Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [73]
During his first year, when Nathan had no seniority in Mrs. Ginsburg’s home, his bed was a lumpy couch in the living room where his single blanket had to be augmented for warmth by newspapers he piled on himself.
Otherwise Bialystok was a revelation to Nathan, a city burgeoning with culture and surging with currents and countercurrents of ideologies.
The smaller towns of the shtetl generally wore a uniform coat of drabness. What distinguished one from another was the degree of orthodoxy and the domination by one of a number of religious sects.
Bialystok was dramatically different. Located at a crossroads between Russia, Poland, and Prussia, the Jews originally settled at the invitation of the Polish nobility, where they became purveyors to the advancing, retreating, and occupying armies. Bialystok grew into a major textile center. By the turn of the twentieth century, over three hundred and fifty mills were in operation and these were almost entirely Jewish-owned.
This brought a strong trade union movement with heavy socialist leanings. Largely because of Wissotzky’s personal interest in Bialystok, equally strong Zionist organizations took early root. When these diverse groups were added to the traditional shtetl religious sects, a Yiddish press and theater, capitalists, czarists, and an assortment of intellectuals, freethinkers, and mystics, Bialystok was a lively mix.
All these philosophies found their way into the Wissotzky Gymnasium, which proved to be liberal and modern with courses in Russian, Polish, and German, along with math and the sciences. There was training in business and several of the skilled trades. For the first time, Nathan was exposed to the history of nations beyond the Jewish Pale and a first peek at the world outside.
Nathan broke out of the cave of Talmud in which he had been locked and drifted naturally toward languages. In a matter of six months, he had mastered enough Russian for the entirely new world of Russian literature to be open to him.
Nathan, the loner, had found the loner’s paradise through books. Books not only stoked his world of fantasy, they proved a practical tool in working himself into group life.
Not many of the students were so captivated by literature. This afforded Nathan a special status, a subtle form of snobbery and a forum to draw attention to himself. So, he read and read and read. Nathan’s book reports became a salable item, particularly to students whose parents were able to afford fresh fruit.
Nathan wasn’t particularly sought after. His personal popularity was close to nil. He didn’t play sports, lust after girls, or indulge in the general mischief befitting gymnasium students. He remained shy and often nasty in response to civil conversation.
But Nathan now had a commodity. Reading gave him his first true social opening, a way to enter and dominate conversation which he could bend around to his sphere of knowledge. By being able to hold court he grew larger in his own eyes, and he played it for all it was worth.
Nathan discovered that his loneliness could be alleviated by lecturing or arguing in the debating club about the books he was reading. As few other students had read the books and knew nothing about the authors, Nathan had an uncontested platform.
“Do you know?” he would ask many times during a talk. Of course the audience didn’t know and that made Nathan smarter than his listeners. This opening gambit of putting them down worked famously. And it led to an invitation for him to join the labor Zionists, who courted intellectuals. This group had their own defense committee with a hidden stash of lethal weapons, pikes, clubs, and petrol bottles. On obscure outings, Nathan usually got himself scheduled to lecture. The more he spoke, the more fiery an orator he became. He could hardly wait to return to Wolkowysk and ram all his knowledge down Mordechai’s throat.
Nathan’s first trip home was for his