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.
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, in case you haven't noticed, most of 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, except for the gentiles, who will speak in a similar patois that mixes English with their native languages of origin. But the narration, rather, will be entirely in English, except for those many moments when the author forgets to hold up the wall of segregation between narration and character speech, during which moments the narrator shall carelessly slip into the Yid-lish of his many characters, perhaps even in the scenes where the characters speak American English.
But in any event, Reb Yaakov sits with his students at the head of an unsturdy rectangular table that has been in the property of this cheder since 1772 (repaired in 1793). Year after year, whenever a vildeh chayeh is bored, this wild animal they call a talmid rocks the table without even realizing what he's doing, and every year, the batayt that the students 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 Torah Parsha of the week: and this week's parsha, Vayeshev, is the infamous Biblical 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 Yaakov's 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 wore her beauty to withers, 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 mekhasheyfeh. This eshes khayil, who was always everything to him, to whom he gemakhted lebe to every Friday night for forty-five years, and many regular nights too, and when she was no longer beautiful, he blew the candle out and gemakhted lebe in the dark to her neshawmeh, to the memory of the beauty she once had, and to the eybik lebe he had for this woman for whom he always knew he'd been all too mazeldik in their shatkhan, and that she'd been all to shlemazeldik; who conceded to his any unreasonable demand, whom he heard crying from other rooms in their years without kinder, and who had no time to ever cry again in the years since all those births - all so frequent and fecund. That woman he so lebed but never knew if she lebed him back, and whom always suspected his ba'ager for her destroyed both her beauty and her glik.
Und yet again, when he teaches Vayeshev, the students can't repress their gelekhter, all those mentions of sheynkeit and geshlekht, and one at a time, each of those so called 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!
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 and lets loose at them the worst curse a Jew can utter to another Jew in 1900: "Is Dreyfus going through all this just so you mamzerim can dishonor his sacrifice?!"
And if this were a theater work, then what follows would become a nervous breakdown of exposition in which he relates precisely the story of his life as related both above and below. 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, a boy whose tzadeykkes will put them all to shame.
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We immediately cut to four of the brothers smoking cigarettes in the Jewish cemetery: which? Perhaps Shimon, Asher, Yisachar, and Z'vulun, because... why not.... And the last mentioned of whom is pisching on the headstone of Rabbi Chaim Schkop, the deceased last year Bransker Rebbe who seemed to live forever, and by the standards of memory before the actuarial expectations of the modern medicine era, apparently did live forever. Rabbi Schkop was born, as one of those all too heavy-handed literary coincidences would have it, on an unspecified date in June 1815. Historically minded readers would put his birthday right around the signing of the Concert of Europe at the end of the Congress of Vienna, which created the Austria and England dominated long peacetime of the European 19th century. Were anyone ever to read this book, perhaps a literary academic with a particular passion for symbolism would read the stability of the Congress of Vienna into the auspicion of Rebbe Schkop's birthdate and biography. But Jewish-minded symbolists would note that June is the month of Shavuos, when Hashem gave us His Torah and His (or it's) laws. And within Rebbe Schkop's infinitely long beard was the lawgiver of Bransk, the judge, the man whom for sixty-five long years sat all too patiently in the study of his house, which we of the shtetl and its descendants refer to as the Bet-Din, the 'House of Judgement', within which a Rabbi functioned as its Philosopher King in virtually every shtetl in the Pale of Settlement: for the Jews of his town, he was judge and jury, legislator and executive, professorial lecturer and school headmaster, giving his ear to every legal dispute from trivial to grand between any two Jews, serving as both their prosecutor and defense, so that legal issues might be solved within the community, and as many Jews as possible spared the terroristic might of the Czar's law.
And it was just in year one of Chaim Schkop's long tenure that the great Rebbe found his star pupil, the ten year old Yaakov Kharlap. Little Yankele was one of those Illuim, a potential Shas Polack whom by his Bar Mitzvah seemed able to recite all twelve books of the Talmud Bavel from memory, or at least soon he would.
On the weekend of his Bar Mitzvah, Reb Yaakov was given the Pin Test. A pin was placed at random in the book of Tehorot, it landed on daf fifty four, Reb Yaakov was asked the seventh word of line 18, he got it right (this writer is not going to take the time to look up the word himself...). He then was asked the seventh word on line 18 of page one hundred twenty six. He did the same feat when asked to name the place of specific words in Zera'im and Kodashim. Three books. But when he got to Nashim, Reb Yaakov failed the Pin Test (another piece of heavy handed symbolism for those who get the Hebrew), and never would he be a Shas Polack in his Bar Mitzvah year, and dreams of him being an illui so precocious to be celebrated throughout the pale would never come to pass. Were he to memorize the Talmud by seventeen or eighteen, just another Shas Polack would he be, good for a wedding party trick, and however good their memories, those Shas Polacks were rarely good for any khokhmah that students could actually use.
So Reb Yaakov was thirteen, Rebbe Schkop was twenty-three and thin enough to walk through a torah scroll - barely able to stand up straight even at that age. The spine of Rebbe Chaim Schkop's ectomorphic frame curved another few inches every decade until he could barely face his plaintiffs and defendants without lying down face up on a bed which Avraham the carpenter built specifically for that congested room of halacha, and which Rebbe Schkop seemed to issue his judgements from for sixteen of the eighteen hours a day he heard cases from his all too contentious nakhgeyers. From the moment in 1848 (more heavy-handed symbolism) when Rebbe Schkop could no longer stand up straight, everyone expected Rebbe Schkop to breathe his last on any day, and joyfully give give his neshawmeh to Hashem, and take with him all the freylikhkeit of the town for whose presence he brought so much joy, even if he could never dance with that freyikhkeit himself, to be replaced by that unhuman encyclopedia who'd taught every Jewish man in the town from his 1.8 million word (give or take a few) Talmudic suppository. And Reb Yaakov waited for Rebbe Chaim to die for ten years, twenty, thirty, forty... and in 1897, year 49 of Rebbe Schkop's krankeit, when two milkhikers were arguing for the fifth time that year about which of them had the right to distribute their dairy to residents on which which streets, the Rebbe fell ashlof in his bed, an old man and full of years, never to wake. And yet he still did not give up the ruakh until the end of 1898, year fifty, existing in a twilight state in which Reb Yaakov, now seventy-three himself and in the perfect health of a mensch who had twelve children at the age of sixty, had to function as both Rebbe and School Melamed, Din Torah, and father tzu tzwelf kinder, Rebbe Yaakov fainted in his kheder on the very day Rebbe Schkop went to schlaf with his fathers, and for a few hours Reb Yaakov too was presumed gathered to his people. The town makhers wrote immediately of this miraculous emergency in which both their beloved Rebbe and his Yursh dropped dead in the same hour (give or take a few...). The Mirrer Yeshiva immediately wrote back that this was a sign that Bransk would need a truly greys neue Rebbe, and they would send one of their most promising young khokhams. For fear of making him faint again, no one told Reb Yaakov that the Mirrers had given Bransk one of their greyster yunge khokhams to become the neuer Bransker Rebbe until the morning of the neue Rebbe's arrival, and Rebbe Yaakov only learned when he saw a boy people called Rebbe Weberman move into Rebbe Schkop's old house.
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Anyway, we not so immediately cut to four of the brothers smoking cigarettes in the Jewish cemetery: which brothers? Perhaps Shimon, Asher, Naftali, and Z'vulun, because... well, who cares.... And the last mentioned of whom is pisching on the headstone of Rabbi Chaim Schkop.... Perhaps if he were asked, he would say he is trying to avenge his father's ignominy, but this narrator frankly doubts Z'vulun put that much thought into it.
"Don't fucking pisch on the Rebbe!" Shimon knows he shouldn't be surprised but he's stunned even so.
They're standing around a copy of a Yiddish newspaper, reading about the injustices done to some guy named Dreyfus in France,
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