The Storks of Bociany, Chava Rosenfarb

Every year before the spring arrived, even before the snow had melted, both the gentile boys and the heder [Jewish] boys ran through the muddy roads to await the arrival of the storks. The gentile boys headed toward the White Mountain and the Jewish boys toward the Blue Mountain, where the windmill stood, and where Hindele now sat. From here, they could see all of Bociany, see the lake where the demons bathed and Kailele the Bride had drowned herself, and see the fields and the woods across the lake. They could also discern, at a great distance, what they believed to be the Mountains of Darkness, which stood on the border of this world and the next. There, at the mysterious Sabbath River, the Sambation, lived the dragons that guarded the land of the eternally happy little red Jews, who knew nothing of exile. It was to the marshes of that happy land, the boys were convinced, that the storks flew every winter, and it was from there that they returned.

These same little boys brought the news to Bociany. "The storks are coming!"

The adults received this information with pretended indifference, as if to say, "May more important tidings be brought to us." But secretly, they sighed with relief. The return of the storks was a good omen. And out of gratitude to the storks for their devotion, the shetl refused to mark the seasons by the calendar. Instead, the day on which the storks returned was considered the first day of summer, and the day they left, the first day of winter.

As far as the Jewish boys were concerned, most were convinced that one fine day the Messiah Ben David himself would arrive in the shetl along with the storks. He would ride his donkey through the Wide Poplar road, and the storks would soar above his head. Together they would pass first the gentile cemetery and afterwards the Jewish. The storks' clucking would help the Messiah waken the dead, so that this particular day would be not only the first day of summer, but also the Day of Resurrection and Deliverance.

All generations of Jewish boys had been preoccupied with the same problem: What would the Messiah do when he rode past the gentile cemetery? Would the gentile dead also profit from the resurrection, or would the Messiah leave them rotting in the Ground? And what would he do with the living goyim? Would he redeem them, toonot, of course, for their good deeds to the Jews, but perhaps because of their kindness to the storks? And since they could never make out the answers, the boys themselves would decide the issue, depending whether or not they were involved in a war with the gentile boys at the time.

Nesting storkThe favorite pastime for the people of Bociany was to observe with a feeling of kinship how the storks built their nests on the roofs, and to philosophize on the similarity between human family life and that of the birds. This subject was of particular interest to the women, both Jew and gentile, some of whom kept prepared a bundle of good straw and sticks in order to save the storks the trouble of going to far in their search for building materials. And when the "she" became pregnant and was about to lay her eggs, these housewives would send their children to the nearest swamp for frogs, tadpoles, snails, or rain worms, which they offered to the female in a gesture of solidarity. They did not believe that a male bird had any more understanding of a female in such a condition than did the human male. The women would carry on this special attention both when the "she" was laying the eggs and during the entire month when the pair were sitting on the eggs. That the male sat on the eggs along with the female was regarded as further proof of male laziness. It was no great trick to join in the act of life-giving, if the wife bore all the pains of labor. . . .

On the whole, thanks to the storks, harbingers of good fortune for humansprovided one behaved humanely to them in turnthe shetl of Bociany, except in matters of livelihood, was a fortunate place for both Jew and Gentile. Since the storks, like nature in general, took no notice of the racial differences among their hosts, they saw to it that the wombs of both the kosher Jewish matrons and those of their gentile neighbors were never empty. Moreover, for the most part, Jew and Gentile lived quite peacefully together.

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excerpted
Barnes and Noble linkFrom: Chava Rosenfarb, Bociany. Translated from the Yiddish by the author. © 2000 by Chava Rosenfarb (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press), pp. 8-13. Excerpted by permission of the publisher.

 

   
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