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A quiet, friendly, and level-headed man, Yaakov Fein decided—despite a few misgivings—to leave his family and thriving business for a while and venture to the village where his parents were born. He did so in a responsible manner, promising to return to his home and work in ten days—two weeks at most—and that everything would again be as it was.
His wife, Rivka, couldn’t accept his decision. She contended that such a trip should not be undertaken in haste. One must consult family and friends, and only after deliberation does one decide to go. And not alone, for a person does not travel alone to an unknown place. Yaakov, for his part, claimed that he had longed to go there for years but postponed the trip because of the shop and the children. Now he felt he could put it off no longer.
Yaakov Fein was not considered stubborn, which is why his wife believed she would succeed, with the help of their children and friends, in dissuading him. She was, of course, mistaken. Behind his affable serenity lurked an obstinate man. True, his stubbornness was deeply buried, rarely revealed, but when it came out of hiding, he would not be moved.
The pressure she applied daily did not affect Yaakov’s plans one bit. His resolve only grew, and he acted accordingly: an airline ticket to Warsaw, a train ticket from Warsaw to Krakow, and then a taxi to the village of Szydowce. In recent weeks, he had been searching for any survivors from the village, even one, who could tell him about the place and what happened there during the war. His efforts led nowhere.
When he was a boy in Tel Aviv, living on leafy Melchett Street, a few people from the village would come to the apartment. They seemed different from other people: short, stocky, closed. His parents were happy to see them. They would sit for two or three hours, talk about merchants and merchandise, reminisce, but mostly keep silent. They didn’t make a pleasant impression, but because they came to the house every month, they inevitably infiltrated Yaakov’s dreams—or, more precisely, his nightmares.
Yaakov’s parents were also uncommunicative, although not with him. He was an only child, living in his world and keeping his distance from theirs. His parents were always strangers to him. The strangeness pervaded everything: the house, the shop, the synagogue, not to mention the annual memorial service they held at home on the twenty-sixth of Kislev. The memorial was very intimate, barely a minyan of ten men, and it would begin with the afternoon mincha prayer, after which they would sit around the big table in the living room.
The modest get-together would immediately transform the house. The winds of their distant village would chase away the usual smells and would spread throughout all the rooms. These were cold winds mixed with the smell of steaming soup. Sometimes also with the smell of women’s cheap perfume. This invasion gave Yaakov the feeling that at any minute his parents would begin packing their belongings, and then they would all take off together on a long voyage to the village where his parents were born, where their parents were killed, and where part of their identity remained.
When his parents passed away, Yaakov immediately sold the apartment and the furniture. He donated household items, Passover dishes, clothes, and religious books to a charitable institution. He did this speedily and efficiently, without keeping a single thing for himself. He knew in his heart that a clean break was necessary, with no second thoughts.
But the shop that he inherited, a successful business, reminded Yaakov at every turn of his parents. Longtime customers never failed to remark that it was not he who founded the shop. Moreover, charities that his parents had supported would send him reminders, as did synagogues. These people remembered his father fondly, often remarking that he had been such an honorable, big-hearted man, devoted to ancestral tradition and loyal to his community. Most of the renovations done at the synagogue came from his pocket.
Yes, Yaakov was more of an Israeli than his parents. He graduated from high school, finished his army service as a captain, and studied for a year at university. Still, something was missing. He hadn’t felt this lack, if that’s what it was, in his youth. After his parents died, he set out to expand the business and bring in new merchandise. And so the successful textile shop became a shop for women’s fashions. He put a premium on space, elegance, and charm, and soon did away with his parents’ homey atmosphere. Were his parents to come back to life, they wouldn’t recognize the place. “It’s much more beautiful,” he would boast.
Those were his desires, and he achieved them with great skill. A different person would surely have been happy, but the inheritance from his parents did not make Yaakov happy. He thought he had obtained it fraudulently. Had he acted honestly, he would have donated his inheritance to charity, as he had the household goods, the clothes, and holy books, and started everything anew. This feeling, which came and went, took root and penetrated deeply in his soul.
To alleviate this unease, Yaakov would sometimes, after closing the shop, drive along the seashore, taking in the view, and then return to the city streets. He loved the mix of old-timers and new immigrants, the Middle Eastern aromas of falafel and shawarma, and the cheap carbonated drinks. When he got home, Rivka would ask, “Where were you?”
“At the beach.”
“You always say ‘at the beach.’ ”
She suspected him needlessly. In those years he did not escape to other women. True, from time to time a woman would lure him to her room, or he would take a woman for a night. But those amounted to fleeting and trivial recreation. His soul was tormented by things beyond his ken, whispering in long, nightmarish dreams.
Sometimes Yaakov thought that he needed to change his life—to move to the countryside and live away from other people for a while. That idea would last for about an hour. To be with Rivka in a place without other people seemed to him like a prison where he’d be flogged day and night. To leave everything he had built was inconceivable. His daughters made sure over the years to preserve and cultivate the family stronghold. They knew, with the practical wisdom they inherited from their mother, that their father might one day rise up and tear off his handcuffs. They stood on guard like jailers: We will not allow you to abandon what you’ve built with your own hands. Yaakov did try now and then, but each time he was thwarted by their determination. They stood as firm as a stone wall.
After the girls got married and left home, Yaakov felt more suffocated than ever. At first he thought of going to London but realized at once that his heart wasn’t in it. One night he woke up and said to himself, I’m going to Szydowce, as if he had finally found the way out.
For a few days he kept it secret. He finally told Rivka, “I’m going to my parents’ village.”
“Where?” She tried to keep calm.
“My parents’ village,” he repeated.
“What on earth for?”
“I must.”
Yaakov was assaulted with pleas and warnings. Even customers in the shop saw a need to weigh in and warn him against his hasty decision. This strategy did not faze him. From day to day he grew more certain that he must make the trip, come what may.
When logic and pleading got nowhere, Rivka shouted, “It’s madness!”
“Perhaps.”
“Where’s the logic? What will you find there?”
“Everything.” He could not resist using the word.
Rivka had always been more practical than Yaakov, but in recent years her practicality grew stronger and was evident in her every move. Yaakov’s practicality was inconsistent. He was often prone to excess, slashing prices at the wrong time, donating generous sums to a person in need, and, in the past year, sleeping for an entire day. Rivka dubbed his behavior “my husband’s craziness.” Now and then she would rebuke him, or explode, or merely insult him. He didn’t let it get to him.
That life now came to a halt. Yaakov packed his suitcase and his backpack. The girls came to say goodbye. They asked him again to postpone the trip. It was easier with them. He was willing to admit that the trip had no clear purpose, but sometimes one must succumb to the madness of the heart.
The daughters resembled their mother, rational and pragmatic like her, but in their hearts they loved their father. It was impossible not to love him. He never told them no, never punished them, and if they needed something expensive he would buy it for them. Their mother, of course, could not abide such generous spending. She would tell Yaakov that this was no way to educate children. You have to set limits on them. And when she was angry, she would add, “You are trying to buy their love.” In the end, the daughters identified with her. Her assertive logic always swayed them.
They wanted to accompany him to the airport, but he didn’t let them. “I want to leave without emotional fanfare,” he said. His determination was now obvious, and they backed off. As always at such abrupt transitions, words came out that were perhaps unintended. Their mother looked up and muttered, “I don’t understand a thing. For the life of me, I don’t understand.” She held her head in her hands as if about to scream. But it only seemed so. In her normal voice, she said seriously, “Take care of yourself, keep an eye on your backpack, call, write, and don’t go anywhere dangerous.” The last sentences were lost in the shuffle, as several friends had come to say goodbye, including two longtime customers and the rabbi of their synagogue, who saw himself as a stand-in for Yaakov’s father.
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The flight to Warsaw was just like a flight to Rome or Madrid, but when Yaakov landed in Warsaw and went to the train station, he sensed at once that the air there was different—damp, slightly fragrant, reminding him of his parents, who used to say, over and over, “Such air, such water.” He couldn’t stand such nostalgia. He loved Tel Aviv and the expansiveness of a big city; everyplace else seemed pitiful, just as his parents were pitiful, clinging to what once was, devoted to religious observance.
He used to say to them, “Believing in God after the Holocaust, this I will never understand.” Based upon what he learned in school and in the youth movements, Yaakov would torment his parents with long flowery speeches, claiming, “You’re still living in your village. You haven’t learned any historical lessons.” In this regard he was no different from his classmates. They, too, tormented their parents with the same accusations. But the other parents would argue, bring evidence to back their claims, and shout defensively. His parents didn’t argue with him, didn’t try to prove anything, but their silence made him crazy. “Beyond my ken,” he would say, confident they would not understand.
—
The train moved, and Yaakov felt its wheels beneath him. Never had he traveled in such a crowded train, and everything he saw seemed different and unique. Farmers sat near him, drinking beer and jabbering loudly. To his surprise, he understood nearly every word. In his childhood, Yaakov and his parents spoke Yiddish. But at night, so he wouldn’t understand, his parents would have long talks in Polish. He suspected they used the foreign language to hide income tax secrets from him. Later on he thought they were discussing forbidden personal matters. From these conversations, Yaakov picked up not only words but also the rhythms of the language. It turns out that things a person hears in childhood, even snippets of secrets, are not easily forgotten.
The train traveled slowly, stopping to let off and pick up riders. As it moved along, he felt himself increasingly detached from his earlier life. From where he sat in the railway car, Tel Aviv seemed far away, bereft of reality, flickering dimly in his past.
Yaakov had a powerful urge to ask one of the farmers if he’d heard of the village of Szydowce, but he couldn’t find the right words for the question. The farmers seemed neither coarse nor hostile. They drank and were merry. He also noted the joy of the women: they talked fast, arguing, making jokes, injecting vulgar words that provoked great laughter.
In his early childhood Yaakov’s mother would tell him about the way of life in the village, about the seasons and the farming. He loved listening to her voice, but school, youth groups, and the army had erased from his mind what she had told him. Now, those scenes came out of hiding and, to his surprise, matched everything he saw with his own eyes: farmers with a lust for life who knew, unlike the Jews, how to be happy.
A man came over and asked him in Yiddish, “Jewish?”
“Indeed,” Yaakov replied, wondering how he knew.
“Where are you headed?”
“Krakow.”
Speaking Yiddish was hard for Yaakov, but he managed a few words. The Jewish man informed him that he lived in a small village not far from Krakow.
“How long have you lived there?” asked Yaakov.
“Forever,” the man replied, and smiled.
The man’s answers and his short stature brought Yaakov’s father to mind. He had spoken the same way, with the same tilt of his head.
“And what do you plan to do in Krakow?” the Jewish man asked amiably.
“I’m going from there to Szydowce.”
“A very small village,” he said.
Yaakov told him that he had been born in Tel Aviv to parents from Szydowce, and that the purpose of his trip was to see the place.
“There are no Jews there. There is nothing there.”
“I know. Perhaps I’ll find remnants of a cemetery, or my grandparents’ house. But even if I don’t find a thing, I’ll make do with seeing the hills, the wells, and if a farmer wants to sell me some religious objects, I’ll buy them.” He retrieved the Yiddish words from his memory, and, amazingly, the Jewish man understood him.
“How strange,” said the Jewish man, with a very Jewish inflection.
“What’s strange?”
“Your trip.”
“What’s strange about it?”
“To travel to someplace where there’s nothing.”
“All their lives my parents talked about Szydowce; a day didn’t go by when they didn’t. It can’t be that there’s nothing there. Jews lived there for generations, always very few—my parents, my grandparents, their parents, and I assume their grandparents, too. Shall we say that they disappeared, that they were eradicated?” Yaakov said in words and emotions not his own.
“I understand,” said the Jewish man, but with a skeptical nod of his head and awe at that flow of words.
“I’m going to a place that’s full of life,” Yaakov said, not grasping the meaning of what he was saying.
“If you say so,” said the Jewish man, ending the conversation.
When the train stopped, the man apologized for the intrusion and wished Yaakov a good trip. “This is where I live,” he said, and then disappeared.
The man’s image lingered for a long while. He did indeed resemble one of the friends from Yaakov’s parents’ village who would come to visit them. But those people seemed more down-to-earth.
Yaakov was once again by himself, and glad of it.
He remembered preparing for his bar mitzvah. The nightmare lasted eight months. His father had retained an old-fashioned tutor to teach him the Torah and Haftarah readings. The teacher was of short stature and perceptive, well aware that he was an accomplice to coercion. Yaakov rebelled, refusing to cooperate. Finally, after many attempts at persuasion, the lessons were reduced to one hour per week. The teacher did his job faithfully, explained things, tried to stimulate curiosity, but all his strategies were for naught. Yaakov refused to listen and asked rude questions. The old teacher restrained himself, didn’t berate him, and arrived every Monday.
Yaakov’s father was miserable and helpless. All his words were to no avail. One time, in his failure to persuade, he said, “You’ll be sorry.”
“For what? ...
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