Yiddish for Pirates Read Online Free PDF Page A

Bupkes. So, nu, they should wait two hundred years for all good sailors to be apprised of the Enlightenment, the scientific method?
    “Heretic,” they called him, and the captain, betrayed by this strange boy whom he’d planned to help, invoked the Inquisition.
    The Inquisition. That Swiss Army–knife trump card of a final solution.
    You’re only the same until you’re different.
    Moishe’s spice-rich accent. His un-Christian curses. His porklessness. Not that it had been his intention to assume a role as anything but Jew.
    Differently Christianed. Jesusly challenged.
    “You, my greedy-fingered lad, will burn at the stake the day we arrive in port. And then we’ll offer your ashes the opportunity to repent.” The captain’s eyes like two fires, condemning him to hell.
    When the going gets tough, the goyim get tough, too.
    There was no escape. In the cold sea it would be water instead of fire that would steal the breath of life from his mortal body. He pled with the captain to spare him, wailing and protesting his youth.
    “Common thievery, and from the captain, no less. The crew has spoken of your ungodly babbling, your pagan psalms. You have recited our Gospel with a forked and goat-footed tongue. You gather with us to pray yet you’ll not eat pork. This is a Christian ship and there shall be no heresy. If Jew you ever were, your Hebrew soul was flayed to dust by demons, and now no spirit but the devil takes residence in your bones,” the captain said.
    Religion a trump card in a game where the captain is king.
    “What shall I do?” Moishe wailed later as he lay in his bunk.
    “The master,” I said. “Remember the sagging sack he would fill with gold in exchange for you? You are an investment. Men protect their investments as if they were the twin baby moles of their own tender between-the-leg sack.”
    Next watch, with both broken voice and tongue, Moishe begged the master to intervene.
    The master weighed the matter on the scales of his own greed, then agreed to speak to the captain.

Chapter Four
    The captain was in his cabin at table before a silver plate of meat. “Captain,” the master purred. “My captain, I’s thinking, this boy’s trip should not yet be done. Let us steady his keel, weather his daring by our own hand on our own grim vessel. I’d wager that the prize you seek can be won with but a few drops of red, and then”—the master paused at this point to grin conspiratorially—“at the nearest port, we can sell him, as he were … off the rack. What says you, sir?”
    The captain, reaching deep into his sea chest of compassion and jurisprudence, replied, “Torture, my good man. It’s as effective as truth serum. What’s flayed onto the back speaks more plain and true than lines found in the hand.”
    He would have Moishe stripped, the better to see the naked shmeckel of his immortal soul. Then he’d let the cat out of the red bag that hung from the impressive manhood of the mainmast. He would flog the boy—who was, naturally, free at any time to present a cogent refutation of the accusations against him—until he bled like an innocent saint or a pestilent piss-veined devil. Certainly, the lash spilled stories from the accused, but those who first confessed would still be flogged so their tales, tanned into their backs, became incorruptible and permanent as leather.
    They waited until dawn appeared blood red on the new sky of the next day. The morality play of punishment made more acute by a vivid setting. The crew gathered, the other cabin boys making box seats ofbarrels for a close view. Moishe’s clothes were rent to rags on the deck, then he was bound to the mast.
    “Sir,” he began to wail. “Very good, sir.” He had command of few words that they’d understand, and most of those learned from his heymishe parrot.
    The bo’sun, a desiccated and diminutive mamzer with rings in his twisted, labial ears, lifted the cat and brought it down hard on Moishe’s back. A