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it, and order whatever my little heart desires.”
    “In our house there’s always plenty for
shabbus
. I should show you my butcher’s bills you’d die.”
    “This write-up’s crazy. An insult.”
    “Slander, you mean. We ought to get Lubin to take the case.”
    “Ignoramus. You don’t bring in ambulance-chasers to fight a case like this. You need one of theirs, a big-shot.”
    “What about Rosenberg? He’s a K.C.”
    “Yeah, and everybody knows exactly how he got it. We would need a goy.”
    Takifman brooded over the magazine, pinching his lips. Finally, he said: “A Jew is never poor.”
    “Oh, here he comes. Takifman, the fanatic. Okay, we’ve got the Torah. You try it for collateral at the Bank of Canada.”
    “For shame,” Takifman said, appalled.
    “Listen here,
Time
is a magazine of current affairs. The Torah is an old story. They are discussing here economics.”
    “The Torah is nothing to laugh.”
    “But you are, Takifman.”
    “A Jew is never poor,” Takifman insisted. “Broke? Sometimes. Going through hard times? Maybe. In a strange country? Always. But poor, never.”
    Tansky threw his dishrag on the counter. “We are the same as everybody else,” he shouted.
    “What the hell!”
    “Now listen, you listen here, with Chief Rabbi Takifman I don’t agree, but the same –”
    “You know what, Tansky. You can stuff that where the monkey put his fingers.”
    Sugarman finished reading the article. “What are you all so excited about?” he asked. “Can’t you see this magazine is full of advertisements?”
    Everybody turned to look at him.
    “According to my son, and he ought to know, these magazines are all under the heel of the big advertisers. They say whatever the advertisers want.”
    “So you mean it’s the advertisers who say we’re poor and dirty?”
    “You win the sixty-four dollars.”
    “Why
, smart-guy?”
    “Why? Did I say I know everything? All I said was that according to my son it is the advertisers who –”
    “Jews and artists are never poor,” Takifman persisted. “How could they be?”
    “We are the same as everybody else,” Tansky shouted. “Idiots!”
    “A Jew is never poor. It would be impossible.”

TWO

The Summer My Grandmother Was Supposed to Die
    D R. KATZMAN discovered the gangrene on one of his monthly visits. “She won’t last a month,” he said.
    He said the same the second month, the third and the fourth, and now she lay dying in the heat of the back bedroom.
    “God in heaven,” my mother said, “what’s she holding on for?”
    The summer my grandmother was supposed to die we did not chip in with the Greenbaums to take a cottage in the Laurentians. My grandmother, already bed-ridden for seven years, could not be moved again. The doctor came twice a week. The only thing was to stay in the city and wait for her to die or, as my mother said, pass away. It was a hot summer, her bedroom was just behind the kitchen, and when we sat down to eat we could smell her. The dressings on my grandmother’s left leg had to be changed several times a day and, according to Dr. Katzman, any day might be her last in this world. “It’s in the hands of the Almighty,” he said.
    “It won’t be long now,” my father said, “and she’ll be better off, if you know what I mean?”
    A nurse came every day from the Royal Victorian Order. She arrived punctually at noon and at five to twelve I’d join the rest of the boys under the outside staircase to peek up her dress as she climbed to our second-storey flat. Miss Baileyfavoured absolutely beguiling pink panties, edged with lace, and that was better than waiting under the stairs for Cousin Bessie, for instance, who wore enormous cotton bloomers, rain or shine.
    I was sent out to play as often as possible, because my mother felt it was not good for me to see somebody dying. Usually, I would just roam the scorched streets. There was Duddy, Gas sometimes, Hershey, Stan, Arty and me.
    “Before your