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any man’s nuptial Eden. This girl adored my mother and entrusted her with many intimate secrets. Once, I ‘accidentally’ overheard Sarah confide that Tsap had asked her to elope with him to the east, his Land of Hope.
    Those were stormy times, and, as it turned out, a preamble to the great catastrophe. Father was quite weary of his restless young friend, who was guilty of ideological promiscuity. Tsap had been an ardent Socialist, an Anarchist, a Syndicalist, and was now a Communist. Perhaps this turbulent searcher was privately jealous of father’s unshakeable evolutionist beliefs.
    In his discussions with my sedate dad, the exuberant Heinrich engaged the whole corpus of highbrow proletarian sloganeering. Father, in his turn, maintained that one should tirelessly seek the simple word, so that one’s message could come across dressed in sobriety and common sense. His composure incensed the young debater.
    â€˜Oh, you and your common sense!’ Tsap fired back on one occasion. ‘What has your buddy Léon Blum achieved with his non-interventionist common sense?’ (This was soon after the defeat of the Spanish Republic.) ‘The problem with evolutionary socialism,’ he went on, ‘is that it is perpetually seeking an alliance with the ruling powers, thereby delivering the starving masses directly into the hands of their tormentors!’
    â€˜Your argument,’ responded my ever-secure father, ‘is a mythical red balloon, without a shred of historical evidence.’
    At this moment the voluptuous redhead Sarah walked in. Naked, I reflected, she could easily have replaced Renoir’s blonde bather! Not surprisingly, her entrance immediately changed Heinrich’s mood. Impaling her with his gaze, he continued as if speaking only to her. ‘The Jewish intellectual bourgeoisie,’ he said, quite softly now, ‘laughed when the huckster equated them with vermin.’
    â€˜Well, what do you expect?’ father replied. ‘The nincompoop calls Sigmund Freud a louse.’
    â€˜Oh no, my friend, that’s not a matter to be treated lightly.’ This time Tsap addressed father directly, his voice betraying emotion. ‘One should never forget Raskolnikov, who, in order to justify murder, managed in his mind to turn a fellow human into an insect.’
    In August 1939, as the Land of Hope went into partnership with the huckster, Heinrich Tsap paid us his last visit. I remember how fervently he tried to explain to my father the wisdom of Bolshevik dialectic.
    Ten days later, the huckster’s agents awoke Tsap at midnight, invited his Friedl and Gretchen to take a spin in their black limousine, and directed Heinrich to join them for a little chat in Radogosz, on the outskirts of our city — where, in the silence of a new dawn, the partners of the land of his dreams relieved Comrade Tsap’s body of his gentle, tormented head.

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    Â  The Social Worker  
    On the subject of the abovementioned White Haskel, father once told us something of this man’s history, and of the circumstances surrounding his first dealings with him.
    When, about eight years before I was born, my parents moved into the four-storey apartment block where they would live for thirty-odd years, White Haskel — so called because he had the look of a man soaked in detergent — had already established himself not only as a ‘social worker’, but as a respected beadle of the local synagogue.
    Haskel always wore lacquered shoes with rubber soles, black trousers with white pinstripes, and a grey coat of English tweed trimmed with velvet; to look the part, he carried a satchel of soft black leather under his arm. He was married to a small, constantly smiling woman — so constantly that her smile might have been affixed as to a billboard. She bore him four decent sons and three beautiful daughters. Needless to say, he was very much admired in our