Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life Read Online Free

to cheer up a little.
    Meanwhile, Father put Leybke’s photograph into a drawer of the wardrobe among the clean linen. Now and then, on a Saturday night, after the havdole prayer, marking the conclusion of the Sabbath, he would take the photograph out of the drawer, gaze at it once again, and mutter something about writing a few lines to Ekaterinoslav. But Mother’s mood didn’t improve, and she had no time to spare, either for him or his son Leybke.
    Winter that year was long and bitter. Icicles hung from the pump in the yard, like molten glass. Overnight, the slops tossed into the gutters froze into a dirty, icy mass. The lock on the door glistened with a thin coating of ice. The mildewed walls of the kitchen, where Jusza slept, at night gleamed with a greenish-blue glow, as did the wall alongside Father’s bed. Nothing could keep out the cold, not the little iron stove in the center of the room, with its rusty tin pipes running across the low ceiling, nor the clay plastered over the cracks of the window frames. Even the cotton wool, stuffed between the windowpanes, turned to ice.
    None of this troubled Father, who, worn out from his day, always fell into a deep sleep. But around four in the morning he would wake up, ready to get going.
    The reason for this was because lately he had gone into partnership with someone called Motl Straw, a tall, lanky Jew with a bobbing Adam’s apple, a pointy wisp of beard, and long, slender hands that couldn’t keep still for a moment. All his life Motl had bustled among peasant carts, pinching sacks of grain, chewing on a wisp of straw between his teeth, now and then running into Mordkhe’s soup kitchen to grab some leftover goose, and, between one thing and another, stuffing banknotes into a long leather purse. While thus engaged, one day he ran into Father and suggested they become partners.
    “There’s a chance to buy up a big load of hay,” he said. “First-class hay.”
    He, Motl, would supply the cash, and Father his expertise, since that was all that Father had to offer.
    Father, you see, before he moved to the city, had grown up in a small village, where there were large stretches of sun-warmed fields surrounded by blue, dark forests, and huts of rough-hewn planks, thatched roofs, and earthen floors. In the village people drank sour milk from large clay jugs and baked flat loaves of bread. In the summer they bathed in the river, slept behind haystacks, and gazed across the broad expanse of fields. There, in the village, is where Father had acquired his knowledge of hay that he brought with him to the city.
    Thus, after Moyshe’s death, life at home took a new turn.
    Night still hung sleepily over the frozen windowpanes when Father began to stir. From time to time, his protracted, hollow yawn cut through the cold dark room. I turned to the darkly glistening wall, waiting impatiently for Father to drop his legs to the floor so I could have the whole bed to myself. But Father was waiting for the signal that would rouse him from under the warm featherbed.
    And there it was. At the crack of dawn, at almost the same time every morning, fingers could be heard drumming on the glass, and a raw, frozen voice called out, “ Pan kupiec ! Mr. merchant!”
    This was old Maczei, the peasant who drove Father in his wagon all over the villages where Father bought up hay from the landowners.
    Father groaned and stepped into the chilly room. He turned up the lamp. In the reflection of the flame, which blinked like an awakened eye, Father attended to an old injury on one of his shins. By now it had turned into a red-and-blue scar, and Father applied his remedy, the green shoots of spring onions growing in a clay pot on our window sill.
    After treating his leg, and more groaning and more yawning, Father remembered old Maczei, still waiting outside, and he opened the door to let him in.
    Maczei entered, frozen blue. Tall, wrapped in a reeking sheepskin and holding a whip, he stood there like