The Frozen Rabbi Read Online Free PDF

unexpected gifts, and pleased with what he deemed (despite the peasant’s response) a successful transaction, the young man turned to face his prize.
    She spat at him, at first actual sputum, then a venomous stream of execrations: “Shtik drek! Gruber yung! I pish in the milk of your mother!” But Salo, as he endeavored to remove the taut noose from around her neck, took no offense. If anything, he felt a pang of nostalgia for the curses his father used to heap on his head.
    “A finsternish, may your testicles soon toll your death knell!”
    Then even as she continued spewing bile, she took up the traces, without prompting or inquiring as to what the coffin contained, and began to help Salo pull the wagon along the furrowed road. In the name of her martyred family and herself, Basha Puah Bendit Benchwarmer’s, she denounced her rescuer as she did the God of Abraham for his discourteous treatment of Jewish daughters. She lamented her lost dowry—which had consisted of some pewter spoons, a milch cow, and an Elijah’s chair—and reviled the world that had deprived her of her due. Enjoying the music of her waspish tongue, Salo wondered how she might look with a little meat on her bones, though he expected that her raw bones would always shun flesh. But vinegar-pussed harridan that she was, at least a decade older than he, she was still a woman, and having never spent time in the society of women, Salo was greatly excited, his loneliness dispelled.
    Warmed though he was by her litany of complaints, the young man begged leave to interrupt. “I respectfully submit,” he said with a bashful formality, “that for the sake of decency we should marry as soon as we can.”
    Snarling as she resolved never to forgive him for the humiliation of having been traded for a horse, and for all the future offenses she anticipated in his miserable company, Basha Puah ungraciously accepted Salo’s proposal.

    THEY WERE WED on the roadside beneath the tattered canopy of Salo’s prayer shawl by a beggared Galitzianer rabbi in exchange for a glimpse of the Boibiczer Prodigy, of whom the rabbi had heard rumors in his travels. He’d heard that the Prodigy was encased in an immense blue sapphire, and was duly disappointed. For a witness there was the rabbi’s dolt of a son, and in the absence of a goblet they made do with Salo’s mother’s silver thimble, which the groom stomped into the brittle mud with his heel. Nights on the road, the newlyweds slept wherever they could: on the splintered floor of an abandoned tollhouse, in the rafters of a sawmill with an ice-locked water wheel, and once, when they were stranded between shtetlakh, in the open wagon beside the cold casket, where they clung to each other desperate for warmth. And although Salo’s termagant bride never left off upbraiding him—“From one degradation into yet another you thrust me!”—she was pregnant by the time they reached Lodz.
    The city, which he’d journeyed so long and endured so much to reach, had assumed a golden aspect in Salo’s mind. But the swarming Jewish district, called the Balut, rather than populated by saints, was a home to ragpickers, organ grinders, professional cripples, prostitutes, and thieves, to say nothing of the legion of slogging automata employed in the silk mills and dye houses that bordered the banks of the sulfurous Warta River. The smoke from the factories hung a mauve miasma over the city, collecting in the twisting lanes of the Balut, whose citizens wore its permanent fetor in the folds of their clothes. Their working children, like human bobbins unspooling, trailed home sticky threads from the cocooneries, their pockets spilling caterpillars that continued to spin fantastic Jacob’s Ladders in the attics of their dilapidated abodes. Slush steamed in the arcaded streets from the excrement of horses and the blood of the slaughtered animals that hung in shop windows or lay cloven and splayed across merchants’ stalls. Malodorous