Spool
I was born on July 6, 1906, just in time for breakfast. A strange thing to know, given all I’ve forgotten, yet know it, I do – with a bright, electric certainty – though I can only guess at my name. There’s merely a pull, a pulse, the faintest of tremors: Raviv, Ronen – something like Reuven. Yes, Reuven. Not sure how that would taste if I had a mouth, but the feeling is right. Just enough tension to snap me back.
It’s settled then. My name was Reuven.
Even if it wasn’t.
I have nothing to say about my birth; I can’t recall the story, and it’s far too late to ask. I simply settled into my skin and called it good – letting the world enfold and embrace me, as we all do in the beginning. Giving myself completely to life. To fickle breath and tender mood. To instinct and love and Poland – or what once was and would again be Poland. One of the defining features of my time was the redrawing of the map: again and again, often with violence. I’d come to love drawing myself, but usually managed it without any bloodshed. I was fairly quiet, though. Not one to impose my illustrations on others. I never did take up much space.
My first home was little more than a shack, tucked away in a sleepy, shrinking village not far from Białystok. An easy memory, even for me; there’s hardly anything to recall. If my shtetl wasn’t already a ghost town, it was surely on its deathbed. I can’t unearth its name, of course, yet hesitate to take the blame for that. It’s possible it didn’t even have a name.
I could be wrong, though. You forget a lot of things when you blow your own brains out.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Either way, my village had an irreparable leak. Pogroms and depression had driven out many, and the remainder steadily drained as I learned to walk and talk. I always knew my family would follow when we had the chance. Few things tied us to that place, and only one really mattered: my grandfather. A widely respected rabbi in his day, my mother was his youngest child and his dedicated caretaker. I remember him in strong streaks of black and white: a hunched shadow with an ashen face, pale beard giving him the look of something slowly melting. Which he was, in a way, though more on the inside than out. While he could recite Tehillim like he was reading, he rarely recognized the people around him – including my mother. A real pity, given all she did for him.
And for me.
Despite her impish, erratic impulses, my mother was a natural nurse. Or maybe the nursing itself fueled her absurdity. Perhaps it was the sleep I stole that forged her dark humor, my own infirmity driving her eccentricities. Perhaps I robbed her of her sanity.
There’s a thought.
But again, I’m losing the plot. Forgive me. We don’t have much time here, and I know you have things to do. I won’t ask you to sacrifice as my mother did. I’m not sure how healthy it was for her.
Of all her sacrifices, she seemed least happy staying in that cold, muddy village while my father went west without us. I’m not sure how many times this happened, or for how long, or why, or who enabled it. I’m not sure of much at all – but I know I didn’t mind. I chased geese and dug potatoes, and did what I could to lift my mother’s moods. But those moods were hers alone.
Her name was Rivka, I believe, and she was a beauty. With thick dark hair, a small mouth, and large, wide-set eyes, her delicate looks belied a wild spirit. She laughed easily, loved the outdoors, and had a peculiar, rather masculine mind. As much as I wished, she never did coddle me. She respected me too much for that. I was more than her son, even as a child. I was her accomplice, her “little bird” with the whistling lungs, her comedic match. I was her friend.
My father’s name is lost to me. A stocky man with a chestnut beard, memories of him are a bit harder to siphon from this gloom. What does stand out, though – what glows in the dark, if you will – is the way he looked at me. All those quizzical faces. That man never did know what to make of me. We shared a mutual appreciation, but there wasn’t much overlap between us. Not much connection. He was all business at heart, spending my youth undoing his farming roots and learning a “respectable trade.” So westward he’d go, following his brothers into the diamond industry.
His business ventures were prompted by me, at least in part. By the time his trips began – whatever they entailed – I’d cut something of a hole in the family purse. My first few winters had taken a toll, leaving me weak, difficult, and expensive. I didn’t have many asthma attacks in the village, but enough to require house calls and medicines – none of which were free. More costly still were trips to Białystok (which I found breathtaking, if you’ll excuse the pun), where doctors would poke and prod and charm me with their myriad metal devices. And these luxuries were hardly optional: I was a creature of extremes, even then. My attacks, rare though they were, invariably brought me near the point of death.
I didn’t fully understand the danger then. I saw each flare-up as a bizarre (if terrifying) exception to normalcy that, once behind me, wouldn’t possibly think to strike again. Time only marched forward, after all. Episodes came and went like fleeting nightmares; afterward I would wake and forget. I was still free then, only at the entrance of that mirrored maze of panic and paranoia. I could still see the world around me. Could still breathe the fresh, country air. How could any illness stretch into perpetuity? In the amnesic fog of childhood, I couldn’t fathom perpetuity of any kind, at all.
And yet, here we are.
But back to then.
My sister Adah was born on November 8, 1910, when my father was away. I tell you, I marvel at my recollection of these dates. I’ve lost my favorite songs and books, and all that’s left of my surname is the letter B. Why birthdays didn’t follow suit is beyond me. The bullet must’ve missed them.
Life felt cramped with a new baby. Our hovel hadn’t the space for more people, but this issue soon resolved itself; my grandfather died mere weeks after Adah’s birth. Not that he really lived those last years. Physically, he remained, but on most other fronts he’d already passed. Until the end, he’d walk me through our gutted village, to the tiny cheider in which I learned to read and write – but he didn’t know whose hand he held. Habit alone told his feet where to go.
With so few people, it’s a wonder we had a school at all. Goods mostly came from a neighboring town, as did the news. Gossip and music, flavor and fun, all that brought color to our lives lay kilometers away – in a real shtetl. And though I couldn’t call it home, its pounding heart would beat within me, on some level, for the rest of my life. However far I strayed from my roots, however anglicized I became, however “abstruse” (as my father claimed), I always held a kernel of that world within me. My hands would never stop touching what I’d touched there.
What is existence, after all, but a collection of events? An unending mosaic, kaleidoscopic and shifting. A baffling web of ancestry and forgotten lives, spun by the secret aims of our souls.
But what was I saying?
Oh yes, the cheider.
My early education was woefully austere: half a dozen boys in a one-room hut, squinting at holy books under dim lamps. But my path was bright nonetheless, illuminated by the influence of Mussar – a philosophy that followed my family as surely as cholent and challah. While my maternal line bore mystical hearts, my father’s stuck to the head, spurring rigorous study and relentless, inward-facing scrutiny. No corner of my soul escaped the light, every aspect of my character polished and purified for the highest good (or so my parents hoped). Throughout my life, our house remained a playground of moral mind games, difficult scenarios laid out like obstacle courses. Politics, disagreements, my sister’s taste in clothes: all passed through a Mussar filter with which we’d refine our objectives while taming our baser natures.
In that laboratory, I became a scientist. An ethics calculator. A spiritual alchemist. And I always felt grateful for this, especially after knowing those raised without such a system. What an immense headache, concocting one from scratch!
Of course, ready-made philosophies do have their shortcomings. Rather serious ones, in some cases.
But I’ll get to that.
