Curt Leviant
Tablet, Dec. 16, 2020
“What Jew didn’t know his family name? What Jew can’t read from the siddur. What Jew has the gruff look of a goy?”
Early one morning, one snowless winter’s day, end November, just before Hanukkah, a solidly built man—he seemed to be in his mid-30s—appeared in our shtetl, Kariukovke. He wore a khaki-colored greatcoat, a peasant’s hat with earflaps, and he had a knapsack on his back. It was obviously an army uniform but it lacked any insignias or markings. He spoke a rough-edged Yiddish with an equally rough Russian accent.
People noticed him when they came out of shul. But since he wore a uniform people hesitated to approach him, their reticence to have contact with the czarist authority ingrained in them. But he didn’t look like an official at all. In fact, he looked like a lost soul. To the first groups of Jews he met, he said he had just finished his obligatory 25 years of service in the czar’s army and he was returning home. He said his name was Dovid.
Judging by the way he spoke, people looked at him skeptically.
“Are you a Jew?”
He laughed bitterly. “What? You think I’m a goy? In the army they sure didn’t treat me like a goy. Ikh bin a Yid,” he added in Yiddish. “I am a Jew.”
But people weren’t convinced. Out of range of his hearing, they murmured that he was a Russki trying to get money before Hanukkah, or perhaps find lodging in the old-age home, which always welcomed Jewish travelers.
“Why did you come to Kariukovke?”
“Where else should I go? This is where I was born, where my family lived, and it is from here the czar’s abductors took me to the army. I was not yet 13.”
It was true, I thought. Years ago, the abductors, “snatchers,” khappers they were called in Yiddish, were active, taking even little children. But Kariukovke had suffered a rare pogrom about a dozen years back and many Jews left the shtetl. Other Jews, fleeing incidents in their villages, sought refuge in Kariukovke. … Source
