Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [72]
“Bialystok,” he answered in a quivering voice. “I was going to take the exam to enter the gymnasium.”
“Gymnasium! Not even yeshiva, but gymnasium. Such fancy ideas! The blood is still flowing in the streets of Bialystok and you have a head filled with notions of grandeur. You’ll go to gymnasium when onions grow in the palm of my hand. Get into the house and stay in your room. You will not come to shul tonight.”
Nathan limped off. His father had not even asked about his injuries. Late that night, with the pain from the blows fully settled in, Nathan groaned close to the wall, put a glass against it, and listened to his mother and father.
“That boy is like a board with a hole in it,” his mother said. “We are lucky not to be having a funeral.”
“We can’t spit on the truth,” Yehuda said.
“And what is the truth?”
“Mordechai is the one who must go to yeshiva. It would be a waste to send Nathan. I don’t know where he got the crazy business in his head of gymnasium. I’ll talk to the savings and loan and maybe they will give him a full-time job.”
“Now who’s talking crazy? He’ll run away again.”
“Maybe you can tell me how we are going to support his elegant ideas?”
Sophie, as usual, was slightly ahead of her husband. “If Nathan goes to Bialystok, his bed here will become available and we can take in an out-of-town yeshiva student and charge the family two rubles, which, in turn, we will use to pay for Nathan’s room and board in Bialystok. So, what’s the loss?”
“What about the ruble a week we will lose from Nathan’s salary at the savings and loan? And Mordechai will have expenses at yeshiva on top of it.”
“So, you’ll have to ask your brother, Sam.”
“I can’t shnorr him. Sam is not a well man and he hasn’t had such a good year in business. Besides, he’s supporting our mother and God knows how many relatives.”
“He wouldn’t turn you down, Yehuda, not when it comes to education.”
“It gives me such a lump in my chest to have to ask him.”
“I know what Mordechai means to you,” Sophie said after a long time, “but Nathan will have to be on his own sooner or later. Even emigrate. We are duty-bound to give him the best education he can get. We’ll manage, we’ll manage.”
Bialystok, 1906
KALONYMUS WISSOTZKY, the “Tea King of Russia,” was among those elite Jews given dispensation to live in Moscow. The fortune he amassed as an international merchant was given away to charity nearly as fast as he earned it.
After the pogroms of the 1880s, it was apparent that there must be an alternative to the misery his fellow Jews endured in Russia. Along with the Baron Rothschild and a number of other Jewish philanthropists, Wissotzky helped found and support the new movements to Palestine.
Wissotzky died just about the time of the renewed pogroms of 1903, but with the knowledge that Zionism had taken root and a door of escape was now opened out of Russia.
His entire fortune was left to a foundation which dispensed moneys to innumerable charities throughout the Pale. One of these was the gymnasium in Bialystok that bore his name and to which Nathan Zadok came in 1906.
Nathan found living quarters in the home of Esther Ginsburg, the widow of a leather worker in the impoverished Channakes district. Over the years she housed a number of students from Wolkowysk. Her rate of two rubles, fifty kopeks a week was the cheapest to be found. For this she provided a bed and four meals a week, and washed and mended the boys’ clothing.
Nathan was faced with a new problem, hunger. No matter how bad things had been at home, there had always been some part of a chicken to eat. Here it was a luxury.
Fortunately there were designated “eat” days for the poorer students, a dubious distinction for which Nathan qualified. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and the Sabbath, different families alternated in feeding the students an evening meal. It was mostly lentils, cabbage dishes, potatoes, and a concoction with a carp base called gefilte fish. Few and far between were whiffs of even the stringiest meat.
On the Sabbath, the students fared a little