Tales from the Old New Land #1

What is the Old New Land? Where is the Old New Land? We have no idea what it is, where to look, where or when we'll find it; but the material who, the how and whither, the warp and weft, the length, width, depth, and time; the dwelling, foundations, splendor, and even eternity, are all mere surface on the face of the deep. The Old New Land is the space within the space, the dimensions between where exist 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 within its unbounded bounds, we bring, so it seems, a very few of its tiny emanations down to our own, if only for a specific indeed finite time, if only in a small indeed definite place. It is that land within which all actions seem motivated by greatness, and much 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 glimpse its possibilities, 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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Bransk: 1899

We begin 'every-shtetl' Northeast Poland of six-thousand inhabitants who are mostly farmers, half-Jewish, half-Christian, a place of Jewish hicks where nobody of particular distinction ever hailed from, except for the author's grandfather, Morris Tucker, formerly Meishel Tecoczki, and formerly before that Moshe Kharlap.

The name Kharlap is 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 merchant-grifter who realized he could mark up his prices if he lied about the eminence of his family lineage (his 'Yichus' as we say in Yiddish).
Kharlap shall be the name of the fictionalized family to which we subject the ordeal of this book. It is a family that incarnates in somewhat mythical circumstances, akin to a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer (for those of you not familiar with Singer, think of a Jewish Gabriel Garcia Marquez if he accepted editors' suggestions, something which this writer shall do only with the greatest reluctance).

It's just before Christmas, just before the final week of the 19th century. For we begin there because while there were as many as 40 centuries of Jews before the 19th, it is only in this century that there 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. All things before this era are legend, and while legends are of what this work shall be made, we aspire after this brief beginning to ground this part of the work in something that seems like fact.

And so while Reb Moshe Kharlap did not truly exist, there were thousands of men recorded by censuses like him, which even in the backward environes of 19th century Czardom, were compiled by thousands of skilled statisticians, public servants, and scientists, who gathered their findings in some of the most reliable composite we had yet of whom and what humans are.

Rebbe Yaakov Kharlap is a small town Rabbi, not even the rabbi for his town but merely a Kheder instructor - Kheder being the elementary school through which shtetl children are first taught their Hebrew letters, how to pray, how to read, how to memorize pages at a time of the Torah and Talmudic tractate. He is an alte mensch of the alte shul, very free with the ruler upon the knuckles and elsewhere, and extremely proud, about the brood of his twelve adolescent children: Reuven, Shimon, Levi, Yehuda, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Yissachar, Z'vulun, Dinah (a daughter), and Yoseph. No doubt he is proud well past the point of denial.

You may recognize these names as the exact names of Jacob (Yaakov)'s children in the Old Testament or Tanakh. The reason for these names was because when the already middle aged Reb Yaakov was told that after he and his not particularly young wife's difficult years of conceiving, an angel appeared to Reb Yaakov in a dream, and in response to Reb Yaakov's insistent demand for a blessing, announced to Reb Yaakov that his wife would bear him twelve sons, which Reb Yaakov must in turn name after the twelve tribes of Israel.

The children come in six sets of twins of absurdly quick succession over five years between 1880-1885. Never mind in what order, it doesn't matter, but all of whom, like the miracle Reb Yaakov knew would happen that everyone else doubted, survived into adulthood, albeit with many illnesses along the way that were meant to test if Reb Yaakov's faith is truly unbreakable. All eleven of his sons are now Bar Mitzvahed, and while to his disappointment he has a daughter in addition to all eleven, the now septuagenerian Reb Yaakov eagerly awaits the birth any day now which his unnamed sexagenarian wife will give to what he absolutely knows will be his twelfth son, whom at his bris shall be named Binyamin.

Of course, Reb Yaakov has a twin brother himself, Ezra. Unlike Reb Yaakov who cannot make more money on his own than a small town teacher's salary can afford, Ezra is a wealthy man in the nearest Polish city., Bialystok. And while most shabboses Ezra goes to deh greicer shul in Bialystok (burned by the Germans, 1941), he has by and large abandoned Judaism as Reb Yaakov understands it for palant, kielbasa, and the occasional shiksa factory worker whom his shaygets foreman brings and takes away under night cover, and while Reb Yaakov has no idea of Ezra's disreputably goyisher habits, he is well aware that Ezra's much more 'enlightened' wife Ada has nothing but contempt for Reb Yaakov's unchanged ways, and through her perhaps correct pressure, Ezra is forced to consistently cut the sums he sends Reb Yaakov to feed his children, who now are old enough to work on their own.

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As I said, we begin in the Kheder class of Reb Yaakov, who is very free with the ruler and constantly berating his luftmenschen for their lack of attention and refusal to sit still. And incidentally to the story, by the way, the narration will be entirely in English, but the characters will speak in a kind of Yid-lish patois which gives the character of the language while still hopefully being intelligible to the average English-speaking reader.

Reb Yaakov sits with them at the head of an unstudy square table that has been in the property of this cheder since 1772 (repaired in 1793). Year after year, whenever a vildeh chayehs is bored, they rock the table without even realizing what they're doing, and every year, the batayt that they find Reb Yaakov boring drives him a little more meshuggeh.
Today's drasha is a particularly poignant one for Reb Yaakov. The gerekhteh Reb always tied his lessons to the Parsha of the week: and this week's parsha, Vayeshev, is the story of Onan, Tamar, Yehuda, and Er. Tamar, the beautiful bride whom a series of husbands refused to blemish by making her pregnant, and always spilled their seed upon the ground during shtupzeit. Every Judaica teacher has their favorite stories, and every time Reb Yehuda taught this story, he had to fight back tears as he thought of his wife forty-five years ago (never mind her name), how beautiful she was when they first met at the khuppah of their wedding, and how a lifetime of a childless marriage had worn her beauty down to a nub, and just when he thought she could not get more ugly, how a second lifetime of raising twelve children wore her down further from a meeskeit into a mekhasheyfe. This eshet khayil, who was always everything to him, whom he gemakhted lebe to every night for forty-five, and when she was no longer beautiful, he blew the candle out and gemakhted lebe in the dark to the beauty she once was and to his eybik lebe for her to this woman who obeyed every command and gave her entire life to everything he asked and demanded, and whom he always suspected his ba'ager for her completely destroyed her beauty and her happiness.

But yet again, when he teaches Vayeshev, the students can't repress their laughter, the mention of sheynkeit and geshlekht, and one at a time, each of his talmids breaks down into a fit of giggling. Yedes yahr it's the same with these vildeh khayas. And finally, Reb Yaakov can't take it anymore:

NIBZEH L'AZAZEL KHALERIYA!

It's the funt fun tzurikkummen, he just can't stand their naarishkeit anymore, their skhok v'kalos rosh, and if ever there was a moment when held back his rage before (and there weren't many), he didn't hold it back this time. "Is Dreyfus going through all this just so you mamzerim can dishonor his sacrifice?!"

If this were a theater work, then what follows would basically be a nervous breakdown of exposition in which he relates precisely the story of his life as related above. He tells these pischers everything of his long life's past of which they couldn't care less, and then tells the story of being passed over as the new town Rebbe after decades of faithful service and sacrifice to a town whom he'd taught everything they ever knew. He compares these naarisher pischers to his model Yiddisher Kops ( whom he raised correctly to be menschen and tzaddikim. And how Hashem has finally rewarded him for his greyceh tzuris, with a final child, whom he knows will be a son he shall name Benyamin, and whose tzadeykkes will put them all to shame.