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

sitting bent over on his high stool, today not singing or making jokes, but applying himself grimly to the task of sewing silver buttons onto dark-blue jackets, and occasionally throwing out a word.
    “Maybe we should call that special doctor, the pumper?”
    “What good can he do?”
    “Who knows? They say he’s an expert.”
    “You and your experts. I’ve already sent someone for some pig fat and dried herbs. With God’s help, that’ll make him better.”
    But, as it turned out, neither the pig fat, which Grandma rubbed on my stomach, nor the bitter potion she poured down my throat, did me any good, and the special doctor had to be called in.
    He thumped his cane on the floor, and screamed at Grandma. I was scalded with boiling hot water, blood was taken from behind my ears and my back. Medicine was forced down my throat, salty, bitter, sweet, until I finally recovered, and for the first time had a good look around. I saw how the wrinkles on Grandma’s face were arranged and how Grandpa’s beard shook.
    Mother never showed up.
    On the evening—so Grandma Rokhl recounted—when I went searching for Mother at Aunt Miriam’s, I fell asleep in the snow. The janitor at the Gentile hospital noticed something lying in a snowdrift and raised a hue and cry. People came running. To make a long story short, an old woman, who sewed caps at Grandma’s, recognized me and told them to take me to Grandma Rokhl’s. Where else should they have taken me? Mother was nowhere to be found, neither at home nor at Aunt Miriam’s.
    That same day Mother had gone off—to Warsaw.
    It seemed she had no choice in the matter. A telegram had arrived, summoning her at once. Tsipele, her only daughter, by her first husband, who lived in Warsaw, was about to announce her engagement.
    For many years Mother used to send Tsipele big yellow pears, shaped like bells, bars of chocolate, braided butter cookies, and, occasionally, a few rubles. From all those goodies Tsipele had acquired a pair of dimpled, red cheeks, a fine figure, and a bridegroom ready to take her without so much as a groshen for a dowry. How, then, could Mother not go? But how could she have left without saying goodbye? Well, there simply wasn’t time …
    Small wonder, then, that Father raged against Mother, against Grandma, and was even angry with me. He knew full well that I lay sick at Grandma’s, but never once did he come to see me. Instead, he sent a boy over to find out how I was doing. Furious, Grandma slammed the door in the boy’s face.
    “What does he think?” she shouted at the boy. “Does he think that his son is a bastard? He can’t come here himself? He’s too good for that?”
    Grandpa hunched his head between his shoulders and growled into the uniforms he was working on, saying that Father was right. One doesn’t go away, just like that, without so much as a “Be well.”
    “But what about the engagement?” Grandma persisted.
    “Engagements can be postponed,” Grandpa asserted with authority.
    “You’re a fool!”
    “And you’re an idiot!”

Chapter Four
    Whatever the reason, Mother lingered on in Warsaw. The freezing weather continued. Grandma’s high, soft bed, in which the special doctor used to poke my back every few days, was now suddenly empty and made up.
    I was now able to drag myself around the room—small, skinny, my face green and gaunt—and to drink the goat’s milk which Grandma brought me, twice a day, all the way from St. Mary’s Street.
    Grandpa had turned paler in the course of my illness, though his cheeks acquired a reddish, scorched glow, and his nose, a sharp point. In the morning, while I drank my goat’s milk, he would take a couple of swigs from a small bottle tucked away in a dark corner of the room. He would throw his head back, just like a Gentile, shape his mouth into a circle, and drain the contents down to the last drop.
    It bothered me that Grandpa drank straight from the bottle. What then was the purpose of