Leo Melamed:
The Mission
(pages 20
- 26)
Two weeks had passed since the Russians took
over Bialystok, and still no word from my father. A restlessness set in, and
life, as I had known it, had unraveled. Although my mother valiantly tried to
mask her desperation from my eyesight, she was too emotional a person to hide
the truth. In front of me, there were smiles and chit-chat throughout the day,
but at night and behind my back the mood was somber. There were whispers and
questions. How, my mother wondered out loud to Aunt Bobble, o of Bialystok was
limited. The war had changed all normalcy, trains and depots were being
monitored by Russian soldiers and its secret police. Even for a child, the
atmosphere of repression was fully evident. In her reassuring manner, my Babba
told us not to worry. But we did.
I don't know what time it was, but night
already had fallen when a loud knock on the door came. It was Chaike London,
a neighbor who lived several blocks from us and a close friend of my parents
who would visit from time to time. She was one of the few neighbors with a
telephone. After a brief exchange in hurried tones, my mother rushed out with
Chaike. I watched them through the window as far as a thin crescent of
moonlight above the trees allowed me to see. They vanished into the darkness.
My father had made contact. He called Mrs.
London to alert my mother. Within an hour my mother had returned with the
news: my father was safe. She had talked to him. And, as expected, he had a
plan. He had made the only decision he could. He couldn't return to Bialystok,
not with his track record of opposing Communism and now, no doubt, he was considered
a fugitive from the Russian regime. Over the years his views had been
extensively expressed in speeches and articles under his byline in the Bialystoker
Shtime, our city's Jewish newspaper.
My father was born to Gimple and Faygl
Melamdoyich on January 2, 1904. Gimple was a carpenter who at an
early age was killed when he accidentally fell from a scaffold. They had two
sons and a daughter. My father's younger brother died as a teenager. My father
was reared in a typically religious environment. From youth, his left arm was
frozen at the elbow as consequence of a severe bout with smallpox. But the
infirmity was unnoticeable and did not prevent him from being extremely capable
with his hands. He had inherited his father's dexterity and craftsman's skills.
Isaac Moishe Melamdovich's life changed dramatically upon becoming a member
of the Skif, the Socialist youth organization of Central and Eastern
Europe, and the precursor to his eventual membership in the Yiddish Socialist
Bund. The Bund, which remained his lifelong ideal, gave his existence purpose
and direction. Although on the outside he appeared small and fragile, inside he
had tensile vitality and the cachet of a banker who takes the long-term interest-bearing
view. He was an excellent speaker who had more than a touch of dramatic flair.
His voice was strong and assertive. It projected no doubts about his views or
opinions. An independent man in thought and deed, there would be no compromise
in my father's life at this juncture or any other. Looking back, I see a man
striking a heroic pose, a man defending his beliefs in an effort to avoid the
shackles he perceived as clamping down on him. He wanted no part of the
barbarians from the east or west. His instincts were accurate, his resolve
unflappable. No one, not from Germany or Russia, least of all some commissar or
commandant, was going to run his life - or his family's. He was, after all,
independent, emancipated, an intellectual, a nonbeliever, and a Bundist.
The Bund, the party of the Jewish
proletariat, was a socialist Jewish labor organization that evolved in the late
nineteenth century when the Czar ruled Russia with an anti-Semitic hand.
Anti-Semitism had deep roots in Poland, too, often forcing Jews from their
villages and hamlets to urban centers. And while many relocated and many more
abandoned their religious lives, all clung to their Jewish identity. The Bund
movement became the bridge from the past to the future. It also served to
bring my parents together.
As Bundists, my father and mother leaned
toward international socialism and abhorred communism. They supported trade
unions and a Jewish working class that had a sense of its own self-worth. By
rallying the working class, they and their colleagues argued, the stigma of
shtetl passivity could be dissipated. Instead of religion, they believed in a
secular and modern Jewish culture based on Yiddish as the language of the
masses. And while my parents were fiercely committed to Jewish national
survival, they dismissed Zionism - the return of the Jews to their historic
homeland in Palestine - as a utopian dream that could not serve as a practical
solution for world Jewry. In the Bundist view, Jews must remain citizens of the
country in which they resided and join in the universal struggle for the rights
of working class-irrespective of their race, ethnicity, or religion. Instead of
moving to Palestine, they advocated living in harmony and with equality within
the world.
Although I didn't understand the entire
Bundist movement until many years later, I was able to sense the intense
feelings it generated in my parents. I will never forget being wedged between
them standing rigidly erect at Bund meetings in Bialystok that opened with the Shvue,
the Bund's anthem - an oath of allegiance. My mother held my hand tightly as
she and my father sang, and I could feel the emotional choking that gripped
both of them as they fervently swore never to forsake the battle on behalf of
the working class. There among the mass of people with the decibels ringing in
my ears, I knew something was going on, something big, something awe -
inspiring, something eternal.
As an only child, they had taken me
everywhere, and I was growing up quickly in an adult world. They brought me to
the Bund meetings for a simple reason: I was being indoctrinated. I was the
next generation being groomed to carry forward the torch, being prepared to
enter the Skif. Alas, fate would not cooperate.
I was much closer to my mother, although
everything my father did in life made an impression on me. However, he wasn't
the kind of person you'd run up to, jump into his arms, and hug when he entered
the house. My father didn't intentionally demand an arms-length relationship,
it was just that, in this respect, his attitude reverted to old-world culture:
bringing up a child was more the wife's obligation; the father's role was as a
disciplinarian and a teacher. He was always the melamed, teacher, and I, the pupil, which allowed me
to grab the ideas of the man but never place my hands around the man himself.
Thus, I don't recall having too many heart-to-heart conversations with him the
way some sons did with their fathers. He left the doting and nurturing to my
mother. She was fully qualified on that score.
My mother, Chay Faygl Barakin, was
born on April 16, 1902, to nonprofessional parents. Her father, Nachman
Leib, after whom I was named, died in 1917. He was a Kashnik, a
grain merchant who owned his own store. My mother once related how her father
would use bags of grain as a shield to protect the family when it was rumored
that the Cossacks were on their way for a pogrom. She was the youngest of three
sisters. The other two, Sarah and Bertha, emigrated to America
while my mother was still quite young. The three sisters were, of course,
reunited when, after our nightmarish journey, we arrived safely to their open
arms in Brooklyn.
My mother had set her sights on teaching
from her early teens. She succeeded in entering the Wilno Teachers Seminary,
the most prestigious institution of its kind, and graduated with honors on May
28, 1926. It was there that my parents first met. They were married in
Bialystok four years later, in 1930. From her youth, my mother was an ardent
member of the European movement for women's equality and rights and thus was a
most likely candidate for the Bund, which espoused a similar philosophy. Like
my father, Faygl Barakin left her religious shtetl ways of her parents,
but remained devoted to the Yiddish cultural movement in Poland, immersed in
Jewish literature and secular studies. Although an emancipated woman, intelligent,
well-educated, and outspoken, my mother was the gentlest of souls. Extremely
sensitive to others' feelings and exceptionally perceptive, she was everyone's
favorite teacher. To this day, adult men and women come up to me to say that
they loved my mother, their lehrerke, teacher. It was no different for
me or my children. My mother was always easy to talk with and come to with
one's fears and needs. Lehrerke always understood.
Parents: Chay Faygl ne'e Barakin & Isaac Moishe Melamdovich, teachers
and idealists.
Still, there was a strong bond between my
father and myself. It is from him that I inherited my love for the Yiddish
language, as well as his tenacious commitment to ideals, responsibilities, and
promises. My father also passed on to me an insatiable attraction to salty
foods, particularly herring and sour pickles. The taste for pickles actually
ran in my father's family; his uncle was a pickle farmer whose small tract of
land lay just outside of Bialystok. My father sometimes took me there, and his
uncle, whom I also called fetter, uncle, would take me out on a rowboat
on a small lake to inspect where his cucumbers were being pickled. Wooden
barrels loaded with pickles, salt, dill, and other spices were sitting in the
lake in their brine waiting to be perfected for the market. We would row out to
those barrels, open their covers, and uncle and I would taste them to see how
close they were to being ready. I became a pickle connoisseur at a very tender
age.
But mostly my love for my father was based
on respect and admiration. He was a man who deserved great deference, and,
though he was an iconoclast, in my eyes he was an icon. He was the smartest
man I ever met. I saw him not just as my father; he was a somebody, an
important person who had an ideal. He was devoting his life to doing something
for the world, for the kehila - the community - and for Jews and for
Yiddish. The "mission." He was a self-assured man, honest to himself,
his family, and his friends, and his advice to me was pure and simple: live for
the greater good, never turn away from your mission, or your back on a friend.
Most of all, never forget you are a Jew. My father possessed what scholar
Irving Howe would later attribute to the Bundists who came to America: élan,
combativeness, and sophisticated conviction. But even more than Bundism, it was
the rich body of Yiddish culture and the language itself, as it is embodied in
Yiddish literature, songs, folklore, stories and poetry, that became my
father's first love.
With all its nuances and psychological
subtleties, Yiddish was the language among Jews that immediately bonded them
whether they were Poles, Russians, Latvians, Rumanians, Lithuanians, Germans,
or from New York's lower East Side. There are few languages that can arouse
humor and pathos with a single word, and Yiddish is one of them. Scholars
estimate that only about 40,000 words were ever printed in Yiddish. You should
hear Tom Sawyer with a Yiddish accent! To this day, in spite of Hitler's
Holocaust, you can travel to the four corners of the world and still find
someone to communicate with in Yiddish.
Yiddish, Mamme Loshn, "Mother Tongue," had become a
language of the masses - 11 million people spoke it throughout the world before
World War II. Hebrew remained the word of the Bible. In America, Yiddish had
aroused political impulses that were harbored in class resentment. Many German
Jews considered Yiddish a "low-class" language, a ghetto vernacular
that held back Jewish assimilation. There were even those among second - and
third - generation American Jews who viewed the Hasidic waves of immigrants as
a source of embarrassment. With their beards and long sideburn locks known as payess,
garbed in black caftans and phylacteries, they were perceived as a group of
Yiddish-speaking medieval throwbacks practicing an ancient religion in Hebrew.
But the Bundists from Poland, Lithuania, and Russia had been the socialists and
social democrats involved in the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. And
their language was Yiddish. They refused to use Hebrew, opposed Zionism, and
behind a new Enlightenment pushed for secularism. Most were agnostics.
Most important, they had a vision on behalf
of humankind. My parents wanted me to carry this mission and the Yiddish torch,
The notion of mission would be reinforced several years later in Chicago when,
as a 10-year old, I was taken by them to listen to one of the world's leading
literature figures and famous Bundists. The lecture was at the Labor Lyceum of
the Workman's Circle on the West Side of Chicago, the largely Jewish section of
the city. The speaker was Shloyme Mendelson standing before more than
500 who had gathered to hear the great man. Reputedly, he was an actual
descendant of the great Moses Mendelssohn himself. Many in the crowd were
Bundists, but mostly they represented a cross section of Chicago
Yiddish-speaking "intelligentsia." There were teachers, doctors,
lawyers, actors, artists, writers, college students, laborers, lowbrows,
middlebrows, highbrows - people who still lived in Yiddish, revered its
literature, and believed in the mission. The audience's attention was riveted
on the speaker as if Mendelson had cast some kind of spell. In Yiddish, of
course, the eloquent sounds of Mendelson's sonorous voice bounced off the walls
and ceiling in a lecture that left an indelible impression on me.
"The only way to achieve immortality," he said poetically, raising
his hand to the sky, "is to connect your life to something that transcends
mortality." He paused for a moment. What was that something? I wondered.
"And that something," he answered "is an ideal."
I could see heads around me, including my
parents', shaking in agreement. If one connected to an ideal, a paragon, a
movement - a mission - and devoted one's life to it, Mendelson explained,
the ideal's inherent immortality would carry one with it forever. Certainly
the founding fathers of American democracy had felt that way. Why shouldn't
the Bundists?
Perhaps it was my father's single-mindedness
to carry out the mission that got us to America. Windows of opportunity for
escape were shutting tightly in the late fall of September 1939, and it looked
like we weren't going to get out of the trap that Europe represented for Jews.
My father's mission then was to save the family, and his first rule was to keep
us together. In a world that was gearing up for genocide, where people were reduced
to survive by how clever they were, to stay ahead one had to plan each move
with the worst possible scenario in mind should things go wrong. Instinct became
more important than intellect. Decisions had to be hard and quick. To stay
alive, who knew what kind of Faustian bargains were going to have to be made?
Years later, the insanity of the Holocaust would bring to memory a story by
Peretz called the "Joy Beyond Measure," in which God trades the world
to Satan in order to save a Hasidic rabbi. Perhaps that's what happened: for a
brief crazy moment, Satan ravaged what he could before he lost it. And in the
wake, the Jews who remained emerged stronger and more resolved than ever to
carry on the tradition and culture.
The day after my father's telephone call,
the information he had acted upon became public knowledge. The border between
Lithuania and Poland was to be closed that very evening as my father had told
us. The Russians were returning Wilno to the Lithuanians. There was no time to
lose. If we were going to reunite, my mother and I would have to leave
Bialystok that very day for Wilno. After that the borders would close.
Lithuania represented a haven for my father. We packed frantically but lightly
because my mother was sure we would be returning in a few days.
We said goodbye to my two grandmothers and
aunt, all of whom escorted us to the depot, and boarded the night train. It
was to be the last train out of Bialystok. We were becoming nocturnal creatures
moving with ease in the dark. It was strange: Darkness, once a child's fear,
now represented safety. It was daylight that European Jews feared more. We were
running from darkness into darkness; our world was being turned upside down and
we had to adjust, to move in shadows, through blackened corridors, along
lightless streets, down murky roads.
The scene at the train station was pure
bedlam, a madhouse of people loaded down with suitcases and bags, jostling and
shouting. Where were they all going? Jews from small towns were fleeing to big
cities, and Jews from metropolitan areas were in flight to rural villages. In
reality, most of them would end up moving in concentric circles facing the same
fate once the wheels of the Nazi death machine churned into high gear.
The train was packed beyond capacity,
forcing some to sit on their luggage or boxes. We were among the fortunate who
actually had seats and I was privileged to sit at a window. The trip, normally
several hours long, took all night. There was no normalcy. The train moved at a
snail's pace, stopping incessantly for very long intervals. I would wake at
each stop and peer out the window, although there was precious little I could
see in the darkness. I sensed that for the adults each stop was nerve-racking
since no one could be certain the train would ever move again. Sometimes, the
engineer would use the train's piercing whistle, screeching at something in
the way; other times, shouting and angry voices could be heard; once or twice,
there was what sounded like gunfire, but most of the time the stops were filled
with silence.
In the morning we arrived. The Wilno station
scene was a duplicate of the bedlam we left in Bialystok. Indeed, one could not
be certain we had gone anywhere until suddenly I saw my father. There was his
face among the sea of people who were rushing about frantically trying to catch
a glimpse of someone through the train windows. He was wearing his kapelush,
hat, and for a split second I thought our eyes met. I shouted to my mother, but
our train was still in motion, so that by the time I could point him out, he
was lost in a crush of humanity. It was a scene that kept repeating itself
throughout the European continent.
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October 30th, 2003