(Author: Eugenie Freed, Vol. 72, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2017)
It was in 1955 that Boris received the call. The unknown man on the line spoke with a strong Yiddish accent.
“Boris Aronstam?”
“Yes, and who am I speaking to?”
“Are you Sam Aronstam’s son?”
“Yee -es, I am. Who is that?”
“Shmulkin – Mendel Shmulkin. I’m calling from Johannesburg. I want to come to Port Elizabeth to see you.”
“To see me? Uh – about what?”
“Family business.”“What family business?”
“I’ll tell you when I see you.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
In the winter of 1895, in the town of Eragola in Lithuania, Hodel was giving birth to her thirteenth child.
Propped up in a birth-chair, tilted back, she was supported on one side by her housemaid, and on the other by the midwife’s assistant. Hodel herself had inserted her prayer-book between the two pillows supporting her head, so that the name of God on its pages would protect her from the demon Lilith, eternally hostile to Eve’s descendants, and especially vindictive towards women in childbirth.
Hodel had begun her labour during the previous night. Before her husband Micah Shmulkin left for work at the local tavern, a thriving pundak owned and run jointly by himself and his brothers, he had sent for Sarah the midwife, who had attended Hodel at other births. Sarah and her assistant had come through the snow to this house that had grown ever larger as Hodel’s family had increased. Now, it was a large brick edifice to which rooms had been added at the sides and back, and a loft set into the steep roof.
Sarah was not one of your old-fashioned superstitious povitukhas. She had attended a training-course in Kovno, where she had learned to wash her hands and to use forceps – she had even acquired a pair of these herself. However, as a gesture of respect for tradition, Sarah had brought with her an amulet, a piece of paper with the names on it of the three guardian angels who shield Jewish mothers and their new-born infants from the envious Lilith. She folded the amulet into a round locket and strung it on a ribbon around Hodel’s neck before sitting down on the midwife’s stool in front of her patient. The curtains were closed, though it was midday, for bright light was said to be dangerous to a woman in labour. The only light within came from the charcoal brazier. Sarah asked for a lamp, and the housemaid placed one on a table near the stool. The waft of the glowing charcoal mingled with the aroma of dried rosemary twigs that Miriam, Sarah’s assistant, was burning in a metal pot, to sweeten and purify the air. Swathed in a black apron, Sarah began her examination at the lower end of Hodel’s swollen body, while issuing a string of instructions to Miriam.
Hodel’s pains were now racing in like the tall breakers of a spring tide, closer and closer to one another. She clutched at the grips on the arms of the birth-chair, moaning as the agony surged through her body. Please God make it quick, she prayed through clenched teeth. Please God, give me peace; no more children, she silently begged the Almighty, in a pause between the crashing of giant contractions.
The hours passed, but time stood still. At last Sarah said “The head’s coming.” Hodel groaned as Miriam’s hands took hold of her feet and thrust them into the stirrups attached to the legs of the birth-chair. Miriam was urging her to brace herself, to put out the last of her strength and force this infant into the world. She heard Sarah and Miriam shouting encouragement, felt Sarah’s hands between her thighs taking up a slippery form, heard an uncertain little cough, followed by a tremulous wail. Hodel closed her eyes and sighed with relief.
“A boy!” Sarah cried, and then – “Oy, there’s another one coming!”
“Push! Push!” Sarah and Miriam exhorted Hodel, but she whispered “I can’t”. One by one Sarah inserted the arms of the forceps into Hodel’s body, and as Miriam watched with awe, she locked them and slowly drew out the head of a second little human creature. She squeezed her hand and arm into the bloodied cleft to help its body into the dim light. As the second twin slid into Miriam’s waiting hands, he sneezed and whimpered; through her pain Hodel heard both infants protesting in shrill staccato gasps against the wintry world into which she had delivered them.
“Two fine boys!” Sarah exclaimed. “Now, the afterbirth …”
But Hodel’s exhausted frame could do no more. Sarah and Miriam between them did as much as they could, but at this birth Lilith was determined to defy the angel guardians. The women lifted Hodel from the birth-chair and placed her in the marital bed, packing pillows so as to raise the lower part of her body. An owl hooted and chuckled in the darkness outside: a bad omen, Sarah thought. With a sinking heart she continued trying to stanch the bleeding. Anyuschka the housemaid got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the wooden planks of the floor with a bucket of snow-water. She bundled up the bloody linen and left the room to take it to the basket for the washer-woman, but Miriam had to call her back.
Despite Anyushka’s scrubbing, despite the changes of linen, the burning herbs and the cold of the winter, by morning the smell of Hodel’s life-blood commanded the whole house. On the second night of her twins’ lives in this world, she was granted the peace she had prayed for. Hodel was forty-three years old when she died. She had been married for twenty-five years, and was already the grandmother of five children.
After Hodel had been laid to rest in the old Jewish graveyard, everyone in the community assembled at the Shmulkin house for prayers. Mirrors in the house were covered with sheets to ward off the evil eye, for Lilith had not yet done her worst; the twin boys still clung to life. One of Anyushka’s younger sisters was taken into service in this family emergency. She administered goat’s milk, dripping it haphazardly into the infants’ mouths from a cloth, until Hodel’s elderly aunt, Chayah-Basha Aronstam, found Olga, a local woman who had recently given birth. Olga was hurriedly hired as the twins’ wet-nurse.
Micah Shmulkin sat in a low chair, surrounded by members of the family, dolefully wiping his eyes with a handkerchief and occasionally letting out a groan of self-pity. Neighbours came to the house on every day of the shivah, the seven days of ritual mourning. Many were Hodel’s former clients, for she had been a skilful seamstress and a popular dressmaker. They brought food– hard-boiled eggs and round beigels, to symbolize life – and they stayed to gossip. Chayah-Basha brought baked potatoes, salt herring and black bread to feed the family. She sat apart from the low-voiced chatter, a matronly figure draped in black, wiping away the occasional tear. Hodel’s other children sat with the mourners each day; even her unruly younger sons joined them for as long as they could sit still.
On the eighth day of their lives the twin boys were circumcised, in fulfilment of God’s covenant with Avraham avinu. Though usually an occasion for celebration, this was a sad and muted affair. Five of the men from the shivah, and the three eldest of the twins’ brothers, joined the tearful Micah, wearing black hats and solemn expressions; the mohelmuttered blessings and cut away the foreskins, and that was that. The two youngest of the Shmulkin family, now bearing the names Zelic and Mendel, screamed for twenty minutes and were not much comforted by sops of kosher wine trickled into their mouths by their sisters, Fruma and Gittel, the first two of Hodel’s brood. They hastily passed their infant brothers over to Olga, who attached one to each of her dripping teats and sat back impassively as two small hungry mouths made their fumbling attempts to suck from her solace for their pain as well as nourishment for their bodies. To Olga, children were one of life’s afflictions; she’d had many of both.
All the talk in the community was about the tragedy that had befallen the Shmulkins. Who would raise these two motherless newborns? What would happen to Hodel’s other children, and what about that miserable man, Micah Shmulkin?
Fruma and Gittel had both married at eighteen, like their mother, and were now in their early twenties. Fruma lived far away in Vilna and Gittel in a village on the distant Polish border. Fruma already had three young children, Gittel two; neither they nor their husbands had any inclination to take in these new-born twins as well. There was a third daughter in Hodel’s family: Faiga, her sixth child. Faiga was fourteen, the only girl left at home. Fruma and Gittel let it be known to the neighbours and relatives that their younger sister was a marvel of capability, a precocious Berya, well able to undertake the running of the household and the mothering of her youngest siblings. When the shivah ended, they kissed Faiga fondly, advised her to “Look after the bubbeles!” – and hurried back to their own homes and families.
Faiga flounced out of the living-room and clattered up the spiral staircase to her loft bedroom. Her sole privilege, as the only girl still at home, was that she had a space to herself, while her brothers squabbled and slept, three or four together, in the rooms beneath hers. She sat down on her narrow bed and took out the hand-mirror she kept hidden under her night-clothes. Glaring at her own angry reflection, she thought about her sisters. “Look after the bubbeles!” Why should she? Faiga had always hated household work – women’s work, the tasks that had to be done over again every day for the men in the family. While her mother was alive she had usually managed to avoid them, because she was willing and able to help Hodel with the sewing and dressmaking; she enjoyed that, and her mother had praised her dexterity and quickness. As an unwilling nanny to her younger brothers, Faiga had developed a serious dislike of babies and toddlers. And now here were these two wretched little creatures she was supposed to look after! The only emotion she felt for the new additions to her family responsibilities was exasperation. It was too bad of her mother to die, leaving these twins to be minded by … who? One thing Faiga had decided already: she was not ever going to get married. She was not going to live like her mother and sisters, forever either pregnant or breast-feeding. And from all she had seen and heard, life in her community offered no other option to a young woman. In your eighteenth year you got married, to a man of your parents’ choice, and after that, you spent the rest of your life either cooking and cleaning yourself, or supervising the servants who cooked and cleaned, if your husband could afford them. And you did this in the intervals of giving birth to one child after another, feeding them, wiping their tochases, getting up in the middle of the night …. Not for me, Faiga decided. I’m leaving this place. First chance I get.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
After Hodel’s death, the household descended into anarchy. Pots and pans disappeared from the kitchen, milchik and vleischik plates and cutlery were confused, food was burned, and the younger boys bunked their cheder school. The older sons – supposedly working for their father and uncles at the pundak – appeared at the workplace irregularly if at all, causing their father to tear his hair and hold up his hands to heaven in protest at the unfairness of his lot in life. Zelic and Mendel struggled through the early years of their existence, but stubbornly continued to survive and grow, like weeds rooting in the cracks of a rock. When Olga the wet-nurse had fed them in their infancy, after each feed she handed the swaddled twins like wrapped parcels over to Kristina, Anyuschka’s sister, and then went away. Kristina too treated them like parcels; she was generally indifferent to the boys, though perhaps she resented them less than Faiga did; after all, she was getting paid. When they were three years old Faiga, who had inherited Hodel’s sewing-machine as well as a little of her talent, announced that she was going to Kovno to work for a dressmaker she had chanced to meet at the home of a friend. She was seventeen. Ignoring the feeble protests of her father, she left the chaotic family home, taking both the sewing-machine and her nineteen-year-old brother Menachem. At about the same time their eldest brother Moishe, aged twenty-three, made it known that he intended to follow the many young men – including Sam Aronstam, Chayah-Basha’s only son – who had already left Eragola to make their fortunes in South Africa. Micah wept, but Moishe left anyway; his parting words to his younger brothers were “I’ll send for you.” Shortly afterwards Kristina vanished, rumoured to have run away with a young man from another village. Anyuschka, bitter about Kristina’s defection, demanded that Micah hire additional help in the house. The busty young woman who joined the household caught the eye of second brother Lazar, then twenty-one, but avoided the twins.
Then how was Micah, always deploring the ill fortune that was his lot, to cope with his remaining offspring? He did the only thing he could think of: he sought a step-mother for them. But even though Micah was reasonably well-to-do, he had no luck. Any woman who showed interest – or was so misguided as to feel sorry for this affluent but pitiful man who was so sorry for himself – was quickly driven away by the horde of wild boys inhabiting his big house.
Zelic and Mendel grew up snot-nosed, grubby, and neglected. Their father and brothers never learned to tell them apart. They were always angry, without quite knowing why. Sometimes they visited Chayah-Basha in her modest log cabin nearby. From the tap of her brass samovar she would fill glasses with strong black tea; she put a sugar-lump into each glass and stirred into it a teaspoon of jam she had made from forest berries. The boys found an inexplicable comfort in the flavour and warmth of Chayah-Basha’s tea, and in the sweetness of the nutty tea-cakes that came with it, crunchy little balls rolled in powdered sugar.
The twins relied on one another for survival. Chatzkel, one of their older brothers, would tease them by pummelling the air around them with mock punches, every third or fourth blow finding a solid target on one or the other of the twins. By the age of five, they had learned to turn on him as one, and Chatzkel became wary of them. When they were six, Mendel found a small dishevelled black dog scavenging at a rubbish-heap. He took him home and named him Grisha. Mendel fed his dog on scraps from the messy kitchen, and Grisha slept under, and often in, the twins’ bed. One day, big brother Yudel took Grisha by the tail and whirled him around, yelping in pain and fright. Mendel and Zelic tackled Yudel together, kicking, punching, scratching and biting. He soon learned to leave them and Grisha alone.
The twins were stocky and heavy-browed, youthful troglodytes, but physically surprisingly strong. They had learned early in life that aggression was their best defence, and that they should be as wary of their siblings as they were of everyone else. But they were not quite as much alike as their father and brothers thought. Zelic’s set jaw and habitual surly expression warned his brothers and the rest of the world not to interfere with him. But Mendel would sit with Grisha on his lap, talking to him in a private language, and at such times his face softened and lit up. When the twins were seven years old, Micah sent them to the cheder to begin their studies. Within weeks they were both sent home, deemed intractable and unteachable. Their father threw up his hands and deferred the problem to another year.
It was soon after the cheder rejected them that Mendel took ill.
When they woke up one morning in the spring he told Zelic his throat was sore; he wanted to lie in bed. Zelic went out to kick a ball around by himself, but when he looked in later he found Mendel flushed and feverish, begging for water. Zelic fetched a jug and a cup from the kitchen and set them by the bed.
“You want to eat something?”
Mendel shook his head and whispered “Wipe my face.”
Zelic dipped the corner of a towel in water and wiped down Mendel’s face and his chest. Grisha, lying on the bed beside Mendel, licked his hot cheeks and pushed his nose into Mendel’s neck.
Nobody except Zelic noticed that Mendel did not appear at suppertime.
Next day Mendel’s throat was worse, and he was burning with fever. As the day passed Zelic, watching his twin anxiously, noticed that he seemed to be having trouble in breathing. Mendel began to cough, a hoarse sound like the bark of a dog.
Zelic was alarmed. They needed help, and it was no use turning to their father. Micah and a drinking-acquaintance were sitting on the porch outside the front door of the house. Micah was smoking his pipe, nursing his schnapps and holding forth on his constant theme of how unfairly life had treated him, when Zelic ran past them, straight to Chayah-Basha’s house.
Chayah-Basha too was sitting before her open front door, enjoying a quiet moment in the twilight. When she saw Zelic running towards her, alone, she knew before he spoke why he had come. She walked with him, as fast as her legs and feet would allow, back to the Shmulkin house, listening as he tried to describe what was happening to Mendel. Owls were calling to one another, “uhoo-hoo-hoo” among the pine trees, as Chayah-Basha greeted Micah perfunctorily on the front porch of the rambling brick house. She said, “I’ve come to see Mendeleh,” and walked through the open front door. In the cramped back bedroom the twins shared, Chayah-Basha put her hand on Mendel’s hot forehead and listened to his cough. She took her spectacles out of her pocket, settled them on her nose, and said to Zelic, “Bring the lamp here to me, bekeleh.” To Mendel she said “Open your mouth for me, bubbeleh”. Holding the lamp close, she looked carefully into Mendel’s throat, then stroked his face, straightened herself up and turned to Zelic.
“Zelicush,” she said, “go call your father. Bring him here, right now.”
Micah appeared at the door, looking frightened. He had seldom seen Chayah-Basha since Hodel’s death; when he did see her, and she looked at him, he felt guilty, quite unreasonably. He was not even aware that the twins visited her. She was standing at the head of the bed, one hand on Mendel’s forehead.
“Micah, this child is very sick.”
Micah gasped. “Sick? What’s wrong?”
“It’s the throat-disease. The old people called it oysvargne malekh – the strangling angel. That’s what it does – it strangles children to death. And everyone else in the house can get it too.”
Micah’s mouth dropped open, and his face paled.
“Oy, a broch tzu mir!What can I do? There’s no hospital here in Eragola, no doctor … Oy, vey es mir, vey es mir!!”
Chayah-Basha looked at this miserable man, consumed with self-pity, this hero who had given her beloved Hodel child after child, until she died. For a moment, Chayah-Basha despised him so much that she wanted to spit on him. But instead she looked down at Mendel, Hodel’s last child, his face inflamed with heat, his head rolling on the pillow as he coughed that strange, brassy, barking cough.
She said, “He can’t stay here– das wil onraysn der ganze mishpochah – all Hodel’s children will get sick, and some will die. I can’t let it happen. Take Mendele to my house. Take the dog with him. I will look after them. If I get sick, Gottse danken, I’ve had my life.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Zelic dreamed a dream that came back every night. In it, Mendel was struggling with a huge dark shape. Sometimes he and Mendel together were wrestling with the powerful figure; sometimes Grisha was helping them, barking and snapping at the assailant – but Zelic always woke up, shivering, alone in the bed, before the contest ended. During their brief spell at the cheder they had heard the story of Ya’akov, who had wrestled with an angel and prevailed. Zelic lay in bed wide-eyed, whispering to Hashem: “Don’t let the angel strangle Mendel – please let him win!”
Zelic walked slowly towards Chayah-Basha’s little wooden house. He had made this solitary visit every morning since Mendel, Grisha and Chayah-Basha had disappeared into that house. Its walls were of upright wooden slats and its black roof-tiles sharply pitched. A red flag on the front door warned passers-by that the dwelling harboured a dangerous infectious disease. Zelic did not go to the door. He would loiter about for a while in the street in front of the house, and then shuffle back home, kicking a pine-cone. But this morning, he caught a glimpse of Chayah-Basha through one of the narrow windows on either side of the red-flagged door, and she must have seen him. The door flew open, and there she was, in the doorway, smiling and waving. Grisha came bounding out past her long skirts to dance around Zelic in the street, yapping joyfully. Zelic gasped. From the door Chayah-Basha called out, “Zelicush! I can’t let you in yet – but he’s getting better!”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
On a tranquil summer evening in 1975, in the city of Johannesburg in South Africa, Evelyn was chatting to Boris, who had come up from Port Elizabeth on a short business trip. He had phoned to say he was in town, and she had invited him for dinner with herself and her husband at their luxurious house in the north of the city.
After the meal, relaxing on the wide veranda of the house as the air cooled down, Boris and Evelyn were discussing their roots.
“I’ve always known we were related somehow,” Boris observed, “but I’ve never known how exactly. Do you know?”
“I think it’s got something to do with your grandmother,” Evelyn said. Boris frowned, trying to recall childhood conversations with his late father and stories passed on by his mother after his father’s death.
“I never met my grandmother – my father’s mother. She died back in Lithuania, before I was born, but that was many years after my father came to South Africa. I believe she lived to a great age. My father, Sam, was her only child.”
“What was her name?”
“Basha, I think – I’m not sure. But I know I was named for her.”
“I was named in memory of a woman called Chaya-Basha, who lived in Lithuania,” Evelyn said. “My Hebrew name is Chaya.”
Boris wondered how much Evelyn knew about his dealings with her late father. Would it be indiscreet … ?
There was a silence. Then Evelyn mused: “My father never said much about his early life. It couldn’t have been easy, him being the youngest of such a huge family – fourteen children! And their mother died when he and his twin brother were born. So those two never even knew what it was like to have a mother.”
There rose in Boris’s mind the memory of the telephone call he’d received twenty years earlier from Evelyn’s father, Mendel Shmulkin.
Boris had heard of the Shmulkin family and knew that they were distantly related to him in some way. At the time when Mendel Shmulkin called him, in 1955, Boris was in his twenties, starting out in life; he had a young wife, and their first child was three months old. Money had always been scarce; Sam Aronstam had never been able to make much of a living, and he had passed away when Boris was twelve.
A week after the phone-call, Mendel sat opposite Boris in the tiny one-roomed flat in Port Elizabeth that he and his wife were renting at the time. Mendel was bald and stocky, a little bent, with hooded eyes. He wasted no time on pleasantries.
“I want to buy you a decent house. You can’t bring up your child in a place like this. And I want you should start your own business. I’ll help you. No strings.”
Boris could not believe what he was hearing. He had heard that Zelic and Mendel Shmulkin – always spoken of in one breath – had made serious money in property in Jo’burg in recent years; he had also heard that the twins had jointly earned the reputation in business circles of having ice in their veins. He had even heard the comment that their teeth were their softest parts. Boris could not imagine why Mendel Shmulkin should make so extraordinary an offer to a distant relative like himself.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked Mendel. Mendel hesitated, shifted in his chair, looked out of the window at the blank brick wall of the building next door. Then he turned to face the grandson of Chaya-Basha.
“ Your bobba gave me my life,” he said in his thick Lithuanian speech. “She took me into her house when I was a child, she looked after me when I was so sick that no one else wanted me.”
He took out a large handkerchief, wiped his face, and blew his nose.
“She could have died of that illness too, but she didn’t get sick, and I got better. For her sake I must look after you and your children.”
On that cool Johannesburg evening in 1975, Boris turned to glance at Mendel’s daughter Evelyn in the half-light spilling from a louvred window opening on to the veranda of her opulent home.
“Did your father ever speak of being very ill as a child?”
“Yes, yes, he did. He told me that this old woman, Chayah-Basha, nursed him in his childhood when he was sick, and saved his life. That’s why he gave me her name …”
Evelyn looked down, rearranging the pleats of her elegant satin skirt against the cushioned chair on which she sat. “So, in memory of her humanity, I bear the name of Eve, the mother of mankind.”
“The mother of mankind …” Boris repeated. “Chayah-Basha. We both have her name.”
Dr Eugenie Freed (Isserow) is a Research Fellow in the Dept. of English at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she taught for many years. She has published a book on William Blake and continues to publish scholarly articles on a variety of literary topics.
