Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [79]
“So, Boris Borokov is telling you that shit about what a great Zionist he is. His sons ran away to Palestine, because they hated equally that house and the coal business. He has no heirs except Tilly, and Mariupol is not big enough for finding a husband for that one. You are a marked man, Nathan.”
What to do?
I went back to bed and coughed and coughed. I coughed in their faces. I coughed at the dining-room table, spraying everyone’s food. I spit and missed the spittoon, landing my wad on Tante Sonia’s most precious Turkoman carpet. I tracked coal over the parlor and got dirty marks all over her doilies. I lost the documents on a coal shipment, which cost Uncle Boris double taxation.
God must have heard me coughing, because the war broke out between Russia and Germany. For the next several months the coal business was in a bad state. All winter long I remained useless to Uncle Boris because my cough continued until springtime. All of us, by this time, wanted to get rid of one another.
Mail was slow with the war on, but by March I received a letter that a job was waiting for me in the city of Minsk in the jewelry store of another uncle, Bernie Zadok.
Minsk, 1915
THE TRAIN TRIP from Mariupol to Minsk, likewise almost three thousand miles, was a certified nightmare. The Russians, from the Czar on down, blamed the Jews for getting them into the war. Their logic escapes me, but every empty wall, particularly in the railroad stations, was filled with anti-Semitic slogans: KILL A JEW AND SAVE RUSSIA.
Before the war it was difficult for a Jew to make a long train ride without having a bad experience. Now it was completely impossible. Soldiers heading for the front prowled for Jews as though it were a blood sport.
From the minute I left Mariupol, I could not escape from the Jew-baiting, from the slogans on the walls to the newspapers to the gossip on everyone’s lips.
Every car I boarded, they would be looking for me. I was easy to pick out and easier to pick on. First came the dirty remarks and the pushing around. Then came the humiliation of having my pants pulled down to see if I was circumcised, and it ended with a slapping around or a beating. Once it was established that you were Jewish, at a whim of the Russians you were not permitted to sit down, even on the floor. The soldiers made all of us—men, women, and children—stand from station to station. After a few hours people would start collapsing. Sometimes I stood for so many hours I crawled off the train in a state of exhaustion. Food had to be eaten carefully. For example, bread could not be gobbled so you hid in the latrine and ate it slowly. If you had potatoes or cucumbers, you gobbled it down fast.
The worst was during the final leg, when the train was boarded by a company of Cossack soldiers returning from the front, where they had taken a terrible beating from the German Army. My overcoat was ripped apart to see if I was hiding money and when they found none, I was beaten unconscious. This is the condition my Uncle Bernie found me in at the Minsk station. I was in the hospital for over a week, with cracked ribs and a broken nose. One more train ride and the story of Nathan Zadok would have been over.
MINSK, I AM happy to say, was a change for the better. Uncle Bernie had become a man of means. He owned a small jewelry manufacturing business with a retail outlet on the elegant Gubnartorsky Street. Along comes the war and his business is booming. Minsk was a major staging area for the Army and its streets were filled with soldiers and many officers had their women. No one seemed to want to go off to war without buying a trinket or two. Uncle Bernie’s was filled from opening to closing.
Despite his new wealth, Bernie Zadok was a real mensch. He and Aunt Sarah remained earthy people with