The Night of the Burning (4 page)

1915–16

Weekday mornings in our village of Domachevo began with the sounds of Papa and big Soos outside.

“Stand still there, Soos,” Papa murmured. “The cart is heavy today, yes?” There was the creak of the leather harness and the jingle of the metal bit as Soos tossed his head.

“Wake up, Nechama, Papa’s leaving,” I urged my sister, and we ran to the door in our long nightdresses to wave goodbye.

Papa’s worn jacket stretched over his back as he bent to check the horse’s hoof. Nechama and I giggled. Soos looked so funny balancing placidly on three legs with his surprisingly delicate hind limb tucked under Papa’s arm, hoof pointing up to the sky.

“Bye, Papa, goodbye,” we each called. Our papa always turned to blow kisses as he walked up the hill behind his
peddler’s cart. We caught the kisses in midair and blew them back until he was out of sight.

With a clang, Mama set down a bucket of icy water from the well. “Wash your hands and get the sleep out of your eyes,” she ordered. Her own face was already clean, her hair groomed neatly, and her workday apron tied on tightly.

“Don’t splash me, Devorah. I’m cold,” squealed Nechama.

“Nechama didn’t wash her eyes, Mama,” I reported, drying my frozen fingers mischievously on Nechama’s nightshirt.

“Devorah’s wetting me, Mama!” Nechama cried.

Mama ignored our bickering. Shivering harder than we really needed to, we jumped back into our still-warm bed to pull on our clothes.

The door banged as Mama returned from the yard, where Tsigele, our goat, was tethered. She poured a frothing white ocean of goat’s milk into our bowls. Wisps of steam rose into the air. I curved one hand around my bowl to catch the warmth and used the other to dunk boats of dark bread into my milk. Nechama copied me, except that she ate the sodden crusts with a greedy slurp.

Then Mama pushed up the sleeves of her cross-stitched linen blouse and began to prepare the day’s food. Nechama had to pick garlic from the muddy vegetable patch outside the door, while I had to peel cold, knobby potatoes for soup. The peels mounted up high in a bowl
for Tsigele, but still there always seemed to be more earth-brown unpeeled potatoes than skinned pale ones. At last Mama said we had helped enough and could go and play.

“Thank you, Mama!” I exclaimed, giving her a big hug. Then I grabbed Nechama’s hand and hurried her along the muddy pathways between the thatched-roof houses. Our friends were already playing, giggling loudly as they crouched behind a higgledy-piggledy fence. We knew the game; we ran to hide with them.

“Shush, or the boys will hear us,” Miriam warned.

Miriam was just being bossy: the boys couldn’t possibly hear us from inside the large wooden synagogue, where they studied. Finally, a burst of whoops and yells announced that it was lunch hour, and the boys exploded out of the carved door. They came running down the lane like a herd of goats, long sidelocks flying under their caps.

“Go, girls!” Miriam ordered.

“Help, they’ll run us down!” Nechama squealed as we scampered out into the lane ahead of the boys.

“Catch them!” the biggest boy commanded, and the herd moved as one into full chase.

“Help, help!” Miriam shrieked excitedly.

Soon I was in trouble. My legs were strong but short, and I was slowed by having to drag four-year-old Nechama along with me. The fastest boys were almost on my heels.

“Hurry, Nechama, run!” I said, panting.

Our crowd pelted around a corner of the narrow lane, and there was a yell from the front.

“The water carrier!”

His mouth hanging open, the water carrier stared dumbly at us. His chapped red hands clutched at the arched rod over his shoulder, from which hung two heavy buckets. The girls in front had just enough time to divide into two groups and run past on either side of him like the waters of the Red Sea. But for Nechama and me, and of course all the boys, there was not enough warning.

The buckets crashed to the ground.
Swoosh!
Water slopped all over the man’s tattered black coat, which was tied at his waist with a rope.
Oof!
He grunted as he sat down hard in the mud. Shrieks of laughter burst from the boys and some of the bolder girls.

But the water carrier’s face was purple with rage. “May you get warts on every finger! May your teeth rot and your noses bleed forever,” he cursed as he got to his feet and righted his empty buckets. “I will tell your parents and they will beat you!”

The boys merely hooted and yelled and ran away, but I shivered as I kept picturing the spittle flying from the water carrier’s mouth when he yelled. I had never done anything really bad before, never been in trouble. I crept through the rest of the day, then in the dark of night I composed my own prayer for the first time.

“Dear God,” I whispered, “I’m sorry about the extra work we caused that poor man. I know my parents would never beat me, but please don’t let the water carrier tell them what we did. I think I’d rather have a few warts,
maybe four.”

I made a deal with God for three warts the next night, and two the next, but there was no sign that the water carrier had made good on his promise, and after that I forgot to make my petitions. No hard little bumps appeared on my fingers, so I hid behind the fence outside the synagogue with the other girls again.

Sometimes, at the end of the day, when I was tired of playing, I climbed up the stepladder that led to our attic. Hiding there alone, I fingered my doll’s golden hair. Maybe one day I could put some yellow dye in my own dark locks so that I could look just like the village girls in the Easter procession. Sunlight filtered in through the tiny, dusty window and sifted together with the smell of the hay and the sounds of geese honking, a cart creaking, a peasant shouting at his goat or his child or both.

The attic was a good place to dream. Nechama told me she dreamed of marrying a prince, even after I’d explained to her that princes were named Leopold or Vladimir, not Moishe or Yitzhak; in other words, princes were not Jewish. I had more practical dreams. When I grew up, I would have enough money to buy Papa a newer cart and a younger horse. Or, better still, I would order Papa to stop working altogether. A black velvet dress would bring out the beauty of Mama’s hair. As for Nechama, I would save her from drowning in a lake, a bigger and much cleaner lake than the village pond. And I would do something so wise and brave to help the Jewish people that they would
tell the story to their children and grandchildren.

As darkness fell, I heard Papa and his horse return slowly, and I tumbled down the ladder. Papa was stooping tiredly over the goods still in his cart, but his face curved into a smile when he saw me running to him.

“Here’s my big seven-year-old,” he said, and he lifted me high and tickled me.

I loved evening the best. From my seat in the kitchen, I could see into the only other room in our house, Mama and Papa’s bedroom. It was completely filled by their bed and a large carved cupboard, which stood near the window and held all our clothes. Nechama and I slept on a small bed in one corner of the kitchen. The wood walls were roughly plastered inside and felt damp most of the year, while the window had strips of old cloth squeezed into the frame to close the gaps. But our family sat in the evenings near the big blackened stove, on wooden benches on either side of the table, and we were warm together.

“Mama, those cheese kreplach were almost too good,” Papa said, rubbing his stomach, with a wink at us. The cheese was goat cheese, kept cool in the musty root cellar below the house. Mama had a clever trick to make it. First she poured goat’s milk into a bag made from clean, thin cloth. Then she hung the bag on a very long string that stretched from a rafter to just above the kitchen table. Cloudy water dripped through the cloth into a bowl, and then came the magic: what was left inside the bag was the creamy white cheese I loved.

Most nights after supper, Papa lit a candle on the table and bent his high, balding forehead and his long sidelocks over a scrap of paper. I heard his low mutter as he counted the coins he had earned from his peddling that day: “Eyns, tsvey, dray—one, two, three …” Mama listened silently as she braided my thick hair for bed. Nechama’s hair was so curly that Mama kept it cut short and needed only to comb it a few times. I was jealous as I watched her twirl Nechama’s light tendrils admiringly between her fingers. But the highlight of the evening was coming. When Papa was done with his accounting, he would be ready to tell us stories. Papa knew the best stories in the world.

Some of the stories were exciting and happy: about my namesake, the first Devorah, who became the judge and leader of all the Jews. And about Sarah, who finally had a baby when she was ninety years old and called him a name that meant “Laughter.” But some tales were scary. A woman named Judith gave an evil general so much wine that he fell asleep, and then cut off his head. In Devorah’s time, there was a woman, Jael, who killed an enemy leader by knocking a tent peg through his temples as he slept in her tent. How did she hold the tent peg and swing the mallet hard at the same time? What would have happened if she hadn’t got the peg in all the way? I thought, shivering.

For nights, the gory story went around and around in my head. I tried different solutions to Jael’s problem. Perhaps a strong two-handed blow with the mallet, without a tent peg at all, would have done the job. Or maybe a large
metal half circle—the swinging handle detached from a cooking pot, for instance—could have been leaned delicately around the sleeping general’s neck, then quickly hammered into the ground, trapping him. Yes, I would be really brave if the Jewish people faced terrible trouble again, I finally decided.

Over a thousand Jews lived in my shtetl of Domachevo, but only about a hundred Christian villagers. I recognized many of them from the weekly farmers’ market held next to the village pond.

Market day in Domachevo was Thursday. Nechama and I didn’t like it much. There was such a clamor of people shouting out their wares and arguing over prices. And we hated the smells of glassy-eyed fish and rotting vegetables.

“What do we need, Mama?” I asked as we reached the first stall.

“Eggs and wheat. Apples. And nuts, if they’re a good price,” Mama replied. Even Mama seemed louder and more aggressive at the market. Nechama and I watched closely while she bargained in the mixture of Polish and Yiddish used between Jews and Christian villagers.

First Mama asked, “How much?”

The peasant gave her a price in a rough voice, as if he didn’t care whether she bought or not.

Mama reacted with shock. “That’s much, much too high!”

Then the peasant raised his arms to the sky and swore, “Mary, Mother of God, you know that my prices are lower than I can afford! You see how my children are starving!”

His children, who looked poor but not starving, stared at us. We shrank against Mama’s skirts. Mama turned away, but the peasant called her back with a beckoning finger. Leaning forward, he volunteered a lower price.

Mama offered less than his figure, and again the peasant swore, “Mother Mary, I cannot go so low!” Then he countered immediately with another slight reduction in his price.

Mama nodded. She counted out some coins; the peasant handed over the produce. Mama placed her purchase carefully into the center of her shopping cloth and knotted the cloth into a bundle. Then she and the peasant parted with a polite farewell.

“Mama, why do that man and his children …” I asked one day as we walked home from the market. “Why do they look at us as if we’re … strange?”

Mama snorted. “Ignorant peasant. He can’t even read and write like your papa can.”

That didn’t answer any of the questions in my head. But I knew how important it was to be able to read and write. Mama respected learning above everything else. Sometimes she called me to her side and gave me a little basket covered with a clean linen cloth.

“Devorahleh, take these hot potatoes to the shul.
Something to fill the students’ bellies. No one can study the whole day on only glasses of tea with sugar.”

All of the boys and a few of the men studied at the synagogue the entire day. The tall wooden building stood proudly at the center of the village. I glanced around for my friends as I walked up to the heavy door, hoping the other girls would see me entering the important building on a day that wasn’t even Shabbes.

Inside the entrance hall, I had to stop for a few minutes until I could see my way in the dimness. A babble of male voices seeped from under the classroom door—high boys’ voices singing the same aleph bet I was learning with Papa, as well as deeper men’s voices chanting in singsong.

In a moment the rabbi shuffled out of the sanctuary carrying several worn books. His beard drifted like white clouds over his chest. “What is it, mamaleh?” he asked kindly.

I began to stammer with shyness, but I held up my basket and said what I’d come to say. “Hot potatoes, Rabbi. From my mama, Chanah Lehrman. For those who are studying.”

The rabbi smiled. “A good woman,” he said. “You should grow up to be like your mama.” Then he patted my cheek, looking quietly into my eyes. “A sheyn ponim,” he murmured.

I blushed and looked down. Not too many people said I had a pretty face. Certainly not when I was with Nechama.

The rabbi shuffled away, smoothing his beard again and again with a shaky hand, and I slipped silently through the open door into the sanctuary. In that solemn place, I stared at the painted murals on the walls. There were marvelous scenes from the Torah and pictures of vines and fantastical animals and birds. No pictures of God, but mountains and clouds where I thought He might be hidden. I lingered as long as I dared.

Mama’s dream was for Papa to study here in the synagogue all day. “Or at least to say your morning prayers with the other men,” she would say wistfully.

But Papa said he needed to begin his traveling while it was still dark. “I say my morning prayers as I walk next to the cart. God is also awake early,” he said, smiling at me.

Mama shook her head. “With your brain, Bzalel … If you just had more time to study the Torah.”