The Accidental Anarchist by Bryna Kranzler, Crosswalk Press, 2010.
By David Strom
SAN DIEGO–The only grandfather (Zaydah) I knew died when I was seven. My memories of him are very slim and dim. What I mainly know about my Zaydah is what my older siblings have said about him over the years. To them, he was a religiously learned man, someone who took a deep interest in their Jewish education and quizzed them weekly, after shul, about what they had learned at the Talmud Torah School. They knew him to be a kind and gentle person.
My grandmother (Babeh) lived a lot longer after Zaydah’s death and so we got to know her well. In fact, just a few months before my father died, we moved into her home. But because of my immaturity or lack of interest in Babeh’s life prior to moving in with her, I didn’t get to know parts of he life that I now wish I knew. (Nostalgia has become an important part of my life.)
Bryna Kranzler, whose book The Accidental Anarchist was featured on Tuesday at the San Diego Jewish Book Fair, is a very lucky person. She read and published her Zaydah’s diary. In this way, Kranzler got to know her Zaydah as a young man, learned how her Babeh, also named Bryna, met her husband to be, and the story of their young life together.
Jacob Marateck, Bryna Kranzler’s Zaydah, dropped out of the Jewish world of learning at the age of thirteen, like so many Jewish children today. In his dairy Jacob wrote, “The seemingly minor decision I made to end my education before the age of thirteen set me on a path which each subsequent choice flowed logically from the previous foolish one.”
Jacob longed for adventure. He left his shtetl (small town) and explored the greater world, in this case, Warsaw, Poland. Jacob found a job working with his brother at a bakery. He also found an important vocation that he loved-union organizer. Of course, those in power frowned upon union organizing, not unlike today. Not only did Jacob want to organize workers into unions, he wanted all the Poles to overthrow the Czar Nicholas II. As a warrior in the struggle between social classes in Poland and as an enemy of the privileges of the royalty, Jacob ran into trouble with the authorities in Poland and elsewhere. His troubles led to imprisonment and at three different times he was sentenced to death. The fact that Jacob survived in the deeply anti-Semitic world of Poland at the turn of the Twentieth Century was in itself, miraculous.
Shackled and on his way to prison to be shot for his bumbling and bungling revolutionary activities, he dropped a note at the train depot where he was to be loaded onto a train that would take him to his last location on earth, the prison where his execution was to take place. As Jacob dropped the hurriedly written note, a young woman at the station picked it up.
Instead of Jacob being shot, he was given another hearing. With a better lawyer on his side, he was sentenced to ten years of hard labor in a Siberian labor camp. On the train to Siberia, he made friends with a colorful Jewish thief, the “King of Thieves” from Warsaw. The thief told Jacob that he was going to escape from Siberia and that Jacob could come with him.
Once they escaped, Jacob’s “on the job” training during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) while in the Czarist army came in handy. Cold, hunger, thirst, wild animals, and the two-legged anti-Semites followed the escapees wherever they went. No one could be trusted. These outcasts had to trust their feelings or instincts. For Jacob it was his Jewish cultural background that he carried with him all of the time that he mainly relied upon. But trying to find someone Jewish or who was willing to identify himself/herself as Jewish in Siberia was nearly impossible except in small towns. There he looked for a synagogue where he felt some of the congregants would have some sympathy, food and possibly shelter for a fellow Jew. He even held out hopes of finding someone sympathetic to his revolutionary ideas.
Jacob accidentally came upon someone he helped survive during the calamitous Russo-Japanese War. Along with the “King of Thieves” he moved into the mansion of the soldier he had saved during the war. The man, a Jew, was economically successful, married to a beautiful Jewish woman, and childless. Jacob’s rich friend bought him clothes, gave him money, and most importantly, secured fake identification papers for Jacob and his companion. Jacob had to stay close to the mansion until he got his papers, which took several weeks. Jacob felt like Joseph in the Bible, trapped. His friend’s wife seemed love starved and was attracted to him, and he to her. Eventually this situation got resolved, with not all the parties involved ending up happy.
When Jacob and the “King” returned to Warsaw, they had some money and their false papers that got them through customs. They took a taxi to the “King of Thieves” home; the “King” exited the cab, walked up the stairs and knocked on the door. A middle-aged woman opened the door, looked out and fainted. (The “King” and Jacob did not bother to let anyone in Warsaw know they were alive or would arrive soon.)
Arriving unannounced at his brother’s house, Jacob was warmly greeted. Being of marriageable age, Jacob sought a wife. A “shatchan” (matchmaker) worked with him in trying to find a suitable wife. Not one of the many women he met matched his tastes.
Mordechai, Jacob’s brother, told him how he learned of his brother’s pending execution. A young woman brought the note that Jacob dropped at the train station, and he, Mordechai, acted upon it immediately. He got the lawyer that was able to get Jacob’s death sentence reduced to ten years in a Siberian labor camp. That young woman saved his life. And now, Jacob wanted to know who she was and where she lived. He wanted to thank her for saving his life. And he did.
Through the diaries of her grandfather Jacob, Bryna Kranzler learned a lot about him as a young man and about her grandmother as a young woman. She also learned a bit of twentieth century Eastern European Jewish history. Through the beauty and poignancy of her grandfather’s narrative, she also grew to appreciate the importance humor played in the survival of a single person faced with a most difficult world.
The Accidental Anarchist is a remarkable, humorously told and engaging first person account of a fascinating life and an important period in the history of the Jews in Europe. Jacob Marateck, a simple and amazing man, never lost his Jewish faith, never let tragedy keep him down, and believed in the goodness of people. The title of the book, The Accidental Anarchist, reveals the reality that Jacob never was an anarchist, but played a valuable role in the class struggles of his time in response to his life’s circumstances and the strong drive of his love for others and for freedom.
*
Strom is professor emeritus of education at San Diego State University