The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl and Motl, the Cantor's Son

by Sholem Aleichem

  The woman tucked me in, left the room, and locked the door from outside. Old Luria rose and paced back and forth with his hands behind his back. He looked down at his slippers and hummed to himself and had this strange frown on his face. I was so sleepy my eyes shut by themselves. Suddenly he came over and said:

  “You know, I’m going to eat you.”

  I opened my eyes and stared.

  “Get up! I’m going to eat you.”

  “Who? Me?”

  “You! You! I have to eat you. It’s only logical.”

  That’s what he said to me. Then he went back to frowning and pacing, head down and hands behind his back. He was talking more softly now, as though to himself. I held my breath and listened. He kept asking questions and answering them:

  “The Rambam says the universe was created. What is the proof? The proof is that every consequence has its cause. And how can this be demonstrated? It can be demonstrated by the power of my will. In what way? By eating him! What are the counterarguments? Compassion? But compassion has nothing to do with it. It’s purely a matter of will. The will must will something. And I will to eat him. I will eat him, I must! …”

  A fine state of affairs! Old Luria was going to eat me. What would my mother say? I shook so hard from fear that the couch moved from the wall. Little by little, I worked my way into the space that this made and dropped to the floor. My teeth were chattering. I wasn’t long for the world. How could he do such a thing? I cried for my mother, the silent tears rolling down my cheeks and into my mouth. They tasted salty. I had never wanted her so badly. And I missed my brother Elye, though not as much as I missed our neighbor’s calf Menye. I thought of my father too. I was still saying the kaddish for him. Who would say it for me when I was eaten?

  I must have slept well because I awoke with a start. I touched the wall and then the couch and peeked out to see where I was. The big room was full of light. The nubby rug was still on the floor and the pictures were still on the walls. Old Luria was reading the big book he called the Rambam. I liked that name. It sounded like a bell.

  Suddenly I remembered the night before. Suppose he still wanted to eat me? I dove back into my hiding place as quietly as I could. Soon a key scraped and the door opened. It was High Society with Khaneh the cook, carrying a tray. On it was coffee, a pitcher of hot milk, and fresh butter rolls.

  “Where’s the young man?” Khaneh asked, looking around.

  She spotted me.

  “A proper rascal you are, I declare! What are you doing down there? Come with me to the kitchen. Your mother is waiting.”

  I leaped from my hiding place and bounded barefoot down the padded stairs, singing ram-bam, bim-bam, ram-bam, bim-bam all the way to the kitchen.

  “Where are you rushing off to?” I heard Khaneh ask my mother. “Let the boy have some coffee with a butter roll. And you might as well have some, too. No one will hold it against you. We’re not about to run out of food.”

  My mother thanked her and sat down. We were brought hot, delicious coffee and fresh butter rolls.

  Have you ever eaten sugared egg cookies? That’s how good those rolls were. Maybe better. And the coffee! I can’t begin to describe it. A taste of Paradise! My mother perked up with each sip and gave me half her butter roll.

  You would have thought Khaneh had been knifed. “What are you doing?” she cried. “Eat, eat! There’s plenty for everyone!”

  She handed me another roll. That made two and a half. While I ate I listened to them talk. It sounded pretty familiar. My mother spoke about being a widow with two sons, one swimming in chicken fat and the other the poor little fellow sitting next to her. I tried to picture Elye in a pond of fat. How big was it? How did it get there?

  Khaneh listened and shook her head. After a while she began to gripe about her own luck. She had always been her father’s favorite and now she had to cook for others. Her father had been a wealthy man until he was ruined by a fire and took sick. Next thing, he died. To think of him rising from the grave and seeing his Khaneh slaving away at a stranger’s oven! Not that she had any reason to complain. She had a good job. The one thing wrong with it was old Luria. He was a bit …but I never found out what old Luria was a bit of. Khaneh put a finger to her forehead and now it was my mother’s turn to shake her head.

  Then my mother talked some more and the head that shook was Khaneh’s again. When we left, she gave me another butter roll. I showed it to the boys at school and they stood watching me eat it with big eyes. A person would think they’d never seen a butter roll before! I gave each of them a little piece and they licked their fingers after eating it.

  “Where did you get that from?”

  I popped the last piece in my mouth and chewed and swallowed it while sticking my hands in my stiff pockets and doing a barefoot jig. If it had had words, they would have been:

  “What a bunch of beggars! A butter roll, big deal! You should try it with coffee some time. Then you’d know what a taste of Paradise is!”

  SWIMMING IN CHICKEN FAT

  Now that old Luria’s is history, all that keeps my mother going is my brother Elye. Thank God he’s still swimming in chicken fat! That’s what my mother says, wiping her eyes as usual—this time with a bit of pleasure. Elye, she says, is set for life. Not that his wife is anything to write home about. (I happen to agree with that.) But Elye has a rich father-in-law, Yoyneh the baker. Yoyneh doesn’t do the baking himself. He has bakers for that. He buys flour and sells bagels. On Passover he bakes matsos for all Kasrilevke. He’s a fiend about his bakery. In fact, he’s a fiend, period. Watch out for him.

  He’s a maniac, Yoyneh is. Once he nabbed me while I was with Elye. I had just helped myself to an egg bagel—a hot one, fresh from the oven. Don’t ask me what got into him, but all of a sudden he had the face of a murderer with these I’ll-settle-your-hash-for-you eyes. I never went back to his bakery. I wouldn’t go there again if you paid me. What kind of Jew grabs you by the collar and boots you through the door with three swift kicks?

  I told my mother, who went running to give Yoyneh a piece of her mind. Elye saw her and stopped her. He actually took Yoyneh’s side! He said I was a disgrace who did nothing but eat bagels all day long. If I had to eat bagels, Elye said, he would give me a kopeck to buy one. My mother told him he had no pity for an orphan. Elye said being an orphan didn’t give you the right to anyone’s bagels. My mother told Elye to pipe down. Elye said he would shout as loud as he pleased and let the world know I was a thief.

  That’s one word my mother can’t stand. She turned every color and told Elye to remember there’s a God above. God is not to be trifled with. There’s nothing he doesn’t see. He’s the father of all orphans and stands up for them and Yoyneh the bagel maker wouldn’t be worth the price of a bagel without him. That’s what she told my brother Elye. She took my hand and slammed the door and we went home.

  Didn’t I say don’t trifle with God? Listen to what happened to Yoyneh. I’ve already told you he didn’t do his own baking. He had workers, two men and three women.

  Well, something began to go wrong. I mean, a lot of things did. Yoyneh’s customers started complaining that his bagels had feathers and ribbons and cockroaches and bits of glass in them. Then some Christian found a big black hairball. A Christian is no joke, especially when he threatens to go to the police.

  There was an investigation to see whose hair it was. The men blamed the women and the women blamed the men. The women said they were blondes, all three of them. The men said that no man had such long hairs. Then the women started to quarrel among themselves and more charming facts came to light. One of them had baked a sock band in a hallah. Another had dropped a bandage into some dough. A third had used a ball of dough as a pillow. Naturally, she denied it. She swore to God it was a lie, and anyway, she had only done it once or twice. It was Yoyneh’s fault for not giving her a pillow.

  The town was in an uproar. Yoyneh was making in his pants. All his hollering to high heaven d
idn’t help. No one wanted to touch his bagels. Everyone said they weren’t fit for the dogs. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer fellow.

  Yoyneh was no pushover, though. He fired the bakers, men and women alike, and hired others in their place. On Saturday he had an announcement made in all the synagogues that he had a new staff and would be personally responsible for the hygiene. He even offered a ten-ruble reward for any hairs found in his bagels. Business picked up again. Everyone was looking for a hair. No one found one and anyone who did was told by Yoyneh that he had planted it himself. Just what you’d expect from a slick operator! But God was keeping score and struck again.

  One fine morning Yoyneh’s new bakers woke up, took their things, and walked out. They wouldn’t come back for love or money—not unless he raised them a ruble a week, let them sleep at home, and promised to stop knocking their teeth out. That was something he had a habit of doing when he was sore.

  Yoyneh lost his temper. In all his years of running a bakery, no one had ever told him who to slug. And a raise was out of the question. For every worker he fired, he said, ten were waiting in line to be hired. Hungry workers were not a rare commodity.

  But when Yoyneh went to look for more bakers, he couldn’t find a single one. No one wanted to work for him. All the bakers had banded together. They said he had to take back the workers he had fired and meet all three of their demands: (1) A ruble raise; (2) Sleeping-at-home rights; (3) No more knocking out teeth.

  It was a grand sight to watch Yoyneh froth at the mouth, bang on the table, and curse a blue streak. Revenge is sweet. But that’s nothing compared to what came next.

  It was a hot summer day. The melon season had just begun. That’s the best time of the year. After it come the High Holy Days. Forgive me for saying so, but I could do without them. I’d rather have fun than be high and holy. And what’s more fun than a market full of melons? Wherever you look, there’s a honeydew or a watermelon. The honeydews are yellow inside. The watermelons are red with little black pits and sweet as honey.

  My mother’s not wild about watermelon. She says honeydew is thriftier. A watermelon, she says, fills your stomach with water while a honeydew is breakfast, lunch, and dinner for two. She’s dead wrong about that. If I were the Tsar I’d eat nothing but bread and watermelon all year round. I don’t even mind the seeds. Give your melon a shake and they fall right out and you can eat all you want. Boy oh boy!

  But all this talk of watermelon has gotten me off the subject. I was telling you about Yoyneh the bagel maker. Was he in for it! No one dreamed it was coming. There we were at the table, my mother and I, eating bread and honeydew, when who opens the door and walks in but Elye, holding my father’s Bible. His wife Brokheh is dragging after him. In one hand she has a fur stole with a tail and in the other a pour-through. That’s a kind of noodle sieve. Elye is white as a sheet. Brokheh is red as fire.

  “Mother-in-law, we’ve come to live with you,” Brokheh says.

  “We barely made it here alive, Mama,” says Elye.

  The two sit themselves down and have a good cry with some help from my mother. I try imagining what could have happened. A fire? A fight? Forget it! Yoyneh the bagel maker is bankrupt. That means he’s gone bust. His creditors came, wrote down the worth of all he owned, and carried it off down to the last feather. They took everything in his house, the house included, and rubbed his nose in the dirt. I mean they begged his pardon for cleaning him out and told him to scram.

  “God almighty!” my mother said, wringing her hands. “What happened to all his money? He was a wealthy man.”

  My brother Elye started explaining that Yoyneh wasn’t as wealthy as all that. Before he could get very far, though, Brokheh butted in and said the opposite. She should only be worth, she told my mother, what her father had been. So what happened to all his money? He spent it on her wedding.

  The wedding cost a fortune. Brokheh likes to talk about it. In fact, it’s all she ever talks about. There’s never been, she says, a wedding like it. The pastries, the roasts, the tortes, the honey cakes, the strudels, the breads, the jams and the jellies—all for her wedding!

  Now the wedding is over and Brokheh owns a fur stole and a noodle sieve. Naturally, she and Elye can forget the dowry Yoyneh promised them. Elye can also forget his good Sabbath clothes, his prayer shawl, and his linens. His silver watch, too. A shipwreck would have left him with more. My mother is beside herself. A calamity! Who would have thought it? Everyone envied her son’s marriage. Someone must have put a hex on her—or else she did it herself with her big mouth. Either way, she’s the main victim.

  “When the chicken fat runs out, all that’s left is an empty hole. You’ll live with me, son, until God has pity.”

  That’s what my mother said, offering Brokheh her bed—the one piece of furniture we had left.

  MY BROTHER ELYE’S SOFT DRINK

  One ruble gets you a hundred!

  Buy our book for a ruble plus postage and earn

  a hundred or more a month. Don’t waste another minute!

  Step right up and see what’s in it!

  That’s what my brother Elye read in a newspaper soon after leaving his father-in-law’s. He had been promised three years’ free board by Brokheh’s parents and had barely lived with them for three months. But I’ve already told you all that. I don’t like to repeat myself unless asked.

  But this time even asking wouldn’t help because I’m too busy making money. I have to make the rounds with a soft drink manufactured by my brother Elye. He learned to make it from the book advertised in the paper. The minute he read about it he sent off his last ruble and told my mother her worries were over.

  “Mama! Thank God we’re saved! From now on we’ll be in money up to here.”

  Elye raised a hand to his throat.

  “What happened?” my mother asked. “Have you found a job?”

  “Better than that,” Elye answered, his eyes bright. He told my mother to wait until the book arrived.

  “What book is that?” she asked.

  “A book to end all books!” Elye said. Would she settle for an income of a hundred rubles a month?

  My mother laughed and said she’d settle for that much a year—in the bank. Elye told her to think big and went off to the post office. He went to the post office every day to ask for his book. A week had gone by since mailing the ruble and there still was no sign of it. Meanwhile, we had to live. “You can’t just spit out your soul when you’ve had enough,” my mother said.

  Now why would anyone want to do a thing like that?

  The book at last! We unwrapped it and Elye sat down to read. Hoo-ha, the things that were in it! Every way of making money you could think of. There was a hundred-ruble-a-month formula for the best ink. Hundred-a-month directions for the finest shoe polish. A hundred-a-month mouse-cockroach-and-bug killer. Hundred-a-month recipes for liqueurs, lemonade, soda water, barley beer, and other drinks.

  Elye chose barley beer. In the first place, from drinks you could make even more than a hundred a month; the book said so itself. And besides, why fool around with ink, shoe polish, and cockroach killers? The one question was which drink to choose. Liqueurs called for capital like Rothschild’s. For soda water you needed a special machine, a thingamajig that cost a fortune. Barley beer was the best bet.

  Barley beer is a drink that costs next to nothing to make and sells well—especially in a hot summer like this one. We have a Jew in our town, Borukh the barley beer maker, who’s made a pile from selling it in bottles. Borukh’s barley beer is world famous. It explodes from the bottle as though shot from a gun. Only Borukh knows its secret. Some say he doctors it with gunpowder. Others say raisins. Or hops. Comes summertime, he doesn’t have enough hands to count his money with.

  The barley beer Elye makes from his book isn’t bottled. It doesn’t explode, either. But it is special. I can’t tell you how it’s made because Elye won’t let anyone watch him making it. He pours the water and shuts him
self up in my mother’s room and measures out the other ingredients. No one—not me, not my mother, not even Brokheh—is allowed in. But if you can keep a secret, I’ll tell you what’s in it. That much I know.

  Here goes, then: one lemon peel, some treacle, a sort of vinegar called crumby tartar, and lots of water. Water is the main ingredient. It takes the place of the barley. You stir everything with a corncob, or just a plain stick, and the barley beer is ready. Then you pour it in a jug and add some ice. It’s the ice that does it. Elye’s drink isn’t worth beans without it. You won’t find that in the book. I learned it the hard way. I tried drinking some warm barley beer and thought I was going to die.

  The first batch of barley beer was finished. Now I had to sell it. Who else was there? It was beneath Elye’s dignity. After all, he’s a married man. And we could hardly let my mother run around the market and shout: “Barley beer! Jews, get your barley beer!” The job was mine by unanimous decision. That was fine with me. In fact, I was tickled pink. Elye showed me what to do. I had to hold the jug in one hand and a glass in the other and chant:

  Jews, have a drink,

  A kopeck a glass!

  It’s cold and it’s sweet!

  Get our brew while it lasts!

  I’ve told you I have a good voice, a soprano I got from my father. I just confused the words, so that they came out:

  Sweet barley beer,

  A kopeck a Jew!

  It’s cold and it’s fresh!

  Be the last for our brew!

  I don’t know if that’s what did it, or if our barley beer was really that good, or if it just happened to be a hot day, but I sold out my first jug in half an hour and went home with fifty kopecks in my pocket. Elye gave the money to my mother and refilled the jug. Five or six rounds a day like that, he said, six days a week, and we’d clear our hundred rubles a month. The overhead was next to nothing. The only expensive item was the ice.