from Vilne Mayn Vilne (Vilna My Vilna)

PLEASE NOTE: You'll find a bilingual version as an attached PDF file at the bottom of this page.

YIDDISH WRITING AFTER THE HOLOCAUST is notably unsentimental about the world the Nazis destroyed. Many heartbroken people did write inexpertly about lost loved ones who appeared perfect in their absence; some of the yisker-bikher (memorial books for destroyed towns) gloss over painful details. But those same yisker-bikher present accurate maps, frank character sketches, and a realistic picture of the culture that was so brutally erased, and many expert writers – equally heartbroken – speak with great honesty about the world before the war.

Abraham Karpinovitch (1913–2004) is known to a small but discerning public as a writer of fine short stories set in interwar Vilna. He belonged to one of Vilna’s literary and artistic families: his father Moshe directed the Folksteater, and his sisters Rivka and Devorah were actresses. His brother Meylekh, after the war, co-edited the important Yiddish literary journal Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain) with Vilna poet and hero Abraham Sutzkever. Abraham Karpinovitch spent the war in the Soviet Union and afterwards made his way to Israel, with a delay of two years in a British detention camp on Cyprus. Eventually he settled in Tel Aviv, where he worked as manager of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

Karpinovitch recreates prewar Vilna with subtle artistry and painstaking accuracy: streets, businesses, libraries, people, slang. In “Tall Tamare,” the multilingual Mefitse Haskole was a real library containing 45,000 volumes on widely varied subjects; the Strashun Library had 35,000 uncatalogued volumes of Judaica, and its librarian, Khaykl Lunsky, knew where to find every book. Siomke Kagan was a journalist and ethnographer as well as a labor organizer. As for slang, klumpes, the Vilna Jews’ term of disparagement for Lithuanians, means “wooden clogs” – roughly equivalent to the English “clodhoppers” as an insult for peasants in heavy shoes.

“Tall Tamare” is both sympathetically comic and painfully tragic in its presentation of Vilna’s poor and the unexpected dignity available to one woman through a chance contact with Yiddish literary culture. We are proud to present this fine translation by Helen Mintz, with thanks for the assistance of Sheva Zucker and the permission of Abraham Karpinovitch’s widow, Dr. Sara Lapickaja.
—Catherine Madsen

The trouble began at Stovepipe Berte’s. She had a brothel on Yatkever Street. It was well established – a business to envy. The place was always packed because of Tamare; Vilne guys couldn’t get enough of her. On Friday evenings Tamare didn’t have a free moment.

But Berte was very greedy; she wanted everything for herself. She started screaming at Tamare, turning her days into a living hell. First, Berte accused Tamare of talking too much, then of laughing when she shouldn’t and ignoring customers. Tamare would have swallowed these insults because, after all, Berte’s brothel was warm and cozy; but one Friday evening Berte did something that was too much to bear. So Tamare waited until after Shabbes and the next morning, first thing, she took her little trunk, packed her few dresses and all the installments of the book Regina the Spy which she bought every Friday, and left Berte’s.

The other girls in the trade advised Tamare not to go. They had each swallowed plenty of insults from the madams. But even though Tall Tamare wasn’t one of the grand ladies of Vilne and didn’t own a dacha in Volokumpie, a beautiful area beyond Vilne, or spend time in the Griner Shtral Café, still, she had her self-respect.

So why did Tamare leave Berte’s? It was like this:

Every Friday evening, all of Tamare’s regular beaus came to see her. There was Itzik the Hare, One-eared Zorekhke, Sender the Stutterer from Yiddishe Street, Mendel the Fireman and many others. They sat together on a bench in the foyer waiting their turn. They were washed, clean-shaven, and wore clean shirts, as befits Shabbes.

Hershl the Porter, a dwarf whose feet didn’t reach the floor, stood out from the others. Tamare pampered him because he didn’t throw himself at her like at the kugel that followed the cholent. Hershl had excellent manners. He never insulted her with vulgar language and even had the sense to bring her a little bag of candy from time to time.

Women killed for men like Hershl. Given his vigor, he really needed to stay the entire night, but he could barely afford one visit. Afterwards he lay with Tamare, his short legs stretched out to her ankles and begged, “Tamarinke, let me lie next to you for one more minute. I want to have the feeling of being a married man.” Tamare didn’t say anything to Hershl. She took advantage of his dream to catch her breath with a glass of cold tea which she had prepared, but had not had time all evening to drink.

Meanwhile, Berte noticed several guys get up from the bench and prepare to leave. She heard Sender the Stutterer suggest they visit Esther with the Eyeglasses, who had a brothel on Zavalne Street, next to the lumber market. Sender stuttered, “Wh-wh-why should we sit h-h-here like h-h-hens on their eggs?”

And so while Hershl was lying next to Tamare and reveling in the moment, Stovepipe Berte began banging her fist on the door of Tamare’s cubicle and screaming, “Hershl! May you burn. . .you know where! Guys like you shouldn’t come Friday night, but during the week. You’re ruining my business!”

Tamare dragged her little trunk to her friend Black Leyke’s, who lived on Shkaplerne Street, behind the train station. As Tamare made her way to Leyke’s, her entire being raged against Berte. “Berte has completely forgotten that a girl in this line of work is also a person with a heart and feelings, like they sing in the Yiddish theatre. I’m not just putting holes in matzo, where the oven is burning hot and you have to shove the merchandise in as quickly as possible.” And who had that gangster Berte picked on? On little Hershl, the loneliest person in all of Vilne – he didn’t have a single soul to comfort him.

At Leyke’s, Tamare had a little time to open a book. Of all the women in the trade, she was the most literate. She even exchanged books at the Mefitse Haskole Library on Zavalne Street. She depended on Krasny, the librarian, to tell her what to read. He recommended a book called The Lady of the Camellias, written by a certain Dumas.

Tamare read the story to her friend Black Leyke and they both had a good cry, especially at the end when the camellia lady went off to die. She had in fact never been a lady, but had eaten the same bitter fruit as they, earned from lying in the beds of strangers.

When Siomke Kagan, the newspaper reporter from the Vilner Tog, had tried to establish a professional union for Vilne streetwalkers, Tamare had been the first to speak up. It was she who had raised the issue of overtime, which the brothel owners, the pimps, weren’t willing to recognize. Like so many of Siomke’s projects, nothing came of the professional union. But from that day on, Tamare used strange words like “exploitation,” “class consciousness,” and “general strike.”

•••
 

Tamare left the profession. She lived with Leyke, who rented a room on Shkaplerne Street, quite far from the city. Leyke survived on what she got from occasional guests, elderly Jews who weren’t from Vilne, and was able to help her friend Tamare out with a bowl of soup and a cup of tea.

Tamare felt very badly about leaning on Leyke, so she searched for a way to earn a groschen. Her efforts didn’t amount to much. Stovepipe Berte offered to take her back, but Tamare had her self-respect. The only person Tamare still saw was Hershl the Porter, who stopped by Leyke’s from time to time. But you could get more love than money from Hershl.

Siomke Kagan really wanted to help Tamare. He saw her as a victim of the brutal capitalist system against which he had struggled so bitterly throughout his youth. He tried once again to open a school for love in Vilne and wrote a long article in the paper about the project, underlining its importance and the honor which such a school, the first in the world, would bring to Vilne. He also pointed out that, added to the bargain, Vilne had two highly qualified educators: Tamare Shmelisky and Leye Brenner, known in the profession by the names Tall Tamare and Black Leyke. That’s how Siomke Kagan introduced his readers to Tamare and Leyke.

Tamare didn’t put much stock in Siomke’s plan. It had been tried once before. They had even ordered a sign, but nothing came of it. Siomke refused to give up and took himself around the city in search of teaching material. He rummaged around for so long in Foonks, the small bookshop on Daytshe Street, that it eventually dawned on him that Khaykl Lunsky, the librarian at the Strashun Library, could help him.

Siomke went to the library to see what Khaykl could do for him. Khaykl Lunsky went over to a side cupboard in the library and took out a thin little book. The pamphlet precisely spelled out all the fine points for correctly having sex with a woman as well as what to do to please the man.

Khaykl Lunsky stroked the pamphlet, reprinted from an old manuscript which had to be a good few hundred years old. The author’s name wasn’t given. The pamphlet, written in Hebrew, was called Ahava Batonugim, which in plain Yiddish means “Pleasure in Love.”

Siomke immediately suggested to Lunsky that he translate the booklet from Hebrew into Yiddish, but Lunsky dismissed the suggestion. He smiled into his thick beard and whispered, “Ah Siomke, our sages long ago brought people the knowledge you’re thinking about introducing to Vilne now. You won’t discover America with this.”

It didn’t help Siomke to argue that the whole undertaking could be a huge success. “It will stir up the entire world,” he insisted. “A school for love in Vilne, which makes use of pedagogic material from original Jewish sources. From rabbinic literature no less.” With steadfast patience, Khaykl Lunsky heard Siomke out. Then he put the pamphlet back into the cupboard amongst the other rare religious books.
Tamare was not depending on Siomke and his fantasies and began to look around for a way to earn a living. She had tried to set herself up in the market with a basket of chicken giblets, but the market women wouldn’t allow it, claiming there were already too many people selling their wares.

So Tamare went to work in the slaughter shed plucking poultry. There the women readily accepted her and before very long she brought in Black Leyke to work with her. The two women sat together, their legs buried in mountains of chicken and goose feathers. From time to time they reminisced about the old days when they had earned more from one guest than from ten plucked chickens. Leyke’s boy Elinke ran around the slaughter shed, bringing joy to all the pluckers. (He was the product of a casual encounter with some Jew, though Leyke insisted that the father was Elijah the Prophet.)

There is one thing that Siomke did do for Tamare. He got her involved in a small circle which gathered secretly in a garret on Yiddishe Street in Ramayles Courtyard. A pair of trouser tailors, several assistant tailors, a few seamstresses, a glovemaker, and a young man with hungry eyes sat together for hours in the evenings. The young man praised life in the great Soviet Union under the sun of the Stalinist constitution. A life to envy. Everyone in the circle knew what Tamare had once been; the skinny young man presented her as a former slave of the bourgeois order.

•••

Tall Tamare plucked chickens, attended the circle from time to time, and tried to feel satisfied with her life. It wasn’t easy. Sometimes she felt the urge to once again put on her skirt with the deep slit which showed off her long legs, slip on a low-cut blouse, take her patent leather bag in hand, and stand on Savitsher Street, next to the Piccadilly Cinema, winking at passersby. But what if one of her new acquaintances happened to walk by? What would they say? There in the garret on Yiddishe Street, they treated her as though she had never worked for Stovepipe Berte. Tamare satisfied herself with the slaughter shed and taking books out of the library.

Once, in haste, Krasny the librarian slipped Tamare a bunch of stories. The collection was called Folk Stories written by a certain Peretz. Tamare wanted to ask for something else right away: a novel, a love story with duels. But it was Friday and readers were rushing around and shoving each other to get a book for Shabbes. Tamare put the Folk Stories in her basket and went off to Leyke’s on Shkaplerne Street.

That evening the two friends sat at the table like two discharged soldiers too worn out to speak. Elinke was already asleep. The Shabbes candles, which Leyke had started lighting regularly once Elinke, her kaddish, was born, flickered on the chest of drawers. It was autumn. A very fine rain was beating down on the low window which looked out on a small garden, in the style of the wooden houses in that neighborhood. Tamare leafed through the book of stories, her full lips frowning in doubt. Leyke silently collected the khale crumbs from the Shabbes tablecloth. She resented her friend who hadn’t said a word to her all evening. Tamare was completely absorbed in her book. Finally Leyke could contain herself no longer and grumbled, “So, tell me what’s so interesting.”

Tamare lifted her chestnut brown cat’s eyes to Leyke, the same eyes whose glance had so warmed the blood of those who had come to Stovepipe Berte’s establishment. Tamare smiled. “These stories are very difficult to understand. There’s a lot of Hebrew words. You have to be a rabbi to figure it out.”

“So why knock yourself out?” Leyke asked. “On Sunday you can ask for a book that you won’t have to kill yourself to read.”

Tamare thought for a moment and then confessed, “There’s one story that I did manage to understand. It’s very . . .Very. . . So . . . About.”

Leyke prodded her, “So tell me already. About this. About that. About what?

“It has a deep thought.”

“So what’s the thought?”

“I have to read it to you.”

Leyke lost patience. “Just tell me what it’s about.”

Tamare cleared her throat and began, “It’s a story about three gifts. A Jew dies and he’s not allowed into Paradise until he brings three gifts to heaven.”

“What? They need gifts in heaven?”

Tamare got upset. “If you ask idiotic questions, I won’t tell you the story. A writer wrote it. Just listen!”

“Come on. What’s going on here? A person can’t even ask a question?”

Tamare dismissed Leyke with a wave of her hand and continued. “He brought a pin to heaven as a gift.”

Leyke was afraid to ask why you’d need a pin in heaven, so she kept quiet. Tamare continued, “The dead Jew brought two more gifts: a little sack of earth from Israel and a yarmulke. But the story about the pin really touched me.”

Tamare closed the book and began telling the story.
 
“This is how it was. Catholic priests condemned one of the rabbi’s daughters to death because she went out on the street when a church procession was passing by. Years ago, Jews weren’t allowed on the streets where goyim lived. They tied the rabbi’s daughter’s braid to the tail of a wild horse so that the galloping horse would drag her through the cobblestone streets.

“The priests asked the rabbi’s daughter for her last wish. She requested a pin and pinned her dress to the flesh of her legs. That way, when the horse sped through the streets, her dress wouldn’t lift up in the wind and people wouldn’t see her female parts.”

Leyke grabbed her head with her hands. “To her very flesh?”

“Exactly as you heard it.”

This didn’t sit well with Leyke. “A person is going to her death. Doesn’t she have anything better to worry about? At that point, what did it matter?”

Tamare disagreed. “But that is exactly the point of the story. She went to her death but she remained a rabbi’s daughter, not a wanton woman.” Leyke shrugged her shoulders and pursed her lips, uncertain whether the rabbi’s daughter in Peretz’s story had been right.

And so, the two friends, for whom taking off their clothes for strange men had been an everyday occurrence, went off to their beds, each drawing her own conclusion.

•••

Tamare stayed in the slaughter shed amongst the feathers until the war broke out. The Germans and the Russians divided Poland between themselves. On the nineteenth of September 1939, early on a beautiful morning at the beginning of autumn, tanks with red five-pointed stars on their steel sides appeared on the streets of Vilne. Tamare shook the down from her apron and, along with everyone else, ran to see the miracle. The entire group from the Ramayles Courtyard milled around the tanks like close relatives at a long-awaited wedding.
 

But the party didn’t last long. In total, six weeks. One night the tanks snuck out of Vilne like well-fed turtles and the Russians gave the city to the Lithuanians as a gift. The klumpes, as people in Vilne called the Lithuanians, enjoyed the gift for eight months, until the Soviets decided to return and free them from the worry of running their own state. This took place on the fifteenth of June, 1940.
 
Only then did the people who had been meeting in the garret on Yiddishe Street come to life. Sheyke Aykher, who had lost an arm in the Spanish Civil War, became the director of city busses. Lam, the men’s hat cleaner, was appointed manager of a movie theatre. Brayke the trouser tailor took over Berger’s soda water plant. Vilne was drenched in the odor of the dictatorship of the proletariat. People said that Tamare had had leftist sympathies for a long time and the new regime installed her in a meat warehouse.
 
Black Leyke did better than anyone else. She got herself a lieutenant from the Red Army, a fine sheygets. Not a big drinker. He immediately bought her a white shawl, the type worn by the lieutenant’s wives, and even went to live with her on Shkaplerne Street. The shawl lay on Leyke’s locks like snow on a mound of smoldering coals; it was a pleasure to look at her.
 
Leyke fit right in with the other wives in the garrison. She even picked up bits of Russian, enough to explain to her friends the difference between a long nightdress and a formal gown. The matrons who had just arrived in Vilne were certain that you could go dancing in the officer’s club in a nightie. With the lieutenant, Leyke became more refined and took on some style. Vilne didn’t recognize her.
 
Tamare was also seen with various officers, but nothing came of it. She found herself a little room on Shavelske Street so as not to interfere with her friend’s good fortune. It really was good fortune. Thanks to the lieutenant, Leyke and her son were saved. During the retreat from Vilna in 1941, the lieutenant placed them on a military truck which took them deep into the hinterland. Leyke wanted to take Tamare with them, but because of the urgency of the situation and the general turmoil it didn’t happen. The lieutenant cursed in the name of his mother, screaming that at any moment the German troops could show up.

•••

And Tall Tamare? She didn’t have to suffer from the Germans for long. On Wednesday, the seventeenth of September, 1941, some ten days after Vilne Jews were driven into the ghetto, Tamare stood with almost 1300 Jews on the field at Ponar – the place, not far from the city, where the Germans had chosen to murder the Jews of Vilne.
 
Tamare had had her own unique luck. They hadn’t had to drive her into the ghetto; she had already been there. Shavelske Street lay in the heart of the area assigned to Vilne Jews.
 
During the first months of the brutal German rule of Vilne, Tamare had tried her hand at various things. She had done a little selling of chicken giblets and from time to time had helped herself out with Hershl the Porter. Until she fell, as into a whirlpool, between the rules and regulations demanding she have the proper certificate, called a shayn, from the Germans in order to stay alive.
 
Tamare stood with the other women on the field at Ponar, gazing into the distance. What and who could she have been thinking about? She was absolutely alone; she had no one. She had been abandoned as a child and grown up in an orphanage. She had earned her living as a waitress for Zuske “the Professor,” who had a bar on Konske Street, until he explained to her that with her legs, if she stood on a corner, she could make good money.

•••

The order was given to undress.
 
Tamare did not undress. She dug her nails into the soft flesh of her plump arms without giving the slightest indication that she would undo even a button. She refused to obey the German with his machine gun. Tamare was taller than him, and standing opposite him in her cotton dress with the red and blue flowers, she looked him straight in the eye without reacting to his shouting.
 
He didn’t shout for long. A moment later, Tamare lay in the sand, felled by a hail of bullets.

•••

That’s how Tall Tamare, the last Jewish streetwalker in Vilne, met her death.
 
A woman who was wounded and crawled out of the pit at night managed to return to the ghetto and later told the story.

Helen Mintz (www.helenmintz.net) is a translator, solo performer, storyteller, and teacher. She brings Yiddish stories and poems, particularly the voice of Yiddish-speaking women, to both Yiddish-speaking and non-Yiddish-speaking audiences. She is seeking a publisher for her translations of Karpinovitch’s stories.