Chapter 2
Everyone knew Zeidy as Yosef Eisenhardt, the man who dodged a failed revolution in 1905, dodged Russian conscription twice, dodged the Great War, survived three programs and had travelled most of Europe under a pseudonym of Erik Volkov the last name a silent nod off to the family story claiming descent of Benyamin.
He was the ‘Rabbi’, he had the longest beard and had the longest peyot and even though observance of Shabbos had been banned for numerous years by the time Mordechai was sat on his knee and taught how to speak choppy Hebrew it was known that Yosef Eisenhardt would not survive another war if he could not observe his holy day of the week.
It’s why they had fled to Poland in 1932, Yosef had become ill and Mordechai was finally old enough to travel, so they left in the dead of night with all their belongings besides a tea set that Yosef’s first wife had bought off a goy thirty years prior.
It was their neighbour that warned them that Poland was no better.
The Eisenhardt’s waved them off, joking about Poland being worse than Russia.
Yosef looks around, looking for his daughter in-laws and his one son in-law. His grandchildren were still in a pile, his three oldest children still slumped against the wall but his children through marriage must be alive, must be.
They bought a nice property and waved off the life of the shtetl in 1937 with Mordechai at seven years old they granted him his non-Jewish name, Max, so he could blend in better at a secular school run by the government.
It’s no use, children run around Max and point out his ‘hooked’ nose and darker curls. He comes home to their apartment everyday screaming, Edie doesn’t understand why, why can’t he be a normal little boy and shrug it off?
It’s okay for Ruth, she manages, they think she is a Pole.
Max stomps his feet around the apartment and lays against the floor as tears stream down his face all while stomping his feet and banging his hands.
Why can’t their little boy be normal?
Max complains about an awful heated pain in his head and palms but is ignored when no burns or wound are found.
Zeidy takes hm aside and talks about what it is to be a Jewish Mutant.
”Will you hide it we’ll?”
He hides it, he hides his mutation and his Judaism.
Jakob takes an extra shift at the smithery after Meyer, his younger brother, falls ill and can’t work to sustain his wife and their newborn but Erich refuses to help and instead buys visas for America.
The family laughs Erich off, Zeidy even laughing that it was a mistake to name him after his pseudonym, because now he wanted to travel the world instead of only Europe.