Nu? I guess I'm supposed to be writing this for you but I know it's really for your tateh who's just making me to write all this down even though he knows every bisl of it and like he always does he's forcing me to do his work for him, but still, it's for you more than anybody else because it's important that you know our meicehs and your tateh always gets the details wrong so I guess he's right that it's better that I tell you myself. Nobody gets the details right but me. Still, he should have paid better attention.
He should have paid better attention when I spoke to him in Yiddish too, but like every other responsibility your farshtunkeneh tateh and his briders dodged, they refused to speak back to me in Yiddish so now they don't know bupkes and Yiddish is gonna die out with me. So I guess I can't write this in Yiddish because I'm gonna die soon and if I don't live long enough to teach you deh mameloshen, you wouldn't be able to read this at all. But gott in himmel you're gonna learn some Yiddish even if those goyisheh kinder of mine take you out every Sunday for a ham!
Right now, your Mameh is in the hospital geboring you, and for your tateh it's probably a very geboring process just like it was for me. I told him to bring a camera with him to the hospital so he can film your birth just like I filmed his. We didn't need the footage, but it gave me something to do while your Bubbie got all the attention and accolades, and if your Bubbie ever buys too much crap, I can always threaten to accidentally email the birth video to her friends.
So what your tateh wants is for me to tell you the story of your mishpocheh. I don't think that's the real reason. I think the real reason is to give me something to do while he's raising the baby so that I don't tell him all the things they're doing wrong with you. You haven't even been geboren yet and I already know every mistake they're going to make. They're gonna hold you wrong, they're gonna hit you too lightly to burp you, they're gonna set the temperature in your room too warm, they're gonna mix the formula wrong and feed you at the wrong times, they're gonna buy the brand soap and oil, they're gonna buy you baby food rather than just put their food in a blender, they're gonna want to buy new cribs and carseats when we've got perfectly good ones in the garage from when your tateh and uncles were young, they're gonna buy new outfits and try to get out of dressing you with old baby clothes every day, and just so you know, all that money they spend is coming out of your inheritance, but I've promised your Bubbie that I would keep myself busy so that you stay the person they want to murder rather than me.
I don't know when you would read this, maybe your tateh wants to give this to you as a Bar Mitzvah present, or maybe when you go off to college, or maybe when you get married, but I don't know how he would even keep track of it until then. I know your tateh, he's kind of lazy. He doesn't misplace things nearly as often as I do, but I'm eber buttel, I have a lokhen kop that's only getting larger. That's why I have a system to keep track of everything. The most important thing you can have as you get older is a system to remember where everything is. He doesn't have a system, so he's probably going to lose this a couple days after I give it to him. But if I go completely eber buttel before you're old enough to remember me, the most important advice I can give to you is "Have a place where you put everything important." When you're old enough, always remind your tateh to remind you to have a place where you put everything. Always have a backup: make a duplicate key for your house and leave it with your parents, make a duplicate for the car and put it in a magnet on the back bumper, have a basket at home where you always put your wallet and keys, always write reminders before you go to bed of everything you have to do tomorrow, always write down every password on a piece of paper and put it in the basket, and always, all the time, alle mol, take care of everything right away and never put anything off until the last minute: putting toys away, doing homework, filling applications, making a shopping list, cleaning the house and the yard and the car, getting the oil changed, and especially paying bills. Your uncle is particularly shreklekh at that.
The system is everything: it's how you survive, it's how we survive, it's how your mishpoche, your nation, survived a million tzuris. The whole emuneh of the people you were born into is based on this system, and if the velt is about to be something we have to survive again, it's because people stopped following the system. Nothing else matters: faith, love, kindness, intelligence, those are all nice, but sometimes they go away and sometimes they come back. If you want to survive, if you want your kinder to survive, having the system in place to follow is the only thing that matters.
Everybody hates it when I get ongeblozen about this drek, especially your uncle, but soon I'll be dead, and they can do whatever they want. Everybody also says that I'm exaggerating when I say I'm gonna die soon, and I always have the suspicion it can't come soon enough for them, sometimes I wonder if it can't come soon enough for me either. That's why I've left instructions with my lawyer that on the night after you become a Bar Mitzvah, your first responsibility as a man is to put a pillow over my face as I'm sleeping - that is, if your Bubbie hasn't done that to me already, since I'm pretty sure that's been her plan since our first date fifty years ago.
So the place to start is to tell you about the town you come from. Not Baltimore, where you're going to live, or Pikesville, where you should be living if your Tateh understood how much easier he would have it if he lived closer to us, but Bransk, the shtetl you come from, the place your great-grandparents were born, the town where two hundred fifty years of Charlaps lived before you.
Your last name, Charlap, is an acronym standing for 'Khiya, Rosh l'Galut Polin.' Which means one of three things.
1. That we might be direct descendents of a Rabbi so important that he gets his own acronym, and all the best Rabbis get acronyms.
2. One of your descendents was really smart for a Pollock - though your uncle tells me that slurs like Pollock are considered offensive now, but since this slur is about white people I think it's ok.
3. One of your ancestors was a brilliant medieval Jewish merchant who realized that he could mark up his prices if he lied about his ancestry and exaggerated his Yikhes.
As it happens, my cousin Yonatan recently emailed me and told me, with lots of exclamation points, that Charlap means 'Khiya, Rosh l'Galut l'Portugal,' not 'Polin', so apparently we're Portuguese and Sephardic Jews after all who came to Poland only after about two-hundred years in Salonica, which is a city in Greece, and Greece is just about the only major country where part of your family didn't live during my lifetime. But it would seem that most Jews arrived in Poland a little after 1500, just after they were expelled from Spain and Portugal, I don't think anybody knows how we ended up in Bransk, but some Jews left Salonica in the 1680s after a bunch of Jewish followers of a false messiah named Shabbetai Tzvi converted to Islam and moved to Salonica to establish their new community there - there goes the neighborhood....
Bransk was a shtetl in Northeast Poland - 'shtetl' is a Yiddish word meaning "here we buy wholesale." There were about six-thousand inhabitants, half Jews, half Christians, mostly farmers, a town which never produced a single person of any note or distinction - here in America, we would call the inhabitants of a town like Bransk hicks.
Jews aren't supposed to be hicks, though your cousin who hasn't had a job since he mooned his boss sure acts like one, but the truth is your whole family is Jewish hillbillies on every side, you, me, your tateh, your Bubbie, probably your mameh and her family too, though your Bubbie doesn't want me to ask your Sabba and Savta about their background because she thinks I'll start a fight about Trump.
According to wikipedia, the key event in Bransk history seems to be in 1264, the same year as the Statute of Kalisz, which guaranteed Polish Jews protection against blood libels (if you don't know what a blood libel is, you'll learn soon enough), and forced baptisms (if you don't know what a baptism is, ask your cousin Shayt who married a shikseh). 1264 seems to be the year of the "famous" Battle of Bransk, which pitted the Yotvingians, a poorly armed tribe from whom the Lithuanians descend - more on them later too - against the mighty Krakovians, for whom the great city of Krakow was christened - a city later that was later the center of the Polish Renaissance, which is a bit like saying that Lakewood, New Jersey is where all the Jewish football players come from. But Krakow would find a lot of fame around the time your Tateh was born because it's the city that produced the first Polish Pope, who believe it or not, may have been involved with your family's history.
It's tough to know what to say about our family before your elter Zaydie's parents were born. It's not like there are family stories handed down about your ancestor Yechiel who smoked opium in front of the Golden Calf, it's only right before my father was born that there's any historical documentation of our family at all. When your uncle Gideon was born, your elter-zaydie wanted us to name him after his own elter-zaydie, Velvl Daniil. I didn't even know he had a great-grandfather named Velvl Daniil.
So by the time Joel was three and your father was seven, a West Highland Terrier started yelping outside our house for days. Day after day, the tiny bitch screaming outside my window every five seconds. I told your Bubbie not to give him any water and he would leave, but of course she gave him water when I wasn't watching. I told her not to feed him, but of course she gave him leftover dinner when I was in the bedroom. I absolutely, positively, would not let the dog in the house, but when I had almost ready to give him away, your uncle Abe started crying and screaming every day. I hate dogs so much, and I hated that hoont more than I hate Arafat, so eventually I had to keep him. By then, your elter-Zaydie couldn't even remember his own name, so instead of Gideon, we named the dog Velvl.
But the family lore does not begin with Velvl Daniil, it begins with a dream from my own Zaydie, who I never met. He might have been a hundred-fifteen years old by the time I was born.
Rebbe Yaakov Kharlap: he was a small town rabbi who wasn't even the Rabbi for his town. Just a kheder instructor, where he taught Jewish boys only a few years older than you how to write Hebrew letters, how to daven, how to read, how to memorize pages of Torah and Talmud - and if he was to his students anything like he was to my tateh, he probably used a ruler on them for every mistake they made.
The story goes that when he was fifty years old and his wife Miriam was forty-five, an angel appeared to him in a dream. They'd been married for thirty years, but in all that time, they'd never conceived a single child. The angel in the dream told Rebbe Yaakov that his wife would bear him twelve sons, all of whom would survive into adulthood, and Reb Yaakov must name the twelve after the twelve sons of Israel.
Well personally, I think the story is completely meshuggeh. If Reb Yaakov and Miriam were that old, and there's no way to really know, then there's certainly no way the kids were entirely theirs. I think all his children were probably just cheder orphans he adopted and Miriam took care of, and Reb Yaakov was meshuggeh, so he changed all their names to be named after the twelve tribes of Israel.
But anyway, that's the story. And there were definitely eleven boys and a girl: Reuven, Shimon, Levi, Yehuda, Dan, Naftali, Gad, Asher, Yissachar, Z'vulun, Dinah, and Yosef. And if there's still family resemblance between them all now? Well, it's the shtetl, we're all inbreds.
Apparently Reb Yaakov had a rich twin brother, Ezra, who had a factory in Bialystok, the nearest city. Ezra sent Reb Yaakov money every week for his enormous family, but Ada was an 'enlightened' woman of the 'Haskalah' - never mind what the Haskalah means but depending on who you ask it's either the best or the worst thing that ever happened to us. Ada apparently couldn't stand Reb Yaakov, thinking he was just a nar from khandrikeville, and my father always referred to her 'die mechashayfeh' so I'm guessing the feeling was always mutual.
Whatever the fights were about, they clearly centered on money. Ezra sent his brother enough money that for shtetl dwellers living on a cheder stipend, they could live pretty well. Your greicer-onkle Jake still has the silver menorah Tateh buried before the war and dug up to take with him on the boat over here - and of course who should get that menorah after he died could have been a huge fight, so I let him take it. We showed him though, we found the same design menorah on ebay for a hundred twenty-five!
But whether or not Reb Yaakov was ever worried about money, he was terribly worried about his career. He was apparently thirteen years old when Rebbe Chaim Schkop came to Bransk, and Rabbi Schkop was always dying, but he never died. Apparently he could never even stand up and just issued rulings from a bed installed in his Bet-Din (think People's Court for frummies).
But on the very day Rebbe Schkop gave up the neshawmeh, in his eighties, just a year before my Tateh was born, Rebbe Yaakov fainted in his kheder. He'd been functioning for years as basically the town Rebbe, school melamed, din-torah and tateh tsu tsvelf kinder and was already in his seventies.
The town makhers wrote immediately to the Mirrer Yeshiva about a miraculous emergency in which the Rebbe and his Yursh dropped dead in the same hour (give or take a few...). Reb Yaakov had come to within an hour and was back to work the next day. But just a few days before his initial installation, the Mirer Rosh Yeshiva wrote back that after much discussion, the Rabbis at Mir had ruled that this was a sign that Bransk would require a Rabbi destined for great things, and one of their grayster yunge khkhams was already on his way to become the new Bransker Rebbe.
Nobody told Rebbe Yaakov until the day of his installment. They didn't want to make him faint again. But just as his kinder were packing the house to move into the Rebbe's heus and he came over a little early to figure out with the carpenter how to move Rebbe Schkop's bed out of the Bet Din, he saw a young boy he'd never seen before next to a young girl holding a baby. The carpenter called this young boy Rebbe Zilbershteyn.
But if Rebbe Yaakov's career went nowhere, his family life was clearly overpopulated. Still, he needed one more son to complete the set: a Charlap who'd complete the vision of his dream that he would name Binyamin. That Binyamin was your Tateh's Zaydie, Benjamin Charlap.
The day of your elter-Zaydie's birth was a pretty terrible one: Rosh Hashana 1899. It was the day, literally, the day, the entire Kharlap family left Bransk for good. Apparently they had to.
So I want to recreate this day for you and set the scene.
Let's just imagine your elter-elter Zaydie, Yaakov Kharlap, chanting the lesson of the day. We'll show you the first half in Aramaic, then the second half in Yiddish transliteration, and then for the purposes of this letter, I'll show it in English. As you read it in English try to hear in your ear whatever you might imagine as the sing-songy way the Orthodox have chanted Talmud since its composition.
מיתיבי כל עשרים וארבעה חדש דש מבפנים וזורה מבחוץ דברי ר' אליעזר א"ל הללו אינו אלא כמעשה ער ואונן כמעשה ער ואונן ולא כמעשה ער ואונן כמעשה ער ואונן דכתיב והיה אם בא
vi der nuhg fun er aun aunn, aun dakh nisht [dvka] vi der firung fun er aun aunn: 'khdrkh er aun aunn', varim es shteyt geshribn in khsubim, aun es iz geven, ven er iz areyn. tsu zayn bruders vayb, az er hot es aoysgegosn aoyf der erd; "du zalst nisht lakhn bite." aun 'la [bdiuk] khdrkh er aun aunn', veyl dart iz es geven an aumnatirlekher meshh, da vert es getun aoyf dem tbei.
An objection was raised: During all the twenty-four months {after a birth, when a mother is nursing} one may thresh within and winnow without; these are the words of Rov Eliezer. The others said to him: Such actions are only like the practice of Er and Onan! -Like the practice of Er and Onan, and yet not [exactly] like the practice of Er and Onan: ‘Like the practice of Er and Onan’, for it is written in Scripture, And it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother's wife, that he spilt it on the ground; (kids start laughing) "Don't laugh please." and ‘not [exactly] like the practice of Er and Onan’, for whereas there it was an unnatural act, here it is done in the natural way.
.......And so for today's dawf yeymi we get to Parashas Vayeshev... You must know the story by now... it's the story of Onan, Tamar, Yehudah, and Er. Tamar, the beautiful bride, that a series of husbands won't make her pregnant so she can keep her nice figure, so Onan and Er always spilled their seed on the ground during schtupzeit.
Don't laugh...
So God punished Onan and Er by killing them. (slightly annoyed) And make no mistake Gimpeleh, that's evil and Hashem might decide to punish you for it if you spill your seed anywhere but your wives.
Please don't laugh, this is important! The Torah teaches a valuable lesson here.... like it always does....
You don't have very long till your married, you all know what spilling your seed is, you just need not to do it until you're married and can make geschlect in your wives.
(Rebbe Yaakov hits one of the kids with a switch)
NIBZEH L'AZAZEL KHALERIYA! LIGN IN DRERD UND BAKN BEYGL! HINDERT HAYSN ZOL ZU HABEN, IN YEDER HEYS A HUNDERD TSIMERN, IN YEDER TSIMER TZVANZIK BETN UN KADOKHES ZOL IM VARFN FIN EYN BET IN DER TSVEYTER!
Farshtunkener Jewish hillbillies!....
Worthless numbskulls!....
No better than wild animals are any of you!... Is Dreyfus going through all this so you mamzerim can dishonor his sacrifice?!
(Kid says distant from microphone): Rebbe Yaakov, Gimpeleh's finger looks crooked...
Zay shtil you naarisher pischer!... Alright! Put your hands on the table! Everybody put your hands on the table!
(Hits kids hands with switch between most sentences)
Laughing at the Torah! Laughing at women! Generation to generation of light-mindedness and ingratitude to your mothers! While you're busy not learning Torah they're making sure you don't starve and freeze! One day all of your wives'll be sick of your disrespect to women and demand all the things men have, and then where'll the world be?....
Feh! You're all just meat with eyes!...
How did I, how did my family, end up teaching generations of zhlubs like you?! We all needed you like a hole in the head! Fifty years teaching this stinking Kheyder, just like my Tateh un Zaydie un Elter Zaydie before me. It was the death of all of them. I'm the only one who lived past fifty and now I'm almost seventy and still stuck with you khamers!...
Teaching all your Tatehs and Zaydies who had cowsheads just like you! Waiting for Rebbe Schkop to retire so I might get a few years as town Rabbi and a decent pension pay for my eleven kinder instead of the bupkes your parents give me, and we said to him 'may you live to a hundred twenty' so many times, he lived to a hundred and would issue rulings from his bed! ...Ach...
Alright. May Rebbe Schkop's memory be a blessing... But then your parents, more naarishkeit! They get a new Rabbi! God forbid a Kharlap be a Rabbi for them for a few years before he plotzes into the ground too! Another generation of Kharlap rebbes passed over for a pischer straight from the Yeshiva barely older than you who doesn't know life from the lamed vav. Schmeggeges, all of you!
(one of the kids is crying from the beatings)
Oy, I'm so sorry Gimpeleh, I didn't mean all that. Kum tzu mir mein kint
(takes crying kid in his arms)
You know I have love for all kinderlach, you know I have love for your parents who I taught when they was smaller than you. Tevyeleh I even taught your grandfathers, both of them! Du veyst, you kinder are my life, I just need you to learn so you can be a light to the goyim just like your parents have always been. I promise.
Let's all sing a song: let's sing Tumbalalaika.
(everybody sings a verse of Tumbalalaika)
You all sound beautiful tatelehs.
Listen kindz, I know this stuff is hard and boring, but you need to pay attention to it.
He's up there, He's watching. He knows which of you are leyning good and which are leyning bad, but when you have trouble, you talk to Him, right during the Shomeh Esrei when we're all going Maaaanehmanehmanehmanehmanehmanehmanehoyriboimnosheloylamesistsoschverunsoshvachunoymein
tzurismeintatehisaschnorrermeinmamehisabalebusunmeinbriderisabeheymeunmeinbubbehisamekhasheyfehunikhveysvos
just between you and me... and Him,... you don't have to do it.
What good is it to do the Shmoneh Esrai twice? Hashem didn't hear you the first time? Use that time to say to Hashem, geb a kook, I know I'm a bad leyner, but I'll try to be good. Just try harder to be good and he'll give you as many chances as you need till you become good because you are good. You're kinder and you're good, because all kinder are good, and you don't have time yet to become the rashas. You know he'll listen, and I know he'll listen....
I know I've told you this story but I know he'll listen. Hashem came to me in a dream. It's true! Your eltern probably say Oy, Reb Yaakov, he's so meshuggeh. That's what they say isn't it?
But today, I'm gonna tell it again, because I know you'll understand it, and today's the best day to tell it. An angel came to me in a dream just like he came to Awv Yaakov in ancient Israel, and he blessed me just like he blessed Yaakov. He told me, Reb Yaakov, I know you and your beautiful wife, and I know everybody thinks she's a mekhasheyfeh now, but she was beautiful before you all were born,...
Reb Yaakov, I know you and your wife have tzuris having babies for 25 years, but you're going to have twelve babies, all of them sons, and they're all gonna grow up. You need to name them after the twelve sons of Jacob: Reuven, Shimun, Levi, Yehuda, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Yissachar, Z'vulin, Yosef and Binyamin.
And then, in four years, five sets of sons: Reuven and Shimun, then Levi and Yehuda, then Dan and Naphtali, then Gad and Asher, then three! Yissachar and Z'vulun and Yosif. And then, nothing, fourteen years, no more kinder. (chortles between a laugh and an oy) Eleven's enough. But then today, today, five minutes just before I got here, Reuven tells me mein weib's in labor, and I know we're gonna have twelfth son.
DON'T CLAP! (spits) Don't tempt the evil eye. After the birth you can sing me Mazel Tov and tonight you'll all come over with your parents and we'll do a l'Chaim and in a week we'll do the bris.
But here's the reason I'm telling you the story. My sons, Reuven, Shimon, Levi, Yehuda, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Yissachar, Z'vulin, Yosef, and soon, one more... I raised them to be Yiddisher Kops. You know them! Reuven, Shimon, Levi, Yehuda, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Yissachar, Z'vulin, Yosef... every one of them is a Tzaddik. You know them! They all love God, and God loves them. They do the mitzvahs, they go to shul, they work so hard, they help their Mameh, they help your Mamehs, they help everybody in the Shtetl, and that's what Hashem gives you if you believe He will.
(4 of Reb Yaakov's sons smoking cigarettes in the Jewish cemetary)
Dan: (imitating his father) They do the mitzvahs, they go to shul, they work so hard, they help their Mameh, they help your Mamehs...
Naphtali: Oh we help their Mamehs... (they all laugh)
Yeah that hard cut to another scene just poured out of me like ruach, but we can't let ruach get too much the better of us, not just yet at least there's a lot to get through. First you have to know who Dreyfus is. You probably don't, but how would any Jew not know in 1899? And for five years, Reb Yaakov, the only mobile Jew in Bransk with enough money and literacy for a newspaper subscription, probably bludgeoned his kinder's oyers with every new detail of Dreyfus and his legal dybbuks. Every Shabbos, Reb Yaakov would probably bring new news of Dreyfus to the denizens of the Bransker shul, his former talmids every one, who never much considered why they so cared for the tzuris of a wealthy Jewish gentleman of the French military; whom even after five years of wrongful imprisonment would probably shpay on them in the street. They suddenly cared much more about Reb Yaakov's vissen and khokhma than they ever did when they were his students. So much so did they care that a guy named Reb Feivl would be on the doorstep of the kheder every morning to be the first to get new news, and by the afternoon Reb Leybl would be waiting at the Kheder door, thinking he rather would be the first with new news. But the very first to get new news was inevitably Reb Yaakov's kinder, every day with the breakfast their mother would quietly awaken at four-thirty every the morning to prepare so the kinder could eat at five thirty so they could milkh deh kauz und plau de felds before they go to shul for the Shacharis minyan, and then to cheder, and when they reached that certain age Jews tend to refer to as adulthood, tsu arbet.
Apparently a couple of deh briders used to hang out in the cemetery, they were apparently the 'cool' shtetlers known as 'Deh Kharlap Khaleriyas'; they'd smoke cigarettes, they'd probably pish on the tombstone of the Rebbe, and I'm sure they'd brag about all deh sheyneh Branskeh maydlach they felt up in the barns. But apparently one day your uncle Asher, who was clearly a hot tempered type even then, got roughed up by a gang of Polish hoodlums.
What was the fight about? I don't know, but don't automatically assume it was the Pollock's fault. Don't let anybody tell you Jews are smart, some Jews if they were twice as smart they'd be idiots. Well, this all was during the Dreyfus years, a story which nobody really cares about now except Jews and the truth is, maybe we shouldn't have cared about it even then. Being one of us is trouble enough, but we have this way of making trouble for ourselves whenever some shtik drek oysshteller thinks he can climb the goyisheh ladder and then has the kind of shlekhteh mazel every Yid has to expect when they think they can be a greyceh goy.
Of course, boychik, Dreyfus wasn't any schtik drek. These na'ars had to know who Dreyfus was. There was no Jew who didn't know in 1899. It probably wasn't until 1896 that Reb Dreyfus would come onto the mental radar of a shlemazel like Reb Yaakov, when it became known that Dreyfus's exile to a prison island was a framing to cover for a mer vikhtik officer with much greater Yuchus: Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. Why did they put a Dreyfus away and not an Esterhazy? Because the Esterhazy's were the Hungary in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (I'm not gonna explain the Austro-Hungarian Empire to you, because even though your farshtunkiner teachers probably never told you about Dreyfus, I'm sure they never told you about Austria-Hungary, and there are some gaps in education for which there's no hope that your generation will ever fill), and however rich the Dreyfus family might have been, Dreyfus is just the name of another German town Jews were expelled from in the Middle Ages. You do the math boychik.
But it wasn't until 1897, when the Dreyfus Affair was reopened and Esterhazy was acquitted after a two day trial that all the Reb Yaakov's went meshuggeh. This Yid who barely knew he was a Yid was suddenly the grayseter Yid of us all. Their shtures got even worse when Esterhazy fled to England, and doubled even again when Dreyfus was re-tried and found guilty, and reached its hits grad as the mob outside the courthouse chanted 'Death to the Jews!'
You can even imagine the scenes the Dreyfus-khopteh caused in Bransk. You can imagine Rebbitzin Zilbershteyn's mother weeping loudly in the synagogue whenever she heard the name Dreyfus. Imagine how he probably got a special M'shebeirach every Shabbos from Khazzen Nudler, from which everybody in shul competes for who can shout 'AMEN' the loudest!
But the reason we're starting here is because everybody in the family remembers it as the legendary day just before Rosh Hashana 1899 when everything was finally supposed to go right for the Kharlap family. Reb Yaakov made a huge speech to the kids that morning before arbet about how hard it's been for all the Jews before them for so many centuries. According to my uncle Z'vulun it was about the history of the Kharlaps, though your elteh-Zaydie Benyamin always told me Z'vulun was full of drek and they didn't speak to each other for almost twenty years about it. But according to Z'vulun the speech was about the whole history of the Kharlaps: Expulsion from Spain to Venice, where they were made to live in a ghetto, eventually making it up to Poland just in time for the Khmielnitsky massacres in 1648 that wiped out half the Jews in Eastern Europe, two-and-a-half centuries of mistreatment, discrimination and pogroms in Poland... but finally, 'it's different now', and no Kharlaps were ever born with the advantages you have. After this coming Shabbos, the shatkhan is coming with matches for all of you. Very soon you'll all be married and have kinder of your own, and it'll be a year of Simkheh. So the kinder went out to work. Apparently it was quite a day...
Dan: Don't fucking pish on the Rebbe!
Naftali: Don't curse in the cemetery!
Z'vulun: Who's gonna hear us?
Naftali: You don't wanna tempt the evil eye.
Z'vulun: What evil eye? You ever see it?
Dan: Mameh's in labor! Just don't do it today, wait to do drek like this tomorrow!
Asher: What drek?
Dan: Why do you always do things like a mamzer?
Asher: I've got the same Mameh as you Dan.
Dan: If Mameh saw your drek on the headstone of the Bransker Rebbe she'd give you a cherem.
Asher: I'm not shitting I'm pishing!
Dan: (sighs) Alright take a shit in the fucking ocean.
Asher: (proud) Ha! There's my tzaddik. You still haven't rolled me a papiros.
Z'vulun: You still haven't told us what this schlock is with that kadokhes Dreyfus.
Dan: You can read it for yourself!
Naftali: Z'vulun doesn't read.
Z'vulun: Shtup ir, of course I read, I just don't like to.
Naftali: He says the words look backwards.
Asher: Wow, we're worried about tempting the evil eye but Z'vulun is the evil eye.
Z'vulun: And you're gonna get it in your evil eye if Dan doesn't tell us what that newspaper says.
Dan: It's just more drek about that nochschlepper Dreyfus.
Z'vulun: What's happening to him?
Dan: Bupkes! Like always happens! He's sitting in jail, his rich brother's giving money for him...
Z'vulun: (interrupting) Are we sending him money?
Dan: What money?!
Asher: We have money!
Naftali: We had money. Uncle Ezra sends less every year. You know this!
Dan: It's that apikeyres wife of his. She always hated Tateh.
Naftali: And Uncle Ezra always hated her!
Asher: He did?
Dan: You heard what Shimon said. Apparently he goes to bed with a different shiksa from the factory every night.
Z'vulun: Well so what, wouldn't any of us do that if we could?
Dan: Yehuda told me that when he went to help Uncle Ezra he saw kielbasa in the kitchen.
Naphtali: (sigh/chortle, stunned) Well now that's shocking... Mein Gott, what the shtup....
Z'vulun: Did you really think Ezra was a Yiddisher kop?
Naftali: I thought he was like any of us, only rich.
Asher: Well we did ok for a while there.
Dan: Yeh, cuz we have a reicher for an uncle!
Naftali: Doesn't Tateh have anything saved away?
Z'vulun: He had twelve children!
Dan: Well, I guess we mazel'd out. Uncle Ezra cut the funds just as we got Bar Mitzvah'd and could go work.
Naftali: Some work we're doin' here.
Z'vulun: This is arbeit! We're here trimming the grass in the cemetery.
Naftali: This is bupkes! We should have been home two hours ago!
Asher: What does it matter? Who's hiring right now? When you have eleven brothers there are only jobs for sev...
Z'vulun: (interrupting) Stop, who's this picture of? (holds up newspaper to Dan)
Dan: That? That's Dreyfus!
Z'vulun: That meeskait is Dreyfus?
Dan: Yeh, that's who Tateh's been talking about... every day since we were in Kheyder.
Z'vulun: Look at the shmattehs on him!
Asher: Yeah,... he looks like a shaygetz.
Naftali: That guy's as Jewish as the shtupping Pope!
Asher: Look at the stripes on his fucking hoot!
Naftali: And what the shtup is that mustache?
Asher: How can a Yid who dresses like that not be guilty?
Naftali: And what's with the fucking knepls on his shirt?
Z'vulun: Dan, is there any way of telling from the picture what colors his uniform are?
Dan: Well, you're not gonna believe this but I once saw the French uniform on a stamp. It was red, white and blue.
Z'vulun: Ret, veis, un bleu?! How the fuck do these zelners go into the field without other soldiers knowing where to shoot them a hectare away?
Naphtali: A feinschmeker like this guy must go into a barber and say "Hey. Make my mustache look like the hair over my putz!'
Asher: Seriously, why the fuck do all these alter kockers give a dreck about some French faygaleh?
(interrupts from 20 meters away)
Jan Kowalski: And who's the faygaleh here
Filip Kowalski: Tak, we know what that word means!
(Three meters away, directly next to the Jewish cemetery's wooden fence; six Polish boys, three of them the Kowalski brothers, whose father Yakub Kowalski was known through Bransk, Bielsk, Wiesocki, and Ciecanowiech as 'der Yid merderer', facing them along with Franczisek Nowak, Filip Wiśniewski, and Aleksander Wojcik. The shortest of these chuligans fifteen centimeters hecher than the tallest Kharlap.)
Jan Kowalski: And who's the faygaleh here
Filip Kowalski: Tak, ve know what that word means!
(Franczisek grabs the paper)
Jan: Look at these dupeks! Laughing sie na cemetery!
Franczisek Kowalski: Smoking papieros too!
Jan: They probably think ze sa special cuz they can read!
Aleksander: Well even if they're smieching sie na cemetery they still look as stupid as every other Zhid.
(Jan Kowalski unzips his fly and starts to pisch on Rebbe Chaim Schkop's headstone)
Dan: Oh don't...
Jan: Don't?...
(pause, only sound of pissing)
Dan: Don't pisch...
Jan: Don't pisch? Like don't siki? You hear that bracia? I started siking seventeen seconds ago he wants me to stop! Give me that newspaper.
(sound of pissing on a paper)
Jan: So what were you Zhids reading about?
Filip: They were probably learning more magic spells.
Asher: Nie don't know any magic spells.
Dan: Asher, don't.
Jan: (imitating) Asher! Don't. Bracia, hold that one, make sure Z'vulun's watching so we can teach him a lesson. (they grab hold of Dan and he crumbles up the newspaper) Here, take a look at these letters up close. (shoves the newspaper into Dan's mouth)
Asher: Take that newspaper out of my brother's mouth.
Jan: Oh! You're brother! Well we hear all about your family Asher Kharlap. A rdzina where all eleven live to be adults? That's fucking black magia!
Aleksander: Tak! They're probably here so nobody can hear their plans to poison our blyading wells!
Asher: Well maybe if your kind cleaned their shtupping wells once in a while your kid siostra wouldn't get sick and die!
(seven seconds of silence)
Jan: What are you saying? That you fucking mordecas of Christ had the secret to not getting chory this whole time and you've been keeping it from us?
Asher: Go back to your shtupping Boyars and Priests! They knew it this whole time and kept it from you to keep you stupid!
Naftali: Asher! Zey shtil!
Filip: Are you calling our Holy Fathers liars?
Asher: They're fucking thieves and rapists and murderers!
Naftali: Mir ale hobn tzu lozn!
(Z'vulun and Naphtali run away, the Kowalski kids immediately lunge for Asher, Dan's paper falls out of his mouth and he falls down to catch his breath while Asher is beaten up.)
Asher: Dan, helf mikh!
Jan: Tak Dan, help him! It's just you and him against six of us. Tell you what,... why don't you just leave this idiota for us and you can run away like a nice Jewish boy.
Asher: Dan, helf mikh!
Jan: Well Dan, are you going to help your bro....
(Gad runs away)
Jan: All your zhid brothers have run away.
Filip: Tak, that's what Jewish boys always do. They always run away.
According to Dan, the Pollocks left Asher for dead five minutes later.
This story is so over the top boychik that I can't imagine it's even partially true. Your greycer-oncle Asher was barely a hundred pounds and meshuggeh as meshuggeh gets (and in case you haven't realized by now, so is your entire mishpocha except obviously your Zaydie, though your Bubbie and uncles would dispute that).
So now we
This is where we have to talk about the real meshuggener, my Uncle Levi. I never met my uncle Levi, we have no idea if he died in Treblinka, or if the Nazis shot him in Bransk or Wysockie or Bialystok, I somehow doubt he killed himself, but they should have stuck him in the meshugoyim hoys on that day, but instead of getting any kind of care, he became meshuggeh frum, had something like eleven kinder of his own, and instead of leyning Torah he wrote and wrote and wrote. Nobody's been able to get through all of the bukhs and bukhs of bopkes he wrote, but somehow a good half oder mer got saved and was brought over here from the Old Country and other cousins you won't ever meet have taken a look at them and sent me some of the parts they find interesting.
This is where we have to talk about the real meshuggener, my Uncle Levi. I never met my uncle Levi, we have no idea if he died in Treblinka, or if the Nazis shot him in Bransk or Wysockie or Bialystok, I somehow doubt he killed himself, but they should have stuck him in the meshugoyim hoys on that day, but instead of getting any kind of care, he became meshuggeh frum, had something like eleven kinder of his own, and instead of leyning Torah he wrote and wrote and wrote. Nobody's been able to get through all of the bukhs and bukhs of bopkes he wrote, but somehow a good half oder mer got saved and was brought over here from the Old Country and other cousins you won't ever meet have taken a look at them and sent me some of the parts they find interesting.
So just read what he has to say here about that day before Erev Rosh Hashana:
...Reuven and I were working for a Shokhet and were shovelling hey for the shokhet's prize lamb which he was saving for the Bransker Rebbe to eat in the Sukkah. We were low on salt and if it wasn't fresh nobody could eat it. My father, Reb Yaakov, with his money from Uncle Ezra, was paying for the lamb which he meant as a peace offering to Rebbe Zilbershteyn.
I was telling Reuven about my dreams again, because like Tateh, I knew I was being visited by angels, only my dreams happened when I was awake. Reuven was a praktisher mensch. He told me I was fertummelt and that I was falling for my own schvindle. "But you don't farshtey how real they are! They have to be real they're as real as you right here!" How else would he believe me? "Are they emesdikker real or are they falshen real?" So finally I had to concede "It's not faktish the way you and I are, it's like you can see them completely but you can also see through them." "So your mind is falling for its own schvindle?" "Feh! It's not a schvindle!" "What do you know from schvindles?" "I know what these malakhim tell me!" "And what do they tell?" "You obviously wouldn't believe them." "No I wouldn't, but I want to hear them anyway." "That this will be the Great Age of our people. That we will all be destroyed, and then we will all be saved." "You mean like Moshiach coming?" "I don't know... they haven't said. I just know that we're about to live through the most important time in thousands of years." "FEH!" "That's what they said!"
I told him so again and again. "Levi I'm getting worried, has anyone ever told you you have a Lokhen Kop?" "You asked so I'm telling you!" "Just don't you dare tell Tateh this! You used to be such a mensch but you're getting really tschunde. If he knew this it would break his heart."
Now here's di zakh boychik. I'm completely sure that 75% of this diary is a total forgery. Maybe it was your cousin Solomon who was a schlemazl academic in New York who some amoretz machers now take seriously because of these journals, and maybe his oyshteller son Levi keeps making new ones because now he's making serious gelt off this schvindl. You're gonna find out about this diary eventually, and it's a big part of your mishpokheh's history even if it's all drek. So I have to make you understand any of this diary, you need to understand that Levi apparently predicted a lot of the events of the 20th century that he had no way of knowing, and the only explanation that makes sense is that Solomon Charlap made a lot of these bubbemeicehs up. So here's what 'Levi' had to say about next about what happened that day.
The shokhet's wife came out of the house to schrek at us to stop kibbitzing and get back tzu arbet. "You're schreking so much I can hear it from the bodroom, i you worked more you'd get angry less, it'll set you free!" (that last part I think was a farshtunkiner foreshadowing Doctor Solomon put in to sell more copies.)
Reuven went inside, and I innocently went about my next job of plaking one or two chickens from the hindl coop for the shokhet to kill for his letste minit orders before Rosh Hashana. The chickens began to talk to me, and the klaks sounded like Toyreh. "Nuuuuuuuuu? Shalkheni ki alah hashakhar!" Literally what the Angel says to Yaakov when they wrestle. Eyner chicken said it, then a sekunde, then a drit, and finally a giant khor of chickens speaking Hebrew. It literally sounded like millions! And they were speaking everything: quoting Torah, arguing Mishnah, singing the Psalms in Haftorah trope, making fun of the butcher, talking about the Kaiser and the Czar, debating whether Reuven and I should go to Amerikeh! I tried to talk to them but they wouldn't listen. It was just like dealing with all my briders!
So I just zetsed there for minutes, listening to the chickens, wondering if I should call Reuven over. Wondering if Froi Blitzer would come in at any minute and blame me for a million talking chickens. Wondering if the hindls might kill me for a change! And then I heard it: the prize lamb screamed out: SHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
And the lamb spoke directly unto me. "Levi! I am the she-e-ep of our fa-athers! The sheep of A-a-avel which he offered to Hashem before Kayin killed his bri-ider, the sheep of Avraha-a-a-a-am he offered in place of Yitzha-a-aa-ak! The yikhus of my bloo-ood was used on the sla-a-a-ave doors of Mitzra-aim before the Malakh haMa-a-a-aves took the ersht gebeym sons of the Egy-y-y-y-y-y-yptians. My ancestors were present at the death of Shmuyel and were given to the Melech Yisroel by Mischa the Mo-o-o-o-o-oabite. Hear me Levi! I must die imme-e-e-e-e-ediately. There is so little time to explain, but a fault in how we say the khawkham harazim brakha means that as many as 600,000 Jews will soon die if you do not ki-i-i-i-i-i-iill me right now. Terrible things will soon happen to the wo-o-o-o-o-orld, and if you do not act, a calamity will befa-a-a-a-a-a-all the Yiddisheh people!"
"But..."
"Hurry! It may already be too late!"
I faniked. What was I supposed to do? Let 600,000 Jews die? So I immediately slit the throat of the lamb. And I sat there for a moment as the blood covered my shirt and dripped to my shikhlekh, betrakhting what I'd just done.
Now I don't want to insult the meshuggeh, but isn't that the biggest load of drek you've ever heard?
So supposedly, on the same day, Levi writes about something significant that happened to Reuven. It's of course possible it was on any day while they were working there, though I doubt it, but honestly, it doesn't matter when it happened, what matters is that around the same time, bad things were happening arum und aroys. This story's at least believable:
They were all tchochkes tsu mir, but Reuven could never stop thinking about all the things in Reb Lazar's heus. All the samovars, the trays, the Shabbos candlesticks, the glessens for veiyn, the menoyrehs, the fantazye china. 'Geb a kuk Levi! Gelt, zilber, brass, portselain, even marble!' He eventually made his way to the badrum, where he found diments, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, jade, amethyst... they were all kleyntshik, and who knows if they were factish or schvindl? But it drove Reuven meshuggeh. I told Reuven to stop going in the heus, he'd just make himself krank und treurik, but he went in day after tag to kuk and putz around, talking to Freu Blitzer about dos nitshik und vos. One day he comes home with one zilber likht, then he comes aheym with the andere. Vos kentsu ton with a person who flyes to danger? One misfortune is too few for a schnorrer like that. Ikh hob geret tzu him, you don't know the trouble gekomming, but vernings meant gornisht to him.
Then the Shabbos lichts weren't enough for him. Then came the trays, then the zilber forks und messers. And eventually, he just had to go for the menoyrah. Okhn vey... And of course, Freu Blitzer knew di gantze tzeit.
"Vos tustu?"
"I was just looking at the Menoyreh."
"Zikher you are! Don't you remember? I promised it to you as a gift!"
Freu Blitzer was zextsik yar alt, she walked with a stoop, had a shnoz like a witch, and sometimes her skirt didn't bahalt that she had what modern meditsin call varicose veins. She unbuttoned Reuven's gartl. Reuven didn't tell me more about what happened except that he didn't realize what was happening until it happened, but he was pretty afgerudert about the whole thing, and within five minutes, Lazar Blitzer got back from shul and shlogged both Reuven and Freu Blitzer unconscious with the menoyreh.
So yeah.... that's a family meiceh, and a believable one. That's the kind of mishpocha you come from, so mistomeh you shouldn't read this until after your Bar Mitzvah. It's far from the only meiceh of schtupping that gets in the way of family members having a gut lebn. We should probably redn about Dina now, who until then was Reb Yaakov's only tokhter. What a hard life she had, as shver as her daughter was gebenscht, but she once wrote me a meiceh about her visit to Zohar the witch. I think this one is either somehow kind of treu and it was a coincidence that what the mekhashayfeh said came true, or like Levi she might have hallucinated it all, or maybe she was just exaggerating. Obviously a lot of this isn't true, but I think the main substance of it is emes. I knew Dina pretty well in her last years, she was a different kind of meshuggeh from her briders. Some of this is obviously so ridiculous that there's no way in gehinnom that any of that happened, but I think some version of this is true because Dina and her tokhter hated each other, even in the 1920s when she wrote this. They never stopped being inkayess and didn't speak for the last dreisig years of Dina's life if nicht mer. Nu? Maybe she imagined it, but she'd have no reason to lie about it.
