The Dance of the Demons

INTRODUCTION

Half the sorrows of women would be averted if they could repress the speech they know to be useless; nay, the speech they have resolved not to make.

GEORGE ELIOT

My yellowed paperback of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Séance, which I acquired in the late eighties in an antiquarian bookstore in Connecticut, carries the following dedication: In memory of my beloved sister MINDA ESTHER.

Somehow I caught the typo already then, circling in pencil the upper-case name. It was an unpleasant coda to a troubled relationship, I would come to realize, not only between the Nobel Prize winner and his forgotten older sister, Esther Krietman, but between her and the entire Singer family and even with the Yiddish literary establishment as a whole.

Kreitman was known in Yiddish as Hinde Esther.

The typesetters had made a mistake in The Séance, which isn’t at all surprising. For the brilliant Kreitman suffered bad luck throughout her life. She was never recognized on her own terms. Her books were perceived as strange. She failed to receive the love she deserved from her parents, siblings, and husband. She weathered recurring illnesses. World War I pushed her to exile and World War II to despair.

Since her death—in London at the age of sixty-three—she remains eclipsed, a mere footnote in the history of Yiddish literature for too many readers.

There are two Singers in Yiddish literature, critic Irving Howe wrote in 1980, referring to the brothers Israel Joshua and Isaac Bashevis, and while both are very good, they sing in different keys. He should have known better, for there are three: In spite of her misfortunes, Kreitman, in less than fifteen years, managed to publish a literary triptych made of two novels, Der sheydim tants (1936) and Brilyantyn (1944), and a collection of stories, Yikhes (1950). That Howe, a life-long Yiddishist responsible for the Pulitzer Prize-winner World of Our Fathers endorsed her anonymity is inexcusable. He surely knew better. But he too was a link in the all-male club that dominated modern Yiddish literature since its inception in the eighteenth century. Open any history of the tradition composed prior to 1960 and you’ll find a huge hole. Half of humankind is omitted. (By the way, Howe was once asked why he didn’t call his book World of Our Fathers and Mothers. What I needed was a title, he answered, not a political slogan.)

Years of research have begun to correct the anonymity and neglect with which female authors were treated. We now have at our disposal parts of the oeuvre of Dvora Baron, Kadya Molodowsky, Rokhl Korn, Celia Dropkin, and Yente Serdatzky, among others. If none of them was as accomplished as the old masters of Yiddish literature—Mendele Moyker Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, and Isaac Leib Peretz—it is because Jewish women in Eastern Europe between 1860 and 1940 were discouraged from embarking on artistic pursuits.

Esther Kreitman symbolizes that discouragement. Her mother Bathsheva was said to be disappointed when, at Kreitman’s birth, she didn’t turn out to be a boy. Her father Pinchas Menahem, a rabbi, precluded her from a formal education. In general the Singer family ostracized her, first in the Polish shtetl of Bilgoray, where she was born, then in Radzymin, where the family moved after Pinchas Menahem became the head of a local yeshiva and unofficial secretary to the rabbi, and finally in Warsaw. In fact, so unhappy was her mother with Hinde Esther that she sent her away to be raised by a wet nurse who had her sleep in a cot under a table. The rest of the Singer clan were male—aside from I. J. and I. B., there were two daughters who died of an outbreak of scarlet fever at a young age on the exact same day and then came Moishe, the youngest in the family, who perished with his mother, apparantly of starvation, in Siberia—and Kreitman was invariably compared to them. No wonder talented women like Kreitman committed themselves to literature through a side door, favoring the domestic and erotic realms, and often writing of women with tragic fates.

Kreitman’s domestic novel is a thinly disguised autobiography about a woman (daughter, sister, wife) in search of a place in the world. Kreitman’s early home, Leoncin, is Jelhitz; Radzymin, where she grew up, is R—; and Krochmalna Street, the street in the Jewish slums that I. B. made immortal, is the novel’s Warsaw setting. Avram Ber is Kreitman’s father, Pinchas Menahem; Raizela is her mother; Israel Joshua is Michael; and Deborah herself closely resembles Kreitman.

Ever since childhood, the reader is told, [Deborah] had longed to receive an education, to cease being a nonentity in the family. And later on it is said: Deborah—the girl who, as her father had once said, was to be a mere nobody when she grew up—would be a person of real consequence. To achieve this end, she escapes and returns home, being ambivalent about almost everything. She also embraces Socialism, an ideology she later finds empty. It would probably be as easy to talk her into Zionism as it had been to convert her to Socialism, Kreitman writes. She was the sort of person who had to cling to something or other—anything would do, but, of course, a lover would be best of all! True, she had the makings of an idealist—an idealist without a definite ideal.

I. B.’s obliquely feminist story, Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy, is loosely based on Kreitman’s odyssey. Yentl rebels against her father and against the divine for having made her a man in a female body. I. B. described his parents in the same terms as Esther and declared them a mismatch. Bathsheva had the mind of a man and Pinchas Menahem the sensibility of a woman. The unhappy housing of male ambition in a female body was the curse of both Yentl and Kreitman—except that Kreitman needed to live within the social constraints of her time and paid a heavy price for it. Hers wasn’t a Hollywood-made life. She was forced to marry Avraham Kreitman, a Belgian diamond cutter, whom she came to despise. The marriage was both an escape and a torture. You’re sending me away because you hate me! she screamed at Bathsheva, according to I. B., just before the ceremony was about to take place. But then she consented: I’d rather go into exile. I’ll disappear. You won’t know what happened to my remains.

To exile she went … Kreitman lived with her husband in Antwerp, where they had a child: Morris Kreitman, later known as Maurice Carr, a journalist and the translator of Deborah. But her liaison was hellish, so in 1926 she returned to Warsaw with her son. I. J. allowed them to live in his summer home for three months. But Kreitman, ambivalent again, returned to Belgium. When the Germans invaded, the family fled to London, where they settled for good. She and Avraham Kreitman lived uncomfortably together, on and off. Eventually, in spite of the scarce income it provided, she dedicated herself to literature, doing translations (she is responsible for the Yiddish renditions of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and George Bernard Shaw’s Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism) and writing fiction.

Disturbances of mind and mood were her plight. Since childhood Kreitman had suffered epileptic spasms. In his memoir In My Father’s Court, I. B. described her as often laughing profusely and then fainting. At one point a London psychologist diagnosed her as neurotic and not as psychotic, which meant, Maurice Carr was told, that she posed harm only to herself. Was her paranoia genetic? Had it been accentuated by the antagonistic environment in which she grew up?

In families like the Singers, the line between genius and mental illness is a thin and tortured one. The list of cases is long: think, for example, of Albert Einstein’s vanishing anonymous daughter. And of Alice James, whose diaries and letters are a painful record of the metabolism that propelled her siblings, psychologist William and novelist Henry, to stardom and her to despair. As she grew older, Kreitman is said to have become delusional, believing that demons, goblins, and dybbuks were out to get her. She asked to be cremated so as to avoid the evil forces that could overwhelm in death as they had in life.

Such has been Kreitman’s eclipse that English-language audiences have had to make due with a partial, elusive view of her work. This is in spite of the fact that she made her debut in Shakespeare’s tongue before I. B. (I. J.’s The Brothers Ashkenazi was published by Knopf in 1936.) Several of Kreitman’s tales are available in anthologies like Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars, edited by Sandra Bark. Deborah* appeared in London in 1946. After receiving conflicting reviews (including a decidedly mixed one in The Jewish Chronicle by a mysterious I.B.S.), it quickly disappeared from sight. It was in 1983, with a rise in interest in women’s literature, that Deborah was reprinted by Virago Press. And then Kreitman’s novel came back to us again, from The Feminist Press, giving us a chance to reevaluate her work in the very year when international celebrations marked I. B.’s centennial.

Have we learned to appreciate Kreitman’s place in Yiddish literature? I trust we have. Critical responses to her have mushroomed. Plus, the other two components of her triptych, also autobiographical in nature, with protagonists that take Deborah’s journey a step further, are available in English from London publisher David Paul: the novel Diamonds (2009), translated by Heather Valencia, and Blitz and Other Stories (2004), translated by Dorothee Van Tendeloo.

Deborah is the main course, though. Far from being a confession of madness, it is a critique of the forces that crush women and catalog them as crazy. In the scholarly essay that serves as an afterword to this edition, Anita Norich studies the stark difference between the Yiddish and English versions, asking important questions: Why did Maurice Carr translate the novel if Kreitman was fluent in English? Did the tension between mother and son affect any editorial decisions? Why did Kreitman give up the more emblematic Yiddish title The Dance of the Demons in favor of a colorless one? And why did she leave out entire passages?

Almost seventy years after its original Yiddish appearance, is it worth the effort? My answer is a categorical yes. Kreitman isn’t a proverbial storyteller. Her narrative structure is prismatic, even erratic. Her atmospheric descriptions are pungent yet disorienting. The reader has difficulty warming up to her awkward style. But in her case the silences, deliberate and unconscious, are the message. She explores the predicament of women in orthodox families with enviable urgency. The surviving members of the Singer family uniformly moved from religiousness to secularism. But not everyone enjoyed the fruits of freedom and education.

Almost seventy years after the novel first appeared in Yiddish, some orthodox Jewish wives and daughters are still considered sheer companions of their spouses—a fixture of the environment. Their intellect is unworthy of cultivation. Metaphorically, they are, like Kreitman, only a typo. My copy of The Séance is proof of it.

At the end of The Dance of the Demons, the protagonist, in a mesmerizing scene, is overwhelmed by a dream in which she returns from Antwerp to her parent’s home in Warsaw … only to find the house empty. Empty and silent.

A disappearing act. But by then, unfortunately, she is past caring.

Ilan Stavans

Amherst

May 2004

*Deborah was the original English title of this book when it appeared in hardcover.

THE DANCE OF THE DEMONS

I

It was the Sabbath. And even the wind and the snow rested from their labors. The village of Jelhitz, a small cluster of wooden cottages and hovels, stood hidden away from sight at the edge of the Polish pine-woods—to all appearances nothing more than one of the many snowdrifts covering the land. But within Jews were comfortably asleep in their beds after the heavy Sabbath dinner.

All was silent in the village, but nowhere was the quietude so impressive as in the large house by the synagogue which stood facing the common meadowland and the frozen river. Here lived the Rabbi, Reb Avram Ber, and unlike most of his flock, he did not snore in his sleep. As for Raizela, his wife, her breathing was so gentle, that whenever Deborah peeped into the bedroom to see whether her parents were astir yet, the fourteen-year-old child grew anxious, wondering whether her mother was breathing at all.

The warmth and the shadowiness of falling dusk were cozy inside the Rabbi’s house, but Deborah, as she sat beside the tiled stove, reading, felt lonely and sorry for herself to the point of tears.

Earlier in the day she had overheard her father say:

Michael is showing great promise in his studies, the Lord be praised! One day he will be a brilliant Talmudist.

Michael was her younger brother who, in accordance with the centuries’ old custom of Orthodox Jews, was being brought up to spend all the days of his life in the study of the Talmud.

And Father, what am I going to be one day? Deborah then suddenly inquired, half in jest, half in earnest, for, as long as she could remember, never had a word of praise fallen to her lot.

Reb Avram Ber was taken aback. It was an accepted view among pious Jews that there was only one achievement in life a woman could hope for—the bringing of happiness into the home by ministering to her husband and bearing him children. Therefore he did not even vouchsafe Deborah a reply, but when she pressed him, he answered simply:

"What are you going to be one day? Nothing, of course!"

This response did not at all satisfy Deborah. It was quite true that most girls grew up only to marry and become drudges, but there were exceptions, such as her own mother, Raizela, who was highly educated, a real lady, and as wise as any man.

To be sure, in his heart of hearts Reb Avram Ber disapproved of his wife’s erudition. He thought it wrong for a woman to know too much, and was determined that this mistake should not be repeated in Deborah’s case. Now there was in the house a copy of Naimonovitch’s Russian Grammar, which Deborah always studied in her spare moments, but whenever her father caught her at this mischief he would hide the book away on top of the tiled stove out of her reach, and then she would have to risk her very life to recover it. She would move the table up against the stove, set a chair on the table, herself on the chair, and after all that trouble, clouds of dust and loose leaves from torn books, disused feather dusters and God knows what else would come fluttering and tumbling down—everything, in fact, except the Russian Grammar. Nevertheless, during her fourteen years of life, she had managed to learn all its contents by heart, and still she was dissatisfied. How tediously morning changed into afternoon and evening into night! How wearisome was her housework, and yet, beyond that, she had few real interests. She was forever lacking something, herself hardly knowing what. A strange yearning would stir in her, an almost physical gnawing sensation, but it had never before been so painful as on this wintry Sabbath afternoon, when all was quiet within and the world outside was muffled with snow.

She sought refuge in daydreams. She recalled how the family had first come to Jelhitz many years ago, arriving at nightfall; how the bearded pious Jews, in long gabardines, black top boots and peaked cylindrical caps—a fashion surviving from the Middle Ages—came forward with lighted candles to greet their new rabbi, crying in unison:

Blessed be thy coming!

What a splendid figure Reb Avram Ber had cut in his rabbinical garb—black buckled shoes, white stockings, satin gabardine and broad-brimmed black felt hat.

As she remembered all this, and saw again the smile—grateful and almost childish—that had settled in Reb Avram Ber’s longish fair beard, hot tears slowly trickled down her flushed cheeks, senseless tears for which she could find no justification.

When Michael burst into the room and found his sister crying, a psalter in her hand, he laughed so boisterously, that his parents woke up in the next room. Michael and Deborah were never on very friendly terms. And he snatched this opportunity of poking fun at her, calling her a fool for staying indoors, for poring over the Psalms with tears in her eyes like a miserable old sinner whiling away dull old age with penitence. As for himself, he had been out on the river, which stretched away frozen, hard as a sheet of steel, with snow-covered fields all around, with a blue, transparent, Sabbath sky hanging above wonderfully silent. After his exertions, Michael’s cheeks were flushed, his ears tingling with frostbite, and the bright gleam in his eyes flashed with ever-changing tints—now black, now brown, then coppery. He had come back brimming over with life, and his sister, who always stayed indoors and meekly bore the stagnation of their home-life, seemed to him now more pitiful than ever.

He became more subdued when his father entered the room.

Have you been getting on with your studies, Michael? Reb Avram Ber asked with a sleepy yawn.

Yes, father.

Deborah gaped. She endeavored to catch Michael’s eye, but he was reading some religious tract very studiously, and there was nothing in his now thoughtful face to betray his lie. Good God, what a wicked boy! And what was worse, he thought himself so clever and dared to make fun of her. She had a good mind to give him away. But Reb Avram Ber was asking her for a glass of hot tea, and seemed to have forgotten all about Michael by now.

Anyhow, not that her own conscience was any too clear! Exchanging one of her father’s religious books for a work of fiction was surely an even more heinous sin than going for a slide on the ice on the Sabbath. If her father was to know of it, he would—she could not imagine what he might do … Good God! How awful to exchange a holy book for a story book! Conscience-stricken herself, she kept her tongue, but as she poured out the tea she reflected that had she been a boy instead of a girl, she would not have found herself driven to commit such iniquities. She would have spent all her time in the study of the Talmud. But hers was a dreary lot, and even when she erred, life was still maddeningly dull. As for the bookseller, he only came down to the village once in every four weeks, on market day.

That was the only day which broke the humdrum silence of the village. When she woke up on market day, to the rumble of springless peasant carts and the sound of strange voices, a thrill passed through her, as though having gone to sleep in an isolated hut far from all human habitation she had suddenly awakened to find herself in new surroundings, where life simply tumbled over itself. Indeed, Jelhitz was unrecognizable on market day. Gone was the sovereignty of the ragged goats that otherwise rambled about the village as if they were the masters of all they surveyed. All was transformed. Even the leaning houses seemed to wear an air of alertness on market day. Peddlers did not leave by candlelight, in the dark before dawn, to tramp the surrounding farms. None of the menfolk idled their time away in the warmth of the synagogue, relating strange tales of events in the unknown beyond. The very womenfolk had no time for the least tittle-tattle. The blanket of snow that stretched away from Jelhitz to the forest and to the horizon was broken by countless footsteps and wheel-ruts. And peasants, in carts and on foot, crowded into Jelhitz, driving cattle before them, or dragging unwilling pigs behind them; with their wives accompanying them in festive attire, while competing merchants from close by villages brought their own wares—anything from lace veils to top boots, carved crosses to sheepskin jackets, sweetmeats to quack medicines. Gypsies were there, and conjurors, and drunkards, and idlers and loungers. And lastly came the bookseller, whom Deborah sought out with more eagerness than the rest, only to be bitterly disappointed. For, as it always turned out, he had nothing of real interest. His was a burden of holiness: prayer books, prayer shawls, ritual fringes, and a miscellany of religious tracts. Only by chance would a profane book get mixed up with this spiritual load. So during the intervals of waiting she would have to read The Fate of the Enchanted Princess or The Tale of the Three Brothers ten times over, and in the end return to the wrinkled pages of the psalter after all!

The wintry light was beginning to fail by the time Raizela joined the family in the living room. She got out of bed and immediately climbed onto the couch by the window, where she spent most of her waking hours, absorbed in philosophic and religious books. Absentmindedly the family drank their tea, all of them except Deborah preoccupied with their reading. And yet, though they all seemed to be unaware of each other’s presence, everyone breathed a breath of gentle disapproval on his neighbor. Michael was grieved to have to stop indoors under his parents’ eye, and indeed, as soon as he could, he slipped out unnoticed. Deborah felt slighted by them all. And husband and wife were displeased with one another on an old, old score.

Raizela was accustomed to a different life from that which she had been leading during the past ten years in Jelhitz. She had been brought up in a house of plenty—plenty, in the material as well as the spiritual sense of the word. Her father was one of the best-known rabbis in Poland and perhaps the most learned Jew of his day. His very presence commanded the reverence of all who saw him—even of such plain folk who live by the sweat of their brow and usually feel nothing but contempt mingled with hatred for those who do no work but wear out the seats of their pants over the Talmud. He was very tall, with a dark lean face, magnificent black, silky beard and large black eyes which showed a fine sense of humor that was eternally being stifled by a stern sense of duty and of the Holy Presence. He rarely spoke, only studying from early morning till late at night, with many scholars, or rather disciples, some of them middle-aged men, at his side, and around him in the house moved his many sons and daughters and grandchildren. It was the custom of pious Jews to marry off their children at the age of fifteen or so, and then to keep them at home until they became self-supporting.

Thus Raizela, his favorite daughter, had been wed at the age of fifteen. And the husband chosen for her, a youngster a year older than herself, was Reb Avram Ber, because of his great learning and the renown attaching to his name. Some of his ancestors were among the great of Israel, household names in the Jewish world, and moreover he claimed descent from King David. So it had seemed a promising match. However, Reb Avram Ber turned out to be a failure. True, there were few to compare with him in learning; but he was unworldly, needed looking after like a child. Beyond the realm of the Talmud, he was just a simpleton.

He went on with his studies in his father-in-law’s house until he was himself a father of two children, and still he gave no thought to the future. At length it was decided that Reb Avram Ber must set up for himself. The only course open to this simple-minded young man was to become a rabbi, but in order to qualify for such a position in a town of any importance he was required by the law of that time to pass an examination in the Russian language and in other temporal subjects, so that he might combine the functions of registrar of births, marriages, and deaths with that of rabbi.

After much persuasion, Reb Avram Ber was finally torn away from the Talmud and made to journey to the town of Plotck, where he took up residence with a tutor who specialized in preparing future rabbis for the official examination. With thoughtless willingness he paid the full fee in advance; with thoughtless reluctance he turned to his new subjects. And still all might have gone well, but for the chance arrival of another future rabbi—a handsome young man with twinkling eyes, a cynical mouth and a delightfully pointed silken little beard. This young man was soon on friendly terms with the tutor’s wife and, among other things, told Reb Avram Ber that this woman wore no wig, as prescribed by Jewish law, according to which no married woman may expose her hair lest the charm of her tresses provoke sinful thoughts. In any case, Reb Avram Ber was tired of the whole business. He simply could not concentrate on the new, queer education. Nor did he relish the tutor’s continual reproaches about not doing as he was told. He was weary to death of the uncongenial surroundings generally, but when his eyes were opened and he saw that the tutor’s wife was not wearing a wig as prescribed by Jewish law, that was the last straw.

For once in his life he became a man of action—and he ran away. Lacking courage to return to his father-in-law’s house, he decided to go into the wide world. The wide world was the nearest village to Plotck. The Jewish inhabitants, finding a stranger in their midst, shook hands with him, bade him Peace! then asked him who he was, what was his business, whence had he come, whither was he going. And many more questions besides did they ask him, as the custom is. But Reb Avram Ber answered briefly. He merely begged the beadle to announce that a preacher had arrived and would deliver a sermon immediately after the evening service.

Reb Avram Ber was well versed in parables, and his rambling sermon, full of deep knowledge of the law, was mingled with many fascinating tales which held his audience spellbound.

His words flow sweet as wine! said the womenfolk, not a little impressed by his good looks.

A great scholar! declared the menfolk.

Thus it was he went from village to village, until he at last came to Jelhitz, which had been without a rabbi for some time. And Reb Avram Ber found great favor in the eyes of the Jews of Jelhitz. The community of three hundred souls determined not to let this erudite young man continue on his travels. After several heated meetings, at which every body tried to speak at the same time, Reb Avram Ber was appointed Rabbi of Jelhitz.

But Raizela never forgave him his escapade. And on this wintry Sabbath afternoon it all came back to her. The family were in great distress. The stipend paid by the community was far from adequate, and driven by the sheer force of circumstances, Reb Avram Ber was that evening going to ask for an increase.

Earlier in the week he had consulted her how to go about it. She was his adviser in all secular matters. Reclining on her couch, ailing and feeble, she would turn his problems over in her mind and drop words of counsel.

Whatever you do, don’t be apologetic, she had said in a quiet voice that seemed to heighten her frailty.

Oh no, I’ll be very firm with them this time, replied Reb Avram Ber.

Raizela’s thin lips spread into a faint smile. She could not help thinking that her husband looked rather ridiculous promising to be firm, with his blue eyes so gentle, with so pleasant a smile playing on his face.

Reb Avram Ber, usually short-sighted and unaware of what was going on around him, had by this time learned to interpret that flickering little smile as a bitter reproach to himself for his past errors, and whenever he noticed it he began to defend himself stoutly, as though her thoughts had been audible. And then, when Raizela made no reply, he invariably transferred to his father-in-law that flush of anger which had risen in him momentarily against his wife. He blamed the father for having encouraged the daughter to study, for having supplied her with reading-matter (orthodox books, of course, though afterwards it was whispered that she read all sorts!) and for generally having taken her—a mere female—into his confidence.

With that, the scene always ended, and calm was restored to the home. But now, on this wintry Sabbath afternoon, when any talk on worldly matters was out of place, husband and wife were again having the same old quarrel, even though not a word passed between them. And Reb Avram Ber felt relieved when the time came for him to put on his overcoat and go into the synagogue, only a few steps away, for the evening service.

In a hushed murmur the sound of prayers reached the house. Deborah listened intently. In her imagination she saw the all too familiar bearded faces of the congregation in the candle-lit synagogue, and she wondered what the heads of the community would say to her father’s request. But Reb Avram Ber returned immediately after the service was over. He looked very grave, and he brought bad news.

One of the villagers’ children, who had been slightly ill for some time, had suddenly taken a turn for the worse. The father, Mendel, nicknamed Big Mendel, one of the wealthiest men of the tiny community, was travelling to the town of R—to ask a tsadik, a holy man, who dwelt there, to pray for the recovery of the infant. Another villager, whose wife was with child and was troubled with presentiments of disaster, was accompanying Big Mendel, in order to beg the tsadik to drive out the evil spirits responsible for the presentiments, and Reb Avram Ber proposed to go too. He would thus have to postpone his request for an increase in his stipend until some other, more propitious time.

Raizela was displeased. Like her father, she was not a believer in tsadikim, professional holy men, who, because of their purity, were reputed to stand in closer communion with God than the ordinary mortal. She often tried to enlighten Reb Avram Ber, ridiculing in her quiet way the possibility of any man being holy by profession, the sophistry of such a man wielding occult powers to heal and to wound, to create and to destroy, in return for temporal might and wealth. These tsadikim lived in great style, holding court like kings and branching out into great dynasties, the sons inheriting the holy spirit from their fathers.

But Reb Avram Ber was not to be deflected from his faith. He was a staunch follower of the tsadikim and their movement of Hassidism. He never doubted that the tsadikim were righteous men, and he loved the cult of Hassidism, which declared that life being God’s most precious of all gifts, it would be sinful for man not to delight in this gift. He loved to serve God by being merry, and he loved to travel to the courts of the tsadikim, where he met other Hassidim, pilgrim believers, from all parts of the country and from all stations of life, where he could mingle with his fellow men in an atmosphere of mystical rejoicing; where he could join in the dancing, the singing and the prayers of the masses; where he heard strange new stories, picked up haunting new melodies and received fresh inspiration for even more steadfast application to the Talmud and the mystical kabbalah.

With eager anticipation now he dressed up in his warmest greatcoat, tucking his beard into the lapels, and by the time Big Mendel’s conveyance had drawn up outside the window, he had quite forgotten about the financial straits of the family and his promise to be firm.

Big Mendel entered with pale face. Usually beaming, he was very grave now, and he chilled everybody’s heart. Reb Avram Ber hastily bade the family good-bye. Raizela was cross and returned her husband’s farewell without even raising her eyes from the book she was reading.

The wheels crunched on the snow outside, and Reb Avram Ber was gone.

II

It was on a Thursday, about ten o’clock in the morning—Raizela had just made her mind up to send off a telegram, for never before had Reb Avram Ber spent such a long time at the tsadik’s court—when the door opened and in walked Reb Avram Ber himself, beaming with joy, his whole person wrapped in an air of mystery. He entered wiping the perspiration from his face with a red spotted handkerchief, although the weather was still cold and wintry. His eyes sought a chair. Deborah brought him a stool and placed it opposite her mother lying on the couch. Reb Avram Ber seated himself, unbuttoned his overcoat, removed his hat, adjusted the velvet skull-cap on his head, stuffed his handkerchief back into his pocket, and exclaimed:

I have news for you! And then—All’s well, the Lord be praised! All’s well!

He turned to Deborah, in whom he hoped to see a bright reflection of his own happiness. Deborah, finding her father in such high spirits, anticipated that he had brought home a larger sum than usual, given to him as a parting gift by the tsadik, and she rejoiced. They were in a bad way, deeply in debt. And she waited impatiently for him to name the amount. Then, recollecting that he had mentioned news, she was all agog to be let into the secret. But as if on purpose to tantalize her, all at once Reb Avram Ber turned very deliberate. He released his beard, took out his pipe in leisurely fashion, knocked it on the leg of his stool, filled it with tobacco, pulled large puffs of smoke to get it to light properly, and at length said:

How would an offer of fifteen rubles a week, with free accommodation, appeal to you, I wonder?

Raizela’s eyes opened wide with astonishment. She looked at him for some time and made no answer.

Aha, you are surprised? Well then, let me tell you all about it.

Deborah sat down on the edge of her mother’s couch in silence. She did not know whether it was best to look solemn, like her mother, or happy, like her father.

Now you’ve heard of the new yeshiva, the Talmud academy, which the tsadik is building at R—?

Yes, I’ve heard. I know all about it, Raizela answered sharply, angry with Reb Avram Ber for having caused her so much anxiety by his prolonged absence.

Reb Avram Ber explained that he had been offered the post of principal lecturer at the yeshiva. Strangely enough, she did not seem at all pleased with the prospect of fifteen rubles a week. She had no faith in the tsadik, and she told Reb Avram Ber as much in plain words.

You’re always the same! said Reb Avram Ber, waxing angry. I do believe you wouldn’t trust your own shadow!

Here he was out of breath after tearing through the village’s high street, the sooner to bring her the glad tidings, and now nothing but disappointment—no response whatsoever…. But he was soon appeased. She was poorly, she should have been spared the worry of the past few weeks, he excused her in his heart.

As you know, he continued, for some reason or other the tsadik treats me with the greatest consideration. Whenever I pay him a visit, he showers gifts on me and insists on my accepting them. And if it wasn’t for his kind help from time to time, I don’t know where we should be. Well naturally, the moment he saw an opportunity of giving me a secure livelihood, he was delighted. I was the very man for the job. The tsadik has a heart of gold, really he has. When he asks me how I am getting on, and I tell him that you are ailing, that the children too are in delicate health, and that our livelihood is only so-so, it simply breaks his heart.

Raizela gave a faint smile. Reb Avram Ber noticed it.

"Well then, you tell me why he insists on giving me money! Does he profit by it in any way? Now I ask you, why?"

Since you ask, I shall tell you. The tsadik of R—, you see, unlike most other tsadikim, has very few learned Hassidim among his followers, not to mention rabbis of course. Well naturally, he likes to see a full-blown rabbi mingling with his crowd once in a while. Don’t you always tell me how reluctant he is to let you go, and how he keeps delaying your departure as much as he can? Only that explains why he is so eager for your company, and that is why he invites you to come the oftener the better, though every visit you pay him is so much extra expense to him. You know quite well that a tsadik always accepts gifts, but never offers any. It’s obvious! You don’t see it—I do!

Reb Avram Ber reached for his beard again, and began striding hastily up and down the room.

You’re a skeptic! You’re no better than your father! You are calumniating a holy man. A skeptic is capable of blaspheming our very Father in heaven and the Messiah. I always said that your father made a very great mistake in giving you an education.

Now, as ever, Reb Avram Ber transferred his wrath to his father-in-law.

Thereafter never-ending discussions took place between father and mother. As the town of R—was of course much larger than the village of Jelhitz, both Deborah and Michael hoped that for once father would have his own way. Then they would at last be rid of sleepy little Jelhitz, and with Reb Avram Ber installed as head of the yeshiva at R—, a new and glorious life would begin.

Reb Avram Ber scarcely applied himself to his studies. He was forever arguing with Raizela, who never once wavered in her opinion that the tsadik was not a man to be trusted—she had the less faith in him because of his gifts! On the other hand, Reb Avram Ber did his best to convince her that here indeed was the finest possible proof of the tsadik’s great-heartedness, holiness, and generosity, quite apart from the fact that the post had to be filled by someone—and the academy was going to be one of the finest in the whole of Poland and even Lithuania.

Moreover, the rabbi of that town is almost eighty, and when his time comes, they’ll have no heir to succeed him. Not that that matters. May he go on living to a great old age, until the coming of the Messiah!

Deborah and Michael