Erratic North by Mark Frutkin

Author:Mark Frutkin [Frutkin, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9781550027860
Google: Z5FhRC10jQMC
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2008-08-15T05:21:16+00:00

When Simon told his mother he was planning to leave for America, she fainted dead away. Simon’s oldest brother, Abram, had already gone. In fact, every one of Simon’s ten siblings, male and female (he was the tenth of eleven), ended up emigrating, except the youngest, a daughter. She stayed in Russia because she had married at age sixteen and was expecting a child.

With the astounding number of Jews leaving Belarus and other parts of Russia, it was as if the traditional shammes who walked through the streets of a town’s Jewish quarter late on Friday afternoon shouting “Jews to the bathhouse!” had changed his cry to “Jews to the New World!”

Simon hadn’t actually been drafted yet. Typically, the Friday evening Sabbath dinner included an oyrekh, a stranger as guest for the meal, and quite often this guest would be a Jewish conscript posted to their town, far from home and family. An unhappy young Jewish soldier in their presence, answering endless questions about his difficult experiences in the czar’s army, would certainly have had a powerful and lasting effect on the boys in the household. After the meal, all present symbolically washed their hands with a few drops of water. Then the knives, symbols of bloody weapons, were covered with cloth and removed from the table. This was followed by the zmiros, placid songs of peace and contentment. Many of the rituals of the Jewish Sabbath, it seemed, worked against the military mentality.

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