Sound by sound, word by word, day by day, they learned to pray. I had grown up in the family of the Soviet Union sister nations; all were alike, and all had to learn my native tongue, but none had to learn prayers. All belonged to our We. I proudly believed that my ancestors taught the orphans of all nations. For an unacceptably long period of time, I couldn’t imagine what language my relatives spoke back then, what language they taught the children. My cosmopolitan present made me think they had taught the deaf-mute children to speak in all the languages of the world, as though deaf-muteness and orphanhood made for a blank page and the freedom to adopt any language and any history. As I saw it, our Jewishness was deaf-mute, and deaf-muteness was Jewish. This was my history and my heritage, yet it was not me.
Sh’ma Yisrael, hear me Israel, where is Israel?
I sifted through stacks of documents, looking for evidence of us in the old papers and on the Internet. The search command highlighted the word deaf in yellow, as though Google knew that yellow was the color of Jewishness, just as I knew that Google highlighted any searched term in bright yellow. Every story with the yellow deaf became a building block of my past, of my Internet Jewishness. Maybe my people had stepped right out of the Talmud, out of the story of the two deaf-mutes who lived near the rabbi and always followed him into the school where he taught, and sat next to him, observing him attentively and moving their lips along with him. The rabbi prayed for them, and at some point it became apparent that they knew everything the rabbi had taught his students; they had learned everything with their eyes. I tried to follow up on all the other stories with the yellow deaf, reading the passages surrounding the yellow highlightings and expecting these deaf stories to flutter up and take on a life of their own.
At the beginning of the history of my family stood a translation. In 1864, the writer and proponent of Jewish Enlightenment Faivel Goldschmidt wrote an article about Simon Geller and his school in a Lemberg-issued Hebrew newspaper, full of enthusiasm about Simon’s personality and his work. Sixty years later, the text was translated into Russian by Simon’s grandson, Ozjel Krzewin, and another sixty years after that, my mother discovered Ozjel’s translation in an archive in Kiev, together with other documents about my relatives’ schools. However, the Hebrew newspaper with Goldschmidt’s article was no longer traceable. Our family’s heritage is predicated on a questionable translation without a source text, and I am now telling the story of this family in German without there ever having been a Russian original.
My mother said, Always with the pencil, they all learned with the pencil, the point in the mouth of the teacher, the end in the mouth of the child. That wasn’t in Goldschmidt’s article, but my mother knew it. She told me about the pencil, amused by the simple trick, yet somewhat put off by how close the mouths came to each other. The pencil vibrated, and the children noticed how the language originates out of the tongue.
“For every illness, even the most severe, the Lord God sends healing,” Ozjel Krzewin translated the article about his grandfather, as though the latter had been a Jewish holy man. After two years the children could read and write Hebrew and German, and they could read lips fluently. After five years, the article went on to say, Geller’s pupils could speak so clearly that their speech barely differed from those who had been endowed with hearing. They set their heavy tongues in motion and lifted off their vocal burdens. Their prophet Moses had also had an unwieldy mouth and a heavy tongue.
When Shimon was still in Vienna, an adult came into his school. The man’s father had died, but he could not pray, because he was deaf-mute. He wanted to learn to pray in spoken language, and when he was able to, he went to the cemetery to the grave of his father, who had died many years earlier, to say kaddish. Even newspapers reported on this.
Ozjel appended his own name, Krzewin, to the name Geller in the translation. Did he want to highlight the relationship, or was the word already in the original text, an added name that Simon had earned? One Polish friend tells me that people named Krzewin are disseminators of knowledge; another says that krzew means “bush”: maybe your Krzewins planted trees. But the Jews had no land, I thought, they planted their trees in the air. I liked the idea that even the name of my ancestors was evidence of this exuberant urge to learn. I leafed through The History of Judaism, six volumes, The History of the Eastern European Jewry, two volumes, The History of the Jews, one volume. I walked back and forth at the Judaica shelves of the library.
I did not find a Simon Geller in the many thick books about Vienna and its institutions for the deaf and mute. The definitive text on the subject, The General Austrian Israelite Deaf-Mute Institute in Vienna, 1844–1926, had a Simon Heller for the time period of our Heller or Geller, but he was the director of an institute for the blind. That has to be him, said the lady in the archive; in the small world of pedagogy for disabled students there can only have been one Simon Heller.
The school started in Vienna, then made its way through rural Polish areas, through Galicia, like a traveling circus, staying briefly in a city, a town, a shtetl, before Simon moved on with his family, the orphans, and the children who were sent by their parents.
I peered inside and listened, thinking of the many selfless men of the Jewish Enlightenment who were inspired by the idea that to spread learning is to pass it from mouth to mouth. For these people, who were obsessed with hearing, the spoken language was everything. I gesticulated, called out, opened my lips, I tried saying Sh’ma Yisrael, again and again, Sh’ma Yisrael, as though I had never spoken, I shook the air, Sh’ma Yisrael, I wanted so much to be heard, putting my tongue and my language to the test, I tried to tell the stories, to render them in my foreign German, I told the stories, one after the other, but I did not myself hear what I was saying.
When Shimon, the teacher, returned from a fund-raising trip and strode along the town’s weather-beaten buildings, I did not let him out of my sight. God lived in these side streets: Poland, Polyń, Polonia, Polania, po-lan-ya, here-lives-God, three Hebrew words that made a Promised Land for the Jews out of the Slavic Poland, and they all lived here, driven by language. I did not let him out of my sight while he was running through the narrow streets to his children, and then, behind the next corner, he took off from the earth and flew through the starlit sky over the little town. Why not fly, what with all the worries in the world, fly, besotted and wistful, so many children, one’s own and the orphans, like stars in the sky, like six hundred thirteen commandments, you can’t count higher than that on one walk, I’ve tried to, they fly toward tomorrow, parallel to time and space, sometimes crosswise, following their own trajectory and the wise and stern books that we will never read and understand, the paths in the towns shimmer, dark green, my evening stroll, my hunt for Shimon, the teacher, who stuffs small, colorful glass balls from Vienna into the pockets of his black overcoat, which is darker than the night, sucking candy from Lemberg, a tad tart, because a tongue needs to carry a tang, and he always has a pencil with him, a kościół, a church, a jug, a candlestick, chase after him, a whirlwind in the sky full of flying objects, another church with bulbous copper spires and a sloping golden cross, then a fiddle and blue flower of a boy with big, long-lashed eyes, taking a few more turns over the earth of their beloved Polania, their Promised Land of Polonia, the house of God, and it is here that the story of a family, of kin, can begin, and maybe even this story.
My first trip abroad, in the summer of 1989, took me to Poland. The country was aquiver with shock therapy, the term attached to the economic experiment