he felt as if he viewed the world from inside the block of ice, from a prismatic vantage that made everything appear lustrous and holy. Away from the icehouse, however, performing the tasks that bowed his spine and deepened the bags beneath his eyes, Salo wondered if perhaps he and the rest of the world were merely figments in the rebbe’s dream.
With the passing years rumors of tottering empires and imminent apocalypse reached even the netherworld of the Balut. The graybearded alter kuckers, as usual, predicted the advent of Messiah (waiting for whom was their principal vocation), and the worse conditions became for the Jews, the more convinced were they that Messiah’s arrival was at hand. But the young tended to read the signs differently, and many were fed up with a religion predicated on anticipation and the suffering one must endure in the protracted meantime. In cellar coffeehouses and shtibls where printing presses had replaced the ark of the Torah, they whispered sedition and conspired to carry it out. The Frostbissen twins, Yachneh and Yoyneh, were among those infected by the revolutionary fever. They had never bothered to assemble separate identities, and despite their tender years they were already sated with the stew of vices the ghetto afforded—they’d shared women with the same cavalier indiscretion with which they might have shared a bottle of contraband cognac or a wager in a game of shtuss; and now, susceptible to loftier passions, they had become enamored of the doctrines of radical change. They joined the socialist labor Bund and, barely literate themselves, distributed Marxist pamphlets on the street-corners of the Balut. They mouthed the prevailing rhetoric, inveighing against the capitalist cockroaches among their own people. “The Jewish bosses, once they cease their blood-sucking exploitation, will be regarded as equal partners in the proletarian struggle for an independent Poland!” and so on. While they’d scarcely lifted a finger to alleviate their parents’ ceaseless toil, they now took unskilled jobs throwing silk and stirring the vats of synthetic dye in the fabric mill, where they attempted to organize the workers into unions. Their efforts and those of their comrades resulted in havoc, sparking strikes and subsequent lockouts that led to battles between protesting workers and hired thugs, to beatings at the hands of police and mass arrests, which the twins only narrowly escaped. And lately, though they had only a nodding acquaintance with their own mother tongue, they had begun to disparage Yiddish as zhargon, espousing the revival of Hebrew as the official lingua franca of the Jews.
Between working and dreaming, Salo was unaware of his sons’ political activities. On those infrequent occasions when he saw them, he could only marvel at how much they had grown; he admired them for having turned into some rare new breed of Jew, no longer anemic and long-suffering but muscular and purposeful, while Basha Puah grumbled that they were becoming so gentile she wondered if they were still circumcised. She couldn’t help but hear the news that percolated throughout the marketplace: There was a failed revolution in Russia, and dozens of Lodz citizens sympathetic to the insurrectionists had built barricades and been wounded in clashes with the police; after which both Polish and Jewish youths, sentenced without trial, had begun to vanish from the city streets by the score. Then all of a sudden the twins came in from the cold; they were back in the cellar, looking over their shoulders, stuffing clothes into canvas knapsacks and informing their mother and baby sister that they were off to found a Jewish state in Palestine. They referred to Zion as if it might have been their original home, which they’d have argued that in a sense it was. For the opiate of religion they of course had little patience, their reasons for going having nothing to do with “holy” lands; nothing was sacred in this unjust world, they contended, but the human will. Full of the zeal of their righteous new ideology, they neglected to say that they were wanted by the authorities.
Basha Puah marched to the icehouse to fetch her husband, insisting—when she’d managed to pry him loose from his post (an increasingly difficult operation due to his stiffening joints)—that he do something to prevent the boys from leaving. But Salo was perplexed; hardly conscious of the passage of so many complacent years, he still thought of the twins as impish little pishers incapable of serious mischief. As for their newly minted ideals, their father never