So here is Vilna, the fabled city, the tragic city, city of fond despair.
Not a family photo this but an ancient map reproduced on a postcard; it shows a sprawling town in the 16th century with sinuous streets and secrets hidden in the byways.
The Jews had been there for 200 years but they could not own buildings because – heaven forbid – they should have something for themselves. By the time of this map, they were allowed to inhabit some of the wider streets but the windows of their apartments could not face the street. And by 1900 the Jews were almost half of the town's population but they still could not vote or hold public office.
This, with its endless pogroms and purges, is the city of my ancestors. Yet it was full of promise as well as distrust; a bustling marketplace and a cultural center too. Art, music, literature. There was the Yiddish Institute of Higher Learning and the Strashum Library with the world's largest collection of Yiddish-language books, more Talmudic scholars than could dance on the head of a pin, and of course Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, The Gaon or Genius of Vilna.
Not mention the earth-shaking invention that was created there.
I heard somewhere that my distant ancestor, Hym Yuda’s great-something, had settled in Vilna because the bread there was crumbly and sour. Mendel Shapiro was a baker from nearby Kaunas where he had a small shop. But when he heard some travelers complain about the bread in Vilna – where no one seemed to have the time to be careful about the process – he saw an even bigger opportunity. And he was right. Soon after arriving, his beugals – fat little mounds of soft and tasty bread – became well known around the town.
In fact people came from all over just to sample them. His secret ingredient, or so he told himself, was not the molasses you would expect but something much more canny. He baked his breads while humming a song of his love for the woman who would become his wife.
Sounds hokey now, I know. Yet standing there at the back of the shop in his apron by the open fire, I can easily imagine him pounding and rolling and humming and thinking of Leva, the butcher’s daughter, whose face was radiant like the moon and just as round.
With deft hands, he dusts the wooden board, then mixes the flour, the salt, the water, the yeast. He kneads the ingredients into a dough: shadows from the sunlight outside find their way in and flicker onto him. He shapes the dough into strips then curls them around into circles that will expand to make the chubby round loaves. A horse whinnies outside; it may rain. When he has made two dozen or so, he leaves them for a half a day in the warm shop to let them rise, then takes a prepared batch and puts them one by one into the boiling water. This is where his competitors, and there are many in the town, believe that he adds barley malt or maybe even sugar, but Mendel insists that the humming is the only extra ingredient. Finally, he bakes them into the chewy, shiny, fat, fist-sized beugals. And already just after dawn there is a line of customers forming.
Mendel is doing well but he is not a rich man by any means, only in his hopes and this is the problem. He wants to propose to Leva but that would mean giving her a gift in addition to a payment to her father. He cannot afford the jewelry that his neighbors suggest. Then one day it occurs to him that the gift is right there in hand and has been all along. With a slight arch of the wrist and a twist of the hand, he forms his gift and when it is done, he puts it in a small bag and takes it to her.
No doubt there are women who would be insulted by this silly engagement gift from a lowly baker, but Leva is not one of them. She laughs and slips her hand through the hole in the ring of dough. A bracelet made of bread, she thinks, now this is an ardent suitor who will never take her for granted.
When some of the other daughters in town – not the fancy ones of course but the ones with good heads on their shoulders – hear about this, they are charmed by the idea too and soon Mendel has a thriving business making doughy bracelets, of all things.
In time he became so skillful with his extra little arch and twist that these breads with holes in the middle soon took over the business and people were coming from miles around to sample them.
“Shapiro, what is this?” said a new customer one day who was not a bride-to-be at all but one of the traveling merchants from Krakow.
“It’s a beygl,” Mendel said, thinking fast and using the Yiddish word for ring.
“But there is a hole in the middle of my bread,” the merchant complained.
“Yes there is,” Mendel said. “Think of someone you love when you see it. That’s what I did and as you can see, I have thrived because of it.”
Okay.
I honestly do not know what to make of the idea that my ancestor Mendel Shapiro invented the bagel. More family lore, more concoction. Romantic babble perhaps, but no matter. As all lovers well know: the truth is in the heart, not the fact.
Come to think of it, a decent baker knows this too.
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