The children of Hayim Jacob Kapliński scattered across Europe. Some of them remained in Nikopol and Giurgiu, some went to Lithuania, where, having purchased noble titles, they were able to own their own land.
Yente is also able to espy a strange and significant thing: both branches of the family, having lost every trace of the memory of one another’s existence, produced poets. One of their youngest descendants is a Hungarian poet who just recently received a prestigious national award. Another was a bard in one of the Baltic countries.
Salomea ?ab?cka, one of the two surviving daughters of the Mayorkowicz family, adopted by the ?ab?cki family, married the administrator of the ?ab?ckis’ estate and became the mother of eight children and the grandmother of thirty-four grandchildren. One of her grandsons was a well-known nationalist and a staunchly anti-Semitic politician in interwar Poland.
Her father’s brother, Falk Mayorkowicz, or Walentyn Krzy?anowski after baptism, moved his whole family to Warsaw. One of his sons, Wiktor Krzy?anowski, joined a Basilian monastery. His other son, an officer during the November Uprising, protected the Jewish shops being looted in the upheaval. Alongside other officers, he worked hard to scatter that havoc-wreaking mob, as was beautifully described by one Maurycy Mochnacki.
Hry?ko, Hayim Rohatyński, remained in Lwów; under the influence of his wife’s family, he gave up his heresies and became an ordinary Jew employed in the vodka trade. One of his granddaughters became a muchlauded translator of Yiddish literature. The runaway, meanwhile, was baptized as Jan Okno and became a coal miner in Lwów. After about a year, he married a widow, with whom he had one child.
Of the Wo?owski family there is the most to say, for it grew until it attained gargantuan proportions. Nearly all its branches became ennobled, some under the Bawó? coat of arms, others under Na Kaskach. A fabulous career was made by Franciszek, son of Isaac Wo?owski, the boy whom Father Chmielowski had once called Jeremiah. Franciszek, born in 1786 in Brünn and raised in Offenbach, became one of the best lawyers and scholars of law of his era. Interestingly, when a proposal came before the Sejm to grant Polish citizenship to Jews, Franciszek, as a member of parliament, vehemently argued that it was not yet time to take such a step. First the Polish nation had to win its independence; only then they would be able to turn to such social reforms.
When the November Uprising was put down, the grandson of another of the Wo?owski sons, Ludwik, emigrated to France, where he, too, earned renown as a brilliant legal scholar, for which he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur.
A lovely little girl plays the spinet
There are concerts in Warsaw, in the home of Franciszek and Barbara Wo?owski, newly built of brick on the corner of Grzybowski and Waliców Streets. Friends of the family often come and stay in the guest rooms. Franciszek, serene and composed, seats the guests in the living room. This is where the concerts are normally held, though today the spinet is in the other room, since the young performer has terrible stage fright and cannot possibly play before such a sizable crowd. The music that flows from under her fingertips thus reaches the living room through the opened doors. Her listeners sit quietly—in fact they are afraid to so much as take a deep breath, so gorgeous is this music. It is Haydn, brought in from Offenbach, from the shop of Herr André. Little Marynia has practiced a whole month for this performance. Her music teacher, a middle-aged man of a slightly frenetic disposition, is as nervous as his youthful pupil. Before the concert, he informed her that he had nothing further to teach her. In the audience are the Szymanowskis, the Majewskis, the Dembowskis, and the ?ab?ckis. There is Elsner, who has also been instructing her, and a guest from France, Ferdinando Pa?r, who is doing his best to convince her parents to polish this extraordinary talent as assiduously as they can. In the corner sits an older woman in black; she is looked after by her granddaughters. This is Marianna Lanckorońska, or perhaps Rudnicka, Aunt Hayah, as the members of this household refer to her amongst themselves. The name Marianna somehow never quite stuck to Hayah. She is very old now, and—why be shy about it—deaf, so she cannot hear the melodious sounds that flow from the fingertips of Marynia Wo?owska; pretty soon her head drops to her chest, and she is sleeping.
Of a certain manuscript
The first book on their voyages across time, places, languages, and borders was completed in 1825. It was written by one Aleksander Bronikowski, under the pen name of Julian Brinken, as the fee owed to the lawyer Jan Kanty Wo?owski, who argued—and won—a case over the fortune of Mrs. Bronikowska, as is stated clearly in the preface.
Jan Kanty was a descendant of Yehuda Shorr, or Jan Wo?owski, or the Cossack, as he was called, and he was universally acknowledged to be an excellent lawyer, a learned man, and an immaculately honest person. For many years he was a dean at the university and the head of the public prosecutor’s office. He is remembered for not having taken a salary while he was dean of the faculty of law and administration, instead allocating the amount in its entirety to scholarships for six students without means. The Russian government offered him a ministry position, but he turned it down. He always spoke about his Frankist, Jewish background, so that when it turned out that his client Aleksander Bronikowski had no money to pay for his trial, he asked to receive the fee in the form of a novel.
“The kind anyone can read, that will tell things as they were,” he said.
To which Brinken replied:
“But how were things? Is there anybody still around who could tell me?”
So Wo?owski invited him into his library, and there, over some liqueur, he told him the story of his family, although it was a story with many gaps in it, riddled with holes, since even Wo?owski knew relatively little.
“You’re a writer, just make up whatever’s missing,” he said to Brinken when it came time for them to part.
At the close of that evening, the writer returned along the streets of Warsaw, somewhat stupefied by the sweet liqueur but with the novel already unfurling in his mind.
“Is all this true?” the lovely and talented Maria Szymanowska, née Wo?owska, the pianist, asked him many years later, when they met in Germany. Julian Brinken, now aged, a writer and an officer, initially Prussian, then Napoleonic, finally of the Kingdom of Poland, shrugged:
“Madam, it is a novel. It is literature.”
“What does that mean?” the pianist insisted. “Is it true or not?”
“I would expect you, being an artist yourself, not to think in a manner more suited to simple people. Literature is a particular type of knowledge, it is”—he sought the right words, and suddenly a phrase came ready to his lips—“the perfection of imprecise forms.”