Vilna My Vilna by Abraham Karpinowitz

Author:Abraham Karpinowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780815653523
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2016-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

8

Vladek

I want to tell you about Vladek, one of Yusef the janitor’s boys. Yusef was a goy who drank constantly and hit his wife and children whenever he felt like it. His son Vladek wasn’t safe at home, so he grew up with us. The cellar where they lived was always dark. Yusef’s wife had something on the boil all day long—either wash or cabbage. The steam only let up a little in the evenings.

Vladek hung out with us, the courtyard children. He didn’t do too badly. Sometimes he got a piece of challah, other times a bit of buckwheat kugel—whatever one of our mothers had shoved into our hands. We didn’t have much ourselves. The courtyard was full of poor, barefoot people, one poorer than the next. Seremetinke, the owner of the courtyard, was always fighting with his tenants about rent money. He was hardly a rich man himself.

When we were young, Vladek had somewhere to go. But when we got bigger, we were sent to a Talmud Torah, the Toras Emes School. Vladek was miserable. He had nothing to eat and no one to play with. In the afternoons, he stood watch, waiting for us to return.

We didn’t walk to Toras Emes, we ran. They handed out American milk and wheat dumplings. We played cops and robbers in the large courtyard. No one pushed us very hard to study. Our teacher, Mr. Gershovitsh, knew who he was dealing with, so he gave up without a struggle. Tevke the Tapeworm, Orke the Lucky Seven, and Shmuel the Organ Grinder’s Twin sat in the first row. They were already thugs by then. We had another teacher, the tiny Miss Funk, one of the daughters from Funk’s bookstore. We called her by her first name, Chana-Bashka. She tried teaching us at first, but eventually she also let go of the reins.

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