Prologue
7 July 1922 — My papa is flourishing his pipe like a conductor’s baton. Smoke wafts through the dining room as he finishes his usual diatribe with: “It’s all about family,” then stares at me. I squirm like a violinist who has lost his rhythm. “Are you with us, Elazar?”
It’s Shabbat, Friday evening, I’m twenty-two years old, and I’m home in Kalarash poking at the sodden remains of my chicken and matzah balls. I unloaded boxcars full of rocks, bricks and lumber all week with my brother Herschel and I hurt all over. Mama gives me a calming smile as she rises to clear the table. Sarah snaps to and helps.
“It’s a complex arrangement,” I say.
“Keep practicing,” he says.
When I was three, we lived in Kishinev, about fifty kilometers to the southeast. During Passover/Easter weekend that year, the Christians waged a pogrom on the city’s Jewish population. In our case, that means they ransacked our store, set our house on fire, murdered my sister, and my baby brother and they threw me off the roof.
For real.
While pogroms have happened for hundreds of years all over Europe – from Barcelona to Prague – this happened in the 20th century. Initially, it was a global scandal wherein politicians from America and all over were outraged and demanded justice. But punishment for the perpetrators came to little or no avail, and because countless, more outrageous atrocities have since occurred, to most of the world, the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 has been swept under the carpet.
Not to us.
I don’t know how or why any of us survived but that’s why papa and mama, Toiva and Polina Gershovich, uprooted our family, packed up the business, and fled to this shtetl—this Jewish prison.
In Kalarash, life is simple. Most people are Jewish. We speak Yiddish. Herschel and I went to yeshiva, Jewish school, where we studied Hebrew, the Torah and Talmud, from which the rabbis taught us to live every day like it’s your last. To that end, they say number one: have some fun, two: try to do some good, and three: don’t screw anyone over too badly, as you may be meeting your maker that evening. So that’s what we do. We go to the Synagogue, we celebrate Yom Kippur, Hanukkah, Passover, whatever, and nobody tries to kill us.
Not everybody here is Jewish. It’s only been in recent memory that it’s become a shtetl. There are a couple of monasteries nearby that were built in the 1700s, even a cathedral, and with that, amicable goys, non-Jews, who speak our region’s book-end languages: Romanian and Ukrainian. Unlike in Kishinev, papa maintains a low-key presence here—he’s not politically active. But with the farmers, dairymen and former vintners, our family is respected, and we socialize amongst one another.
Papa is fifty-three, and while he finds solace here, giving up our store, our house, our horses, and his whole life in Kishinev has taken its toll. He has trouble sleeping, he has a stiff lower back, and he treats Herschel and I like strivers. Yet, in nineteen years he’s fought and clawed his way back. We still don’t have horses, but we own our properties—our house and the store—and we pay taxes to the King of Romania.
Mama is fifty-one, and to this day I don’t know all the details, but there is no question that the pogrom and the exodus from Kishinev scarred her for life. She looks old for her age and while she’s loving and ultra-protective, there is deep-seated pain in her facial expressions, the husky tone of her voice and the hunched over way in which she walks.
While our family has managed to rebuild our life out here in the heartland of Bessarabia, the big downside for me is there are very few girls my age, and I’ve known all of them since I was a child. I’ve dated several, gone through the usual coming-of-age milestones, but now dating any potential female mate in Kalarash seems incestuous.
In my life there is percussion in day-to-day work, the rise and fall of the sun, the coming going of the seasons. There is rhythm in family, eating meals, and celebrating holidays; but alas, there is no beauty, no high notes, no intimacy… no melody.
