by Max Gross
Dedication
For Jane and Harry
Epigraph
“To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish.”
—YIDDISH PROVERB
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
1. The Meteor
2. Yankel
3. Wolf Boy
4. The Myrmidon
5. Jubilee
6. Auguries
7. Schema
8. Terra Incognita
9. Geheimnisträger
10. Saint Teresa
11. Poczta
12. Heresy
13. Disquiet
14. Schism
15. Brother Wiernych
16. Fleshpots
17. Reparation
18. Eruption
19. Bolt
20. Unrest
21. Misdirection
22. Denouement
Glossary
Debts
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
The Meteor
Even in a happy, peaceful town, such as ours, it is possible to find someone you never want to see again.
Pesha Lindauer found one such person. A man whose visage drove her to rage, and whose voice made her clench her fists and grit her teeth. A man who haunted her dreams, tormenting her with whips and fire, and whose appearance always left her with the faint smell of sulfur upon waking.
It was doubly unfortunate that the personage in question was her husband, Ishmael.
A few months after a marriage contract had been signed and a dowry paid, Pesha asked her husband for a divorce.
This was not exactly a surprise to most of the people in our town. We had all observed the frostiness between husband and wife when they walked through the market square on Friday afternoon to do their Sabbath shopping. We had heard the scintillating gossip that Pesha was a woman of peculiar appetites and that she slapped her husband when they were in bed together. There had been plenty of reports from the neighbors that the two of them roared at each other late into the night like a pair of caged animals. And there was a story making the rounds (who knows if there’s any truth in it) that Pesha went to her father the night before the wedding contract was to be signed and begged him to call the whole thing off. The only real surprise was that Pesha had the nerve to end their marriage so soon after it had begun.
“Shouldn’t the woman at least give the thing a year before she calls it quits?” Esther Rosen asked the women hovering around her stall in the marketplace. All of whom clucked in agreement.
The Rebbetzin* was sent to pay Pesha a visit and see if there was anything that could be done to rescue the marriage. “Is your objection based on something that happens in the dark?” the Rebbetzin asked, getting straight to business. “Because if that’s the case, there are things that can be done. A serious talk can be had with Ishmael behind closed doors where he can be wised up about the facts of life.”
“No,” said Pesha. “The marriage never should have happened in the first place. We were wrong for each other right from the beginning.”
“Why do you say that? Give me reasons.”
“It’s nothing I can put my finger on,” Pesha said a little cryptically. “I just can’t stand to look at him anymore.”
“You can’t just divorce him,” the Rebbetzin said. “There must be a reason.”
Pesha Lindauer dutifully outlined a smattering of her husband’s flaws—from ox-like silence, to bad breath, to fits of temper and crankiness—all of which the Rebbetzin listened to without interruption, and then waved away.
“Nevertheless, you must try to reconcile,” said the Rebbetzin firmly. “Divorce should always be the last resort. Besides, nobody wants to marry a divorcee, Pesha. You’ll be damaged goods for the rest of your life. Give up on him at your own peril.”
Which was a slight exaggeration, of course, but I suppose a rebbetzin has a duty to make a divorce sound dire.
Pesha and Ishmael were told to be on their best behavior for at least a week. “You are to try to find common ground,” Rabbi Sokolow instructed them late one winter afternoon in his study. “You are to treat each other with dignity. You are to be humble and courteous. And you must stop your bickering—you must both promise here and now not to raise your voice.” (“For goodness sake, Pesha,” the Rebbetzin whispered when they were alone, “the Coopermans hear your yelling next door almost every night. Try to control yourselves.”)
A week later, Pesha showed up at Rabbi Sokolow’s study and told both the Rabbi and Rebbetzin that her and her husband’s attempts at treating each other nicely had failed. Instead of yelling, they had retreated into a murky, ominous silence. The tension in the house—that uninvited visitor, who nipped at their heels and whispered into their ears at all hours—refused to leave peacefully.
“And he did this to me,” Pesha said, rolling up her sleeve and showing the Rabbi and Rebbetzin a large black-and-blue bruise along her arm, which made Rabbi Sokolow’s face redden.
“It’s quite possible that things will change once you have children,” the Rabbi offered. “A barren house is a lot less happy than one brimming with youth.”
Pesha sat up straight in her chair, with her eyebrows arched. And the immediacy of her reaction made Rabbi Sokolow feel like a fool.
“Maybe not,” he mumbled.
And over the course of the next few weeks, many people took both Lindauers aside and tried to straighten them out individually. “Let me ask you something,” Rabbi Sokolow said to the husband when they were alone together. “Have you ever struck your wife?”
Ishmael Lindauer looked mortified.
“Who told you that?”
“It isn’t important. Rumors have a way of getting around. And this one has gotten back to me.”
“An utter lie!” Ishmael Lindauer spat, his wedge of a black beard quaking. “That’s the foulest piece of slander I’ve ever heard!”
The Rabbi was a pacifist by nature, and he edged back in his chair, spooked by the violence of the young man’s reaction.
Rabbi Sokolow had known Ishmael Lindauer since he was a baby, and always regarded him as a somewhat odd but quiet boy. No one in the Lindauer family had ever come to him with tales of woe or heartache over something Ishmael had done to make their lives miserable. There were no sisters driven to tears by meanness or teasing. (In fact, the boy had no sisters. Only brothers.) Ishmael Lindauer was simply the wigmaker’s son, who had taken up in his father’s store after he had finished cheder.* The boy had been unfailingly quiet and unexceptional, and had grown into a slender, olive-skinned man—also quiet and unexceptional.
“Look, Ishmael,” Rabbi Sokolow said calmly, but with firmness, “we all know that things happen behind closed doors that a husband and wife could not possibly explain to anyone else in the world. But I’m telling you right now that if you’re hurting your wife there will be consequences.”
Ishmael’s face was purple with rage.
“I haven’t laid a finger on her,” Ishmael said. “Whoever told you that is a liar. A liar!”
Both men sat quietly for a few moments, as the words lingered in the air.
“If she’s telling such lies about me, then maybe she should get her divorce,” Ishmael finally said. “I have no interest in being married to a liar like her. I’ve never walloped anybody in my life. Certainly not a woman. Certainly not my wife! But I just want to let you know that not only is she a liar, she’s a horrible wife.”
Rabbi Sokolow said nothing.
“The woman can’t sew to save her life,” Lindauer thundered after taking a moment to silently compose his complaints. “I gave her a pair of socks to mend two mont
hs ago and it still hasn’t happened yet. And she’s a horrible cook.”
These were serious matters, so Rabbi Sokolow fought off the impulse to smile. He simply stared intently at Lindauer, who looked as if his anger were a rabid dog he had completely lost control over.
“Well, obviously, that can cause problems,” Rabbi Sokolow said. “Keeping a good house is nothing to sneeze at. But that can’t be the only thing that destroys a marriage. What’s been going on between the two of you in your marriage bed?”
For a moment, Lindauer had a look on his face that you would have suspected on a boy who had opened a closet door and discovered his mother in some stage of undress. He couldn’t summon the words necessary to answer. His anger was countermanded by embarrassment.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing’s been going on?” Rabbi Sokolow asked. “Or nothing, and by that you mean nothing’s wrong and everything’s fine in that area.”
“Everything’s fine.”
The way Lindauer said this—with his eyes turned away from the Rabbi—made Sokolow doubt the young man’s sincerity. And as he sat watching Lindauer, it occurred to Rabbi Sokolow that the husband was so angry that he might decide not to grant his wife her divorce, in a fit of spite. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time, although nobody could remember when it last happened in Kreskol. Rabbi Sokolow put his hand through the gray wool of his beard and tried to carefully work out what his next words would be. But Lindauer spoke first.
“Is that all?” he asked, suddenly on his feet.
Actually, the Rabbi had plenty more to say. The conversation hadn’t even begun to scratch the surface of this peculiar marriage. But sometimes when one party is determined to trespass no farther, it’s pointless to engage. Rabbi Sokolow simply nodded.
With that, Ishmael Lindauer bowed his head and stormed loudly out of the Rabbi’s study, stomping his shoes as he walked.
“To be honest with you,” Rabbi Sokolow later told his wife, “I can’t tell who’s lying.”
“What’s there to tell?” asked the Rebbetzin. “I thought you said that he was violent. He’s obviously the one who’s at fault.”
“Oh, certainly,” Rabbi Sokolow said. “I thought he might slug me then and there. But you don’t get that worked up over an accusation that’s true.” Which was one point of view, I suppose.
And his worry that Ishmael might punish his wife by refusing to grant her a divorce proved prophetic. A few days later, Shmuel Lindauer (Ishmael’s youngest brother) appeared in Rabbi Sokolow’s chambers and announced that his brother had no intention—none whatsoever—of granting his wife a divorce. Under any circumstances.
Of course, the Lindauers would hardly have been the first two people to have been divorced in our little town.
If you were to consult the Kreskol archives you’d discover at least seven instances of divorce over the last twenty years. Which makes us, I’m proud to say, well below average as far as divorces go.
This does not mean that there couldn’t have been many more. Men and women are the same everywhere, and as much as we liked to believe that we were better than the glumps in Pinczow or the know-it-alls in Bobowa, Kreskol isn’t really any different. Many more people came to Rabbi Anschel Sokolow (and Rabbi Sokolow’s father, Hershel, before him) requesting bills of divorce than actually received them.
However, we were fortunate in that one of our dayyanim,* Meir Katznelson, and his wife, Temerl, possessed an exceptional talent for smoothing over problems between husbands and wives and talking both parties out of rash action.
There was, for example, the famous case of Yasha and Miriam Greenberg. Yasha Greenberg (with his elderly father, Zalman, in tow) came to Rabbi Sokolow and Rabbi Katznelson asking for a divorce because he believed that his wife was a witch. An amulet had been discovered by Zalman in his daughter-in-law’s wardrobe, among the undergarments, as well as a deck of tarot cards. Yasha Greenberg had been too horrified to confront his wife with the discovery—he had gone straight to the beit din.*
“Who can abide having witches in our town?” Yasha asked. “She’s apt to cast some kind of spell and turn us all into a bunch of frogs.”
A farfetched concern, certainly, but it is the duty of guardians of the law to consider everything.
Miriam Greenberg was summoned to the beit din and confronted with the amulet and cards.
She burst into tears. “I didn’t mean any harm,” she whimpered. “I traded the amulet for a necklace from one of the gypsy girls who had come through town.”
The gypsy caravans had come through a few months earlier as they had every spring, when the band of black-haired, black-eyed peddlers with gold hoops in their ears would hawk pots, and pans, and yards of cloth, and enormous metal contraptions no one in town knew the first thing to do with.
“I figured, a little extra good luck couldn’t hurt,” Mrs. Greenberg said, dabbing her eye with a handkerchief. “There was no harm.”
“What about the cards?” asked Rabbi Katznelson.
“The girl showed me how to use them,” Mrs. Greenberg explained. “She told me that they predicted the future. I didn’t see the sin in that.”
Of course, Mrs. Greenberg was set straight. The cards and amulet were taken to the town gravedigger, who was charged with destroying them. And Mrs. Greenberg swore up and down, the holiest oaths she could think of, that she would never again chant the black spells the gypsy girl had taught her.
“And you!” Rabbi Katznelson said, pointing his finger at Yasha. “You should be more forgiving. The woman didn’t know any better. And she who does not know cannot sin. Besides, what kind of a husband asks that their wife be chased out of town like she was a korva* without even talking to her first?”
Greenberg, with tears running down his cheeks, apologized to the woman that only an hour earlier he claimed he had been wronged by. The request for a divorce was withdrawn.
What’s more, the mothers and daughters of Kreskol felt they had a champion in Rabbi Katznelson. Even though Mrs. Greenberg was decisively in the wrong, Rabbi Katznelson seemed to take the position that she was not fully wrong.
So in the middle of all the Lindauers’ woes, he was called upon to expedite either a divorce or a reconciliation.
“What does she mean she ‘just can’t stand to look at him’?” asked Katznelson. “I’ve never heard such nonsense in all my life. Why did she marry the fellow in the first place if she doesn’t like him?”
A relevant question, one would suppose.
The marriage between Pesha Rosenthal and Ishmael Lindauer was, in retrospect, too hasty in its arrangement. The day after Pesha turned seventeen, Mira Rut, the matchmaker, appeared on the Rosenthal doorstep with a long list of bachelors to whom Pesha could be married off.
“How about Avigdor Lipsky?” Mira Rut said, referring to the sturdy, straw-haired fishmonger, who was indisputably one of the more handsome specimens in Kreskol.
“Lipsky?” Pesha replied. “He’ll come home every night stinking of fish!”
There was no sense pretending that wasn’t true. Mira Rut then suggested Yakov Slibowitz, whose family ran one of the dairy farms. “But he’s cross-eyed,” Pesha protested. Then Reuven Brower. (“Too short.”) Or, possibly, Reuven’s younger brother, Itzik. (“He laughs like a buffoon.”) Or Asa Shanker, who mooned about Pesha in a constant quest for her favor and attention. (“He gives me the creeps.”)
“Very well,” Mira Rut said, getting up from the Rosenthals’ kitchen table. “This might take some thinking.”
Mira Rut—never one to be done out of a broker’s fee—came back several weeks later with more ideas; first, there was the sexton, Reb* Zelig Minkin, a widower. (“Too old.”) Second, there was Zachary Mandell, whip smart and almost of marrying age. (“He looks like a crow.”)
“What about Ishmael Lindauer?” Mira asked.
Pesha didn’t know the Lindauers very well. The family consisted exclusively of boys, and Pesha didn’t have any female counter
parts to compare him with. All she knew of the Lindauers was that they ran the dress and wig shop on the other side of Kreskol, which she hadn’t had occasion to visit since her mother died seven years earlier.
“I don’t know,” Pesha replied, which was the most encouraging thing Mira Rut had heard out of the girl.
A meeting was arranged between prospective husband and wife at the Market Street Tea Shop, halfway between each of their homes, and the conversation was polite enough. Reb Issur Rosenthal sat at the table behind his daughter, and Ishmael’s oldest brother, Gershom, sat at a table nearby.
“Why didn’t you stay in yeshiva?” asked Pesha when her father appeared to be distracted.
“Because it’s just about the most boring way to spend a life that I could ever dream up,” Ishmael replied.
Which elicited a smile.
“Nu?”** asked Mira Rut the next morning when she came around to the Rosenthal house. “What do you think?”
Pesha considered the question. “He’s funny,” she finally pronounced. Which was a misreading, on her part. He was mocking, perhaps. Sarcastic, certainly. But few people would have characterized Lindauer as humorous.
Still, that was good enough. Issur Rosenthal was enlisted to tell his daughter that in a town of our size, she couldn’t afford to be picky. Pesha’s sisters began saying that they found the quiet, dark-complexioned Ishmael to be handsome and admirably modest. (“That’s why I think he’s so quiet—he clearly doesn’t want to boast,” said Hadassah Rosenthal. “Maybe he doesn’t have much to boast about,” Pesha replied.)
After three or four weeks of nagging, Pesha agreed to the marriage; the canopy was raised and the inn was rented for the evening. But Pesha barely smiled when the wedding jester came to entertain her aunts and her sisters. Throughout the signing of the contract, Pesha looked pale and she stumbled slightly as she circled Ishmael for the second time. Only Esther Rosen thought this was a bad omen. Everyone else just assumed Pesha was nervous.
The wedding party had the fanfare one would expect. A procession, led by the four klezmer musicians, paraded the bride and groom back to Pesha’s house. They were showered with wheat kernels along the way. When they got to the Rosenthal house they were presented by Pesha’s aunt Elka with a large challah* and a clay jug of salt. The subsequent feast was as sumptuous as anyone could remember, and after the bride and groom had retired to a back room in the Rosenthal house, Yetta Cooperman came back to the wedding party a half hour later to triumphantly report that there was blood on the sheets. The occasion was deemed to be a success.