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.
Tale Genesis: Reb Yaakov, Bransk, 1894
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 Tecoczki, and formerly before that Moshe Kharlap.
The key event in Bransk history was in 1264, 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, and genuinely adorned with sparkling Renaissance architecture and art which one would never associate with Poland. But Krakow would truly find its true fame in the personage of 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 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 that 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.
The key event in Bransk history was in 1264, 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, and genuinely adorned with sparkling Renaissance architecture and art which one would never associate with Poland. But Krakow would truly find its true fame in the personage of 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 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 that 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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