Shlomo Shorr, or Franciszek Wo?owski, Elisha’s oldest son, teaches everyone about names. They want everyone to think about a new, Christian name. He counts out on his fingers the twelve apostles, and yet he wants to be known as Franciszek. “Who was Francis?” they ask him. He tells them about saints, the Catholic hakhams.
“This was the name I liked best,” he says. “And you, too, should choose carefully, and take your time. But do not get too attached to your new names. Nor to the country, nor to the language, although you have to speak it. Names must come about before nations do; the sound that creates them corresponds to a certain accord of the universe. That is your real name. The names we carry on the street, on the other hand, around the market, traveling in a carriage on a muddy road, or those others use to call us—all that is just tacked on. Those names are useful like the clothing you put on to go to work. There’s no sense in getting attached to them. They come and go, like anything. Here one minute, gone the next.”
Wittel won’t let it go. So she asks Jacob:
“We’re supposed to think up some new name for ourselves. We have to be able to say, ‘Me, Wittel, me, Jacob,’ right? But what do we call ourselves to ourselves?”
Jacob answers that he immediately thought of himself as “Jacob,” always calling himself Jacob in his mind. But not just any Jacob: this Jacob, the only one.
“The one who saw the ladder in his dream,” Wittel guesses.
But Jacob sets her straight:
“No, no. The Jacob who put on an animal’s hide and then set himself before his father’s hand that it might take him for someone else, for his beloved Esau.”
Yente sees all of this from above, watches names peeling off the people who have carried them. For the time being, no one notices, and they all trustingly call each other what they always have: Hayim, Spryne?e, Leah. But those names have already lost their luster, dulled, like snakeskins from which the life has faded even before they’re shed. So it is with the name Pesel, which slides off the girl like a too-big shirt, and underneath, the name Helena is already coming into its own, though for now it is still very thin, like skin after a burn—completely new, almost transparent.
Wajge?e sounds careless now and has absolutely nothing to do with this petite, slender, but very strong girl, with her skin that’s always hot and dry, who, with a carrying pole over her shoulders, is currently bearing water. Full buckets. Wajge?e, Wajge?e. Somehow it just doesn’t suit her anymore. In the same way, Nahman seems too big for her husband, as if it were an old kapota.
In fact, Nahman is the first to ask everyone to call him “Piotr,” adding “Jakubowski,” a Polish last name that means “Jacob’s” or “of Jacob.” Peter of Jacob. Piotr Jakubowski.
This loss of names in the Ivanie grass might be alarming, as the sight of disposable things, of transient and fleeting beings, always is, but Yente sees at the same time many things that repeat. Yente herself is repeating. The cave repeats. Repeating are the great river and the passage across it on foot. Repeating is the snow, and so, too, are the parallel sleigh tracks marking the exposed, broad space with that alarming digraph. Repeating is the stain in the snow, yellowish, unpleasant. Repeating are the goose feathers in the grass. Sometimes they catch onto people’s clothing and travel with them.
Of Pinkas, who descends into hell in search of his daughter
Pinkas, the secretary who is taking part in the council’s meetings, listens attentively to the discussions and does not miss a single word. Rarely is he bold enough to speak, fearing that his voice will begin to tremble and he will be unable to hold back his tears. Fervent prayers have not helped him, nor the chicken with which his wife removed from him any sorceries that might have been placed upon him. The chicken was then given to the poor, along with all that dust and dirt with which Pinkas’s soul had been covered.
For Pinkas, it has always been obvious that leaving the true religion and accepting another—even going so far as to be baptized—was the absolute worst thing that could happen to a true Jew and to Jews in general. Even talking about it is a terrible sin. The actual act, Pinkas can’t even imagine—it’s like dying, or worse than dying. Like drowning in vast waters, being a drowned man, and yet living—living only to experience terrible shame.
That is why, when Pinkas, writing out documents, comes to the word shmad, or “baptism,” his hand doesn’t even want to write it, and his pen rebels at the shin, mem, and dalet, as if these were not innocent letters, but rather yet another curse. He is reminded of the story of another heretic, Nehemiah Hayon, of whom everyone had talked constantly when Pinkas was young. Hayon, too, favored Sabbatian ideas and was cursed by his own people, wandered all around Europe, and was driven out of everywhere. Doors slammed shut before him. They say that when he made it to Vienna, sick and tired, the Viennese Jews also closed the door in his face, and there was no one who would dare so much as give him a cup of water. Then Hayon sat in some courtyard, right there on the ground, and cried, and didn’t even admit that he was a Jew, such was his shame, and when passersby asked what was wrong with him, he said he was a Turk. No Sabbatian, the length and breadth of Europe, could find in any decent Jew some hospitality, food, or even a kind word—nothing. At the time, there were not so many of those apostates. Now Hayon would find one of his own wherever he went.
Recently, at a council meeting, Pinkas watched as the rabbis were talking about the heretics’ book, which they treat as holy. In fact, “talking” is an exaggeration; the rabbis were more just stammering around it, exchanging a word here and there. Pinkas, who had been keeping the minutes, just listened, for when they were talking about the diabolical book, they bade him stop writing. Rabbi Rapaport, that holy man, said that reading two, three paragraphs was enough to set the hair all over your whole body on end—for that cursed book contains so much blasphemy against God and the world, and everything in it is upside down. The world knows nothing like it. Every copy of it ought to be burned.
Pinkas creeps along by the crumbling wall of a tenement house, heading to a place where he can rent a cart. The wall, which is coated in lime, leaves a white mark on his sleeve. Someone recently told him that he had seen Gitla on the market square. She was dressed as a servant and had a basket on her arm. It might not have been Gitla—it could have just been someone who resembled her. But this is why Pinkas, when he finishes his work for Rabbi Rapaport, instead of going straight home, keeps walking the streets of Lwów and scrutinizing women’s faces, so that some even mistake him for an old lecher.