“Bobeh,36 you have his letter at home,” a small boy shouts in her ear. “He wrote you before the fighting started, don’t you remember?”
“Yes, yes! Will you wait, gutinker?”37 the old woman begs. “I’m going right away to fetch the letter. Maybe you know my Khayim.”
She moves heavily away. The others ply me with questions, about their relatives, friends, brothers, husbands. Almost everyone of them has someone in that far-off America, which is like a fabled land to these simple folk—the land of promise, peace, and wealth, the happy place from which but few return.
“Maybe you will take a letter to my husband?” a pale young woman asks. All at once a dozen persons begin to clamor for permission to write and send their letters through me to their beloved ones, “there in Amerikeh.” I promise to take their mail, and the crowd slowly melts away, with a pleading admonition to wait for them. “Only a few words—we’ll be right back.”
“Let us go to Reb Moishe,” my guide reminds me. “They know,” she adds, with a wave at the others, “they’ll bring their letters there.”
As we start on our way a tall man with jet-black beard and burning eyes detains me. “Be so good, one minute.” He speaks quietly, but with a strong effort to restrain his emotion. “I have no one in America,” he says; “I have no one anywhere. You see this house?” There is a nervous tremor in his voice, but he steadies, himself. “There, across the way, with the broken windows, paper-covered, pasted over. My old father, the Almighty bless his memory, and my two young brothers were killed there. Cut to pieces with sabers. The old man had his peyes38 cut off, together with his ears, and his belly ripped open. … I ran away with my daughter, to save her. Look, there she is, at the third stall on the right.” His eyes, stream with tears as he points towards a girl standing a few feet away. She is about fifteen, oval faced, with delicate features, pale and fragile as a lily, and with most peculiar eyes. She is looking straight before her, while her hands are mechanically cutting chunks of bread from the big round loaf. There is the same dreadful expression in her eyes that I have recently seen for the first time in the faces of very young girls in pogromed cities. A look of wild terror frozen into a stare that grips at my heart. Yet, not realizing the truth, I whisper to her father, “Blind?”
“No, not blind;” he cries out. “Wish to God—no, much worse. She has been looking like that ever since the night when I ran away from our house with her. It was a fearful night. Like wild beasts they cut and slashed and raved. I hid with my Rosele in the cellar, but we were not safe there, so we ran to the woods nearby. They caught us on the way. They took her from me and left me for dead. Look—” He takes off his hat and I see a long sword cut, only partly healed, scarring the side of his head. “They left me for dead,” he repeats. “When the murderers had gone, three days later, she was found in the field and she has been like that … with that look in her eyes … she hasn’t talked since. … Oh, my God, why dost Thou punish me so?”
“Dear Reb Sholem, do not blaspheme,” my woman guide admonishes him. “Are you the only one to suffer? You know my great loss. We all share the same fate. It has always been the fate of us Jews. We know not the ways of God, blessed be His holy name. But let us go to Reb Moishe,” she says, turning to me.
Behind the counter of what was once a grocery store stands Reb Moishe. He is a middle-aged Hebrew, with an intelligent face that now bears only the memory of a kindly smile. An old resident of the town and elder in the synagogue, he knows every inhabitant and the whole history of the place. He had been one of the well-to-do men of the city, and even now he cannot resist the temptation of hospitality, so traditional with his race. Involuntarily his eyes wander to the shelves entirely bare save for a few empty bottles. The room is dingy and out of repair; the wall paper hangs down in cracked sheets, exposing the plaster, yellow with moisture. On the counter are some loaves of black bread, straw dotted, and a small tray with green onions. Reb Moishe bends over, produces a bottle of soda from under the counter, and offers the treasure to me, with a smile of benign welcome. A look of consternation spreads over the face of his wife, who sits darning silently in the corner, as Reb Moishe shamefacedly declines the proferred payment. “No, no, I cannot do it,” he says with simple dignity, but I know it as the height of sacrifice.
Learning the purpose of my visit to Fastov, Reb Moishe invites me to the street. “Come with me,” he says; “I’ll show you what they did to us. Though there is not much for the eyes”—he looks at me with searching gaze—“only those who lived through it can understand, and maybe”—he pauses a moment—“maybe also those who really feel with us in our great bereavement.”
We step out of the store. Across is a large vacant space, its center littered with old boards and broken bricks. “That was our schoolhouse,” Reb Moishe comments. “This is all that’s left of it. That house on your left, with the shutters closed, it was Zalman’s, our schoolteacher’s. They killed six there—father, mother, and four children. We found them all with their heads broken by the butts of guns. There, around the corner, the whole
