dovid katz: intervyu mit

Avrom-Nokhem Shtentsl

1978

kval: The Mendele Review

Vol. 07.003, 30 March 2003

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The citations which follow are extracts from an interview Stencl gave me in Whitechapel on 10 November 1978. The transcribed tape-recorded interview has been lightly edited to allow for differences between oral and written styles. (Dovid Katz)

I was born in Czeladz near the town of Bendin, which is close to the German border, on the seventh of Iyar, 1897. Tsheladzh [Czeladz] is a small coal-mining town. Thousands of gentile coal miners. The Jews had shops. There were ninety Jews in the entire town, no more. My father's grandfather – my grandmother Esterl's father (my greatgrandfather) was a distinguished rabbi some two hundred years earlier. He was a member of the khevraye (‹bunch; inner circle›) of Duvidl Lelever ¹⁾, and of the Seer of Lublin ²⁾, who established Chasidism in Poland. He lived in Bendin; he was a goen (‹genius›). I remember that the anniversary of his death was celebrated every year. His burial tomb on a hill in Bendin was an enclosed one like the tombs of the greatest sages. There and in his study-house in Bendin his followers danced and sang. The family by that time included both rich and poor. They all took pride in the formidable lineage.

My greatgrandfather came from the family of a famous rebe (‹Chasidic rabbi›). When the rebe died, the Tiferes Shloyme, Rabbi Solomon Rabinowitz HaCohen of Radomsk ³⁾ – known, as was the practice, after the title of his most famous book – approached the rebe's widow and suggested that she marry the dayen (‹head of the Jewish religious court›) of Tshenstokhov [Czenstochow], whose wife had died a year earlier having, like my greatgrandfather, left two sons and two daughters. It is from this Czenstochow match that my father was born – from a second marriage with lineage from a dayen and not from a rebe.

My mother's father, who was at first the rabbi of Bendin, was the first Jew in Tsheladzh [Czeladz]. He became wealthy, and when my father married my mother (his daughter), he sat and studied. The Jewish population slowly grew, and soon there was need for a rabbi, a post filled by my father. My brother Shloyme Shtentsl was a rabbi and a prodigy, the author of Koheles-Shloyme. ⁴⁾ When he became free from military conscription, by which time he already had four children, he was hired as a moyre hoyroe (‹rabbi›) in Tsheladzh [Czeladz]. From there he moved to Sosnovits [Sosnowiec], a big city.

I was a wild kid. I didn't want to study in kheyder, I ran about. I lived in Tsheladzh [Czeladz] until 1911 or 1912 and afterwards in Tshentokhov [Czenstochow]. When my brother taught the older boys I would join them. I can hardly recall attending kheyder. I ran around and played with the Jewish and gentile boys. My father didn't believe in education – living in a Jewish home turned you into a Jew. I never actually learned to write – nothing, not any language. Once when my mother went away – I was about ten – I cried. Father wanted to cheer me up and said, ‹Come I'll teach you to write›.

In the study-house I was known as a quibbler and a casuist. There was a fellow there by the name of Vevyorke ⁵⁾ – you have probably heard of his brother, Avrom Vevyorke. Their father was a ritual slaughterer. This fellow was regarded as having gone astray and my father didn't approve of our being fast friends. But there was little he could do; our love for one another was almost physical. My friend had already read Peretz, Mendele and Sholem Aleichem and was brimming with secular learning, though he kept all this hidden from his father, the ritual slaughterer. This was in Tshentokhov [Czenstochow]. I was about fourteen or fifteen and wore earlocks and a little beard, so as not to hurt my father.

That's how I lived, wild. I worked with iron, with wood, in gardens, for peasants. I wanted to go to erets-yisroel. (‹the Land of Israel›) to be a kholets (Heb. khaluts ‹pioneer›). I wanted to be a gardener, a peasant, I dreamed about this. I used to walk through the fields of grain, in the meadows. I wormed my way into a khaluts group which tried to learn from the peasants. When I saw it didn't suit me I pulled out. I wrote my first poem at age twenty at home in Tshentokhov [Czenstochow]. What poem was that? «Ikh hob nisht keyn koyekh tsu bageyn zelbstmord» (‹I Don't Have the Strength to Commit Suicide›).

I left Tshentokhov {Czenstochow} the night Passover ended. I was in Holland. I arrived in Berlin in 1921. Shneyer was in Berlin at that time. I went to see him and he gave me a hundred mark note to get myself organized. When Dr. Elyashev came to Berlin, Shneyer sent me to see him. Elyashev published my first poems and a long story about village life (later reprinted in a Yiddish paper in Danzig) in the New York Morgn-zhurnal in 1921. Dr. Elyashev paid me fifty marks and I felt myself a «writer.» I began a cafe-life in Berlin like that of all the writers. One day while sitting in a cafe, Zalmen Reyzen walked in. He came over to me, questioned me and made notes. I didn't want to give him a photo. He didn't ask for my mother's, only my father's, name. ⁶⁾ So you write this down now: my mother's name was Freydl-Genendl.

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1) R' Dovid Ben Shloyme Lelov {David Ben Solomon of Lelov} (1746-1813), founder of the Lelov branch of Chasidism. 

2) Yankev Yitskhok Ha-Khoyze Mi-Lublin {Jacob Isaac the Seer of Lublin} (1745-1815), one of the founders of Chasidism in Galicia and Poland. 

3) Apparently: R' Shloyme Rabinovitsh Ha-Koyen {Solomon Rabinowitz Hakohen of Radomsk}, author of Tiferes Shloyme, Part 1 (Warsaw, 1867-1869); Part 2 (Piotrkow, 1889 and Bendin 1910). 

4) Shloyme Shtentsl, Koyheles shloyme. (Piotrkow, 1932). 

5) Volf Vevyorke (1896-1945), who was born in Zhirardov, then lived in Czenstochow and left for Berlin after World War One around the time that Stencl did. See the entry for him in NL 3:481-483. 

6) Stencl's biography to this point is found in Reyzen vol. 4, p. 624-626 (Reyzen, Zalmen: Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye, 4 vols., Vilna, 1929).