Published by the Telshestone English Library
378 pages, Reviewed by S. Weinbach
My downstairs neighbor of years back came from New Zealand.
In the next entrance of our building, lives — until 120
— a fascinating, very distinguished Sefardi woman who
was born to a chareidi family in Jamaica and speaks
English with an exotic accent. My next door neighbor survived
Auschwitz, with a tatooed number on her arm. Another, in her
nineties (until 120) is the granddaughter of the renowned R'
Nosson Tzvi Finkel zt'l, and yet another, a great-
granddaughter of R' Boruch Ber Levovitz zt'l; yours
truly is a Holocaust survivor from Belgium.
Each one with a distinct tale that spans the bridge of time
and space and that fascinating additional dimension of
ongoing Jewish history that unites us all, even the seventh
generation Jerusalemite family from our first entrance.
"This book illustrates the story of Jewish migration in the
last hundred years from an unusual perspective. There is no
faceless narrator sweeping the characters along the tides of
history; the stories are told by the people themselves,
unaltered and with all the poignancy of memory intact."
That's the back cover testimonial. The front cover says it
far better. At first look, you are almost invited to step
into the frame of an idyllic farmhouse scene, with two horses
in the barn adjoining a cottage "where last the lilac
bloomed" clinging to the lintel, a milk can standing, waiting
to be filled, a cobblestone path . . .
And then you see the two figures, a teenage boy in
knickerbockers, knapsack over his back, holding the hand of a
beribboned little girl carrying a satchel, locking a parting
look with her friend, the trusty brown mare. The house is
open — and it seems it will remain that way until
vandals come to strip it of anything of value.
Brother and sister are literally stepping out of that
pastoral frame, their feet set for the long trek of
golus — and that is the keynote of this book.
The Wandering Jew, the vicissitudes of our existence in
history, the special Providence which we have experienced
— and, sadly, it tells as well of those who have fallen
by the wayside.
It is not a sad book, per se, because we Jews take the road
of life in stride, determined to survive, if not
individually, then ultimately. There is maturity in the older
brother's look, resignation, responsibility, but hope and
trust that just as he is holding his sister's hand, so is
Someone holding both of theirs and guiding their
footsteps.
This book is unique, full of flavor, of nostalgia galore,
inviting you to step into yestercentury and beyond, and
relive the cradle scenes of your grandparents' grandparents,
be they from Minsk, Pinsk, Frankfurt, Hungary, India, the
South African Transvaal, England or the East Side of New
York. Somehow, you identify with these brothers and sisters
through their own chronicles, straight from [I almost said
`the horse's mouth,' the one on the cover] the source,
spanning a century and a half of five generations.
"Our family tree can be traced back to the return of Jews to
England in the seventeenth century during the Parliament of
Oliver Cromwell," writes the elderly granddaughter of Esther
Deyong who was born in 1864! She reminisces through the eyes
of a six-year-old (her grandmother) who was taken to see
stagecoaches careening to a stop outside a coaching inn amid
shouts and the sound of a post horn, relives the scene of
Londoners skating on a frozen River Thames — and of
challah baking in the 19th century. Since some ovens
were two small for the family's challos, "my
grandmother would run around with the unbaked challahs
and then return to collect them" after they were baked in the
large oven of one of the neighbors. "This woman eventually
became her mother-in-law."
Visit yestercentury of Botei Ungarin. "I lived with my
grandparents until I got married at the age of fifteen and
moved into my own two-roomed apartment close by, where I
still live. My ten children were all brought up in this
apartment."
This entry tells of water being fetched from the courtyard
well which had a drainpipe from the roof of each building
that directed the rainwater into the well. You can still see
this well today, locked for safety's sake.
"The government rationed the water . . . with every soul
receiving a bucketful twice a week." The well was locked,
with one person responsible for doling out the water.
She tells of parafin stoves, icemen, the communal bakery
where you brought your loaves, challos and even
cholent to bake. "For lighting, we had a keronsene lamp.
Arabs would come with their horse and cart and ring the bell
to let us know they had arrived. My father wrote a big book
on astronomy by the light of the lamp."
They had no telephones — and no loshon hora. No
checks that bounced — since they barely had money. "If
a girl asked for a dress, mother would say, `Your father
learns in yeshiva,' and she wouldn't ask again . . ."
The next entry is about a Jewish `diamond digger', Solomon
Joseph Cohen, who was six when he came to South Africa from
Ponevizh with his family. It tells of backbreaking work in
terrible conditions, but this was during the Great
Depression, and one had to eat to survive . . .
Then there is the story of Pinchos Trachtenberg, b. 1879,
told by his daughter. She tells how he was inducted into the
Russian army and how his mother bribed the guards and brought
him a bag of woman's clothing, enabling him to escape.
Then there is Rabbi Yaakov Baker, who reminisces of times
"after the First World War. When I became bar mitzvah,
I would walk to the yeshiva in Lomza, 19 kilometers away, in
order to save a zloty. The villagers were kind and used to
invite me to have a drink. I was surprised that, later on,
many of them became Holocaust murderers. As I walked through
the woods, I found berries, mushrooms and fruit such as
apples. I took them with me to the yeshiva to share with the
bochurim."
He tells a hair-raising story that begins when the rabbi of
his town came to the Lomza yeshiva and said, "We need to save
the town from starvation." The shochet was watched by
the Secret Police 24 hours a day so the rabbi taught Yaakov
shechitoh so that there would be something to eat on
Pesach, since the townspeople did not use milk products. The
police learn that he has become a shochet and there is
a suspenseful tale of his evading them again and again
through clever Jewish wiles where the last calf was
slaughtered in the police stables, no less!
Miriam Pollack boasts of her parents' "beautiful house in
Hungary with a sink in the kitchen and a toilet in the
garden." Her father was considered a wealthy man; he
purchased old clothes in the Budapest market. At home, they
cleaned them, sewed up seams, changed buttons, pressed them
and resold them for the price of a new garment.
She goes on to tell about her grandmother's screening process
in shidduchim. "This boy is not for you," she
announces. "Bubbie, why?" "His cufflinks weren't matched."
Another boy was rejected because his handkerchief was dirty
and another, because he "didn't look healthy." He died the
same year. "She saw things that I did not."
You feel the flavor of this book, where history is interwoven
with human interest and pure homespun flavor. You can't help
but love it!
Let Them Journey is a fundraiser. It is very
skillfully put together by the women who run the library in
Kiryat Telshestone, Jerusalem, the follow-up of "Library in a
Book," a literary project and also fascinating. But this is
unique, fully packed, very authentic. Jennifer Hall claims
they did not touch up the stories, but they sure made them
readable.
Memoir writing has come into fashion these days, especially
since the Holocaust survivors are slowing vanishing from the
scene. People who thought they couldn't write are tapping
into their colorful pasts and dredging up bygone memories to
preserve for their posterity. The recent Writers' Conference
which took place in Jerusalem had one workshop on it and this
is a subject which should be promoted and pursued.
A second volume coming up, Jennifer?
