I thanked my Zaida for sacrificing this splendour so I could live

The May sun rises early in Vinnitsa and I rose with it. I met my translator Vlad in the hotel lobby at dawn. He took me outside and introduced me to the driver Maxim, whose four-wheel drive Nissan Humvee was primed to overcome all natural obstacles.

We were in the centre of town and it was deadly quiet. I asked what the region we were going to was called and Vlad said “Khmelnitsky”. Many of the towns nearby are named after other, lesser pogromists. We were heading west in the direction of Lvov, which was once also known as Lemberg. OMG.

Vlad the Translator was a kind and timid soul, his English was good enough to earn a living. Maxim on the other hand was bursting with life, like the countryside around him. Like his car. He told me, with Vlad translating, that it would take three hours to drive there and another three back, if we got there at all. I was standing with them, next to the car, having a coffee and a cigarette to prepare myself for the trials ahead while they chatted to each other.

Read all the chapters of Maurice Glasman's A Jewish Chronicle Of A Death Foretold

Vinnitsa is a town where, at daybreak, it doesn’t take much imagination to see Nazis marching down the street in their uniforms, with their flag. The Machaneh Mavess — The Camp of Death. It made me feel sick. I was in Kirkuk in 2014 and I saw the Isis flag flying just beyond the city gates and I had the same feeling then. I lit another cigarette. Yes, I said, I would like another coffee.

When Maxim heard the reason for my trip his face took on a serious resolve, he moved towards me and held me close in his enormous arms and then he looked dead into my eyes and grasping my shoulders, as you would a barmitzvah boy, he spoke to me intensely in Ukrainian, which was simultaneously translated by Vlad.

He said that it was very great what I was doing. That he would be my protector and my guide and that he hoped that one day, his grandson, who was two months old, would also go the village where Maxim was born and honour him in that way. He let me go.

What can you say? I said thanks. I got into the front seat, Maxim disabled the seat belt alarm with a click of his screwdriver and we sped out of town to my rendezvous with fate.

This was all unexpected. With Maxim by my side I felt elated. Hashem had turned his face to me and been gracious unto me. I thanked Levi-Yitzchak for coming through. With his pipe, his tight fitting checked shirt and combat trousers, Maxim looked like a man who could wrestle a rabid dog to the ground with his bare hands and he was on a mission. “We will find it,” he said, hitting the steering wheel as we hit the main road. Put your foot down.

What was also surprising and very disturbing was how beautiful the countryside continued to be. I still expected and wanted something uglier. The sky and the skittish clouds were heavenly in form, swirling and reforming with endless delight. The road was terrible, full of jagged holes and Maxim explained that if we went really fast it made it easier to drive. Fine with me. Vlad sat in the back with a doomed expression on his face and the speed added to the glory of the woods and forests that spread between the black-line contours of the fields.

Another surprising thing is that I must have travelled through at least 1,000 miles of the Ukraine in all directions over the ten days I was there and I never saw a tractor. Peasants bent double like old beggars under sacks, hacking at the earth with a hoe. There was plenty of that. They were scattered like dots over the expanse of fields. I saw no horses, let alone horse-power, across the vast vista of Ukrainian earth. It made me wonder what the collectivisation of the Kulaks and the famine was all about. The industrialisation of the countryside and the endless mantra of modernisation that also left a numberless dead in its wake.

The “zhida-kommuna” were blamed for that as well and I was thinking it through and wondering whether that added to the ferocity of the merciless Jew killing in Ukraine, a kind of peasants’ revenge, when it dawned on me that I had always thought that my Zaida came from a damp, horrible miserable place and I could not have been more wrong. I had never thought of the loss of leaving somewhere so beautiful. Somewhere where butterflies drift past your ear while you stare at the lakes, the different kinds of trees and the cosmic gorgeousness of their greens.

I asked Maxim to stop the car several times so I could just look at it. And always, and everywhere, you can hear the birds singing and smell the scent of flowers and blossom mingling in the breeze. It ebbs and flows but it’s always there. I have never smelt an air so sweet. You cannot convey the smell or the breeze in photographs, or on film.

I understood, for the first time, why Reb Nachman instructed his followers to have their hour daily conversation with Hashem in the woods and forests around them. It’s so obvious. All that god gave was good, all that man made was rotten. That was the thought I wrote down again as we bounced across the broken road and saw the sign for Vinkivtsy, which we once called Winkowitz. The rusty sign to the shtetl sat in the shadow of the silver dome of an Orthodox church. St Dimitry’s.

Two hours. Not bad.

We had got there but our problem was unresolved. Neither Vlad nor Maxim had any idea where the Jewish cemetery was. It was not to be found on Google maps or any maps. As we overtook a woman leading five goats down the main road leading into Winkowitz, Maxim noticed a parked car and two men working on it. He pulled up, bounded out and asked them if they knew where the Hebrew Cemetery was. I noticed that he used the word Yevrei rather than Zhida.

I stood by the ruins of a house and its broken windows framed the tree filled view that lay behind it. The three men talked for a while. One of them stopped fixing the car and stood up. Maxim took out paper and his pipe and the man started drawing a map. The other one took out his mobile phone and spoke at length. Maxim still wasn’t satisfied. More calls were made. He then announced that there was still a Jew living in Winkowitz and his name was Lev Haisan. He received money from the Israeli government, was in charge of the cemetery and Maxim had found his address. Wallop. I shook both their hands.

We drove into the village and there was a main street with pre-fabish shops, a chemist, a bakery, a beautician. It was all new, which I date from the 1960s. Maxim was going from shop to shop with his map to find Lev Haisan’s home. We walked down the main road and turned left and behind a small block of flats were gardens and allotments, sapling trees and cherries. Rusty sheds were submerged by purple flowers and giant dandelions. They don’t do, “she loves me she loves me not” in the Ukraine. I did and she loves me not.

We found the entrance and Maxim banged loudly on Mr Haisan’s door but there was only a still silence in reply. Faces popped out of doors all the way up the three stories. Maxim called out his request to all. “Where is the Hebrew Cemetery?” And pointing at me he said that this man had come all the way from London to say thank you to his grandfather for leaving Vinkivtsy. I felt a bit awkward as Vlad droned his translation. A smiling young woman shuffled down the stairs and said she knew the way and we followed her up a hill with a path of purple flowers and there was the Jewish Cemetery of Winkowitz, intact and protected by an iron fence with a gate, tucked away behind a chicken coop and a slur of violets and lilies. Wow.

Here was the Jewish cemetery and I put my cuppel on, but I realised after I walked around it for a couple of minutes, and I could feel my heart sinking further with each step, that it wasn’t the right one. All the graves were from after the war. I couldn’t believe it.

There were many Jews who returned. And another thing. Virtually all the tombstones had a black and white photograph of the deceased embossed in life size on the black marble stone. In Odessa, at the New Jewish Cemetery, the photos on the stones are something else.

Fania Kamras has “Hollywood Forever” written in English beneath a huge photo of her smiling face. Yuri Gunerin, a Jewish pop star, has a more than life-size photo of him jumping towards you with the words “to infinity and beyond” written beneath it in a flowing Russian script.

Back in Winkowitz I found the grave of Freda Haisan, and I concluded that Lev had lost his wife. Little stones sat beneath her big stern face. I found a pebble and placed it next to them. The Cemetery was well kept and surrounded by woods. I regretted not knowing the names of more flowers because they were all there, popping up by the side of the graves, yellow with red spirals and purple with green ones. I said Kaddish but I knew that none of my family were buried here.

Vlad and Maxim were standing outside the gate, giving me time. I walked out and pointed my finger at both of them. This was not the cemetery I came to find. There must be another one. We stood in an unresolved silence.

A peasant women with a flowered scarf folded on her head like a turban came out of her house to feed her chickens next to the cemetery gate. Maxim spoke to her and she nodded. She had the number of Lev Haisan. She kept the cemetery tidy and confronted vandals if they tried to get in.

She told me she was sorry, there was an old cemetery, or there used to be. And she and Maxim led me up another steeper hill and at the top there was a tombstone memorial, written in Russian, to the 16 Jews who were shot on that spot on May 9, 1942.

It stood on its own looking down into a valley and there at the bottom of the hill were three old matzeyvas that they hadn’t smashed.

I ran down the slope to get to them but the grass was long, sticky and dense. I couldn’t make out the Hebrew names, the stones were old and worn. Beneath my feet I could feel the hard edges of submerged stones and I pulled up grass trying to get at them. The inscriptions were too faint to read.

I took out my Siddur from my backpack and said the prayer for going to a cemetery and Kaddish. I had a super-abundant Minyan of the Dead and I said it for all of them. Maxim, Vlad and the peasant woman had been watching me from the top of the hill but when I looked up they had gone. I was completely alone and standing by the last remaining headstones near the bottom of the valley. I was prepared for the smashed graves, I had been warned. What I was not prepared for was that it had then been left alone.

It had not been sealed by new housing. They could still breathe. Jewish grave stones still stood. And above all I was not prepared for its resplendent beauty, the buttercups and daffodils swaying in the perfumed air, birds singing and swooping. The birds were all you could hear and they were loud. It was a lot different to Waltham Abbey, or Edmonton, in that regard.

I sat on the sap seeping grass and thanked my Zaida for leaving, for sacrificing such splendour to come to foggy, damp, ugly Whitechapel so that I could live. I thanked the mothers and the fathers, the bubas and the zeidas that went before. I thanked all of them for all they gave in all their lives. I closed my eyes and rocked backwards and forwards in words of praise and gratitude for all they had done. I said words like Brocho, Hatzlocho and Parnoso. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

And as I sat on the vivid green pasture and the white chipped fragments that once held my unremembered dead I could glimpse through the trees diamonds flashing on the still blue river. I was not prepared for this at all. I was confused. I thought for the first time that my family had a good life here for hundreds of years.

A walk in the woods on Shabbes. Lovely. A Succah looking up to the shining stars and the swirling clouds. Magic. Swimming in the river on a hot summers day. Cool.

I took out my blue Soncino’s Tehilim and lay back on the slope and read my Dad’s favourite Psalm 23 in Hebrew, as I had vowed that I would. I read it out loud with solemn attention, like a prayer, and the Hebrew words were concise and expressive, shockingly concise and extremely expressive, just as he loved it. Then I turned round and face down on the grass with my Tehilim open in front of me, elbows on the earth, chin in my hands, the river in front of me and the valley rising behind me I began to read out loud in English.

The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.

He leads me to lie down in green pastures beside the still river.

He restores my soul and guides me down the just path in his name.

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death

I will fear no evil for you are with me.

Your rod and your staff protect me.

You lay the table in the presence of my enemies so I may eat before them.

You anoint my head with oil. My cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.

And your house will be my home forever.

I wondered why my Dad loved this one most of all. It was so brave and resolute, while he was amused and resigned and something clicked in my head but I couldn’t quite grasp it. Something stirred in me and I thought for the first time that maybe he felt blessed in his life. Maybe it was his love poem to my Mum, the one we read at funerals. He viewed Psalms that way and he was funny. It made sense. “My Love is my shepherd, I shall not want, she leads me to lie down in green pastures beside the still river”. Nice.

Just replace he and his with she and hers and you’ll get the point. My Dad was right about the Psalms and it seemed he worshipped a female God. Her house was his home forever, and it was her house. He never questioned her authority.

I thought it was beautiful for a man to love a woman in that way. He did the washing up. Faithful and grateful for her courage, her beauty and her goodness. His cup runneth over. I’d never looked at it like that before. I thought that she was enough for him but he was not enough for her. She longed for company, for her sisters, for the noise. He liked to be near her and do the crossword in silence but that was never enough for her. That made sense too.

Sundays were the worst. My Mum would walk into the lounge where me and my Dad had been sitting for hours not doing anything at all and say, “I haven’t spoken to anyone all day.” And my Dad would say to me, “It’s good to know where you stand” and then we would get into the car and go to Hatfield House or Hampstead Heath and sometimes the car would overheat, or break down and the whole world went to hell. Children would be sick by the side of the road, the AA didn’t turn up and when he died she lost her whole world.

I don’t think she ever really returned from that. There were flashes of fire and moments of tenderness but the Mum who is alive to me is from before he died. She is more alive to me now than my Mum was then.

She said to me that she had never told him she loved him and I said that she didn’t need to. She told me that before the operation he told her that he had had the most perfect life with her and she told him to be quiet and said he would be fine. I didn’t believe him when she told me that. But I did now. She only found out how much she loved him when he died and she missed him more than I can say. My heart bled for her then. What can you say? She didn’t let go and she didn’t move on. Faithful to death.

I was reliving this in my head as if he died yesterday, not 24 years ago. I hadn’t thought about any of this for ages. It seemed new. My mind was just drifting and the clarity of the memory was amazing. As vivid as the nature that surrounded me.

I stared at the river and the valley. Its sweet fertility was so unique that it shook me. It was one of the two most beautiful places I had ever seen. The only other one was when I went up the Zagros Mountains in South-East Turkey. I sat drinking sweet tea in a glass and eating cashew nuts with the Kurdish PKK and there were waterfalls and gambolling lambs, flowering olive trees and streams glimmering beneath the snow-capped peaks.

I remembered the sound of tinkling water as the sun stumbled its way down the mountains and thinking that maybe this was Gan Eden. The idyll was disturbed by the sound of aircraft and then the explosion of Turkish bombs aimed at us and we ran for the caves.

After the echo of the bombs had stilled, the crystal silence of Creation was restored. And it was good.

I was still lying down and I dug my fingers into the earth and pulled out three fragments of broken stones to bring back for my sisters and my brother. I knew I should keep moving so I got up and started walking in the deep long grass, listening to the birds, looking at the size of the bees and trying to find a buried grave whose inscription I could read. I heard Maxim calling. I looked up and he was strolling down towards me with an old man and it was Lev Haisan.

I walked up to greet him. We shook hands and I said Shalom Aleichem and he said Aleichem Shalom. There was a living Jew in Winkowitz. He and his mother were two of the few who survived the slaughter in Vinnitsa. His mother protected him, he said, in a thousand ways, every day, for a thousand days.

Vera Haisan. May her name be blessed.

He was born there, in the Vinnitsa Ghetto, and she brought him to Winkowitz when it was over. More than 40 Jews came back, it was their home. They had nowhere else to go. What happened to the other Jews? They were all taken to Kamianets-Podilsky, he turned and looked in that direction, indicating the same with his hand. None of them returned.

May our love for them never die. I can’t bear to tell you what happened to my family and all the Yidden of the shtetl of Winkowitz. Kamianets-Podilsky. Please don’t look it up. It’s too terrible. The lucky ones were sent to Vinnitsa.

I felt that sense of panic that hits me when I suddenly lose my confidence and I don’t know what to do next. Lost. Lev Haisan didn’t speak and I couldn’t speak.

After my Dad died, I used to read the Psalms at night. I lost myself in them. I started to make rhyming translations to catch the beat of the Hebrew and their brevity of words. I used to fall asleep easily in RK lessons when I was at school and I hoped that it might work again. It was a long time ago but my version of Psalm 77 came back to me with the familiarity of hearing and then remembering all the words of a forgotten song that once I loved but had been entirely erased from my memory. Like The First Cut is the Deepest by Rod Stewart. They appeared before me as if on a speech prompter.

I raise my voice to you

I raised my voice at you, but you don’t hear me

On the worst of days when my tears are ablaze

And ceaselessly stream from my soul in a rage

I reach my arms to you, but you won’t kiss me

My troubled eyes won’t close, and it’s worse than I supposed

I cannot speak the doubts that shiver through me

And I remember our first days

When your wonders filled the stage

When the glory of your promise was redemption

But I can’t take it and I can’t shake it

Has your love been effaced?

Have you forever withdrawn grace?

Is it over? Is it gone?

Has our covenant gone wrong?

Did you make your sacred promise just to break it?

They were thrown to the wolves.

I kept asking questions, dreading that I would leave without answers, knowing that I had to keep going, keep asking. That this would be over soon and I would want to know. In boxing, when you’re hit and hurt you have to keep moving.

When they saw the Jews returning the locals were ashamed of what had happened to the cemetery, he said. They put the stone up on top of the hill and declared the valley as a memorial. The Jews who were shot were like you and me. They were marched up the hill and shot. We both looked up at the lonely stone at the top of the hill and bowed our heads.

People would come and sit there on Sundays and have picnics. The view is very beautiful and he shrugged. He recognised the name Glasman but he was too young to remember anyone from before the war. He was born in 1939. He was 80 years old. His mother, his wife and his daughter were all in the cemetery. There was another Jew he said, an old lady but they weren’t talking to each other. The shul was knocked down. It was all knocked down. After the war, he said, we all lost our faith.

“And the photos on the headstones?” “That’s how we do it in the Soviet Union,” he said and he smiled. He used to work as an engineer and now he just wanted to die and be buried with his mother, his wife and his daughter. It would be, he said, the last Jewish funeral in Winkowitz and the story would be over. Everyone had moved, to America, to Israel, Australia, to Kiev, to Moscow. He didn’t want or need any money. A Canadian visited about 15 years ago and paid for the upkeep of the cemetery and for the iron fence. No. He had never met anyone from the Israeli government and had no contact with them.

The Jews all used to live in the centre of town and in the houses around. He spread his hands towards the whole village. This was our shtetl, there were more of us than them. Then.

Vlad was translating as I asked Lev questions and he answered gently, shrugging and sometimes moving his head from side to side. His frame was so slight that I could have lifted him into my arms and carried him. He was so familiar that I almost recognised him from childhood weddings. His deeply brown eyes emanated the truth that he had once been loved but that all who loved him were now dead. They reminded me of my Mum’s eyes after my Dad died.

Maxim emerged with a shiny small shovel and a sky blue patterned cloth. At Lev’s feet he outlined an immaculate square on the ground. We stopped talking. He then cut a narrow length of cloth with the shovel edge and put it in his pocket. The rest of the cloth he placed on my outstretched hands. He then dug up a perfect square of earth, sieved out the little pebbles and dead grass and a few fragments of broken headstones that nature kept on pushing back up to the surface and he placed it on the cloth. He took it from me and tied up the sack in a bow with the slither he had cut. He gave it back to me and said that it was the earth of my ancestors. He said that I must use this earth to plant a tree in their memory. I said thanks but how could I explain that I lived above a shop. That I had nowhere to plant my tree of life because I didn’t have a garden. I owned no land.

And that is when my Zaida came alive. He was bareheaded. He pointed at me and he said: “That’s because you never do any bloody verk. You mix up der nicht mit der tug and der tug mit der nicht and no good will come of it.”

I nodded without saying anything and he was gone. It was definitely him though. He stood before me and he wasn’t very nice.

And he was right. That’s what I thought when he said it. “You’re right”. I nodded in agreement. I’ve always found it hard to go to bed and even harder to wake up. Every night I linger and I can’t let go. Sometimes I don’t see my children from Shabbes to Shabbes. It’s not as if I’m a long distance lorry driver. They’re asleep when I get in and gone when I awake.

When people invite me for lunch I wonder if I can make it in time. I was never allowed to forget that as a baby I used to stay up all night and would only stop crying if one of my parents got out of bed and held me. Then, apparently, I was quite happy. My infancy was described by both my parents as a “total nightmare”. I’ve never been able to go to bed and I’m full of longing for company at night. But not in the morning. It’s always been this way.

I noticed, while remaining really calm, with no acknowledgement really, that my Dad was standing next to me, as if at a funeral at Waltham Abbey, near the grave, after the service and the eulogy, waiting for the mourners to find each other by the clay clumps of earth before the coffin is lowered on ropes into the ground, with family and friends scattered around trying not to tread on anybody’s grave. It was very casual. The funeral was of someone we knew, but not very well. Someone called Eddie, or maybe Stanley.

It was Mum who insisted we came. And we had all the time in the world. No one was going anywhere. This could take two hours, this could take four. We may have to go back to the house for prayers. It really didn’t matter. It was like a Sunday funeral. And my Dad was telling me that he once got a B in Chemistry in his school report and his father was so upset he couldn’t eat and, putting his cigarette out in the middle of a full plate of hot food he said, “I’ll remember this day until they take me away to Edmonton”. My Dad said these words in my Zaida’s accent, while jabbing the cigarette down into the food three times. Take me away to Edmonton.

“But he’s right,” I said. I was almost irritated. My Dad slowly shook his head and his green eyes with a fleck of brown found mine and he said with gentle finality, “I told you. This is what he’s like.” He kept his eye on me as he disappeared.

If my Mother had joined us she would have said that I went “as white as a sheet, as pale as a ghost”. I loved my Dad more than I can speak from a time before I could speak. I was told that when I was really little I would hold his leg so that I wouldn’t be apart from him as he walked across the carpet.

All he needed to do was look at me and I laughed and if he was worried my heart was with him. I loved him as a child loves. Unquestioningly, instinctively, eternally. I always did.

When he was alive and people used to ask about him I used to call him the sublime shadow. His presence hovered over the room, and it was always better when he was there, even though he was doing the crossword most of the time.

When he died, all my lights went out. I didn’t say goodbye then and now I didn’t even say hello. I didn’t ask about Psalm 23 which had filled my head a few minutes before. I didn’t ask how he was and what it was like when the nights grew long in Waltham Abbey. What kind of company was he keeping?

He used to worry about that, the kind of people who get to heaven were not his kind of people. He dreaded it. I just accepted him being there as if it was normal. He was so alive that I forgot he was dead. And I was still arguing with him about his Dad. He’d come all that way to comfort me and I mugged him off.

And then I realised that today was May 25 and from the moment I wrote it in my diary I was ticking off the days until I got here. And what I forgot, as I often forgot when he was alive, was that May 25 was his birthday. I had actually spent time with my Dad on his birthday and had forgotten to wish him many happy returns of the day.

My Mum once said that she bent over backwards for me and all I did was kick her in the teeth. It’s a shocking sentence with a terrible image and it felt like that.

OMG.

I was stupefied. I was mortified and I felt completely ashamed of myself. I was overwhelmed by the merciless reality of complete personal uselessness. If my Mum had been there to describe it she would have said that I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me whole. But she wasn’t there. Thank God. She would have been furious with me and told me it was typical.

I had that sinking feeling, like I was falling down a hole. And the words Chadeysh Yomeinu Kekedem popped into my head for some reason and I think I said them and I remembered that Eitz Chaim was the name of the Yeshiva that my Dad went to in Brick Lane after school. I was lost but my mind kept moving in real time, scrambling around from this to that, trying to stop falling.

I had a strange memory of the Chazen hitting a note at the end of a lingering kekedem that was almost as high as a dog whistle. And of my Dad standing next to me in shul hoping there wouldn’t be a drosha. I turned to meet his eyes, with a bad luck look, as Rabbi Shaw moved to the lectern to speak but he wasn’t there.

I’d lost him again.

Read Part Five: Please write this on my tomb: The thing I love most is being a Yid