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    In the Unlikeliest of Places: How Nachman Libeskind Survived the Nazis, Gulags, and Soviet Communism
    In the Unlikeliest of Places: How Nachman Libeskind Survived the Nazis, Gulags, and Soviet Communism
    In the Unlikeliest of Places: How Nachman Libeskind Survived the Nazis, Gulags, and Soviet Communism
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    In the Unlikeliest of Places: How Nachman Libeskind Survived the Nazis, Gulags, and Soviet Communism

    By Annette Libeskind Berkovits and Daniel Libeskind

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    About this ebook

    Annette Libeskind Berkovits thought her attempt to have her father record his life's story failed. But in 2004, three years after her father's death, she was going through his things and found a box of tapes—several years' worth—with his spectacular life, triumphs, and tragedies told one last time in his baritone voice.

    Nachman Libeskind's remarkable story is an odyssey through crucial events of the twentieth century. With an unshakable will and a few drops of luck, he survives a pre-war Polish prison; witnesses the 1939 Nazi invasion of Lodz and narrowly escapes; is imprisoned in a brutal Soviet gulag where he helps his fellow inmates survive, and upon regaining his freedom treks to the foothills of the Himalayas, where he finds and nearly loses the love of his life. Later, the crushing communist regime and a lingering postwar anti-Semitism in Poland drive Nachman and his young family to Israel, where he faces a new form of discrimination. Then, defiantly, Nachman turns a pocketful of change into a new life in New York City, where a heartbreaking promise leads to his unlikely success as a modernist painter that inspires others to pursue their dreams.

    With just a box of tapes, Annette Libeskind Berkovits tells more than her father's story: she builds an uncommon family saga and reimagines a turbulent past. In the process she uncovers a stubborn optimism that flourished in the unlikeliest of places.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilfrid Laurier University Press
    Release dateSep 15, 2014
    ISBN9781771120685
    In the Unlikeliest of Places: How Nachman Libeskind Survived the Nazis, Gulags, and Soviet Communism
    Author

    Annette Libeskind Berkovits

    Annette Libeskind Berkovits was born in Kyrgyzstan and grew up in postwar Poland and the fledgling state of Israel before coming to America at age sixteen. In her three-decade career with the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, she spearheaded the institution’s nationwide and worldwide science education programs. Her achievements include the first-ever agreement to bring environmental education to China’s schools. The National Science Foundation has recognized her outstanding leadership in the field.

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      In the Unlikeliest of Places - Annette Libeskind Berkovits

      Thompson.

      Part 1

      Before

      Prologue

      My father’s visits gave me a chance to pick his brain and work at unearthing its tightly held secrets. I grabbed my briefcase and rushed out of my office heading to Gale Place in the Bronx to meet him. It was only a twelve-minute drive, but in the Friday-evening rush hour I wove in and out of traffic, glancing at the dashboard to check the time. I didn’t want him to wait outside because already the air held the sting of winter.

      It was getting dark and large droplets of rain rolled down the windshield as I pulled up in front of his apartment building, the Amalgamated Co-op adjacent to Van Cortlandt Park. He emerged smiling and holding a large stainless-steel pot wrapped in checkered kitchen towels, his overnight bag slung over the shoulder of his weatherproof parka, navy cap festooned with Chinese buttons from our trip to China. He looked youthful and fit, though he was nearly seventy-five.

      Dad got in the car and we hugged over the centre console. How are you, Tinku? I asked.

      "Zeyer gut. Very well, he replied in Yiddish, then added, Der vinter kumt shoyn." Winter is almost here.

      I pulled out of the cul-de-sac and noticed the wind twisting the branches of the trees in the park. I better hurry before the weather worsens, I thought. It worried me, but I knew that a storm meant nothing to my father. The gulag experience prepared him to survive hardships, and weather was the least of it. The rain turned heavy as I merged onto the Major Deegan Expressway, the mad rush hour by now well underway and the road surface slick. Cars whizzed past us. I needed to speed up. The car was infused with the smell of my father’s cooking. My stomach growled and I realized I was starving. I inhaled the pungent ginger aroma. It was pleasant and surprising.

      Dad, what did you make today?

      Ginger meatballs.

      Did I give you that recipe?

      No, your mama’s friend gave it to me. It’s very easy to make.

      You had ginger in the house? I asked, surprised for this is not a common ingredient in Polish Jewish cooking.

      A huge truck passed, making the road momentarily invisible. I pressed the gas.

      Dad was oblivious. No, I used ginger ale.

      My husband, David, and I had been begging my father to move into our Larchmont home since Mama passed away nine years before. But Dad refused resolutely, saying only, I need my Bronx headquarters. We settled for the weekend visits. It didn’t matter how frustrating our workweeks may have been, what arguments we had with or about the children, the minute my father crossed our threshold something magical happened. Everyone was calmer. Problems that seemed impossible on Thursday would be solved by Monday.

      After Friday dinners we often lingered in the dining area, the adults sipping tea, the kids moving their chairs closer to Zayda, all of us huddled around the proverbial fire, though the only glow came from the scarlet glass lamps that hung over the table.

      Our daughter, about to graduate high school, usually got dibs on conversation first: "Zayda, tell me again about your marriage to Bubby under Stalin’s portrait."

      Ach, vedding, shmedding, he’d say. It’s the love that counts.

      Our son, two years younger than his sister, would pipe up next: "Zayda, can you tell us the story about when they threw you into that Polish prison?"

      But I have told it a hundred times, my father would say, waving his hands in frustration, while his smile invited more questions.

      Yes, but each time you tell us a different wrinkle. The part about the tattoo was new last time! I don’t want to miss any part of it.

      One weekend, when we were helping my father prepare for his annual migration to Florida, we gave him a new tape recorder to bring with him. I had had so many questions for my mother that I never thought to ask. I believed that she would always be there, that I could ask later, or the moment wasn’t right and then … she was gone. I wouldn’t make that mistake again.

      On Saturday morning, David struggled to open the impossible plastic packaging. He called to my father who was in his room busy practising a new tune on his electric keyboard. Nachman, can you join us in the den? We want to show you something.

      We heard the strains of the melody repeating. I knew he’d come in only once he had the tune exactly right. Finally, Dad appeared, triumphant. His eyes shone and his cheeks looked rosy as if he were suddenly younger. I got it! he said.

      David presented the tape recorder,

      Perplexed, my father asked, What’s this, when I want to play my music?

      Dad, I hope you’ll record stories from your life on this machine when you go to Florida.

      You know them already, he said.

      But I want them for the children, for the future … I didn’t want to say for when you are gone. He seemed to understand. His face turned serious for a moment and all he said was, Ach. I didn’t know what to make of it.

      And we showed him how the tape recorder worked.

      Why do they need all those buttons and why are they so small? he asked. Ania, have you seen my glasses?

      Look, Nachman, David instructed. This is the pause button, if you want to stop your narration for a moment and think.

      I handed Dad his glasses. The lenses magnified his eyes into two blue pools.

      What should I think about? It’s all in there. He tapped his head.

      Look Dad, this is the button to press if you want to rewind and hear what you have recorded, I chimed in.

      What are those double arrows? he asked.

      Oh, I forgot to say, these are fast forward? I told him.

      Who is in a hurry? I won’t need these, he said.

      Then David showed him the mini tape cassettes.

      This small thing will hold my whole story?

      No, Dad, you will have to put in a new one when this one ends, I said.

      He held his head with both hands. Oy, is this necessary? I have told you enough stories already, he said.

      My father pushed up the glasses slipping off his small nose and stared at the buttons. He pressed one tentatively, took a deep breath and began: I was born in 1909 in Lodz, but my passport says Przedborz … He stopped suddenly and searched for a button.

      I said, What’s wrong, Dad?

      I … I what do you call it? I want to cancel, to go back.

      Why?

      Ach, I forgot to explain this, he said utterly frustrated, then pushed the wrong button and erased what he had just recorded. "Shayze! An uncharacteristic curse escaped his lips. He took off his glasses and said, I think it’s time to prepare lunch. Today I will make the broccoli with eggs. Good?"

      Dad died in 2001. My grief abated slowly. Every time I stepped into his room, the funeral rushed at me as if it were only days before so I put off tackling his closet for three years. Now I stood in his room staring at the geometric rug he himself selected, the slippers still lined up like soldiers where he’d left them under the bed, everything still held his persona and seemed to scream, Are you going to keep this bedroom like a museum?

      Not that my father’s closet had much in it. He was very frugal and hadn’t bought anything new for years. I was wracked by guilt because I knew what he would have said. Take my coats and sweaters and give them to a charity, there are so many homeless people who could use them.

      But Dad, I need them here for a bit longer, I would have pleaded.

      And surely he would have replied, "It has been three years! Ach, Ania it’s such a shande. Take them to Goodwill now. Do me a favour."

      But it was spring and the coats wouldn’t help anyone now. I made a mental note to take them to the donation centre in the fall and started rummaging through the closet. I hugged his coats and sweaters and inhaled deeply hoping for his scent, but by then there was nothing of it left; just the slightest hint of mothballs. I took out his favourite blue shirt and noticed a tiny smear of paint on the sleeve. He wore it while he painted. It made me smile because he was so fastidious that he wouldn’t have worn it had he noticed the yellow paint smudge. I went to hang it in my closet. This way every time I open it, I thought, just for a split second, I would have the illusion that he was still here.

      I had sorted the clothes I would donate, some twill trousers, old flannel shirts, his blue terry bathrobe, a few sweaters he rarely wore. Who is cold? I’m never cold, he’d say, and some ties that he’d only use to attend graduations and his show openings. It was unfortunate that David was too tall to use any of my father’s things. My father’s five-foot-four stature, perfectly normal in pre-war Europe, was decidedly below average in America. I was almost finished with the emotionally exhausting job when I noticed a shoebox, way at the back of the closet.

      I opened the box and stared. It was full of cassette tapes neatly labelled with dates in my father’s fine hand.

      Oh, my God! I called out though no one was nearby to hear me. So he did use the tape recorder! How could I have doubted him? David!

      David ran upstairs, office papers still in his hands, and stood at the door out of breath and wide-eyed. Annette! What is it? Are you okay?

      It’s Dad, I said, showing him the tapes.

      All these years, David said. He chewed on his lip. Drying out.

      I handled the tapes gingerly, priceless, ancient treasure—my inheritance.

      For weeks I agonized. The fragile tapes had to be transferred to CDs. It bothered me that some stranger in the lab would get to hear my father’s voice before I did and I was wary of letting the shoebox out of my sight, but there were no appropriate conversion services in our immediate area. What if the tapes were to get lost in the mail? What if they were so brittle they crumbled when handled? After consultation with experts, I reluctantly decided to send them out for conversion to CDs, to a business whose reputation I verified as if I were a detective. In a few days I received a call from the recording company. "Who is calling? I asked, expecting to hear about some disaster that destroyed the tapes. Fire? Flood? Why would they be calling me otherwise?

      Mrs. B?

      Yes, yes. What is it?

      I am the technician converting your father’s tapes. I am sorry to be disturbing you, but I just wanted to tell you something. He sounded nasal, young, inexperienced.

      My heart pounded. He must have screwed up.

      What, what is it?

      I just had to tell you how I enjoyed hearing your father sing.

      Sing?

      Yes, he has such a beautiful voice and … and his stories were better than many of the books I have read. I was deeply touched by them.

      I unplugged the phone and turned off the dishwasher. I closed the windows. I wished I knew how to halt the sounds of traffic whizzing past our house. I didn’t want to lose a single syllable. I wanted no sound mixing with his voice. I sat at his desk and pushed the start button. Goosebumps rose on my skin. Mesmerized by the sound of his voice, a melodious baritone, upbeat and conversational, I barely breathed. His rich Yiddish lexicon was peppered with expressions I knew so well: "Nu, Anya, lomir shmuesen khaloymes. So, Ania, let us talk about dreams and reminisce. Or with urgency in his voice, Du darfst dos farshteyn." You have to understand this, he’d insist. He was with me, just in the next room, or on one of the long telephone calls from Florida. I listened with my whole body, every cell in my brain straining to absorb every word, every nuance, the said and the unsaid.

      Chapter One

      In the year of Nachman’s birth, Piotrkowska Street, the boulevard that cut a long, wide swath through the city of Lodz, might have impressed a visitor from another part of Poland. Its elegant facades looked vaguely British. Compared to other towns, it was grand in its sweep and so modern, with a tram that ran along its length, and neo-Renaissance bourgeois villas, industrialist palaces, and public buildings adorned with dragons and dolphins. Smaller, less impressive streets branched off toward the east and west. Here tenements surrounded narrow shadowy courtyards that made dark play areas for the hordes of children who treasured them. In these yards, permanently infused with the pungent smells of poverty—refuse from the trash cans and urine wafting in from the staircases—they could, at last, run and stretch their muscles: freedom from cramped flats overfilled with the basics—a stove, a table, and several narrow beds wherein family members slept head to foot in pairs if they were lucky, or if they weren’t, in foursomes arranged like sardines.

      Nachman was luckier than most because his family’s apartment was on the ground floor, in a corner near the courtyard entrance. Here on summer days, if the sun’s rays were at just the right angle, light would seep into the apartment and make playful rainbows that bounced off the edges of a glass bowl above the stove. But in the winter when it was too cold to venture outside, he could perch on the windowsill looking at the comings and goings. Wiping the rivulets of steam from the high window with his sleeve, five-year-old Nachman could see wondrous things.

      He sat for hours at the window hoping for the magical machine that had appeared for the first time weeks ago. Most days it was nowhere to be seen, but on this day he could tell from the racket at the gate’s entrance that it was on its way. He held his breath. The sound came closer and now the machine and its owner stood before his widened eyes. A stooped man in a shabby black jacket and baggy pants cranked a shaft on the side of the barrel-shaped box and made sounds emerge out of its belly. Nachman did not know the box was an organ or that organ grinders were disdained because of the poor quality of the music. To Nachman and the poor children of his neighbourhood the tones emerging from the box were fairylike. The sounds bounced off the concrete walls and filled the courtyard, seeped into open windows and filled Nachman’s lungs so that he could barely breathe. He had never heard anything so beautiful. He repeated the music in his mind long after the wondrous machine and its master were gone.

      Other children were more fascinated by the monkey on the man’s shoulder, but Nachman felt sad for the poor creature, a lively little thing wearing a tight-fitting suit. If someone were to put me in the jungle, he thought, and make me wear a coat of fur I would feel equally uncomfortable! But Nachman lived nowhere near a jungle. He lived off Piotrkowska Street in Lodz, Poland, smack in the centre of the country.

      On some days, Nachman saw the ragman with his wagon tilting his head back and yelling, all the way to the top floors, "Szmaty! Szmaty! Szmaty! Rags! Rags! Rags! or, Noże! Noże! Noże!" Knives! Knives! Sharpen your knives! The words reverberated through the courtyard. Windows opened and sometimes people threw down bundles of rags, or knives wrapped in them for sharpening. Then children would run down to retrieve them and hand the ragman a few zloty, sparing their parents the many flights of stairs.

      On Friday nights when his parents came home from the synagogue, the whole family would sit after dinner in the candle glow and sing. All of his siblings, two older brothers and two sisters, had lovely voices. They joined with their parents and their music made Nachman so pleased that he belonged to this particular family, not the others, whose loud arguments he could hear through the thin walls. His family was harmonious, like the sounds he had heard in the courtyard. One of these nights, still too young to join the others in the singing, Nachman crawled under the table, his favourite private spot and listened while he stared at the shadows dancing on the walls.

      This is where he fell asleep, and if it weren’t for his mother, Rachel Leah, scooping him off the floor and arranging him in the bed he shared with his brothers, he would have spent the night on the floor. It gave her immense pleasure to sing him her favourite lullaby: "Shlof, mayn kind, mayn treyst mayn sheyner, Shlof-zhe, zunenyu. Shlof, mayn lebn, mayn Kaddish eyner, Shlof-zhe, lyu, lyu, lyu." Sleep, my child, my strength, my handsome sonny, Sleep, my life, my only Kaddish, Sleep, Lyu, Lyu, Lyu.

      She must have experienced a brief moment of inner peace singing it, knowing that she was lucky to have a son who would recite the mourner’s Kaddish three times a day, for eleven months after she was gone.

      Nachman was her youngest child, arriving, as she often said, with the last train. Nearing fifty, she hardly expected this baby and found more tenderness for Nachman than for her other children. With his big blue eyes, blond hair, and button nose, he struck her as an angel child. She wanted to keep him close to give herself the illusion that she wasn’t growing older. As was the custom then, she clothed him in dresses but for longer than her other two boys, and nursed him till he was almost four. She had never seen such a contented, happy child. It was as if HaShem smiled at her and sent her this one last gift. All his life Nachman would remember her telling him this. He was a constitutionally good-natured child and nothing much could upset him. Some things, like the organ grinder and their Sabbath singalongs, could make him feel positively jubilant. For him the world was perpetually filled with sunshine and music.

      Rachel Leah knew that if he had just those two things—light and music—he might not even need food. This notion made her heart swell because she could be sure that those were things he could get without worrying about money. Money was something she and Chaim Chaskel, her husband, worried about each and every day of their lives.

      They migrated to Lodz from the village of Przedborz shortly before the birth of their fourth child, Rosa. Folks back in Przedborz always talked about the opportunities in the big city. Lodz was known as the Polish Manchester because of its industrial base and the multitude of textile manufacturers. No one told Nachman’s parents about the smokestacks that rose high into the sky, higher than the tallest trees back home; that they spewed foul clouds into the sky that settled onto the buildings and into lungs.

      Chaim Chaskel’s old friends still called him the Tishler. He brought his Przedborz carpentry tool chest filled with planes, saws, and hammers, but couldn’t make a go of it. It seemed no one needed him to build tables, or benches, or to repair anything. The fancy city folk preferred to buy modern, factory-made furniture. After a while Chaim pushed the tool chest under the bed where it gathered dust.

      After a time in the big city, he and Rachel Leah opened a tiny grocery that adjoined their one-room apartment and faced the street. In provincial Przedborz , a shop this minuscule might have seemed like a real business, but in a city like Lodz, it was too small and understocked to be anything but an insignificant hole in the wall. They struggled to scrape a few zlotys together to buy the merchandise—mostly vegetables and fruit—at the market. They went to the stalls before closing time and managed to negotiate a better price on the unsold fruit and vegetables—a few apples with too many spots, a wilted cabbage, onions pungent with incipient rot, or potatoes that started to grow roots. For most of their meagre clientele these would be all right because they could buy them for less than at the bigger markets.

      The gevelbl (little shop), as they called it with a dose of irony, also carried tea that had sat in the boxes so long that its aroma was a distant memory. There were also some rusted tins of herring, and cykoria, a cheap coffee substitute made of ground chicory roots, because who in their neighbourhood could afford real coffee?

      Rachel Leah, look, I need a few potatoes. Can you put them on my tab? I will pay you next week, I promise, old Sarah, their next-door neighbour, said, pulling off the roots that were starting to sprout from them.

      "Farvos nisht? Why not? Rachel Leah answered with a smile. What’s another week?"

      "A gezunt oyf dayn kop, Rokhele." Health onto your head, Rachel, said Sarah, and shut the squeaky door as she shuffled out.

      When Nachman turned seven, his parents wanted to send him to study at a cheder, a small religious school for Jewish children. As soon as he overheard the start of a discussion on the subject between his two older brothers and his father, Nachman knew to make himself scarce. They always took Nachman’s side and he knew instinctively to keep quiet. He picked up his pencil, the one with the chewed up end, and crawled under the table to draw while keeping his ears pricked up to catch every word. The two older brothers, old enough to argue with their parents, would have none of this cheder business for their youngest sibling.

      Poppa, said Yankel, the oldest, let Nachman go to the new Vladimir Medem School. It’s just a few blocks from our home.

      "What’s the matter with the cheder? You went there, your brother went there," Chaim Chaskel replied, raising his eyebrows and putting aside his pipe. He was surprised that his oldest son, the one who still followed the traditions, would make such a radical suggestion. Chaim Chaskel had heard about the new school. It was the talk of their neighbourhood. The Jewish Labor Bund party was opening up free schools in the poor sections of the city and it had become a powerful socialist voice in Lodz.

      Like Chaim Chaskel’s family, most Lodz Jews barely scraped by. They were tailors, shoemakers, hat makers, small grocers, but most of all, weavers and dyers, because Lodz was the capital of textile manufacturing in Europe. Jewish factory labourers constituted more than a third of all workers. Dramatic and bitter class differences had turned Lodz into a hotbed of political activity, with the Jewish Labor Bund as a major player. It was a city whose industrial growth was unprecedented in Europe, but this rapid burgeoning spawned abject poverty for the workers while for the factory owners it generated untold wealth. Polish, German, and Jewish industrialists vied to build bigger and better factories, filling blocks and blocks with brick edifices whose chimneys reached ever higher to spew black clouds. Like germ-encrusted living tissue, the city’s lopsided social layers were a ripe breeding ground for political turmoil. Abysmal factory conditions and indecent wages spawned constant labour unrest, strikes, demonstrations, protests, and brutal confrontations with the police. The Bund fought with factory owners to reduce the workdays from eleven hours to eight and to increase starvation wages by a few kopecks.

      As Yankel was making his argument about the Medem School, Chaim Chaskel reflected on how even he, an old man, engaged in a bit of subversive activity on behalf of the Jewish Labor Bund. His mind spun to the recent elections and on how when he went to pray at the Great Synagogue on Zachodnia Street he furtively distributed slips of paper with the number four written on them. Number four promoted the Bund party’s slate of candidates. Chaim Chaskel knew that political activities in the synagogue were not welcome, but he believed in the Bund party’s ideals because they stood for the rights of the working poor. He believed in the Bund’s values as much as he believed in God.

      Chaim Chaskel decided to give his oldest son a hearing. He adjusted his glasses and said, "Nu, so tell me why a cheder isn’t good enough for Nachman."

      I learned the prayers, but not much else, Yankel said quietly, looking down. It was not his way to be pushy with his ideas. By now the early religious training he’d received had become so ingrained that he followed its precepts, but without much enthusiasm. He wished he had learned something about the world around him. If his parents would relent, at least his little brother could have his eyes opened. Yankel, twelve years Nachman’s senior, was a Bundist, though looking at him one couldn’t tell. He wore the usual black garb of Orthodox Jews, but on the inside he was different. As soon as he learned of the Medem School’s creation he promised himself he’d convince his father to send his little brother there. He wanted Nachman to come under its positive influence while he was still impressionable and open. Though he himself continued to attend the synagogue and pray for a better life, he could see that prayer did little to fill empty stomachs. Deep down, Yankel suspected that people needed to take matters into their own hands if they wanted to see changes on earth, not wait for rewards in the other world. He couldn’t quite bring himself to break out of the religious habits that had been ingrained in him, but he wanted his youngest brother to look at the world through a different lens. The Bund’s socialist teachings and emphasis on equality among people, including women, were enticing. The Medem School would grow a new kind of Jew—proud, unassimilated, socially engaged, and deeply steeped in Yiddish culture.

      Nachman shifted around in his spot. His legs were getting numb from trying to keep still and not attract attention. He was glad that Yankel was trying to talk Poppa out of the cheder. Playing with older boys in the courtyard he had heard how the rabbi rapped on their knuckles with the Torah pointer when they misread the Hebrew prayers.

      Natan, six years older than Nachman, had been listening to the conversation quietly, but now he itched to add his voice to this discussion. He, too, had known about the Medem School and wished he had gone there. It sounded so exciting. The classes would all be taught in Yiddish, the language they spoke at home. There would be music and art and sports, subjects never included in his religious school. Nachman would love it. It was as if the Medem School’s founders had anticipated a student like his little brother—thirsty for all things artistic.

      Poppa, listen to Yankel. He is right. Don’t you support the Bund? Aren’t you always encouraging your friends at the synagogue to vote for Bund candidates for the city council?

      What does that have to do with anything? For the moment Chaim Chaskel couldn’t grasp the link.

      They will teach Nachman to believe in himself, not to depend on anyone, to be a strong Jew who won’t be afraid of the goyim. They will teach him about fairness and about being decent to others, no matter who they are, Natan launched into his speech repeating exactly what he had read in the paper.

      Chaim Chaskel didn’t mind having Nachman introduced to these ideas. He believed in them himself. The way the Bund stood up for the workingman’s dignity, well, he couldn’t argue with that. He was beginning to soften, but wasn’t ready to give in so easily.

      Imagine, Yankel said, emboldened by Natan’s comments, "Nachman can learn world history and science, not like the cheder kids who only learn how to pray in Hebrew. Nothing else. They don’t even learn the meaning of the words they mouth."

      The brothers argued late into the night on behalf of Nachman. Rachel Leah had been listening to her boys. They made sense. She had high hopes for her youngest son. She wanted him to become a man of the world. Maybe he, more than any of her other children, could break out of their poor neighbourhood and taste the world. She knew that the Medem School was to be a secular place for learning unlike any other, and she knew her husband like no one else. He wouldn’t exactly like it, but his expression told her that he could be persuaded.

      It’s late, she said, pointing to the grandfather clock. Let’s sleep on it. We’ll figure it out later, she added with a wink. Come to bed Chaim. Then she glanced under the table and saw that Nachman had fallen asleep. He breathed so quietly that engrossed in their big debate they had almost forgotten he was there. She lifted him up as she used to do when he was a baby and put him in bed. He was small for his age and light as a feather.

      Despite his deep religious values, in the end, Chaim Chaskel relented. Yankel and Natan had won. Nachman was enrolled in the Medem School along with twenty other neighbourhood boys and girls from poor working Jewish families for whom religious instruction was secondary to their financial woes.

      As I listen for hours on end to my father narrating his story, sometimes the mind plays tricks. It deceives me into thinking we are sitting on the balcony of his Florida condo, drinking tea, and he is telling me these stories. I catch myself and then hit the back button to hear some of his phrases again. "Yo, Anya. Emes. S’iz azoy geven." Yes, Ania, it was really like that. I can see him nodding with a faraway look as if he were seeing himself as that slight blond schoolboy in knee-length trousers and a cloth cap.

      By the time Nachman began school, Lodz was a bustling, industrial city with its population roughly divided into thirds: Jews, Poles, and ethnic Germans. The rapid technological growth had made it a modern city in many respects. Many religious Jews had abandoned their Hassidic attire. A substantial number had become modernized and politically active in the Jewish Labor Bund and the various Zionist parties. This meant that even those who were still somewhat religious no longer wore the wide-brimmed black fedoras or fur shtramls of the Orthodox. Instead, they wore black wool caps that made them look much more like Greek fishermen than Hassidim.

      Trams criss-crossed the wide streets and wagons hitched to horses were seen mostly on market days. Poles shopped in stores owned by Jewish merchants. Jews bought produce from Polish farmers and hired Poles to turn on their lights on the Sabbath when this action by the pious was forbidden.

      The school was like a rebirth to Nachman. All day long he sat spellbound by the amazing things teachers taught him. He learned about faraway lands where people spoke different languages; ate raw fish and rice with sticks, or snails, or noodles as long and thin as his sisters’ hair. He swallowed stories about composers who wrote music when they were still boys; the mysteries of the constellations in the night sky, and how fancy artists from fancy countries made pictures in which people’s faces looked as if the features had been scrambled.

      No longer confined to observing the world through his window, he felt as if he were finally a participant. Everything interested him but music and art most of all. He loved drawing with the coloured pencils the teacher distributed during art classes and felt embarrassed when the teacher held up his pictures as examples for the class. In music class, he waited anxiously for the operas and concertos the teacher played for them on the scratchy gramophone. It was stunning to learn that real people, not unearthly creatures, could sequence sounds that transported him beyond the classroom and beyond the city. The dance class with Miss Zina was his favourite because here he not only listened to the music but watched her execute elegant dance steps as she twirled to the rhythm. He could watch and watch, but then she called the children to join her and he jumped up with joy to skip and dance with his friends.

      Nachman began to dream of owning an instrument of his own. He wanted to see if he, too, could make music. But this was an unattainable dream. The school’s tiny budget could not support instruments. They were lucky that someone donated an old piano that allowed teachers to offer musical accompaniment to dance lessons. At first Nachman fancied a piano because of the way Miss Chana, the music teacher, coaxed out sounds with her long, delicate fingers gliding gracefully along the black and white keys. Soon enough it became clear to him that his parents could never afford one even if they saved every groshen. He realized that his piano idea was quite laughable. Even if by some miracle they found one on the street just begging to be taken in, it would no more fit in their one-room apartment than a goat, though the goat would be far more useful.

      One day Nachman took a different route home from school and on the way passed a store that sold all manner of musical instruments. He pressed his nose to the display window and stared at the guitars with their graceful necks, the drums he could almost hear tapping out a march, the cymbals like golden suns. But it was the bugle in one corner of the window that captured his imagination more than the rest. Its gleam bounced off the shiny surface, reflecting on the window. Its shimmer exuded a magical pull. Nachman pursed his lips and imagined blowing in it. He wondered how he could get it to emit different notes. Maybe I would have to vary the intake of my breath, he speculated, but he had no idea though he desperately wanted to know.

      While his friends liked to play games in the street, or run directly to the lady who sold bagels on the corner, Nachman ran to spend time before the instrument display. It made his imagination soar and just the sight of it satisfied him for a while, but then his longing became so intense that he got a pain in the pit of his stomach. On some days he stood there until it became dark. On those days he thought that his ache for an instrument was the fault of the organ grinder with his monkey and music machine that he spied in the courtyard all those years ago. Then he ran home faster because he knew he would get a scolding from his worried mother.

      Nachman’s two sisters were busy around the kitchen rushing to set up the Shabbat table before Friday sundown. The older one, Pola, with her round, thick glasses, looked as if she were meant to perform this ritual. She polished the utensils with the corner of the kitchen towel knowing they would never shine quite like silver, yet she enjoyed the illusion that someday they may have a silver set and then she would be ready.

      Rosa, at sixteen, five years Pola’s junior, stepped into the alcove of the large room that served as the bedroom, living room, dining room, and kitchen. Over the cot covered in a worn green coverlet she shared with her sister, hung a small round mirror. Yankel had found it in the courtyard, discarded by a family who had moved out. He brought it in like a cat dragging in an unusual offering. He banged a nail into the wall, hung the mirror on it, and said to Rosa, Here, you can now style your auburn tresses.

      She looked at the mirror satisfied. Yes, she thought, my hair is definitely my best feature.

      Stop primping and help me, Pola called out. Mama and Poppa will be back from the synagogue any minute.

      Not a moment later, Rachel Leah opened the door; her usually pink cheeks reddened a shade more from the cool air. The winter will be here before you know it, she said, and asked of no one in particular, how many pairs of socks have we knitted?

      Poppa came in right behind her and greeted his daughters, "A gutn shabes! He pulled out his pocket watch and glanced at it. Where are the boys? They should have been home by now."

      Don’t worry, Poppa, Yankel will make sure that Natan and Nachman will be here by the time Mama blesses the candles.

      Yes, yes, he said, not sounding convinced.

      His oldest child, Yankel, was the one Chaim Chaskel could understand best. He still

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