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A Night During the Gulf War

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Even after the story about the sheep called Lady, I doubted whether Grandfather would have understood what it was all about. I looked up at the photograph of Grandfather in the sealed room. I wore my gas mask and waited for the all clear siren, and the report that the Iraqi SCUD missile had landed on a vacant plot of land without causing any casualties.

In the photograph, Grandfather wore a bowler hat and the coat of a prince. The photo had been taken after Grandfather had returned to Biala Podlaska from London and I, then 10 years old, had come to his house to receive the gift he brought me. He and I stood behind the locked gate leading into his courtyard waiting for the dreadful event to pass, hoping there would be no casualties. Through the gaps in the gate we watched a drunken peasant staggering in zigzags along our street. Jews fled from him in a panic.

Grandmother opened a window and called us into the house so we could hide there. Earlier that morning, a rumor had spread among the Jewish inhabitants that a dead child had been discovered. It was shortly before Passover Eve; the Poles weren’t going to waste any time. Grandfather held me by the hand and didn’t budge from the gate. He shook his head, unable to believe his eyes. A single drunkard setting an entire township into panic-stricken flight! In London such a thing was unheard of. But he’d been obliged to return home because Grandmother wouldn’t hear of leaving Poland and migrating to a land of non-Jews.

While waiting for the all clear siren, I gazed up at Grandfather’s photograph and thought to myself: We’re no longer in Biala Podlaska but in Jerusalem, no longer in a country of non-Jews, but in a country of our own. In the tense silence of the sealed room, I told him about Lady, the only sheep in my flock that had a long memory. Even after her lamb had been taken away from her and had grown into a sheep, both went on bleating to each other when taken out to pasture. Though by then fully-grown, she’d still kneel down beside her mother and Lady would let her suckle from her swollen udder. The daughter, too, had a long memory and when she herself gave birth, she also remembered the voice of her grown-up offspring. Through three and even four generations, Lady’s descendents were blessed with that same long memory. I once held my breath while I watched four generations of sheep suckling each other at one and the same time in the field around me. Sometimes, when the flock had scattered all over, cropping the grass around them, Lady would hastily gulp entire bunches of leaves from a nearby bush. Later at night, in the sheep shed, she would crouch on her stomach and leisurely chew the cud, forgetting the other sheep who had frantically rushed about the field during the day. The field lay in her stomach.

When the all clear siren sounded, I took off my gas mask and told Grandfather that I myself felt in the Jewish state what Lady had felt when the field lay in her stomach.

Grandfather died before the establishment of the State of Israel, but in my memory he still stood shaking his head in disbelief from behind the locked gate in Bia?a Podlaska. On that day, he opened the low door within the gate and a neighbor stumbled through, his face deathly pale. A rampaging mob armed with axes and pitchforks was nearing our street, he told us, before he rushed off to his house and locked himself in. Grandfather and I went on peeking through the gate. The staggering peasant had by now disappeared and the street was deserted.

Then we caught sight of something else, not a rampaging mob, but a Hassid wrapped in a tallit holding a Torah scroll in his arms. He zigzagged along the street, dancing and calling upon the inhabitants to come out and rejoice at having been rescued from a calamity. Almighty God had been merciful to His People. The murdered child was Jewish.

I had just barely managed to remove my gas mask when another wail of the siren rent the silence of the night. I cast a glance at Grandfather through the eyelets of the mask and clearly recalled what he had shouted, still holding me by the hand, while both of us watched the receding figure of the dancing Hassid: “An insult! What an insult!” The sound of his voice reverberated inside my head even after the wail of the all clear siren had died down.

When I left the sealed room and lay down on my bed, I went back in my mind to the story about Lady. One night on entering the sheep shed I caught sight of Lady crouching on her stomach while another sheep of the common herd pissed on her head and dropped pellets of dung all over it, which spread across the top of her head like the crown of a queen.

“With the stench of urine, with the crown of a queen, and with the field inside her stomach,” I murmured to myself before falling asleep, “maybe there is fear, but there is no insult.”

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Translator Margaret (Waisberg) Birstein was born and raised in Germany. She immigrated to Australia after Kirstallnacht and there met Yossel and soon married. Margaret learned Yiddish from her husband, and has translated most of her husband’s work into English from Yiddish and Hebrew. She remains an active preserver of her husband’s literary legacy and still resides in Jerusalem.

Zeek’s Hebrew translations are made possible in part by a grant from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, supported by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.