Dear Boychik,
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 it'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 (we'll explain what that is later but for the moment, just think Jeffrey Epstein crossed with Hannibal Lecter), and forced baptisms (think Ernie in a bathtub with Mel Gibson). 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, is involved with your family's history.
It's tough to know what to say about our family before your alter 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 Joel was born, your alter-zaydie wanted us to name him after his alter-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 alter-Zaydie couldn't even remember his own name, so instead of Joel, 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 alteh-Zaydie's birth was a pretty terrible one: Rosh Hashana 1899. 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 Shimon, who was clearly a hot tempered type, got roughed up by a gang of Polish hoodlums who left him for dead after he told them that their priests and boyars were murderers. I mean.... he was probably right, but don't let anybody tell you Jews are smart, some Jews if they were twice as smart they'd be idiots. But apparently later that same day, your uncle Asher killed one of the Polish kids who roughed up Shimon so he already had to leave Bransk before the big news.
What was the fight about? 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. And for five years, Reb Yaakov probably was the only Jew in Bransk with enough money and literacy for a newspaper subscription - he probably bludgeoned his kinder's oyers with every new detail of Dreyfus and his legal dybbuks. He probably brought new news of Dreyfus to the denizens of the Bransk shul, all of them his former talmids, who never much considered why they cared so much for the tzuris of a wealthy Jew in the French military who after after five years in prison would probably shpay on them in the street. They probably cared much more about Reb Yaakov's vissen and khokhma than they ever did when they were his students. Reb Yaakov probably told his kinder every day over breakfast after their mother would awaken them at four-thirty every morning to milkh deh kauz and plau de felds before they go to shul for Schacharis, and then tzu arbet.
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 changed '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!
I think it was me, Asher, Naftali, and Z'vulun, maybe it was Reuven not Z'vulun but who gives a drek..., We were 'Deh Kharlap Khaleryehs' and we came to the cemetary to smoke papiros, trink vodka und zubrowka; literally tsu pisch und dreck away the tags, to shpring und shrey. We'd tzurikommt six times a week for more than five years to lean on the headstones of all the Bransker Rebbes. No macher ever saw us, Jew or shaygets. Who had time during arbet? Even if they did, no Yiddisher kop would ever go outside their own house to show they had gornisht besser tzu do during a weekday.
It was still early morning but we all were shikkured and either Reuven or Z'vulun was pisching on the headstone of the old Bransker Rebbe, Rabbi Khayim Schkop..... Asher was offended, "Don't fucking pisch on the Rebbe!" We knew we shouldn't have been surprised but we were stunned that Z'vulun broke off from crowding around the latest Yiddish paper which Tateh hasn't even seen yet, looking at this kadkokhes in France. We were all couldn't believe what we were seeing. I remember some of what we all said: "Look at the schmattes on this amoretz! This guy's as Jewish as the shtupping Pope!" "Look at the stripes on his fucking hoot! And what the shtup is that mustache? "How can a Yid who dresses like that not be guilty?" "And what's with all the fucking knepls on his shirt? What color is that even?" "It's, you won't believe this... Yosef told me.... The French uniform is red, white, and blue!" "Reyt, weiss, und bleu? How the fuck do the zelners go to the feld without the other soldiers knowing where to shoot them a hectare away?!" "Even a feinschmeker like this guy wouldn't walk into a barber and say 'MAKE THE MUSTACHE LOOK LIKE THE HAIR OVER MY PUTZ!" "Seriously, why the fuck do all these alte trombeniks give a dreck about some French faygaleh?"
We didn't realize we were watched, it never seemed that way before: "And who's the faygaleh here?" "Tak, we know what that word means!" Less than twenty meters away, right next to the cemetery's wooden fence; it was six Polish boys, I remember all their names because we spent our lives trying to avoid them: three of the Kowalski brothers, whose father Yakub Kowalski was known through all the shtetls nearby as 'der Yid merderer', along with Franczisek Nowak, Filip Wiśniewski, and Aleksander Wojcik. The shortest of these schloggers was a foot hecher than any of us. "Look at these dupeks! Laughing sie na cemetery!" "Smoking papieros too!" "They probably think że sa special cuz they can read!" "Well even if they're smieching sie na cemetery they still look as stupid as every other Zhid."
Jan Kowalski unzipped his fly and started to pisch on Rebbe Chaim Schkop's headstone. Asher got offended again and started "Oh don't siki..." but stopped himself. Every Yid knew fluent Polish in the old country.... "Don't siki on what?" asked Szimon Kowalski.... So Asher said "Never mind..."
Jan shrekked "GIVE ME THE NEWSPAPER!" Jan dropped the newspaper and pished on the picture of Reb Dreyfus. "So what were you zhids reading about?" "They were probably learning more magic spells!"
Shimon always had a schlekhter temper and shrayed "Nie don't know any magic spells." I warned him right away not to say any more. Kowalski said to him "Look at these letters!" and shoved the pisch-filled newspaper into Shimon's face. Szimon Kowalski piped up "This is probably the newspaper where you learn the magicznych spells that killed our baby sister." "Tak." Jan resumes. "We hear all about your family. A rodzina where all the kids live to być adults? That's fucking black magia!" The other Kowalski chimes in next "You're probably here so nobody can hear your plans to poison our blyading wells!" Shimon's meshuggeneh temper couldn't hold it any longer. "Well maybe if your kind cleaned their shtupping wells once in a while your kid siostra wouldn't get sick and die!"
Everything went as silent as deh Rebbe. "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?" I shouted to him "Shimon zey shtil!" but he couldn't help himself: "Go back to your shtupping Boyars and Priests! They knew it this whole time and kept it from you to keep you stupid!"
"Are you calling our Holy Fathers liars?"
"They're fucking thieves and rapists and merderers!" At the same moment, Naftali and Zvulun bolted away. Nowak and Wiśniewski grabbed ahold of Shimon from either side and Shimon shouted "Asher, helf mikh!" But I hesitated for a few seconds. One of the Kowalskis said "Well Asher, are you going to help yo...?" I was over the fence and already run so far away I didn't even hear the end of the sentence, I.
Five minutes later, Shimon told me the Polacks left him for dead. He had scars and cigarette burns on his face for the rest of his life.
I spent the next couple of hours weeping, thinking I was responsible for Shimon's merder. Ikh hat tzu do something about it. Shimon dying might have been the start of other Yids getting killed, even andere Kharlaps, and I could have stopped it or at least shown them they have a reason to be scared. I was an idyot, I honestly getrakhed that if I avenged Shimon, it would stop the violence not make it worse. So I went to our yard, got a meser, went to the Kowalski house and hid in the bushes. I waited all day. Nobody kummed aheym. I knew Mameh was in labor and we'd have a L'Chaim that night, but if Shimon was dead, it's not like it would be much of a Simcheh anyway.
I was no match for Jan Kowalski and eventually it occurred to me that the Kowalski boys would probably come home together. Eventually, by fimf a-zeyger, Mameh Kowalski, Anna, came home. She was the only person in the house and soon other people would be home. She must have been drey-hunderd pounds and six feet hekh, she might have been pregnant for all I remember. I came up behind her, grabbed her mouth and neck, and I slit her throat and must have stabbed her in the stomach nine times. She never saw me or turned around but I heard tschooking noises and I could swear she said 'ZHID! ZHID! I ran out of the house, ran into the woods and cried some more. All my clothes had blut everywhere, my hents, my arms and legs, even my panim. I didn't even try to wash it off. I just went back to my mishpoche's house to tell them everything, but when I got back, half my briders had blood on them, the other half had bruises and scars.
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 as meshuggeh as meshuggeh gets (and in you haven't realized by now, so is most of your entire mishpocha except your Zaydie), so if the freu was six feet tall and three hundred pounds she could have tzubrokhen him in half. But whatever happened it was definitely a bad day for the Kharlaps.
No comments:
Post a Comment