Two years ago, when her mother was seriously ill, Laurie Liberty took over her genealogical research and discovered a Yiddish writer in the family. Shea Tenenbaum, a prolific memoirist and critic with 24 books to his credit, was her mother’s Uncle Sid. Laurie called the Book Center, bought one of every Tenenbaum title we had, and plunged into the study of Yiddish. A year later she sent us preliminary translations of a few of his many family stories, two of which we present here.

Shea (short for Joshua) Tenenbaum (1910–1989) was born in Bobrinik near Lublin, the youngest of 12 siblings. He became a typesetter at age 14 and began publishing at 16 (after which time, Laurie conjectures, he was never seen without a notebook). Before coming to the U.S. in 1934 he lived in various cities in Europe, including Marc Chagall’s Russian hometown Vitebsk, and he knew and corresponded with Chagall. Like many Yiddish writers, he worked for some years in New York; he then spent time in Denver recovering from tuberculosis. From there he traveled to California, but he missed the cultural life of New York and returned after a year. He received the National Jewish Book Award in 1985 for From Ash and Fire Is Your Crown.

Tenenbaum never married. These two stories, in their portrait of the uneasy marriage of his parents, suggest a partial explanation. “The Rendezvous of the Grandfathers” tells the story of the first awkward meeting of Rachel Leah Grossman and Abraham Mordecai Tenenbaum and sets the stage for the painful vignette from their youngest son’s childhood, “God’s Mournful Bread.”

The story of the grandfathers appears with slight differences in two of Tenenbaum’s books, Midnight in Warsaw and The Truth Shall Be Your Star. Laurie has occasionally interpolated especially interesting phrases from the second narrative into the first, so there are a few places where the translation will not match the Yiddish text. Our thanks to Dovid Braun for checking the translation.

— Catherine Madsen

The Rendezvous of the Grandfathers
Excerpted from Midnight in Warsaw and The Truth Should Be Your Star

MY FATHER AND HIS WHOLE FAMILY came from the city of Ivangorod. My mother and her whole family came from the city of Kurov and the neighboring town of Markushof. At that time, my father’s father, Reb Leybush Yoyelkes Tenenbaum, the great, vastly rich and philanthropic businessman from the town of Demblin (which was called Ivangorod during the Czarist rule in Poland, and called by the Jews Modzhits), who was also the official purveyor to the czarist fortress, used to meet with my mother’s father, Reb Moyshele Yoynes Grossman. Usually they talked about business matters. The meetings must have taken place in my grandfather Reb Moyshele Yoynes’ tavern in the village of Garbov, not far from Kurov. At one point, Grandfather Moyshele Yoynes told Grandfather Reb Leybush Yoyelkes:
—My dear Reb Leybush! I have a fine respectable daughter for your eldest son, Motl.

Several times, according to the family chronicle, the two grandfathers conferred in the tavern by a hilly road until they finally agreed to join their families in wedlock. They arranged that on a bright and beautiful day the bride and groom would have a “viewing” and meet in person, eye to eye.

This historic rendezvous of my future parents was to take place in this same tavern where the grandfathers had already met. The thick smoke of cheap tobacco that the farmers from the surrounding villages put in their pipes hung perpetually under the ceiling of the tavern like a thick, grey cloud. Fantasy paints before my eyes a scene of robust farmers in their thick, yellow fur coats. Strong, callused peasant hands carry to thick lips tall steins of thick, brown, transparent beer that foams like silver snow glazed by the sun over the sturdy glass rims of the steins. The farmers’ mustaches froth with the thick foam of the beer and from the icy Polish frost.

Heated and vigorous conversations can be heard in the tavern concerning politics, the severity of the czar and his reactionary ministers who strangle the national-revolutionary spirit of the Polish people; the stubborn revolutionaries who throw bombs at the czar’s loyal messengers in the streets of the great Russian cities; last summer’s bad harvest, which has intensified the hunger of the poor in Poland’s cities and villages; and that nevertheless, after all the misfortune, “Poland still is not lost.”

In the middle of the tavern under the whitewashed ceiling, where the reticent swallows build their nests with thin threads and delicate silky feathers, hangs the great kerosene lamp on its iron chain; its glare shows up the smallest marks on the red and sweaty faces of the drunkards, a reminder of Van Gogh’s famous painting of “The Night Café.” In the corner of the spacious tavern hangs a large wooden clock whose pendulum steadily beats the moments of time like a hammer in the steady hand of an angel. The dark hands on the round face with the Roman numerals turn slowly and elegantly like a couple in an eternal tango. But yours truly is not yet present, having each night to wind the hard bronze weights of the wooden clock when they almost touch the floor. At this point I am still perfectly absent from the world, difficult as it is for me to imagine now. My future parents have yet to unite. They will likely look into each other’s eyes, perhaps into each other’s souls as well.

With all that said, let us paint the features of Grandfather Reb Leybush Yoyelkes. He appears, in the single photograph he allowed to be taken after much persuasion, to be a Jewish nobleman or the heir to an estate, clothed in a long satin caftan with a silk belt pulled around his waist. He wears a fur-edged hat on his head. From somewhere in Paradise, on the eve of physical birth, I reach out my pale, childish, precarious little hand in order to play with his thick golden watch chain which trembles over his broad vest, and I eagerly want to touch the threads of his dark, silky beard. My hand, from the land of non-existence, stretches over his substantial belly.

Grandfather Moyshele Yoynes, by contrast, appears to be a short, lively little man – charming, active, strong and brisk. He is good-natured and congenial, just like my mother. Even before I, his grandchild, am rightly born, I seem to have a feeling for our heartfelt bond. I already want to embrace and kiss him like a proper grandfather who is greatly loved. He is simplicity and genuineness itself. His Yiddish is gilded and coppery with robust folklore, with healthy folk-wisdom, and peppered with old-fashioned proverbs and similes like clumps of dark gold and ancient treasure.

Yes, the meeting of the two grandfathers was to occur in a tavern, indeed in the Garbov tavern among the fur-cloaked peasants and under a cloud of cheap tobacco smoke. This detail somewhat provokes my literary imagination. It was so ordered, this time of wine, song and simple folk, from the very first conception of their destined meeting together. The two grandfathers, still relatively young in their early middle years, the architects of my soul, the blacksmiths of my existence, met earnestly in the tavern in order to prepare the ground for me and my other 11 brothers and sisters whose souls were then still shining down like golden stars from a vast heaven.

When my mother, Rokhl-Leye, as my father called her throughout her life, was a tired, frail old woman, I once came home from the unfamiliar New York streets late at night, soaked through from the rain or frozen from the ice and snow and frosty winds, and pleaded with her to tell me something about her family, especially of her grandfathers and grandmothers. Mother smiled, shed a few tears, and proceeded to tell me:

—My child, your father was at that time around 16 years old. I, your mother, was only about 14. At that time I was still playing games with my young girlfriends in the street. I remember the sun was gradually declining like it wanted to depart from the world forever. But it soon rekindled, pacing blithely like a queen in a palace on top of a cloudy staircase. It was springtime upon the world and spring in our lives. Your father, I remember now like it happened just yesterday, was standing so thin, slender and a bit unsure, in a long cloth caftan with a narrow Jewish cap on his head. Your father took a long strange look at me, severe and even unfriendly. It sort of gave me chills and sent a shudder over my whole body. I even glanced at his brow and tried to read his thoughts. He apparently doubted whether he would take me for a wife. I felt his sharp cold glance on my entire body and soul. But I did not have the courage or the boldness to regard him for too long. I was of course quite embarrassed, with plain girlish fears, and certainly with no boldness to look directly at my destined-one-to-be, the future father of our 12 children, whose souls now waited for us in heaven. Everything was so strange, unclear, overwhelming and intoxicating. I was not spiritually or emotionally prepared for such a personal meeting with my destiny, with my future, with my entire life, which was now embodied in an incomprehensible image of a not-too-sympathetic man with a not-too-pleasant face, not to mention his cold and reserved disposition. And they didn’t ask afterward whether I liked the groom. In fact I really didn’t like him at all. He hadn’t even directly smiled at me, or said a single friendly word to me; he did not even greet me, let alone extend a warm hand to me to tremblingly touch my wilted fingers. Nor did he give the least hint of gentility or tenderness, even during our further meetings later on, or even after our wedding. This, my dear child, this is how our first wretched encounter took place, which clearly foretold no good. Our wedding was to take place three years after the first meeting of your two grandfathers in my father’s pub, in the big village of Garbov.

This simply means, I suppose, that for three whole years my father did not know my mother, although officially she was already committed to him, his destined bride. Even their first meeting, their “viewing,” was obviously so cold and awkward.

Bitter poverty reigned in our house through all the years of its existence; true physical hunger, especially during the years of the First World War, along with constant arguing and contention which deeply depressed me during my young years and made me very sad. My father was descended from a house of rich, arrogant parvenus. Unfortunately, he did not inherit my grandfather’s goodness and humanity. Instead he inherited his mother’s conceit and open wickedness together with her empty arrogance. My father, in truth, was a person of extraordinary abilities and talents. He possessed (besides his truly golden hands for all kinds of work in the house) the gifts of an artisan, as well as artistic talents for poetry and painting. A vigorous imagination, ambitions, plans and dreams – along with thoroughly mishandled and incompetent moves in life, which were condemned in advance to failure, and which any more or less sane person with good judgment could clearly see as such, except for one person: my father himself. The simple and practical capacity to earn a living in order to honorably support a family with a wife and children, and to reach his goals and purpose in life in a normal and direct way, he did not possess at all.

He searched, fought and suffered severely all his life. He wrestled bitterly with the struggles and drama of his life. Many times he took to different daring enterprises and undertakings. He possessed a great many involved theoretical plans, but in practical life he could never succeed with any of them. He was always a pensive and melancholy person who apparently strongly regretted his constant failures and misfortunes. Everything he conceived and undertook fell through. The well-known Polish proverb could be well applied to him: “I truly don’t have any money, but honor and dignity I do possess!” Even better was the Yiddish proverb: A sakh melokhes un veynik brokhes: “Jack of all trades, master of none.”

God’s Mournful Bread
Excerpted from The Angel of Life

ONCE A DAY MY MOTHER SERVED my father his poor and wretched dinner. But it happened once that earlier she had cut off a slice of bread for a child, or perhaps for herself, although in fact she usually short-changed herself. For herself she would put to cook on the stove a small iron pot of potato skins.

The knife must have been sharp, and it cut deeply, as if by its own force, into the fresh, aromatic and (as I still remember it now) warm and well-raised bread. My mother, however, had second thoughts in the middle of cutting such a thick slice. My father would notice how much bread she had cut. Even if he didn’t openly express his resentment through deadly curses he would instead become eerily silent. My poor mother was therefore assailed by fear in the midst of her cutting and she quickly extracted the reckless knife and began to cut a thinner slice of bread, leaving the earlier cut unseen in the hot loaf of bread.

When my father, as usual, began cutting himself a thin slice of bread, his knife immediately strayed into the cut my mother had already made. His knife leaped out from inside the cut and, from the momentum, cut into his own throat as he held the bread pressed against his heart. The knife must have been very sharp, and my father’s neck wound was deep. He began to bleed as if someone were slaughtering him, God forbid, with a kosher-slaughtering knife. My father immediately suspected that my mother had already sliced the loaf of bread. He fell, as was his nature, into a frightening rage. He started broadly cursing both my mother and the children. Not only was his own throat bleeding, but the drops of blood had wet the bread, my father’s shirt and garments, and even the clean white tablecloth. My father pressed against his bleeding throat, and his two pale hands were also smeared with blood.

It was a very strange scene: you suddenly see your father bleeding. You see your own father’s red blood. You see your insanely angry father with an almost slit neck. However, even more deeply bloodied than my father was my unfortunate mother in her heart. She carried in her heart a much more terrible wound than my father’s. Her wound was much more agonizing and ran deeper. It is impossible with a writer’s pen, even with Shakespeare’s quill, to be capable of describing the scene.

Finally, my father’s wound dried and abated. But his volcanic outburst of rage lasted a long, long time and issued in a stormy downpour of offensive speech. My mother was quiet and hushed with guilt, as always, and she laid pieces of cloth and compresses on his throat. With warm water and with her tears she later quietly washed off the table, the floor, the tablecloth and – the bread. She lay on the ground as she wiped the floor, and she was a heap of sadness, misfortune and dejection. And we, the small frightened boys in the house, were mournfully quiet. The knife that had cut carelessly into God’s warm bread – because mother feared as she sliced the bread that the slice would be too thick for her child – that same knife cut into my young heart for ever. That was the sharp slaughtering knife of our poverty.