‘The Dybbuk’ [Fragments] by Hanna Krall
Translated by Christopher Garbowski

Extract from Contemporary Jewish Writing in Poland : An Anthology
Presented here by kind permission of University of Nebraska Press

‘The Dybbuk’ [Fragments]

Adam S., tall, handsome, with blue eyes and a white-toothed smile, teaches the history of construction at an American technical college. He’s been to Poland several times. He was interested in the wooden synagogues which burned down during the last war.

I asked Adam S., why an ambitious American, almost six feet tall, born after the war, should be interested in something that no longer exists.

The answer came in a letter written on a computer. He must have been in a hurry, for he didn’t even tear off the perforated sides. His father, he wrote, was a Polish Jew, who had lost his wife and son in the ghetto. After the war he had left for France and re-married. His new wife was French, Adam S. was born in Paris, at home they talked French. ‘So why do I come to Poland?’ he wrote in his print-out. ‘Because of the dybbuk. My step-brother, my father’s child from his first marriage, born before the war with my name, who was somehow lost in the ghetto. He’s been with me a long time now, through my childhood, through my school years…’

The word dybbuk comes from the Hebrew and means union. In Jewish tradition it is the soul of someone dead that dwells in a living person.

Quite early in his life Adam S. realized he wasn’t alone. He was possessed by outbursts of unexplicable rage; someone else’s rage. At other times he was swept up in sudden, alien laughter. He learned to identify these moods, controlling them well enough and not revealing them in the presence of others.

From time to time this tenant would say something. Adam S. had no idea what, because the dybbuk talked in Polish. He started studying the language: he wanted to understand what his younger brother was saying to him. When he learned enough, he visited Poland. Then he became interested in the wooden synagogues that had existed for three hundred years only in Poland. On their walls were painted heavenly gardens, fantastic animals, the walls of Jerusalem or the rivers of Babylon. Their domes, invisible from the outside, since they were covered up by normal roofs, inside created a feeling of unending, vanishing space.

Those gardens and walls were long gone, Adam S. examined them on old, poor photographs, but he wrote beautiful essays about them. After some time he got a PhD and moved to a better college. He got married, bought a house and lived like every normal, educated American, except he had a double life. His own and his younger brother’s, who was called Abram, and when he was six years old ‘somehow got lost in the ghetto.’

In April of 1993 Adam S. came to Poland. He hadn’t been here several years, so first he went to Połaniec, Pinczów, Zabłudów, Grójec and Nowe Miasto. Who knows what for. Maybe he hoped that this time in Grójec he would see the rivers of Babylon in a synagogue, and the willows, on which ‘we hung up our harps…’ Perhaps in Zabłudów he wanted to find gryphons, bears, peacocks, winged dragons, unicorns and fish-serpents…

As was to be predicted he found grass and a few sad trees.

He returned to Warsaw, the fiftieth anniversary commemorations of the Ghetto Uprising were just getting under way. During a break at an academic conference we went for dinner.

I congratulated Adam S. on the birth of his first son, I looked at the photographs and asked:

‘What about… him?’

I didn’t know what word to use: brother? Abram? dybbuk?

‘Is he still with you?’

Adam S. understood immediately.

‘He’s still with me, although I’d rather he went away. He irritates me, complains, he doesn’t know himself what he wants. It’s hard for him with me and I feel worse and worse with him.

‘I found out about a Buddhist monk living in Boston,’ continued Adam S. ‘An American Jew who converted to Buddhism and became a monk. A friend told me that this man could help me…’

‘I went to the monk. He asked me to lie down on a couch and he started to massage my shoulders. At first I didn’t feel anything, I just lay there, then after a half-an-hour I suddenly burst out crying. I listened to the weeping and I knew it wasn’t my voice. It was the voice of a child. The child cried in me. The crying grew stronger and I started to shout. The child started to shout. He was shouting. I knew that he was afraid of something, it was a cry of fear. He was terrified and furious, tossing and striking about with my fists. A few times he calmed down, obviously tired, but then he started again. It was a child unconscious from exhaustion and fear… Samuel, the monk, tried to talk to him but he went on shouting. All this lasted a few hours. I thought I would die, I didn’t have any strength. Suddenly I felt that something was happening inside me. Something rocked inside. The crying subsided, a shadow loomed on my belly. I knew that all this was only an illusion but the monk must have noticed it as well for he addressed the shadow directly: ‘Go away,’ he said gently. ‘Go to the light.’ I didn’t know what it was supposed to mean for everything was taking place in the normal daylight . ‘There, there…’ And the shadow began to move. Samuel kept on talking, he repeated the same words over and over again. ‘Go to the light… Go… There, there, don’t be afraid, you’ll be happier there…’ And the shadow kept on going away… It didn’t go, rather it slunk further and further away and I understood that in a moment it would disappear altogether. I felt sad. ‘You want to leave me?’ I said.’Stay with me. You are my brother. Don’t go away.’ It’s as if he was waiting for that. He came back, with one swift motion jumped on me and I stopped seeing him.

Adam S. stopped talking.

We were sitting in an Oriental restaurant on Plac Teatralny in Warsaw. A cold afternoon outside. Those anniversary days were always humid and cold. Drizzling grayness settled on cars, people rushed about without looking sideways. We looked at them thinking about the same thing: does anybody care about ghetto celebrations, wooden synagogues and crying dybbuks?

‘In America they don’t care about them either,’ I said although Adam S. knew it better than I did.

Photos of Adam’s son and wife were lying on our table: a cheerful, smart boy embraced by a serious looking woman with brown eyes behind thick glasses. ‘Moshe,’ said Adam S. ‘Like my father. But my father was an ordinary, real Moshe, and my little boy is called Michael.’

‘Did you tell your father about the monk and Boston?’

‘On the phone. He lived in Iowa then, I called him when I got back home, I thought he wouldn’t believe me, or that he would at least be surprised, but he wasn’t surprised at all. He listened to me calmly and then he said: ‘I know the sound of that crying. When he was thrown out of the hiding place he was standing in the street, crying loudly. This was how he cried, my child, when he was thrown out into the street.’

‘This was the first time I talked with my father about my brother. My father had a heart condition, I didn’t want to upset him. I knew that my brother had perished, like everybody else, what was there to ask about? Now I found out that the little boy had been hiding somewhere with his mother, my father’s first wife, and several other Jews. I don’t know where, whether in the ghetto or on the Aryan side. Sometimes I imagine a kitchen crowded with many people. They were sitting on the floor… They tried not to breathe… He cried… They tried to calm him down… How can you calm down a crying child? With a candy? A toy? They had neither candies nor toys. He cried louder and louder, the people crowded on the floor were all thinking the same thing… Someone whispered: ‘Because of one brat we’ll all die…’ Well, perhaps it wasn’t a kitchen… Perhaps it was a cellar or a bunker… My father wasn’t with them, only she was there, Abram’s mother. She stayed on with the people and survived. Later she lived in Israel, maybe she still lives there, I didn’t ask, I don’t know…

‘My father died.

‘My wife went to the hospital to give birth to the baby. I went with her and lay down on a bed next to her. When the midwife told my wife: ‘Push, it will soon be over,’ I felt that something was happening inside me as well. I felt a motion, a sort of rocking… It was him, I realised. He was getting ready to come out. He was getting ready to settle down inside my child. I quickly got up from my bed. ‘Oh, no,’ I said aloud. ‘Don’t you dare. No ghetto. No Holocaust. You shall not live inside my child.’

‘No, I wasn’t crying, but I was speaking clearly. I was speaking in Polish so my wife and the midwife did not understand me. But he did. He calmed down and I lay down again. I was so exhausted that I dozed off. A loud crying woke me up but this was crying without fear. This was a crying of a normal healthy kid that was just born. My son. Moshe.’[...]

Translated by Christopher Garbowski