Coda VII

IV.       A hand was rousing Boris Kahanowitz.  A Polish conductor was pointing out the window and saying “Kabtsowz” the Polish name for Kabstiel. 

            When Boris alighted from the train, he looked about.  There was a wide main street, only partially paved.  A brick town hall and a synagogue.   A few houses constructed in a modern style.  But here and there, the pastiche remains of the shtetl: a tumble down shack, trees sprouting through its roof; an old chicken coop one half upright and one returning to the earth.   

             Out beyond the small town was a vast expanse of swamp.  A long dock jutted out at the end of the main street, as if the town was meant to extend into the brown waters and had stalled and were replaced by a dozen skiffs moored to poles.  There was a maze of channels surrounded by reeds twice as high as a man and as far as the eye could see.  A stiff breeze blew in from the marsh.  Boris clipped his nose against the stench. 

            He entered a café and about two dozen people were huddled around a radio broadcasting something in English.  Someone translated it into Yiddish but without satisfying the crowd.  The poor flustered man would try and translate again, only to be hit with a barrage of comments and questions.  The line of the story was lost in the hail of conflicting, bickering voices. 

            “What happened?” Boris asked the man nearest him.

            “Invasion.”

            “Who?”

            “As far as we can tell,” the man answered, “Russians from the east and Germans from the west.”

            “Who will make it here?” Boris asked.  The man simply shrugged his shoulders.

            “We’re between the hammer and the anvil, as the saying says.”

            “Can I get a drink in this town?” Boris asked, his head reeling.

            “The man who runs the tavern has fled,” the man said, taking a few steps toward the door. 

            “Can you take me to Reb Yasha Shulevitz?” Boris then asked, moving forward as if to chase the fellow.

            “Better to flee, landsman,” the man said, already out the door.

            “Where to?” Boris asked.

            “Farstuken Swamp… where else?”

Coda VI

III.       There was a workingman’s tavern by the station, so Boris went in for a drink.  Eight hours later, he was surrounded by Yiddish speaking factory workers coming off a shift.  Train after train left the depot for the provinces, but Boris continued to drink.  All the talk around him was of imminent war.  But Boris could not make out what was being said.

            “What war, Comrade?” he kept asking, again and again.  Men kept telling him war with Germany or Russia or both.  A secret pact.  They would carve up Poland like the Passover lamb.  The workers debated the merits of Jews falling under the Germans or the Russians. 

            “Thieves and murders all,” Boris grumbled.  One of the workers recognized him.

            “But you are a known Communist,” he said.

            “What they’ve done there Comrade isn’t Communism,” Boris answered, “its Butcherism.”  Boris so swelled with anger a cordon of space around five feet in circumference surrounded him.  He drank in dignified but rage laden silence.

            Then Boris found himself surrounded by two men.  On was Meir, a Yiddish poet.  The other was Bronsky (Boris could not remember the first name) or whether the man wrote poems in Hebrew, Yiddish or Polish.

            “What gives, Boris?” Meir asked.  And then, gingerly: “I heard you are going to find Yasha Schulevitz?  Is that why you are here, so close to the station?  A fortifying drink before you search?  You are like Samson going down to Gaza, but instead of drinking honey from the jaws of a lion, it is vodka, and instead of going to your Philistine intended , it is a poet!”

            “Leave him be,” Brodsky answered for Boris, sitting at a stool next to him and ordering a drink.  “Kahanowitz is a genius.  His poems are like dripping honey.  And what are your poems like:  like the sounds a mute man makes when he has the temerity to try and speak,” and then Brodsky made some grunting noises.  Meir laughed.

            “But why the fixation on Schulevitz?” Meir asked Boris, moving closer to the big man.  “Let a dead dog lay, I say.  If he wants to be the Baal Shem Tov reincarnated, let him be.  Let him be Moses if that is what he believes.  You know Schulevitz spent time in an insane asylum.  Half these zealots are mentally ill.  I read a learned article about it.  Religious enthusiasm is a form of narcissistic mania.  Schulevitz is a traitor.”

            “To whom?” asked Meir, stamping his foot on the bar railing.  “To the Communists?  The Socialists?  The Bundists?  The Zionists?  To the Golus Nationalists?  The Yiddishists?  The Hebraists?  The Assiminationists?  To the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals… shall I go on?”

            “You forgot the Chasids and the Rebbes,” Meir added.

            “Ahh!” Brodsky intoned, “to them especially.  What is the rumor?  He lives in a hut all by himself in that swamp.  What is it called?”  Both men went back and forth and could not produce the name.

            “Farstuken…. fools,” Boris boozily answered through clenched teeth.  Meir and Brodsky looked at him as if a golem had finally figured out how to steal the power of speech, and continued on.

            “Yes,” Brodsky said. “That swamp. He lives in a hut in the reeds.  With only himself and his Zohar.  No wife.  No minyan.  It is not Jewish.  There are no Jewish monks .  Even when he is pious, he is a heretic!”

            “The wonder rebbes lived in the woods and fields,” Meir added. 

            “Sure,” Brodsky answered, raising his glass. “But they always returned to their wives to climb aboard and fulfill the first commandment, Be Fruitful and Multiply.  As I said, there are no Jewish monks!  Every Jew must have a duty to something.  And I don’t give a damn what it is: God, the Party, Zionism, the Bund… it is the doing that matters, not the believing.  Isn’t that what being a Jew is about?  What Schuelvitz is doing is just another extension of his swinish poetry, egotistical, self-referencing, sexually maniacal bull..”

            Brodsky found himself on the floor, blood spooling down from his nose.  Boris hardly looked at him as he walked over his sprawled form and out the door.  He had heard the last whistle of the last train to the provinces.

Coda V

         

            But a new generation of poets sprung up, and Yasha was rediscovered.  He no longer cared about his copyrights, so volumes of his poems and prose appeared in numerous pirated editions.  Some of his unpublished poems, languishing around the offices of this or that literary journal in Odessa, Warsaw or Paris, were roused from the grave and printed.  

            His style was widely copied; his literary mannerisms were aped, like a style of dress or a variety of hat.  A Yiddish newspaper sent a reporter and photographer to find the reclusive genius.  Everyone in the town of Kabstiel was tight lipped about the location of their local celebrity.  After a hefty bribe, a gentile fisherman took the reporter out on a skiff and circled about the Farstuken Swamp to no avail.   

            A week later a letter arrived at the offices of the Yiddish newspaper where Yasha had formerly worked.  It read only:  “Fear G—D and his retribution --- Y.S.”

            So then it was known.  Yasha Schulevitz, effete poet, playboy bon vivant, renowned sodomite, revolutionary agitator, and ace-egotist, had become a pious hermit.  The arch of his life had looped a complete circle.  News of this only fueled interest in the man.  But every attempt to find him had failed.  Like Enoch, Yasha Schulevitz seemed to have been swept up by God Himself.

            This was why Boris Kahanowitz cursed his own bones.  Finding Yasha Schulevitz had become a colloquial expression for any doomed enterprise.  And here Boris had not only announced that he would find him, but haul him back to Warsaw in chains.  Boris would be mercilessly heckled every time he mounted a lectern to read a poem.  He could beat a single taunter into silence, but he could not flog every Jew in Poland?  So Boris Kahanowitz had little choice.

            He changed his vomit stained shirt for one stained with dark red wine, or blood, he could not tell, and set off for the railway station.

Coda IV

             

            Yasha Schulevitz then underwent a transformation not unlike a legion of his co-religionists.  He raised and lowered the banner of various ideologies:  the Jewish Enlightenment, Yiddhism, both its aesthetic and political arms, Communism, Bundism, Hebraism and Zionism, Psychoanalysis as a Metaphysical view of the world, and finally, in the eyes of his innumerable and dogged critics, egotistical nihilism.   

            And during all these sea changes he wrote sparkling, lucid Hebrew verse.  He penned occasional pieces for the Yiddish press, and each one, charged with venom and charm, caused riotous debate and even the occasional brawl.  His first collection of poems, Two Sisters, was widely rumored to be based on love affair he had with the wealthy daughters of a Warsaw neurologist.  The poems hinted at all manner of sexual malfeasance.  Yasha with one girl, and then the other; Yasha with them both simultaneously;  and the final insult to general morality, the girls together, and Yasha watching, an affront to nature and the Torah.  But Yasha’s poems were always of the highest caliber, even if his subject matter sparked the most violent debate. 

            Then began his lean years:  Yasha moved to Paris before the Great War, and when hostilities broke out, as an Austrian citizen he was detained as an enemy alien.  After the war he settled in Palestine, his beloved at the time, one of the wealthy Warsaw daughters, was killed in Arab rioting in Jerusalem.  So Yasha returned to Europe.  Tel Aviv and Jerusalem could not compare to the grander of Paris, Vienna, and even Warsaw.  And the antisemitism on display  in Europe was far more decorous than in the that in the Holy Land.    

            Then began the forgotten years:  For nearly a decade, no one heard a word from him.  Every now and again a piece would appear in the Yiddish Press under the by-line of his name.  And even a Hebrew poem or two would sprout up unexpectedly, like a flower during a winter thaw, in a literary journal.  A few fellow poets made inquiries about Yasha’s whereabouts but could find out nothing definitive.  The landlady at his last known address said he had “returned to the provinces.”  

           Yasha Schulevitz was then largely forgotten. 

Coda III

              

        The son of a poor Rebbe from an obscure and backward Chasdic sect, Yasha was born in a remote corner of Poland hemmed in one side by mountains and the other by a vast sea of marshes known as the Farstuken Swamp.   

        The little hamlet of Kabstiel was plagued by mosquitoes and a miasma of mist in the summer and the frosty devastation of a lingering cold in the winter.  Cattails froze in cracked ice; water clung to docks like fringes of crystal. 

            The major trends of modernity had by passed the Jews of Farstuken like an express train speeding toward the capital without stopping at any provincial towns.  But Yasha was different.   

            In the high methane stink of the Farstuken Swamp, he was a rare flower of bold beauty.  He could read Hebrew and Aramaic by the age of four.  He had memorized large portions of the Pentateuch by the age of six.  Before he was ten he was a prodigy in the Gemara.  By his Bar Mitzva he had read Rashi, the Rambam, the poems of Judah HaLevi, his The Kuzari, and the works of Isaac Abravanel.  

            It was even rumored that he studied The Zohar, a work of mysticism whose study was banned to youngsters, even with his rare gifts.  He could quote scripture at will or command.  It was only after his Bar Mitzva that the crack in his piety began to show.  Like a fragile vessel filled too fast and too soon with a sweet and intoxication elixir, Yasha began to read secular Yiddish works, both novels and shorts stories, and works on mathematics, biology, even evolution.   

           From grammar books he taught himself German and French. By the age of fifteen he had cut  his side locks, shaved the burgeoning beard from his handsome, angular face, traded his gabardine and silk socks for a short modern coat and long trousers.  He walked about without a covering over his head.  One day he bid his father, mother and brood of brothers and sisters a fond but cold farewell and departed for the glitter and grime of Warsaw.