And then their sons were born. One a year, born at the ebbing of the tide. And Sel sang to them, one by one, long, longing wordless songs that carried the sound of the sea. But to Merdock she said nothing.
Seven sons they were, strong and silent, one born each year. They were born to the sea, born to swim, born to let the tide lap them head and shoulder. And though they had the dark eyes of the seal, and though they had the seal’s longing for the sea, they were men and had men’s names: James, John, Michael, George, William, Rob, and Tom. They helped their father fish the cove and bring home his catch from the sea.
It was seven years and seven years and seven years again that the seal wife lived with him. The oldest of their sons was just coming to his twenty-first birthday, the youngest barely a man. It was on a gray day, the wind scarcely rising, that the boys all refused to go with Merdock when he called. They gave no reason but “Nay.”
“Wife,” Merdock called, his voice heavy and gray as the sky. “Wife, whose sons are these? How have you raised them that they say nay to their father when he calls?” It was ever his custom to talk to Sel as if she returned his words.
To his surprise, Sel turned to him and said, “Go. My sons be staying with me this day.” It was the voice of the singer on the beach, musical and low. And the shock was so great that he went at once and did not look back.
He set his boat on the sea, the great boat that usually took several men to row it. He set it out himself and got it out into the cove, put the nets over, and did not respond when his sons called out to him as he went, “Father, fair wind!”
But after a bit the shock wore thin and he began to think about it. He became angry then, at his sons and at his wife, who had long plagued him with her silence. He pulled in the nets and pulled on the oars and started toward home. “I, too, can say nay to this sea,” he said out loud as he rode the swells in.
The beach was cold and empty. Even the gulls were mute.
“I do not like this,” Merdock said. “It smells of a storm.”
He beached the boat and walked home. The sky gathered in around him. At the cottage he hesitated but a moment, then pulled savagely on the door. He waited for the warmth to greet him. But the house was as empty and cold as the beach.
Merdock went into the house and stared at the hearth, black and silent. Then, fear riding in his heart, he turned slowly and looked over the door.
The sealskin was gone.
“Sel!” he cried then as he ran from the house, and he named his sons in a great anguished cry as he ran. Down to the sea-ledge he went, calling their names like a prayer: “James, John, Michael, George, William, Rob, Tom!”
But they were gone.
The rocks were gray, as gray as the sky. At the water’s edge was a pile of clothes that lay like discarded skins. Merdock stared out far across the cove and saw a seal herd swimming. Yet not a herd. A white seal and seven strong pups.
“Sel!” he cried again. “James, John, Michael, George, William, Rob, Tom!”
For a moment, the white seal turned her head, then she looked again to the open sea and barked out seven times. The wind carried the faint sounds back to the shore. Merdock heard, as if in a dream, the seven seal names she called. They seemed harsh and jangling to his ear.
Then the whole herd dove. When they came up again they were but eight dots strung along the horizon, lingering for a moment, then disappearing into the blue edge of sea.
Merdock recited the seven seal names to himself. And in that recitation was a song, a litany to the god of the seals. The names were no longer harsh, but right. And he remembered clearly again the moonlit night when the seals had danced upon the sand. Maidens all. Not a man or boy with them. And the white seal turning and choosing him, giving herself to him that he might give the seal people life.
His anger and sadness left him then. He turned once more to look at the sea and pictured his seven strong sons on their way.
He shouted their seal names to the wind. Then he added, under his breath, as if trying out a new tongue, “Fair wind, my sons. Fair wind.”
The Snatchers
YOU COULD SAY IT ALL began in 1827 (though my part of it didn’t start until 1963) because that was the year Tsar Nicholas I decided to draft Jews into the army. Before that, of course, only Russian peasants and undesirables had to face the awful twenty-five-year service.
But it was more than just service to the state the Jewish boys were called to do. For them, being in the army meant either starvation—for they would not eat non-kosher food—or conversion. No wonder their parents said kaddish for them when they were taken.
After Tsar Nicholas’ edict, the army drafted sons of tax evaders and sons of Jews without passports. They picked up runaways and dissidents and cleaned the jails of Jews. Worst of all, they forced the kahal, the Jewish Community Council, to fill a quota of thirty boys for every one thousand Jews on the rolls—and those rolls contained the names of a lot of dead Jews as well as living. The Russian census takers were not very careful with their figures. It was the slaughter of the innocents all over again, and no messiah in sight.
The richest members of the community and the kahal got their own sons off, of course. Bribes were rampant, as were forgeries. Boys were reported on the census as much younger than they were, or they were given up for adoption to Jewish families without sons of their own, since single sons were never taken. And once in a while, a truly desperate mother would encourage her sons to mutilate themselves, for the army—like kosher butchers—did not accept damaged stock.
In my grandfather’s village was a family known popularly as Eight-Toes because that is how many each of the five sons had. They’d cut off their little toes to escape the draft.
So many boys were trying in so many ways to avoid conscription that a new and awful profession arose amongst the Jews—the khaper. He was a kidnapper, a bounty hunter, a Jew against Jews.
My Aunt Vera used to sing an old song, but I didn’t know what it meant until almost too late:
I had already washed and said the blessing
When the snatcher walked right in.
“Where are you going?” he asks me.
“To buy wheat, to buy corn.”
“Oh no,” he says, “you are on your way,
Trying to escape . . .”
One of my uncles remarked once that the family had come over to escape the khapers in the 1850s, and I thought he said “the coppers.” For years I was sure the Yolens were but one step ahead of the police. Given my Uncle Louis’ reputation as a bootlegger, why should anyone have wondered at my mistake? But I learned about the khaper—the real one—the year I was sixteen. And I understood, for the first time, why my family had left Ykaterinoslav without bothering to pack or say goodbye.
I was sixteen in the early sixties, living with my parents and two younger brothers in Westport, Connecticut. My. father, a member of a lower-class family, had married rather late in life to a young and lovely Southern Jewish intellectual. He had become—by dint of hard work and much charm—part of the New York advertising fraternity. He had also rather successfully shaken off his Jewish identity: of all the Yolens of his generation, he was the only one without a hint of an accent. If he knew Yiddish, he had suppressed or forgotten it. My mother’s family were active leftists, more interested in radicalism than religion. I was reminded we were Jews only when we went— infrequently—to a cousin’s wedding or bar mitzvah.