A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [48]
Menahem Mendel Braz, son of Alexander Ziskind, grandson of Rav Yossele, great-grandson of Rabbi Alexander Ziskind the author of the Yesod Ve-Shoresh Ha-'Avodah, settled in the early 1880s in Odessa where, together with his wife Perla, he owned and ran a small glass factory. Previously, in his youth, he had worked as a government clerk back in Königsberg. Menahem Braz was a well-to-do, good-looking bon vivant, and a strong-willed nonconformist even by the very tolerant standards of late-nineteenth-century Jewish Odessa. An undisguised atheist and well-known hedonist, he abhorred both religion and religious fanatics with the same whole-hearted devotion with which his grandfather and great-grandfather had insisted on observing every jot and tittle of the Law. Menahem Braz was a freethinker to the point of exhibitionism: he smoked publicly on the Sabbath, consumed forbidden foods with gay abandon, and pursued pleasure out of a gloomy vision of the brevity of human life and a passionate denial of the afterlife and divine judgment. This admirer of Epicurus and Voltaire believed that a man should reach out and help himself to whatever life put in his way and give himself over to the unrestrained enjoyment of whatever his heart desired, provided that in doing so he inflicted neither injury, injustice, nor suffering on others. His sister, Rasha-Keila, that educated daughter of Rav Alexander Ziskind Braz, was, on the other hand, affianced to a simple Jew back in the village of Olkieniki in Lithuania (not far from Vilna), whose name was Yehuda Leib Klausner, the son of Ezekiel Klausner, a tenant farmer.*
The Klausners of Olkieniki, unlike their learned cousins from the nearby town of Trakai, were mostly simple village Jews, stubborn and naive. Ezekiel Klausner had raised cattle and sheep and grown fruit and vegetables, first in a village named Popishuk (or Papishki), and later in another village called Rudnik, and finally in Olkieniki itself. All three villages were near Vilna. Yehuda Leib, like his father Ezekiel before him, had learned a little Torah and Talmud from a village teacher, and observed the commandments, although he loathed exegetical subtleties. He loved the outdoor life and hated being cooped up indoors.
After trying his hand at dealing in agricultural produce and failing because other traders soon discovered and took advantage of his naïveté and edged him out of the market, Yehuda Leib used the rest of his money to buy a horse and cart and cheerfully carried passengers and goods from village to village. He was an easygoing, gentle-natured carter, who was contented with his lot and enjoyed good food, singing table songs on Sabbaths and festivals, and a drop of schnapps on winter nights; he never beat his horse or recoiled from danger. He liked traveling alone, at a slow, relaxed pace, his cart weighed down with timber or sacks of grain through the dark forests, over empty plains, through snowstorms, and across the thin layer of ice that covered the river in winter. Once (so Grandpa Alexander loved to relate over and over again on winter evenings) the ice broke under the weight of his cart, and Yehuda Leib jumped into the icy water, grabbed the horse's bridle with his strong hands, and pulled his horse and cart to safety.
Rasha-Keila Braz bore three sons and three daughters to her husband the carter. But in 1884 she fell seriously ill, and the Klausners decided to leave their out-of-the-way village in Lithuania and move hundreds of miles to Odessa, where Rasha-Keila came from and where her affluent brother lived: Menahem Mendel Braz would surely take care of them and see that his sick sister was treated by the best physicians.
*Names run in families. My elder daughter is named Fania after my mother, Fania. My son is Daniel Yehuda Arie, after Daniel