What is the Old New Land? Where is the Old New Land? We have no idea what it is or where to look or where we'll find it, but the material who, the how and the whither, the warp and weft, the length width depth and time, the dwelling foundations splendor and even eternity, are mere surface on the face of the deep. The Old New Land is the space between space, where exists possibility, plane, history, law, condition, and infinity; glory, law, lovingkindness, the sources of wisdom, and the crown of creation itself. If it exists at all, and of that existence there shall always be doubt, then it abides in that apogee of maximal cosmic tension to which we all arrive in the instant before the great celestial snap, a place of the world of no end that by wrestling to realize, we seem to bring tiny emanations down to our own, if only for a specific and small indeed finite time, if only in a specific and small indeed definite place. It is that land that within all actions seem motivated by greatness, and much in that brief instant even by goodness, for from that unboundedness of spheres above, we carry those best selves which comprise our share of the divine creation. Once we see it, we work, and we work, and we work, and we wait, and we wait, and we wait, but we're always thrown out of the Old New Land.
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Tale Genesis: Reb Yaakov, Bransk, 1899:
We begin in Bransk, 'Everyshtetl' Northeast Poland, comprising six-thousand inhabitants who are mostly farmers; half-Jewish, half-Christian, a locale of multicultural hicks from whence nobody of singular distinction ever hailed or created anything of note, except for the author's grandfather, Morris Tucker, formerly Meishel Ticoczki, and formerly before that Moishe Kharlap.
The key event in Bransk history was in 1264, the very same year as the Statute of Kalisz, which guaranteed Polish Jews protection against forced baptisms and blood libels. But 1264 was also when occurred the historic 'Battle of Bransk' - pitting the poorly armed Yotvingians, a small Baltic tribe, against the mighty Krakovians, for whom the Polish city of Krakow was eponymously christened - latterly famed to anyone out there who cares as the capital of the Polish Renaissance, which apparently did exist, and genuinely adorned with a kind of sparkling Renaissance architecture and art one would never associate with Poland. But Krakow would find true international fame under the personage of its Archbishop Karol Wojtila, latterly Pope John Paul II.
One might think this battle merits sufficient distinction for mention in the illustrious archives of wikipedia because a David-like underdog crossed overwhelming odds to hammer Goliath with a mere slingshot. But no, the Krakovians massacred the Yotvingians at the Battle of Bransk, it was all over in two days, their general Komata, slaughtered along with the rest, and never again were the Yotvingians to plunder the Polish countryside.
All that we know of the Yotvingians is speculation, one of the thousands of peoples whose contributions to the world seem to be entirely oral, and therefore lost to the darkness of pre-history. But a bit of that speculation comes from Heroditus himself, Father of History, writing from his Athenian cultural paradise, who mentions a people called the Neuris who live near the Narew river in western Belarus and northeastern Poland, thought the mouth from which the Yotvingians emanated. But nothing truly definitive until a couple treaties in the 900s record that the Yotvingians joined the armies of Prince Igor, and later of Vladimir the Great, both of them ancestors of the Russian Czars. We don't even know if they were called the Yotvingians: they may have been called the Sudovians, and there is a separate line of documentation for the Sudovians whose pedigree begins in the 2nd Century AD with Ptolemy, writing from his particular cultural paradise in Alexandria. We hear not of the Sudovians for another thousand years until a Teutonic Knight treaty in 1260 refers to a tribe known as "Sudowite, Sudowia, in qua Sudowit."
So we're not even sure if the Yotvingians and the Sudovians were the same tribe, but whomever they were, they were over shortly after their first definitive mentions. There was one eyeblink of glory in the 1260s when they managed to challenge the vaunted Krakovians, when they were led by a sovereign named Skomantas, who may in fact be the murdered general Komata, but seems to have lived more than twenty years past Komata's death. In 1263 Skomantas or Komata led the Yotvingians or Sudovians in a raid on the city of Chelmno, known to Jews around the world as the town of Chelm, where all the stupidest Jews lived in the Pale of Settlement, and at some other unspecified year in the same period, raided the city of Pinsk, a very small city which in the Russian census of 1897 would be comprised of seventy-four percent Jews. Six hundred years after their glory, a similar census by Belarus in 1860 would list 30,929 inhabitants of the Belarus Grodno area as "Yatviags."
The fate of Yotvingia is the fate of all things; one brief moment when all imagining seems possible, only for stark reality and all too common sense to plow itself through all possibility yet again, and thereafter tens of thousands live from generation to generation, passing on legends of barely remembered glories in past lifetimes and centuries to remember what might have been, and hope for what might still be.
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In the beginning, or 'at the beginning,' or 'in principle cause,' or 'in primal cause,' or 'in the head of the cause;' in the beginning was the word: 'B'reishit', the primal document of civilization beginning with a primal word so enigmatic, with meanings so infinite, that it is no beginning at all, and rather implies an infinity of presence before the beginning.
There is an infinity of presence before every beginning: no definite first cause or initial yesh, but either an infinite yesh or an infinity of beings who were present before we were able to record any definite shekhina. And yet most of our definite presences begin not at the rosh, not even in the biblical tekufah, but in the modern era. Before the Kharlap family whom we shall follow through the 20th century, there must have been 80 generations who preceded them merely of Jews, and an infinity of beings: prehistoric men, primates, mammals, avians, reptiles, amphibians, fish, invertebrates, arthropods, mollusks, annelids, porifera, protazoa, bacteria,... going back to inorganic matter of the earth, formed from rock, which itself comes from the stars, perhaps separated from one another as far back at the Big Bang, which may be the instant of separation into distinct parts of a single whole, the whole of which may have either been the divine totality of which we are each a part, or was matter that only came together for the smallest instance - previously divided in a completely different permutation, or perhaps before the beginning existed an infinity of other possibilities to us either unconceived or inconceivable.
And yet only in the 19th century did there truly begin reliable historical documentation of the pluralities of every individual human, each life now acquiring meaning not only for when it was lived and what it lived among, but meaning something in itself for its own sake. "This person lived, here is where and when.' Occasionally there is even record of what they looked like, and even more occasionally, record of what they did.
And while Reb Yaakov Kharlap did not truly exist, there were thousands of men recorded by censuses like him, which even in the backward environs of 19th century Czardom, were compiled by thousands of statisticians, public servants, and scientists, who gathered their findings in good faith into some of the most reliable composites we've had yet of whom and what humans are.
What was Reb Yaakov Kharlap? Well.... he was a Jew, and a Rabbi at that, and like so many unlucky Rabbis down the millennia, a Rabbi of no particular prestige so far as we know. Had he any great Talmudic insights, he never wrote them down, and if he wrote them down, nobody preserved them - neither his sons nor his students. He may have been a rabbi, but he was just another Jew, undesignated by Hashem for a life of any distinction, and rather condemned to make his living teaching the same dafs of Talmud, triennial year after triennial year, to the boys of a Kheder in the same town, for seventy or more years, and subject, like any Jew, to the laboratory Hashem seems to have chosen Jews as his test subjects in a laboratory of endless permutory experiments, in which Jews are compelled and commanded to wrestle with endless turahs and tzurahs of Yesh, for which he uses (and some might say: abuses) his Jews as test subjects for all states of being; for Jews a people for whom human issues can still exist in a state of tohu va'vohu, before he releases these tzuris upon the general public with much more definite tophes and tupos.
The name Kharlap is itself shrouded in mystery. It is clearly an acronym for 'Khiya, Rosh-l'Galut L'Polin', in Hebrew letters Khet-Reysh-Lamed-Pey, and translates to Khiya, head of the exiles in Poland; which means that the patrilineal line of the author's family is either descended from the first chief Rabbi of Poland, or some medieval Polish-Jewish grifter who realized he could mark up the prices of whatever he sold if he lied about the eminence of his Yichus. And yet of that 'Pay' at the end of the name there also is mystery, because it may not be the head of the exiles in Poland, but rather in Portugal. So rather than an Ashkenazic family who moved to Poland from the Holy Roman Germany of Charlemagne, it may be in fact an eminent Portuguese family moving to Poland after the Portuguese expulsion of 1496. But Portuguese or Polish, it may just be some low-class Jewish fraud adapting an important sounding name to get some better deals.
The Russian Imperial Census of 1897 lists Yaakov Kharlap as born sometime around the 27th of January 1845: one hundred years to the day on the secular calendar before the liberation of Auschwitz, but Reb Yaakov always insisted he was born on Rosh Hashana 1844, which would put his birth exactly a hundred years before the Warsaw Uprising.
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And so Kharlap shall be the name of the fictionalized family to which we subject the ordeal of this book. And just as all circumstances of the world are incarnated in primal mystery, so will the Kharlap family's incarnation come to us, and to Reb Yaakov, in mysterious, mythical circumstances. Perhaps akin to a hassidic tale by Reb Nachman of Bretslav or a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer (for those of you not familiar with Singer, think of a Jewish Gabriel Garcia Marquez if he incorporated editors' suggestions - which like Gabo this self-deluded author will only accede to with great reluctance).
According to hebcal.com, Hanukkah came early in 1899. Beginning on the sunset of November 26th and the eighth night on December 4th. It's a whole month before 1900 and the 20th century--a century whose vistas of progress most Europeans could not look forward to with more eager anticipation.
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