I Shall Live (4 page)

I especially loved to read history and geography, and soon became stuffed with facts and figures. When Sam and Felek were preparing for their final gymnasium exams, a few of their friends would come to our house to study with them. Soon they discovered that I knew the dates of virtually all the major battles in history, the
names of generals, of famous travelers, the populations of cities. They got a kick out of this boy, not yet seven, who could give them all the answers.

Mother was very proud of her precocious child, and one day she overheard these eighteen-year-olds quizzing me. I loved to show off, and was snapping out one answer after another. After a while she summoned Felek and said, “Felek, isn't he a real genius?” Totally preoccupied with his forthcoming exams, Felek replied impatiently, “Mama, I don't have time to discuss this now. Yes, he is a very smart boy.” But that wasn't enough for her. “Well,” she said, “I think he is at least
half
a genius.”

My first personal experience of death occurred when I was seven. My maternal grandmother, Sarah, died. Once a week Hanka and I had visited her in her tiny cottage across the bridge, and although she was very poor she always had a piece of candy or a little gift for us. She was a shriveled-up little woman who had lost her husband, Mordche Hersh—after whom I had been named, although I was called Heniek—years before I was born, and who was now supported by my mother. I remember well how bare and poor Grandma's house looked, and how meticulously clean it always was.

After she died, the only remaining member of Mother's family to whom she was close was her younger brother, Abu
ś
. He was ill with heart trouble and in failing health generally, and Mother worried about him. He was a very intelligent man who had educated himself, and we all loved him. He had a beautiful voice and was the leading singer in the town's small amateur theatrical group. Abu
ś
was a dental technician, and his wife, Lisa, a beautiful girl from Warsaw, was a dentist. Their combined incomes were not enough to make ends meet, and Mother would often help them out with gifts of money. They had only one child, a boy, Józiek (Joseph), who was not quite a year older than I, a very good-looking and lively child,
much spoiled by his parents. When I was small, Joe was my frequent companion. He loved to jump up and down; he would jump on sofas, chairs, tables, floors—wherever he got a chance. One day when he grew tired of doing it alone, he asked me to join him. I replied, “Józiek, you jump, and Sianiu [as I pronounced Heniek] will watch you.” My brothers overheard this exchange and teased me about it for a long time afterward.

Abu
ś
and Lisa finally decided that they were never going to make a go of it in Hrubieszów and moved to Warsaw, hoping for better luck there. Their departure, which took place when I was only seven, made me very sad and left an emptiness in my life.

Father was an unusually courageous man. Our cook told me the following story: One day he and a group of other Jews were talking together in the town square. A Polish policeman, who was known to be anti-Semitic, came over and pushed one of them down and contemptuously called him
“parszywy
ż
yd”
(rotten Jew). Father happened to be standing nearby, and without hesitation he hit the policeman in the face, calling him
“Polska
ś
winia”
(Polish swine). Such an act was comparable to a Black punching out a small-town Mississippi sheriff and calling him “Whitey pig.” This episode cost Father a lot of money, and at that he was lucky the authorities did not put him in jail. But the whole town was proud of him.

I was six or seven when I had the opportunity to see for myself how fearlessly Father would stand up to anyone who challenged him. He had made a deal with a Polish nobleman, a Count Chrzanowski, the scion of one of the oldest families in Poland, who owned many villages not far from Hrubieszów. He was very rich but always short of cash, because every winter he would travel to the French Riviera, where he lost heavily at the casinos. Father
had already made enough money to buy the whole crop of certain commodities from Chrzanowski and other Polish landowners. He would pay cash for them during the preceding winter, and receive the shipments after the harvest. That year he bought Chrzanowski's entire crop of poppy seed. It so happened that after he had paid Chrzanowski for it, bad weather destroyed virtually all of Poland's poppy seed crop, except in the Hrubieszów region. The price of poppy seed rocketed to four or five times its normal price.

Harvest was over, and still there was no word from Chrzanowski. A great deal of money was at stake, and with the passing of each day my parents became more anxious. It was a sensitive situation; demanding one's rights from a Polish aristocrat was no light matter. At last Father decided to go to see the count in person. He hired a
droshka
(a horse-drawn carriage) for the trip, and at the last minute decided to take me along. After several hours' drive along country roads, we arrived at the count's mansion, where we were told to wait in the anteroom. In a few minutes Father was summoned to the main reception room, while I waited apprehensively. At first I could hear nothing through the closed doors, but soon voices were raised. Suddenly I heard a loud bang, and Chrzanowski shouted, “Remember to whom you are speaking! My name is Chrzanowski!” Immediately came another bang, and Father shouted, “And my name is Orenstein!” I was frightened for his safety, but soon he reappeared in the doorway, put his arm on my shoulder, and said, “Let's go.” We got back into the droshka and started home.

No one could guess what the outcome would be, and the intervening time was tense. But a few days later, with no advance notice, a caravan of wagons appeared outside Father's warehouse. He had won the battle of wills in a confrontation with a Polish aristocrat—a victory to be treasured always by our family.

Father was a highly unusual man. He had an open mind, never accepted anything at face value, and refused to trust anyone's opinion on any matter until he himself had examined the facts. Once when Mother developed an internal infection of some kind, the local doctor insisted that she had to have an operation, but Father was opposed to it; probably he didn't trust the doctor. He wanted to take Mother to Warsaw, but the doctor maintained that if the operation was not performed within a few hours, Mother would die. At that point Father was called away for a short time, and the doctor took advantage of his absence to persuade our relatives and friends to get Mother to agree. She was ill and confused, and the doctor assumed he had her permission to go ahead. He was going to perform the operation in our house, and he told the women to get buckets of boiling water ready. He had his instruments spread out on a bed sheet and was all set to start operating when Father returned. He took in the situation at a glance, seized the bed sheet, threw the instruments on the floor, and chased the doctor out of the house. Later, when Fred was told what had happened, he said it was almost certain that Mother would have died from hemorrhage had she been operated on then.

Mother and Father were true partners. Although he trusted his own judgment, he consulted her on every important matter in his life. She in turn looked after Father's interest in the shop, took care of the house, did the marketing, and cared for the children. She could also bake the most delicious cakes and cookies, and these were the first things my brothers would ask for when they came home on vacation.

Mother could be both very gentle and very determined. When I was about eight she discovered that Fred had become seriously involved with a French girl while studying medicine in Montpellier, France. The question was: Should Fred marry a
shiksa
(Gentile girl)?
One subject of many discussions between my parents was: If he did, would their children be brought up as Jews or as Catholics? Finally Mother decided to take matters into her own hands. She set off on a three-day journey across Europe, arriving in Montpellier without knowing a word of French. When she left, she took a surprised Fred back home with her for a cooling-off period.

This, however, was not the end of the story. The girl, who apparently was very much in love with Fred, decided to follow him, and soon she too arrived in Hrubieszów. She, naturally, spoke not a word of Polish, and the poor thing must have had a terrible time of it making her way to our little town. Somehow my parents got word of her imminent arrival and sent Fred away to visit a relative. I well remember the girl's brief visit. I was told to stay in my room out of her way, but I managed to catch a glimpse of the pretty young thing as she walked by. She couldn't communicate with anyone, and it must have been heartbreaking for her to have made such a long, difficult journey without even seeing Fred. My heart went out to her, and I was angry with my parents for breaking up the romance and with Fred for not standing up to them.

Another troublesome romance involved my brother Sam, who fell in love with Bluma Brandt, a pretty girl who was from a well-known but poor family. Mother didn't want him to marry her, and claimed that Bluma was too frail and sickly. Later I learned there were other objections as well. Not only was there no money in the family; Bluma's older sister, Syma, was known to go out with the officers of the local Polish army regiment. But Sam persisted; he continued to see Bluma. He didn't, however, go so far as to insist on marrying her.

After Felek graduated from the gymnasium, he, like Fred, went to Montpellier to study medicine. But Sam, who had studied particularly hard, was able to get into the Warsaw Law University. Fred
and Felek returned home on vacation from France only once a year, but Sam would come home often from Warsaw, and I used to love the long talks we had on the sofa in Father's study. We always had so much to talk about.

By now I was reading more serious authors. I read every book in the library by Gogol, Chekhov, Dostoyevski, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Feuchtwanger, Wassermann, and Balzac. Philosophers like Spinoza were more difficult, but I persisted, even though reading them sometimes gave me a headache.

My favorite writer was the Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz, who had written a famous historical trilogy. The first part,
Ogniem i Mieczem (By Fire and Sword)
covered the 1648 Chmielnicki rebellion; the second,
Potop (The Deluge)
, the Swedish occupation of Poland in 1656, and
Pan Wołodyjowski
(Mr. Wołodyjowski), a number of subsequent wars. I read and reread those three volumes until I could recite whole pages from memory. So anxious was I to discover the world through books that I would start reading a new one the minute I left the library with it, and continued reading all the way home. Mother, fearful that I would be run over by a horse and wagon, made me promise at least to be careful crossing the streets.

When I was eleven I at last agreed to go to school. I attended the junior class of the grade school, and soon discovered that thanks to the private tutoring and so much reading, I was easily at the head of my class. I was the best reader aloud, and our Polish-language teacher usually chose me to read to the rest of the class. This gave me some prestige, but it wasn't enough to protect me from anti-Semitic abuse; the Polish boys pushed me around just as they did the other Jewish kids. They used to chant, “Jews, go to Palestine,” and write anti-Semitic slogans on the blackboard. I dreaded the morning roll call. Every time my official name, Mordche Hersh Orenstein, was called, there were nasty chuckles and snickering. Morning
prayer was another source of embarrassment; the Polish kids would pray aloud, repeating the teacher's words, while we Jews stood in silence. Before I started school I had been aware of anti-Semitism, but for the most part only to the extent of having overheard conversations about it. Now it was hitting home. Occasionally a Jewish boy would resist and put up a fight, but whenever that happened a whole gang of Polish kids would set upon him and really beat him up. There was no one to complain to, because most of the teachers, the police, and the town officials were leading the way in teaching anti-Semitism to the young.

This was very depressing to me. Suddenly I realized that the future was clouded. The fascinating world I had discovered in books, and the sense of that world opening up to me, somehow no longer seemed so exciting.

Nevertheless, there were moments of triumph too. The following year I had to take the crucial entrance exams for admission to the Hrubieszów State Gymnasium. In my brothers' time it had been a little easier for Jewish boys to be accepted, but now, with anti-Semitism increasing everywhere in Poland, the school administration was restricting the admission of Jews to only one or two a year, out of a class of about thirty—in a town in which fully half the population was Jewish. There were no other high schools within fifteen miles. There were no automobiles either, and few Jewish parents who could afford the high tuition fees were sending their children to Jewish high schools in other towns. But a diploma from one of those schools counted for little in the Polish universities; the tiny number of Jewish students admitted by the universities came almost exclusively from the Polish state gymnasiums.

About five hundred kids applied for the thirty or so places in the freshman class of the gymnasium. There were two written examinations, in Polish language and in mathematics. I was well prepared
and breezed through the math exam—I was the first to turn in my paper. The Polish-language exam took longer. The subject was “My First Adventure in a Forest.” I wrote a story that started on a beautiful sunny morning and ended with an evening storm full of thunder and lightning. In between, I described baking potatoes, searching for hidden treasure, and generally experiencing the beauty of nature.

About a week later the applicants and their parents assembled in the auditorium to learn the results. It was packed, with standing room only. The director of the school read the results, calling out the students' names in alphabetical order. The marks ranged from “very good” to “failing,” and were mostly very low. One student, Bienkiewicz, the son of a Polish landowner, got “very good minus” in Polish language and “average” in math. When my turn came, the director read “Orenstein: Math—very good. Polish language—very good minus,” and a murmur went through the crowd. The director stopped and looked around, but he didn't know who I was and I was too shy to raise my hand. He then read through the rest of the students' marks. There wasn't another “very good” among them.