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‘What soap is for the body, tears are for the soul.’
Yiddish Proverb
The new direction of the train woke me. Vertical. I looked out the pitch-black window. I could see the orange glow of the crane operator’s cigarette, thirty feet below. My balance played catch up with the aerobatics. No one told me they would be hoisting all the carriages onto new flatcars. The Romanians had narrower gauge railroads. But there were still two big wide Russian sets of tracks, going all the way to Bucharest. Just in case.
The moment my coach landed on its new bed, I was dragged out of mine. This time it was the Romanians. For three o’clock in the morning, he was dapper. Short, dark moustache, slicked-back hair, three-piece suit, and Italian shoes polished to such a shine, you would have seen his reflection, if he hadn’t been a bloodsucker. Dollar Dracula. His shiny head was crammed with broken French, and his battered briefcase with valuta, for my mandatory currency exchange, from US greenbacks to worthless lei. He drooled when I pulled real money out of my belt. Whenever I asked a question, he would cock his head, grin, and snap his fingers. Prest-o change-o. Tilt. Smile. Snap. Slide. Voila. I swear he changed into a bat while leaving.
They woke me at six a.m., to change for a train to Rădăuţi, the town the other grandparents emigrated from. It was listed as my destination. It was in the middle of nowhere, in Bukovina. After the night I had just been through, I decided to see Bucharest first. Romania was different from the Soviet Union. They didn’t just throw me off the train. When I next awoke, it was after seven. The peasants farming outside my moving window, looked like they were playing through the world’s biggest golf course. We pulled into Bucharest midmorning. The Soviet piglet who cut in front of me, in the Information booth queue, got a mouthful of the Russian words I had cultivated, for such occasions. It brought a head tilt, grin, and a finger snap from the old Romanian woman behind the counter. She booked me into the Marna, a ‘special hotel.’ Five stories up, a bald eagle with thick spectacles, showed me to the special unmade closet, with a view of the adjacent brick wall. I’m usually thankful for an upgrade. I met Stefan in the Hungarian Embassy, who invited me home to meet his three dogs and three ‘assistants.’
“This is a house with no women.” He said. And all the alarms went off so loud, I’m sure they must have heard them. He scrambled to show me a picture of a girlfriend in Esbjerg. I made a graceful exit, careful not to appear too graceful, and caught a bus back to the Ritz. Later, through unlit streets, I found a buffet express, for a salad and a memory. Mămăligă is the same as polenta, but not the way the Romanian side of the family made it. Cornmeal in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire wasn’t a hoity-toit splash of color for some Piedmontese pheasant and matching Barolo, it was staple peasant soul food. What potatoes were to the Irish, and rice was to the Chinese, Aztec corn Mămăligă was to my father’s parents, Jacob, and Rose. And I was heading to that part of old Austro-Hungary, where they had been born.
But I had diverted to Bucharest to see the place. Between the two World Wars, it was known as the ‘Little Paris of the East,’ because of its architectural elegance, and the sophistication of its elite. Both of those had changed dramatically. The only thing Bucharest had in common with Paris the year I was there, was that I was there. The man most responsible, for both the architectural and hierarchical misfortunes, was still running the country.
Nicolae Ceaușescu had created a pervasive personality cult, bestowing on himself the titles of ‘Conducător’, Leader, and ‘Geniul din Carpați,’ The Genius of the Carpathians. Salvador Dalí sent Ceaușescu a telegram, congratulating him on his introduction of the ‘presidential scepter.’ The Communist Party daily, Scînteia, published the message, unaware that it was a work of satire. Ceaușescu razed an entire historic quarter of the city to build a megalomaniacal ‘Palace of the Parliament.’ He made abortion illegal and divorce difficult, creating a crisis of child abandonment, and the overflowing of orphanages. He compounded this by allowing transfusions of untested blood, creating an epidemic of pediatric AIDS. He bought into the Juche philosophy of North Korean President Kim Il Sung and initiated a hard-line ideological remodeling of Romanian society, into a Socialist Realism nightmare. After borrowing thirteen billion dollars from the West, he decided that it needed to be repaid quickly, regardless of the consequences. During my time in Romania, there were already electricity blackouts, and long breadlines in front of empty food shops. Ceaușescu was shown on state TV, in staged scenes of plenty. The produce he inspected was from Hungary or made from painted polystyrene. Well-fed cows were transported across the country, in anticipation of his farm visits. Unfortunately, Romanians would have to wait another six and a half years to shake him off. The image of his uncomprehending expressive response to boos and heckling, during a mass meeting on December 21, 1989, was a critical portent of his vulnerability. The firing squad soldiers that had volunteered to execute him and his wife, on Christmas day, didn’t even wait for the order. They were just opening their presents early, feeling the love.
Bucharest’s version of the Arcul de Triumf had only three broken down Dacias drive around it, during the time it took me to walk by my way back from the curved shingles, spires and thatched roofs of the relocated houses, churches, and windmills, in the Village Museum. I ended up among the artists and vendors on Calea Lispani, eating meatballs and bread. Down the street was the Historical Museum, with thirty-four rooms of Romanian crown jewels, the Pietroasele treasure, and Vlad Dracul and his son, Vlad Ţepeș. At that time, there were also ten rooms of Ceaușescu.
Stefan’s assistants, Basil, Kiss, and Dominici intercepted me on my way to the post office. They went to great pains to convince me of their heterostatus, and we went for a beer in a sunny café, to celebrate. We spoke of East-West politics, the horrors of their recent attempt to emigrate, and their plans to try it all over again. The shorthaired eavesdroppers who took adjacent tables kept their voices low. We agreed to meet later. I returned to the Marna in a blackout and hiked the five floors for a rest.
The Bucharest evening escorted me to the Architect’s Club. Stefan and his assistants were already there, sitting with other friends. All of them spoke English and were planning to emigrate. We drank vodka and danced to the disco music until late. One sad but memorable young girl told me she loved me, out of the black and blue, much to the silent chagrin of her boyfriend. I told him that vodka and valuta were a dangerous mixture. He nodded.
There was no breakfast at the Marna next morning. Perhaps that was part of what made it special. I had paid for a first-class ticket on the Bucharest-Brașov ‘Rapid.’ It left an hour late. In my compartment was a nineteen-year-old bleached blonde babysitter, in a pair of well-contoured Canadian Jeans. Christina and I ate pink citroms, and she told me of her German boyfriend, her yearning for emigrant freedom, and reluctance to prostitute herself to obtain it. She looked over her shoulder a lot. Brașov was pretty, built by the Teutonic Knights, with a cobblestoned plaza, and Transylvanian architecture. Christina took me to the Gothic Black Church to see its clock tower and many portals, one of which led to a touching goodbye. Thanks to the Genius of the Carpathians, we had run out of doors and time.
I checked into the Hotel Sport and went to shower. I went downstairs and asked the desk clerk if she had any soap. She cocked her head to the side, grinned, and snapped her fingers. There was a goat chewing on the door handle.
* * *
I was wending my way to Grandmas’s house. It was going to be convoluted. The goat had left by the time I awoke. Determined, as I was, to hitchhike from Brașov to Rădăuţi, the Romanians were just as determined. Two hours after I took bus number one out of the city to the route I needed, I took bus number one back. Perhaps, it was the way I pronounced the hooks hanging off their place names. Perhaps, it was because there were more horse carts than Dacias. It didn’t matter. Some demented Moldavian shoulder hog had almost killed me anyway.
My first four hours, on bus number four, took me back towards Bucharest. In Plojest, a friendly old French-speaking pensioner guided me to the other station, where I watched the gypsy band until mid-afternoon. The next bus took me back towards Brașov, in the superheated peasant body odor. I ran out of water. Most of the pungent passengers disembarked in Romaw, leaving me with a loud old crone drinking wicked brandy. I was dozing in the humidity when an actual ticket inspector thumped me awake. He stole my pen.
It was dusk when we arrived in Suceava, just in time to see my antique hardback wooden train pulling out. Chank-chank-chank. It was going so slow, I had time to buy a citrom before boarding. The worse the lighting became, the bigger the crowd I drew. Perhaps the blues harmonica was a mistake but, in the darkening carriage chank-chank-chanking through the rolling Moldavian scenery, it just seemed right.
The last train was waiting for me in Dornesti, although the term ‘train’ would only be correct in a historical context. It was the size of a Chevy van and looked like an armored car circa 1870. There were no lights. The superheated peasant smell filled up that space that wasn’t already as crowded as Hell will be when I get there. The chank-chank-chank becameclank-clank-clank. The sweat poured out of me, and them. For just over an hour, I was drenched in their nasty, brutish and short lives, and what they lacked- food, water, security, freedom, dignity, and soap. Just before midnight, we clank-clank-clanked around the last bend, into the land of my forefathers, and stopped. I remember stumbling down unlit dusty streets, looking for a place to stay. I found the Hotel Bukovina. There was no water. I had wound down to neutral. I needed a wash. The Talmud said that there were three gates to purgatory, and one of them was Jerusalem. I could have found the second. There I was, in all my aromatic Aramaic glory- waiting for daylight, and redemption. I fell asleep in my clothes.
No man knows till he has suffered from the night, how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be. Something like water trickled out of the hand basin tap. I washed the warm moist parts, as well as I could without soap. Downstairs, there was no one. It wasn’t like there was anything to steal. I rubbed my eyes, blinded by the May sunlight in the street.
I was in Bukovina. It was named after the beech trees. In 1775 the Habsburgs annexed it from the Principality of Moldavia, into what would become the Austria-Hungary Empire, a hundred years later. The new administration encouraged the influx of immigrants, including its persecuted and dispossessed Jews from Galicia and Lodomeria.
I was in Rădăuţi. On a plain between the Suceava and Suceviţa rivers, its origins were as old and as murky. Some maintained the town was originally called ‘Rottacenum,’ named by the Roman garrison in nearby Siret. The Romans had come to Romania for gold and salt. They left their name. A boyar property document, from 1392, mentioned ‘Radomir’s village.’ By the 14th century, the settlement was flourishing, and had become famous for its fairs. The Jews initially made a living from lumber and livestock, but by the period between the World Wars in the last century, they had established 250 diverse industrial plants, constituted most of the area’s professionals, and made up over thirty per cent of the population.
Nothing in the market I walked through that morning, suggested any such form of human endeavor or influence at all. Tarpaper hung off the scalloped picket fence roofs of the long wooden empty stalls, their lichen-colored paint faded, and stained with the rust of what remained of the drainpipes. Angular men, with angular suit jacket lapels and angular Tyrolean hats, were accompanied by weedy women with headscarves and soiled aprons, buying and selling onions. It seemed that, in Rădăuţi, onions were currency. Here, at least, was no hint, of the more complex flavors, that once lived on the plain between the rivers.
But around the corner, in the main square, there was. In 1880, during the visit of Emperor Franz Joseph I, a delegation of locals requested a proper plot of land, to build a large synagogue, to accommodate the Jewish population of 3,452 souls. The consent of the emperor was followed by the dissent between the orthodox and more progressive Jews, as to which style should govern its creation. The dispute postponed construction for several years. In a final compromise, the synagogue was built in the modern style of the great shuel of Czernowitz, but instead of one large cathedral-like round dome, two twin towers rose instead. It was inaugurated on the emperor’s birthday, 18th of August 1883. Both my paternal great grandmothers sat in the women’s section in the western gallery that day. The new chief Rabbi of Rădăuţi, Yithak Kunstadt, gave the inaugural address, in front of the central ark. A great religious scholar and orator, he would, in subsequent years, instill in his community a great love for the renewal of Israel’s sovereignty as a nation. Despite the thousand seats, the synagogue was packed. Chassidim had also come from all parts of Bukovina. From the beginning, Rădăuţi had been a hotbed epicenter of Jewish intellectual conflict. Eight years after the inauguration of the Central Synagogue, as many more prayer houses had been constructed in the township. There were twenty-three synagogues in Rădăuţi on the eve of the Second World War. Back in the 19th century, philosophical debate between the Orthodox and the more modern Jews, and the Vizhnitz, Bojan, and Sadagoran dynasties of Chassidim, gradually transformed into a contentious political argument between the Zionists, the ultra-religious, and the left wing-socialist Bund. I had tangential childhood associations with a Conservative synagogue, but I was more the product of the simultaneous intense love affair I had with the Scientific Method. For me, civilization was a Western child, the logical progression of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the French and American Revolutions. My religion was Progress, technological and social, and my ancestors were Jurassic obstacles to enlightenment. And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill… Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explains not, then it says there is nothing to explain. I thought about my love of debate, and theirs. I read how much more radical some of their views about progress were, than my own. I found out that one of my Jurassic ancestors, ten generations back was Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Chassidic Jewry. It was hardwired.
A horse pulled a cart full of haphazard barrels in front of me, as I crossed the square. The white stone twin towers had dentate ornamentation above their long columned arched windows. I walked through the beech trees between the pillars under a filigreed iron gate, and up the seven stairs, to the two green wooden doors. A yellow Star of David hung on each one, loosely. I pushed on the right door. Nothing. I pushed on the left one. It swung inwards, ajar. I called out, and from the deep recesses of the house of God, an old caretaker appeared. We had the iron irony of German to communicate with. I watched his face for any hint of recognition, as I asked after Rose. His brow furrowed.
“Babi Goodman.” He said, remembering. He didn’t, and couldn’t, remember much more. They had left a long time ago. He opened the main room for me. As he did, another piece of a three-thousand-year-old jigsaw clicked into place. There were frescoes of musical instruments, a golden ark, and row upon row of empty seats. I finally asked the question. He didn’t tell me directly. I could see his eyes filling up. He turned away for a moment and, from a nearby washbasin, handed me the answer… soap.
* * *
Baba Rose died when I was in Leningrad. She didn’t know that I would find her hometown, and I didn’t know that she died. The story of the rest of the Rădăuţi relatives was the same story as that of every other Jewish community in Eastern Europe, with differences.
In 1937, the anti-Semitic Goga-Cuza party came to power. Jews were beaten on the streets, and forced to keep their shops open on the Sabbath. Those who lived in the surrounding villages fled, leaving behind all their possessions, for the false protection of the town. In September of 1940, Cuza’s government was replaced by the even more sinister Garda de fier, the ‘Iron Guard’ or ‘Legion of the Archangel Michael,’ a green-shirted cult of martyrdom, and violence. ‘Nests’ of action Death Squads traveled around Romania, singing and Roman-saluting their ‘virtues’, and observing rituals that included the drinking of and writing oaths in blood. ‘The blood is the life!’ They railed against Freemasonry, Freudianism, homosexuality, atheism, Marxism, Bolshevism, the civil war in Spain, and other ‘unexpected protean forms of rabbinical aggression against the Christian world.’
By 1940, Jews were being thrown out of moving train cars, including my great uncle, a veterinarian. He took two months to die of his injuries. Homes were confiscated. Romanian soldiers, retreating from Russia, engaged in casual random murder. Jewish students were forbidden from attending public schools, and doctors from attending non-Jewish patients. Government workers were fired. Distinguishing clothing became mandatory. The pogroms began.
The final chapter of Rădăuţi Jewry commenced with Romania’s involvement in Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union. A curfew of six p.m. was imposed on what was now a ghetto. Hostages were demanded by the military government to work as slaves. On the 11th of October 1941, the ten thousand Jews of Rădăuţi were ordered to begin a forced march towards the camps of Transnistria, within 24 hours.
‘Denn die Todten reiten schnell.’ For the dead travel fast. Those found in the town after two days were shot. The expelled were ordered to leave the keys to their houses in the doors and put all their valuables in the National bank. They received no receipt. Only hand luggage was permitted. Ninety per cent were murdered en route, by Romanian guards; most of the rest died from cold, hunger, or disease, marching, on cattle trains, or in the camps. There were occasions when the Germans actually stepped in, to restrain and slow down the excesses of the Iron Guards, such was the enthusiasm of some of the Romanian involvement in the Holocaust. On January 24, 1941, a Legion-instigated deadly pogrom resulted in the vicious slaughter of dozens of Jewish civilians, their bodies hung from meat hooks in a Bucharest abattoir, in a gruesome parody of kosher ritual practice. Their synagogues had been transformed into cowsheds and warehouses. Their houses and possessions had been confiscated, and their cemeteries desecrated. Torah scrolls had been ‘recycled’ into sandals and drums.
I drifted back through the market. The acid in the pickles jump restarted my saliva. Romania, like its people, had been defined as the meeting point of three regions: Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans- but couldn’t be truly included in any of them. The Folk Art Museum was missing more than a little something. I paid for another night at the Hotel Bukovina, and boarded a crowded slug bus behemoth to Putna, to see the first of the many famous painted Eastern Orthodox monasteries in Bukovina. Everything except the priests was undergoing a frantic reconstruction, but the colored postage stamp scenes of kerchiefed women hoeing flat sun-flooded fields, and pine groves dripping down green candle conical hills, made the excursion. I bought a citrom, and some soap from a later vintage, and learned that there were bungalows further down the road in Suceviţa. I took the bus back to Rădăuţi, to retrieve Serendipity and my deposit. The first was easy. The second was what used to be called a ‘problem’ and now, in an era of political correctness, is referred to as a ‘challenge.’ According to the desk clerk, it was going to be a problem. In his Romanian-English dictionary, I had him look up the words ‘broken’ and ‘liver.’ Problem solved. Disarmed with a handshake, I returned to the Autogara for the 15:15 bus to Suceviţa. Unfortunately, there was no 15:15 bus. More unfortunately, the 16:15 bus was now doubly occupied, piled to the rivets. The superheated body odor returned, in the intensity of the angled lapels of the afternoon sun. I gave up my seat, to a young girl who had fainted. It may have been the temperature, or the lack of food. Two hours and fifteen kilometers later, we rumbled into Suceviţa. I inhaled real air again, stepping off the bus. A Serendipity stroll past horse-drawn Carpathian carts, fairytale lush hills, and thick emerald dipped candles, brought me to a quiet bungalow in paradise. I showered with soap and water and, just before the sun dropped into the mountains, walked to the four-hundred-year-old fortified Byzantine and Gothic monastery. I thought it was closed, but a sweet antique nun let me in to see the ‘Scale of Virtues’ and other frescoes, a moving Sister of Mercy mass, the convent museum, where I bought a painted egg, and the rich ether of Eden. Crystalline perfect heady stuff. I thanked the abbess, and retraced my steps to find sustenance next to my bungalow. I ate a cutlet with fried potatoes, peas, and real bread and cheese, like I’d never seen food.
In the last rays of the Carpathian day, I opened Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and starting a new absorption. But everything I read took me back to the old guardian at Baba Rose’s synagogue, chanting ancient mournful psalms in a now deserted temple, rocking away his loneliness for all those ghosts who could no longer sing with him, or light him candles, or invite him to weddings or Sabbath dinners, or pray for him when he died.
______
Lawrence Winkler is a retired physician, traveller, and natural philosopher. His métier has morphed from medicine to manuscript. He lives with Robyn on Vancouver Island and in New Zealand, tending their gardens and vineyards, and dreams. His writings have previously been published in The Montreal Review and many other literary journals. His books can be found online at www.lawrencewinkler.com.