Part One, December 1933, Galicia in Eastern Poland, a small town south of L’viv
Mine was a place defined by war, but also by the hope war would someday end. I was born on one of those hopeful days.
My father, Marcus, joked that marching bands greeted me as my mother, Clara, brought me, her third child and second son, into a world emerging from the chaos of World War I and that was about to plunge into twenty-five more years of conflict and destruction. The people in my town and across the Ukraine celebrated what they thought was a momentous day, one on which their dream of living in a unified nation had been realized.
They were wrong, but they believed what they wanted to believe. The news from the capital Kiev was uplifting. A massive unification celebration filled the streets there, and newspapers heralded the noisy birth of a new nation. The dusty streets of our town were joyful, too. They writhed with euphoric drunkenness from the horilka being swilled by the men and the simple joy they got from taunting the Jews foolish enough to leave their homes. Yes, father said, it was a glorious day for some in our town, but dangerous for us. Tucked into the hills of Galicia, population four thousand, about nine hundred of them Jewish, a borderland, where control for centuries had shifted among powerful nations in a seemingly endless, meaningless battle between the armies of Poland, Austria and Russia, life in the place I was born was personal and local. Yet, it was stained by those bigger, outside forces.
“The first words she says to me,” father recalled at the dinner table on my thirteenth birthday. “The very first words your mother says to me after you were born, 'The Golem,' she said. ‘The Golem.’ “
The room where we ate was not big, and we crowded around a small rectangular table, father seated near the oven, mother stirring a pot behind him on a coal-burning stove, and the three of us, my brother, my sister and me, arranged shoulder to shoulder just a few feet from them. Father, his long face beaming, his sharp nose and joyous eyes an oasis for anyone gazing at them, told this story as a means of celebration on each of our birthdays, recalling unique details when he recounted our births. There was one part each story had in common. He would raise his voice when he said the words, “the Golem,” and they echoed around us. He liked a bit of drama when he told stories.
“The Golem was not something to fear, Wolchi,” my father said to me, as he had on past birthdays, his voice lowered, almost a whisper. Pointing to a clay figure on a perch beside the front door: “No, what mama wanted was for me to protect you, as I’d protected your brother, Ira, and your sister, Leja, after they were born. So, I wrote your name on a piece of paper that I tore from our bible and placed it inside the hollow statue. That paper is there today, along with the names of your sister and brother.”
Ira, 18 years old, thin and handsome, his head a riot of brown curls, looked at Leja and rolled his eyes; she stifled a soft laugh. I loved this story, especially because it was about me, and I sat rapt at attention as my father retold it.
A year after my parents' marriage, Ira was born. A year later, father was conscripted into the Austrian army and fought for two numbing years a war against Tsarist soldiers, men he might have otherwise shared a game of chess with or even a Sabbath table. Some were men he knew growing up. He lost his right foot in that war and now used a cane as he walked and also when he needed to make clear on the streets that he would defend himself if threatened.
“Papa, you know that Golem is just a lump of dried mud?” Ira said.
“Hush, Ira. Don’t disrespect your mother,” father said, pointing at my brother. “She believes it is more than that.”
My father was not a religious man, nor was he a superstitious one, but he believed in the power of his wife’s vision, her energy like a ray of sunlight that illuminated what he could not see. He believed in science, machines, the future, the absolute finality of death, but my mother saw something else, something ancient, and she taught us to respect it.
Superstition was one of two parenthood principles that guided my mother’s interactions with her children. The other was food. On the evening of my thirteenth birthday, she served us chunks of sour black bread and steaming bowls of the dark mushroom soup she prepared for special occasions, each with two floating puffs of meat-filled kreplach. She stood behind my father as we ate, watchful that her expressions of love were being properly consumed. She rarely smiled or seemed happy. She also never ate with us. Only after she cleared the table would she sit, solitary in the shadows of the kitchen, and eat quickly while absent-mindedly sweeping crumbs from side to side. As she watched us eat, she reminded us that “a Golem had always protected my people, and it now protects us.”
She fashioned our Golem from the mud of the flooded River Stryi in the autumn of 1913 after she and father were married. The riverbanks steeply up toward the dirt streets of the town, and the mud there is ankle deep in October, dark and cool. Everything near the river is wet after the autumn rain until the ground freezes in winter. The blue and yellow of the late summer flowers, the grey of the sky, the bugs swirling about her as she scooped the dark earth with her hands into a wooden pail – that’s what she remembers and tells us about as we eat. We’ve heard it before.
Her creation, the ugly clay man now watching over us, reminded me of a fat brown bullfrog. She had hardened the soft mud in her oven and later carved three Hebrew letters across its chest –aleph, mem and tav – the first, middle and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet. They spelled truth and gave the statue its power, she said. Without the first letter, the remaining two spelled death. A Golem with that first letter obscured or removed is something to fear, a stark reminder of how thin the line is between sanctity and chaos.
“He is small, but powerful,” she said, turning from us and returning to her stove.
Ira and Leja shared a meaningful glance, eyebrows raised. They wouldn't admit they believed any of it. It was like the wooden cross that guarded the entry to the Orthodox Christian church towering above the town or the Torah scroll the bearded, red-headed rabbi held high as he walked through the streets on the Sabbath leading a parade of his bent-back faithful. These were symbols of something that seemed to my older brother and sister of a time past, of a way of life that held no future for young people like them. I wasn’t so sure. I was glad we had Golem and that father had stuffed tiny pieces of paper inside it with our names, and that mother seemed to understand the ins and outs of the whole Golem business.
“Remember when the Golem saved you, Wolchi, from the cemetery people?” Ira asked, his mouth wide in a grin and his hand messing my hair.
I loved my brother. He was gentle and said smart things, but he teased me too often. It was annoying. "Remember that night, Wolchi?" he continued. "There's nothing scarier than a monster you alone can see. Right?"
He was talking about the time I went lizard-hunting with my friend Ivan near the old Jewish cemetery by the river. The banks were dangerous in autumn, steep and slippery, a fast, straight slide into rushing waters. Towns people told stories about children disappearing from the muddy slopes after wandering too close to the river edge, their curiosity rewarded with a terrifying end in the cold inescapable currents. Mother insisted we stay away from the river after the autumn rains began, but that was where and when the best lizards, hidden beneath damp rocks and decaying leaves, could be found. So, that's where we went.
Ivan, three years older, was more Leja’s friend than mine. They were the same age, shared a nascent interest in Ukrainian independence and the complex politics of the day, and sat beside one another at school. They liked each other and sometimes talked and joked during lessons. Even though I sat several rows from them near the back of our single classroom, I could hear them. So could our teacher, a scowling Polish woman, who would yell at Leja. “Stop disturbing that boy, you dirty infected Jew.” Leja, who prided herself on her appearance and her robust health, was not infected and rarely dirty. Still, she turned her eyes away at the teacher’s rebuke, avoiding more stern punishment. Nor was she disturbing Ivan, a tall, confident Ukrainian kid, an instigator who loved to tease my sister and tell her silly jokes instead of listening to the yak-yak-yak from the Polish schoolmarm.
He hung around with me, too, and on an October evening when I was seven, just before dusk, with storm clouds darkening the sky ahead of us, we were returning home from an afternoon of hunting the small orange salamanders that lived near the river. I carried a wooden bucket with dozens of them, bringing them home for reasons I couldn't explain.
It started to rain, a drizzle at first and then a cold, angry downpour. We ran as the storm intensified, rain and then hail on our faces like the slap of tree branches. I heard thunder and felt the wind, so cold I knew it was from the other side, where my mother said the dead rose from their graves at night to dance and where malevolent spirits and dybbuks hid among them, the people so evil they couldn't cross to an afterlife. The trees of the cemetery on my left, already barren of leaves, swayed with warning against the grey and white sky. Wind lashed the brown grass between the fallen and broken headstones. Stars of David and the names of the dead carved in careful Hebrew letters were reflected on the wet ground. I heard the rapids on the river made angry and dangerous by the storm.
“I’ll race you, Wolchi,” Ivan yelled.
My head down, I ran toward the safety of home, with Ivan in front urging me to run faster. Faster. Lighting cracked across the sky in front of us, and the wind caught the cylinder of my bucket, filling it like a sail in a tempest, snatching it from my hand.
I stopped to retrieve the bucket and recapture the tiny orange lizards racing to safety, when I was enveloped by a dybbuk. Wet, white and snapping in the wind, it twisted around my legs and dropped me to the ground. On my back, fighting, I could feel myself sliding down the riverbank, could hear the rushing water becoming closer. The harder I fought, the more entangled I became, the wind so cold against me. Golem, I thought. Where is he? I called for him. Help. My mind raced with mother’s warnings about the river. I sobbed. My breathing grew shallow, blocked by the dark force that had captured me. When the whiteness suddenly lifted, a grey shadow stood over me, its face dripping, its hand lifting me to my feet just yards from the riverbank. I saw ghosts everywhere, all the dead from all the generations of Jews who'd died in ancient pogroms. They floated in the trees, and I knew the dybbuk hid among them.
“Wolchi. Come on. Let’s go,” Ivan shouted.
I pushed past the shadow, grabbing handfuls of mud as I climbed the wet riverbank and ran, without stopping or looking behind, until I burst through our front door.
Leja, sitting near the warm oven with a book and Ira beside her, called for me. “What happened? You're covered in mud," she asked.
“I saw one, A dybbuk,” I cried. “It caught me. I couldn’t breathe. Golem saved me.”
Ivan came through the door a moment later carrying my bucket and a dirty white sheet that had blown from a clothesline in a neighbor's yard beside the cemetery and which, he explained, he had peeled from my face and body.
“Maybe not the Golem,” Ira said.
Leja wrapped me in her arms just the same. Still, I thought, maybe it was.
My fear that night didn't shame me, and Ira could joke all he wanted. It was nice, truthfully, to be the focus of his attention and his charms. Even though it was my thirteenth birthday, and I was a man in the eyes of the Jewish faith, with some emerging signs of adulthood on my face and elsewhere, I reveled in being the family’s youngest and having Ira fuss over me and Leja hug and comfort me.
By the time mother served the special birthday honey cake, talk had shifted to more mundane daily matters, the likelihood of snow and the need to haul more coal into the house (father), the pretty blonde-haired Polish girl that Ira had his eye on (Ira), and the oppressive policies of the Polish regional governors and the emerging Ukrainian liberation movement (Leja).
“Mama, I think I’m in love with her,” Ira said.
“I’m telling you to stay away from the Polish girls,” Mother replied. “They will be nothing but trouble for you. For us. There are plenty of Jewish girls for you to be 'in love with.' "
“But none of them has her hair, so blonde and with so much flair,” Ira said with a broad grin, his hands moving dramatically up and down from his forehead to his shoulders, combing through the imagined strands of his beloved. "Long blonde hair.”
My mother turned from him in frustration, but Leja, shaking her head at Ira's performance, took up the debate.
“She doesn’t even know you’re alive. And even if she did, what would the two of you talk about? The best way to milk a cow? She’s not the brightest firefly in your garden, you know.” Leja smiled approvingly at her witticism, as she watched Ira squirm while formulating a reply. And what better one than to turn the focus onto Leja.
“And what do you and Ivan talk about when the two of you are walking in the woods,” he asked. “I’ve seen you.”
Leja’s face reddened, more embarrassed than angry. “That's not your business.”
“I think the two of you will get married someday," Ira said. "Would that be okay, mama? A Ukrainian boy and Leja?”
Mother shook her head as she handed me cake, tension stiffening her face. Father stirred uncomfortably, searching for a way to settle his family and move the discussion away from this jagged terrain.
“Wolchi, can you help me bring in more coal after supper?” he asked. “It will snow tonight, and we'll need two buckets.”
The room fell silent, everyone left to their thoughts. Ira resisted the impulse to have a last word. (“I love my family, so I'd best keep the peace among us.”) Leja eyed Ira with that look she reserved for her older brother. (“Should I hug him or smack him?”) Father ate his cake quickly. (“Delicious, mama.”) Mother kept busy at the stove, moving pots about. (“What will happen to these children?”) I watched them all, my gaze moving from one to the next, savoring mother’s honey cake, bite after small bite.
“Honey will bring a sweet year to everyone who has a taste,” my mother said. It seemed crazy, but I was wondering as I looked at my family whether the Golem would like some cake, too. (“It couldn’t hurt.”)
+++
There was a lot I didn't know about my hometown while growing up, things I didn't learn until much later. Important pieces of history lived inside all of us, invisible, but defining. Our sliver of Eastern Europe, known as the Kingdom of Galicia, had Europe's most chaotic transition to modernity. Natural barriers, such as the Carpathian Mountains and the mighty Vistula River, sometimes defined its borders. More often, though, the succession of European powers whose armies gridlocked within Galicia's borders just kept what they'd conquered until the next war, redrawing the boundaries of the region. Some confuse it with a Spanish state of the same name, but my Galicia had a unique and colorful history that, even though it never existed as a nation, played a defining role in shaping 20th Century Europe.
It was a cultural center, where writers, professors and philosophers considered important human questions -- the nature of freedom, the horror of war and the beauty of love -- and where a Jewish population thrived in the large cities, Krakow and L'viv, and in hundreds of small towns scattered through the countryside.
It was part of Poland until it was annexed by the Austro-Hungary Empire in 1772, but Polish influence continued to dominate everyday life and sparked a nationalist movement to unite Galicia with the Ukraine, the Russian-dominated territory to the east. When the Austrian Empire collapsed in World War I and Poland re-emerged as a distinct nation, the ill will and conflict between Galicians of Polish and Ukrainian descent escalated.
In the twenty-three years between the end of the first world war and the start of World War II, Galicia would be punished by the rise of Nazism to the west and the spread of Marxism to the east. It was the place where those ideologies confronted one another in 1941, when the German and Russian armies divided it, and Europe descended into its most horrible war. Those years shaped and then nearly destroyed my family. When I tell our story, those times can seem cruel, but I recall them as wondrous, too, because so much that was lost from then still lives in me.
