The Banker of Bread

    Jerusalem 2002
   
    Moshe Cohen lived with his married granddaughter Miriam in a small old house facing the Mount of Olives. The house had an upstairs balcony where he liked to sit and eat his breakfast in fine weather. It was always the same breakfast: yoghurt, fruit, muesli, a boiled egg, and two thin, crispy sheets of the unleavened bread known as Matzos. He never buttered the Matzos, or spread them with jam or marmalade, but swallowed them down completely dry, chewing resolutely away with the expression of someone forced to take a slightly unpalatable medicine. His wife Sarah, may she rest in peace, would sometimes ask why he ate them when he obviously didn’t like them, but he simply shrugged and told her the same thing he told everybody: that it was nothing, just an old man’s foolishness. But there was clearly more to it than that. You see, Moshe Cohen, a baker since the age of thirteen, had refused to eat any other kind of bread for more than fifty years. 
                                                                         

  Passover Eve, Berlin, 1939.

  Moshe Cohen was hungry, and what he wanted to eat more than anything else was bread. That was as it should be, for Moshe was a baker. His father and grandfather had been bakers, too. He had grown up surrounded by more bread then the average man sees in a lifetime. He could scarcely remember all the different types he had baked in his day:  black bread, white bread, pumpernickel, yellow, flour-dusted baguettes, rye with sunflower seeds, rye with pumpkin seeds…the list was endless. His own, all-time  favourite was Zwiebelbrot--rye with toasted onions.

    But Passover was no time for a Jew, not even a Jewish baker, to be dreaming of Zwiebelbrot. As all the world knows bread of any kind except the unleavened bread called Matzos is forbidden to Jews throughout the entire holiday week, and that was set to begin any minute. Instead, Moshe tried to concentrate on the meaning of Passover, how it marked the great journey out of Egypt made by Moses and the Jewish people in search of the Promised Land. He reminded himself that they, too, had been hungry, yet they had no Zwiebelbrot, no Pumpernickel, no crispy flour-dusted baguettes, not even a single, solitary beigel. All they had was Matzos, Matzos and bitter herbs. 
   
    He would gladly have bought Matzos if he could. They weren’t very filling, but they
would have done at a pinch. Unfortunately, Matzos were a little difficult to find in Berlin
in those days. His own small bakery had sold them all year round, but the bakery had gone up in flames during the great pogrom of Kristallnacht, the infamous Night of Broken Glass. There wasn’t much demand for Matzos after that.

    Moshe tried not to dwell too much on what else had been broken on Kristallnacht, for this was the time to think of survival; mourning would come later. At least he had no one else to worry about. Sarah and the baby were already safe in Palestine. He himself had stayed behind in the hope that things might improve enough for him to sell the bakery before he followed them. Unfortunately, it didn’t take him long to realize nobody was going to buy, not when the state was confiscating the property of Jewish émigrés, and then selling it at a knock-down price. He found a certain satisfaction in the idea that when those Nazi thugs burned his bakery, they were actually burning what would soon have become their own property. 

    Without the money he had hoped to raise from the bakery Moshe found himself almost penniless. Emigration was out of the question, as anything he might have used to buy his way out was lost in the looting that followed the fire. There was only one thing left to do: he ripped the yellow star from his pocket and took to the streets. From then on he survived by begging, hiding in the cellar of an abandoned house by day, and emerging to ply his new trade when night fell.
   
    Necessity brought out an unexpected talent for acting. He had none of the facial characteristics so beloved of the cartoonists and, with his wild hair and unshaven face, he soon became the very picture of a homeless drunk. He also developed a most convincing half-stagger, and the bottle of cheap Schnapps protruding from the pocket of his torn coat added an artful touch. Occasionally, when he was feeling a little manic, he would offer a swig from the bottle to well-dressed passersby, and then laugh as they recoiled. He quickly learned that, if he persisted, they would give him money to make him go away.

  Moshe’s golden rule was never to leave his hide-out during the day. This Passover Eve was no exception. He did, however, make one concession to the holiday: he fasted. There was no religious reason for this; it was simply something he had always done in order to enjoy the celebratory feast all the more. It made no difference to him that tonight there would be no feast. He fasted because it reminded him of who he once was.

  He left the abandoned house a little early that night, with the vague idea of taking a stroll around his old neighbourhood. He was less than half-way there when he decided this would be a bad idea, and that he ought to look for something to eat instead.

    The first restaurant he saw was packed with diners, which was a good sign, because it meant there would be plenty of leftovers. It didn’t take him long to locate the bins behind the restaurant. He had just begun pawing through them when the back door opened, and several kitchen workers stepped outside for a smoke. When they saw Moshe they rained blows down upon his head, and threw him out of the yard. 

    Nursing his bruises he wandered off, muttering angrily to himself. He hadn’t gone very far when he became aware of a tantalizing and familiar smell: the smell of hot, fresh bread. His hunger by then was so great that only the thought of what his late father would have said about his son wolfing down unleavened bread on Passover stopped him buying some on the spot. With a great effort he turned his head to one side, and kept on walking.

    On the corner of the street he came across a second bakery. Against his will he stopped and gazed, enthralled by the richness and variety of the mouth-watering display. And, as he gazed, his resolve dwindled to nothing. After all, he reasoned, why shouldn't he have just a taste? What harm would it do? A time would come when he'd eat Matzos until he burst, just not tonight. So when? when? said his father's voice in his mind. Then Moshe remembered an ancient phrase from the Passover Seder: Next year in Jerusalem, he said to himself; that's when.

    Scruples forgotten, he checked his purse and found just enough in it for one loaf of Zwiebelbrot. The baker glared at him, but still didn’t refuse his money. Moshe couldn’t care less; he just grabbed the bread and hurried out of the bakery. Outside on the pavement he broke the loaf in two, stuffing one half inside his coat for later, then strolled off down the street, munching on the other half. He hadn't gone very far when a voice called on him to stop. He looked round and saw a group of brown-shirts crossing the road towards him.

    "Where d'you think you're going?" asked one.

    "Home," said Moshe, keeping his eyes on the ground

    "I know you," said the brown-shirt.

    Moshe raised his head slowly. The young man before him looked scarcely old enough to be a boy scout, but the uniform he wore showed him to be something very different. Moshe recognised him as the son of one of his former neighbours. His name was Hans.
   
    "You should have gone to Palestine when you had the chance," said the boy. "Empty your pockets."

    Moshe obeyed. The brown-shirt took the purse from him, found it was empty, and threw it away. He tasted some Schnapps from the bottle, spat, and casually let the bottle drop from his hand to smash on the cobble-stones. Then he turned his attention to the bread.

    "Well, well, well, what have we here?" The young man examined the half-eaten loaf as if he'd never seen anything like it before. Then he grinned and said, "Who's been a naughty boy, then? I'll have to tell the Rabbi on you. If we can find him, that is…"
   
    "What are you babbling about?" asked one of his friends, impatiently.

    "Don't you know anything?" said Hans. Then he thrust the bread in Moshe's face. "Eat it," he snapped.

    "Keishe mein touchess," said Moshe.

    This petty defiance made them laugh. Then, when they’d finished laughing, they beat him and made him swallow every single crumb. And he couldn't even hate them, because he knew he deserved it.

    So that was that. No more 'Next year in Jerusalem' for Moshe Cohen; more like 'Next week in Auschwitz.' Actually, there were a variety of other camps first, with Auschwitz the end of the line, so to speak. And there was bread in the camps, as well. Moshe spent his entire time in them baking it. His Zwiebelbrot was especially popular with the S.S. It was probably what kept him from the gas.

    But bread in those hungry places was not just bread. It was a currency more valuable than gold, for it represented the difference between life and death. Even so, Moshe would never accept even a single crust for himself. When the other inmates realised this they made him a banker--a banker of bread, and paid him in extra soup and potatoes, not much, but he still ate a little better than some. He even survived a year in Auschwitz, until the Russians came.

    And so, in the next year but one after the Liberation, he reached Jerusalem.

                                                    *
Jerusalem 2002

    Moshe would often think about these things as he ate his Matzos. He was thinking about them one bright spring morning when Miriam called him into the kitchen, where her two year-old son was sitting in his high chair, playing with his breakfast.

    "You'll have to feed him, Saba," she said. "David worked the late shift last night, and I'm going to miss my bus if I don’t get a move on."

    "Where's Shula?"

    "Stuck in traffic. By the time she gets here it'll all be cold," Miriam said. Then she kissed the child, grabbed her coat and hurried out the door.
 
    "All right," said Moshe, and sat down facing the high chair. He spooned up some egg from the plate. "Open wide."

    The child shook his head.

    So Moshe tasted the egg himself, chewing slowly and making appreciative noises until the boy obediently swallowed down the rest. Then it was Moshe's turn. The boy picked up a bit of egg between forefinger and thumb. "Gran'pa open," he said.
   
    Moshe obliged, and the child rewarded him by beginning to eat on his own. He started with a finger of toast spread with strawberry jam. When he was half-way through it he remembered Moshe, and held the mangled remainder under his grandfather's nose.
   
    "Yum!" he commanded.

    Moshe shook his head.

    "Gran'pa open wi'..."

    Moshe sighed. "The things I do for you," he said.


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