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Every year before
the spring arrived, even before the snow had melted, both the gentile
boys and the heder [Jewish] boys ran through the muddy roads to
await the arrival of the storks. The gentile boys headed toward the White
Mountain and the Jewish boys toward the Blue Mountain, where the windmill
stood, and where Hindele now sat. From here, they could see all of Bociany,
see the lake where the demons bathed and Kailele the Bride had drowned
herself, and see the fields and the woods across the lake. They could
also discern, at a great distance, what they believed to be the Mountains
of Darkness, which stood on the border of this world and the next. There,
at the mysterious Sabbath River, the Sambation, lived the dragons
that guarded the land of the eternally happy little red Jews, who knew
nothing of exile. It was to the marshes of that happy land, the boys were
convinced, that the storks flew every winter, and it was from there that
they returned.
These same little
boys brought the news to Bociany. "The storks are coming!"
The adults received
this information with pretended indifference, as if to say, "May
more important tidings be brought to us." But secretly, they sighed
with relief. The return of the storks was a good omen. And out of gratitude
to the storks for their devotion, the shetl refused to mark the
seasons by the calendar. Instead, the day on which the storks returned
was considered the first day of summer, and the day they left, the first
day of winter.
As far as the Jewish
boys were concerned, most were convinced that one fine day the Messiah
Ben David himself would arrive in the shetl along with the storks.
He would ride his donkey through the Wide Poplar road, and the storks
would soar above his head. Together they would pass first the gentile
cemetery and afterwards the Jewish. The storks' clucking would help the
Messiah waken the dead, so that this particular day would be not only
the first day of summer, but also the Day of Resurrection and Deliverance.
All generations of
Jewish boys had been preoccupied with the same problem: What would the
Messiah do when he rode past the gentile cemetery? Would the gentile dead
also profit from the resurrection, or would the Messiah leave them rotting
in the Ground? And what would he do with the living goyim? Would he redeem
them, too — not, of course, for their
good deeds to the Jews, but perhaps because of their kindness to the storks?
And since they could never make out the answers, the boys themselves would
decide the issue, depending whether or not they were involved in a war
with the gentile boys at the time.
 The
favorite pastime for the people of Bociany was to observe with a feeling
of kinship how the storks built their nests on the roofs, and to philosophize
on the similarity between human family life and that of the birds. This
subject was of particular interest to the women, both Jew and gentile,
some of whom kept prepared a bundle of good straw and sticks in order
to save the storks the trouble of going to far in their search for building
materials. And when the "she" became pregnant and was about
to lay her eggs, these housewives would send their children to the nearest
swamp for frogs, tadpoles, snails, or rain worms, which they offered to
the female in a gesture of solidarity. They did not believe that a male
bird had any more understanding of a female in such a condition than did
the human male. The women would carry on this special attention both when
the "she" was laying the eggs and during the entire month when
the pair were sitting on the eggs. That the male sat on the eggs along
with the female was regarded as further proof of male laziness. It was
no great trick to join in the act of life-giving, if the wife bore all
the pains of labor. . . .
On the whole, thanks
to the storks, harbingers of good fortune for humans —
provided one behaved humanely to them in turn —
the shetl of Bociany, except in matters of livelihood,
was a fortunate place for both Jew and Gentile. Since the storks, like
nature in general, took no notice of the racial differences among their
hosts, they saw to it that the wombs of both the kosher Jewish matrons
and those of their gentile neighbors were never empty. Moreover, for the
most part, Jew and Gentile lived quite peacefully together.
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 From:
Chava Rosenfarb, Bociany. Translated from the Yiddish by the
author. © 2000 by Chava Rosenfarb (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University
Press), pp. 8-13. Excerpted by permission of the publisher. |
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