East of Time by Jacob Rosenberg Page B

Sport  
    Imbued with the spirit of the forthcoming Berlin Olympics, some of our fellow citizens embarked on a new yet generations-old sport: pogroms. The old cry went up: The Jews! — no one really knew why. But things seldom appear to people the way they really are, only the way they want them to be, and suddenly the land of my birth began to mushroom with pogroms — many, many pogroms. I will relate only the one I witnessed myself.
    A mob of university students, in league with some individuals who were intellectually inept, rushed into the house at Zawiszy 7, home of my school friend Zisza Kliger, who dwelt there in a windowless flat with his younger brother and widowed mother. The soberly irrational Olympians ripped apart the only bedding the Kligers possessed, let the feathers fly all over the street like petals of snow, threw the mother’s ever-hungry cooking-pots out the window, and knocked her unconscious into the bargain for trying to protect us.
    Warming to their task, they made for the home of my friend Huna Kurbic, who lived next door to the Kligers. Huna’s father was a gardener, and the only Jew in the city of the waterless river employed in the public service; he was also an old revolutionary who had fought against the Tsars for the independence of our country, and although hardly in his prime, he would not have let these rascals as much as spit in his porridge. But they quickly overpowered him and gave him a good thrashing, andfor his temerity he was sacked from his job — for planting (as a bitter jest had it) Jewish trees in Slavic soil.
    Encouraged by their successes and by the quiet acquiescence of the authorities, and filled with zest to emulate their Berlin contemporaries, our local heroes soon renewed their crusade; they reappeared on the corner of Zgierska and Limanowskiego, where they caught the seventy-year-old Alter ‘Herring’ (so called because he dealt in that variety of fish). Two medical students who were part of the gang gave him a proper physical, and to crown their victory they tipped Alter’s barrel of herrings into the gutter.
    These outbursts and other similar demented deeds and disturbances stirred our town’s two organized trade unions into action. Jewish workers, together with an admixture of other men of goodwill, decided to make a stand. The next ‘sports event’ was scheduled for Sunday, right after the morning church service. The racial athletes gathered under their party flag on the local marketplace, Bałucki Rynek, fervently intoning their saintly hymn:
    To our last drop of blood
    We’ll defend our People’s right
    Till we rid our sacred land
    Of the ugly Hebrew blight.
    Every Jew is a deadly foe
    So help us God,
    So help us God.
    The name of the Almighty was invoked in profound solemnity, with eyes closed.
    Haughtily, and in crisp military step, they entered Limanowskiego, my street. But to their bewilderment, they found themselves met by a wall of sternly resolute men armed withiron bars. For a moment they stood there as if paralysed. And then, hoodlums being by their very nature cowards, they took off in all directions, dispersing like a cloud of dust driven off by a gust of wind.
    However — as I would learn later, much later — this dust never actually disappeared. It found shelter and settled, to reemerge all too soon from out of the dark crevices of time.

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    Â  The Improviser  
    My little friend, pimple-faced Shmulik, lived with his parents and three siblings in an attic no bigger than an alcove. Shmulik was a born improviser. You’d say a word and he’d come back at once with a rhyme. On top of that, Shmulik had the voice of an angel. He could soften a stone with his singing. The young cantor of our local synagogue believed that we had Shmulik’s voice to thank for all the mercies the Almighty bestowed upon us.
    But our landlord Motke was of another mind. We kids, he said, were the