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

by Sholem Aleichem

  I jumped out of bed and dressed quickly. My mother was in tears. (When wasn’t she?) Brokheh was furious. (When wasn’t she?) Elye stood in the middle of the room with his head down like a cow being milked. What was the matter? Plenty!

  All hell had broken loose when the neighbors rose that morning. Help! Murder! One man had ink on his wall. Another had ink on his new fence. Someone’s white goats had turned black. We might have wriggled out of it even then if not for the slaughterer’s socks. A new pair of white socks, hung by his wife on the neighbor’s fence—ruined! I ask you: who told her to go hang his socks there?

  My mother promised to buy her a new pair if she calmed down. And the wall? And the fence? It was agreed that my mother and Brokheh would take two brushes and some whitewash and paint over the stains.

  “You’re lucky to have such good neighbors. If that ink had ended up in the Doct’ress’ garden, you would know what the fear of God was!” So Pesye said to my mother.

  “Who says you need luck to be lucky?” my mother answered, looking at me.

  Search me what that means.

  “I’ve learned my lesson,” Elye said. “Tonight we’ll take the rest of the bottles to the river.”

  That’s quick thinking or else I’m not a Jew! I’d like to see you show me quicker. All the junk in the world ends up in the river anyway. Folks do their wash there, scrub their horses, clean their pigs. The river and I are old friends. I’ve already told you how I catch fish in it. I couldn’t wait to start dumping ink.

  As soon as it was dark we filled a pillow case with bottles, carried it down to the river, poured out the ink, took home the empties, and filled the pillow case again. It took us all night. I’ve never had a grander one.

  Just picture it. The town is fast asleep. The sky is full of stars. The moon is shining on the river. It’s so quiet it’s a joy.

  The river has a life of its own. It’s liveliest after Passover, when the ice breaks up and it rips and tumbles along. After that it starts to shrink. By the end of summer it’s fallen asleep. The mud at the bottom goes bulla bulla bulla and the frogs sit and talk from bank to bank. It’s a poor excuse for a river then. Honest, I can cross it with my pants on.

  All our ink made that river a little bigger. A thousand bottles of ink is no joke. We worked like oxen and slept like the dead in the morning. My mother was sobbing when she woke us.

  “I’m ruined! What have you done to the river?”

  Kasrilevke had been struck by a disaster. There was nowhere to do the wash, nowhere for the horses to drink, nowhere for the water carriers to get their water—and everyone was blaming us. That was my mother’s wake-up news. We didn’t wait to hear any more. We didn’t want to find out how an angry water carrier took his revenge. We lit out, my brother Elye and I, for Elye’s friend Pinye.

  “Let them look for us there if they want to!”

  That’s what Elye said, taking my hand and running down the hill to Pinye’s. Pinye is someone you should meet. He’s worth being introduced to. He’s a pretty quick thinker himself.

  THE STREET THAT SNEEZED

  Would you like to know our latest business? It’s mice. My brother Elye spent the whole week reading One Ruble Gets You a Hundred. Now he’s an expert on exterminating mice, cockroaches, and other pests. Rats too. Just let him loose with his powder and the mice are done for. If they don’t run for their lives, they’ll lie down and croak on the spot. Don’t ask me how he does it. It’s a secret. Only the book and Elye know. Elye keeps the book in his breast pocket. The powder is in a packet of paper. It’s pink and grainy like snuff and called “shemeritsi.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Turkish pepper.”

  “What’s Turkish pepper?”

  “Any more whats out of you and I’ll make a door handle of your head.”

  That’s what he said to me, Elye. He doesn’t like to be bothered when he’s working. I stopped asking and watched. He had another powder too. It was also good against mice, he said, but it had to be handled with care.

  “It’s death itself,” Elye told my mother, Brokheh, and me a hundred times. Especially me. If I knew what was good for me, I’d keep away from it.

  Our first experiment was on Pesye’s mice. Pesye has more mice than you can count. You know her husband, Moyshe the bookbinder. Their house is full of books. There’s nothing a mouse likes better. I mean, it’s not so much the books that the mouse likes. It’s the glue in the bindings. A mouse will eat a whole book just to get at the glue. Mice cause Moyshe a lot of damage. Not long ago they made a hole in a High Holy Day prayer book, right where it said “God is King” in big letters. By the time they were done with God, nothing was left but the top of the “K.”

  “Just let me at them for one night,” my brother Elye begged the binder. Moyshe didn’t want to. He said: “I’m afraid you’ll ruin the books.”

  “How can I ruin them?” Elye asked.

  “I don’t know. But you will. They’re not mine.”

  Go talk to a bookbinder! It wasn’t easy to get him to agree to even one night.

  The first night didn’t go too well. We didn’t catch a single mouse. Elye said that was a good sign. It meant the mice had smelled the poison and run away. Moyshe wagged his head with a one-lipped smile. You could see he didn’t believe us.

  Pretty soon the news got out that we were expert exterminators. It started with Pesye, who went to the market that morning and told the whole town we were the world’s best mice-ridders. Pesye is out to make a name for us. Back in the days when we made barley beer, she touted it all over Kasrilevke. Then we switched to ink and she spread the word that we made an ink to beat all. Not that it did any good, because who needed ink? But mice are something else. Everyone’s got them. There’s hardly a house without them.

  Of course, every house has a cat too. But how many mice can a single cat take on? And especially, if the mice are rats. Cats scare a rat as much as the Book of Esther scares Haman. I’ve even heard it said that the cats are more frightened than the rats. At least that’s Bereh the shoemaker’s opinion. The stories he tells about rats are terrifying. Some people think he exaggerates. But even if he’s telling only half the truth, that’s enough. He says his rats once ate a pair of new boots in a single sitting. He swears to it by so many oaths you’d have to believe him even if he was a Christian. He saw it with his own eyes, he says. Two big rats came out of their hole at night and ate the boots. He was too frightened to come close, since they were as big as dogs, so he whistled, stomped, and shouted “Scat!” to drive them off. Nothing worked. The rats went on chewing even when he threw a shoe heel at them. Then he threw the cat and they jumped on her and ate her. No one believes him. It’s a fact, though. Bereh said it under oath.

  “Just give me one night with them,” Elye told Bereh. “You won’t have a single rat left.”

  “My pleasure,” Bereh said. “I do appreciate it.”

  We spent the whole night at Bereh the shoemaker’s. Bereh sat up with us. Does he have some swell stories! He told us about the war against Turkey. Bereh served in the Russian army. He was stationed in a place called Plevne and the Turks were shooting at him with cannon. To give you an idea of the size of them, one cannon ball is bigger than a house. Each cannon fires a thousand balls per second—and just for the record, you can go deaf from a single one.

  One night, Bereh says, he was standing guard when he heard a big bang and went flying high above the clouds, where he saw a cannon ball burst into pieces. It was sheer luck, he says, that he landed on soft earth and didn’t squash his brain. My brother Elye listened with his eyebrows. I mean, his eyebrows were the only part of him that laughed. That’s a strange way to laugh, let me tell you. But Bereh didn’t notice. He kept telling the grandest stories, one scarier than another. We stayed up all night. Rats? We never saw any.

  “You’re a wizard!” Bereh said to my brother in the morning. He went and told the whole town that we had a magic charm that drove his ra
ts away in one night. Blow him down if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes! My brother Elye said abracadabra and the rats jumped from their holes, lit out down the hill, and swam across the river the devil knows where.

  “Are you the exterminators?” Every day a new customer shows up and asks us to charm away his mice.

  Elye is an honest man. He doesn’t like to fib. He says we use a powder not a charm. The mice smell it and run.

  “A powder, a charm—just get rid of my mice! How much does it cost?”

  Elye doesn’t like to bargain. He has one price for the powder and one price for his work. Both get higher every day. It’s not Elye who raises them, it’s Brokheh.

  “What are you waiting for?” she says. “If you’re going to eat pork, do it till the fat runs down your chin. And if you’re an exterminator, get paid like one.”

  “What about honesty? What about God?” my mother asks.

  “Honesty? So much for honesty!” (Brokheh gives the oven a kick.) “God? So much for God!” (Brokheh gives a pillow a smack.)

  “Brokheh! What are you saying?! What’s gotten into you?!”

  My mother shrieks and wrings her hands.

  “Leave the fat cow alone!” Elye says, pacing and playing with his beard. He’s got a pretty nice beard by now. It’s grown like nobody’s business. The more he plays with it, the faster it grows. It grows kind of funny, though. I mean, it’s all on his chin and his throat. The rest of his face has no hair. I’ll bet you’ve never seen a beard like that.

  Call Brokheh a fat cow and you’d normally end up seeing stars. But this time she kept her mouth shut. That’s because Elye is making money. When Elye makes money, Brokheh treats him like a king. And being his assistant, I’m somebody too. Brokheh used to call me “Tagalong.” And “Stumblebum.” And “Beggarguts.” Now I’m Mottele.

  “Mottele! Fetch me those shoes.”

  “Mottele! Bring a quart of water.”

  “Mottele! Take out the garbage.”

  Make money and you’re treated differently.

  The thing with Elye is that he likes to think big. If it’s barley beer, it’s by the barrel. If it’s ink, it’s a thousand bottles. If it’s rat poison, it’s a whole sack. “What do you need all that poison for?” Moyshe asked. Did Elye give it to him! Leave it to Elye to go off and saddle me with that sack instead of locking it in the closet.

  I suppose you want to know what made me ride it like a hobbyhorse. Well, I’ve always wanted a horse. How was I to know the sack would burst and yellow stuff would pop out of it? I could have passed out just from the smell. As soon as I bent to clean up, I began to sneeze. I sneezed as though I had a snuff box up my nose. Hoping the sneezing would stop, I ran outside. Some chance!

  Just then my mother passed by. “What’s the matter?” she asked, seeing me sneeze. All I could say was Ah-chooo! And Ah-chooo and Ah-chooo and Ah-chooo.

  “Lord-a-mercy! Where did you catch such a cold?” my mother asked, wringing her hands. Since I couldn’t stop sneezing, I pointed to the house. She went inside and came back sneezing worse than me.

  Along came my brother Elye and saw us both. “What’s going on?” he asked. My mother pointed to the house. Elye went to have a look and came running out sore as hell.

  “Who broke the …Ah-chooo! Ah-chooo! Ah-chooo!”

  I hadn’t seen Elye so angry in ages. He went for me with both hands. If he hadn’t been sneezing so hard, I’d have ended up a cripple.

  Now Brokheh passed by and saw the three of us sneezing like crazy.

  “What’s with you?” she asked. “What are you all sneezing for?”

  What can I tell you? No one could say a word. We just pointed to the house. Brokheh went inside, ran out red as a beet, and laid into my brother Elye:

  “How many times do I have to …Ah-chooo! Ah-chooo! Ah-chooo!”

  That brought our neighbor Pesye. All we could do was point to the house. A minute later she ran out of it.

  “What kind of …Ah-chooo! Ah-chooo! Ah-chooo!”

  Pesye stood waving her arms. Moyshe came to see why, stared at the five of us, and burst out laughing.

  “You’re a sight for sore eyes!”

  “Maybe you could …Ah-chooo! Ah-chooo! Ah-chooo!” We all pointed to the house.

  Moyshe went inside. He came out laughing even harder.

  “I can tell you what your problem is. I took a pinch of it. It’s shemi …Ah-chooo! Ah-chooo! Ah-chooo!”

  He grabbed his sides and started to sneeze. With each sneeze he took a hop, landing on the tips of his toes and balancing there for a second before taking off again with the next sneeze. In no time all our neighbors and their wives and their children and their cousins and their uncles and their aunts and their friends were sneezing too, lined up from one end of the street to the other.

  My brother Elye was good and worried. What worried him most was the thought of all those sneezes being blamed on him. He grabbed my hand and we ran to Pinye’s house. It took half an hour to stop sneezing. Then Elye told Pinye the whole story. Pinye listened like a doctor to a patient. When Elye was finished he said:

  “All right. Now show me the book.”

  Elye took the book from his pocket and handed it to Pinye. Pinye began reading the first page. One ruble gets you a hundred! With nothing but your own two hands, you’ll soon be making a hundred rubles a month as though by magic …He took the book and threw it in the oven. Elye lunged for it. Pinye grabbed him and said:

  “Easy there! Where are your manners?”

  Before long Elye’s book was a heap of ashes. Only one page was not completely burned. You could still make out the word “Shemeritsi” on it.

  OUR FRIEND PINYE

  You may remember my wanting you to meet Pinye. I said he was a quick thinker. Before I introduce him, though, I’d better tell you about his grandfather, his father, and his uncle. Don’t worry, I’ll make it short. I’ll start with his grandfather.

  You’ve never heard of Reb Hesye the glazier? That’s Pinye’s grandfather. He’s a glazier, mirror maker, painter, and tobacconist all in one. Nowadays he makes and sells snuff. As long as you’re alive and kicking, he says, you should work and be independent. He’s a tall, thin fellow with red eyes and a monster nose, broad below and curved like a shofar on top. I’ll bet it got that way from taking snuff. He’s still pretty sharp, even though he’s a hundred years old. Some say he has more brains than both his sons put together. That’s Hirsh-Leyb the mechanic and Shneyur the watchmaker.

  Hirsh-Leyb the mechanic is Pinye’s father. He’s tall and thin like Reb Hesye with the same monster nose, even though he doesn’t take snuff. He’s an oven mechanic. That means he makes ovens. They all say he has a good head on his shoulders. It sure is a big one with an enormous forehead. Hirsh-Leyb, they say, could learn any trade and be tops at it. There’s nothing he can’t figure out. He even says so himself. One look at anything is all he needs.

  Hirsh-Leyb taught himself to make ovens. He did it by watching Ivan Pichkor the oven maker and almost dying of laughter. The poor goy, he said, didn’t know the first thing about ovens. Hirsh-Leyb went home, took apart his old oven, and built a new one from the same bricks. It smoked so badly that he nearly choked, so he took it apart and made another. A couple of tries later he was a famous mechanic.

  Hirsh-Leyb has invented an oven that holds its heat for eight whole days. If he had the materials, he says, he could build it. Just give him the right sort of tiles and he’ll make an oven you’d pay to see. An oven, he says, takes more brains than a watch. That’s a dig at his brother Shneyur.

  Hirsh-Leyb’s brother is younger and even taller and has the same nose. He’s a watchmaker. With a mind like his, they say, he could have been a rabbi or a teacher or a slaughterer. That’s how good a student he was. But he wanted to be a watchmaker. Why a watchmaker? It’s like this.

  To listen to Shneyur, he was always figuring things out, even as a boy. For example, he thought a lot about locks. Why did on
e lock open with three twists to the right and another with three twists to the left? What made a clock tick? How come it chimed when the hour hand reached twelve?

  The first time Shneyur saw a cuckoo clock, he nearly went out of his mind. It had been given to his father by a retired colonel in payment for some work. Every hour a door opened and out came a bird and said, “Cuckkoo!” It looked real enough to be alive. Even the cat was fooled. It went for that bird every time it appeared.

  Shneyur swore he would find out how that clocked worked. One day when no one was home he took it down from the wall, unscrewed all its screws, and emptied out its insides. His father beat him so hard that he was given up for dead. To this day, he says, you can see the marks. That didn’t stop him from becoming a watchmaker, though. I don’t know if he’s the best there is, but he’s cheap and he’s fast.

  Shneyur has repaired my brother’s watch many times. He fixes it at least once a week. Elye has a funny watch. When it isn’t running faster than a madman, it’s four hours slow or has stopped completely. Go get it to start again! Elye would look for another watchmaker if he wasn’t afraid of hurting Pinye’s feelings. Pinye says it’s the watch’s fault, not his Uncle Shneyur’s. It’s simple logic, he says. If the watch were a normal watch, any watchmaker could fix it. Since it isn’t, what difference does the watchmaker make?

  You can’t argue with that.

  Pinye has a head like his father’s and his uncle’s. He has their nose too. His whole family is nosey. His Aunt Kreine’s daughter Malka has a nose that’s beyond belief. Actually, it’s more the face that her nose is on. It isn’t quite human. It looks more like a bird’s or an animal’s. She’s ashamed to go into the street with it. Lord-a-mercy!

  Although Pinye looks like Malka, he’s a man. It doesn’t matter so much what a man looks like. Still, you can’t help laughing at the sight of him. Besides being tall and thin with a pair of long ears and a neck like a gander’s, he’s nearsighted. He’s always bumping into you. Watch out for your feet when he gets up to leave a room. One pants leg is hiked up, one sock is falling down, his shirt is rumpled, and his tie is never where it should be. He talks with a wheeze and sucks on candies. He always has something in his mouth.