Have I Got a Story for You

by Ezra Glinter

  Throwing off his jacket and cap, the boy laid the belt over the wheel, dampened and oiled it, gave the wheel a turn with the foot-pedal and asked the boss what to do. The boss told him that for now, he should go set up the samovar.

  THE GIRLS GOT up very late, and because their own holiday was over and it was the first day of the Christian holiday, they arose in a depressed mood, bone lazy and disinclined to start working, though there was a lot to do. They had to wash all the Passover dishes and store them away for the year in their proper places, and they had to bring the everyday dishes out of storage and do the same with them: wash and dry each piece.

  It was a regular weekday; but because it was the first day after the Jewish holiday and the first day of the gentile holiday, it seemed more difficult than a usual weekday, and a heavy sadness depressed the girls’ hearts.

  One washed, the other not yet washed, both in their slips, hair in tangles, the girls entered the wide, sun-drenched corridor. With dazzled eyes, they stood by the glass door and gazed out into the courtyard. They could see people coming and going. Gentile children ran around and stuffed big pieces of yellow Easter bread into their mouths. It was just like the day before, when the Jewish children had run about clutching their pieces of matzo.

  “Did you get enough sleep?” their father asked. “The samovar must be cold by now.”

  Each in turn, the girls went back into the house and surveyed the mess. Neither lifted a hand to do anything. They were not so much sleepy as despondent. They yawned, and each drank a glass of lukewarm tea from the Passover samovar in a Passover glass at a Passover table, and it seemed to them that the Jewish Passover had fallen asleep there and was sleeping into the workweek and into the gentile holiday. Or perhaps Passover was dead, lying like a corpse, and until the corpse is removed from the house, it’s both there and not there at the same time.

  In the workroom, the week was already underway, busy as usual, though Elya, the worker, hadn’t arrived yet. His workbench stood between Leyzer’s and the apprentice’s in idiotic, paralyzed immobility, and shavings from the two other workbenches showered onto it like hail on a dead horse.

  “For everyone else, Passover’s eight days long, but when it comes to me, it’s nine,” Leyzer grumbled.

  He’d nursed a hidden grudge for some time because the worker held himself apart from the household and particularly from the girls. Leyzer wasn’t as annoyed by his absence on the ninth day as by his not having shown his face during the eight-day holiday.

  He recalled his daughters’ late return on the previous night. Maybe they’d met up with the worker somewhere? Looking through the window into the house, he caught sight of them and said:

  “He’s not here yet, eh? So late! He must have been living it up until all hours last night.”

  They didn’t answer, and Leyzer went on, “And you two, where were you so late last night?”

  After eight days’ leisure, Leyzer felt too sluggish to work. He got up from the workbench, shook the shavings from his beard and clothing, went into the house, and seated himself as he usually did after a day’s work. He watched the girls, who were finally busy clearing away the holiday things. He watched the workweek taking shape in the house and felt sick at heart. From every direction, far and near, he could hear the unceasing clanging and clamor of the church bells. It was no longer the deeply religious tone he’d heard at midnight, but a completely different sound. Now the ringing was happy, impetuous, without order, sequence, or rhythm: a sound to rouse the hearts of believers to belief. Now it awoke courage and joy; it summoned the Christian world to life and pleasure in the holiday.

  And here, in Leyzer’s house (as in the homes of hundreds of other Jewish tradesmen), with the clanging of the holiday bells people ushered out the Jewish holiday and ushered in the week; but under the subconscious pressure to assimilate, they dimly felt the workweek was neither a workweek nor a holiday. This foreign holiday, like a current flooding into a poor Jewish house, sapped the will and hands of the strength to work, and people sat enervated, in a state of suspension. Though idle, they took no pleasure in their idleness. They felt an apathetic discontent with their own holiday which had just ended, with the gentile one which was just beginning, and with their own workweek, which had just arrived to be greeted with the joyous sounds of a foreign holiday and a foreign, Christian life.

  74 Phylacteries.

  75 Tefillin are worn only on weekdays, and not on the Sabbath or holidays.

  76 Prayer shawl.

  Zalman Shneour

  1886–1959

  ZALMAN SHNEOUR IS best known as a writer of Hebrew poetry and of Yiddish prose, although he wrote poetry and prose in both languages.

  A scion of a Hasidic rabbinical family, Shneour was born in the city of Shklov, in what is now Belarus. He received both a traditional and a modern education, and began writing Hebrew and Yiddish literature at a young age.

  At the turn of the century Shneour visited Odessa and became friendly with the city’s Jewish writers, including the “grandfather” of modern Yiddish literature, Mendele Moykher-Sforim (Sholem Yankev Abramovitsch), and the great Hebrew poet Haim Nahman Bialik. Shneour later lived in Warsaw, where he became close to the city’s Yiddish literary eminence, I. L. Peretz.

  Shneour continued to live a peripatetic life for most of his adulthood. Between 1904 and 1906 he lived in Vilna, before moving to Geneva and Paris, where he studied literature, philosophy, and the sciences, and then to Berlin, where he studied medicine. During the First World War, Shneour was held in Berlin as a civil detainee because of his Russian citizenship. Between 1924 and 1941 he lived in Paris, before escaping German-occupied France for the United States.

  Shneour started writing for the Forward in 1927 at the invitation of editor Abraham Cahan, who met with him in Paris. According to Hillel Rogoff, who was the managing editor, and later the editor, of the Forward, Cahan was congratulated by his staff upon his return for having recruited a writer of Shneour’s reputation and prestige.

  For more than two decades Shneour published both short stories and serialized novels in the Forward. “That Which Is Forbidden,” which appeared on April 25 and 26, 1929, was part of a series titled Shklover Yidn (Shklov Jews), which was published as a book the same year. Here Shneour offers psychological insight into the mind of a child while vividly depicting the relations between Jews and non-Jews in a relatively traditional Eastern European context. As literary critic Dan Miron writes, the book “seethes with the bitter alienation of a boyhood in a restrictive society, with rebellious critique of the Jewish traditional family, with vicissitudes of a difficult puberty, and with a welter of negative emotions and childish libido gone wild.”

  That Which Is Forbidden

  (APRIL 25–26, 1929)

  Translated by Sarah Ponichtera

  I

  BEFORE URI’S ADOPTED son Velvel was even seven years old, a hidden desire for the forbidden awoke within him.

  The evil impulse arose like an early morning mist, and every time this fog clouded his young mind, his innocent heart would tremble, sensing danger. Yet, in this quiet trembling there was also something of an illicit pleasure, a sweet pain rooted in unacknowledged desire.

  The thoughts were still indistinct. However, Velvel knew it would not be long before he would sin. He feared the terrifying but somehow alluring temptation coming closer and closer to him, and longed for it at the same time.

  If Velvel could not understand the adults, with their beards and hairy hands, at the very least he tried hard to understand. Fat papa Uri said that according to the Torah one was not permitted to do certain things, and Velvel was afraid of him, and of committing a sin. He tried to convince himself that his father was right, and refrained from doing those things. For example, papa Uri said that on the Sabbath you aren’t allowed to tear paper, even if you were just playing. Velvel dreaded the “Fiery Knight” he was told would punish such sins in the World to Come. Even more, he feared his father’s leat
her belt. So he didn’t tear any paper. But deep in his heart he harbored a profound, burning suspicion of the adults around him. He suspected that behind all these things that weren’t allowed there was a great and wonderful secret that could soothe the soul, like cold water on a hot day. But the adults didn’t take him into account, since he was still little, and just tried to frighten him and hide the great secret from him. And Velvel longed to know. The secret of that which was forbidden teased his imagination, floating before his eyes in unnameable colors and wondrous tastes.

  One Sabbath the impulse overtook him to tear a piece of paper, even a small piece. It had to be on the Sabbath, of all times! Any other day, it would have been fine. For a long while, he wandered around confused, fighting a battle within himself. In the end—his heart pounding, his breath short and hot, and his tiny fingers trembling—he tore the paper, slowly and carefully, so that no one would hear. But his little brother Fayvke, the wretched brat, saw and heard, and immediately told their father, who was just waking up from his Sabbath nap, testy and yawning.

  “He tore paper, Papa! Him, him, Papa! The newspaper, look, look there!”

  Papa Uri loosened his yellow leather belt, and shouted, “Come here, you good for nothing kid!”

  It did no good. The secret of the forbidden drew him in more and more.

  He was drawn to the sound of the Catholic church, where the bells rang down the street from the gardens behind Uri’s house. What was happening inside? How did they pray? What kind of prayer books did they have? What were those soft and sad songs that he heard? His friends said that the songs could steal you away from the synagogue. Was that true?

  One day, on a Christian holiday, when throngs of people were filing into the church—the men in their new hats, and the girls with their colorful ribbons—he found himself going inside along with them, almost inadvertently. Frightened by so many unfamiliar sights, he was swept in with a wave of celebrants. Thrown off-balance, he even forgot to remove his hat.

  Candles were burning, there on the foreign altar. A strange darkness prevailed in spite of their light. Someone was singing a peculiar song, and a suffocating sweet scent filled the air. It must be the incense he had heard about! Crucified figures made from marble stood in every corner. “Do not make for yourself a graven image . . . ” 77 How did they pray in such darkness? Everyone around Velvel was kneeling, kissing the pierced stony feet of the statues . . . He was left standing alone, staring fixedly, his mouth half-open. Suddenly his heart clutched, and he was overcome with the frightening and compelling desire to kneel along with them, to pray and say the Shema 78 with great concentration, while kneeling . . .

  Velvel went pale, and his father’s bearded, pious face swam before him in the mystical darkness and then disappeared. An aged, hunched Christian woman dressed in black appeared in the shadows. She stood for some time, watching him with cold eyes. After a while, Velvel heard a soft, almost imperceptible voice, a voice without teeth. “Why do you stand there, dear? Go pray, speak with God!”

  At first he didn’t understand her words, since she was speaking to him in Polish, but her meaning was clear enough. When she repeated her words, a cold sweat ran down his neck, and a sudden urge to flee this place, and this scary old woman, came over him. “Pray to God,” she said. The thought of saying the Shema in this place, kneeling here . . . what was wrong with him?

  A few months later, when he had completely forgotten about it, he ran into the old Christian woman on his way home from school. He was sure it was the same old woman who had told him to pray in church. He was terrified, and fled from her as if from a great danger. He could never have explained why.

  II

  IT WAS NOT long before the evil impulse came over him once again.

  In Papa Uri’s kitchen there were a couple of old boards in the floor that bent down, off kilter from the rest of the floor. One day, Fayvke, Velvel’s younger brother, got his foot caught in the gap, and fell down hard, screaming to high heaven. Mama Feyge pulled on her headscarf and made an arrangement with Trochim, the Polish carpenter. The next day at six in the morning, the deafening sound of a saw woke Velvel from his child-like slumber.

  Velvel knew: Trochim must have arrived. Quickly he pulled on some clothes. He wanted to see for himself how a floor was fixed, how they fitted the smooth, fresh-smelling new boards to the old ones, to see the shiny long nails flying into the white wood.

  “Up so early, my good man?” Mama Feyge asked him sardonically. “On your way to synagogue for morning prayers?”

  “If it’s impossible to sleep anyway . . . if they’re sawing away like that . . .” Velvel mumbled, washing his hands. Leaving her, he slowly snuck over to where Trochim was working and touched his tool kit, which sent him into a paroxysm of excitement: “Look, Mama, how it shines, how it sparkles!” But Mama Feyge just shot him an irritated look. He was excited by everything he saw: how the sawdust showered down from the saw, how the boards smelled of pitch. Velvel heard the sound of Trochim diligently sawing and hacking behind him, sighing rhythmically as he worked. A sigh and a saw, a sigh and a hack. A minute later he was fulminating over a wayward nail. Velvel took his time, stretching out his breakfast as long as he could before he had to go to school.

  The carpenter cursed him in his own language: “Little boy, stop stuffing yourself and get to school!”

  On the side table his mother used for nonkosher food, Velvel saw Trochim’s dirty bag. He peeked into that too and got excited again, running over and grabbing his mother’s apron. “Mama, look at the strange food he brought! Is this the kind of thing our neighbors eat, Mama? Look, Mama, do you see?”

  “That’s his, that’s his! What’s wrong with you? What do you care what he eats? Get away from there!”

  God, he was so curious. He was practically dying of curiosity and his mother was yelling at him! He pulled himself together and moved away from the bag, so that no one would suspect him. But in truth his mind never left it . . . What could possibly be inside? What sort of thing would someone like Trochim eat? What did Polish food taste like?

  At eight o’clock Trochim put down his saw, untied his satchel and sat down to eat. Velvel was still standing there, and he watched closely, like a cat, as the peasant brought each bite of food to his lips.

  The Pole had brought out of his sack half a loaf of rough soldiers’ bread, a rude knife with a sharp tip that seemed as suited for stabbing people as for slicing food, a small paper packet of salt, and finally—a square of some pale meat threaded with red veins that Trochim regarded intently.

  “Mama, Mama, look! Is that pork?” His heart was pounding with excitement and longing.

  “So what if it is? Get away from there. How many times do I have to tell you not to stare at people while they’re eating?”

  Velvel walked away but continued watching out of the corner of his eye. Trochim had cut his bread and pork into neat squares, flat and inviting. The bread was black and opaque—the meat, white and glistening. One color brought out the other. The tip of Trochim’s nose, his fingers, his teeth, and his knife were smeared with the fat of the forbidden meat that he was eating. He dipped every piece in the coarse salt, grinding like a millstone, and the sound of his chewing filled the house. Velvel imagined they could even hear it outside on the street. Velvel looked at his mother, who stood with her back to the warm oven, hands folded over her belly. She was watching Trochim obliquely and with a little pity, a little disgust, a little mockery, as though she wanted to say:

  “Poor fool, poor fool, what a meal you have for yourself here, poor thing . . .” Lost in thought, she turned aside and spat quietly.

  “I understand,” Velvel thought angrily, upset that he had been driven away not once, but twice. “I understand!” He suspected that even such a pious woman as his mother longed to savor the unknown taste of the forbidden Polish food, just as he did. Her spitting was an act of contrition to God.

  Trochim got to work putting his food away. He ate with grea
t single-mindedness, engrossed in the act and pleasure of eating, like a healthy animal or simple villager.

  Velvel could no longer contain himself. “Mama, I want to eat! Bread with . . . cheese, mama. No, with butter . . .”

  “And what about saying your prayers?” Mama Feyge replied angrily. “Obviously you’re not going to make it to school in time to participate, so you might as well do it here. Pretty soon your father will be back from synagogue, and you better have it done by then!”

  Velvel went into the dining room to say his morning prayers. They had never seemed so long and boring, especially the parts blessing God and thanking God for having made him a Jew, thereby giving him the opportunity to serve Him through observing Jewish law. It seemed to go on forever.

  Meanwhile, Trochim kept eating lustily.

  “Blessed are you O God, ruler of the universe, who did not make me a gentile . . .” Velvel murmured the Hebrew words that he said every morning fluently, while his head was spinning with thoughts of the incredible forbidden taste . . . a flavor that would inspire and invigorate . . . Trochim was so lucky. He could do anything he wanted! He knew all the forbidden secrets. Gentiles had it so good!

  His prayers were interrupted by the sound of Mama Feyge suddenly throwing a fit, yelling at Trochim in a voice fit to wake the dead. Running back into the kitchen, Velvel saw what had happened. Mama Feyge had taken a set of fresh loaves of bread out of the oven, and Trochim, who was used to eating coarse black soldier’s bread, got excited and picked up a fresh brown loaf, sprinkled with caraway seeds, asking Mama Feyge how much it would cost to buy it, smearing pork fat from his hand all over it. Disaster! Now the loaf was completely unkosher—ruined.

  Mama Feyge explained as best she could in her broken Polish that as soon as he touched it with his pork-covered hand, it was forbidden to eat it. Nonkosher! Feh! She could not understand how it occurred to him to just grab a loaf of bread that wasn’t his. In Yiddish she cursed him that his hands should fall off.