The Family Moskat Read Online Free PDF

as executor of the es-tate. Koppel himself maintained an attitude of subservience toward the younger Moskats. Whenever they came to ask his help in some matter of preferment, he would put on a meek look and say: "Who am I to decide?"
    Koppel was with the old man at Karlsbad during the summer when he had met and married the Galician widow. Reb Meshulam had met her at the springs while he was taking the waters and had started a conversation with her, first in an attempt at an elegant Judæo-German, then in the familiar Yiddish.
    It pleased him to find that she had the habit of including a few Hebrew words in her conversation; that she wore an orthodox matron's wig--although its elegance disturbed him a little--that her dead husband, Reb David Landau, had been a wealthy brewer in the city of Brody, and that her daughter, Adele, had finished the preliminary college course in Lemberg and had studied in Krakow, Vienna, and Switzerland. Rosa Frumetl was suffering from some sort of liver ailment. She was not staying at a hotel, but in a furnished room in the poorer section of the city.
    She was frank to confess that she had very little money.
    Nevertheless she conducted herself like a woman of means. Each day she wore different attire. A string of pearls hung about her throat, earrings dangled from her earlobes, and a precious stone glistened from a ring on her finger. She had invited Reb Meshulam to her lodgings and had served him a glass of cherry brandy and some aniseed cookies. There was a pleasant odor of lavender about her. When Reb Meshulam raised his glass to wish her good health she said: "Health and happiness to you, Reb Meshulam. May your blessings increase."
    "I've had enough blessings in my time," Reb Meshulam answered in his abrupt manner. "There's only one thing I can look forward to now."
    -17-"May God
    forbid! What kind of talk is that?" Rosa Frumet! scolded him gently. "You'll live to be a hundred and twenty--and maybe a span more!"
    When the idea of marrying Rosa Frumetl and taking her and her daughter back to Warsaw occurred to Reb Meshulam, he was afraid that Koppel would talk him out of it. But the bailiff neither dissuaded nor encouraged him. Meshulam asked him to find out what he could about the widow and he brought back a detailed report. When, after a good deal of hesitation, Reb Meshulam decided to go through with the affair, Koppel attended to all the details. A thousand and one formalities had to be arranged so that Rosa Frumetl should be permitted to cross the Russian-Austrian border. A wedding ring had to be provided, as well as quarters for the married pair, and a rabbi to perform the ceremony. Koppel was as busy as though he were the groom's father. Rosa Frumetl wanted Reb Meshulam to settle some money on her and promise to provide a dowry for her daughter. Reb Meshulam agreed and even put it in writing. Adele went away for a week to Franzensbad, near by, and in her absence the marriage took place.
    "The man's a lunatic," elderly gossips declared. "The old lecher."
    Reb Meshulam had hoped for a quiet wedding, but it turned out to be a noisy affair. The hall was crowded with visiting rabbis, their wives, sons, daughters, and in-laws; Rosa Frumetl had been quick to make a host of acquaintances. Among the guests there was also a Galician badchan , a professional wedding jester, who had stumbled into the place and who at once began to improvise verses, bawdy and impudent, in a mixture of Yiddish, German, and Hebrew. There were all sorts of gifts, the kind that could be bought in the Karlsbad souvenir stores; fancy jewelry boxes, tablecloths, slippers with gilded heels, pens with magnifying glasses at the ends through which one might peer at a pretty colored view of the Alps. The large salon was full of sables, fur-lined silk coats, silk hats, and fashionable millinery. After the wedding ceremony there was a feast that lasted until late in the night, the women gossiping maliciously about the bride, who