Gittel

Thou art like those who, seeking to escape from smoke, fall into the fire --Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

Editor’s Note: An excerpt from Laurie Schneider’s middle-grade novel about thirteen-year-old Gittel Borenstein’, whose family left behind the deadly pogroms of Eastern Europe only to find life nearly as harsh in 1911 Mill Creek, Wisconsin. —David Michael Slater

INTRO

Set in 1911, Gittel tells the story of 13-year-old Gittel Borenstein and her family, survivors of the deadly Kishinev pogrom, who’ve come to Wisconsin to start over as farmers. Gittel illuminates a little-known piece of Jewish-American history: American Jewish agencies, with funding from German philanthropist Baron de Hirsch, helped resettle groups of recent immigrants from eastern Europe in small Jewish agricultural colonies. The goal? To alleviate crowding in the tenements of Chicago and New York and to speed assimilation—for what could be more American than tilling the soil?

In this excerpt from chapter two, Gittel is struggling to fall asleep after her latest encounter with Karl Leckner, a gentile classmate who’s been taunting Gittel since elementary school. Tired of tossing and turning, she gets out of bed to check on her brother before slipping into her grandmother’s room.

EXCERPT

I flip and flop in bed like one of Bubbe’s latkes in a pan. It’s hopeless.

I tiptoe across the hall and listen at Ben’s door. Nothing. He’s a tree when he’s awake, with thick protective bark, and a log when he sleeps. He says I’d sleep like a log, too, if I helped out more around the farm instead of always having my nose in a book. But I’m not the only one awake in the house, or the only one with their nose in a book.

I can hear Zayde’s chair scraping in the kitchen, his slippers shuffling across the floor to sneak one of Bubbe’s poppy seed cookies from the Folger’s tin. Every night he’s there hunched over his Talmud, his finger following the words, the lantern making lightning on the walls.

I continue down the hall to Bubbe and Zayde’s room. Zayde’s bed is empty, but Bubbe is asleep in hers. I gently lift the covers and crawl in. Mama wouldn’t approve—a big girl like me sleeping with her Bubbe, but Bubbe won’t tell. She’s a restless sleeper, too, but somehow together, we both sleep better. Or maybe it’s Zayde’s prayers that put us to sleep, the familiar words anchoring us in the night in a country where we still feel like strangers.

Bubbe and I go down together in the morning.

“Shhh.” She puts her finger to her lips.

Zayde is still asleep, but Ben and Papa are out in the barn. The sun is barely up, but they’ll finish the milking before we leave for school.

Bubbe pulls open the kitchen curtain. It’s snowing again. Huge fat flakes. She opens the door and motions me over.

It’s the strangest thing. The snow is falling and rising at the same time. We tip our heads back and watch.

“Shalvedik,” Bubbe says. Peaceful.

Peaceful, but it makes me dizzy, too.

“I many times thought peace had come, when peace was far away,” I say.

“What’s that?” Bubbe asks.

“Emily Dickinson.”

“Ahh.” Emily Dickinson is the one thing I read that Bubbe approves of. Zayde says Emily Dickinson is my Talmud. I plan to commit every page in my poetry book to memory.

Bubbe catches one of the fat flakes on her palm. “Feder.”

She’s right, they do look like feathers. Feathers that melt.

“Flakes,” I say, in case she needs the English word.

“No, Feder.”

Bubbe closes her eyes and sways a little. I put my hand on her shoulder. I think I know what she is seeing, though I wasn’t there to see it myself. Mama has told me the story Bubbe will not.

I am five, and it is spring—not winter. Papa sends Ben and me to the countryside to stay with cousins in a neighboring shtetl.

It starts with posters, Mama says. Approved by the tsar himself. Posters all over the city, calling on Christian men to attack the city’s Jews on Easter. Why? Because Jews make their Passover matzos from the blood of Christian babies. Stupid, hateful words. Words so ludicrous no one in the Jewish ghetto thinks anyone could believe them. Still, they take precautions. Those who can, like Papa, send their children away. Shop owners draw chalk crosses on their doors to show they do honest business with Christians.

Easter morning is sunny and warm, Mama says. Some men from the ghetto go to Chuflinskii Square to see what is happening, to see the families picnicking and the men drinking. Drinking and ranting. They come back to warn everyone. “We locked and barred our doors,” Mama says. “Like mice caught in traps, waiting for the cats.”

They wait and watch. The most beautiful day of the year and not a soul in the street. When Mama peers from the window of our second-story flat she can see the faces of our neighbors looking out, too.

She hears the yelling before she sees the mob. “Like a flood of sewage pouring down the street,” she says. Dozens of men with clubs and knives, hatchets and crowbars. They break everything in sight, smashing store windows and stealing whatever they can stuff in their pockets and destroying what they can’t.

They kick down the door of the synagogue, split open the ark, and tear the Torah from its scroll. And when every stained-glass window is shattered on the ground they rage from house to house, smashing dishes, hurling chairs out windows, using their clubs on anyone they can find. Young, old, it doesn’t matter.

They hang pillows and bed tickings from broken windows, slashing and punching until feathers drift up and down the street like snow in springtime. Snow that falls and rises at the same time. But not silent like snow in Wisconsin. In Kishinev there are screams. Feathers and screams. Screams when the mob chases the butcher and his daughter onto the roof of their house. Screams when they leap off in terror only to be beaten to death on the ground.

Mama and Papa are lucky. Our door holds. But when they come out of hiding that night, it hardly matters.

“The man who sold us our meat. The girl who wrapped it in newsprint,” Mama says. “We found them in the street, feathers stuck to the blood, wearing coats of feathers, like angels. If only they had had wings….”

Everyone had to start over. “But not there. Not in Kishinev,” Mama says.

She and Papa decided to go to America, to the place where his brother Frank lived—Wisconsin. Frank said the Jewish Agricultural Society in Milwaukee would help. They would give us land; we would become farmers.

“Of all things,” Mama says. “Farmers.”

I think of this story often. Sometimes, when I can’t fall asleep, I come downstairs to talk with Zayde. My Zayde is a learned man, a cantor who chants the prayers in the synagogue. I want to know how God could let this happen, how God could let them destroy the Torah.

“Tearing pages doesn’t silence the voice of God,” Zayde says.

But I’m not so sure. Where was God that day? Maybe he moved to Wisconsin, like we did, to get away from the hate.

Bubbe shuts the door, brushing away the flakes that have swirled into the kitchen. “Be a good girl and put the kettle on,” she says.

Bubbe thinks everything can be cured with tea and chicken schmaltz. But some things have no cure.

Hey Geetle. Jew Girl. Beetle.

While I wait for the water to boil, I clean the crumbs out of the breadbox for the grackles. I love to watch the little birds with their shiny black feathers and tracks like Hebrew letters in the snow.

Bubbe shakes her head. “Are you feeding those nuisance birds again? In the winter they eat your bread and in the spring they’ll eat our corn.”

She’s right, I know, but they’re God’s creatures, too. God’s creatures all—right, Bubbe? But what about those men in Kishinev? I don’t dare ask.

Laurie Schneider grew up in central Wisconsin not far from where Gittel is set. A library professional and former editor, Laurie studied English and creative writing at Oberlin College and has a master’s degree in American studies from Washington State University. Her thesis—a collection of poetry focused on community and identity in diaspora—included several poems about her great grandparents, who were part of a small group of settlers in the Jewish agricultural colony in Arpin, Wisconsin, in the early 1920s. Years later, those poems became the inspiration for her debut middle-grade novel, Gittel.

What five tiny delights lift your spirits and make you happy?

• Blue herons

• Rhubarb pie

• Re-reading a favorite book

• Ice skating at an outdoor rink

• Road trips

What five tiny JEWISH delights lift your spirits and make you happy?

• Learning to say Modeh Ani at age 66

• Knishes from Cecils Deli in St. Paul

• Both of my sons choosing to wear Magen David necklaces

• Discovering the Jewish kidlit community

• My grandmother’s annotated, food-stained Settlement “The Way to a Man’s Heart” Cookbook