The Heart of the City That Once Was

There are no places like this in Poland anymore. I was lucky to see them in Jerusalem. Batei midrash in a synagogue or a private flat. An example of the latter was my uncle’s place. A big bright room stacked with piles of books, just as all other rooms in the house. A room which every afternoon would transform into a house of study. My uncle and his neighbours would congregate around a big table covered with white tablecloth. Three or four old religious Jews, wearing plain jackets and black kippot, each with his own book. ‟We are studying” – this is what my uncle would say to me, in Polish. There was no pretence to it, no fanfare. Just one of the items on the daily schedule. Piety and exercising the mind. Having awakened from the afternoon nap, some would go out for a walk, others would sit down to read the Talmud. I don’t know what they studied, I didn’t read it, at most I would decipher the titles. I wouldn’t know how to study them back then. A lay intruder. I didn’t want to disturb them. But I would eavesdrop from the other room. All I heard were disconnected sounds. The music of the yeshiva. One person leads, the others answer. Followed by a discussion and another verse. Soft-spoken Hebrew with a Yiddish twang. Repeating phrases, answering a question with another question. The typical Ashkenazi way of stressing the penultimate syllable, the upward inflection of words, the lamed pronounced like the Yiddish dark L. Nobody seems to speak like this nowadays. Neither here nor there. It sounds more like Vałožyn than modern Jerusalem. A piece of the old world which has, by some miracle, achieved the feat of teleportation. Artur Markowicz, a Jewish modernist painter from Kraków, also travelled to Jerusalem. But he had a beth midrash a stone’s throw away and he painted it there. It seems that he, too, was cautious not to disturb anyone, which is why he remained on the outside looking in. His subjects aren’t paying him any attention. They are sitting at a table covered with red tablecloth, studying as if their study were to succeed them. They are arguing over a verse while the beth midrash is filling up with blueish green light. At my uncle’s, the sweltering Jerusalem sunshine seeped through the blinds. A strange glow, like being inside a dream. Those images and sounds, too, became a dream. I am now dreaming them both. 

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