The Story of Leah, David's Mother
One bright spring morning, when the sun was benevolently smiling on all nature, Leah was sitting on the veranda of her two-story dwelling overlooking the great “Parade Platz” market place, in her native town of Tukums, Courland [in what was to become Latvia]. Leah, with her shawl tightly drawn over her smooth shoulders, her heart hushed in deep content, her lips humming a love song, sat holding her infant child close to her breast, listening to her baby’s prattle.
Courland: A semi-independent duchy linked to Poland, with a prevailing German influence from 1562-1795. The oldest Jewish community in Latvia, Courland never was part of the Pale of Settlement, but had two separate political entities.
The market place was smoothly paved with gray cobblestones and was kept scrupulously clean. What stories the worn stones could tell; how many differently shod feet had passed over them, from the coarse, hard sole of a bare foot to the silken elegance of a lady’s slipper. It was used one day in each week as the city market, where peasants from the neighboring country brought their garden truck, fruits, grain and poultry for sale to the citizens. One day was reserved for the volunteer bucket fire brigade drill and four days were used for military drill. Here the new recruits were trained. Young recruits, who were mere children, ten years old and upward, were mingled with some big bearded youths and middle-aged men. They represented a conglomeration of races, Mongolian, Kirghiz, Kalmuk, Tartar, German and Russian from many far-off provinces, most of them hardly understanding one another, for all were unfamiliar with any language except their mother tongue. Many of them had a bunch of hay tied on one foot and a bundle of straw on the other.
For a useful overview, see Olga Litvak, "Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry" (Bloomington, Indiana, 2006).
The corporal yelled [in Russian], “Sena na levo,” hay to the left, and “Soloma na pravo,” straw to the right, for such was the military system of drilling in those crude days. Many of the poor recruits did not understand their officers’ commands. The corporal would hit some poor boy under the chin hard enough to make his teeth rattle. Those military officers were steeped in brutality, and always grumbled about their work, uttering vulgar names especially to the small Jewish boys, “cantonists,” whom they were trying to convert to Christianity by forced orders from the Czar.
The topic of forced conscription of Jews into the Russian Army has been intensively researched by historians. By the time that David was a baby, the forced recruitment of very young Jewish boys was still in force. (I believe that this practice was vastly reduced as of 1856.)
Leah found herself now with this infant on her hands and no means of support. “It compels me,” she sighed to herself, “to the unpleasantness of going back to my father’s house. My sole provider, my husband dear Ben-Zion, was snatched away by the ‘catchers’ on that fatal night, pressing him into the army for 25 years. The ‘catchers’ said he will only be there until we can procure a substitute. God only knows when I will be able to buy one. My father Yanke Hennes is rich, but oh God, so miserly! He says everything must be for the ben Yochid, his only son. My dear husband Ben-Zion may be sent far away. I may never hear from him again.” Her eyes rested lovingly on the sleeping child. “My dear David, thou art my only consolation,” she murmured as she cuddled the child to her heart and whispered fondly, “I hope thou wilt grow up to be a great scholar like thy father, well versed in the Talmud and Hebraic lore.”
Here’s the first instance of David switching into archaic language — to indicate his native tongue, I assume.
Leah's reputed surname was Gottschalk; her death certificate lists her father as "Jacob Klashoff" but records from JewishGen.org point toward Klatsov. My best research suggests his real name was Yankel Klatsov.
Ben-Zion Yassel Dones, as he was known, was a lanky, frail Yeshive Bochur, a Talmudic student. In those days women were supposed to be strong and well built to function as wives and mothers of the race. Men were at their best when they were students absorbed in the spiritual life of God in intellectual attainment by study of the Talmud, and just men enough to be able to carry on the race.
Leah mourned over her fate: “Such a calamity to befall our people is far more cruel than the Egyptian rule in the day of the cruel Pharaoh, when they wrested infants from the mother’s breasts and drowned them. Thou art not yet safe with me, for if thou live to be ten years old, they may yet take thee away from me and force thee into the cruel army.”
Already David is worried about the weakness of his father, and how the religious orientation of the men of that generation would compromise his own ability to succeed as an adult. The emphasis in his introduction to the Diary is on how Ben-Zion’s “tenacious loyalty to [his] faith and conscientiousness in [his] religious activities” would hamper his access to material success; here, he focuses on the physical weakness resulting from his “frailness” as a student of the Talmud.
Ben-Zion was born in 1839, so he's relatively old here at 24.
Leah’s large brown eyes would cloud in tears at such thoughts as she sat with her two-months-old baby David in her lap. She murmured to herself, in despair, “It is only four weeks since my Ben-Zion was torn from my embrace by the cruel catchers and left me, Yanke Hennes’ daughter, a poor grass widow.”
Here, David is pointing us to the extreme class hierarchy which was typical of Jewish communities in this era. The rich Jews would pay the community to exempt their sons, while the poorer Jewish families would lose a son to the army. When she refers to the “only son,” at first I thought she was referring to Ben-Zion’s birth family. Upon reflection she is talking about her own “only son” brother. It would be fascinating to find out how much of a yearly income it might cost to buy out a young man from the forced recruitment. Also the age of Leah’s husband is of interest here. It was my understanding that most of the forced recruits were in their adolescent years.
It is also interesting that David uses the term “grass widow.” We should investigate what we think the Hebrew or Yiddish term would have been. I believe that he is referring to the phenomenon of the agunah, which is often translated into “grass widow.” This refers to a woman whose husband has disappeared or made himself otherwise unavailable, but without having given his wife a Get, the official Jewish religious divorce. This remains a very serious problem among Orthodox Jews in Israel and elsewhere today.
These opening, idealized images of Leah are ironic given that David later goes on to characterize her father as an old-fashioned, narrow-minded man whose conception of women is limited to their role as self-effacing, unquestioning, dutiful Jewish wives and mothers. His characterization of Leah, his own mother, is not far from that mark. Leah’s imagined “deep content” is no doubt a reflection of David’s generation, with its idealization of motherhood and womanhood, for how could she be so, given her situation?