The gates of November Read Online Free PDF Page A

mysteriously and abruptly ordered his soldiers to cease their plundering and killing of Jews. “Only with the help of God did the tsar save us,” comments the record book of that Jewish community. But the hand of God seemed unable to save others. And so we have photographs of a different sort: pogroms consummated with singular barbarousness.
    Pictures of pogroms are difficult to bear. The head wounds are what shock one most. The Russians, wielding sabers and axes, seemed to go for the Jewish head. One photograph of the wounded shows nearly every head bandaged, thirty or so heads, assembled to record and display the event to the world, most of them the heads of elderly men and women. And there are photographs of rows and rows of bodies with heads fearsome to behold. City after city in Russia, from 1881 to 1917, witnessed fractured Jewish heads and rows of Jewish bodies: Mogilev, Minsk, Gomel, Bialystok, Lodz, Kiev, Zhitomir, Vologda, Simbirsk, Balta, Smela, Odessa. And Kishinev.
    Solomon Slepak was about three years old when his family moved from Dubrovno to nearby Kopys. They lived with a family of rabbis friendly to Solomon’s father. The Jews in and near Dubrovno would certainly have heard of the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev, a city not far from Odessa near the Black Sea; it attracted the attention of the world. More than three hundred dead, thousands wounded, six hundred children orphaned, fifteen hundred homes and shops plundered, forty thousand people left without property or means of work. The Kishinev pogrom occurred when Solomon Slepak was ten years old. His father had been dead about two years.
    In October 1905, there was one week in which three hundred pogroms took place in cities throughout Russia. Five months later young Solomon Slepak became a bar mitzvah and entered adulthood. Soon afterward he was told by his mother, Basheva, that she wished him to enter an academy of traditional Jewish learning, become a rabbi, and carry on the tradition of his late father, Israel, by linking his fate to the generations of rabbis and teachers in the father’s family. Either that or—the implied threat, though unstated, was quite clear—leave the house. Slepak family history reverberates with echoes of furious quarrels between mother and son, the mother defending her dead husband’s dream, the son weighing his own future.
    The chronicles tell us that at the age of thirteen, Solomon Slepak left home.
    Other young Jews were leaving then, too, fleeing from their religious homes, living with fellow runaways in vile rooms, sharing food and clothes, attending or watting to be accepted into Russian schools, barely eking out livelihoods by tutoring the children of well-to-do Jewish families or working at odd jobs. Many died of hunger and disease.
    Solomon Slepak fled to his older brother, Aaron, who still lived in nearby Dubrovno and worked in the textile factory. Aaron was then twenty-seven, devout, married, and with children. Solomon sought his brother’s support, but his brother thought it a fine idea that Solomon become a rabbi and urged him to return home.
    Solomon moved on once again, to the town of Orsha, some twenty kilometers north of Dubrovno, to the home of a Dr. Zarkhi, an old friend of his family’s. The doctor, who was not an observant Jew, took the boy in and gave him a room in the attic.
    No one seems to know why this Dr. Zarkhi accepted the thirteen-year-old Solomon into his home and what his precise connection was to the Slepak family. But it was not uncommon in those days for people to take in the runaway children of friends rather than abandon them to a bed in a reeking cellar or tenement, to streets and hooligans and the specter of disease, starvation, death.
    Solomon Slepak intended to enter a technical school, but he was too young and unprepared for the qualifying entrance examinations. He helped himself by getting his date of birth changed on his official documents from March 6, 1893, to March 6, 1892—no