Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life Read Online Free PDF

today wasn’t Friday. That I remembered … of course, I knew Father was hungry. That’s what made me wonder: How come he was already asleep? How could you be hungry and be sleeping at the same time?
    I couldn’t possibly have dreamed the ending. It was hot and blue all around me. I lay on a high bed, smothered in a featherbed and a pile of pillows. The burning smell of hot flatirons hung in the air. Above me hovered an old, hollow-cheeked face, topped by a red nightcap
    “Take it,” the nightcap said, pushing a large wooden spoon into my mouth. “Take it, Mendlshi. It’s magnesia with almond milk. It’ll bring down your fever.”
    At the foot of the bed, shaped like a cross, stood a tall, lean Jew with a little white beard, wearing an unbuttoned vest with dangling buckles. A long, white cotton thread, resembling a wriggling worm, hung from his lips. A tape measure, green with black dots, drooped down from one of his shoulders. Surely, that was a snake crawling down his other sleeve. He passed the thread between his teeth, bit off small pieces, spat them out, and shook his head.
    “Swallow it, child, swallow it. N-n-a! Imagine, sending a child out in such a blizzard!”
    Now I knew. Instead of ending up at Aunt Miriam’s, I must have stumbled into Grandma and Grandpa’s house. Those old, hollow cheeks, the face that was pushing a wooden spoon into my mouth, belonged to Grandma Rokhl. This was the same Grandma Rokhl who was constantly accusing Mother of not looking after her own children, who day and night sat on a small, wooden chest, gazing through steel-rimmed spectacles containing a single lens and sewing starched white muslin into nightcaps for pious old women. And that tall Jew standing at the foot of the bed was, of course, Grandpa Dovid Froyke the tailor, who usually wore a long, black cape and a stiff yellow hat, was fond of his drop of whiskey, and on Saturday nights could always be found playing cards with his cronies, well into the small hours of the morning.
    For all that, Grandpa was a good man, and visiting him was always great fun. Unlike other tailors, he didn’t take orders for kapotes, coats, and trousers, but made uniforms for the students of the Russian high school, the gymnasium, short, dark-blue jackets with a slit down the back, and white silvery buttons, each of which Grandpa sewed on by hand.
    He would pull the thread across a yellow piece of streaked wax and, sitting on a high stool, one leg across the other, let the needle fly in and out, as he sang:
    In the plowshare lies a blessing,
    The true happiness of life …
    When he tired of singing about the plowshare, he’d lift his right leg off his left, thread the needle once again, pull it across the wax, and burst into an altogether different song:
    My beauty, my life, pure as gold,
    Another I threw over,
    So you in my arms I could hold.
    Grandma Rokhl, sitting on her wooden chest in the corner, would raise her small, sunken face, look at him over her steel-rimmed spectacles, and, in a harsh voice, call out, “Would you stop it with those silly songs of yours!”
    “What’s it to you, my dear little wife?”
    “Oh, stop it, you stupid fool!”
    But Grandpa wouldn’t stop. He’d merely start rocking back and forth, push his needle faster, shake his head from side to side, and, in the singsong voice of someone studying Talmud aloud, say, “If I’m a fool, then what an idiot an old wife like you must be.” And to forestall Grandma’s next retort, he would shake his head even harder and sing out like a cantor on the Day of Atonement: “ Unesane toykef … Let us tell how utterly holy this day is and how awe-inspiring.”
    All was now quiet and white in Grandpa and Grandma’s house. Wedged between the double windows, like filthy down, were clumps of dark cotton wool.The Gentile visage of Tsar Alexander III, sporting a thick, yellow, fly-specked beard, looked straight down at me from above the narrow worktable.
    Grandpa himself was