LEONARD KRIECEL
67
speak of as daring. Even his stories about the Old Country downplayed
man in favor of that tough God who seemed to challenge his endurance
like a Parris Island drill sergeant practicing his profession. At twelve, he had
been seized by Cossacks and forced into a work gang. He had wandered
the steppes of R.ussia for almost a year and a half, boy-turned-man before
his time who knew that he had to keep a wary eye on the Cossacks mount–
ed on horses alongside of him, whips at the ready as they sat high in the
saddle. That time of forced labor haunts my brother and me with the same
kind of isolation we have read about in fi'oIltier captivity narratives, where
children must make their way through forested miles of haunted landscape.
For our father,just one more test of endurance that his God had set in his
path. " Had your Judaism been stronger," Kafka writes to his own father,
"your exampl e would have been lI10re compelling." Kafka's father was no
more like our father than his
All/erika
was like our America. Had Abe or I
offered advice to our father, we would have urged hill1 to pay less heed to
his God and more to the American imperatives his sons worshiped.
And yet, even with that burden of Europe, he made the journey away
fi'om home and into manhood. Only it was a journey from which he
emerged in much the same condition as he went in, tattooed by the tribal
history of the
siltetl.
There could be no doubt that he was l11an enough. But
a man who would be of Europe forever, aged before his time. Years later,
when I first read Isaac L3abel, I actually thought that he must have known
lI1y father. Of course, he hadn't. The Jews of L3abel's Odessa were less fear–
ful as well as more sophisticated than that Galician peasantry to which my
father belonged. Yet I still see him in the depths of imagination tramping
through the I<..ussian steppes, as if in an Eisenstein film, cold air permeating
his longing
fex
escape into a place that could offer him safety. The experi–
ence of being forcibly taken fi'om his home must have been an extension of
everything he knew about a Europe that was a knife to the throat of the
siltetl.
The baggage of the Cossacks would prove his baggage, too.
It was too much to hope that he not carry that baggage wi th him to
America. Still , I like to think of hilll as he moves toward manhood. In the
movie in my mind, I watch him struggle against the emptiness of the
steppes, lost in the dead space as he wanders into a flat endless horizon. I
think of him as a boy bold beyond his needs, like L3enya Krik , Babel's
Odessa gangster. I think of him pushing across a vast white blankness, one
eye on the Cossacks, the other on an America already just beyond the hori–
zon. In all the photographs of L3abel that I have seen, he looks remarkably
like the last picture that was taken of my f:lther in Europe. I know how
childish the fantasy is. Yet that God in whom my father believed so pas–
sionately can play the fool with any of us. Like L3abel, my father
understood why the joke is alw:1Ys on those who survive.
