A Voice From The Underworld: Urke Nachalnik

By: Gwido Zlatkes

Urke Nachalnik belongs to the Jewish underworld, perhaps even more today than in his own time in interwar Poland.  At home neither in the sentimentalized shtetl nor on the cultural barricades, his is a past that never reached official history and has nearly faded from Jewish collective memory. 

We are venturing into uncharted territory.  There is very little written about the Jewish underworld or Jewish criminals in Poland. The Encyclopedia Judaica entry for "crime" gives only a summary account of crime statistics in the Diaspora.  Practically the only scholarly work on the subject is a statistical study by Liebman Hersch of the University of Geneva, written as a series of articles in 1936-38 and published in book form in Polish translation in 1938.[i]  Hersch analyzed official Polish statistical data for 1924-25 and found a relatively lower level of criminal activity among the Jewish population compared to the general population.  This applied both to the frequency and gravity of criminal acts committed by Jews in two of three examined categories: crimes against the person and crimes against private property. Only in the third category, crimes against the legal order (namely draft dodging, profiteering, and begging) was the level of crime higher among Jews than non-Jews.  According to Szyja Bronsztejn the same trend continued in the 1930s.[ii]

We lack some of the most basic biographical facts about Urke Nachalnik, not to mention an authoritative biography.  Two basic reference works, a new dictionary of Polish Jewish history and culture and an essential monograph on interwar Jewish literature, do not mention him at all.[iii]  There are two accounts of Nachalnik's life, an apologetic one by Abram Karpinowicz and a critical one by Stanislaw Milewski. Both, however, are of a literary character.[iv]  They lack sources, they differ in significant details, and they are inconsistent with other sources including Nachalnik's own autobiography. Even Nachalnik's real name differs in various accounts of his life; it is variously given as Icchok Farberowicz, Icek Boruch Farbarowicz, and Icek Sarderowicz from Bialystok.[v]

Urke Nachalnik was the underworld nickname that he retained as a pen name. The linguist Maria Brzezina tells us that the first name derives from the thieves' argot urka, meaning a seasoned thief, in a form adjusted to the morphology of Yiddish (and the Polish of Jews that was influenced by Yiddish), and the second name comes from the adjective nachalny (meaning "brazen" or "impudent" ).[vi] But Milewski's assesment both of Nachalnik's professional accomplishments and his credibility as a criminal and a writer undermines this interpretation. Nachalnik, according to him, "was convinced that in thieves' slang the word urke meant 'an internationally prominent thief,' as he himself explained in a footnote in his principal book. This already puts into question his reliability as a self-proclaimed expert in the clandestine affairs of thieves. This was a myth he created for himself in his writings and conversations. Yet respected professional pickpockets and other 'professionals' reserved the term urka for 'inferior thieves, botchers, thieves who would not shy from banditry'....It is noteworthy that the word urka found its way to some dictionaries of criminal slang with the definition given by Nachalnik, apparently owing to the influence of his books, whereas among thieves and prisoners even today the word urka is used with the [other] meaning."[vii]

The following is what can be established with a relative degree of certainty. Nachalnik was born in 1897 in Nowogród near Lomza to a reasonably well-to-do miller[1]. His mother wanted him to become a rabbi, apparently against his inclinations. Immediately after her death he dropped out of the yeshiva in which he had been studying and entered the criminal underworld where he passed through all the stages of initiation, from "konik" [little horse, that is, apprentice] to seasoned criminal. Nachalnik's self-portrait from the period of his imprisonment in the Mokotów prison in Warsaw in 1923 reads as follows:

Prisoner's Description:

Age: 27

Height 172 cm. [5'8"]

Body: strong

Hair: dark blond

Beard: shaven

Face: pale

Brow: high

Eyes: blue, normal, set deep

Eyebrows: thick, black

Nose: small

Ears: medium

Mouth: medium, protruding lower lip

Teeth: 8 missing

Hands: medium, medium fingers

Palm: wide

Legs: medium

Stature and walk: straight

Pronunciation: normal

Languages: proficient in Polish, Russian, German, Hebrew and Yiddish

Tattooing: none

Special features: eyeglasses

Education: high school[viii]

In 1927 Nachalnik began serving an eight-year sentence in the Rawicz prision for a bank robbery in Warsaw.  Stanislaw Kowalski, a young graduate of the pedagogical institute at the University of Poznan, held a series of lectures for inmates of the prison at this time and asked them to bring him their writings.  Nachalnik responded with two novels and the beginning fragment of an autobiography written in Polish. Nachalnik had already submitted the novels to the Rój publishing house, where he had had received a positive response as well as the recommendation that he write an autobiography. Kowalski encouraged Nachalnik to continue writing and then edited the manuscript, minimally correcting spelling and grammar.[ix] Zyciorys wlasny przestepcy [The autobiography of a criminal] was published in 1933 in Poznan by Towarzystwo Opieki nad Wiezniem "Patronat" Oddzial Rawicz [Association for the Care of Prisoners "Patronat", Rawicz branch].

Nachalnik was released in the same year, two years before completing his sentence. He moved first to Vilna and then to Otwock, a suburb of Warsaw. He became a full-time writer, got married and fathered a son. According to Karpinowicz, Nachalnik was in the Otwock Ghetto during the war. He talked two young men into derailing German trains, and during one of these actions they were caught by the Germans. After interrogation and torture, while being led to his death, Nachalnik slugged the escorting officer in the face and was shot on the spot. His wife and son were last seen in the Warsaw Ghetto.[x] Milewski, more critical of Nachalnik, states only that during the war Nachalnik "perished without a trace like millions of Holocaust victims."[xi]

Despite the popularity of Nachalnik's writings in interwar Poland, his bibliography is rather difficult to reconstruct. According to a reviewer of Nachalnik's collection of short stories, Milosc przestepcy [A criminal's love] (Warsaw: Naklad M. Fruchtmana, 1933), Nachalnik's Zyciorys was printed twice in 1933 and serialized in a daily newspaper.[xii] The book was later translated into several languages including Yiddish and Russian, and was reprinted in 1989 by Wydawnictwo Lodzkie in Lodz. This book covers the period from Nachalnik's childhood to November 1918 and the restoration of an independent Poland, a moment that finds him in the "Czerwoniak" prison in Lomza. The continuation of the Zyciorys is Zywe grobowce [Living tombs], most of which describes Nachalnik's stay in the Mokotów prison in Warsaw where he was transfered from Lomza. The book was first published in 1934 by Rój in Warsaw and reissued in 1990 by Wydawnictwo Lodzkie. Karpinowicz mentions another title, Zmartwychwstanie [Resurrection], possibly the third installment of his autobiography,  describing his break with the underworld. Milewski writes about two mystery novels published in 1938 by M. Fruchtman in Warsaw, Rozpruwacze [The rippers] and W matni [Trapped] as well as an unnamed play staged at the Scala theatre in Warsaw.[xiii] "Wyjscie z sytuacji" [A solution] is the title of a short story published in the satirical journal Szpilki. According to Milewski, its hero is one Boruch who seeks a rebbe's help because his wife cannot have children. "No problem," responds the rebbe, "you will have two boys but beware – one of them will become a pimp and the other a thief." Boruch departs saddened but then returns to the rebbe and says, "I found a solution. I'll build a fancy hotel near the main train station for the pimp, and a publishing house for the thief. It will be almost the same, but not quite..."[xiv]  Milewski also often mentions Nachalnik's contacts with American publishers and money he received for publishing in American magazines. I was unable to confirm this fact, nor was I able to trace, through the means available to me, any of the works mentioned above with the exception of  Zyciorys, Zywe grobowce, and "Wyjscie z sytuacji".

Nachalnik was certainly not a great writer and he probably never had the ambition to become one. His style bears all the characteristics of popular novels of the period. It is heavily sentimental and filled with clichés, especially with respect to descriptions of nature and the author's emotions. Nachalnik's characters are one-dimensional; he does not even try to penetrate their motives. When he sometimes ventures into "philosophizing," as he calls it, he addresses the reader directly with a self-serving sermon of dubious profoundity.[xv] Still, both Nachalnik's autobiographies provide very lively and entertaining reading. He is at his best when he simply relates events: who stole what and how. He also writes effective dialogue in which he often uses criminal slang, sometimes providing explanations in footnotes. According to Maria Brzezina, Nachalnik offers the lexicographer of underworld argot a treasury of some 300 words.[xvi]

Nachalnik's importance extends well beyond literature. There are four particularly important aspects to his writings. First, he provides an insight into the underworld, its structure and customs. He provides rich information about relations among the subsets of this world -- thieves, fences, pimps, prostitutes, etc., and the codes which governed their lives. The sociological value of Nachalnik's testimony is great even if he sometimes distorted particular facts. His colleagues, in fact, accused him of boasting. In 1933, a Warsaw daily wrote that "prominent representatives of the criminal world have alleged that Senderowicz was not an 'urke' but a 'lachudra,' a petty thief held in contempt by others. He claimed others' actions to boost his literary career. 'Surely, a dintojre [thieves' court] awaits him,' they have quipped. Senderowicz is said to have been so frightened by this that he has gone into hiding in the outskirts of Vilna."[xvii] But Nachalnik's editor Kowalski writes about verifying the content of the memoirs in his introduction: "During our frequent conversations I did not notice any inconsistencies with the text of the autobiography. Nachalnik himself admitted that he omitted many things and assured me that all he wrote was true."[xviii] It seems that Nachalnik more often inflated the importance of his criminal accomplishments than outright invented them. He often puts himself at the center of the action, yet a closer look shows that he generally served as an auxiliary, a lookout or an accomplice.

Second, Nachalnik's descriptions of prison life are even more detailed and reliable than his descriptions of life on the streets. Milewski points out that Nachalnik "was...in the criminal underworld for a year at the most, whereas he learned Russian, Prussian and finally Polish prisons really well."[xix] By the age of thirty-six Nachalnik had spent more than half his life behind bars. His expertise about this world canot be questioned. He offers, for example, one of the first accounts of the homosexuality that was widespread in prisons, and pioneers in detailing the mechanisms of incarcerated communities.

Third, Nachalnik offers us an entirely unsentimental, probably accurate even if one-sided, account of the Polish Jewish world. The description of his kheyder in an airless, damp and filthy basement where the rebbe dispenses humiliating punishments is a world far removed from the accounts of Sholem Aleichem or the images of Roman Vishniac.  Nachalnik's warm words about his yeshiva do not conceal its desperate backwardness.

Finally, Nachalnik provides evidence of the underworld as an advanced outpost of cultural exchange, a kind of democratic avant-garde. Nachalnik sleeps indiscriminately with Jewish and non-Jewish women, prostitutes and non-prostitutes, and nobody seems to mind. His partners and accomplices are people with names like Staszek or Wojtek; his fences are Jews.  He steals equally from Jews and non-Jews.

Nachalnik is the best known Polish Jewish criminal, but by no means the only one. Outstanding Jewish criminals are recorded as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century. Milewski writes that "Kurier Warszawski in its first year of publication [1821] announced that a very dangerous thief had been caught, 44-year-old Judy Icek Goldstein, married, father of two, who came to a fair in Warsaw 'in hopes of big gains.' According to the Kurier, he had snatched purses and watches from crowds even as a 6-year-old child carried around by his father. Later he was caught together with his gang. He was to be executed in Kraków but managed to escape from the strongest fortress in Silesia. He was famous because of his thefts and the greatest thieves considered him their master. 'He was amazingly clever and bold,' we further read in the Kurier.  He eluded prison many times. Another trace of him is found in the Kurier in 1827. The paper reports that the appeals court sentenced him to twenty years of confinement, branding and exposure on the pillory. He probably escaped beforehand; another report states that owing to his cleverness he managed to escape twenty times from various prisons."[xx]

Ryszard Dzieszynski presents a gallery of Jewish characters from the interwar underground, among them Abram Sycowski, reputedly Al Capone's sidekick who returned to Poland and masqueraded in Warsaw as Prince Aleksei Romanov; another Chicago mobster named Symche Majer Eichenbaum a.k.a. "Bloody Sam," who had once studied at the Sorbonne; Tewel Gromb and his gang, who "protected" businesses in Warsaw's Muranów district; Israel Mossak, a pimp who supplied white slaves to provincial brothels; and Chil Tennenbaum, an international drug dealer.[xxi]

In the memoirs of his childhood in Baluty, the proletarian quarter of Lodz, the communist activist Waclaw Kuchar provides a fascinating description of the Jewish underworld. His account deserves to be quoted at length:

Besides the groups of impoverished children playing in the gutters and looking for a momentarily unattended stand, Baluty was different from the rest of Lodz because of the prostitutes walking their "beats" from early morning until late at night. For a long time my 11-12-year-old mind didn't realize what kind of job some of my neighbors' daughters had. They just dressed a little flashier, which I rather liked. I had a classmate living in the other part of our house who was an excellent student, and whose two sisters were prostitutes. They worked in a brothel on an adjoining street, and there they paraded around and found their patrons. They helped their parents with a portion of their earnings. I liked a particular girl with auburn hair a lot; I often visited and talked with her and her sisters who regretted that they could never could go to school and didn't have real jobs. 

On some Baluty streets prostitutes walked about who were not much older than I was. They had their pimp protectors who defended them against overly aggressive clients, obtrusive drunkards, and various degenerates. Generally, every girl working in this oldest of the world's professions needed a protector who took the lion's share of her earnings and often mistreated her, but at the same time served as a shield protecting her from the blows of the hostile environment.   In a brothel, an older, worn-out prostitute would govern and enforced unwritten but firm rules. Pimps were the organizers and owners of the brothels, and their wealth and importance grew depending on the number of girls they employed. They were judges who instantly resolved all conflicts, and executioners immediately implementing merciless punishments. Woe to a girl who tried to escape her Argus-eyed protector! In that capacity they ruled the streets of Baluty, cooperated amongst themselves, made alliances, assigned turfs, proclaimed and fought bloody wars. Every once in a while decaying corpses were found in ponds outside the city, butchered beyond recognition, the result of a relentless war among various factions of what today we would call gangsters. 

Besides prostitutes working in brothels, there were sometimes girls who tried to work on their own. Usually they were new, attempting to enter the ranks of the profession, and did not yet know the rules and regulations strictly observed in it. But soon they learned. Through their colleagues, pimps from the immediate neighborhood would efficiently force the girl to give up her independence. And if she tried to resist, either the pimp himself or a decoy pretending to be a client would beat her up, making her unable to work for many weeks. After such a bloody lesson the starved and submissive girl would either come on her own to the protector or go to a brothel -- which she did didn't matter. 

Less visible than prostitutes on the streets of Baluty were gangs of thieves. Actually, Baluty was only their residence, not their workplace. Loosely associated, they formed groups of highly specialized professionals who did not depart from their narrow specialty. They were all linked in many ways to prostitution, the world of love-for-pay. However these groups of specialist thieves did not have much to do with each other except in the narrowly-defined sense of the expropriation of someone else's possession. A shoplifter (szopenfeldziarz) wouldn't work with a housebreaker. A burglar had contempt for a pickpocket (doliniarz), and the entire society of thieves highly respected the aristocracy of the profession, the safecrackers. A true thief wouldn't disgrace himself with a dirty job such as armed robbery or banditry. That was an entirely different profession. 

In Baluty, there were schools for thieves with different specialties.   Veterans of the profession taught the next generation, and it appeared to me that volunteers were never lacking. The Lodz thieves, as professionals, were well known in all the cities of Europe where they could always find booty. They used their own language understood only in their community. Neither in Baluty nor later in prisons have I encountered a single occurrence of national animosity among thieves, something, regretfully, I cannot say about other social groups. The world of thieves followed its own moral code with strictly enforced rules, according to which the worst crime was informing on others. Any other transgression against their code could have extenuating circumstances, but there was no pity for an informer. He placed himself outside the law governing the community, and if found out, the dintojre judgment over him was often quick. In serious cases, if the informing occurred among the elite, dintojre was performed with full ceremony, by the light of black candles. The sentence could be merciless and immediately carried out with a knife. 

Old thieves were highly respected in the Baluty community. You could borrow money from them and they gave to charity more than others. It could happen that one of them, or several from one family, would be the sole support  of a house of prayer, a shul. If a daughter began to age in a poor family and couldn't find a husband because she had no dowry, or if someone needed funds for doctors for a sick child, these older thieves would help. This way they "bought good deeds from God," hoping thereby for a good inscription in the book of life on Yom Kippur.

Fences recruited receivers of stolen goods most often from that old guard. They sent out merchandise stolen from shops or goods from emptied apartments to other towns through channels known only to them; they skillfully covered their tracks and sold everything. Without a well-organized network of fences the thieves' profession could not have operated effectively. It often happened that a victim found his way to the fence without notifying the police, and either himself or through middlemen bought his property back.

At the time of my adolescence, there were two famous centers of underworld power in Baluty. One was of a thief-fence nature, and was controlled by the authoritative patriarch of a large family, Shaye (nicknamed the Magnate), who owned several houses in Baluty and a kosher butchery. The other was governed by the co-owner and patron of several brothels, Moyshe (with the nickname of Poyte). Their spheres of influence were strictly divided. They chaired at dintojres. Their authority was limitless, and when they walked on a street everyone respectfully gave way before them. Even some members of the police recognized their prestige, and it happened more than once that fines or penalties meted out to a poor worker or shopkeeper were averted as a result of the intercession of one of the two.[xxii]

There is a great store of source material available on the Jewish criminal world before World War II.  There are crime chronicles in the daily press, an inexhaustible source of information about spectacular cases that preoccupied all of Polish and Jewish society, as well as the everyday petty crimes and misdemeanors. There are court and prison records, at least partially preserved. There are some memoirs and literary testimonies. It is imperative that this part of the past be regained as well and analyzed to show the scope and function of Jewish crime, the processes occurring within it that affected both Jewish and Polish societies.  This article and the following excerpts from Urke Nachalnik's autobiography are small steps in that direction.

NOTES

I would like to thank Katarzyna Raczkowska of the National Library in Warsaw for her invaluable help in gathering material for this article.

Original article: Copyright © Littman Publishing  

This article was first published in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, Volume 16: Jewish Popular Culture and its Afterlife, edited by Michael C. Steinlauf and Antony Polonsky, published in 2003 by the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization on behalf of the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies and the American Association for Polish-Jewish Studies

Edited by: Jose Gutstein.