Frampol is a small town in Poland. Have you ever been to Frampol? Perhaps Frampol no longer exists, perhaps my short story is all that remains – wondered Isaac Bashevis Singer in 1989 talking to Ewa Zadrzyńska, whose interview with the writer “Widok z okna” (A View from the Window) was published in the weekly Polityka. Despite the Nobel laureate’s concern Frampol does exist.
Kraśnik is featured in six works: “The Mirror” (in the collection Gimpel the Fool), “The Image” (in The Image), “Esther Kreindel the Second” (in Short Friday), “Guests on a Winter Night” (in A Friend of Kafka), “Zeitl and Rickel” (in Séance) and the autobiography Love and Exile. It is possible that some Kraśnik events known to the writer from oral tradition can also be found in other short stories. It is all the more probable since several accounts have been recorded which bear significant resemblance to some Singer’s stories.
Image – Aunt Yentl’s tale.
In Kraśnik there was a small yeshiva. It was run by a very poor Reb Pinchos. His wife, Greena Chasha, kneaded dough and washed linen in wealthy houses. They had one son and two daughters. The elder, Zylka, was very beautiful. One day, Yakir, a son of a rich family from Lublin came to Kraśnik. He instantly fell in love with Zylka. Their engagement was announced. However, Yakir unexpectedly left for Lublin. Days passed but he did not return. Instead of Yakir, his mother came to Kraśnik and declared he had already found another girl. That news made Zylka’s mother ill, and Zylka herself also suffered a great deal. In Pinchos’s yeshiva there was a young and poor Talmud prodigy from Kielce named Illish. Illish sent a matchmaker to Reb Pinchos and his marriage proposal for Zylka was accepted. The wedding was celebrated in the courtyard of the Kraśnik yeshiva. The whole town attended. But the newlyweds’ problems were not over since they could not consummate their marriage. During a questioning before the rabbi they revealed that a man’s apparition lay between them on the wedding night. It must have been Yakir. Zylka stopped leaving home. One day she disappeared altogether. She escaped from Kraśnik, converted and entered a convent
The Mirror
Zirel, a rich coquette from Kraśnik, raised in Cracow, cannot get used to provincial life. Her mother is dead, father trades in timber, and husband floats timber to Gdańsk. The bored girl spends all days sitting naked in front of a mirror. She has no common interests with people from Kraśnik, she yearns for a change. One day she saw a tiny devil in the mirror. She yielded to his incitements and persuasion. While promising happiness, the devil carried her to hell. When she disappeared from Kraśnik, everybody looked for her. To no avail.
Esther Kreindel the Second
The protagonists of the short story are the widower Meyer Zissl - a Talmud teacher from Biłgoraj; Reitze – a widow of a bankrupt entrepreneur from Kraśnik, Tanchum Izhbitzer; Simmele – Reitze’s daughter, later turned into Esther Kreindel the Second; and Zorach Lipover from Zamość, Esther Kreindel’s widower. After her death Simmele was incarnated in Esther and became Esther Kreindel the Second. According to Singer, the story was discussed among the Jewish community of Kraśnik, Biłgoraj and Zamość for a long time.
What’s interesting, Singer mentions Kraśnik on several occasions as a town known for demonic possessions of women. For example in Love and Exile he writes about a girl repeatedly possessed by a sinner’s soul making various disgusting utterances in a male voice. The girl who did not even know the alphabet quoted passages from the Gemara. Today it is difficult to say to what extent Singer’s Kraśnik stories are true, especially if their protagonists include devils and demons. However, they do not seem to be entirely fictitious.
Eugeniusz Pelka, born in 1927, recalls: I was born in Kraśnik, where I also went to school with Jews - I remember them as if it were yesterday. What stuck in my memory the most were the Jews washing dishes in the river after the Sabbath. They did it only on Monday not to offend the Christians. I remember vividly those heaps of pans, pots and plates. I also remember a case of a mixed marriage. He was Polish, she was Jewish. They had a civil ceremony. They lived in Kraśnik for a time, but then left as neither side accepted them. In Jagiellońska Street there lived a man named Kulesza, who married a Jewish woman. He was on friendly terms with the Jews, he traded with them. When they went to get married, they drove through the crowd that came to attend. But it came to no good as after she had converted, neither Poles nor Jews looked favourably on them. |
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