A Day of Small Beginnings Read Online Free PDF

grunting sound. But underneath the beard, I knew he was smiling
     at me.
    I floated above Itzik along that road. In the hour before dawn, I watched for trouble from the village walkers. They were
     on their way to the local farms to trade their grain or leeks or potatoes. When he saw one, Itzik slowed to a walk. He kept
     his head down. I was sure no one recognized him, bent as they were under the heavy sacks on their shoulders.
    A Jew, Nahum the Driver, plodded by, his wagon heavy with hides for Goldfarb’s tannery in Zokof. “My horse don’t have eyes
     for humans anymore,” Nahum used to say. “Why should he? I don’t have money to buy him oats.” Nahum didn’t raise his eyes for
     Itzik either, thank God.
    At morning light Radom wasn’t far off. Itzik fell exhausted onto a patch of dandelions, under a stand of birch trees.
Sh’ma Yisrael. Adonoi eloheinu, Adonoi ehad,
he prayed. He took off his shoes, and careful as can be, he pointed the toes in the direction of the city, so he should know
     where he was going when he awoke.
    What?
I thought.
I should sit here and eat cherries?
I had discovered I had strange powers of observation. I could see hundreds of images at once, each stacked on top of the
     other, but every one clear to my strange new eyes. I saw again the crooked streets and alleys of Zokof. Inside each household,
     the grandfathers and the grandmothers, the fathers and the mothers, the children and even the great-grandparents were rising
     from their beds and making their first water of the day in pots and privies. The men laid
tefillin
around their arms and heads and wrapped themselves in prayer shawls. The women woke the children with prayers. I heard their
     voices drifting from the windows, hundreds of them, old and young, giving thanks for the new day. As the saying goes, one
     who takes the joy of waking in the morning without giving thanks to God is like a thief.
    When I lived, those half-sung prayers were as much a part of me as the skin on my bones. How I missed the voices of our Jews.
     Even the best death, like mine, is still a lonely thing. Who knew that after, when you can no longer speak, the only sounds
     your soul can make no one can recognize as you. To the living, you are the stray call of a bird in the trees beyond the town,
     the lift between two notes, the sharp hiss of sparks from a fire. You are not at all the human who cursed your children one
     minute, sang their praises the next, and every year, on the Day of Atonement, said
Al Chet
for these sins of cruelty and pride.
    Still, I got a shock to hear the first few notes of Aaron Birnbaum’s tune. It rose above the din of the Zokofers’ prayers
     like the blowing of the ram’s horn on Rosh Hashanah, ushering in the New Year. Even now, a year in my grave, this melody had
     the power to clutch my heart, to make me remember feelings I thought I’d lost in girlhood.
    The truth was, despite my love for Aaron, I’d felt a little ashamed to live in Zokof, where the Hassidim believed in the ecstasy
     they found in their music as dearly as their Torah study, maybe even more. My family was known, for generations, for its scholarly
     piety. “The Hassidim have it all turned upside down and inside out,” my father lamented. “The music is for the Jew, not the
     Jew for the music.”
    But on the morning after Itzik and I left Zokof, I hoped the music of the Hassidim would never end. When Aaron’s tune rose
     like smoke through the chimneys and vanished in the wide Polish sky, I fought the temptation to leave Itzik and fly away with
     it. It was no triumph to discover Poppa had been wrong, that sometimes a person, his own daughter even, could be for the music
     and not the other way around.
    Itzik awoke with dragonflies winging around his head and a snail creeping into his shoe. He hugged his bundle to his chest
     like a rag doll and flicked the snail away. As he set out again, he skittered back and forth across the dusty road into