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 with what (we hope) will be by far the longest of the tales - the crown from which this creation springeth. '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 (Meyshe) 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 Yitzhak Bashevis, 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 at least half of this work in fiction that reads not unlike fact.
And so while Reb Moshe Kharlap did not truly exist, there were thousands of men recorded by census like him, which even in the backward environs 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 Kheyder instructor - Kheyder 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 Torah and Talmudic tractate. He is an alte mensch of the alte shul, interpret that in English how you'd like, people who know Yiddish would fight about whether it's even idiomatic to translate foreign idioms into Yiddish (as they do everything else), but Reb Yaakov was 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 almost 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 Ezra attends to 'deh greicer shul' in Bialystok (an ornate synagogue burned by the Germans in late 1941) most shabboses (meaning sabbaths, though you could have figured that one out), Ezra has, more or less, abandoned Judaism as Reb Yaakov understands it for dishes like palant, kielbasa, and a parade of shiksehs, comely factory workers whom his shaygets foreman brings and takes away under night cover for which he handsomely pays both, and while Reb Yaakov has no idea of Ezra's disreputably goyish (actually goyisher) habits, he is well aware that Ezra's '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 earn their own.
As I said, we begin in the Kheder class of Reb Yaakov, who is very free with the ruler and constantly berating his luftmenschen (an untranslatable insult) for their lack of attention and refusal to sit still. And incidentally to the story, by the way, the characters of this story 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. In many future stories, please be warned, the writer will do by and large the same for whatever mother tongue (mamehloschen...) which the characters speak. For those manifold obvious emergencies when you truly won't know what it means, the writer will translate graciously, along with some additional commentary.
Reb Yaakov sits with them at the head of an unstudy square table that has been in the property of this kheyder since 1772 (repaired in 1793). Year after year, whenever a vildeh chayeh is bored (wild animal - really 'wild coyote', though how did anybody in the shtetl knew what a coyote was...), they rock the table without even realizing what they're doing, and every year, the implication that they find Reb Yaakov boring drives him a little more meshuggeh - are you really crazy enough to not know that word?
Today's drasha (lesson) is a particularly poignant one for Reb Yaakov. The judicious (gerekhteh) Reb always tied his lessons to the Parsha of the week: and this week's Torah portion (parsha), Vayeshev (who cares), is the story of Onan (Onan), Tamar (Tamar), Yehuda (Yehuda), and Er (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 (sexytime, I have no idea if 'shtupzeit' is a word but everybody else makes up Yiddish words...). 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, whom we shall allow to remain nameless in a masterstroke of heavyhanded symbolism about the lack of woman's agency in normative Judaism - a trait obviously not shared by any of the world's other major faiths. Reb Yaakov recalled every day how beautiful she was when they first met under their wedding canopy (khuppah), and how a lifetime of childlessness wore her soul's glow (neshawmeh) to ash, and just when he thought she could not get more ugly, how a second lifetime of raising twelve children wore her down further from meeskeit into mekhasheyfe (from garden variety ugly into a witch). This woman of valour, who always was everything to him, to whom he gemakhted lebe (finished making love) every Friday night for forty-five years, and when she was no longer beautiful, he blew the candle out and gemakhted lebe in the dark to her soul, to the beauty she once was, and to his eybik lebe, his eternal love, to this woman who obeyed every command and gave her entire life to everything he asked and demanded, and whom he always suspected his once distractingly sinful desire 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 (beauty and that thing which you stick into beauty...), and one at a time, each of his students breaks down into a fit of giggling. Every year it's the same with these vildeh khayas. But even if this portion did not mean to Reb Yaakov so very much, it is so particularly important to teach them Vayeshev, because here is the urgent message that God might kill them if they don't wait for marriage to schtup... I have no idea how to say masturbate in Yiddish... But Reb Yaakov can't take it anymore and as he finally hits Gimpeleh on his hand, utters one of those basically untranslatable curses uttered by Kheyder teachers along the Czarist Pale:
NIBZHEH L'AZAZEL KHALERIYA!
He just can't stand the naarishkeit anymore - their foolishness, their light-mindedness (skhok v'kalos rosh), and if ever there was a moment when he held his rage back - and there weren't many, he didn't hold it back this time. After hitting the unfortunate kindt (kid) four times, one of the other kids points out that one of the kid's fingers looks crooked, but that one should have known better - it only makes Reb Yaakov angrier. He orders all the kids hands on the table and proceeds to work his anger out on each one of them.
Laughing at the Torah... Laughing at women. Generation to generation of light-mindedness and ingratitude to your mothers... While you're busy not learning Torah they're making sure you don't starve and freeze... One day all of your wives'll be sick of your disrespect to women and demand all the things men have, and then where'll the world be?... And finally he utters the ultimate admonition of this era: "Is Dreyfus going through all this just so you mamzerim can dishonor his sacrifice?!" (Mamzerim, by the way, means bastards, and there will be plenty of those in this book.)
How did Reb Yaakov, how did his family, end up teaching generations of zhlubs (schlubs) like you?! We all needed them like a hole in the head! Fifty years teaching this stinking (farshtunkener) Kheyder, just like his father and grandfather and great-grandfather before him... It was the death of all of them.... He's the only one who lived past fifty and now he's almost seventy and still stuck with you donkeys!... (khamers)
Teaching all their Tatehs and Zaydies who had cowsheads just like them... Waiting for the town rabbi, Rebbe Schkop, to retire so he might get a few years in his place and a decent pension to pay for his eleven children (kindter) instead of the bupkes (literally 'little shits') their parents give him... We said to him 'may you live to a hundred twenty' so many times and he lived to a hundred and would issue rulings from his bed!
Ach, alright, may Rebbe Schkop's memory be a blessing... But then their parents, more naarishkeit... They get a new Rabbi... God forbid a Kharlap be a Rabbi for them for a few years before he plotzes into the ground too... Another generation of Kharlap rebbes passed over for a little pisser (pischer) straight from the Yeshiva barely older than them who doesn't know life from the lamed vav (don't worry what that means yet...) Schmeggeges, all of them...
But like so many teachers with Borderline Personality Disorder, Rebbe Yaakov is as quick to love as he is to hatred, and when he notices that Bontsheleh has broken down in tears, his rage immediately quells into compassion. He takes the poor boy in his arms and kisses him on the knuckles where he'd just emptied so much fury.
They know he has love for all kinderlach, don't they? They know he has love for their fathers who he taught when they were smaller than them. He even taught Tevyeleh's grandfathers, both of them! They know (zey vissen), kindter are his life, he just needs them to learn so they can be a light to the goyim just like their parents have always been.
He has them sing Oeyfn Pripitschik, the song he's taught fifty years of kids: "It's warm in the little house, and the rabbi is teaching little children the aleph beys (ABC's). Remember children, remember dear ones, what you learn here, repeat and repeat again...."
The tatalehs sound beautiful. I know stuff is hard and boring...
He's up there, He's watching. He knows which of you are learning (leyning) good and which are leyning bad, but when you have trouble, you talk to Him, right during the Shomeh Esrei when all the grownups are schuckling back and forth going "Maaaanehmanehmanehmanehmanehmanehmanehoyriboimnosheloylamesistsoschverunsoshvachunoymeintzurismeintatehisaschnorrermeinmamehisabalebusunmeinbriderisabeheymeunmeinbubbehisamekhasheyfehunikhveysvos"
The longer he does this schtik the harder the kids laugh. So he says to them:
"Just between you and me... and Him,... you don't have to do it."
Every Jew in a prayer service chants the Shmoneh Esrei, the 'eighteen blessings', twice. Once silently to themselves, then once as a congregation. Why does anybody really need to say the Shmoneh Esrai twice? Hashem doesn't hear us the first time? Maybe it's because we're supposed to use that time to say to Hashem, take a look (geb a kook), I know I'm a bad leyner, but I'll try to be good. Just try harder to be good and He'll give you as many chances as you need till you become good, because you are good. You're kinder and you're good, because all kinder are good, and you don't have time yet to become the rashas (bad ones). You know He'll listen, and I know He'll listen....
And though he tells it once a month, he tells them the story of his dream. The trouble (tzuris) having babies for 25 years, the promise of twelve sons that need to be named after the tribes of Israel. Then five sets of twins in quick succession, then one more (he doesn't even mention Dinah...).
But then! Today! Five minutes just before he left for Kheyder, Reuven tells him his wife (weib)'s in labor, and he knows they're gonna have a twelfth son.
The class claps and for one second he turns into rage again: DON'T CLAP! He spits and yellingly warns them not to tempt the evil eye. After the birth you can all sing him a Mazel Tov and even tonight they'll all come over with their parents and we'll all do a l'Chaim, and in a week we'll do it again for the bris - that thing Jews do on the eighth day...
But here's the reason he's telling them the story. His sons, Reuven, Shimon, Levi, Yehuda, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Yissachar, Z'vulin, Yosef, and soon, one more... He raised them to have Jewish heads (Yiddisher kops). They know all his kids: Reuven, Shimon, Levi, Yehuda, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Yissachar, Z'vulin, Yosef... every one of them is a righteous one - a tzaddik. They all love God, and God loves them. They do the commandments (mitzvahs), they go to shul, they work so hard, they help their Mama (Mameh), they help other Mamehs, they help everybody in the Shtetl, and that's what Hashem (God's nickname) gives you if you believe He will.
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