King of the Jews

King of the Jews

“A masterpiece that forged a boisterously new, morally intense vision of the Holocaust.”

—New York Times

“The first novel about the Holocaust that manages to be adequate to its own ambition.”

—Larry McMurtry, New York Magazine

“Monumental, vivid, and engrossing.”

—New York Review of Books

“The best book yet to be written on the Holocaust. A superb novel.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“Epstein has done the impossible…. He has shown what the power of art—his art—can reveal of the depths of the unspeakable.”

—Philadelphia Inquirer

“Profoundly daring…. Epstein can summon up life from the bottom of despair.”

—Boston Sunday Globe

“An astonishing accomplishment.”

—Washington Post Book World

“The only novel of its kind to survive the horror it confronts and emerge undamaged as a truly superior work of art.”

—Terrence Des Pres

“Epstein’s great power as an artist is the discovery of a voice—humane, civil, curious, befuddled, intelligent…. He has by the power of the mind’s eye borne true witness.”

—Geoffrey Wolff, Esquire

“Stark, powerful…. A story that pulsates with an almost manic intensity, a story that mirrors a world gone mad.”

—Publishers Weekly

“This novel compels our witness.”

—Village Voice

“A work of elegance, intelligence, wit, and originality…. Epstein presents an in-depth picture of human suffering and deals with the most horrible topic of our century in a moving and credible fashion.”

—Dallas Morning News

“A brave and powerful novel.”

—St. Louis Globe-Democrat

“The extraordinary storytelling facility of the author matches the vivid imagery in his telling. Thus, invested in this shattering novel, is the pure, delicious rhythm of a true artist.”

—West Coast Review of Books

For Joe Kanon

Contents

1. The Golden Age

2. The Elder

3. Smuggling

4. The Wedding

5. The Five Day Strike

6. A Decision for the Judenrat

7. The Yellow Bus

8. Makbet

9. The Pulley

10. Fighters

11. Urania

Chapter One

The Golden Age

I

In the winter of 1918-1919, on a day when the wind was blowing, I. C. Trumpelman arrived in our town. He was wearing a brown overcoat and a brown hat and had a large suitcase in either hand. The overcoat was a cheap one, woven from horsehair. “Mister,” he said in Polish to the first person he saw on the platform, “find me a hotel.” For such a large man his voice was high, with a trace of the lisp that Jews have in Vilna. Even at that time his hair was gray, almost white, and hung far over his collar. His eyes peered through the same pair of “American” spectacles—round lenses in black metal frames—that he was to wear twenty and twenty-five years later. The eyes themselves were also round, like a boy’s, and were for a Litvak’s remarkably blue.

Our main station, like many others built in the 1880’s, was designed by the Italian, Donati. It is to this day still standing, with turrets of red brick, with stone buttresses, with slanted windows through which you can see clouds and birds and the lemon-colored lozenge of the Polish sun. The man on the platform, the one Trumpelman spoke to, led him through the station arches and out into the winter light. Although he was not a railway porter, and not even a member of the working class, this Pole carried both of the Jew’s valises.

The newcomer, now standing on the steps of the Donati Station, put his hand on his hat and stared through the Central Square. There were carts there, and wagons, and several automobiles. Toward the east, over the rooftops, steam from the dyeworks steadily rose. Women passed with their bundles. Boys chased each other in the open air. Then the Pole pointed to where, on the far side of the Rumkowsky Monument, a flag was flying over the Hotel Europa. Trumpelman, with his teeth protruding a little, smiled. Then he picked up his bags and walked down the steps, into the square. The tails of his coat, as if angry at something, lashed round his legs.

The Hotel Europa, still intact also, though now the site of a state ministry, is even larger than the main station. It was generally thought to be the equal of the Britannia in Warsaw, and finer than the Zoppot Casino-Hotel in Gottentow-Lanz. The pastry shop on the ground floor had an international reputation. It made butter tarts, with crumb crusts that were toasted, and those traveling east-west, Paris-Moscow, or north-south, Danzig-Budapest, would buy them in between trains. In this hotel, in a corner room with a washstand, Isaiah C. Trumpelman stayed for three nights and three days.

It seems he spent this time walking, in wider and wider circles, so as to cover the entire town. Thus the first day he stayed near the Central Square, in the commercial district, and especially on Alexsandrowska Boulevard, with its travel posters and elegant shops. The next day he went to the residential sections, the Walburska quarter, the twin avenues, Leczyca and Pabianice, whose large houses were set into gardens and decorated with a pattern of banana leaves. Finally, he went past the New Market, to the working-class district known as the Baluty Suburb: here everything smelled from the tanneries, the dyeworks and mills were always steaming, and there was mud in all of the roads. So much for Trumpelman’s days. At night, at least for the first night and the second, no person saw him. Probably he was sleeping, or reading, or staring out the single round window high up on the wall of his room.

The third night was different. The Lithuanian walked out the front door of the hotel. Now he wore blue—the trousers, the jacket, the blue, white-dotted tie. A white shirt also. And a pair of long, narrow, shiny black shoes. Dressed in these clothes, which set off his eyes, and with his whitish hair brushed over his collar, he must have made a striking figure. He walked through the square and onto a side street, down which, blinking excitedly, were the lights from the Astoria Café.

That nitespot was not then as famous as it later became. Trumpelman took a table at the back. He ate a beefsteak and drank a clear liqueur. He bought four cigarettes. A thin comedian, losing his hair, told a number of jokes. About the Jew and the bathtub. About the landowner and the crow. Then a woman with black bangs and painted lips began to sing songs. She looked, with her straight, bare shoulders, like a statuette, like an Egyptian. The visitor at the far table ordered a hothouse flower and, when the songs were over, sent it to the stage. The singer pinned the rose to her waist, just above the split in her tight, gleaming gown. Then she blew that patron a kiss. It was in this manner that I. C. Trumpelman celebrated his forty-ninth birthday.

The following morning the guest checked out of the Hotel Europa and took a motor taxi to a wooden house in the Walburska quarter. To the front of this house, at Lepecky 6, there soon was affixed a bronze-colored plaque:

I. C. Trumpelman
Practicing Physician

That street, as it happened, was a lucky choice. Many of the houses on it were occupied by industrious and progressive Jews: the managers of the spinning mills, the owner of a furniture factory, lens makers, and such. Poles and ethnic Volksdeutschers, the sort who read newspapers, who wore wristwatches, lived in the rest. Moreover, from morning to sundown hundreds of men and women passed in front of Number 6 on their way to the nearby Rumkowsky Geyser—in fact not a geyser, but a branch of the municipal baths. Of course, such people, so hygiene-conscious, would notice the neat new sign on the wall—the only such sign, by the way, except for old Doctor Fosduk’s, in the entire quarter. You will not be surprised to learn that the new doctor thrived.

Trumpelman rented three rooms in the old wooden house, one upstairs, in which he lived, and two on the ground floor: a surgery and a room for waiting. This last place always contained, for adults, the latest illustrated magazines from Berlin, from Warsaw; and for children there was a round bowl with two fish. The young Volksdeutschers especially would sit with their fists on their thighs, like little men, and stare at the creatures behind the glass. Some of them would knock on the sides of the bowl, or blow on the surface of the water, trying to make the minnows come from their porcelain castle.

The doctor treated most of his patients with pills, either long white ones, or green ones, which were round. How he knew which color to give which patient was a secret; sometimes he would insist that the very man he had previously given the green capsules should now take a white one, or vice versa. “Swallow!” he’d say, and you had to do it, on the spot. Trumpelman had another skill, which in our town was completely unheard of. Without warning, he would shoot out his left hand and take a sick man by the neck; then with his right hand he would twist the fellow’s head like the knob of a door. If the person resisted, the doctor got angry. He would grasp his spectacle frames with one hand, so they wouldn’t fall off; with his other hand he would strike the table. “What’s the matter with you? Are you the expert? Look, I am getting upset!” These different techniques—the pills, which did make people feel better, and the neck-twist, which worked wonders, too—were thought to be typical of medical science in Vilna, though there was no diploma from that northern city, or any other, upon the wall.

From the first days of his practice this physician cared for large numbers of children. There were not then in Central Europe—and perhaps there are few today—specialists in juvenile diseases; yet people brought to this stranger, a man with a foreign lisp, their little ones, even from distant parts of the city. “He treats my Meilech as if he were his own” was how one woman put it, and all the others in the waiting room nodded their round Polish or square Volksdeutscher or long Jewish heads. Trumpelman never gave pills to these children, or wrenched their necks. Instead, he had a box of hollow sweets, which, after you sucked them for a time, suddenly flooded your mouth with a syrup that turned your tongue, your lips, even the world before your eyes, the deepest raspberry red.

“Attention!” the doctor would say to the boys, and when they stood against the wall like soldiers, he would thrust a thermometer like a baton under their arms. The girls he rode on his knee, at a real jogging pace, until their pinched faces grew healthy and flushed. “Stop! Chaim!” they would call, using his middle name. In spite of his famous temper, he never struck, never screamed at, these patients. Once he stepped from the surgery into the waiting room and discovered a pale, pudgy boy with his arm in the fishbowl and the two little fish alive on the floor. “Ho! Ho! What big trout you have caught! Yes, my Franz! You’re a brave hunter!” Then Trumpelman scooped up the minnows. As for the trembling Volksdeutscher, all the doctor did was pinch him a bit on the ear.

Trumpelman did not just treat these children; he tended their mothers as well. Best to say here that all through the twenties and thirties his name was connected to one type of scandal or another. Much of that reputation—for being a roué, a ladies’ man—began at Lepecky 6. People believed that with his blue eyes he knew how to hypnotize his female patients and make them do what he wished. It became a kind of fashion to develop a rash or a fever and then let it be known that the doctor from Vilna was attempting to bring on a cure. Rumors began to circulate about his past. You heard that he had already had three different wives, two of whom died in childbirth and one of whom was hit by a train. Or that, as a result of some liaison, he had killed a Lithuanian officer in a duel. Such stories explained why—crushed by tragedy, or a fugitive from justice—he had suddenly appeared among us. But whether they were true or not, or even whether his reputation was a deserved one, nobody could say for sure. Leib Korngold, who later grew up in our town, used to tell everyone how he once pushed open the door to Trumpelman’s office and discovered Malka Korngold, his own mother, without any clothes. She was walking up and down, he said, on the back of the physician. The odd thing was, it seemed as if it were Trumpelman who had been hypnotized. He looked, with a dazed expression, right through the boy.

These are not pleasant stories. And there are worse things, terrible things, to come. Ladies and gentlemen, whatever you hear in the future, at least remember the true, genuine feeling of this man for all the little Leibs and Meilechs and Franzes, who were the first ones to call him Chaim. All too soon the whole town, or at least the Jews in it, tens of thousands of people, would call to him, would cry out to him, by that very name. We all became his children.

But first the years had to pass. In 1923 Trumpelman bought a new suit. This was camel-colored, and always had a neat white handkerchief in the breast pocket. The next year he got an overcoat to match. In 1926 the doctor hired a nurse, a Polish girl, Miss Wysocka. She had dark hair and a dimpled chin. All this meant that Trumpelman was prosperous, that he was respected. But it was only after the Walburska Pogrom in the spring of 1927 that he became a really well-known figure.

This disturbance differed from others in the quarter in that the hitting and beating, which went on through the night, reached as far as Lepecky. The waiting room at Number 6 became crowded with people suffering from wounds, from burns, from broken limbs.

By the time dawn broke Trumpelman was exhausted. The walls of his office, his new armchair, his wrists and thumbs, were smeared with blood. Plasters and bandages hung everywhere. A child with a crack in his head was lying on the movable table, and a middle-aged Jew, a complete stranger, was shaving in the surgical mirror. At this point the doctor happened to look out the window. In the first light two Poles were walking down the middle of Lepecky, carrying a rolled-up carpet on their shoulders. Without hesitating, Trumpelman picked up whatever came to hand—it turned out to be his little rubber hammer—and went into the street.

“Stop!” he cried. “What’s that you have?”

The first Pole halted, but the second, a stocky man, kept going, so that the carpet looped in the middle. “It’s a rug,” said the lead man, with a smile.

“To walk on,” said the rear fellow, who at last stood still.

“Where did you get it? Explain yourselves!”

“It belongs to my aunt!” said the first Pole, quick-witted. “On my mother’s side.”

From fatigue, not from fear, Trumpelman swayed. The crowd had come out on the steps of Lepecky 6. More Jews peered from the windows. The tall doctor stared down at the Poles.

“Describe the rug! Tell me what it looks like!”

The second man began grinning, too. “That’s easy!” he said. “Blue! And green! Like when a peacock spreads its tail!”

“It’s more of a yellow, a yellow-green. Not like peacocks, exactly.” This was said by the more intelligent man.

“Roll it out!” Trumpelman demanded. With his left hand he grasped the frame of his glasses. With his right hand he waved his mallet, a foolish weapon. The Poles paused, shifting their feet.

“You see, sir, what’s blue to one man is green to another—”

“At once! Unroll it!” Trumpelman’s voice, always high, nearly screeched.

The two men obeyed him. A sigh, ah, came from the crowd. For the rug, a beauty, from Bessarabia, was bright red, except for a border of purple plums.

Wordlessly the doctor turned and strode to where two of the “mayor’s police” were sitting on brown horses.

“Arrest them. They have stolen a valuable carpet. They have broken into a citizen’s home.”

The policemen looked at each other. One of their horses blew air through its nose. The sun was now high enough to give everybody a shadow.

“Why do you sit there? Didn’t you hear? I, Trumpelman, order you to do your duty!”

The Lithuanian, bloodstained, white-maned, must have made an extraordinary impression. The two policemen advanced upon the thunderstruck looters and, between the flanks of their horses, led them away. Most people said that was the end of the pogrom. And it is true, within a few hours the whole Walburska quarter was quiet again. As for Trumpelman, he smoothed down his hair and returned to his work at Lepecky 6. Behind his back people threw their caps and their derbies into the air.