The Pinch Read Online Free PDF Page B

prospects for the downfall of the czar. He looked forward to the impending establishment of an international socialist utopia. It was clear, however, that he was disappointed when his nephew, despite his own afflicted history, did not readily share his uncle’s political enthusiasms. Muni showed little more interest in such goings-on, in fact, than did his aunt Katie, who merely smiled indulgently at her husband’s theorizing as she carried on peeling potatoes.
    Still, Muni was sorry that he couldn’t find it in himself to better accommodate his uncle Pinchas; there was a time when he would have responded zealously to the shopkeeper’s concerns. Hadn’t he tried, during his imprisonment in Minsk and later Moscow, to stay informed about the seditious happenings in the streets? But privation and hunger and the coffled march across an icebound continent had distanced him from the once overriding importance of the Marxist dream. Now he felt not the least temptation to take down the fat volume of Das Kapital from his uncle’s overstuffed bookshelf; nor was he drawn to the other staples of his insurgent years: neither Darwin nor Auguste Comte or the Yiddish editions of Tolstoy and Edward Bellamy, which elbowed aside Pinchas’s copies of The Ethics and the Shulkhan Arukh. Of course, if Muni were honest, he would have had to admit that a thirst for social reform had never been his original impetus. It was perhaps simply his guilt over the lack of a passion for change that had compelled him to act so audaciously, to declare after refusing legal counsel at his trial, “I am a member of the Jewish Revolutionary Federation, and I will do everything in my power to overthrow the czarist autocracy and its bloody henchmen!” Which had thus sealed his fate.
    Muni could hardly remember the person who’d shouted those words so defiantly in that Moscow courtroom. Bereft now of ideology, even curiosity, he felt nothing when looking back but a deep lassitude. There was little that engaged his interest—though now and again some character out of the cavalcade that passed through the general merchandise might briefly capture his attention. He might look up an instant from sweeping the floor to observe Mrs. Gruber the bootlegger, accompanied by her flame-bearded familiar Lazar der Royte, as she waddled in to purchase a sack of corn. Or the chapfallen Mr. and Mrs. Padauer, widely regarded in the Pinch as objects of pity, holding the hand of a toddler who resembled a wizened old man. Or Jenny Bashrig, upsetting a pyramid of butter churns as she gazed at Muni with unblinking black satin eyes. (Once or twice she had inquired of him concerning the use of a nickeled emasculator or fly powder in a bellows box, items whose utility Muni had no knowledge of nor Jenny any intention of purchasing.) There was Hershel Tarnopol, scamp, liar, and thief, whose petty pilfering was largely tolerated in deference to his talent for sleight of hand; and Rabbi ben Yahya and his disciples, some of whom entered the store trailing bits of rope they’d neglected to remove from their ankles. These were the strands they tied to furniture and doorknobs during prayers lest they levitate beyond a height of easy return.
    It was nearly sundown on the first evening of Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the Days of Awe, and the population of North Main was heading en masse toward Catfish Bayou. A stagnant inlet of the Mississippi only a few blocks north of the Pinch, the bayou was the site where Irish refugees from the Great Potato Famine had beached their johnboats decades ago. They had dismantled the square-ended boats to build makeshift shanties, some of which still stood, or rather leaned, though they’d long been abandoned by their previous tenants and taken over by destitute Negroes. The Irish had since emerged from the muck around the bayou to become the original inhabitants of North Main Street, which was then a lawless corridor atop the river bluff called Smoky Row.