He had returned, just as he promised two years ago, the day he left us. Who could forget that day? Yosef Cohen walked out of Shtetl Grinz at the head of a procession of friends and villagers. They walked two miles with Yosef on the dusty road to the train station in Raskow. It was almost like a shiva – a shiva walk instead of a shiva sit.
Amerika? He was going to Amerika, a land of goyim; a land even farther than Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, the destinations of a few earlier adventurous Grinz emigrants. Who knew where they ended up – a shipwreck and a watery ocean grave or maybe an Arab bullet and six feet of Jerusalem earth marked by a crude Mogen Dovid.
But this rash departure was certainly the end of Yosef, we thought. Didn’t our rabbi say never to run from a Cossack’s blows – while he’s chasing you he’ll pick up three friends to beat you worse.
Amerika! Unlike the spies who explored Canaan and returned with fruits of the land, no one until now had come back from Amerika to the old country. Oh, there were letters from the emigres full of bubbe meises about jobs that allowed even an uneducated Jew to afford a warm bed and plenty of food for supper.
But above all, boasted the new Americans, here was a nation that was governed by law. This law protected all, even a poor Jew who could speak only Yiddish. In the courtrooms the truth was respected. Oaths were taken on a book that contained our Torah. In these courtrooms the testimony of the Czar would have no more weight than the testimony of the janitor at our synagogue.
That’s what the letters said. But a letter was a cheap thing. Who knew the real fate of those who left for Amerika before Yosef? Maybe their Shabbos meal was cabbage soup, their home a doorway. And maybe their letters were all lies.
But Yosef, like the scouts of Canaan, had returned. Had he arrived in Grinz naked, bony, and shivering with hunger, his presence alone would have shouted success because the steamship fare was 60 rubles, not to mention the train fare from Odessa to Raskow and then a wagon ride from the train station. And look at that suit – like from a fancy shop in Warsaw.
All that afternoon and into the night and the next morning our friend told us of Amerika. We ate and drank well. We had saved up for Yosef’s homecoming. The rabbi was there, too. He took his place of honor in a chair with a cushioned seat next to Yosef.
There was even honey cake covered with plums for dessert as he told tales of a shining New World. And there on the table where we sat was a jug of vodka. We listened as closely to our spy from the Promised Land as a good Jew listens to a scholar explaining Torah. Many of those whom we had invited to the reunion crowded along the wall and leaned forward. Eyes and ears as close to Josef as possible so they wouldn’t miss a single word.
This boy who had left two years ago was now a man. We were children of the old world. He was now a man of the New World. Our eyes had never witnessed the wonders Yosef spoke of:
The trolley cars that ran on rails in the street. The water that came out of a pipe in the house. Hotels with dining halls offering all manner of foods. Machines that plowed and sowed and reaped the earth outside the cities to provide an abundance of foods for all. And police who only struck and detained criminals.
But the Cossacks, what about them? Any Cossacks?
“Not one,” he said. Not in the city and not in the fields around the city.
Oh, how we talked. Almost to sunrise. The next day Yosef called on all his old friends. And he was generous with his American dollars. He stayed a week; only left yesterday.
Naturally, we all walked the two miles to the train station just as we had two years before when he left the first time. Life is a series of farewells, as we are told. So Yosef leaves. We stay. Here nothing changes. Pesach still comes every spring around seedtime. We sow and reap, over and over like the turning of the earth beneath our feet that we do not notice. Mostly it’s a quiet life.
Oh, there is talk of war between the Fascists and the Communists, but such rumors have no reality in our modern age of 1939. And who takes notice of a shtetl full of Jews beside the Berlin to Warsaw highway?