The Teacher

Translated by Leo Shtutin; Published in Of The Book

When I am brought before the court of Heaven, no one will ask me, “Zusya, why were you not Abraham, Jacob or Moses?”

They’ll look at me and say, “Zusya, why were you not Zusya?”

Rabbi Zusya of Hanipol

Reb Motale checked himself, set the Book aside and fixed his pupils with a stern look. “Who’s that disturbing us?” he asked in a hoarse voice. “Amalek!” specky Mordche yelled out lustily.* Reb Motale blew his nose. “Wiseguy, eh? Thanks for enlightening us! No, but who’s that screaming outside the window like he’s being butchered by Khmelnytsky? Out with it, you little hellions!” “It’s my brother!” This, laced with glee, from lank, handsome Hirsch. “Get him in here, I’ll have his guts for garters!” said Reb Motale, and wiped a watering eye. Cloddish Shoyl jumped to his feet, one-upping Hirsch, and wasted no time dragging wet-cheeked, teary-eyed Savka in by the collar. “Out with it, Savka,” said Reb Motale, making himself more comfortable in his seat as he began the grilling. “What’re you bawling like a goy for?”** Savka stopped bawling. Spooked now, he backed away to the door. “I’m not a goy,” he said, getting ready to leg it just in case. “Let anyone who says you’re a goy spit in my beard,” said Reb Motale. “No one could possibly call you a goy, not least because no self-respecting goy—yes, such creatures do exist—would ever wallow in the mud like that. Savka, you’re the spit of a chazir.*** Whose mould are you in, Savka?” “In Hirsch’s, Rebbe,” Savka said, his teary eyes glistening. “In Hirsch’s? In your beanstalk brother’s? You’ve as much in common with him as I do with a Chinaman. Look at him, he’s spotless as a constable’s boots… Well, am I anything like a Chinaman?” he asked, surveying with severe eye the entire unruly mob. “No,” Savka said, frowning. “But I am something like Hirsch.” “You’re stubborner’n a mule. Your brother has a clean nose, a pretty-pretty phiz and nothing in his bonce. He doesn’t even know the name of the Vilna Gaon. What d’you need him for, dolt that he is? ” “I want to be like Hirsch!” shrieked Savka, melted to fresh, ever-loud tears by the rebbe’s carping. “All right, all right, no objections on my part! What about that clever brother of yours, though—who does he want to be like?” Hirsch leapt from his bench, breathing heavily. “Rebbe,” he said, “I want to be like Mordche,” then, blushing, plopped back down again. Specky Mordche gave a little jump of startlement. “So young, yet so wise!” said Reb Motale. “Mordche’s a tad brighter’n you, granted—by the time old age comes around he may’ve even graduated from cheder.**** But tell me, my learned friend, why would you want to be like our venerable Mordche? Yes, he has a half-decent memory, but he also has specs on his nose, consumption in his lungs, a pauper of a father, and all the usual tsores besides.***** You, on the other hand, are fighting fit, and some day you’ll inherit your folks’ waggoning business! Wenches’re already giving you the eye, while Mordche here can only smack his lips. How would being like him do you any good?” “Rebbe,” said Hirsch, blushing painfully once again, “he’s very smart.” “I don’t know if the heavens can hear me right now, but this Jew wants smarts! Not money, not love, but smarts! All right,” he said, blowing his nose a second time and glancing askance at Mordche, “and what does our groyser chochem want?”****** Little Mordche grew terribly flustered, so much so that he almost legged it out the room. But he was accustomed to telling the truth. “Rebbe,” he stammered, clearing his throat, “I want to be strong—like Shoyl is.” It was an answer none of those present expected to hear. After a flabbergasted instant, cloddish Shoyl seized his oaken bench, brandished it over his lop-eared head, and stomped his feet in joy. “That can’t be,” Reb Motale managed to say. In his agitation he had clean forgotten about his cold. “Shoyl—can you hear me, Shoyl? What piece of the jigsaw are you missing, then, you lunatic? Can it be that even you aren’t happy in your infinite joy?!” Shoyl, as ever, smiled blissfully by way of response. All at once, though, his face darkened—a symptom of heroic mental effort—and, frowning, he said in a loud voice, “Rebbe, I want to be like you!” That declaration must have caused the cup of the rebbe’s patience to run over, for he ran out of the room with a wave of the hand. After trotting about the yard for some time and composing himself after a fashion, he returned to his pupils. “Jews!” he said with a hand-flourish. “Jews,” he repeated, with the same gravitas, “what is happening to my people? What have we done to incur the wrath of our Lord, if the littlest amongst us wants to become a strapping pretty-boy schmuck, the strapping pretty-boy wants to become a sickly clever clogs, the clever clogs wants to be a madman, and that lunatic hulk wants to become me!? Me, who understands nothing about this world and prays to God for wisdom! Shoyl, meshuggener, you want my aches and pains, my gout, my sleepless nights?******* You want to survive two pogroms, the death of your wife and child? You want my loneliness? What d’you know about me, you mad fool?”    Shoyl raised his eyes, face once again illumined by the most blissful of smiles, and said, “I do. I want to.” “Well, well!” Reb Motale exclaimed. “Well, well!” Mordche removed his specs, wiped them on his shirttail, cast a sidelong glance at the others, then said, quietly, “What about yourself, Reb Motale? Who would you want to be?” Though posed sotto voce, the question rang out with such ear-splitting force it appeared to strike the rebbe deaf. All at once he wilted into himself, his very stature seemingly diminished. Shoyl half-stood so as to keep his idol in sight, concerned he might decide to vanish altogether. No, he was never going to answer, was he. But then, at long last, he spoke. So quietly, though, that everyone struggled to make out what he was saying. “I wish I was like my son…” he began. It was my grandfather, that selfsame Mordche whose fate the rebbe predicted so unsuccessfully, who told me this story. The rebbe would soon leave the mestechko behind.******* In defiance of his prognosis, my grandfather promptly graduated from cheder, failed to die from consumption, made it to Central Asia (which, by the standards of the age, was tantamount to journeying into the wilds of Africa), made a fortune there, and did not return home until the Russians had triumphed over one another in the civil war. He found the mestechko in ruins. Half the houses had been burnt to the ground. A blind old woman emerged from a surviving building and told him about the pogrom of 1918. All his ex-classmates had perished. Lank Hirsch was shot by the Petlyurovites. His brother Savka was butchered during the pogrom. When the pogromists entered the mestechko, madman Shoyl  climbed the belltower and drove off the bellringer and the priest and set the belltower on fire. Engulfed in flames, he wrapped his arms round the bell and leapt down with it into the very thick of the Uman thugs. His final words were, “Rebbe, rebbe, I’ve become like you!” What Shoyl meant by these words, what thoughts pulsated through his crazed skull as he uttered them, no one shall ever know. As for the fate of Reb Motale, it long remained obscure. The mestechko found itself abuzz with the wildest of rumours. Some contended that he’d gone insane and been committed to a gentile mental asylum in Petersburg. Others, conversely, insisted that he’d remained sound of mind, travelled to Constantinople, and secured a promise from the Sultan to relinquish all of Palestine to the Jews. Still others maintained that he’d turned his back on everything, reached American shores, discovered himself to be a second cousin of Rothschild’s, donned a top hat, forgot Yiddish, and now communicated exclusively in English. Still yet others declared that he’d travelled to Boer country, struck diamonds there, become fabulously rich, and was received by the Emperor, who assured him that the Pale of Settlement would be abolished posthaste. An overjoyed Baron Günzburg, meanwhile, was said to have yielded to him his personal seat in the first row of the Great Choral Synagogue. The reality was rather different. Many years down the line, my grandfather, who’d been rooting about in the Kishinev archives, happened upon a yellowed sheet from a Jewish newspaper, and encountered Reb Motale’s name in an article on the poet Hayim Nahman Bialik. In 1903, the Odessa Social Committee dispatched to Kishinev a group of Jews, Hayim Bialik amongst them, to collect documentary evidence of the pogromist atrocities perpetrated there. Reb Motale decided of his own accord to accompany the group, but missed the arranged train, and, on finally arriving in Kishinev, failed to join up with them. He walked the city alone,  surrounded by Jewish survivors, and wandered into looted flats. In one such flat he crossed paths with a gang of marauders who’d been following in the pogromists’ footsteps. Seeing a Jew in the doorway, they knifed him, ditched their loot and fled. He fell into a puddle of his own blood. He lay in the iron stairwell until nightfall, when he was found by some fear-crazed, grief-deranged Jews. Death by stab wound, confirmed a Russian doctor. The victim died at once, without regaining consciousness, he added, taking pity on the Jews now huddled around the body. “Blessed be his memory,” they murmured. Perched on a worn-out chair in some nook of the Kishinev archive, my grandfather read the article—which had been penned in Yiddish, a tongue he’d well-nigh forgotten—and began to weep. He emerged into the alien city and was a long time abroad on its streets. By nightfall he had found a synagogue. He went in, specky little Mordche, who’d long since buried his penurious father, who’d cured himself of consumption, but who was still consumed by tsores. Possessor of a half-decent memory, as the rebbe had once described him, he went in to intone a kaddish in memory of the rebbe.********* Having read the prayer—a prayer read by thousands of sons in tribute to their deceased fathers—he walked out of the synagogue, flung back his head, saw the endless black sky, and screamed into it, by way of response to that selfsame question, “I don’t want to be like anyone else anymore, Rebbe! I want to be myself…”

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*Аmalek (in the Torah, king of the Amalekites, enemy-nation of the Israelites): synonym for “evil” or “enemy”

**goy: non-Jew

***chazir: pig

****cheder: religious primary school

*****tsores: troubles, adversities

****** groyser chochem: great sage

********meshuggener: madman

********mestechko: small Jewish market town; a shtetl

*********kaddish: memorial prayer