On Sundays Zev liked to go down the street to the upholstery shop and argue with that lackey of capitalistic decadence, Reb Avner Wissotzky. Reb Wissotzky had owned Wissotzky and Sons for most of his life. It was a small shop with only three employees, but it did a brisk business before the war. Now with the textile shortage he had trouble filling his orders. The ones he could fill paid him a premium, so although he worked less, he was still able to pay his employees and provide a decent living for his wife and three daughters.
When Zev walked in that day he spotted Wissotzky in the back at his battered desk, going over the company’s books. Even though it was Sunday, the shop was busy. The workers were Jews and since their Sabbath ended at sundown on the previous night, they were expected to come in and work. With the help of his crutch, Zev dragged his leg through the shop and passed two workers who were tying padding onto a sofa frame and a third worker who was in the corner, cutting fabric on a long work bench. The floor was littered with scraps of material and overhead discarded chair frames hung from the rafters. There were piles of foam padding and bags of down feathers stacked up against the walls and specially designed heavy-duty sewing machines sat on a few tables around the room.
Zev nodded to the workers, calling them by name and asking about their families. He had tried to organize them once, but they wanted none of it. Wissotzky paid them a livable wage and they worked only ten hours a day. They got off for Passover and the high holidays, without pay of course, but once a year they were all invited over to Wissotzky’s house for blintzes and schnapps served in ruby red glasses with thin gold rims. Zev didn’t have any real hope of organizing them. He just did it to aggravate Wissotzky and, in that, he was wildly successful.
“Have you seen this?” Zev asked, throwing down a crisp one-hundred- karbvanet note, newly printed by the fledgling Ukrainian state.
“Ya, so?”
“So look at it, right there.” He pointed to a line in Yiddish that read HUNDRET KARBOVANTSES. “There, see? Official. Even the government is saying that Yiddish is the official language of the Jews.”
With the fall of the czar in March 1917 and the rise of the Kerenskii government, a liberal democratic regime, Jewish allegiance wavered between the Provisional Government in Petrograd and the Ukrainian Central Rada in Kiev. At first it looked like an easy choice. The Jews had always thought of themselves as Russians. They had more in common with the Russian intelligentsia than with the Ukrainian peasantry. But as the Provisional Government began to falter in the summer of 1917, Jewish sentiment began to shift to the Rada. By the time the Kerenskii government fell to the Red Guards on the night of October 25th, the various Jewish factions were embroiled in ideological minutiae over how best to implement the autonomy that had just been granted to them. There were the socialists, who refused to deal with the bourgeoisie; the secularists, who wanted to keep the rabbin-iate in their place and the Torah out of secular life; the Bund, Poale Tsion, Folkspartey, and the Fareynikte parties, who wanted Yiddish as the official language; and the Zionists, who favored Hebrew. While all this bickering was going on, reports of scattered pogroms in the west went largely ignored.
Wissotzky picked up the money and stared at it. “The Rada tells you what language you speak and that’s it? Now it’s Yiddish. Done. Just like that. How long do you think this government will last? Till suppertime… till morning prayers?” He wadded up the bill and threw it back at Zev. “You think I care what they print? What they say about my language? And who will be printing next, the Germans, the Bolsheviks? Maybe the czar will return—may an onion grow out his navel. Now you listen to me, Mr. Know-it-all, Hebrew has been the language of the Jews for over five thousand years. So don’t come to me with this horseshit about the official language. The official language is Hebrew. It always has been, always will be.”
Wissotzky was a slight man with a generous moustache that hung down nearly past his chin. His black hair was streaked with gray. His eyes were small, amber, and shot with flecks of gold. He was a religious man, but not as religious as some. He wore no beard, just the moustache, his coat was cut short, no side curls, and his tzitzis was tucked under the waistband of his pants. When he was fuming, as he was now, he slapped the back of his hand against the palm of the other, enumerating all the reasons why he was right and Zev was wrong.
“Nu? What are we speaking now? I don’t hear Hebrew. Maybe my ears are plugged or my brain stopped working, but what I’m hearing is Yiddish.”
“That’s because you’re an ignoramus and you don’t speak Hebrew.”
“Right, me and everyone else.”
“There are plenty of people who speak Hebrew.”
“Oh yes? Where? Here in the shop? On the street corner? Hey, Pincus, you speak Hebrew?”
The man looked up briefly from the cutting table and shook his head. He was too smart to get in the middle.
“People speak Yiddish because it’s the mother tongue. Everybody speaks it, unless they’re in shul or a pompous ass like you. If you weren’t such a stubborn fool, you’d see what I’m talking about. It’s the new order. The new order… the twentieth century, Wissotzky, wake up!”
“Feh! New order! What kind of an order doesn’t respect God’s language? Doesn’t respect the Torah? You can keep your new order.”
They went on like that for some time, their impassioned voices filling the shop despite the hammering and the clatter of the sewing machines. Even though these two disagreed on most everything, there was one thing that they could agree on, and that was the pleasure of spending every Sunday morning proving that the other one was a witless fool and that everything he believed in was unreasonable, unlikely, or just plain wrong.
They were so absorbed in their argument that they failed to see three soldiers dressed in the uniform of the Kuban Cossacks standing in the doorway of the shop. One of them had a bolt of fabric wrapped up in burlap on his shoulder and was discussing with the other two the merits of stopping at this shop or going on to the other one down the street.
“What is it?” Wissotzky called out in Russian, when he looked up and saw them standing there.
“You interested in brocade?” asked the one carrying the fabric. He seemed to be the one in charge. He was young, somewhere in his twenties. His blond hair, shoved under the tall lambskin papakha, was tangled with bits of leaves and twigs as if he had been lying on the ground. His beard was unkempt and his filthy gray coat was missing one of the red shoulder boards.
“Depends… what color?”
“Red. Is there any other?”
Wissotzky shrugged. “Let me see.”
The leader led the way through the shop, tracking in mud and snow and picking up scraps of fabric that stuck to the soles of his boots.
“Lay it out here,” Wissotzky said. He cleared a worktable of newspapers and dirty cups and the Cossack set the bolt down, slid off the burlap, and rolled it out on the table.
“I used to work in a textile factory,” he said. “This is quality. I know what I’m talking about. This was made before the war.”
His companions hung back, slouching against the worktable, eating sunflower seeds and carelessly dropping the shells on the floor. Neither of them was handsome like their leader. He could have been an artist’s model, poising on horseback for a bronze monument, the mythic Ukrainian hero.