It is hard to say, even after careful research, which side of which family Cousin Meish was on since, quite frankly, no one really wanted to claim him. Not that he was a bad man and certainly not evil in any way; Meish was simply a shnook and more or less forgettable on that score.
A shnook, as you may know, is not a lot of things. Where a shmuck is obnoxious, a shnook is merely pathetic. If a shmo is unlucky, a shnook is unfortunate in the dumbest sense. A shlemiel may be a loser but a shnook is too useless to lose anything…
Well, you get the idea.
Leave it to Yiddish, the very language of nuanced suffering, to make these distinctions.
With that mind, it is not hard to imagine how at one point in his glumdom, unable to pay his debts, unwilling to work for his pay, uneasy looking for work, he did what any shnook in his situation would do…he became obsessed with the Legend of the Thieving Dybbuk.
This legend said that ages ago – perhaps even back in the 12th century – in the land just to the north of where Vilna now stood, a dybbuk, which is a kind of demon, had stolen a cartload of treasure from a caravan passing through on its way to the Kingdom of Polotsk. Why a demon, who only exists to aggravate everyone, would want such a treasure was anyone’s guess…except for those cranks who pointed out that this was, after all, a Jewish demon. In any case, no one could say for sure precisely what this treasure was but only that there was a ton of it. According to the legend, just to be ornery, the demon buried each little piece of this treasure separately in the ground there, probably scattered across several acres. In that way, if anyone tricked him into giving it up, that person would have quite a task collecting on it.
It is one thing to be charmed by a story like that and quite another to take it seriously. But only a tried and true shnook like Cousin Meish would actually devote himself to it. And so, throughout the summer of 1942, a year before the invasion, he spend day after day sneaking into the forest and digging holes everywhere, trying to find it. Hundreds of holes.
The task naturally gave him plenty of time to think, if only that had been one of his talents. But instead of calculating the likelihood of finding the treasure or limning the difference between a legend and a lie, Meish spent his time wondering just what the treasure might be. Jewels maybe, or gold nuggets, or whatever kinds of coins they had back then, or maybe even something more astounding than that.
He kept digging.
One day in the forest, an old lady from the village named Gebbel, happened to see him and wondered why a perfectly healthy man who could be gainfully employed was wasting his time digging holes in the forest floor. Meish, enough of a shnook to not come up with a good excuse, told her just what he was doing. Surprisingly, it turned out that Gebbel knew all about the legend and she scolded him for his ignorance. The treasure in question was not that kind of thing at all, she said. What do demons need with gold or jewels anyway? No, the treasure the dybbuk had buried was something that would protect the people of Vilna. A magical weapon buried in pieces maybe, or enough echoes and whispers to weave a cloak of invisibility. Something like that. Something for everyone, not just for one person’s enrichment.
Keep digging, she urged him, because in her bones she knew that they would need something like this all too soon.
Meish would have done just that; shnooks are sadsacks at heart but they can be very stubborn about it. But the invasion interrupted his plan and soon there were German soldiers moving through the forest and coming like a storm towards Vilna. On a clear day in May as the Partisans took to the forest to fight back, Meish was already there digging yet another empty hole and finding nothing and so he got caught up in the wave as the Partisans moved forward, each one hiding behind a tree, waiting for the soldiers to come.
Meish hid behind a tree too; he had only his shovel in his hand; his heart was throbbing. From his position he could peer out and see many of the holes he had dug scattered throughout the forest and all the Partisans, his neighbors from Vilna, each one hiding behind a tree, waiting and waiting…
And he began to howl with laughter.
“Shut up, you fool, you’ll give us away,” said the miller’s daughter.
But he couldn’t stop himself. It had suddenly hit him what was happening and this struck even him deep into his sense of irony. The sounds of his laughter filled the forest.
“Tell that shnook to keep his trap shut!” shouted the lawyer who was now a guerrilla.
“Shoot him before they find us,” said the plumber but he did not mean it. In fact, it was infectious and he too began to laugh though he had absolutely no idea why.
Tension, stress, fatigue…you can decide the reason that the Partisans of Vilna who refused to succumb, who took up arms against the invaders, stood behind their trees that day and turned slaughter into laughter. They certainly had no idea.
But Meish knew.
In fact, it hit him like a bolt the moment he saw that every one of them, including he himself, was hiding behind a tree in the forest. In that instant he understood that the legend was true. The dybbuk really had buried a secret protection scattered throughout the area. The problem was that he had been digging in exactly the wrong places. Namely, the empty spaces between the trees because in fact the secret weapon was the trees themselves. What the demon had stolen and buried were saplings on their way to the north. He may have been the perfect schnook, but he was no fool and this struck him as a deep hilarity.
The first shot that day changed the mood of course…but it did not change the truth.
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