Judah the Pious Read Online Free PDF Page A

and features traditionally attributed to the diligent student, this improbable caricature might well be an accurate portrait of Simon Polikov. He was short, skinny, and gangly, with a slack, toneless body. His thin face had turned a pasty blue-white shade, the color of dim lamplight in the late afternoon; his myopic eyes were the dead brown of plants which have died from lack of sunshine. He was absent-minded, forgetful, timid, withdrawn; he squinted, and scratched his head perpetually with a tense, irritated motion.
    In fact, everything about Simon Polikov was spare and pinched, except for his heart, which was large and extraordinarily generous.
    As a youth, the promising student had been hounded by all the Jewish families with marriageable daughters; but not a single girl could be found whose love for God and wisdom could reconcile her to the prospect of sharing a double bed with Simon Polikov. Sensing this, Simon decided that his bachelor’s habits were already too well established to change, and, as gracefully as possible, hastened to remove himself from the marriage market.
    Then, in his fifty-fifth year, he awoke one night with a searing pain in his chest and knew that none of his precious textbooks would be able to say the memorial prayers necessary to insure his soul’s speedy entrance into heaven.
    The next morning, his new-found determination to take a wife was reinforced by the realization that he already had one.
    For almost five years, Simon’s meager home had been conscientiously tended by an attractive middle-aged spinster named Hannah Bromsky, who, though not a charwoman either by necessity or inclination, did the scholar’s cooking, cleaning, and washing as an act of charitable piety. To Simon, the fact that she had lived only a short time in the village seemed far less important than the fact that she had spent that time practicing for the job of being his wife. After due consideration, Hannah somewhat reluctantly admitted the seemliness of Simon’s proposal, and opened her well-rounded arms to him.
    Overjoyed at the mating of two such worthy people, the villagers danced for three days and nights at their wedding, then left the happy couple alone to go about the serious business of producing an heir.
    The Polikovs put all their energy and concentration into this task; during the first days of marriage, Simon’s eyes could hardly focus on the printed page, and Hannah’s housekeeping grew careless and inattentive. Weeks passed, and the aging pair learned to integrate their strenuous efforts into a certain routine. Months went by; the couple was amazed at the tenderness developing between them, but still nothing came of it. At last, on the evening of their second anniversary, Hannah looked down and slapped the skin of her flat belly with anger and frustration.
    She simply could not believe it might be too late for her, especially when all signs seemed to indicate the contrary. Nor could she understand why God might wish to punish her in this way, when, all her life, she had never committed a single sin worth fasting over. Like many women whose expectations for girlish happiness are awakened only late in life, Hannah had been sure that the satisfactions of her coming years would compensate for all the disappointments of the past; faced with the possibility of finding a fresh set of disappointments, she grew bitter and furious—so furious, in fact, that she resolved to force down her pride and seek a remedy for barrenness.
    Immediately, the villagers began searching through their memories and their family almanacs for time-tested sterility cures; none of their suggestions proved too obscure or unpleasant for Hannah to try. Day after day, she immersed herself in ritual baths while swallowing endless philters, powders, and potions. She smeared her body with pastes and poultices, cut her hair and nails and buried the clippings, waded through bogs, cut the combs off roosters, and choked down mouthfuls of raw