“Back then, though, on the night before the breakout, the disagreement in the ghetto was so violent that a fight broke out. Rabbi Shirman, who was already well past eighty, pacified them all. He was suffering from prostate cancer. Isaak operated on him in the castle. Well, it wasn’t much of an operation. He just inserted a catheter. The rabbi stood up on a chair and everybody fell silent. He said that he would stay, he had no intention of leaving. Those who had not the strength to leave should stay, but those who did have the strength should escape. Isaak said we would leave and we did. Your mother also left, taking her son, but Naum stayed behind. Nobody knew she was pregnant, only Isaak, because she had come to him a short time before and asked for an abortion. He refused because the pregnancy was so far advanced.” Esther shook her civilized head. “And you can see he was right—such a lovely girl was born, and survived.”
Esther looked very wearied, and it was late. We agreed to meet again and I left.
I have a strange feeling. I have always wanted to know about that time, and about my father, but now I am suddenly afraid. I want equally strongly to know and not to know, because for so long I dragged my past around and it is only in the last few years, with Grisha, that it has fallen away from me. Ewa, that little girl from the Polish children’s home in Zagorsk and the teenager from a Soviet orphanage, seem no longer to be me, just stills from a film I saw long ago. Now I have an opportunity of finding out how everything actually happened. I still cannot imagine what could make a young woman, a mother with two children, hand them over to a children’s home. It still seems to me there must be something there that I do not know.
2. January 1986, Boston
E
STHER
G
ANTMAN
I had supposed that by my age no new people would come into my life. In the first place, all the vacancies in my heart had already been used up by people who were dead. In the second place, here in America there are many worthy people but their experience of life is extremely limited, and that makes them rather flat and cardboard creatures. I also suspect that old age forms a kind of shell and your own emotional reactions atrophy. Isaak’s death also revealed how dependent on him I was, and am. I do not suffer from loneliness, but I notice it envelops me like a fog. Ewa has suddenly materialized in the midst of these rather melancholy feelings. I sense something fateful in her appearing. Here is a young woman who could have been my daughter. It would have been good to discuss this with Isaak. He was always able to say something insightful and even unexpected despite our complete agreement about everything. What would he have said about this girl? The very fact of our meeting is extraordinary. Even more amazing is that we got around to talking about Czarna Puszcza. Her mother, that Kowacz woman, was a complete monster. Isaak thought she was a Soviet spy. He always said the Jews are a driven people. He put Jewish zealots, especially the Hassids with their silk hats, ridiculous caftans, and patched and darned stockings, in the same psychological category as the Jewish commissars, ardent Communists and members of the Cheka secret police.
The second time we met, Ewa said something similar about her mother, only in a different way. It is amazing that she saw this despite having no intellectual sophistication or even a decent education. She is evidently very strong-willed, and honest by nature. She wants to tell the truth to herself and about herself. She questions me avidly. One time she stayed until two in the morning and, as I later discovered, her husband suspected she was having an affair or something of that sort. This is the third time she has been married. Her latest husband is an émigré from Russia, ten years younger than her and, she says, a successful mathematician.
In our conversations we always come around to that area that Isaak found so important and germane. He was forever joking that there wasn’t a Talmudist in the world who had thought at such length about the Lord God as he, a nonbelieving materialist.
She is young enough to be our daughter. Indeed, we were together in the forest at that time but she was born not to us but to other parents. Isaak used to say that in the twentieth century for Jews to have no children had become as much a gift from heaven as having many was in historical times. He never wanted children, perhaps because we weren’t able to have any. When I was young I shed many tears over the insubstantiality of our marriage, and he comforted me by saying nature had made us elite. We had been freed from the slavery of giving birth to children. It was as if he foresaw the kind of future that awaited us.
When we came out of the ghetto and found ourselves in Czarna Puszcza he asked me, “Esther, would you wish that we had three children right now?” I honestly had to say no. We left Europe after the Nuremberg trials. Isaak was included as an expert witness as a doctor, a captive of the ghetto, and a partisan. After the trials we had an opportunity to emigrate to Palestine, a year before the creation of Israel.
Ewa asks so many questions that I have decided to reread the notes Isaak made in those years. Actually, he was writing a book, but in fits and starts, and he kept putting it off “till later.” He died in his sleep at seventy-nine years of age, before he was old. He was robust and energetic. He never retired and the book remained unwritten.
Ewa is asking me about her father, Bauch. “Perhaps there is something about my father in your husband’s papers? What if I have brothers or sisters? You understand, Esther, I’m a child from the orphanage. All my life I have dreamed of having a family!”
Isaak’s papers are in perfect order, the notes sorted by year. I am a little afraid of opening them. Ewa said she would be happy to help me sort the papers—he wrote his notes after the war in Polish but switched to English in the late 1950s. I declined. It would be impossible to put his notes into somebody else’s hands. As it happens, all the events relating to the 1940s were described many years afterwards. Not even in Israel, but after we came to America, after 1956, when he was invited here to work.
One other thing surprised me in what Ewa has told me. When she was three months old she and her brother were put in a children’s home. Their mother was busy organizing the Gwardia Ludowa, fighting the Germans, and then being imprisoned in Stalin’s labor camps. She was released in 1954 when Ewa was eleven or twelve. Her brother, Witek, did not live to see his mother’s return. By that time Ewa was already a little Roman Catholic.
She is very pretty. Outwardly she belongs to the Sephardic type, with heavy black hair and a plain face, nothing overdone. Eastern eyes, not languid but fiery, like Isaak’s.
3. 1959–83, Boston
F
ROM
I
SAAK
G
ANTMAN’S
N
OTES
I have been interested all my life in the topic of personal freedom. It always seemed to me to be the supreme blessing. Perhaps in the course of a long life I have managed to take a few of steps in the direction of freedom, but one thing I most certainly have been unable to overcome or to free myself from is my national origins. I have not managed to stop being a Jew. Being Jewish is something intrusive and final, like the accursed hump of a hunchback, and it is also a beautiful gift. It dictates one’s logic and way of thinking, fetters and enfolds us. It is as irrevocable as gender. Jewishness restricts your freedom. I always wanted to move beyond its confines, and did, and wandered footloose down whatever roads I chose to follow for 10, 20, 30 years, but at a certain moment realized I had got nowhere.