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Perl KANTOR 's Memoir "After
All" as Published in Vesti
Newspaper April 27, 1995
Translated from Russian by Dr. Mark
FISCHER
After All - Judith
AGRACHEVA
My name is KANTOR. KAUSHANSKY
is simply the name under which I lived for
many, many years. I was given the name in the
ghetto. My name is Perl. In Israel I tried to
go by the name Pnina, but the translation
didn't stick. I decided to remain who I was: Perl KANTOR.
From sundown to sunup the NKVD investigator,
shining an intolerably bright lamplight in my
face, asked the same question over and over:
"Why were you left alive? Why?" I have thought
about the answer my whole life. I think that
now I can tell the story. In the Ukraine, in
Vinnitsa oblast, there was once a little town.
Its name was Lyubar. Why did it exist? For all
that is left of the old Lyubar is a name. And
a gravesite in the woods. The world that
perished there was Jewish. So many Jews that
Russian words are not enough to describe that
life or for a story about the people who lived
then. Back then when I was born. One of my
grandfathers was David BONDAR. What
can I say about him? He was a very good Jew.
The other grandfather, Sholem SHOICHET,
was not only a very good Jew, he was a
supporter of Jewish culture. All Jews in
Lyubar lived according to the commandments of
the Almighty. Sholem SHOICHET was a
servant of the Almighty like everyone else,
and a little bit more. He cared most of all
about his family. Nevertheless, when his son Shloimke
revealed that he was in love with Blumka
MAZUR, the daughter of David BONDAR,
Sholem SHOICHET became very angry. Then
Shloimke left home and married Blumke
in Ostropol, all of seven kilometers from
Lyubar. But after that, Bobe Rokhl, Sholem's
wife, said all her life that Blumka
was more her daughter even then Shloimke
was a son. And the first granddaughter was for
everyone a "pearl." How then could she be
named anything but Perl?On the day
before the pogrom, Bobe Rokhl had a
dream. She dreamed that in the garden she
tended, everything was trampled and destroyed.
Only one cucumber was left intact. Bobe
Rokhl awoke, took me by the hand, led me
into a room where nobody was about, stroked my
hair with a soft, warm palm and said, "If only
you, Perele, turned out to be that
cucumber!"There was no real ghetto in Lyubar.
So why was one created in a matter of days?
And who gave the order to shut in the Jews if
even the Russians in Lyubar had forgotten they
were Russians? Mother looked out the window
and saw terrible men in black helmets, cried "Perele!",
tied a kerchief on my head and without further
ado took me out of the house. I fled into the
garden and cowered there without a sound for a
day and a night. First my mother, sister and
grandmother were taken from the house, then
right past me they took my father and
grandfather, and then killed them all…I would
not escape from the Salkhov ghetto on my own;
I was not convinced that I should. But a boy I
knew told me, "Perele, we have to get
to the front lines." I thought, "Maybe he's
right." Later he escaped to hide in a [grain]
elevator. I watched him go, waited a bit, and
then went back to the ghetto, back to the
Jews. From Salkhov they sent us to Ulanov.
From Ulanov, they picked out those who could
work and took them to Kordalevka in the
Kalinin District, to a concentration camp.
There we built and built an airfield. How
long? I don't remember.any dates from those
times, for Lyubar was no more. Swollen,
covered with lice, at night, obeying God knows
what, I crept under the wire through the
cesspool, and made it to Chmelnik. On the
night before the pogrom in Chmelnik I---not Bobe
Rokhl, but I!---had a dream. I dreamed
that I arose and went through a lane I had
never seen before, came to a fence, moved
aside a plank that was there seemingly just
for me to escape through, descended into a
ravine, ascended some steps hammered by
someone and was free.I awoke, left the house,
found the lane, and the fence, and the ravine,
and the steps. Thus I left Chmelnik. In
Zhmerinka, to get to the Jewish ghetto, one
had to pass for a local. Some kind people sent
me to the family of AVREMELE the
confectioner (in peacetime he really did make
candy, to the delight of all) and there they
took me in as their daughter and named me KAUSHANSKY.
From Zhmerinka many Jews migrated after a
while to Mogilev-Podolsky, and there we were
liberated.We were very thin, very ill and
utterly exhausted. But when I could understand
that we were free, I jumped for joy. Maybe you
don't believe it. Maybe you think that I rose
off the earth even a centimeter? No, I, the
living, graceful Perl, tore myself
from the ground and took flight. I hung from
the ceiling, looked around at my dear ones,
Jews who had escaped death, and flew no more,
but came back to earth to stand shoulder to
shoulder with my people…The survivors talked
for a bit and then started to gather for the
trip back to the places from which they had
been driven out. Some people suggested that I
be their daughter, other promised me their
hand and heart [?; made offers of marriage?].
How could I promise to be someone's faithful
wife if I was not sure that I had been spared
so as to live a human life? I went to
Chernovtsy because they promised to feed me
there…I eat, I drink, I think, but around me
there are none of the people who taught me to
eat, drinkg and think. The world that gave me,
Perl, life, has died…My closest friend,
David BERGELSON, had a memoir, "Noch
alemen" (published in 1913 in Russian as
"Posle vsevo" ["After All"]). In it, the girl
Mirl, beautiful and kind, sees the Jewish
community dying. But what can she do? And with
whom should she share her intangible trouble?
Mirl's friend, a poet, calls himself the Guard
of a Dead City. He walks the deserted streets
and meets only one woman. The woman, who is
clad in black clothes, presses a doll to her
bosom and says, "This life is a masquerade."
What was it about being survivors that left
them brimming with spirituality? For her, in
this new, present, masked-ball world, there
was no escape…Do you know what I did? I wrote
a letter to David BERGELSON. If he
really existed, and not just in my soul, I
thought, well then, a remnant of this Jewish
world has survived. Do you know what David
BERGELSON did? He sent for me, Perl
from the village of Lyubar, the poetess Riva
BALYASNY. In Moscow, only one Jewish
school had been preserved: The Theatrical
Studio. Its director was Solomon
Mikhailovich MIKHOELS, and the
[artistic] director was Moisei
Solomonovich BELENKY. How beautiful our
teachers were, talking about the theater,
literature, art! What great people came to the
shows and sat in the first row, watching and
listening to us students. And we were given
free admission to the Writers' Center to see
evenings given by friends of the studio, to
the Gorky Theater, to the Maly Theater…And one
night, after a performance of Madame Bovary at
the Chamber Theater, I and Syoma [dim.
of Semyon]---then a patient and faithful
friend, and later my only beloved
husband---couldn't find a streetcar or a bus
to get to the dormitory at Trifonovka. We
waited for a streetcar and were late for the
bus. We waited for a bus and missed the
streetcar…I thought this was so funny that I
started to laugh, and would not have noticed
what happened but for Syoma. He looked me in
the eyes, and whispered in a trembling voice,
"Perele, du lachst, du lachst!" "Perele,
you're laughing!"Before that night, no one
knew that that was possible. Everyone
frightened me; I avoided people. I never told
anyone anything about myself. When my future
mother-in-law first laid eyes on me, she
cried, "Oh my God, what an awful, angry old
goika!" [?; perhaps a Russified colloquial
form of "goy"] Once only did I resolve to bear
witness to my experiences. This was in the BERGELSON
house, with David and his wife Zipa.
No one interrupted me, and no one said
anything when I stopped. Only when we were
saying our goodbyes did the head of the house
tell me, "Perl, you must write it
down." Should I? David BERGELSON
would not deceive me. I set to work. Writing
about it was as difficult as living it. But I
had been asked to by my idol. I gave him a fat
notebook filled with my story. David
tried to edit it, but eventually threw up his
hands and said, "It can't be edited. We'll
print it just as it is." He said this at the
end of 1948. BERGELSON once wrote a
story called "Yohrzeit licht" ("Yahrzeit
light"). Doctor Soifer is sitting by the
sickbed of a patient who had been blinded in
the war. He no longer could see "his family,
his town, or his world." But Dr. Soifer in the
same war had lost everything that he had seen:
Family, hometown, world! Only no one had taken
into account how deeply wounded he was. An
orphan who has lost his mother and father is
pitied. Dr. Soifer had lost his whole people.
But no one had ever heard about his
loss.Everything ended again. Jewish writers,
teachers and directors were arrested, and
shot. The Theatrical Studio was closed. We
students still did a graduation show, in a
different theater. Not one person on the
[?graduation] committee knew Yiddish. There
was not one Jew in the hall...It became
necessary to leave the capital [Moscow]. In
Penza, where my husband's parent's lived, I
tried to do Russian drama. My husband tried to
help me by breaking every sound down into
cues. I repeated them, but grasped the sense
of the phrases poorly. Nevertheless, Victor
ROZOV noticed me and offered me a part
in his play, of the secretary of a school
Komsomol organization. How hard it was to
pronounce correctly sentences that said
nothing to me practically in a foreign
language! One day during a tour in the
Ukraine, I met Nusia, a girl with whom
I had been in hiding during the war. We sat
together , the three of us, frightened, and
one other girl, Miriam, rocking,
whispered prayers, and we envied her, because
we did not know them by heart. And them Miriam
very softly sang "Kinneret sheli"…I did not
recognize Nusia. And I would not have
recalled that time at all, had she not sung,
very softly, as had Miriam once,
"Kinneret sheli." Nusia's husband was
the head of the art department at
Blagoveshchensk-on-the-Amur [River]. So Syoma
and I went to live in that distant town. I
worked in the theater and my husband worked in
the regional newspaper. When after many years
we returned to Penza, we were, so to speak,
big people. We were paid various honors. Only
none of it was real---a masquerade. Even when
the earth was burning underfoot, I sought out
Jews, I looked for my own people: the great,
funny, noble and clever Jews, without whom
there was no breath of life. In the most
fearful of times, I did not knock on others'
doors. If I did not come upon Jews, I kept
going.In Penza the community was so small, and
the Jews had forgotten so much that their
grandmothers had taught them, that I, Perl,
a survivor of perished Lyubar, was treated
like a rabbi. They came to me asking what they
could and couldn't be eaten and when, and what
shouldn't be done…You know, I can tell you now
why I lived through it all after I was not
killed. I can tell you how I managed to endure
after the death of my home town. I think only
in Yiddish and dream only in Yiddish; I
learned to love and never forgot how…only in
Yiddish.
The Newspaper Vesti, April 27, 1995
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