Broken Song Read Online Free PDF Page A

sell to me because I am a Jew. And that’s the least of it. It’s crazy. In what other country are Jews forced to serve in the army, and then that same army is given license to tear through their own villages and burn them? You know, I heard a story that in Bukova a mother cut off her boy’s fingers so he would not be conscripted into the tsar’s army.” Reuven curled his hands in his pockets. He felt the calluses on his string hand against the softness of his palm.
    Chizor looked up to the black sky swirling with stars, as if appealing to God. “So what’s to be done? People either leave or get mad.”
    “What do you mean, Uncle? What do people do when they get mad?”
    His uncle slid his eyes first toward Reuven’s father, as if he was asking for permission.
    “The Bund,” Aaron said in a barely audible whisper.
    “There are people,” Chizor said quietly, “who stay but try to change things. These are very angry people; some call them revolutionaries.”
    “What do they do?” Reuven asked.
    “They organize strikes, worker strikes, for better pay, better conditions. Some do sabotage.”
    “Sabotage? Sabotage what?”
    “Weapons in the tsar’s armories, maybe train tracks.” Chizor flicked the ashes from his cigar. “But you see,Reuven, I am not a revolutionary. I am a tailor. I have nobody to save except myself. I have anger. But I guess not enough to stay and turn the whole place upside down. And I have no patience. Yes, I am an impatient man. Very impatient, and that is why I choose to leave.”
    There was a fierceness in his uncle’s voice, and the glow of the cigar now clamped between his teeth as he spoke cast a red shadow on his face. He looked quite angry to Reuven. His eyes were like two furious dashes. His black brows with their tufts of white slid together at steep angles. His mouth drew back in a weird grin, with the cigar still clamped between his square stained teeth. He looked like the devil, a
dybbuk
come to life on this little alley off Krupinsky. There was silence, an uncomfortable one. The smoke, the mist hung between them. Reuven bit his lip lightly.
    “Uncle Chizor where are you going? Poland? Warsaw? Vilna?”
    “Naw,” he said roughly, then spat into the gutter. “They’re still too close. No good for a Jew.”
    “Chizzie, are you going to America?” Aaron Bloom asked.
    “Probably, but who knows? Maybe the Caribbean.” He winked at Reuven. The old Uncle Chizor was back, not a trace of the
dybbuk
.
    The three continued to walk up the hill of the narrow street that twisted like a corkscrew.
    “New York, they say New York is good, Chizor,” said Aaron.
    “Ah New York—every tailor goes to New York. They got too many tailors there already. I’ll go some-placewhere I can stand out. I don’t know, maybe Canada, Montreal, Chicago, or someplace out west—the prairie—Minnesota.”
    “Minna—what?” Reuven asked
    “Minnesota.”
    Reuven walked quietly as his father and his uncle continued to talk. Reuven wished his father would consider such a thing, but he never would. He knew his father. His father believed that Russia was their country. Their home. That they had a right to be here. Besides, his father had a wife and three children. Uncle Chizor had nothing but fine books and bottles of good brandy. He could leave tomorrow and take nothing, or perhaps a few books and a couple of bottles of brandy.
    They walked on, talking and smoking, taking the long way home. The mist blew away; the night was black and starless. Reuven listened and wondered and thought. Even on this darkest night he could pick out the cats sliding across rooftops, the chimney pots that sometimes looked like hunched little men, the heap of rags that might be a beggar, the swift shadows that belonged to boys sneaking out of their bedroom windows. This was his home. He had learned how to sift the shadows of the Berischeva night, to pick out the blackness of a cat against the darkness of the evening, or