"Down and Out in Chelyabinsk" in Judaism 44 (1995) is an excerpt from The Siberian Bachelor/The Further Notebooks of Yakov Marateck Outlaw which continues the picaresque saga recorded in The Samurai of Vishogrod (Philadelphia, 1976)

The story so far: Yakov M., a skeptical participant in the botched Russo-Japanese War of 1904/5, returns to his home town of Vishogrod in Czarist-ruled Poland. But before long, driven by his old insatiable spirit of adventure, he evades the matchmakers and moves on to the modern metropolis of Warsaw, where he dabbles in revolution while dodging the gang-wars of the local underworld. Betrayed to the Russian authorities, he is casually sentenced to death and just as casually saved by a passerby, a resourceful young woman of 16 named Bryna Migdal.

His sentence commuted to life in a Siberian labor camp, Yakov takes advantage of the all-pervasive corruption and incompetence to make his escape. His partner in this enterprise is his newly-acquired friend, Pyavka, self-anointed "King of Thieves" and, as it turns out, Warsaw's most inept master criminal.

Starved, exhausted and hopelessly lost, they stumble presently into Chelyabinsk, a raffish Siberian town straight out of Dead Souls. But I will not lie to you, seen from up close in the milky light of a Siberian summer afternoon, Chelyabinsk is not after all a town of churches alone, nor solely of police posts from which swine-faced men in uniform go forth each day to keep their cells filled with the likes of Pyavka and myself. In the spaces remaining between these twin pillars of Czarist society, there is room also for small factories and shops and rows of prettily-embellished wooden cottages which look as though they were meant to be lived in only during the few mad flickers of midsummer heat.

Among these, after much aimless walking-on my part in the vain hope of finding work; in the case of my criminal friend, on the lookout for something to slip into his pocket-we find an eating place which grandly calls itself the "'Cafe Lodz." We take this as an indication that Jews are not unwelcome as clients.

Not an actual "cafe," of course, nor even what you could generously call a restaurant, this small establishment is lodged in a building which rests upon, or rather clings to, the edge of a ravine on one of the city's outer extremities. Its shell is the windowless ruin of an abandoned warehouse, whose builders, it would seem, forgot to allow for the sudden onrush of melting snow which would, each spring, descend upon it with the force of an avalanche.

Presiding here over what passes for a kitchen is a shrunken woman with a face modeled so nearly in the image of a chicken, you expect her any moment to aim her beak at the ground and peck for grains of corn.

Her husband, in contrast, is a meek, blubbery giant armored in a barrel-like chest, who welcomes us with the uncertain smile of a newly-honest merchant, a position in which he has, as far as I can see, invested not much more than the labor of his resourceful little wife.

The vessels and utensils employed in this establishment all derive, the owners acknowledge with pride, by way of the city dump, souvenir of a bankrupt restaurant which had invested too lavishly in its furnishings.

Even the meat boasted on its "menu" (a slate board covered with incoherent chalk marks) is salvage of a sort, collected by night from the pits into which the city's butchers toss bones and scraps and other such offal. From these amputations, shreds of actual meat could still be scraped, to be plunged into a perpetually boiling cauldron that is never allowed to cool off long enough to need cleaning.

The table and the seating are equally modest. But to Pyavka and me, of course, after more than six months of prison, exile, and flight, it is a place of sheerest luxury, awakening fond memories of Warsaw itself.

Best of all, they serve quite a decent portion for only five kopeks. And when Pyavka, on our first visit, yelps he has been scalded by the soup because his wooden bowl has a large crack in it, the owner's wife calms him with the gift of an extra bone.

About to tuck into our meal, Pyavka and I are puzzled to note the other customers do not sit at the common table but hastily carry their food outside, where they must eat standing up or squatting on the ground.

I ask one of them why.

He flicks a black thumbnail at the ceiling, which I notice only now to consist of moldering straw in which spiders and other such livestock have built their nests and webs for what seems like the last hundred years. And since the roof has, for some Siberian reason, been designed to capture every passing gust of wind, a sudden rain of stubble and spiders may at any time erupt upon the table and into the food, presumably offending those of a more delicate appetite.

Duly warned, my partner and I take our bowls and join a group of men eating at the edge of the ravine.

Unlike Pyavka, who never tires of instructing me about life's unfairness, none of my fellow-diners show much inclination to chat, even with one another. This, I know from my days as a prisoner, means the clientele are, for the most part, traditional criminals, surly, brutish, hard-drinking louts, ragged and unshorn, whose silence is probably no great loss to the world's accumulated wisdom.

A slightly better grade of conversation may be had with the owner's wife. (Need I mention that in Siberia you don't, without good reason, ask a person's name, even a woman's?) She reveals to me that, despite her small overhead, she is not only not getting rich, but her steady clientele is robbing her into the poorhouse. There are, to begin with, those who "forget" to pay her and yet come brazenly back to eat the next day and, when told they still owe money, sometimes turn violent. Then there are those who pay but, the moment her back is turned, will, out of sheer lifelong habit, steal even things for which they can have no earthly use, like scraps of greenish raw meat which she would be ashamed to throw even to a dog.

She has barely finished making this improbable accusation, when I see one of the diners passing through the kitchen coolly slip a bloody piece of uncooked lung into his pocket.

For a moment I forget myself, forget I am no longer a corporal in the Czar's army and to Pyavka's horror, raise my voice to the thief and command him, "Put that back at once!"

In the frozen silence that follows, the thief turns to me, not in the least offended, and permits me a good look at the long, pointed knife in his belt.

And before I can withdraw my innocent suggestion, he smiles at me with glinting teeth and says, "I'll Iisten to you this time, because you are new here and obviously ignorant. But if I hear you ever again interfering in other people's business, this knife will go straight into your heart." He illustrates his promise by jabbing a deep gouge into the table.

Pyavka hastily inserts himself between us and confesses that I am not, alas, a criminal at all but, let no one whisper it, a radical, in fact a revolutionary, and quite without experience in how to conduct myself in normal society.

The man with the knife readily accepts my friend's explanation and, on leaving, even gives me a friendly wink.

Pyavka, I see, is already transformed. Here, among his fellow outlaws, he dearly feels himself again, as he had been in Warsaw, a man of consequence, a diplomat, an arbitrator. In short, once more a very "King of Thieves."

Meanwhile, the lacerating September winds serve notice of a Siberian winter drawing close with all the ferocity of an invading army. Racked with sudden overpowering nostalgia for my old life, I ask Pyavka, with his head for numbers, to calculate for me the dates for Rosh Hashonoh, the two days in which our clouded destiny will be inscribed for the year to come.

In the process, he also calculates for me that, if I insist on our accepting nothing but so-called honest work-assuming we miraculously find such employment-merely to earn the price of two tickets to Warsaw will take us a good year and a half, all the while in danger of arrest, and thus unable even to notify our grieving families that we are alive.

"You have a better solution?" An unnecessary question. Has he not already assailed me with his envy of the practicing criminals, Gentile and Jew, who, merrily as locusts, fan out each night throughout the city, stealing with both hands, while my friend and I squander our days walking the streets, smoking cheap cigarettes, spinning preposterous plans and trembling in fear of every thug in uniform?

"I am a man with a profession," he says. "All I lack is a trustworthy accomplice." He fixes me with an accusing look.

"There is a shortage of thieves at the 'Cafe Lodz'?"

"They're criminals!" he shouts in exasperation. "Lowlifes! The scum of the earth! How can I trust them?"

I laugh heartlessly. "Only an honest man makes a good thief?"

"I am trying," he says with teeth-gritting patience, "to induct you into a trade that will never let you down, no matter where fate may cast you."

"I have a trade," I remind him, although without much conviction.

"Organizing runny-nosed bakery apprentices to overthrow the Czar? With that you hope one day to support a wife and family? Two weeks, and you'll be back on your way to Siberia. If not worse. And what if, Heaven forbid, your Revolution succeeds? What will you do then for a living?"

All of which may be true enough. But the fact is I am also the son of Shloime Zalmen Marateck of Vishogrod, who I assume would not do cartwheels at the news that his son Yakov had entered into a career of crime.

This conversation does not of course take place in public but in the privacy of the nearby forest where we have been sleeping. This enables Pyavka to raise his voice and charge, "It is exactly blockheads like you that are keeping the Czar in power!"

"Like me?"

"The ordinary Ivan, what does he care about Revolution? It would frighten him to death. All he wants is to be left alone to sleep in his bed and drink his vodka and beat his wife. Tell him he has no 'freedom,' and he will look at you like an ox at a circumcision. Get his wife to run away with you, and he will grumble at having no one to serve him his dinner. But let somebody steal his boots or his cow, and just watch him curse the Czar and his corrupt police. That's when he's ready to talk Revolution!"

I must admit Pyavka's regrettable philosophy may not be all that far from the truth. But if thievery is what it takes to bring on the dawn of a Just New Society, then I fear I will never amount to anything more than being a baker's apprentice.

My glum silence persuades Pyavka that I am softened up enough now to hear his plan. To begin with, he has heard that, for the passports and travel documents we need, there is a master-forger available right here in Chelyabinsk. Of course, being a businessman and not a crazy radical, he expects to be paid for his services. The amount in question is a mere few hundred rubles, a sum which, to me, might as well be a hundred million.

As far as Pyavka is concerned the only real problem is his so-called friend, chaining his hands with my pig-headed Talmudic scruples, deaf to the voice of reason, even in a crisis like this especially now that we are lucky enough to find ourselves in a civilized city, an ideal site for him to take up his old profession.

He has, in fact, already earmarked our target.

Having carelessly neglected to put my hands over my ears, I realize what I am listening to is not simply a man in the grip of, as the Talmud has it, "the spirit of folly." This is an artist possessed by his craft.

All I can do in the end is reach into my hidden pocket, take out our common funds, and start to divide them in half, kopek by kopek. In other words, to dissolve our a partnership."

Pyavka is not only shocked, but tears of honest pain rush into his eyes. "After what we have been through together? Would I be here today without you? Would I even be alive today? My dearest friend," he says, "we will either return to Warsaw together, or we will perish together." And, having delivered himself of this oration, he forces all the money back into my hand for safekeeping.

For the moment, my shaky nobility of soul has passed its test.

But more days go by and, paralyzed as we seem to be by my grim notions of right and wrong, our cash reserves have very nearly reached bottom.

Pyavka, quietly confident, bides his time. And when he judges I am demoralized enough, he once again brings up the matter of just one small venture that would, overnight, enable us to travel home in dignity and comfort.

This time, he explains, it is not a matter of my helping him commit an actual "crime," you understand, not even a small misdemeanor like breaking into a home or a business. All he needs from me is something so simple, no man since Noah's Flood could ever possibly have been arrested for it, let alone punished. Absolutely all I need to do is follow my friend around the streets until he has targeted some well-dressed victim, and then, in some polite manner, distract the man while my accomplice picks his pockets as neatly as a surgeon removing an appendix.

I look at my good friend and sigh. What he has failed to consider of course is that, while he performs his little operation, I would have to look the victim in the eye a practice which, as we know, inevitably leads a man, in time, to acquire what the Commentaries call an azus ponim a "brazenness of face."

Let down once more, yet unwilling either to give up on me or let me condemn him to an existence of utter idleness, Pyavka inquires next how I would feel about stealing from other criminals. This, after all, could on no scale of morality, human or divine, be called anything but a meting out of deserved justice.

I draw gently to his attention that this would also be somewhat more likely to get us knifed or shot.

Barely a day or two later, Pyavka comes up with a fresh propose? His target this time is a factory not far from here, a place which turns out agricultural tools. Tomorrow is the day it will pay its workers their miserable weekly pittance. Which means that tonight, and tonight only, their strong-box will be stuffed with cash. On a scouting expedition the previous week, Pyavka already determined that the management has such blind confidence in the Germanic precision and hardness of its safe, it does not feel it necessary also to lavish the few extra kopeks it would take to hire a night watchman.

"So you see," he pre-empts whatever far-fetched objections I might contrive this time, "you will simply, as you did in Warsaw often enough, be punishing a Capitalist Exploiter."

My accursed friend has begun to make it sound almost tempting. But, having had my share of run-ins with other citizens of Warsaw's underworld, including a couple of Wild-West-type shoot-outs, I also know that every word spoken by a professional criminal must be not only closely examined, but weighed and measured and filtered a hundred times over before you swallow it.

On the other hand, I am by now, like a certain type of young woman, already half won over and in need only of a small additional push. In consequence, I fatally forget also to ask one obvious question.

Pyavka awakens me at midnight, annoyed to find I am so "unconcerned," I have fallen soundly asleep.

Under a moonless sky, we fumble our way out of our wooded dormitory. As luck has it, all of the city's fierce guardians of law and order, the devil take them, appear this night to be smothered in sleep. We reach the factory without being accosted by so much as a cat.

The tall iron gate, of course, is no serious obstacle. The way Pyavka, however, goes to work on its padlock, I can wonder only why the noise does not wake up every householder on the street.

"We'll go over the top," he finally rules, as though this had been part of his strategy all along.

I am about to sling one leg over the spiked gate, when a couple of bellowing watch-dogs explode under my feet. And this, of course, was the question I'd forgotten to ask. The dogs flash their avid fangs and fiery tongues at us and hurl themselves against the bars of the gate as though hoping to tear off at least one of our legs. Before I know it, I am back outside and running like the wind, with Pyavka panting and trampling at my back.

Back in the forest, I roll on the ground, laughing with hysterical relief. Pyavka is furious to see me take the matter so lightly. "With anyone competent, "he says, "I would at this moment be sitting in front of an open safe, stuffing my pockets. Do you realize what you cost me tonight?"

"The question, good Brother, is," I say, "how would you have gotten away on one leg?"

At which, Pyavka, not being entirely without humor, allows himself to cough up a lump of dry laughter.

Moments later, he admits to a terrible fear. What if he has indeed lost his masterful touch? Having no other trade to fall back on, how will he, back in Warsaw, support himself and his long-suffering wife?

He has, I admit, good grounds for his anxiety. As September runs its stormy course, and we awaken mornings on a bed of frost as sharp as splintered glass, my friend abruptly announces he will no longer sleep in the forest. Not when, if not for me and my "womanly" scruples, he might already be home with his wife. Oh yes, it is all well and good for a feather-headed idealist like me to turn up my nose at such a bourgeois trade as common theft. But what alternative do I propose?

I agree that the nights are cooling off, and we, that is to say Pyavka, may not much longer be able to sleep under the stars. It is now less than a week from Rosh Hashonoh, when Jews in more civilized places assemble and pray for a good year. And here I am in exile within our Exile, a castaway among castaways, and, of all people, it took a monarch of thieves to reawaken my Jewish conscience!

I say, "What can we do?"

"Nothing," Pyavka says bitterly. "Nothing at all. If you refuse to help me earn even some pocket money, what can we do but live here in the woods until we freeze to death? But, of course, you at least will die an honest man," he adds cuttingly.

"If one has no choice," I try to console him, "it's really quite possible to sleep in the snow. I've done it many times. You simply dig a little tunnel for yourself and heat it with your own body."

Never having been a soldier, Pyavka looks at me as though I had gone mad. "You will never amount to anything," he pronounces with finality. What's more, I can see him take it as a personal affront that I sleep so soundly, while his head is bursting with worry for both, our bodily and spiritual health.

Infected by my comrade's desperation and eager to encourage this unexpected turn toward repentance, I question the distinguished owner of the "Cafe Lodz," not ordinarily the most reliable of witnesses, whether there might not be such a thing as a synagogue in this wretched city of his. He gives the matter several seconds of his deepest thought, then refers me to his chicken-wife who, he confesses, is the scholar" in the family.

She, busy stripping shreds of meat from a bone of dinosaur dimensions, can only shrug. "I have a prayer book, if you want it," she allows, "although it doesn't have all the pages. I think he," she singes her husband with a scornful look, "used some of them to roll cigarettes. As for a synagogue," she chokes with laughter at the thought, "you can make one right here. My customers will be your congregation."

The husband also laughs and, frankly, I laugh with him.

I have, by this time, lived and worked and fought and prayed with almost every manner of Jew, from exotic Georgians, fierce as wild Indians, to glum Russian-style marranos. But expecting to make up a congregation out of the dregs, Jewish and otherwise, who constitute the clientele of the "Cafe Lodz," seems to me simply a bad joke.

Pyavka on the other hand, is charmed by the idea I discover, to my dismay, that he also fancies himself a talented cantor and, even in these unlikely surroundings, cannot wait to demonstrate his skills.

Since we need, of course, a quorum of at least ten male adult Jews, Pyavka canvasses some of our fellow-diners, asking whether they would care to join us in two days of prayer for, don't laugh, a good year.

In response, they don't exactly roll on the floor, but some of their responses bear out my father's observation that, since the Creator has such extra-high expectations of His people, when a Jew stumbles, he has infinitely farther to fall.

Pyavka, though, is not at all discouraged. To him, he assures me, the criminal mind is an open book. With great dignity, he simply lets everyone know what time the service will start tomorrow, with or without them.

In the morning, at precisely the appointed hour, Pyavka and I are the only congregants. (This being a sacred occasion, I refrain from asking him where he had suddenly acquired a gold watch.) Even the cafe owner and his wife are nowhere in sight. But they have left for us a tattered prayer book and a large gray talks somewhat diminished by mothholes and not very skillfully patched.

Pyavka mantles himself and, before my eyes, undergoes an astounding transformation. His copper beard which, left too long untended, had lent him the aspect of a low-grade charlatan, suddenly frames a profile radiant with otherworldliness. Surely, I decide, the Gates of Repentance are open wide even to those that dwell on the harsh plains of Siberia. And, this being the season of forgiveness, I am prepared to accept that no Jewish soul is ever totally lost, and no doubt it was only his laudable desire to make a comfortable life for his wife and son that had diverted him onto the hard path of criminality.

By mid-morning, the congregation has grown to six tentative men and the cafe-owner's wife who, with traditional modesty, has put up a ragged curtain to delineate the women's section. Gradually, more men amble in, one by one, hands in pockets, intending perhaps to scoff or, at best, to stay only a moment or two. But something in Pyavka's voice seems to penetrate their souls, and most of them, Jew and gentile, stay on, mute, respectful and only mildly bored.

Intending to save the full power of his voice for the Mussaf Service, Pyavka pauses and invites the cafe-owner to take his place for a while. Our host obediently steps forward, slings the talks over his shoulders like a rifle, picks up the prayer book, opens his mouth, takes a deep breath and falls dead silent. He has remembered he cannot read Hebrew. Nonetheless, he tries bravely to chant what sound like prayers to him until some of his more knowledgeable customers stand up and tactfully drag him away from our makeshift pulpit.

I look around me and, almost while my back was turned, our congregation has grown to nearly fifty men, including some I have never seen here before.

Not one of our new congregants, unfortunately, knows a single word of the prayers.

Pyavka, in desperation, snatches the abandoned talks and puts it on me.

For a moment I feel overwhelmed. Never in my life have I led a congregation. But, with just a little prompting from my partner, it all comes rushing back, even the melodies which once had stirred my heart and even now prove capable of extracting tears at least from my own eyes. And so, with an unexpected burst of sorrowful conviction, I thank the Almighty who had (thus far) kept my foot from stumbling, mindful that I am, willy-nilly, also pouring out my pleas on behalf of assorted footpads, housebreakers, and pickpockets.

In the process, I can only wonder, what if my petitions indeed reach the Throne of the Most High, and I succeed in wheedling a good year for my clients? A "good year," to them, after all, means merely a year of good opportunities for the commission of whatever felonies sent them to Siberia in the first place.

Be that as it may, I feel helplessly wrenched by emotions kept half-buried since childhood. And while I fail to raise any responding echoes other than Pyavka's, whose tone sounds to me almost a little jealous, the congregation's very silence makes me feel a curious kind of solidarity with even these tainted souls.

What's more, I begin to imagine that my words not only pierce the Gates of Heaven but, here and there, even enter the hearts of murderers and thieves, gentile and Jew.

At the same time, naturally, I take good care not to let any of my fellow worshippers stand close enough to pick my pockets.

Afterwards we all sit down in excellent spirits and pound on the tables, clamoring for our mid-day meal. We cheer, as the owner's wife emerges from the kitchen, carrying a large, steaming wooden platter almost as heavy as herself.

We fall briskly upon our portions, but only for the first mouthful Our noses warn us belatedly that, for once, whatever dark magic she usually worked in the kitchen, no amount of spicing could have disguised the fact that this particular piece of animal flesh was not merely spoiled but had already begun to putrefy. Possibly our hostess had saved it for this day on the flattering assumption that our minds would be distracted by more spiritual concerns.

Alerted by our mutterings, she pops out of the kitchen, her face and apron blackened with wood smoke, and demands, "Why aren't you eating?"

No one says a word. The silence grows embarrassing. I look to my friend Pyavka to exercise a bit of diplomacy. He avoids my eye.

I finally open my mouth and suggest to our hostess, "I think we're a little late for this meal."

"Late? What do you mean late? I just served it."

I explain that, for this particular piece of meat, we are in fact, quite a bit late. Seeing her look of dismay, I concede that, had we come about three months earlier, it would no doubt have been delicious.

With a look of utter scorn, she pads back into the kitchen, spills a torrent of abuse upon her bewildered husband, and does not show her face again until evening.

We, meanwhile, look at one another in resignation and proceed to make a holiday meal out of grey, glutinous chunks of bread and a basket of shriveled Siberian apples.

Purely from the standpoint of attendance, things go about equally well the Second Day. That is, more than half our congregation actually comes back.

That night, as Pyavka and I return to the "Cafe Lodz" for our dinner, we are startled to witness a barefaced act of armed robbery. Two of our fiercer-looking cutthroats are going from man to man and, at knife-point, extract money from each.

Resigned, I too reach into my pocket. Should I really be surprised that neither Pyavka's prayers nor mine have softened as many hearts as I had thought?

But no knife-blade threatens either me or my friend. Has our new status as religious functionaries, I wonder, earned us some sort of immunity? And if so, for how long?

At the end of our nervously silent meal, the two cutthroats approach our table, their faces split in broken smiles, and dump their loot in front of us.

"What's this?"

"For your work these last two days. Divide it between you. Divide it honestly!" they threaten.

It is the first legitimate money I have earned in over six months! Flushed with enthusiasm for my newly-discovered aptitude, I leap up on the bench and assure my fellow diners and idlers that, never in my life, have I prayed in an atmosphere of such broken-hearted remorse. And, swept along by my own eloquence, I further wish them all a year of good fortune and a short exile and a speedy reunion with their loved ones back in Europe, and assure them that, come the Revolution, there will be a new social order governed by universal justice, with enough work and enough food for one and all, so that no man would ever again be driven to steal or lift a hand in anger against his neighbor.

This last observation, I note, does not go over too well, and Pyavka obliges me to sit back down before our newfound admirers have second thoughts and decide that, on balance, they might have been a bit too generous.