Isaac's Torah Read online

  ALSO BY ANGEL WAGENSTEIN

  Farewell, Shanghai

  Originally published in Bulgarian as Petoknizhie Isaakovo by Izdatelska kushta “Khristo Botev,” Sofia, 2000.

  Copyright © 2008 Angel Wagenstein

  Translation copyright © 2008 Elizabeth Frank and Deliana Simeonova

  Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  Text design: Natalya Balnova

  Ebook ISBN 9781635421354

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Wagenstein, Angel.

  [Petoknizhie Isaakovo. English]

  Isaac’s Torah : concerning the life of Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld through two world wars, three concentration camps, and five motherlands / Angel Wagenstein; translated from the Bulgarian by Elizabeth Frank and Deliana Simeonova.

  p.; cm.

  ISBN 978-1-59051-245-6

  1. Blumenfeld, Isaac Jakob, 1900—Fiction. 2. Jews—Ukraine—Fiction. 3. Jews—Ukraine—Social conditions—20th century—Fiction. I. Frank, Elizabeth. II. Simeonova, Deliana. III. Title.

  PG1039.33.A37P4813 2006

  891.8′134—dc22

  2005034311

  Publisher’s Note:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  a_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

  If the Lord had windows, they would long ago have smashed His panes.

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Angel Wagenstein

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Instead of a Foreword

  Isaac’s Introduction: A Letter to Rabbi Shmuel Ben-David

  Isaac’s First Book: How I Went to War, in Order to Bring Victory

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Isaac’s Second Book: The End of My War, or How I Became a Pole

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Isaac’s Third Book: The Red Front, or the Five-Year Plan Speeded-Up

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Isaac’s Fourth Book: “To Each His Own,” or to the Concentration Camps, with Love

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  The Fifth Book of Isaac: “Shnat Shmita.” Once More, from the Beginning. About the Black Sun and the White Nights.

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Final Apocalypse of Revelation

  Author’s Acknowledgments

  Translators’ Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Instead of a Foreword

  Except for the title of this work, if I may call it that—because it is nothing more than a conscientious transcription of another’s memories and reflections—I have not invented anything, since any intervention of mine in the narration would be like a liter of vinegar in a cask of good wine, and any embellishment like a pinch of yeast and salt that could only spoil the sanctity of Easter bread. Everything you will peruse a little further on, my dear and unknown reader, even the most incredible twists and caprioles in the destiny of Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld, was told to me by the man himself, from the beginning, in the renowned and prestigious Russian Club, in Sofia, and later at his home in Vienna, at Margaretenstrasse 15.

  Mr. Blumenfeld used to supply a Bulgarian firm with sewing machines and other equipment for making ready-to-wear clothes, and he looked me up on his own, because he had seen, on television, somewhere in the West, a film based on a screenplay of mine about the fate of the Jews. I thank Fortune for this meeting, because it has enriched my life with yet another friendship, and by what else does a man become enriched if not by friendship, love, or wisdom?

  I want personally to thank as well Isaac Blumenfeld, who never stopped being astonished by my interest in his life, on behalf of which he gave me access to surviving letters and the scanty traces of things like diaries, documents, and snapshots, testimonials to the abominations of one epoch, but also because of which he made me feel that this planet has never lacked good joyous people with sad, intelligent eyes. Such, for example, as Sarah Blumenfeld, here in this little old snapshot, who left with her children for the mineral baths, and arrived, not there, but at the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Such as, staring at me from a photo unglued from a document, the good rabbi Shmuel Ben-David, probably much like the many other inhabitants of the little town of Kolodetz near Drogobych—Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian—who turned into smoke passing through crematoria chimneys and now shepherd the white flocks of clouds through the limitless blue meadows of God. Here also is a certificate in English stamped with the seal of the Eighth Corps of the North American Army, which testifies that Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld was liberated from the camp Flossenbürg (Oberpfalz), Germany, and that he was permitted to set off with the American military forces for Vienna. There is, as well, a slip of paper serving as a paid baggage receipt, filled in with violet ink and sealed by the prosecutor of Yakutsk, certifying that citizen so-and-so was freed on October 7, 1953, from the camp in Nizhni-Kolymsk, northeastern Siberia, and must therefore be considered completely rehabilitated by reason of lack of evidence of crime. There are also five documents, according to which Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld was, consecutively, an Austro-Hungarian subject, a subject of Zhech Pospolita, that is, the Polish Republic, a Soviet citizen, a person of Jewish background residing in the eastern territories of the Reich and deprived of citizenship and every kind of civil right, and, at last, a citizen of the Federal Republic of Austria.

  I gaze with love and sorrow at the little portrait of this plump, freckled person, with a wreath of reddish hair that sticks out from the bald spot on his head, who made me swear not to publish even one page of his biography as long as he was alive. And here, today, is a telegram from Vienna with black borders. I rea
d it through the blurring filter of my tears and vow neither to keep anything back nor to add one word to the new Torah, or, as you might call it, the new Pentateuch of Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld.

  ISAAC’S INTRODUCTION

  A Letter to Rabbi Shmuel Ben-David

  Grüss Gott! Cheshch, pani i panovie! Zdrastvuite, tovarishchi, and Shalom Aleichem! In other words, peace to you and to your home. If you ask me how I feel, I would honestly reply: thank God, excellent, because things could be even worse. But even if you don’t ask me, I’ll still tell you—because have you ever seen a Jew who can keep to himself what he’s already decided to say?

  I’m not young anymore, I’m sitting on my terrace in Vienna—my wonderful eternal dream of Vienna—I’m drinking coffee and reflecting on various matters concerning Life. Around my completely bald pate, a golden wreath of hair, which was once, if you remember, copper-red, is shining against the descending sun. A more poetic writer would compare it to the halo around the head of a saint, but as I consider myself a sinner, who survived by chance the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah, it rather reminds me of the ring around Saturn. Because what is that ring if not remnants of old worlds, planets broken into shards like clay pots, asteroids, national myths—“eternal” truths and revelations, ground into ashes and dust—which turned out to be less durable and more poisonous than an old can of fish, Reichs that were supposed to last for millennia, while they couldn’t even count to twelve, empires smashed to bits that turned into midget-states, and cruel maniac dwarves, self-proclaimed immortal emperors, dictators, fathers of nations, great leaders and prophets, who would poop in their pants if after their deaths they could only read what the grammar school history book says about them.

  All these remnants from the past are circling not only around Saturn but also around my head, so that I can understand that, from the times of Nebuchadnezzar, enslaver of the Jews, till the present day, nothing much has changed, or as that genius bastard, who signed himself by the mysterious pseudonym “Ecclesiastes,” put it, all is vanity, what was, will be, and what has been, will be done again: I saw everything that is done under the sun, and here—it’s all vanity and chasing after wind…. That’s what he said—or something along these lines.

  Someday I’ll try to tell you how my five most cherished dreams, which we’ve discussed more than once, were fulfilled. Now, at the sunset of my life, I know that for one human life this is no small thing—to live through five dreams-come-true, for which I should have thanked God and fate, if things were not a little strange: I feel shy about saying this, but those dreams were actually never mine. As a matter of fact, everything was the result of the political situation, and I was never interested in politics, just the opposite—politics was interested in me and kept setting for itself the goal, or as the government leaders would say, “the task of tasks and the main priority,” of fulfilling my most cherished, as they insist and they’re probably right, historic dreams, so to speak. They are five, as I’ve already mentioned, those dreams-come-true of mine, and five are the books of Moses, which proves without doubt that my tribe is God-chosen, and so destined to have its dreams realized. And therefore I, as a minute speck of dust from this tribe—or if you wish, a little ant from our ant colony dispersed around the world—have the right to my own piece, to a percentage or bonus, or something like shares from this joint venture of the God-chosen. On the other hand, when I think about what’s happened to the Jews through the counting of the endless prayer beads of Time, and when I add up my own modest invoice, including Value-Added Tax, I will myself cry out, like that bard who roamed our lands under the name of Peace to You: “Thank you, God, for the high honor, but couldn’t you have chosen some other people?!”

  Please, don’t look for any logic in my destiny, because it was not I who directed the events, but they who directed me. I was neither the millstone nor the water that turns it around, I was just the flour, and mysterious remain for me the ways of the Miller, glory to His name eternally and unto the end of time.

  Don’t look for logic either in the historic events that determined my destiny—they don’t have logic, though maybe they have some hidden meaning. But is it given to man to know the secret meaning of the tides and of the sun and the early blooming of the snowdrop, of love and the mooing of the cow?

  Don’t make me, brother, begin the explanation of the political situation with that shot in Sarajevo that I am so fed up with, when some high school student with the strange surname of Prinzip shot our dear, beloved, unforgettable, et cetera, et cetera, and so on, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Because the First World War was ripe as a festering boil in Europe’s womb and was going to burst even unprinzipled, that is, even without the foolish shot of this Prinzip, as if, let’s say, some German diplomat in Stockholm had slipped on a banana peel, dropped by chance by the French representative of the Michelin company. Please, don’t look for logic either in the fact that my dear motherland Austria-Hungary and its unconquerable army, under the wise leadership of General Konrad von Götzendorf, raced to shove itself even deeper into the conflict exactly when even the last idiot could have guessed that we were already losing the war. Is there logic in the fact that all true subjects of Austria-Hungary most zealously wished for the breaking-up of the Habsburg empire into small states, suspicious ethnic unions and tectonic federations, waving national flags and wiping away their tears and snot while they listened to the performance of the “Hey, Slavic People!” song, and are now sobbing by the broken washtubs and remembering Austria-Hungary as the “good old days”?

  Tell me, my dear brother, is there logic in all that? Or in the fearful joke of Greece and Serbia, who held hands like little brothers as they jumped into the bloody abyss on the side of the Entente, while Turkey, this eternal English spy, without a single known reason, turned against England, and Bulgaria sided with its enslaver of five centuries and leaped into the war against Russia, its liberator, which in its turn…et cetera, et cetera, and so forth.

  The First World War is the first whale on which, as the ancient people say, my story will rest its foot. The second whale, of course, is the Second World War, and if now, as I’m stepping on it with my other foot, I start exploring the meaning and meaninglessness of this most frightful of all wars, I’ll most probably be torn to pieces at the very beginning, because historic whales only very rarely swim parallel. In this connection, it will suffice only to remind you about those eternal and sacred national ideals, as a result of which during the First World War, Germany was a mortal enemy to Italy and Japan, and during the Second World War proclaimed them its blood brothers and entered with them into a similar eternal and sacred alliance.

  Let’s forget the grief from this most frightful war; it’ll turn into a dull ache from an old rheumatism. It is characteristic of humans to forget the bad, because if they only think of death and of those they’ve lost, the plowmen will cease to plow, the young to make love, the children to repeat syllables and words—these golden beads on the string of thought. We’ll forget the pain and then the meaning of wars will come down to that old, ancient anecdote, which you’ve probably heard a hundred times in a hundred different versions, but that I’ll still tell you, because can you stop a Jew from telling a joke when he’s already made up his mind to do so? So, somewhere in Galicia, a Jew and a Pole are walking from one little town to another. The Jew, who always thinks himself cleverer than the rest, and so, entitled to give them advice or to make fun of them, points to a smoking horse turd on the road and says: I will give you ten zloti if you eat this turd. The Pole, shrewd like any peasant, has nothing against making ten zloti. Okay, he says, and, frowning and gasping, he eats the turd. The Jew gives him the ten zloti, but soon feels sick to his stomach when he thinks that he gave away all this money for a stupid thing like that. So the next smoking horse turd he sees, he swallows hard and says to the Pole: will you give me back the ten zloti if now I’m the one who eats the turd? Okay, says the Pole. The Jew frowns and gasp
s but even so swallows the turd and gets his money back. They continue down the road, until the Pole stops, scratches the back of his head, and says: Listen, if you Jews are so smart, could you tell me why we ate those turds? This time the Jew says nothing—an extremely rare event.

  So if you ask me about the meaning of everything that happened during the two wars and in between, I would in turn answer your question with a question that doesn’t have an answer: Why did we, indeed, eat that shit?

  I don’t know, my dear brother, if you’ll ever receive these lines of mine, because you too are like a leaf blown by the whirlwinds of destiny and chance, which you in your Marxist way consider an ordinary logical occurrence, and you Marxists so marvelously predict, and even more marvelously explain the reasons why your predictions don’t come true. But who but Jehovah or rather Yahweh, whom you renounced (I’m not blaming you for anything, everybody is right for himself), was able to predict or could have foretold that you, the good rabbi of our little town by Drogobych, would later become a labor union activist and chairman of the Atheists’ Club? Could anyone have foretold that our paths would cross again at the barbed wire of the Flossenbürg camp, and that they—these camp fences—a symbol and a road sign of the Epoch, would divide us at the crossroads—you over there, and me over here? Did anyone on earth, in hell or in heaven, know that destiny would be so generous to us, and instead of disappearing into the gas chambers or Jewish paradise, we would meet again—oh, joy, do you remember!—in the Gulag, somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Kazakhstan? But you, ZEK 1040-260 P, as a political case had to go to the left, to dig Stalin’s White Sea-Baltic canal, and I, ZEK 003-476 V, as a war criminal and traitor to the motherland, was just coming from the bottom of the Archipelago, where I was the interpreter of captured barons, marshals, and et ceteras, bearers of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves, who so intelligently, through common efforts, thank God, had managed to lose this war too. For me, the insignificant Jew, a private from the Austro-Hungarian army, and later on an honest Soviet worker in Sewing Workshop No. 6 (this was my father’s atelier, Mode Parisienne, do you remember?), for me it was a high honor to serve the chevaliers of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves. Learning that I was a simple soldier, they asked me to polish their boots and bring their metal cups of oily tea, though they never learned that I would dart behind the barracks and piss in that tea of theirs. One time Baron von Rodenburg, whom—do you remember?—the Russians caught in the lavatory of the Leipzig railway station, while he was getting into a housemaid’s clothes so he could sneak out to the Americans, so this baron once said the tea tasted a little different that day. I mumbled that the night before we’d had turnip soup. He conceitedly asked what there could be in common between the turnip and the tea, and I dared mention that all the phenomena of our existence, Mister Baron, sir, are connected by a mysterious metaphysical link. The baron looked at me through his monocle and said: you’re a smart-aleck Jewish philosopher. How right he was, this baron!