I heard about the cabinet a few times when I was little,
perhaps even read an article or two about it later on in life. My Aunt Bessie, who was more prone to
dreams than her sisters, told me that her uncle claimed to have seen it once in
Vilna during the war.
It sounded fanciful to me which, as you can guess, made it a
lot more believable when I was just a dumb kid. Now that I know better, I see it as more of a legend than a
thing. A story to tell, a myth to
pass on. It was known as Dr.
Eisenbaum’s Cabinet of Jewish Curiosities. You see what I mean?
Figment and fancy.
Apparently the Cabinet was rather ordinary, made of oak with
brass knobs. But very well crafted. And it was large, the size of a door or
a breakfront, and that was unusual in Vilna because it must have been expensive
too. Eisenbaum was a doctor of
something or other but precisely what no one could pin down. I figured an eye doctor because of the
name but that was just the kid in me.
He might have been a dentist for all I knew. A vet even.
The Cabinet had been on display in his country house in Zalesa,
a town outside Vilna, and by 1944 it had acquired quite a reputation. Visitors who could afford to, would go
there and see it and talk about it, and carry tales of it around the
country. “Have you seen
Eisenbaum’s Cabinet yet? Well you
must. There is nothing like it.”
Naturally I assumed it contained such items as the heaviest
matzoh ball, the blandest boiled chicken, a schmear of this, a schmitz of that. But that turned out to be wrong
completely. It was no joke. Folks claimed to have had visions
before it, to have been cured of diseases, to have seen the future or the
past. To be healed of grief.
In fact, the stories were so astounding that people who had
not seen it began to accuse Eisenbaum of some kind of scam. Chicanery at the very least; outright
fraud at most. Lawsuits were
hinted; vandalism threatened. So
the doctor decided to go public and take his cabinet on the road. In that way, everyone who could not get
themselves to Zalesa would be able to see it and judge for themselves. He rigged up a horse cart and hired a
driver to take the Cabinet to other villages and towns. Eventually he landed in Vilna, which is
where and when this legend intersects with the story of my family.
My aunt showed me a photo once of an old cabinet like that
and suggested, hinted really, that it might have been the very one in
question. I doubt it now. What are the odds that she would happen
to have such a thing? On the other
hand, what are the odds that such a thing existed in any case, so maybe long
odds cancel each other out and become a possibility. I wouldn’t know; I was just a dumb kid, as I said, and did
not grow up to become any genius either.
According to the story she told me, when her uncle saw the
Cabinet arrive in town, he too was skeptical. We were a family of merchants and peddlers, not
philosophers, and a cabinet of wonders was not on anyone’s list of must-see
things. No doubt he was more interested
in the craftsmanship of the cabinet – the wood, the joints – than what was
inside of it.
The Cabinet sat in the street for two days under the
watchful eye of the driver so that by the time Eisenbaum himself arrived to
open it, the curiosity was at a high pitch, as though a new movie were about to run. Remember, this was during the war and
Vilna was under siege, partisans gathering in the forest, food rationed. And suddenly here was a man – a doctor
no less! – opening the doors to a strange cabinet in the middle of the street.
There was no fanfare; Eisenbaum was no showman. He wore a wool suit and had round
spectacles and looked uninteresting, like someone ahead of you on line that you
looked at but could not recall later.
He simply grabbed two knobs and pulled the doors open.
There inside were no strange vials or mysterious
gizmos. No occult remnants or
magical talismans. No. The drawers and shelves of the cabinet
were filled with ordinary objects, things you might pick up from the street and
discard or not even notice that you ever missed. Pocket items, daily debris…a cheap brooch, a broken
stopwatch, a piece of string, a cracked leather handle from an old valise.
Is this what the big deal was all about? Was this the famous Cabinet they had
all heard about? No wonder
Eisenbaum was on the lam! But just
when it seemed that he might close the doors and race out of town, he did the
opposite. He invited everyone to
come closer and take an item, if they wished, to hold it for a few
moments. Just a loan, a few
heartbeats to touch a thing and return it. What could be the harm in that?
The Vilnians obliged him more out of courtesy than true
curiosity. And that is when the
Cabinet took on its true meaning.
A small girl, seeing a limp rag doll battered and torn, picked it up and
held it close for a moment, just a moment. But in that moment she suddenly decided, even if she did not
know it then, to become a surgeon and spend her life patching up. A young man near her spying a small
comb with missing teeth took it in hand and without thinking, ran it through
his hair. A silly thing to do but
in that instant he decided to ask the girl for whom he pined for her hand in
marriage; he would not wait any longer.
And a woman picked up a bootlace with mud on it mostly to see what it
was; by the time she put it down the notion had already formed in her head to
leave Vilna that evening. The Nazi
occupation began the following morning.
You see?
The Cabinet was filled with ordinary items, not sacred or
magical ones. But these items had
been taken from the bodies of those who had died during a massacre near the
Rudnicki forest. They had been
removed so that the bodies could be buried. They were lost objects, forgotten things, leave-behinds, but
they retained the dreams of their owners at that last moment…the girl holding
her doll and wishing she had the time to fix it, the boy who fondled his comb
and longed to see his true love one last time, the woman who
looked at her bootlace and yearned to run away.
And so on for that scratched key that would unlock the heart
of the brutal landowner, the busted harmonica that would inspire songs of love,
the handkerchief that would catch the cough and stop the flu from spreading.
The story is different now that I am old, no longer a child,
and the unbelievable has become a source of hope for me. I have had my fill of the answers, the
explanations, the convictions, the endless flood of truthiness. I want so much to believe in a bunch of
wonders, in the power of a small thing in this dither of a world.
At night I dream of objects that will transform me since I
cannot seem to do this on my own and of a cabinet that is bigger on the inside
than the whole wide universe without.
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