Read Online A Day of Small Beginnings by Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum - Free Book Online

hopefully. But before Hillel could answer, Itzik’s face darkened. “What’s so great about calling
     ourselves Poles?”
    It was a fair question, but it clearly stopped Hillel cold, the way children’s questions often do.
    “What’s so great about living like a Jew, like your father and that Mendel the Blacksmith back there?” He waved dismissively
     in the direction of Plac Gryzbowski. “That’s the world you want for the future? You want to continue that golden chain of
     generations?” He rolled his eyes. “That’s nothing but
shtetl
Jews living in filth with their ridiculous notions of superiority. No wonder the Jew is a figure of fun! What else do you
     call someone who thinks memorizing every page of the Talmud is what man was put on earth to do? That’s about as useful as
     learning to repeat every argument ever made on whether an egg laid on the Sabbath can be eaten. Is that what you believe in?
     Then go home to them. Go ahead!” He pulled the boy from the crate and gave him a push. “Go back to your momma.”
    Itzik was close to tears. “I can’t.”
    I could feel his body heat up as it did when he clung to my gravestone. His stomach muscles tightened. His breaths shortened
     with panic, and the focus of his great round eyes became distant, as if he barely could see the Warsaw street at all. He staggered
     a bit, then braced himself against the wall. A moment later he sank to the ground and put his arms protectively over his head,
     as if to block out the blows of the world.
    Hillel, I could see, was not prepared for a reaction like this. “Look, boychik,” he said gently. He kneeled at Itzik’s side.
     “All those people back east in that muddy town you come from, I know them. I grew up with people like that too. I had a father
     like yours once.”
    “What do you know about my father?” Itzik said thickly.
    Hillel seemed to consider this. “Itzik, listen to me,” he said. “Ever since I came to Warsaw, I’ve been getting myself an
     education from a man named Pesha Goldman. Pesha Goldman came also from one of our towns in the east. He has made a great change
     in his life. Before, he spent his days wrapped up in mysticism. But then soldiers raped his wife, Devora, in front of him.
     He put away the Kabbalah and took her and their son to Warsaw. He says a Jew doesn’t have the luxury to live in the clouds.”
    I felt a pain, like the cut of an ax, in my heart.
    Hillel sank down the wall next to Itzik, who was rigid after what Hillel had just said. “Pesha joined the movement. He became
     an activist. He got caught organizing striking workers. They put him in prison, but he said they couldn’t do anything to him
     that would change his mind about fighting for a better life here and now. He and his wife take in boarders like me, and he
     teaches us social history. He’s a photographer by trade.” Hillel smiled. “He likes to collect pictures too, especially of
     Indians in America.”
    Itzik looked at him like a bird in a nest, opening its mouth to be fed. “Why?”
    “Pesha says the Jews are like the Indians. We hold to this idea of the greatness of our ‘tribe.’ They dress themselves in
     feathers and paint. We dress in caftans and fur. But it’s all an illusion, he says, just like the studio photographs with
     the painted backgrounds. We’ve both been conquered. The Indians they sent to live on reservations, the Jews to the Pale of
     Settlement in Russia, to live like rats and starve. Pesha says the only picture that tells the true story is the one a friend
     of his in America sent him. It’s hanging in a frame in his house—a freezing Indian boy huddled between two mongrel dogs, trying
     to keep warm in the bitter winter on the plain. Pesha says that’s what comes from allowing ourselves to be led by superstitious,
     fanatical chiefs and rabbis. That’s what happens to people who insist on being tribal in the twentieth century.”
    “What choice is there? We’re