Zalmund’s father, Isaak, was an overseer of the Koszuty estate. Isaak started as the bookkeeper for the elder Rekowski. Kosiński kept him on because of his familiarity with the operations, and certainly not because he liked Jews. Isaak was successful in organizing the house accounts, and since the Kosiński couple produced no heirs, Isaak continued on inconspicuously managing the business of the estate while the Kosiński’s maintained their social and political circles. At the turn of the century, Isaak guided the addition of a small shoe making operation and then a leather goods shop to the estate. When Maria Kosiński died in 1911 Witold held a wake and funeral the size of which Koszuty had never seen.
Isaak’s reward for his work was to be assigned the task of collecting rents and taxes from the tenant farmers and shopkeepers of the estate. As was tradition, Witold gave Isaak a commission on whatever he collected. Over the years, Isaak grew rich, at the cost of the resentment of the Catholic townspeople. Isaak moved his family from an apartment above a bread shop in the nearby Jewish village to a stand-alone wooden house on the grounds of the Mansion. He had dreams of a dynasty and purchased a seat in the synagogue on the front row on the east side, a place of honor. His wife, Miriam, was a meek and unpretentious woman. She kept a traditional house for her husband and son Zalmund and enjoyed a pious life. Her health was never good after a miscarriage when Zalmund was four. She was uncomfortable with the move from the apartment right before Zalmund’s bar mitzvah. Isaak insisted on hiring an older Catholic widow from the town to serve as a maid to relieve Miriam of the household tasks. Although his intentions were benevolent, he took from Miriam her identity that she had learned from her mother. She took to her bed, and Zalmund did not remember her often leaving that room of their house.
When Zalmund was 14, Isaak sent him to the Novorodok yeshiva in Pinsk. He hoped to instill in him a traditional education, which would bring him a significant bride, while relieving Miriam of the obligation to keep a home for her son. Isaak was sure that he could teach him how to run the Koszuty Estate. By the time he was twenty, Zalmund received his degree of s’micha, or ordination in the rabbinate. It was a purposeless career of study that ill-suited a brooding and edgy boy, but it made his father proud.
Zalmund returned home to Koszuty in 1906, but it was a difficult time for Russia. Unrest had forced the Tsar to accept a Constitution in 1905. By the next year he regretted his decision. The war he instigated with Japan served in some way to unify the country behind him. He found another outlet for discontent in sponsoring pogroms against Jews. His supporters formed the Black Hundreds, a secret fraternity organized to murder, pillage and rape in the shtetls. Jews were libeled as enemy conspirators in the War. Of course, it was undeniable that many Jews formed the backbone of the socialist revolutionaries and anarchist opponents of the Tsar.
The Black Hundreds brought the savagery to Koszuty in the Spring of 1906. On a bright Sunday afternoon, the drinking started early after a rousing sermon in the parish church by a visiting monsignor from Kyiv. By mid-afternoon a team of two dozen Black Hundreds horsemen galloped into the main square, shouting patriotic slogans and urging action against the plague within their town. They brought torches and single-shot game rifles and marched to the Jewish village outside of town, murdering everything in their path. They burned the synagogue, market stalls and the flimsy wooden homes, and the Black Hundreds captain made a show of trampling the Rabbi under the hooves of his horse. After they left, the grieving survivors lined up eighteen corpses of children in the street for a picture. The photograph became a postcard that was circulated around the world as an icon of a pogrom.
Isaak, Miriam and Zalmund remained protected on the estate grounds, but they were not shielded from the resentment of the surviving Jews. Why had Isaak not interceded with Kosiński to protect them? Why had he turned his back on his fellow Jews? Isaak was sick with guilt. The shtetl grossly overestimated his influence with Witold Kosiński. Isaak took orders like all the mansion servants. Could he have protected anyone? Could Kosiński have stopped it if he wanted to? Not likely at all. But the inescapable truth was that Isaak did not try.
Zalmund was acutely aware of the family’s isolation. He was no longer welcome in the makeshift synagogue. He had no vocation and his marriage prospects evaporated. His mother was an invalid in the upstairs room who did little more than inquire about his health. Then she rolled over and stared at the wall with vacant eyes. Isaak was a practical man and sent Zalmund back to Pinsk for studies and work as a bookkeeper in a sugar mill of a business acquaintance.
Zalmund did not return to Koszuty for seven years. He took successive jobs in business and spent time in Warsaw. He had two serious marriage prospects which fell through after his father’s objections. When his mother developed early signs of dementia, Zalmund returned to prepare to accept the management of the Estate. War in 1914 then quickly engulfed the Polish territory, which was partitioned between Germany, Austria and Russia. Poznan and Koszuty lay west of the front in German land.
By that time, Zalmund was 25 and the widowed maid had died. Isaak hired a young girl named Deena Wójik from the town to take care of Miriam and his household. Deena’s father was a tenant farmer who walked each day from his small home to work his parcel. He paid his rent in crops and needed the hard currency that Deena brought home for his wife and son. But he hated Jews in general and especially resented Isaak as his overlord. He swallowed his pride with a mighty gulp each Sunday morning when he walked to the Hofitz home to escort Deena to church.
Deena was a pretty girl as a child, with a translucent complexion and flaming red hair, and attracted much attention from the boys in the few years she attended school. She took great interest in her studies and outperformed the boys but was squelched at every turn. “You’ll be a fine farmer’s wife,” she was told. “Don’t make your face wrinkled with studies. You will nurse many babies!” When she went to work in the Hofitz’s house at 14, the attitude of the town changed. She was now the Jew’s whore, and she was shunned at stores and church. For her part, she turned her heart cold to them. She felt inside her a great curiosity about the world, but inside school she was told not to learn and outside she was told not to work. Her father loved her but could not help regarding her as a foul necessity. Her mother, pretending or not, was oblivious to all the stigma, neither comforting her daughter nor condemning the crowd. Deena developed an aloof demeanor of protection and simmered with teenage rebellion.
Isaak was a secretive and controlling sort and did not leave many serious tasks for Zalmund. He lounged around the house with a book in his hand, eyeing Deena’s maturing beauty as she carried out her chores. He teased her on occasion, and she relished the attention in her lonely routines.
One day Deena saw Zalmund reading. “What do you have there?”
After a pause, he said “the Bible.”
“Your Torah?” Deena, asked, showing off her knowledge of Jews, which exceeded most of Catholic Koszuty.
“No, your New Testament,” he replied. He raised the book to show her it was a copy of her Church approved version in German. “It’s a very nice story. A poor boy is born a bastard in a small town. No one likes him because of it. He apprentices as a carpenter, but he doesn’t like that. He studies to be a rabbi, but no one will give him a pulpit. He finds a small town, Capernaum in Galilee, in which to preach. Soon he gathers around him very young students that no one else wants. He preaches against the authorities, and advocates love. These teenage boys eat it up and adore him. Well, you know the rest. It doesn’t end well for him. Sad.”