People arrived every day throughout the autumn, mainly from Wallachia and the Turkish lands, but also from Czernowitz, Jassy, even Bucharest. All thanks to Osman—it is he who brings in their co-religionists, especially those subjects of the sultan who have already converted to Islam. These differ only slightly from the local Podolian Jews: they’re a bit more tanned, more vibrant, readier to dance. Their songs are a little livelier. Languages, clothing, and headdress mix. Some wear turbans, like Osman and his plentiful family, others fur shtreimels. Some sport Turkish fezzes, and the northerners don four-pointed caps. The children embrace their new playmates, those from Podolia and those from the east all chasing each other merrily around the ponds. When winter comes, they chase each other around the ice. Their quarters are tight. For now, they crowd inside their little dwellings with their children and all their possessions, and even so they’re very cold, because the one thing they do not have in Ivanie is wood to burn. In the mornings the little panes of glass in the windows are covered in frost in patterns that innocently imitate the advancements of spring—leaves, buds, ferns.
Hayim of Kopczyńce and Osman allocate housing to newcomers. Hava, who’s in charge of provisions, distributes blankets and pots, shows them where they can cook, where they can wash up—there is even a mikvah at the end of town. She explains that here everyone eats together and cooks together. All work is communal: the women take care of the sewing, the men tend to the buildings and go in search of fuel. Only children and the elderly are entitled to milk.
And so the women launder, cook, sew, feed. There has already been one birth here, of a boy they named Jacob. Meanwhile the men head out in the mornings on business, seeking trade—earning money. In the evenings they convene. A couple of adolescents make up Ivanie’s postal service, delivering packages on horseback, going all the way to Kamieniec if need be, sneaking across the border to Turkey, to Czernowitz. From there the post goes on.
Yesterday the other Hayim, the one from Busk, Nahman’s brother, brought Ivanie a herd of goats, dispensing them evenly around the various households—there is much rejoicing over this, for there had not been enough milk for the children. The younger women assigned to the kitchen leave their offspring in care of the older women, who have assembled in one of the cottages what they call “kindergarten.”
It is the end of November, and everyone in Ivanie is eager for Jacob’s arrival. Lookouts have been sent over to the Turkish side. The younger boys stake out the river’s high banks, monitor the fords. A solemn silence has descended upon the village, everything ready since yesterday. Jacob’s abode glistens. Over the miserable floor of tamped-down clay they’ve unfurled kilims. Snow-white curtains hang in the windows.
Finally there are whistles and whoops from along the riverbank. He is here.
At the entrance to the village, Osman of Czernowitz awaits, suffused with solemn joy. On seeing them, he starts to sing in a strong and beautiful voice: “Dio mio, Baruchiah . . .” and the melody is taken up by the excited crowd that is there to greet him. The procession that comes around the bend looks like a Turkish formation. In its center is a carriage, and excited eyes seek out Jacob—but Jacob is the man riding ahead on the gray horse, dressed like a Turk in a turban and a fur-lined light blue coat with broad sleeves. His beard is long and black, which ages him. When Jacob dismounts, he touches his forehead to Osman’s, and then Hayim’s, and finally he lays his hands on their wives’ heads. Osman leads him to his house, which is the largest in Ivanie; the yard has been cleared, the entrance lined with spruce. But Jacob points at a little hut nearby, an old shed slapped together out of clay. He says he wants to live alone, anywhere, it doesn’t matter where, that hut in the yard there would work fine.
“But you are a hakham,” says Hayim. “How could you possibly live alone in a hut?”
Jacob insists.
“I’m a simple man,” he says.
Osman doesn’t really get it, but he rushes to arrange for the shed to be tidied up for Jacob all the same.
Of the sleeves of Sabbatai Tzvi’s holy shirt
Wittel has thick curls the color of the grass in autumn. She is tall, with a good build. She holds her head high. She has appointed herself to Jacob’s service. She glides between Ivanie’s houses, graceful, jocular, flushed. She is witty. Since Jacob’s hut is in their yard, she has taken on the role of protector, at least until the arrival of his rightful wife, Hana, and their children. For now, Wittel has a monopoly on Jacob. Everybody is always wanting something from him, always pestering him, and Wittel is the one who shoos them away. Sometimes people come down just to look at where the Lord lives, and then Wittel goes and beats carpets on the fence and blocks the entrance with her body.
“The Lord is resting. The Lord is praying. The Lord is delivering his blessing to our people.”
By day everyone works, and Jacob can often be seen amongst them, with his shirt unbuttoned—for Jacob never gets cold—as he chops wood in a frenzy or unloads carts and carries bags of flour. Only when the sun sets do they all gather for the teachings. It used to be that the men and women heard the teachings separately, but the Lord has introduced a different custom into Ivanie. Now the teachings are for all adults.
The elders sit on benches while the youth squeeze in along the bundles of grain. The best part of the lessons is the start of them, because Jacob always tells funny stories that make them all burst out laughing. Jacob likes dirty jokes.
“In my youth,” he begins, “I went to one village where they had never seen a Jew before. I drove up to the inn where all the farmhands and wenches went. The wenches were weaving, and the farmhands were filling their heads with all sorts of stories. One of them spotted me and launched into insults, and kept on mocking me. He started telling a story about the Jewish God and the Christian God, how the Christian hit the Jew smack-dab in the kisser. This seemed to really crack them up, because they belly-laughed like the guy was a first-class wit. So I told them one about Muhammad and Saint Peter. Muhammad says to Peter, ‘I got a good idea to rut you, good and Greek.’ Peter didn’t want to, but Muhammad was strong, and he tied Peter to a tree and did his thing, Peter howling how his backside was burning, how he’d take him as his saint if he’d only just stop. Well, that little story didn’t go over so well, and the farmhands and the wenches cast their eyes down to the ground, but then the more aggressive one said to me, as if to make peace, ‘Let’s call a truce. We won’t say nothing on your God, and you don’t say nothing on ours. And let Saint Peter alone.’”
The men chuckle, and the women cast their eyes to the ground, but in fact they all like it that Jacob, a saint and a scholar, is down-to-earth and doesn’t put on airs and graces. They like that he lives on his own in that little hut, and that he wears regular clothes. They love him for it. Especially the women. The women of the true faith are confident and gregarious. They like to flirt, and what Jacob teaches pleases them: that they can forget the Turkish customs dictating that they should be shut up inside their homes. He says Ivanie needs women as much as men—for different things, but it needs them all the same.
Jacob also teaches that from now on there is nothing that belongs to just one person; no one has things of his or her own. If anybody needs something, he is to request it of the person who had it last, and his request shall inevitably be granted. Alternatively those in want can go to the steward Osman or to Hava, and whatever their lacks—if their shoes fall apart, or their shirt comes unraveled, or the like—they will be attended to.
“Even without any money?” shouts one of the women, and the other women are quick to respond: “In return for those pretty eyes . . .”