Body of Glass Read Online Free PDF

stronger than me by a factor too large to bother guessing. You can lift a block of marble over your head. No, little as an affectionate term, the way so many languages attach suffixes of endearment that diminish in size as they enlarge in effect. Avram has forbidden me to see you, but we can still communicate through the Base, and there I create my bubeh maisehs for you. I am not at all sure to what extent I am guilty of great folly and overweening ambition for my role in your programming, or to what degree I am instead that figure of Strength on the Tarot deck, the woman who tames the lion, who taught you to temper your violence with human connection. A task Avram interrupted.
    I am telling this story for you as I lie alone in my own huge antique bed in the bedroom shaped to me like an old familiar garment, with the scent of narcissus from the courtyard, in this the house of my family with its oasis of green in the desert the world has become. I lie awake sensing the danger gathering around us in this fragile modern ghetto. This is a tale of my family from long ago when the world seemed to be breaking open. They called it rebirth. Renaissance. But nothing ever comes back the same. The world moves in epicycles on the human level, although at the time in which my story is wanting to be told, it was those very projected epicycles of the universe that were being discarded by the few brave astronomers in favour of a system that was simple, clear and utterly alien to the human or rather the man-centred universe held to be immutable and preeminently Christian by most of those living in Europe. But like the Ptolemaic universe, my story has a human centre.
    This is the story particularly of one Judah Loew, several men and women around him, and one un-man. But it is also the story of a city, and of a town within a city, a town as special and as isolated and as endangered as our own free town of Jews huddled here beside the rising poisoned sea. Prague is the city, beautiful Prague just taking on its grey and golden, mustard and terra-cotta, strawberry and pistachio stucco warmth, just beginning to be shaped into the city whose Baroque lineaments I walked through in the spring of my twenty-second year — 2008 — while I was studying philosophy with that brilliant man who was so great a teacher and so awkward a lover, and yet I thought the bargain of my flesh for his company and his conversation a worthy one, and I was right. I wandered those twisted ways and climbed the streets of stairs, dreaming of Kafka, whose stories I carried always with me, and dreaming, too, of Einstein, who had taught at that university while he was creating his theory of relativity. I was a bright, bright student, the best student of my professor and his momentary beloved besides while lilacs bloomed that spring.
    Every day from the university buildings I looked back into what had been the ghetto; every day I crossed it, past the Altneushul, past the Jewish cemetery to my neighbourhood of students and workers, a medieval warren of narrow streets, two-and three-storey houses washed with mustard stucco over the ancient crumbling bricks on Rasnovka Street. In the Pinkas synagogue, built in the thirteenth century, a synagogue already old when Rabbi Judah Loew walked those narrow streets, on the stripped interior walls are written the 77,397 names of the Jews who perished into smoke from the death camps the year my mother was born in Cleveland, Ohio, forty-one years before my own birth. The lilacs were in bloom when I conceived my own daughter Riva, whom in my barely post-adolescent stillness I carried away from Prague, a lump in my womb like a souvenir of delight, as other sojourners carried away artefacts of Czech crystal. Indeed Riva grew up about as malleable as crystal.
    Inside 1600 Prague is Jewtown, the walled ghetto, the Glop of its time, with houses shoehorned into courtyards and families squatting in one room or several families jammed in a space hardly