Unfortunately, the mountainous land they crossed was sparsely populated and what peasants did live there were poor, so all they got for their wares was food — cheese and smoked meat. Still, they continued on their way, until they happened upon a band of Jewish smugglers selling supplies to both French and German troops across the German-Swiss border and were able to get a good price for the food. That led father and son to alter their plans, and for the next two years they traveled back and forth between borderland and hinterland with cartloads of food and alcohol. Then, in the third year, the entire family, which had increased by one member, crossed over into Germany.
Thanks to his close ties among the smugglers there, Nachmia started working as a middleman himself, and soon he was doing well enough to build a house. But in 1815 a group of Italian mercenaries who refused to pay picked a quarrel with him, stabbed him and David to death, threw them into a pond, and made off with their wares.
After finding and burying her husband and son, Nachmia’s wife, Sarah, sold their house and moved deeper into Germany for security. Her second son, Moise, worked as a hired hand and, having proved strong and industrious, was made steward by a local landlord. He took a wife, fathered a son and two daughters, married off his two sisters, found employment for his brothers on the estate, and buried his mother when her time came. But in 1848 the peasants rose up in rebellion and burned down both the mansion of the landlord (who had escaped to the town) and the house of his steward. The frenzied mob murdered Moise, raped his daughters, and tossed them all into the fire. Nor were his two brothers spared. Only his wife, Rebekka, and his son, Eleasar, who had fled to the woods during the fire, survived.
Rebekka and Eleasar found shelter with a kind miller in town, but since the riots in Baden continued, they decided to join Rebekka’s brother David, who was moving with his family to the eastern part of Germany, where, rumor had it, things were calmer. But Rebekka died en route, and David and Eleasar, who found pogroms raging all over Germany, headed south to Austria and from there to Moravia and Brno, where they found a fairly large Jewish community. David set Eleasar up as an apprentice to a kosher butcher and then traveled on with his family in the direction of Galicia, never to be heard from again.
Eleasar soon learned his trade and the ritual laws that went with it, married the butcher’s daughter, and took over the business when the butcher died. As a result of the law of 1879, he became the first of his line to have a surname: Blahm. He fathered three children: two sons and a daughter. His daughter married a man from the village; Blahm made the older son, Samuel, his assistant and apprenticed the younger son, Jufka, to a tailor.
After Eleasar’s death, Samuel took over the business and Jufka moved north to the town of Ostrava, where, caring little for the not particularly remunerative tailor’s trade, he took a lame but well-to-do bride and opened a tavern. He was soon left a widower with a son and daughter. He married the daughter to a businessman by the name of Josef Ehrlich, who took her and her dowry to Vienna to open a shop. Samuel kept his son, Jakob, at home to help him in the tavern.
Jakob grew up motherless but pampered and soon proved to be a good-for-nothing, playing cards and billiards with the customers instead of waiting on them. He married a girl from a distant Slovak village (no one in Ostrava would have him for a son-in-law) and fathered two sons, Heinrich and Wilhelm. Since Jakob led a dissolute life, his father-in-law gave him the following ultimatum: either he moved in with his in-laws and lived an honest life or his wife and sons would leave him. Jakob decided to make the move and began helping his father-in-law in the shop, but continued to gamble and carouse. He died at the age of thirty-two, falling from a bridge into a ravine while drunk.
Heinrich and Wilhelm were brought up by their widowed mother and their grandfather. Heinrich was kept at home to work in the shop, while Wilhelm was sent to the Pressburg Gymnasium. After five years Wilhelm quit school and found work on a newspaper, delivering messages at first, then canvassing for classified ads. Two years later he decided to try his luck in Budapest, attracted by the city’s colorful newspapers that had come his way. He was determined to become a real newspaperman. But when Budapest proved the last place for him to realize his dream, he moved on, first to Szeged, then to Novi Sad, where he at last landed a job on a local paper. He lost it with the fall of Austria-Hungary, but soon after — thanks to his knowledge of Czech and Slovak, which contact with the local population gradually developed into Serbian — he managed to become a reporter for the new Serbian daily Glasnik (The Herald), which later turned into Naše novine (Our News). Wilhelm Blahm had become Vilim Blam.
The family into which Blanka Blam, née Levi, was born came to Novi Sad from the opposite direction, from the south, from Serbia. Her great-great-grandfather, Meir, a livestock merchant, left Smederevo in 1820 (the town was no longer safe after the Turks departed) and moved up the Danube to Petrovaradin with his wife and two sons. He failed to gain admittance to the town, and when he tried to ply his trade outside the moat surrounding it, he was informed that non-Christians were forbidden, under pain of exile, to deal in livestock. As a result, he opened a tavern in a mud hut and lent officers and their men money at interest. When the authorities learned of his usurious activities, they sent him packing and set the tavern on fire. Meir and his family headed for Erdut, but on their way they were attacked and robbed by a band of highwaymen. Meir was killed.
Meir’s widow, Mariam, found shelter with the Jews of Erdut and worked as a servant in their houses. Soon after their arrival, her elder son, Gerson, set out into the world as a peddler and never returned; her younger son, Isaak, thanks to the connections of some Erdut Jews, went to work for a Novi Sad shopkeeper by the name of Adam Hirschl. Isaak took a wife in Novi Sad and brought his elderly mother to live with him. He tried to open his own shop, but the municipal authorities turned down his request, so he moved to the village of Rumenka. There his wife bore him a son and a daughter. During the Revolution of 1848 the rebels robbed him of everything he owned and the Austrian troops, called in to take revenge on the rebels, burned his house to the ground. Mariam died, and Isaak fled with his family to Kać, where he too died four years later, never having recovered from the loss.
His widow, Rava, supported herself as a greengrocer until she married off her daughter and went to live with her. Her son, Nathan, married into money and opened a tavern. Nathan had six children: two daughters and four sons. Three of the sons found employment in shops in the vicinity, and the fourth, Avram, became the municipal inspector of scales.
Avram married and fathered two children: Karl and Blanka. He wanted them to have an education, and when he learned that the Jewish community of Novi Sad was looking for a business manager, he applied for the position and accepted the offer of a monthly salary. Karl enrolled at the gymnasium but died young of tuberculosis; Blanka attended the local secular school. When Avram unexpectedly died — of tuberculosis as well — his widow, Regina, moved back to Kać, where she lived with her sister and helped run her shop. Blanka stayed on in Novi Sad with her mother’s relatives. It was there that she met and married Vilim Blam.
BLAM WAKES UP.
In the final throes of his dream he is standing in front of a thick glass wall watching several figures twisting, writhing. Since the light is poor, he sees them as a blur of simplified forms, a skein of snakes crawling about with no direction or purpose. Yet he can somehow tell that they are people rather than snakes, and he senses that something terrible is going on there — pain, convulsions, death. Though horrified, he is also irresistibly drawn to the wall. He moves toward it with leaden steps, and the closer he gets, the clearer it becomes that there is in fact a tangled mass of human bodies on the floor behind it. Suddenly a figure detaches itself from the pile, rises to its knees, then to its feet, and reaches the wall at the same time as Blam. Blam stops, and the figure on the other side leans against the wall, pressing its hands and face to it. The hands squeeze out a blood-red color and gradually turn yellow; the face squashes flat, the nose broadening like a ripe fig, the mouth dividing into two leeches, the chin twisting into a pear, and finally the eyes meet the glass, two large goggle eyes whose eyeballs the pressure of the glass enlarges like water rings. The face, deformed as it is, looks familiar to Blam. He strains to connect its twisted features and faded complexion to something in his memory. His mind runs through the circle of his acquaintances and narrows until it comes to a point in the center and Blam realizes with amazement that the face is his own.