The Empty Stage

 

Flying eastwards out of central Europe on an Airbus A320, retracing in a few hours and at a height of 38,000 feet the months-long cross-country journey that—according to the most favoured but least supported version of Yiddish history—led the Jews’ ancestors into Poland and Lithuania from the Rhineland, the borderland between France and Germany, I realised that I had never looked really closely at Europe’s shape before. I had consumed my statutory free airline drink, eaten my plastic airline food, folded the tray back out of my stomach and declined, without regret, my chance to buy an expensive and un-needed designer-trinket duty-free. I was now lying back in my seat trying to relax but the relentless vibration and constant growl of the engines in my ears made it impossible to concentrate on the airport pulp thriller I had bought in hope, and would abandon in disappointment. Instead I was staring up at the map on the screen over my head that displayed, in a thin red line, the aircraft’s snail-trail across the sky.

Europe, I noted, isn’t a continent. It’s a peninsula projecting from the western end of Asia, looking as if a cosmic hand had decided to pinch off a piece of territory, aiming to place it elsewhere, and had then thought better of the plan and withdrawn, absent-mindedly leaving only a great thumbprint, the Black Sea, and the impression of a giant forefingertip, the Baltic. Between the two waters—the first a warm expansion of the Mediterranean on the latitude of Montreal, the second a cold extension of the Atlantic on the level of Hudson Bay—is nipped the isthmus, the waist, of Europe, the landmass’s narrowest point, 800 miles wide from north-west to south-east. Through this bottleneck, made even narrower by the southern curl of the Carpathian mountains, every movement of peoples and cultures between orient and occident had to squeeze: every horde of Dark-Age horseback nomad archers surging west, every host of medieval mailed and helmeted mounted knights clanking onward in the German eastward thrust, the Drang nach Osten, and every phalanx of twentieth-century Russian tanks, bronirovannii, rumbling towards the sunset and a rendezvous with proletarian victory.

This ever-disputed area, this crack between Europe and Asia, this stretch of seashore, forest, mountain and steppe half the size of all western Europe, was the heym, the Yiddish homeland, in which the Yiddish nation was raised—only to perish after ten fruitful centuries, their imprint vanishing, I was to find on my arrival, as completely as footmarks in last year’s snow.

With a preliminary crackle, the aircraft’s captain announced over the PA that we had just passed the Carpathian mountains and, below us on the left, we would shortly be able to see the Vistula river, and the hill topped by the former Polish royal citadel of Kraków. Something about the announcement, perhaps the implied connection between mountains, river and city, brought to mind the opening lines of a story by one of the pioneers of nineteenth century Yiddish literature. The Panic, or The Town of Hérres by Aizik Méyer Dik begins like this:

   It is written: It is impossible to depict a nation accurately without first accurately describing the country it lives in, and it is just as impossible to record a story about a Jewish community without first accurately presenting the town it lives in.[1]

The way the Yiddish story unfolded must have had much to do with the heym’s peculiar geographical location—occupying a religious (Catholic and Orthodox) and ethnic (German and Slav) no-man’s-land that is neither truly of Europe’s west nor of its east, a territory as far as possible from the centres of western or eastern power, the result of the Jewish search for an unclaimed seat in the historic life-and-death musical chairs contest of the European tribes.

 

Landscape and climate help shape a nation. Coastal peoples are not like steppe-dwellers, forest-folk are not like mountaineers. Those who relax in the warm airs of the south have little in common with those who shiver among northern snows. The poet Byron related Britain’s cloudy climate to “our chilly women”, claiming that “What men call gallantry, and gods adultery, is much more common where the climate’s sultry”[2]. By the same token, the scenery and set of the stage on which the thousand-year Yiddish drama was played out should tell us something about its plot-line. The geographical location of the Yiddish heym must have deeply influenced the kind of society which the Yiddish people built there.

A thick textbook^[3] tells me that the rocky basement of the east of Europe dates back to very ancient times, its landscape forged by a cataclysmic clash of continents, as the earth cooled from its initial molten state, and sections of solidified rocky crust, floating on a sea of simmering magma, bumped and jostled each other towards their present positions. Three hundred or so million years ago, in the era when the first amphibious creatures were crawling onto land and most of Europe and North America were still a single landmass with a great sea called the Tethys stretching southwards, the north east corner of what would one day be South America began a ten-million-year push, with inexorable, unstoppable force against the margins of the conjoined twins called Euro-America, buckling the surface into great east-west Hercynian mountain ranges.

Over subsequent aeons, the land would be eroded to near flatness, flooded by warm seas, raised again to leave great layers of dried-out ocean salt (which would one day be mined by Yiddish-speaking engineers at Halle in today’s Germany, Wieliczka and Bochnia near today’s Kraków), now covered in deep coal-forming swamp (as in Silesia, in today’s south-west Poland, where Yiddish-speaking prospectors like Solomon Isaac of Bytom would one day found the mines that would pioneer the region’s industrial revolution), now penetrated by great surges of volcanic magma that would throw up new peaks and infiltrate the rocks with deposits of potash, sulphur, barium, zinc and copper (where a Yiddish-speaking engineer from Prague called Gans or Gaunse would learn the smelting trade that would bring him as a consultant all the way to Elizabethan England), of silver (as at Joachimsthal—today’s Jáchymov—in Bohemia, from which Jewish mint-masters like Joseph of Kalisz would one day strike Poland’s earliest coins and which would bequeath a name to the US Dollar (from Joachimsthaler to Thaler to Dollar) and even of uranium (which, centuries later, political prisoners of all religions and none would extract with fatal hard labour for the Soviet Union’s nuclear stockpile).

Then, starting around the time, some forty million years ago, when our first ape ancestors began their long lope towards the human condition, another irresistible thrust, this time by Africa, drove Italy and Greece into Europe’s underbelly, ruckling up the surface yet again into fresh Alpine and Carpathian folds. But, like teeth worn to gum-level by old age and rough diet, the eroded but resistant roots of the earlier Hercynian uplift still extended deep below the surface, forcing the new peaks to pass them by, leaving mountain-ringed flat bottomed basins in Bohemia, Hungary, Romania and the Ukraine, which would, one day, divide the Yiddish family into separate cousinhoods. So slow was this movement—about as fast, says my textbook, as fingernails grow—that the final stages are still grumbling away. The Balkans remain the most active earthquake zone in Europe, suffering around ten highly destructive shocks per decade, like the disaster that ruined Skopje, capital of Yugoslav Macedonia, in 1963.

More recently, there came several ages of intense cold. Layers of ice, miles high, ground rocks to flour, rounded off sharp cliff edges, gouged out lakes, and deposited heaps of clay and smooth-worn boulders in swathes of moraines and drumlins before temporarily retreating again. Between the times of ice, drying winds desiccated the surface and blew it up in dust-storms across the flat plains, to deposit thick layers of a yellowish powdery soil called loess against the windward faces of the Carpathian mountain chain, from Dresden in Germany to Wrocław and Kraków in Poland, to L’viv and all the way to Chernivtsi[4] in the Ukraine,   as well as into the more sheltered basins of Bohemia and Hungary. Here, after many millennia, farmers would find the soil so fertile, rich, and easy to work that the grain they produced in great volume, as well as the cattle they raised on it, would one day feed half of Europe in a trade which would become a virtual Yiddish-speaking monopoly.   

Finally, cubic miles of meltwater from the ice’s last retreat would pour off the glaciers daily, sometimes ponding between the ice-edge and the mountains until breaking through, to gore out routes like the Moravian gap that now links the Polish Plain to the Danube Valley, and the Iron Gate Gorges of Romania down which drained the great inland sea which once occupied the mountain-ringed Hungarian plain. Other ice-waters formed torrents of Amazonian size, which scooped out great wide valleys, German Urstromthäler, Polish pradoliny, stretching in parallel diagonally across eastern Europe and Germany on their way the North Sea—ancient river beds whose later damp and marshy bottoms and ill-fitting streams would provide the routes along which trade, the flag, and the Middle High German language which would become the mother, or perhaps just the midwife, of Yiddish, would one day travel from west to east. Even today, towards the northern, Baltic, margin of eastern Europe, around cities like Vilnius (formerly Wilno or Vilna), the landscape is still dissected by streams, pitted by lakes, and swollen by hills of till, clay and sand dumped by the ice as it melted back north-eastward towards the Asian heartland 10,000 years ago, looking, from an aerial vantage, as if the glaciers had only just withdrawn.

Soon dense woods blanketed the temperate plains of Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and the northern Ukraine, a mix of broad-leaved and coniferous trees swaddling the lower flatlands, pine, spruce and juniper climbing the slopes of the higher hills. This would be the classic land of the Yiddish shtetl, the mostly-Jewish small town, where an impoverished peasantry laboured in a constant struggle against nature. As long as the forest stood, thick layers of leaf-mould, collecting under the green canopy, regularly nourished deep and healthy brown forest soils. Once the trees were felled, however, and the land cleared for crop-cultivation, the nutrients were soon broken down and washed away by the copious rain, leaving the earth thin and podzolized, or impoverished.

In the warmer south, with its more Mediterranean climate, where the weather is too dry to support full tree cover, grass clothes a wide area from Hungary to the Ukraine and beyond. Each season the grass dies and rots to humus. Each spring fresh blades are reborn. Thousands of such seasons have laid down thick, black, rich soil, the chernozem, its nutrients retained unleached by the sparser rainfall, yielding plentiful rewards to the farmer and stock-breeder without the need constantly to re-fertilise the ground. Here, as also along the slopes of the Carpathians and the mountain-ringed basins where layers of loess underlie the generous cropland earth, agricultural and pastoral settlements flourished. But these grasslands are also the final terminus of the main road from China, an extension of the great Steppe that runs all the way from the Altai mountains through Central Asia to the Ukraine, giving easy access to tribal groups of marauding horseback warriors who, down the centuries, would repeatedly devastate the smiling south country and keep it under-developed and under-populated until quite recent times.

 

On the plane, I was growing frustrated that the map on the video-screen above me was too small and diagrammatic to pinpoint our precise location, nor did it show the borders between the states, some entirely new, others reborn from history, that have emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet Union. So I pulled out the complimentary magazine from the pocket in the seat in front of me and opened it at the page showing the airline’s flight-lanes. The pattern of eastern Europe today seems quite simple, the formerly Communist countries arranged in a rough diamond, or a square standing up on one corner.

In the leftmost angle lies the Czech Republic, more westerly than one might think—my birthplace Vienna is actually farther from London than is Prague. In the north the states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania line the Baltic Sea coast. Below them—separated by a triangular, small and out-of-place detached Russian enclave: Kaliningrad or Koenigsberg—Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania link the Baltic to the Black Sea in a long sweeping arc. All these now consider themselves of the West and aspire to membership of the European Union. Between our new western bedfellows and the vast frowning expanse of Russia—outside the Yiddish area proper, since Jews were discouraged from entering the sacred lands of the Third Rome until the 19th century—clasped between the arms of Lithuania in the north and Romania in the south, nestle Belarus, Moldova and the Ukraine, the Slavic giant that projects deep into Russian territory to form the rightmost corner of the eastern European diamond.

These last three remain members of the Commonwealth of Independent States, and still largely stick loyally to old Communist ways. Indeed, Belarus may be the first state in post-cold-war history to be regretting its independence, which many, perhaps most, of its people seem to want to reverse. Travelling a little later around that sad land, I and my Russian interpreter would regularly be treated to warm speeches, by local officials indistinguishable from traditional Soviet apparatchiks, about the close friendship between the people of Belarus and their “brethren to the east”. “Our President and yours,” one school director told my interpreter, referring to Alexander Putin, “are true brothers.”

“That’s all we need,” was her tart reaction as we later descended the cracked concrete steps outside the school’s front door. “Just when we’re getting ourselves together and becoming a modern nation, to be joined by ten million semi-literate peasants who still vote Communist. No thank you!”

The simple political geography of eastern Europe is a modern creation, the result of the post-war agreement between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, and the eventual collapse of the Communist Bloc. Older atlases show a far more mysterious part of the world, labelled with strange names and oddly called places that are no longer found in today’s guidebooks: Bessarabia, the Bukovina, Livonia, Podolia, Polesia, Volhynia, sub-Carpathian Ruthenia. Here were the countless shtetlach (plural of shtetl, Russian: mestechkoi) with eye-dazzling names like Bukaczowce or Frysztak or Strzyzow, and an even greater number of villages where, once upon a time, one or two Jewish families lived, mostly harmoniously, among gentiles.

I look down out of the oval aircraft window. The North European Plain stretches from western horizon to eastern horizon—a surprising distance of nearly five hundred miles at this altitude^[5]. We are overflying the north, where much of the terrain is still deep, damp, dark green forest, here briefly rounded by low hills, there randomly patched by collages of multicoloured fields, interspersed with tiny glinting lakes, sandy defiles sheathing rivers looking like threads of mercury. The demarcation lines, where cultivated lands meet the forest edge, are still mostly as sharp and square-cut as if trimmed by a knife, sure sign of how recently the croplands have been claimed from the trees.

Here and there a human settlement gives focus to the fields. I had often wondered about the paradox in Sholom Aleichem’s description of his ancestral shtetl in his autobiographical novel The Great Fair[6]. He describes his village of Voronko as “a tiny, humble village,” yet at the same time “if your legs are strong enough you can walk its length and breadth in half an hour.” How can a tiny, humble village take half an hour to walk round? Now I understand the reason as I look down from above, the landscape made into a two-dimensional diagram by our height. These łlańncuchówka, forest chain villages, or ulicówka, street villages, are strung out long and narrow on either side of what were once woodland paths, before the tree-line was pushed back to make way for pasture and planting. Some layouts are quite straight, others wind their way around obstructions of rock and water. The typical formation of human settlements in these parts suggests people who shrank from the dark and dangerous forest depths, certainly populated by dangerous wild beasts and perhaps also by terrifying ogres and evil spirits. Elsewhere, along the fertile mountain fringes and the grassy plains, where people colonised more welcoming open countryside, villages have a circular, nucleated shape, Polish okolnica,   that may develop and spread but still remain roughly round.

An occasional town comes into view. Across the spread of eastern Europe some of these are ancient seats of power, visibly grown from the seed of a defensible hilltop or riverbank, places of refuge, over which a fort, or a palace together with its church, still looks out protectively, as at Budapest, Kraków and Prague; others are merchant towns, expanded in higgledy-piggledy order around an open market place with a group of municipal buildings—town hall, perhaps, or mayor’s residence—built conveniently in the centre, as at Warsaw, Wrocław, Lublin or Kalisz; yet others look like garrison towns, founded by fiat, designed on a rigid military grid, positioned like chess-pieces to hold the region for the crown or local lord.

Between the clustering fields, the scattered villages and the rare towns, the landscape appears untouched by human interference—though in reality the trees have long been managed by the people who live among them. Only one patch of truly primeval woodland remains: the forest called Białowieza in Poland or Belavezhskaya in Belarus, straddling the border between the two, and home to elk, deer, boar and the last remaining herd of wisent or European bison. To my innocent eye looking down on it from the plane, the treescape still looks so wild that for the first time I understand how, in parts of Poland, Lithuania and what the Germans called Weissruthenien or White Ruthenia (and is now western Belarus) it was possible for tens of thousands of Jews to escape the Nazi terror by fleeing into the forest.

Sitting beside me in the plane is a Jewish-American businessman on a genealogical mission to rediscover his ancestral village near Kovno, now Kaunas. As we approach Lithuanian airspace, he becomes ever more agitated, torn between family nostalgia and horror at what became of his community during Nazi times. “Are we over Lithuania yet?” he keeps asking, standing up and trying to peer out of the aircraft over my shoulder, as if, beneath the seven empty air miles under our seats, there might be a sign, a mark of some kind, an indication of the point at which we were to enter the vanished realm of Lite, Yiddish Lithuania. But of course there isn’t. It is said that the only human artefact visible from space is the Great Wall of China, and even the Iron Curtain, with its bristling barbed wire, its tank traps and its watchtowers, which in his famous Fulton speech Churchill said had descended on the Continent “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic”, roughly the western boundary of the Yiddish heym, could not be—while it still existed—distinguished from the air.

There are, though, lines on the globe which, while invisible, seem to mark fundamental divisions that persists throughout history. The front line that temporarily divided the Romans during the civil war that followed Julius Caesar’s assassination in 44 BCE reappeared as the border between the Latin and Greek halves of the later Roman Empire in the 360s, between the domains of Boris, Khan of the Bulgars, and Louis the German, King of the East Franks, in the ninth century, between Germanised and Slavicised Yiddish-speakers from the middle ages onwards, and appearing in perhaps its final manifestation as the twentieth century border between the Soviet bloc and the democratic West. (Maybe it is now to be permanently shifted eastward with the accession of Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia to the European Union.)

Such lines are thought to make you a different person when you cross them, and therefore need to be marked by some form of ceremony or rite of passage. In the navy, sailors who crossed the Equator for the first time used to be—and perhaps still are—summoned to appear before the court of King Neptune and his mermaid entourage, then to be first lathered with a mop, next shaved with a giant wooden razor and finally tumbled ignominiously into the water, a ceremony called Crossing the Line. The boundaries of the Yiddish world were, however, of a different kind from the equator and the tropics, denoted by arbitrary human chance rather than astronomical necessity.

Looking down on the undifferentiated landscape, I remembered that long after the Yiddish-speakers had vanished, these notional borders were still being recognised by ceremony—albeit inspired by modern technology and twentieth century politics rather than by the special rôle that Jewish eastern Europe once played in history.

I recalled that in the 1960s, while the USSR still brooded powerfully over Eurasia, any journey back from Khrushchev’s kingdom into the West had been marked by formalities both practical and sinister. Once, while travelling from Moscow to London by train, I was exposed to the traditional Soviet rites on leaving the jealous embrace of the Communist East. The train stopped far from any station, and the conductor, a large and terrifying woman, a model, perhaps, for James Bond’s Rosa Klebb, proceeded along the corridor, unexpectedly ordering us all off. As we stood out in the open in our shirtsleeves, buffeted by an icy wind, a mobile crane chugged up alongside and, section by section, lifted the train’s carriages high into the air, while one set of wheels were trundled away and replaced by new bogies of different dimensions. A friend joked that the Russian communists were trying to stop prevent the wheels of their trains from being sullied by foreign, capitalist, western soil, adding that the Soviets probably had rules like those governing the Cohanim, the Jewish priestly caste, who must avoid being defiled by contact with the dead. In fact the mundane reason was that Russian railway-track gauge was, like Soviet concern for human rights, of a different standard from that in the West.

Nearly a day later, on entering West Berlin, having travelled right across what had once been the Yiddish heym, everyone had to leave the carriages again and assemble like schoolchildren on the platform, while rows of border guards marched in to bracket the train from either side, machine guns at the ready. Then two more uniformed functionaries strode up, each armed with a long pole and crawled on hands and knees past the wheels, poking every space and crevice, to make sure that nobody was clinging on underneath and trying to flee the workers’ paradise undetected.

How odd it felt to be faced with two ritualised line-crossings on passing from Communism to Capitalism, rather than just one, like suffering double vision after concussion. As if the ceremonials marking the Russian and West German borders were an explicit recognition of eastern Europe’s special place in history; as if for the ten long hours it took our train to cover the 450 miles between Brest and Berlin, we had passed through a different dimension, on a different plane, neither east not west, out of joint with the real world. It came as no real surprise to discover, years later, that this region, in which the Yiddish nation was nurtured and finally destroyed, had been recognised, some eighty years previously, as special, particular, and crucial to world power-politics.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, British geographer and imperial diplomat Halford John Mackinder, later Sir Halford, who had earlier drawn attention to himself by being the first to climb Mount Kenya—”a geographer,” he claimed, “must also be an explorer and adventurer”—ruminated on the link between geography and politics. His book Democratic Ideals and Reality, appearing just after the end of the First World War, indeed while the Paris Peace Conference was still in session, contained a passage that was to bring him fame beyond the domain of academic geography:

   A victorious Roman general, when he entered the city, amid all the head-turning splendour of a Triumph, had behind him on the chariot a slave who whispered into his ear that he was mortal. When our statesmen are in conversation with the defeated enemy, some airy cherub should whisper to them from time to time this saying:

 “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the World.”

In the course of history, many tribes, peoples and nations have tried, and failed, and tried again, to rule East Europe. Their story is very much part of Yiddish history too.

 

Enter the Barbarians

I am off the plane now, having left my American seat-mate at the airport, arguing with a taxi-driver over what he insisted was an unrealistic fare for the hundred-mile round trip to his familial village. I myself am travelling south from Lithuania into Belarus, formerly White Russia, in cheaper but more interesting fashion: on an antique Soviet-built country bus, along the modern motorway that cuts through the forested flatland. I look at the other passengers: working men with round, sun-dried, open peasant faces; young mothers bearing amazingly quiet and well-behaved children on their laps; old wives encumbered with string-bags and packages, a few wearing the headscarves that were once—long before Islam brought its own version of the custom to the West—the universal uniform of the married woman over most of Europe. These are the people among whom the Yiddish folk once lived. They warrant closer study.

I am not seeking out signs of anti-Semitism or holocaust guilt. None of my fellow travellers are old enough to have been of responsible age when the Nazi crimes were committed. Instead I am looking to see what kind of people they are and guess what sort of life they lead, since Yiddish lives and theirs must have once been inextricably bound together, if not by social ties, then at least by bonds of business and the practical needs of everyday life.

At one of the infrequent stops, in a small forest town, in front of a new brick-built ticket office, a wooden shack serving food and a crumbling ruin that turns out to be a public lavatory, all except the sole disabled passenger step off the coach to stretch their legs. I stand in line at the refreshment kiosk. The air is spicy with the scent of pines. When my turn comes I scan with dismay the shelves of blemished fruit and cheap, gaudy packages of unidentifiable products. Then my eyes light with relief on a familiar sight. I buy a small loaf of bread for a few pence. It is plaited and dusted with poppy seed. I break off and taste a piece. If I wanted to buy a loaf like this in London to eat on a Friday night, I would ask for a (Jewish) Chollah, my parents in Vienna would have requested a Barches. Here it is simply Plaited Bread, as common and ordinary and local as wooden houses and winter galoshes. The discovery makes me feel closer to my fellow-passengers as we reboard the bus. People who share the same style of bread surely have much else in common.

Did the Jews borrow the recipe for Chollah from their gentile neighbours, the ancestors of my fellow passengers? Or did the non-Jews acquire a taste for Jewish bread and keep on baking loaves like this even after the Jewish bakers disappeared? Impossible to say. And why only imagine a local origin? So many peoples have walked and ridden onto the eastern European stage over the centuries, some in the rôle of leading players, others as extras and walk-ons, that which nation brought which props to the production, which ingredients to the feast, is an almost impossible question to answer. All we can be sure of is that no kind of bread at all was baked when the human drama began in this region towards the end of the last ice age, long before the invention of agriculture and the start of European history.

 

The ice retreats, the curtain rises and first onto the boards tumble the mammoth hunters, dressed in skins and furs, armed with stones, clubs and spear-throwers, chasing their hairy prey along the glaciers’ edges. One day, millennia later, a Ukrainian farmer digging a new cellar under his house will find a 15,000 year old collection of mammoth bones, the support structure of one of the oldest known living-huts ever discovered. In Kostienki, not very far away, archaeologists will unearth a wooden long-house, more than 100 feet by 50, equipped with eleven cooking hearths, like a prehistoric kibbutz kitchen, or one of the collective cooking facilities common in the divided-up formerly bourgeois apartments of Soviet era Russian cities. The oldest map in the world will be discovered in the Ukraine, engraved on a mammoth tusk, as will an early work of art: a mammoth-skull painted with a symbolic red design. Elsewhere in the region, stone weapons and oven-baked- clay animal and human figurines will be found, as well as musical instruments, not only flutes made of bird legs and antelope toes, but even a set of tuned percussion, fashioned from mammoth bones, an osteophone.

Distant though those stone-age ancestors may seem to us they nevertheless began a continuous tradition of musical instrument construction that would somehow be passed down the ages from people to people, community to community, musician to musician. The last great virtuoso of the strohfidel (also known in German as Hölzernes Gelächter, ‘wooden laughter’), master of an instrument that the mammoth-hunters would still have recognised as related to their osteophone, died in the early nineteenth century, having been lauded by Mendelssohn as a true musical genius. He was, coincidentally, the Yiddish musician Mikhoel–Yoysef Guzikov.

We will never know to what race of people the hunters belonged nor what kind of language they spoke, nor anything of their fears and fantasies. But their relationship with the great Aurignacian cave artists of southern France and Northern Spain, as well as the care and ceremony with which they buried their dead, tells us that they too had their own spiritual and religious notions.

The end of the ice spelled the end of the mammoth herds and the end of the hunters. They leave our stage, slowly retreating northeastward behind their prey, to vanish from archaeological view somewhere in the Siberian waste. Perhaps their descendents still hunt the taiga, the frozen scrublands. Perhaps, as DNA studies suggest, some of their blood still runs in our veins today.

The annual temperature slowly rises and—in an interlude largely unaccompanied by the sound of human effort, shouts and laughter—unpeopled forest silently spreads across the north European plain, bringing with it a new fauna of bears, boars and wolves. Then, far off to the south-east, a revolutionary innovation explodes: people learn to grow crops and to domesticate animals; now humans no longer must depend on wild nature or follow the herds. Gradually, perhaps no more than a few miles in each generation, farmers and stockmen colonise the landscape: first the riverbanks, the tree-bare hilltops, the open land, spots where the earth is easier to work with primitive tools. Later they attack the margins of the forest and drive back the trees with stone axes, opening up the woods for fresh fields and pastures new. Bands of pioneers trek across the ice-made passes over the mountains; family groups spread along the river valleys, put down roots by the bands of rich loess and black earth soil, settle beside the seashore and on the edges of the streams which purl through the woodlands.

The course of colonisation is long, slow and unfathomable. By the time recorded European history begins, some thousands of years later, in the classical era of Greece and Rome, almost every landscape supports its own particular people, speaking a different language, wearing a different costume, worshipping different gods, growing different crops—in sum, developing different ways of life.

 

The solid, oppressive dark walls of pine, fir and silver birch crowding in on the road from either side suddenly open onto a scene of farms, fields and meadows. A little town of mostly single-storey wooden houses appears, only village-sized by western European standards, but dominated by two large churches painted yellow and white, immediately identifiable by their architecture: one Catholic the other Orthodox. I won’t give it a name—we could be riding into any one of the many tens of thousands of small market settlements scattered all over Poland, Belarus and the Ukraine. In the centre, to which our bus delivers us with a squeal of brakes and a cloud of choking diesel fumes, stand a few modern buildings of 1970s design, faced in a horrid grey-white glazed brickwork more suited to a public convenience than to the general store, the cinema, the administrative centre.

It is easy to see how this place, like so many others, grew along a stretch of forest path, where the modern road still encounters a little river and glances off again at the opposite angle, like a ray of light reflected from a mirror. I and my Russian companion take the narrow lane down to the riverbank, between the shop and the bus station, past wooden houses and, overgrown with pines and raucous with the sound of crows, a large untended Jewish cemetery—for we are in the heart of the vanished Yiddish heym; Elazar Rokeach (1665–1741), Raphael Cohen (1722–1803), David Dov Meisels (1814–1876) and Abraham Kalmanowitz (1891–1964) were once rabbis here. A metal bridge of unrecognisable age has been overthrown—whether by natural or human violence is hard to say—and lies rusting, broken and twisted in the water. Next to it a local craftsman has erected a simple timber replacement, posts driven into the river bed supporting narrow planks, a rickety handrail on one side attached by wooden pegs—a design which could have been realised at any time in the last few thousand years.

On the other side of the water we climb a grassy tumulus, a small hillock some twenty-five feet high rising from the centre of a wide weedy depression that shows clear signs of flooding during wetter seasons of the year, and so—unlike the meticulously tended gardens all around—is not used for raising produce. The flattened mound-top, no more than fifty yards wide, is uneven and much pitted as if burrowed by animals, but the many depressions and potholes are actually the remains of archaeologists’ trenches, out of which have been brought up rusted knives, spade blades, sickles, and other tools and parts of tools typical of an iron-age settlement. They are mementoes of the band who began the history of this village, living in a small group of simple huts and probably sheltering behind a wooden palisade, on top of this little hill at a time deep in the past, when water-levels were higher and the hillock was a dry island in a wide swamp.

Were these the remains of the first Slav settlers? The teacher who showed us the relics in the little village school museum certainly thought so. “The Slavs originated in the Pripyat Marshes and expanded from there, north, south, east and west, at the beginning of the Middle Ages,” she assured us. But scholarship has moved on since she learned her history, at least among western academics. Geographers now find it most unlikely that any nation would have sprung from the Pripyat, Europe’s largest swamp, more than 100,000 square miles of it. Most experts are now persuaded by Professor Colin Renfrew’s argument[7] that that the Neolithic revolution which brought agriculture to Europe from the south east, brought with it an undifferentiated people, speaking the original parent tongue of all the so-called Indo-European languages, who slowly settled the continent, only later growing apart and distinct, without much movement or invasion, in time separating into the nationalities that classical geographers found resident, each upon its own lands.

To the south, Dacians and Thracians tilled the soil, a group that the Greek historian Herodotus (born 484 BCE) described as the biggest nation of all mankind, except for the Indians. “They have,” he wrote, “many names, each in his own territory, but they all use much the same customs in everything.”

To the west, in Central Europe, farmed those whom Greeks called Kelts, described by the Greek geographer Strabo (born 64 BCE) as “high-spirited and quick to do battle, but otherwise straight-forward and not of bad character”—tribes such as the Boii who gave their name to Bohemia, or the Carni remembered in the Austrian province of Carinthia.

North and centre were colonised by Slavs and Baltic peoples, mysterious to classical authors like the Roman historian Tacitus (born 56 AC), who admired some for their industry, “in producing of grain and the other fruits of the earth, they labour with more assiduity and patience than is suitable to the usual laziness of Germans,” but libelled others as “continually traversing and infesting with robberies all the forests and mountains lying between the Peucinians and the Fennians”. These last, surely the Finns, apparently lived “in beastly poverty, destitute of arms, of horses, and of homes; their food, the common herbs; their apparel, skins; their bed, the earth; their only hope in their arrows, which for want of iron they point with bones.”

To the north-west resided the Germanic peoples, for whom life, so wrote Julius Caesar (born c. 100 BCE), was based on “hunting and on the pursuits of the military arts; from childhood they devote themselves to fatigue and hardships.” They would deal the Romans their most humiliating defeat, when, nine years after the birth of the Christian Messiah, three legions under Quintilius Varus were ambushed and hacked to pieces in the Teutoburger Forest by a force led by Arminius (Hermann), Chief of the Cherusci tribe, a man who, according to the Roman military writer Velleius Paterculus (born 19 BCE), was “brave in action, quick in apprehension, and of an agility of mind far beyond the state of barbarism.” Several other Germanic tribes, Vandals, Gepids, Lombards and Rugians, unable to break through into Roman-occupied soil, were already beginning their millennial eastward march, enclosing new colonies for themselves in the underpopulated lands between their original north European home and the Baltic.

The south-west and the lands below the Danube were controlled by the Romans, who left their language in Romania and defended their borders with great fortresses like Aquincum, which had first been a settlement of the Celtic Eravisci clan and would one day become Budapest—and introduced the first Roman Jewish communities into Central Europe, witness a tombstone in Hebrew script from third century Hungary.

Meanwhile the east, all the way to Central Asia and beyond, was controlled by the Iranian-speaking peoples of the steppes, the Scythian and later the Sarmatian nations—mounted and armoured nomads of the Eurasian grasslands, whose influence must have been felt particularly strongly here, almost next door to their Asian pastures. The horse-warriors commanded the south-eastern approaches to what would become the Yiddish homeland, the steppes of the Ukraine and the south of what is Belarus today, and made many lightning raids and forays into the settled west, sometimes reaching as far as northern Germany and Poland, where they left richly-furnished tombs, the delight of archaeologists today. The Slavic peoples were particularly affected by these unpredictable Iranian neighbours who, at the very least, imposed their own clan names (Serbs, Croats) on the South Slavs, bequeathed an aristocracy (the Szlachta) to Poland, and contributed an Iranian religious vocabulary (including the very words for God, Bog, and Heaven, Rai) to all the Slavic languages.

This stable ethnic pattern would not remain for ever undisturbed. Some two thousand years ago, there began a restless movement of tribes and nations, who would campaign across Europe, settling and then uprooting themselves again, capturing and losing kingdoms and empires, principalities, duchies and counties, for most of the centuries that separate us from those ancient times. In accordance with Halford Mackinder’s maxim, many powers would try to dominate the passage between east and west, and this village, right in the heart of the inter-continental traffic-lanes, grew up in what must be one of the most fought-over territories on earth. Whoever first colonised this riverbank hillock, they would certainly have had to serve under many masters and mix their blood with many races in the course of their history.

 

Looking down from my vantage point towards the villagers crossing the grass near the foot of the mound: young women in bright cotton dresses with small children in tow, old men in shabby worn suits, young workers in jeans and broken trainers, loud teenagers racing each other around the bottom of the hill on rusty bicycles, I tried to detect in their faces some sign of the diverse genetic inheritance I knew must have been passed on from so many different parts of Eurasia. I persuaded myself that from among the passers-by I could pick out angular Slav faces, broad German faces, rounder Mediterranean faces, some with a darker Iranian look, others with high Turkish cheekbones, yet others whose slanted eyes hinted at Mongolian ancestry, not to mention those who looked plain Jewish.

Of course I was kidding myself. Distinguishing between the ethnic strains that contributed to those villagers’ appearance is no more achievable than defining some notional Jewish appearance. Centuries of intermarriage, of genetic mixing, matching and miscegenating, have made it quite impossible to separate out the different original components that may have contributed to the eastern European physiognomy, the legacy of all the many tribes and peoples that spread their genes across what are now Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Belarus, and the Ukraine and, from time to time, divided the lands between them.

The first new nation to upset the ethnic order came from the North. Early in the first millennium, a little flotilla of three Scandinavian ships, forerunners of the Vikings, landed on the Baltic coast near the mouth of the Neman river, somewhere in the region of the city the Germans called Koenigsberg, the Russians Kaliningrad and the Poles Królewiec, in the detached patch of Russia crammed uncomfortably into the space between the Polish and Lithuanian coastlines. The sailors and fighters who clambered out onto the shingle beach and began unloading their supplies, numbered perhaps three hundred all told. They called themselves Goths. When all was ready, they set off under the leadership of a chief by the name of Berig, “for the village of the Ulmerugi, who were living by the shores of the Ocean, where they pitched camp, joined battle with the villagers and drove them from their homes.” So says proud Jordanes, the sixth century Goth historian. Having established themselves in their new base, they then proceeded to carve themselves a great empire, starting with a victory over their neighbours, the Germanic Vandals, who were standing in their way, and moving ever further southeast until “in search of suitable homes and pleasant places they came to the land of Scythia … Here they were delighted with the great richness of the country.”

By the time of King Ermanaric in the fourth century, the Goths had come to control a huge territory from Gdansk (Godansk, End of the Goths) in today’s Poland, to the Black Sea coast above and beyond the Danube, and up to the bend in the Volga river where Volgograd now stands, already a strategically vital river-crossing whence porters carried goods over thirty miles of swamp between the Volga and Don rivers, thus linking the Black to the Caspian Sea, the Mediterranean world to the heart of Asia. Ermanaric’s kingdom included most of what would one day become the Yiddish homeland: Posen (Poznán), Łódz, Warsaw, Lublin, Lemberg (L’vóv), Zhitomir, Vinnitsya, Kiev.

The political and economic system the Goths imposed was a rehearsal for the feudalism of later times: an armed and armoured mounted aristocracy supported by the sweated labour of the peasantry. The arrangement looks to the twenty-first century eye little more than an organised protection racket. The life of a subsistence farmer under Goth hegemony would seem to a modern westerner a bitter struggle to survive in a world ruled by rival mafia gangs and riven by incessant turf wars—with the added danger of plague, crop failure and starvation, and of being kidnapped and sold in a distant slave-market. But at least the conquerors’ way of life was not totally unfamiliar. In taking over the steppelands from the Iranian tribes, the Goths had been forced to adopt the military techniques of their nomadic enemies, in the process adapting to much of the Sarmatians’ ways of life, their crafts and arts, which they later passed on to the rest of Europe as the so-called Gothic style. From the Slav peasantry’s point of view, the new feudal system may not have been welcome, but at least it was understood.

However, the centuries of calm came to an end when, in the year 370 or soon after, the Goths were faced with a new challenge, and one that they were quite unable to meet. In fact so futile was all resistance that King Ermanaric is reported to have killed himself in despair. It was the arrival of the first of a thousand-year series of devastating whirlwinds out of the far east: the coming of the Huns.

Sitting on the edge of the grassy ridge that rings the top of the village mound, looking down on the meadow and the stream with its broken bridge, it is not hard to imagine the first arrival of the Huns. By the time of their appearance on the scene, this settlement would have spread well beyond the hillock. The waters would have by then fallen in level and become mainly confined to the river below, though the marshy valley floor would have kept the immediate area as free of houses and cultivation as it remains to this day. At times of danger, the fourth century inhabitants would still probably have retreated to the safety of their stockaded hilltop.

They would have had warning that the Huns were on their way. Travellers, traders and visitors from other villages would have already brought the news of raids and conquests in the neighbourhood. But that would hardly mitigate the shock. The Huns finally arrived in this little village one day in the year 372 or 373, storming into the clearing around the hillock in their terrifying leather armour, helmets and masks, roaring aggression, brandishing swords and bows, their horses snorting, stamping, rearing, and jingling the weird iron magic charms and symbolic decorations festooning saddles, reins and bridles, the leader calling out orders to his men in their—to the Slav farmers cowering behind their wooden palisade—unintelligible and brutal sounding language; and commanding the village chief, in unmistakeable dumb-show, to come down from the hillock-top to pay homage, to bring food, and to turn over a tribute of whatever wealth the poor farmers might have amassed. I imagine them, like the bandits in Kurosawa’s film Seven Samurai, stripping the settlement bare and then galloping off again to seek out their next peasant prey.

They would be back. No selfless samurai would turn up to protect the villagers. And after the Huns there would be many others. The Slav farmers could not have foreseen how many more ruthless raiders would invade their clearing during the following thousand years. Nor that the regular arrivals would not just impose a reign of terror, pillage, murder, rape and slavery on this now peaceful scene, but would eventually change the Slav world out of all recognition. For many of the intruders would never leave. They would put down permanent roots, introduce new bloodlines, new cultures, new languages and new connections to lands east and west.

And among these new arrivals would be Jews. Not, of course, trekking directly from their unimaginably far-off Holy Land, but swept through these wild bypaths and crooked ways of the continent by an irresistible storm of nations that was now gathering around to strike down the distant Italic superpower of the age. The Slav peasants had probably never heard of the Romans. The Jews would one day people this countryside owed them their existence. The Yiddish people would always be, in a sense, the Jews of Rome.