My brother’s best friend’s uncle told me
during the Kiddush luncheon
at our sister’s Bat Mitzvah service,
both of us holding paper plates with kugel, salad, a bagel,
he’d been to Harbin, in a remote Chinese province,
south of Siberia, north of North Korea,
the average temperature twenty-two below zero.
The city’d been built by Jews
around the turn of the 20th century,
after the Chinese okayed the Trans-Siberian Railroad
to go through Manchuria.
After the 1905 pogroms in Odessa,
Jews had flocked to Harbin.
At its peak, 20,000 Jews lived there.
Then came the 1917 Russian Revolution,
and the anti-Semitic White Russians moved in.
They and the Japanese extorted, confiscated,
kidnapped and murdered: the usual story.
Then by 1949 the Maoists controlled Harbin,
stripped the businesses and property
of the thousand or so Jews still there.
The last Jewish family left in 1962.
Only Hannah Agre remained,
the crazy-old-lady who refused to leave,
living in a tiny room in the Old Synagogue.
That’s where the best friend’s uncle’s story came in.
He happened to pass through on business
just the year before. This was 1984,
the year of Orwell. He met Agre,
seventy-four at the time,
miserable in her little room,
huddled on a wooden chair.
Her only other possessions a brass bed,
a blackened kettle, a worn cabinet.
“Give me death,” she said in Russian.
The uncle knew a little of the language.
“Dress me in a shroud. I am old,
sick as a dog.”
She did die the next year.
A jaw-dropping story. But since then?
A whole tourist industry’s sprung up,
“Jewish Heritage sites,” meant to rake in the dough:
Tours of the “largest Jewish cemetery in the Far East,”
a Jewish museum in a reconstructed synagogue,
lifesize plaster Jews seated at typewriters,
holding knitting needles, playing the piano,
photographs of “real Jewish industrialists”
who “brought about numerous economic miracles”
to Harbin – a sugar refinery, a candy factory, a brewery.
Nothing about why they were gone.
I wonder if the best friend’s uncle ever returned.
I know I have no desire to go there. Ever.