30
PARTISAN REVlEW
I recall my cousin Eva's story. Soon after the war, on Yom Kippur, she
entered the synagogue with her mother, and one of the old men stood
up and offered his place to her mother. She was surprised-an old man
yielding his place to a young woman. He explained that he did it in
memory of her father, Wolf: "He was a
guter yid."
A good Jew, that is.
Those who sat next to him nodded respectfully.
A
guter yid
...
Yikhes .
...
As I grew up, I heard these words more
than once. But I never bothered to figure out exactly what they meant.
Only now do I recall Mama's stories about my great-grandfather Mor–
ris, Wolf Bendersky's father. A legend spread among Uman Christians
that he was "a holy Jew." He worked as a manager for a Polish sugar–
plant owner, a descendant of the famous magnate Count Potocki, the
very same Potocki who, in the eighteenth century, rebuilt the town after
the Haydamaks had burned it, built the Sofievka estate, and laid out a
remarkable park. Morris Bendersky ran the business so skillfully that he
not only got the owner out of the red, but he multiplied his wealth. The
sugar-plant owner couldn't be happier with his manager and generously
rewarded him.
What did my great-grandfather do with his money? Before the Sab–
bath began, the tailor would make him a new suit from the best English
wool. When the first stars broke out in the Uman sky it was time to sit
around the table, to break
chalah,
the ritual bread sanctified with a
prayer, and to pour wine into delicate goblets from the family set,
splashing it over the edges a bit. Great-grandfather Morris, dressed in
his brand-new suit, would walk down the streets of the town. There he
would look for a pauper. He wouldn't have to look for long. He would
stop a passerby and, smiling, lead him back to his house. He'd seat him
at the family table, treating him to good food and wine. When it was
time for the guest to leave, he'd remove his brand-new jacket-and, if
they were needed, his pants as well-and give them to the stranger.
There wasn't anything eccentric about this. Great-grandfather simply
tried to be a good Jew, that is, the kind that the Torah prescribed. He
did his mitzvah indiscriminately-it wasn't important whether the man
he met was a poor Jew, a Ukrainian peasant, or a drunken Polish cob–
bler down on his luck. In
1919,
when Petlyura's whooping Cossacks
poured into Uman streets, the town's Christians came to the defense of
Morris Bendersky. They talked the Cossacks into sparing his life, for he
was "holy."
From all this I conclude that Grandfather Wolf's status in the town
was of the highest order. He had a double
yikhes-his
own, earned by
his learning, and the inherited one, in memory of his father.
