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Authors: Isaac Bashevis Singer

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A Hasidic rebbe, whom I portrayed in my book
In My Father's Court,
lived on our street. But one day a new rebbe moved in. While the first was a grandson of the Kozhenitzer Rebbe, this one, from the provinces, was connected to the Kotzk court and related to the Rebbe of Kotzk's family.
The new rebbe had come to pay my father a visit. Short, young, with a little blond beard, he wore a tattered silk gaberdine and a shabby high fur hat.
The fact that this new rebbe had moved to a street where a rebbe already lived was considered an improper act of competition. But where should a rebbe live? There was no need for them in the gentile quarter, and a Hasidic rebbe had already established his residence on the Jewish street.
The other Hasidic rebbe was already old, eighty or more. What did an old man need? But the new rebbe had a young wife and a houseful of children: girls with braids and boys with sidecurls down to their shoulders. Unlike the old rebbe, the new one was a scholar. He could have been a rebbe with a court of
followers, but where could one find Hasidim for so many rebbes? So he just remained what people called a “grandson” or a “descendant” of a noted rebbe.
To succeed in a trade one must have luck, but it was immediately apparent that the young rebbe had no
mazel.
He looked too refined, too wise, too aristocratic for the simple women on the street. No one came to him. No one believed that he could intervene with God on their behalf. The old rebbe, then, had nothing to fear: the new one took no one away from him.
The new rebbe wanted me to befriend his little boys, and I went to play with them. The rooms in the apartment were half empty. A young woman, her head covered with a silk kerchief, was puttering around in the kitchen. The little girls were teaching each other the
aleph-beys
and copying lines of Hebrew script from a penmanship manual. The boys were swaying over Talmuds. Everything was fine and orderly in the apartment, but no one visited. No one knocked on the door. When someone
did
knock, it was a beggar going from door to door. The rebbetzin gave him a groschen or a piece of sugar.
The rebbe, who had a pale face, blue eyes, and a high forehead, wandered about the apartment in a silk robe. He had all the attributes of a Hasidic rebbe: fine familial lineage, scholarly ability, a talent for preaching and sharing the bread at his table, and perhaps even for producing a miraculous feat. But no one needed him. All the bankruptcy of the Hasidic courts radiated out of him.
One day the rebbe came to talk to Father. Sitting at the table, he said, “The Jews in your street have no regard for me.”
“They don't come to you?”
“They don't even stick their nose in the door.”
“They don't need us,” Father said in sympathy, using the plural.
“The waters have risen up to here,” the rebbe said, quoting the psalms, pointing to his thin throat, long and white as a girl's.
“Can I help you in any way?” Father asked.
“No, no.”
Mother brought in the usual glass of tea and Sabbath biscuits. The rebbe held the glass with long, thin fingers. He looked at Mother with his kindly Jewish eyes, which seemed to say, Look what's become of us …
Suddenly the rebbe declared, “Rabbi, I'm going to America.”
Father looked confused. “To America?”
“Yes. America.”
“What will you do in America?”
“I'm going to rid myself of humiliation. I'm going to become a tailor.”
Father seemed embarrassed by these words. “Some fine tailor!”
The rebbe took hold of his beard. “What do you think? Will I be a good tailor? In America one doesn't have to sew an entire garment. It's enough if you sew on a button or a loop.”
“It's not for you. Not for you.”
“And is starving with my family any better? ‘Rather skin a carcass in the market,' says the Talmud, ‘than depend on charity.'”
“Still … what about your children?”
“One can also be a Jew in America.”
“Yes, but …”
“In America, people walk around upside down,” I called out.
Father cast a rather angry glance at me. “You're talking nonsense.”
“But I read it in
The Book of the Covenant.”
5
“You read, but you didn't understand,” the rebbe said. He explained that people everywhere walk with their heads up and their feet on the ground. But pertaining to heavenly bodies, one cannot say precisely what is up and what is down. It was clear from the rebbe's words that he had dipped into secular books.
Then Father asked, “Well … do you know any foreign languages?”
“I know Russian, Polish, and German, too.”
“How?”
“I looked into books.”
“Hmmm … it's not a good situation.”
The rebbe kept his word. I don't know how, but he obtained passage for his entire family. A little sign that had hung on the gate stating that the rebbe lived there had been removed. I witnessed a quiet revolution at his house. The rebbetzin removed her silk kerchief and donned a wig. The boys' sidecurls were shortened. The rebbe had discarded his silk gaberdine and now wore a ribbed cotton cloak. It was clear that he was not going to America to be a rebbe but would indeed learn tailoring.
Once, when I went to his house, I saw him reading a newspaper. He even peeked into a novel. It seemed as if he were saying silently: Since God doesn't need me, I don't need Him. The boys ran about, yelling and fooling around, and their father let them. It was strange, but the rebbe's appearance had changed—he looked stronger and more manly. Now he discussed mundane matters with his wife. Then someone knocked on the door and I watched a bizarre scene unfold.
A woman came in and asked, “Does the rebbe live here?”
The rebbetzin asked her what she wanted.
“Alas, my child is very ill!” the woman began crying and wringing her hands.
Instead of her being escorted to the rebbe's study, the rebbe came to see her in the kitchen. He asked her what ailed the child. When she replied, the rebbe said, “Why have you come to me? Go to a doctor.”
“Holy rabbi, first God and then you.”
“I can't help you in any way,” the rebbe said.
“Holy saint!”
“I am not a saint. I'm a plain Jew.”
“Aren't you the rebbe?” The woman stopped crying for a moment.
“I'm a rebbe no longer!”
The woman wanted to give the rebbe a gulden, but he refused to take it, saying, “Take the gulden, see a doctor, and buy medicine.”
Just then the youngest boy whispered into my ear: “In America I'm going to cut off my sidecurls.”
“Will your father let you?”
“He himself said so. He's also going to send me to public school.”
“To public school?”
“Yes … public school.”
The rebbe wasn't merely emigrating to America, he was conducting a strike against God. His face expressed rebelliousness and impatience. The look in the rebbetzin's eyes seemed to radiate hatred. And strangely, the rebbe never even came to bid farewell to Father.
Sad news concerning the rebbe soon made its way to us. Someone reported that he had seen the family at the Vienna train station. The rebbetzin was wearing a hat. The boys' sidecurls had been cut off. The rebbe wore Western-style clothes and a fedora in the German fashion.
For a while we heard nothing more and then someone from Brussels wrote a letter to a relative in Warsaw stating that he had met the family there. One of the rebbe's daughters had had an eye problem which needed treatment. The rebbe had eaten in a restaurant that was not glatt kosher, a place where truly pious Jews would not even set foot.
More time passed with no news of the rebbe. Then one of the Jews on our street got a letter from his brother in New York saying that the rebbe was working alongside him in the same shop. He had shaved off his beard. He worked all day long standing next to gentile girls.
Every fresh bit of news was a blow to Father, but he did not get angry. True, one could not wage war against the Almighty, and this rebbe was not conducting himself properly. Nevertheless, sometimes one has to address God with a sharp word. He
shouldn't assume that He can do what He wishes to Jews and they will routinely stretch their necks out for slaughter. If He wants Jews, He should provide them with a livelihood. If He wants Torah and Yiddishkeit, He should see to it that they are held in high regard.
In fact, while Father didn't articulate this, one could see in his eyes something akin to triumph mingled with sorrow. It seemed to me that Father's thoughts went something like this: If such a fine young man from such a glorious family lineage could abandon the straight and narrow path, it would be noted in heaven that the situation of the Jews was critical and that the Messiah would have to come.
I, too, was pleased with this news. It showed that everything was falling apart. Who knows? Perhaps they would also let me cut off my sidecurls. Perhaps Father, too, would go to America. I had a strong desire to go somewhere—every time I heard a train whistle, the longing was reawakened. In my fantasy I saw the rebbe in a factory, bareheaded, clean-shaven, a gentile girl on either side of him. The rebbe was sewing buttons, singing a song like the ones the journeymen sang in their workshops. The rebbetzin's hair was not covered. Their sons, my friends, went to public school and wrote on the Sabbath. Who knows, perhaps they even ate unkosher food. I fancied that when the rebbe came home from work, the rebbetzin told him, Today I cooked noodles and ham …
A year or more must have passed. Then out of the blue we got a letter from the rebbe declaring that it had indeed been his ambition to be a worker. For a long time he had slaved away at the factory, but he didn't have the strength for it. Then someone
suggested that he study slaughtering. The rebbe wrote to Father asking him to send him the slaughterer's handbook,
Tevuos Shor.
The letter pleased Father and he showed it to the men in the Hasidic
shtibl.
“See, he's a scion of the pious, after all,” he said.
But I didn't take kindly to that sort of submissiveness. I wanted the rebbe to convert. I wanted his boys to become Christians. I was overflowing with modern rebelliousness and a mad desire for upheaval, extraordinary news, weird changes. I dreamed that the moon had fallen, the sun was extinguished, an earthquake had rocked Warsaw—even that the hill in Krashinsky Park suddenly started to spew fire and become what
The Book of the Covenant
called a volcano.
“Papa, how would you look without a beard?” I once asked Father.
Father cast a frightened look at me. “Don't talk nonsense!”
I imagined Father without a beard, without a mustache, and wearing a straw hat, checkered trousers, and yellow shoes. I began laughing and crying at once. A pair of scissors or a razor could have made Father beardless. Just trimming down Father's gaberdine would make him look fashionably German. He, too, could have been placed among gentile girls and been told to sew buttons … Suddenly I took hold of Father's beard and tugged it.
“What are you doing, you rascal!” Father scolded me good-naturedly.
A horrible thought took hold of me: he could have been converted, too, God forbid … Father could have become a gentile. A cold chill ran through me and a lump knotted my throat. Anything could happen to a human being. A man could even be
slaughtered like an animal and his flesh chopped on a butcher block.
“Why are you looking at me like that? What are you thinking? Why aren't you studying?” Father asked me.
I kissed Father on the forehead. “Stay the way you are!”
 
 
One sees all kinds of unhappy people in the course of one's life, but the young couple I will now depict were unhappy in an unusual way. It wasn't until years later that I began to understand what had happened.
It began with the couple getting married in our apartment. Since both were short, they looked younger than they really were. He was a tinsmith, and she had once been a housemaid. He was swarthy, Oriental-looking, and prematurely balding, with a high forehead. His coal-black eyes had a strange glow. I had seen him several times clambering barefoot on slanty rooftops with feline agility.
The woman was broad-set, with a big shock of wiry hair, a flat nose, and thick lips. For many years she had worked as a maid, had assembled a trousseau, and had saved up money for a dowry. The two met and married immediately. Both were orphans.
Husband and wife rented a fairly nice apartment, which they furnished. He worked for a master tinsmith, and she, his young wife, was now the mistress of the household and went to market with her basket. For the first couple of weeks it seemed that everything was going well.
Then an argument broke out. The wife came to us to complain that her husband constantly grumbled, picked on her, and reproached her. She didn't speak with Father but with Mother.
“What does he want from you?” Mother asked.
“Rebbetzin, I don't know. I give him a plate of food straight from the fire and he shouts that it's cold. Here he says I've over-salted the food and there he says it has no salt at all. The soup is too watery, the meat is too hard, the milk is curdled. He interferes in my household affairs, too. I have to account to him for every penny, and if a penny is missing, he makes such a fuss that all the neighbors hear it.”
“Has he always been so stingy?”
“No. When he was engaged to me, he threw money around. I would have to restrain him not to spend so much.”
“Perhaps he's angry about something.”
“Why should he be angry? I haven't caused him any harm …”
“Perhaps his boss is giving him trouble?”
“No.”
“Perhaps he's not well.”
“I haven't got the faintest idea.”
Mother gave the woman the eternal womanly advice: Wait, have patience, sometimes a crazy notion gets into a man's head. Sometimes a man suffers but doesn't want to talk about it—so he takes it out on his wife. What can one do? One must put up with everything. With time, when a man sees that his wife is loyal and devoted to him, he becomes nice and stays that way.
This is what Mother said. I heard her advice and was pleased that she spoke with such respect about men. When I grew up, I too would become a man …
The woman left, apparently ready to obey Mother.
But instead of being good and submissive, the woman drank half a bottle of essence of vinegar after their next argument, then ran at once to a neighbor's apartment with burned lips, groaning, “Help me!”
They called out the rescue-squad wagon and the attendants pumped the woman's stomach.
A couple of weeks later a fire broke out in their apartment. The woman opened the window that faced the courtyard and shouted, “Help! Fire!”
Someone telephoned the fire department, and they came at once with their wild horses. First the firemen smashed all the windows in the apartment, then they broke the new furniture, and only then did they extinguish the flames. The fire itself was a mystery. The woman said that she had opened her clothes closet and a fire ensued.
“How do you get flames in a clothes closet?” her neighbors wanted to know.
“I ask you!” she replied.
Some time passed. Then one day the street suddenly turned black with people. The young tinsmith had fallen off a roof. He wasn't killed, but he had broken a leg. His fall was also a mystery—the roof was less steep than others and he had been standing next to the chimney. There had been no wind. In the hospital, he told people who had come to visit him to learn what had happened that he felt as if two hands had seized him by the shoulders and pushed him. He had tried to hold on to the roof's gutters, but that other, the one who had pushed him, was stronger than he.
“Wait a minute. Who was pushing you?”
“It must've been a demon.”
“In the middle of the day?”
“Well, you see what happened.”
People could not understand. On the other hand, on occasion tinsmiths fall from roofs. That business with the hands was probably his imagination. But clearly ill luck was plaguing the couple.
Soon the tinsmith left the hospital and the woman became pregnant. It seemed that everything was now going smoothly. But then the woman had a miscarriage. She declared that she was standing in the kitchen, cooking soup, when the door suddenly opened and a black cat ran in. Her sudden fright caused hemorrhaging.
“Perhaps the door was open,” someone suggested.
“No. It was shut. Someone turned the handle and let the cat in.”
“Who could that have been?”
“I know like you know.”
People on the street began saying all kinds of things. Some said that the misfortunes were occurring because the woman had the same name as her husband's mother. Others suspected that she wasn't heeding carefully the laws of family purity and wasn't going to the ritual bath at the proper time. Father told a scribe to inspect the mezuzahs. He also lent the couple a volume of the Zohar, which was considered a charm to drive demons from one's house.
For a while it was quiet. Then, one Friday night, the woman ate a chicken head and the beak got stuck either in her gullet or in her windpipe. Cries for help broke out in the courtyard. Once again the rescue squad was called and a doctor removed the chicken head from the woman's throat. The doctor declared that had he arrived ten minutes later he wouldn't have found her alive.
One misfortune came on the heels of another. The courtyard gaped and was astounded. It was obvious that something was amiss. Evil powers had besieged the couple. But why them?
There was another round of fires. Not great conflagrations but smaller fires. A garbage container burst into flames all by itself and flickered with a hellish fire. The woman quickly doused it with a pitcher of water. Two hours later, when she went into her bedroom, she saw a little flame bouncing around the bedcover, which she smothered with a jacket. A day or two later, a curtain caught fire and burned.
Each time the woman came running to my father, but Father told her to see a Hasidic rebbe. Such things were not his specialty. She needed a Hasidic master who could give her amulets, pieces of amber over which spells were cast, or other charms to drive away demons. During those years great rebbes did not yet live in Warsaw (they started arriving only after World War I). The woman went off to see a small-time rebbe. He told her to place pieces of garlic on the walls, a remedy against ghosts and imps. The woman bought a wreath of garlic and placed cloves on all the walls. But they did not help.
Once, while she was scraping the scales off a fish, a scale slid under her nail. Her finger swelled up and she developed a high fever. Gangrene almost set in, but a doctor performed a minor operation, after which her hand began improving. I don't remember all the misfortunes that plagued that house. I only remember that one trouble followed another; however, they never suffered a full-fledged tragedy. It seemed that the dark powers wanted to frighten them more than kill them.
During those years a famous fortune-teller and reader of cards named Schiller Shkolnick lived in Warsaw. He placed
advertisements in newspapers stating that he gave advice and could read cards, could find stolen goods or lost relatives. It was said that he had a black mirror hanging in a dark room in which a deserted wife could find her vanished husband. My father told the woman that she was forbidden to go to him because his deeds smacked of magic, pagan customs, and the black arts of the nations who had lived in the Land of Israel before Jews had conquered it. But neighbors convinced the woman that Schiller Shkolnick was the only one who could help her.
Supposedly, when she went to see Schiller Shkolnick, he wrote all sorts of charms and told her all kinds of things. But precisely what he did and said I don't know. I only remember people saying that he, the famous Schiller Shkolnick, could not help either.
After that the husband and wife came to Father and asked him to divorce them. Father never rushed through with a divorce. He advised them to move out of their apartment.
“The Talmud teaches that he who changes his place changes his luck,” he declared. “It happens that sometimes an apartment is unlucky. There's always time to get a divorce.”
Apparently the couple was not too anxious to divorce. They moved out of the apartment and found a new one somewhere in the fancier district, either on Mizke Street or on Mila Lane.
Strangely, this simple remedy helped. We began hearing good news about them. Their troubles had ceased. The woman became pregnant again. The tinsmith found work with another master.
The landlord of the previous apartment house was angry at Father. For several months the apartment remained empty. Finally, a gentile moved in. It seemed that the spirits had a score to settle only with that couple—the goy they left alone.
The master tinsmith came to visit us once in a while, and he often spoke about the couple. They had stopped arguing and now they lived like a pair of doves. The woman completed her pregnancy and gave birth to a boy. She was terrified before her lying-in, because it was known that demons have power over a woman in labor. But everything went well. The child was healthy. Now everything was fine and dandy with them.
I said earlier that only lately have I begun to understand what happened with that couple. But I'm still not sure that I really understand it.
A Freudian might interpret all of this as follows: The husband and wife subconsciously tried to sabotage their life together. Perhaps he or she had another love. Perhaps they weren't happy sexually. It is easy to hang the blame for everything on sex and the subconscious.
One might also say that the couple was the victim of a poltergeist, the same sort of spirit which several months ago emptied bottles of liquid in a house on Long Island and threw things with an invisible hand. But what is a poltergeist? And why did he beset that particular apartment? This belongs to that category of things where the facts are known but no cogent explanation for them exists. Yes, it is connected with a person's spiritual attitude. That much is certain. Our inner attitude and outer circumstances are closely bound together. But what sort of connection exists and how it operates—that has not yet been discovered. Only during the past few years have people come to realize that such a link does indeed exist.

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