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they were out of doors, as though late for an appointment with the Almighty. And their house was not a gypsy caravan of trumperies and trinkets to protect it from the evil eye. No, the Washinskys were not living in the Middle Ages, but to us they were the halfway house on the journey back.
    And they were still frumkies.
    ‘I’m not asking Elohim,’ I’d say, usually while gouging out the mortar between the bricks of our air-raid shelter – a peculiarly wanton impulse, to pull apart what sheltered us – ‘I’m asking you .’
    To tell the truth, I wasn’t asking Manny anything. I was needling him. As though to pay him back for my own shortcomings as a friend, for making me ashamed to acknowledge him in such polite company as Errol Tobias’s, I pestered him to distraction. Why this, Manny? Why that? When Manny or either of his parents went through their front door they put a finger to their lips and then to the mezuzah on the door frame. I knew about mezuzahs; we had one at our front door, put there by the Jewish family who had lived in the house before us, but now painted over and ignored. I knew what a mezuzah contained: words, words from the Torah, including the Shema, the holiest words of all – ‘Shema Yisrael, Hear, O Israel, the Lord is one . . .’ But precisely because the Lord was one we did not tolerate idols. In which case why did we kiss words? A word too could be an idol, couldn’t it?
    Why, Manny? Why the food hysteria? Why all the salting that went on in his house, salting the flavour out of everything? Why,when they bought kosher meat from a kosher butcher did they have to kosher it again when they got it home? Had the Christian street unkoshered it? And why the obsessive keeping this from that? So a crumb of cheese the size of mouse bait fell on to a thrice salted, petrified slice of chicken breast from which the flavour had already been extracted to make soup, was that so terrible? Did Elohim have nothing else to do, was he so smallminded that he would notice and punish a transgression as negligible as that? And why the obsession with Saturday? How can a day be holy?
    ‘It’s a commandment,’ Manny told me. ‘Remember the Sabbath day to—’
    ‘I know all that. But next to “Thou shalt not kill”, remembering the Sabbath day is a bit unimportant, isn’t it? We don’t say “Remember not to kill”. Because forgetting wouldn’t be any excuse. “Remember the Sabbath day” is more like a nudge than a commandment.’
    ‘The Ten Commandments are all equally important,’ he replied. ‘The rabbis say that if you break one you might as well break them all.’
    I had reason to recall that in later years. But at the time all I wanted to do was break him . All right, all right, so his family chose to do as they were told and remember the Sabbath day, but why did that stop them from making their own fire on it? Why, though they had no money, did they employ a Gentile – a Shabbes-goy, or as we called her in our neck of the woods, a fireyekelte – to make it for them? Why didn’t they light it themselves the day before and leave it smouldering behind a fire guard? Or, if that was out of the question, if Elohim thundered ‘No!’ to prior preparation and a further ‘No!’ to a surreptitious blow into the embers on Shabbes itself, why didn’t they just go without a fire for one day out of seven altogether? They could always come and warm themselves in front of ours if it was really cold, unless ours was unacceptable having been lit on the Sabbath by Jews who didn’t cover their heads, didn’t keep a kosher house and didn’t otherwise give a shit.
    Not true that. We did give a shit about treating Gentiles as skivvies. Particularly we gave a shit – or at least my father did – about calling someone a fire-yekelte, a yekelte being a coarse non-Jewish woman of the lower orders, in other words a person with whom we, having been worse than beasts of burden in Novoropissik, should have felt