh and she taught us, a good change. We jumped, Chaya and me, splash to splash, the cold rain in the fall morning, our shoes in one hand, handkerchiefs of sugar cubes in the other one, the puddles pinching our toes underneath the thin mirrors of ice, like a prickling when we walked in the woods outside our shtetl, David-Gorodok — ah, bigger than a shtetl, almost a town already, almost coming up to Luminets and Minsk with patches of trees, woods, along the river by the necks of wheat stubbles, that the scythes didn't reach. I hoped the muzhik chazzerei, the peasant boys, wouldn't come in our way to make bad noises with their fists in their armpits or to sing "Jewbird, Jewbird, whistle through your nose," or to call out, "Lay me down to sleep and I'll lay you like a chicken in the coop, my dear!" Chaya and I ran all the way, almost to the fields past the brown and grey houses with heads of straw, all like old people benching, praying.
Finally, we came to Tante Frumeh's front door. She was an aunt to everyone but not to anyone. I loved to visit her, to have the lessons in reading and writing Yiddish she gave for payment of sugar cubes, yes, but also for the books and newspapers and photographs of scowling rabbis on the walls and for the use of the Singer sewing machine; I could pump the treadle that put the needle in a blur. I even made Chaya's wedding dress here.
"I don't know why I'm giving up sugar for my tea," Chaya said. "When I'm married, am I going to be reading books?"
"You love the romances," I said. "How could you live without them?"
"Oh, you're the one who believes in all that kasha, that mush."
"Kasha makes you strong."
"Or gives you a bellyache."
Tante Frumeh was waiting in the doorway, her black wig almost falling off, her hands up as if she were surprised, her face as wide as a Russian's, like her smile. "My darlings!" she said. "I thought today you wouldn't come, such a tumult in your house."
"Maybe it's Chaya's last chance," I said, a joke. "Who knows what her husband will allow?"
"He will allow what you will allow him to allow," Tante Frumeh said. "When my husband, may he rest in peace, taught me, he said it was a gift to himself that I should read and write."
Everything was doilies, even the window frames white against the brown boards. Inside, lace curtains hung like a stage scene I saw when I sewed buttonholes for Uncle Jacob in Minsk: white lace held apart by blue bands, a piece of gauze over a picture of Rabbi Triebwasser, Tante Frumeh's husband, a white beard around his chin, and a photograph from a newspaper of the Czar, may he suffer a pogrom himself — Tante Frumeh put him on the wall: who knew? — maybe when the Cossacks saw him there they wouldn't harm her. Another thicker cloth draped across a door, a narrow but long table beneath it with lace on top, all touching, a crowd of lace in the tiny room, the walls in blue plaster, the smell of clay. At one side lay a thin bed, a lace cover over it; on the other side, a small oven, tile on top, twigs there to burn. The windows couldn't open so even on the cool day it was hot inside.
Tante Frumeh taught us from a book of stories by Sholem Aleichem, her thick first finger under each word we'd seen before, many times, and I never got tired of, especially the scenes from his childhood, The Great Fair, and especially for the places of dreaming, where he's in the synagogue and has the honor to carry the Torah and, when he comes to the cantor's daughter, he's "astonished and bewildered — instead of kissing the Scroll, she had kissed his hand." He almost drops the Scroll — "he wanted to pause, to look again into her eyes." When he gives up the Torah, he glances back. "But she was no longer there." The kiss on his hand remains and, "As he left the synagogue, he felt that he had wings; he was flying — Angels were flying with him." He also had to run to America to be free. The Czar drove the Jews there even though he didn't know who we were — just Jews, the boys he put into the army for 30 years to change them to Christians. They would die first. My oldest brother, Velvel, cut off a finger so they wouldn't take him, but they would, so he ran away to America with Louie and Abe and Jake. They went in a wagon as if it carried them the whole way, and they wrote about the ship and the railroad trains and the one that took them from New York to Detroit, how agents kept the money and flew away and didn't come back.
Angels flying — Tante Frumeh's brown-and-white cat leaped upon the table, its paws over the text. "Oy!" the Tante said. She swept up the cat, limp like a wet rag, still purring on the way to the floor. "Kayne-ahora, it means nothing — nothing!" too loud. "Wait, wait, we'll see what we'll see." Going to a shelf with stiff, white lace on it, she fumbled at a pile of cards and brought them as if they were burning to the table. She searched until she found a red queen and placed it slowly in the middle of a doily there. From the top of the pile, she took a card and placed it, a black clover with a five, next to the queen. "Money," she said. Then, another, this time a black shovel with a seven. "Who can tell? It comes, it goes." Again, now a red diamond with a three. She smiled and tapped her crooked, sharp-pointed first finger on it. "The wedding comes in not-one, not-two, not-three days," not saying the numbers, Satan couldn't use them to claim their souls. She kept laying the cards in a circle around the queen, each a promise or a warning. The tenth one down was a black soldier. "Oy, oy," pressing her palm to her chest, "pray to God He should give you naches, good luck and blessings on your head. Go. Run! Jump over the puddles not-one time but not-three times and you should spit, also, ptoo, ptoo, ptoo so the evil spirits and witches will hide from you. Hurry! It's a life or a death!" Tears coming fast. When we turned to the door, she cried, "Oy! Wait!" She thrust the pack of cards into my hand. "You'll lay out, you'll see."
"How can I lay out?" I said. "I don't know from one to the other."
"When you'll lay, you'll know. It will come to you. I see it in your eyes." What did she see?
We ran home as if the winner would get everything — I won, the way I always did, so fast I was, laughing and dancing for victory, for the dreams that were going to come true for me. What was I, sixteen, seventeen? Momma told me I was born in the time of the big snow on Simhat Torah, but what year? When? Who knew? In her shtetl, David-Gorodok, I waited for life to begin, for my breath to run out of me when I would see him on his white horse — who? The Right One. That night, in bed, I couldn't get to sleep, not because tomorrow was Chaya's wedding but because death might come instead, and on a black horse. I bit the edge of her pillow that Mommeh made from goose feathers: oh, God, would I miss everthing? The Talmud says, or maybe the Mishnah — who can remember? — that we are here as in a hotel, and when we die we come home. Would I marry a life then, like the one, I already had, another unpainted wooden, swollen frame with cracking seams and a roof of straw? Pa couldn't afford to fix what the law would not allow him to own: like the other Jews in David-Gorodok, he bought the property through the Polish farmer who promised to keep it a secret, a threat. Ah, so many fears — wake up! I called to myself in my sleep. How many times would I die before I died? Pa said death does not knock on the door, but it did.
When muzhiks used to throw pebbles at me on the street and shouted, "Christ-killer!" I ran home and cried to Mommeh, "Why do they call me Christ-killer? I didn't even know him." When the Cossacks came like a storm, they yelled, "Christ-killers!"
Who was to blame? Pa said the boys, the Cossacks, the Czar himself, should all blame the chickens. Why the chickens? "Why the Jews?" he said, his old joke. Like a little Moses with pink cheeks, a nose to be a nose, his beard as red as his face when he got mad over nothing.
Life is one pain after another. When you get old, it's patch, patch, patch. When my period scared me with blood and Mommeh took me to the mikvah, the holy bath to make me clean, the old ballebosseh cut my finger and toe nails to bleeding and dipped me into the cold water like a piece of meat to make kosher. After, at home, Mommeh had rubbed butter on them. "So you are a woman," she said. Two years later, time for Chaya's wedding. I was glad for her, so it wouldn't be for me — I didn't see my white horse yet. Mommeh opened the shutters, the eyes of the windows to the sun, and bent over me in bed like a cloud to kiss, a schmock, soft, wet on my cheek. "Wake up," she said. She pulled off the perineh, the goose-down quilt she made herself, famous in the shtetl for her covers and blankets and pillows — everybody came to buy.
Who was with me in the bed? Sarah and Rebecca so Chaya could have one night by herself before she would be there with Shlomo — a beard like a goat, eyes like stones, like a rabbit he jumped. What could she do? She said yes to the choice, the old lady, the matchmaker, made.
Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning for the wedding, the whole family cleaning — the girls. The boys? The boys didn't clean. I scrubbed and wiped and polished — you could eat off the floor, Mommeh said — but who wanted to eat off the floor? Later in the morning, I carried a pail with dirty water to throw on the ground and I saw at the end of the street — dirt and mud — a feather floating in the sunlight. The feather changed into a curl of hair lifting in the wind, and into dust under hooves. A rider on a white horse. Oy, not the right one. Cossacks came on their black horses behind him — may they all grow onions in their bellybuttons. May all their teeth fall out except one and it should ache them in the afterlife. Ah, I gave them the worst curse: may someone name a newborn child after them and soon (you don't name a child after a living person because that robs him of his soul. Jews have no Juniors). I couldn't tell where the horses separated from the riders, their bodies growing from the wet, black muscles, and their arms sticking out long, silver at the tips — swords waving. Mouths looked as wide as wells to me, shouts of blood spraying from them and screams from men and women and children on the streets and from inside the houses. Mommeh ran out, flour in spots on her big apron, and she yelled for her children, thirteen of them, name by name, the whole list, even the sons in America, and she ended with "Pearl, Leah, Sarah, Genesha, Meyer, Chaya, Itkeh!" And for Pa, "Zaidel! Zaidel!" Little grandfather they called him because he was like a Zaidel. Where was he? In the barn.
To Sarah, the youngest, and to me, Mommeh said, "You're sick with the scarlet fever. Don't say a word. Do you hear me?" Yes. We had done did it before. I pinched my cheeks and Sarah's to make them red. She was a good girl.
Like bears and wolves scratching the door, and then axes hacking — it wasn't locked. On the bed, I pulled the perineh over our faces, mine and Sarah's. The Cossacks were barking at their own noise and Mommeh cried, "Sick! They are sick!" But who stood over them all? The Angel of Death, from his white horse, his mustache a piece of black fur. He jumped down and burst into the room and yanked away the perineh from me and Sarah. His blue jaw stuck out like a hammer, knuckles for the bones in his cheeks, sparks in each eye, his cap black, his shirt red silk. Mommeh pushed between him and us. "My children are on fire with fever."
A bear, a Mongol, with slits where his eyes should be, knocked, shoved against her. He raised his sword to kill her and us, mosquitoes. Mommeh cried, "Scarlet fever!" Who cared? But all of a sudden Shlomo fell into the room, somebody pushing him. On his knees like a Christian with his palms together — Jews don't pray from the knees; they stand and bend and rock and turn for the whole body to praise God and for agony they beat their breast with their fists — no palms. Shlomo crawled under the bed — oy, gevaltl Chaya and Genesha and Pearl and Leah were hiding there.
"Look!" Mommeh said. Some flour sprinkled spots on her cheeks and arms. "Already I'm dying with the scarlet fever. You want to catch it for yourselves?" She pulled up her sleeve, a sin by itself, to show.
But the bear raised his sword again.
The other one, the Angel of Death, spat "Pah!" and held up a hand like a policeman to the bear. To Mommeh, he said, "So give it to me," and grabbed on her breast.
She knocked away his hand — Mommeh! "I'll give what you want better — schnapps."
"You'll give me fever in a bottle?" He laughed, so the bear laughed, too — little, square teeth instead of fangs. "Where is it?" Death said and grabbed Mommeh and pulled her and the Mongol went with them.
I jumped from the bed to look out the window, Cossacks dancing on the street, stomping the ground to shake it — why dancing? For what joy? From the barn came two holding a bundle in the air between them — oy, Pa, kicking in their arms, his hands out to say, Why? Why not the chickens? The Mongol, a goose waddling, took from his own waist a rope and wound around Pa's neck — oy, God help us, Hashem, praised be He, make a thunderspear, split the earth in two, come down in fire, God, God! Mommeh! She ran to hit at the Mongol but he carried Pa like a sack of potatoes to the oak tree in front and the Angel of Death grabbed her like a lover while she cried, "Zaidel! David!" as if his name would save him and "God help me!" and pounded her fists on the Angel's chest and he laughed but he let her go and she ran into the house.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Golden Medina by Jack LaZebnik. Copyright © 2004 Jack LaZebnik. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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What People are Saying About This
Itkeh, the protagonist of The Golden Medina, will capture your heart. The hopes and dreams that bring a young Jewish girl from a Russian shtetl to America, the love she finds and the conflicts it engenders are beautifully rendered in this compelling novel. Jack LaZebnik has not only given us a personal drama created in vivid detail, but also the world of late 19th century immigrant experience, this time in Detroit. It is a novel that reflects in an important way on the American past.
—author, Carnival for the Gods and Ghost Dance: A Play of Voices
A totally absorbing saga, a richly interesting journey into another time, written in a typical Jack LaZebnik leanness that creates a craving for more. Poignant, humorous and romantic with the suggestion of a remote bitter harvest
. . .beautifully developed characters and a statement of hope and compassion that defines the human spirit. LaZebnik weaves timeless grace and clarity to perfection.
—author
Early in the last century, Itkeh leaves her home in Russia for America, her innocent heart learning passion as she travels to the new world. LaZebnik recounts her journey in language that illuminates like lightening in the night sky. Her fiery story is both turbulent and tender, dramatic and intimate, and, above all, timeless. I love this book!
—author;
Some of the Things I Did Not Do, and Taking Leave
Jack LaZebnik's leathery, but lyrical poems pierce the heart with a wry insistence that life is too dear to go unregretted...or uncelebrated.
—author
Chair, English Department,
George Washington University