Every time I come, Grandpa Yosef is in the midst of some burning matter, rushing past me, does-he-look-like-someone-who-has-time-to-sit-and-talk-about-what-happened-fifty-years-ago? Yet he is eager to talk of the voyage raging inside him, and very soon he sits me down, rids himself of all sorts of nuisances, including the ones I bother him with, and tells me offhandedly about Grandpa Lolek’s status. He looks at me sternly: What do I mean by coming here and demanding miraculous improvements in the health of someone lying in bed like a sphinx? What could be new? Then he reaches out with impatient fingers to the bag I’ve brought, pulls out the clothes Anat prepared for him, the neatly cut sandwiches with little stickers noting the content of each one and whether they should be refrigerated. He nods, mumbles, “Thank you very much,” and can’t resist biting into the first sandwich, supplementing it with some coffee from a thermos. He sips and munches.
It seems to me that we both try to time our shifts so that we are together. But in fact Grandpa Yosef does most of the shifts, sharing days and nights with Effi too. One morning, between shifts, she asks me, “How many Aktionen were there in Bochnia anyway?” Atalia, at the end of a shift, asks me something about the ghettos. And I slowly begin to comprehend that the voyage is taking place during their shifts too. Or perhaps there is a completely different voyage going on there. The same places, the same events, and yet a different voyage. Grandpa Yosef does not divulge — he divides and conquers.
I come to take over from Dad on one of my shifts and find him and Grandpa Yosef laughing. They were recalling a day in Dad’s childhood in Bochnia, when his mother sent him with his sister to the dayan-posek, the arbitrator, to check if the chicken for Shabbat was kosher even though she had found a tiny imperfection in it. Dad and his sister spoke only Polish, the dayan only Yiddish. With great effort they memorized their mother’s question, learning the words by heart: di mame hot geheysn fregn a shayle oyb dos hindl iz treyf oder kosher. But on their way to the store, the syllables scattered in disarray. The two walked on worriedly, rapidly losing their arsenal of words as they neared the dayan. By the time they arrived, only a few confused letters and one simple phrase remained, a few sounds at the end of the sentence.
Dad and Grandpa Yosef laugh as they reminisce, and I realize there is no happenstance here: Grandpa Yosef is in the same era with everyone, the era of the voyage. I am not enough for him. During Dad’s shifts the voyage slips through. It is planted in Atalia’s shifts too. In Effi’s shifts a twin voyage sneaks in. Grandpa Yosef is producing enough baby voyages to conquer the expanses of the family.
“Life went on after the Sperre. Those who had gone, were gone. Those who remained were overcome by hunger, thirst, and a will to live. It is hard to believe how quickly people went back to discussing the affairs of the day — potatoes, soup, the prospect of a cabbage shipment. Gradually the streets healed from the Sperre and, wondrously, new Jews flowed into the ghetto. As if the Germans had forgotten that they had evacuated Jews because of over-crowdedness, they continued to bring in more and more. Although I had not been taken away, I myself became a ghost after the Sperre. No one came close to me; they wouldn’t dare. But I needed friends. My town of Bochnia was far beyond the mountains and the darkness, and the Jews here did not want me. Feiga was gone. I was not going to find her. It seemed the hunger and loss had weakened me so much that I no longer had the strength to get up and continue searching for my little bird. My legs longed to take me to Feiga, to awaken my heart. But my heart, what could it do? I could not just pick up my hat and go. All I could do was tire out my legs. There was not a day when I did not roam the ghetto in circles. I needed people, needed to talk, to socialize. I wanted to pray, to share a prayer with other Jews. I wanted to join a prayer minyan, to contribute my voice. But after the Sperre all religious life was forbidden, holy studies punishable by death. Even marriage ceremonies, when permitted, were conducted by Rumkowski. He was given sort of captain’s duties. People gathered secretly to study and went on praying in underground groups. Me, they fled like the devil, exercising extreme caution.
“About a week after the end of the Sperre, Yom Kippur came, on September twenty-first. The ghetto was preoccupied with work, food and sickness. I walked far, as far as my legs could carry me, as if that were my way to somehow mark the torments of the holy day. And behold, from one of the houses emerged a distinguished Jew. He looked at me with penetrating eyes and asked, ‘Would you like to pray on this holiest of days?’ And wonder of wonders, he took me into an alcove in the house, where a secret prayer group was squeezed into the cellar. Jews wrapped in prayer shawls looked up at me and nodded their welcomes. I was handed my own tallis. A moment later, I, Yosef Ingberg of Bochnia, was praying in a minyan. Guess who this miraculous man was, who dared to come out to me, to look into my eyes, to see that I was merely a Jew seeking prayers, not an agent or a chief agent?”
Grandpa Yosef wants me to guess. I give up. “Well, who was it?”
“It was Mr. Hirsch. Yes, Mr. Hirsch, the man who sometimes wanders through the neighborhood.” He looks at me, detecting trains of amazement running over my face.
“Hirsch?”
“Yes, Mr. Hirsch. Now you have to make an effort and replace the person you know with his image from the ghetto days, when he was still an honorable rabbi, one of the senior beadles of the Admor of Tipow. Soon after I arrived in the ghetto I had noticed him on the streets; he stood out because of his great height, which did not result from the length of his body but from his gait — upright, arrogant even. He walked proudly through the ghetto, fraternizing only with similarly Orthodox men. They lived as a collective, a cohesive group from Tipow, obeying the rulership of their rabbi, the Admor, daring even to defy Rumkowski and his gang. In every matter they held Rumkowski accountable. They negotiated with him fearlessly over food rations and work quotas and housing. Everything. The Admor of Tipow gave the word, and his disciples went to battle.
“After the prayers, where I had been the tenth man to complete their minyan, Hirsch did not dismiss me. For some reason he attached me — not to his group, God forbid, but to himself, solely to himself. I found myself strolling the streets with him, just the two of us. We spoke a little, but mostly we were silent. Most of the words were spoken by Hirsch. He thought out loud, gave me his homiletics, and the things I heard from him I never imagined I would hear. Until the war I had been a man of Torah, I had studied diligently, but what I had learned was unlike anything I heard from Hirsch. He spoke pearls of wisdom and his persona was lofty and exalted, splendor in his appearance and splendor in his heart. To him, only to him, I poured out the entire truth, that I was not an agent nor anything of the kind. Only with him was I bold enough to let down my guard. I also gave him Ahasuerus’s money. I told him to take it and give it to charity. But Hirsch only shook his head and laughed bitterly. ‘Why would we want your money?’ he asked mockingly, as if I had offered something forbidden.
“Sometimes he would erupt in fits of anger, accusing the whole world, accusing assimilated Jews, modernism, even myself. Sometimes there were long silences and I walked beside him quietly, waiting for his foul mood to pass. But usually he was in good spirits, and his Torah was as sweet as honey. During the hours I spent with him, life seemed to grow larger. It was so easy to believe that there was a world beyond the ghetto walls, and it was as if my soul had already been set free, comforted. I felt myself a man of freedom, walking wherever I pleased.